Intimate Objects

I watched the film The Unbearable Lightness of Being last night and found myself putting Mulvey’s theories onto it. It was not hard to do.

The film follows the lives of three people: Tomàš, a philandering doctor, Tereza, the childlike woman with whom he falls in love, and Sabina, one of Tomàš’ mistresses. With that description I mean to imply that is a patriarchally structured film: the film begins with and centers around Tomàš, and the two women are introduced to the audience only through their relationships with him (Sabina especially, who is introduced after a title card says, “But the woman who understood him best was Sabina”). Tomàš is Mulvey’s typical male Hollywood hero, the character with whom the male viewer narcissistically identifies (and can form himself after).

And boy, is there scopophilia in this film. Tomàš spends much of the film seducing women. His technique? He looks at a woman straight-on, hard, with a devilish, smiling glint in his eyes, and says, “Take off your clothes” (in a Czech accent). It always works. Tomàš is thus an extreme example of Mulvey’s typical male protagonist. Speaking of the way the male audience member identifies with the male protagonist, Mulvey says, “the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look, both giving  a satisfying sense of omnipotence [to the male viewer]” (2187). Tomàš’ erotic look does more than coincide with his control of events, it is the way he controls events. Which I would say affects the male viewer rather strongly: I remember that for weeks after my teenage self first watched this movie I would try to imitate Tomàš’ look almost every time I looked in a mirror.

The seduction scenes also exemplify Mulvey’s split between active/male and passive/female. Tomàš’ gaze is in control; he sees the women as spectacles, and they, conscious of his objectification of them, display themselves. As Mulvey puts it, “The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly” (2186 in the blue book). For instance, in one scene he makes Sabina put on a bowler hat, take off her robe, and crawl on a mirror in her lingerie; spectacle. She allows him to make her do this, and then, while on the mirror, conscious of herself as spectacle, asks him, “What are you looking at?” He replies, “Your eyes.”

This reply points, I think, to the way Tomàš’ pleasure in looking does not fit completely into Lacan’s and Mulvey’s theories. At one point in the film he tells Sabina that his chief erotic pleasure is in discovering the particularities of the women he sleeps with, in that part of their physical existence in the world which is unique to them, those expressions or movements which are theirs alone. He does project his desire onto them by turning them into spectacles, but he pays attention to them as spectacles. They are not simply objets a, objects that he only looks at for an outline that he can fill in with his fantasies. Rather, the beauty (and, perhaps, ugliness) of Tomàš’ look is that, in actually seeing women’s bodies for what they are, it makes their bodies special and beautiful and individual, and it makes them conscious of their bodies as special and beautiful and individual. He shows them that they have power over him, power to incite his desire, and they delight in exercising that power. This is still objectification by men of women, and thus still a subjection of women, but is there not a possibility for beauty in it? I mean to make a compromise out of Tomàš’ look which might satisfy both feminists and queer theorists: if a woman, independent, conscious of herself and her innate dignity as a human being, were to voluntarily allow Tomàš to look at her and see her beauty, there would be intimacy in his objectification. The same if a man allowed himself to be looked at in such a way. And why not make “intimacy” the trump signifier, especially in matters of sex, where objectification is the point?