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?

 

The abject

I have two long quotes:

In its social context, ‘abjection’ means to operate at the social rim. Adolescence is a time of cultivating group identity; socially abject figures cannot seem to manage either the material conditions and habits or the identifications necessary to sustain a position in a social group… Both social and psychological abjection precipitate violence in the narratives of young-adult fiction and hence offer suggestive ways of thinking about the increasing violence of adolescent society. (138-139)

Just as we abject the unclean and improper evidences of the body’s physicality in order to constitute a clean and proper body, so in the social realm we abject the unclean and the improper, again often on the basis of physicality, in order to constitute the boundaries of community and nation…. Throughout social history, the exclusions of peoples based on race, sexuality, and disabilities have established and bolstered both personal and national identities…. Identities, communities, and nations are “permanently brittle” constructs because they are built on abjection, which haunts their borders. (141)

So then. The adolescent moves into society, either entirely unaware or only vaguely aware of it as artifice, as a construction of the Law. Society needs abjection (the naming of a thing as unclean and improper) to survive, needs to make boundaries in order to define itself. Those who (through an unquestionably performative use of Language) are deemed abject often meet with or exercise violence, there being fear and dislike between the abject and the accepted.

One of Coats’ illustrations of this is a discussion of S. E. Hinton’s young adult novel The Outsiders. She gives a synopsis: a group of young men called the Greasers (who are the socially abject heroes of the story, she tells us, excluded from the discourse of the majority) clash violently with another group, the Socs (some clean and proper young men); two of them, Johnny and Dallas, die (though not at the hands of the Socs; Johnny dies from burns he gets while saving some children from a fire, and Dallas “cannot accept Johnny’s death and challenges the police with a loaded pistol” (150).) Coats says, “That they die suggests that abjection is an unsustainable social position.… the unconscious truth of her 1967 text is that figures like Johnny and Dallas must be expelled from a clean and proper society. Ponyboy’s [the protagonist’s] successful adult identity is contingent upon his ridding himself of his associations with these abject figures” (150).

I thought of the 1995 film La haine (in English, Hate), directed by Mathieu Kassovitz and starring Vincent Cassel, Hubert Koundé, and Saïd Taghmaoui. The camera follows three friends (Vinz, a Jew, Hubert, an Afro-French, and Saïd, a Maghrebin) through a day in their lives. They live in the banlieues of Paris (roughly equivalent to the ghettoes of America) and all three are or have been involved in riots, violent protests of their social marginalization; they are some of the socially abject of French society. (a side note: The notion of the “clean and proper” body reminds me of a remark once made by Nicolas Sarkozy, the current president of France. In 2005, as Ministry of the Interior, he called the youth of the banlieues “racaille” (roughly, “scum,” with racist connotations) and spoke of cleaning out the banlieues “a Kärcher” (referring to a manufacturer of power hoses).)

In the film the three friends move in the society of their fellow abject banlieue inhabitants, in a culture of camraderie, rap music, and violence. Toughness, sexual prowess, and humor are respected, and vulgarity is the norm. Many of the men of the banlieue speak in one of the various versions of verlan, a slang that works by inverting words (“verlan” comes from “l’envers,” or reverse). Marginalized economically and racially, they affirm their uncleanness and impropriety and transgress the laws of Language. In one scene the three end up at an art gallery, where they drink the wine and eat the food and make fun of the art. They see a couple of girls and Saïd asks Hubert to help him charm them (“Didn’t I buy you a taco last week?” he says); Hubert plays it cool with the girls, but Saïd comes on too fast. This impropriety disgusts the girls, and Saïd, Vinz, and Hubert get angry and end up yelling at everyone in the gallery (“You can all go suck dick in hell,” and “Yo momma in hell”) and breaking a champagne glass and a sculpture. They cannot play by the rules of polite society (having never been taught to abject sex properly), and when it rejects them they return that rejection with violent vulgarities. They walk out the door and the gallery owner turns around, tired and disgusted, and dismisses them with, “The malaise of the ghetto.”

I have perhaps been too quick to label Hubert, Vinz, and Saïd as abject; I only did so because they are excluded from the discourse of the majority by a lack of material wealth and power. In the above scene, each society (that of the banlieue and that of the rich) abjects the other because neither accepts the Language and Law of the other.

Zither music

I thought of Carol Reed’s film noir The Third Man, a picture permeated by a subtle uncanniness. Here’s a synopsis for those who haven’t seen it- the film opens on the arrival of the American Holly Martins (a hack writer and a fool) in post-World-War-II Vienna. On looking for the man he came to visit, his old friend Harry Lime, Martins discovers that Harry has just died in a car accident. In the midst of his heartbreak he finds a hole in the official story of Harry’s death and so begins trying to find out what really happened to Harry. I’ll spoil the ending later in this post. Reed complements his pulp fiction plot with a masterful use of the techniques of film noir, plenty of long shadows and off-kilter shots and jolting cuts. These techniques contribute much to the film’s sneaking uncanniness, presenting to us a slightly strange world whose dissimilarities somehow speak to our world.

The film begins by introducing the situation in post-War Vienna: after the war Vienna was split up into four zones by the Allies, each zone governed by an imported police. The center of the city is a fifth zone governed by a multinational police. This has given rise to a confusion of tongues and a bureaucratic mess, a lawkeeper’s nightmare which has led to a booming black market. A psychoanalyst might say that the id has gained the upper hand because of a breaking down of the Language and Law of the Father.

