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--- Online advice for the culturally disgruntled ---

Enough with the "male gaze"!

After decades of reactionary, puritanical theories, it's time feminist film criticism turned to "The Birds" and other works of art.

Professor Paglia:

I just recently finished your BFI Film Classics study of "The Birds," and I want to thank you for such an enthusiastic, detailed and insightful approach to Hitchcock's masterpiece. I hadn't seen the film in years, but I rented the video the same day that your book arrived. I sat down early in the evening and watched the film, then spent much of the rest of the night reading your analysis. Your conclusions regarding Hitchcock's treatment of the women, with the underlying themes of captivation, domestication and deception, have given me a greater understanding -- and a deeper appreciation -- of "The Birds." The overarching theme of nature's tyranny, and the mythic associations that you convey, are especially insightful. Your personal Nicene Creed -- "We all go to school in Bodega Bay!" -- bespeaks the elemental power of "pagan nature" that we, as a culture, so dangerously deny.

Which brings me to my query. I'm a Ph.D. candidate in the humanities at a Southern university, and as a teaching assistant, I have been teaching a course on multicultural perspectives in film. Specifically, we look at representations of race, class and gender as portrayed in, or rather "constructed by," American films. It can be an interesting class, and is often quite fulfilling, especially in some of our more freewheeling classroom discussions of the films and the issues they raise. However, we're moving into the "Issues in Femininity" section soon, and I'll be assigning Laura Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" essay from our reader, and I invariably have trouble with that essay. Not only is its language often inpenetrable and its ideas difficult to convey to freshmen and sophomores, I also have trouble with her ideas themselves, such as the voyeuristic pleasure derived from the "male gaze" being "obsessively subordinated to the neurotic needs of the male ego." The female image as "castration threat" is also a tough sell to undergraduates.

While discussion of the gaze itself is important, and I've learned much from my study of her piece -- I especially like her description of spectators losing themselves in the darkness of the theater, and the sort of magical power that the images on the screen then assume -- her essay also raises some significant questions. Isn't she relegating women -- on the screen and in the audience -- into a passive state of objectification, setting up a perpetually oppositional system? Also, when showing examples of the gaze in class, I play that classic clip from "Cool Hand Luke" where the men on the chain-gang are driven crazy by the blond washing her car, the camera lingering on her boobs as she caresses the car's body. It's an incredibly hot scene, and the next scene in the shower, with the nude men working off their sexual tension through violence, is a great follow-up. But when I ask the class who has the power -- the men on the chain gang (or in the audience) or the blond on the screen, the answer seldom varies. Just like the George Kennedy character says, "She knows exactly what she's doing!"

What's your take on Mulvey's essay and on the "male gaze"? I realize that she's now a distant professional associate of yours through the BFI Film Classics series. But is her Lacanian approach to the gaze necessary for undergraduates? The feminists that run the department don't appreciate my questioning Mulvey's relevance. But I don't sense that my colleagues or Mulvey are very connected to the lessons taught at Bodega Bay School.

-- Jim Maynor
Florida State University

Dear Mr. Maynor:

Thank you so much for your gracious remarks about my British Film Institute book on "The Birds." You're quite right to zero in on my challenge to feminist film criticism in it. American humanities departments have been in the grip of poststructuralist and postmodernist theory for 25 years. How many student minds have been twisted by that pretentious, labyrinthine gibberish?

What you praise in my commentary on the film is coming directly from my superb 1960s education at the State University of New York at Binghamton, where I had brilliant teachers like the visionary poet Milton Kessler, who preached the gospel of sensory response to literature and art. I hate and condemn false abstraction in the discussion of art. Scene by scene in "The Birds," I focus on mood, emotion, humor, mystery, facial expression, body language, choreography, gesturalism, costume, makeup, décor -- all the visible and invisible aspects of film that poststructuralism is too clumsy to describe or analyze with precision.

Yes, British critic Laura Mulvey is now a highly esteemed member of the staff of the British Film Institute, which invited me to contribute to the Film Classics Series (and has asked for another book). Her 1973 essay, with its references to "patriarchal society" and "phallocentrism," is the ultimate source of the theory of the "male gaze" that made my life so difficult in those decades of feminist orthodoxy and political correctness in America when I could not get published or employed by a research institution.

My own theory of the imperious, phobic, Egypt-born "Western eye," as set forth in "Sexual Personae" (originally my Yale dissertation), was based on my exploration of art history, anthropology and comparative religion, as well as on my passionate devotion to high-glamour Hollywood cinema and fashion magazines. From the start, the "male gaze" struck me as conceptually limited and wrongly skewed to gender. It seemed to spring a priori from 1970s feminist ideology rather than a posteriori from primary study of world art works, particularly the glorious nudes of Greek, Roman and Renaissance art.

As a pop Warholite and pornographic apostle of the 1960s sexual revolution, I found the "male gaze" to be a reactionary, puritanical idea, needlessly destructive of artistic connoisseurship. Its victim-oriented premise of woman's status as passive object did not conform to my appreciative understanding of Babylon-born erotic dancing -- where strippers rule from the stage -- or of gay male porn, with its roots in the homoerotic idealism of classical Athens.

I believe I finally turned the tide on this issue (and helped kill Lacanian feminism in the process) in my aggressive celebration of Sharon Stone's performance in "Basic Instinct," which was being picketed as sexist and homophobic by feminist and gay activist protesters in 1992. When Stone's icy femme fatale flashes her pudendum at a ring of police interrogators and turns them to