This introduction to Vienna is given by a cheery English accent while charming zither music plays, a joviality unnervingly dissonant with the darkness it rolls over; the voice is that of a professional criminal; it mentions “amateurs” as we are shown a body floating in a river near some chunks of ice; it describes Vienna as “bombed about a bit” while a series of images of Vienna in ruins is shown to us. The voice is in some ways a manifestation of the id: cheerily indifferent to law and culture and ‘humanity,’ closer to the fundamental drives of the organism. The uncanny effect of the introduction is not uncanny by Freud’s definition; it does not play upon “infantile complexes which have been repressed” or “primitive beliefs which have been surmounted” (950 in the blue book). It is rather the uncanny defamiliarization Dr. Johnson speaks of in his post “Bags of Blood”; it shows its audience (originally an audience of the late forties and early fifties) several familiar things (a post-War European city in recovery, the seedy underbelly of a city, the post-War economic boom) but presents those things in an unfamiliar way, (in corresponding order: suffering from its own recovery, gaily, and in conjunction with crime). The truly uncanny thing about this gaiety is its seductiveness; I, for one, went along with it on first viewing, and thought the film was going to be a good romp. Thus this ‘unfamiliar’ gaiety is really familiar, for many of us can easily sympathize with a criminal’s view- he speaks to our own lawless desires, our ids.

Next come the spoilers.

The film’s other prominent id-manifestation is in the form of Orson Welles. As it turns out Harry Lime (played by Welles) faked his own death- he was profiting from a penicillin shortage by selling diluted penicillin (extremely dangerous and often lethal to those who use it; in the film we visit a hospital ward filled with children made deathly ill by Harry’s) on the black market. And then, in this scene, Holly speaks to Harry for the first time:

The uncanny I see in this scene is closely related to the uncanny in the introduction: a cheerful child-murderer appears in an amusement park to sound of the cheerful zither theme. Holly’s ridiculous imitation of the hard-boiled noir hero seems stupid, and one’s first inclination is not sympathy for his side. Especially if one takes into account the hypocrisy of the film’s ‘good guys.’ Philip Kerr points out in his explication of this scene in his essay “Seeing Greene” (included in the booklet of the Criterion edition of the film), that all of the good guys in this film are part of nations (many of the good guys are even ex-soldiers) that have just spent years taking part in the killings of thousands upon thousands of “dots.” What right have they (Kerr asks), or the audience for that matter, to judge Lime?

Thus the scene is a perturbing vision of the uncanny. Our old (childhood?) friend comes back, at once familiar and unfamiliar. (This side of Harry existed when Holly knew him, as we find out in Holly’s allusion to the gambling story; yet Holly’s managed not to remember this before, in his longing to see Harry.) Our friend speaks to a part of us that we find revolting and that we reject as quickly as possible. Yet it is still a part of us. I remember that when I first watched the film the logic of Lime’s offer (of 3.43) momentarily appealed to me. It’s a damn good scene and a damn good film.

axe, trucks, men, androgyny, etc.

So I immediately thought of those Axe commercials that flaunt their sexism in a mixture of self-parody and dead seriousness. In them women (or a woman) smell the Axe on a man and instantly become intensely desirous of him. They are strange commercials in terms of desire and power and Barthel’s masculine and feminine modes; the women are usually given some sort of strength through their desire but lose power over themselves in the process- their ids are unleashed, in a way. The man usually also loses power – the women usually look as though they are going to be physically in control of the situation – but he gains the power to attract. Take this modern mock-epic for instance:

The portrayal of the women is self-consciously ridiculous. The first woman, who sets up the type for all the rest, is shown in the masculine mode, looking like a powerful Amazon: animal-like, running barefoot, smelling her prey (note the bestial coarseness in that sniff; there’s a traditionally masculine roughness to it), ready to rip into flesh with her teeth. And yet the costume and the camera put her in the mode of Woman-as-portrayed-in-frat-boy-movies (which is supposed to be humorously incongruous). She has her long, monochrome hair done-up, her make-up on, her body is thin and scantily-clad, and, as a matter of course, there’s a medium shot with her breasts bouncing in slow-motion. So we have these sub-human sexual beings, portrayed with the power and performance of the masculine mode but placed in stereotypically feminine bodies.

And the man is in both the masculine and the feminine- he has this new power that comes from simply spraying on Axe. He glories both in the power and the effortlessness with which he acquires it; the final image of him is a typical man-with-new-super-powers image, narcissistic and gleeful. He is chosen, as Barthel says the feminine suggests, but in a masculine way, for he is the one that has made them choose him.

I chose this other add for its similarly ridiculous incongruities:

The cars and their drivers are most obviously in the masculine mode: there’s the roar of the engines, the mastery of the rugged terrain (which is even, subtly, in the foregrounding of the cars in the second-to-last shot), and the power our roaring pistons have over the British and their tiny phalluses. The British faces, so cool at first, soon contort in fear, and George’s face, as calm and cool as his gleaming vehicle, takes command. There is something feminine in this victory too, in its naturalness and effortlessness. And the last voice-over encourages the narcissism of nationalism, that “God’s chosen people” feeling. Chosen, of course, because we’re better and more powerful than everyone else in our devotion to freedom (the materialist’s inversion of the Jewish sentiment?).

Both of these adverts appeal to men in an (according to Barthel’s theory) androgynous mode. Perhaps that’s what Manly Men actually want- a sort of androgyny.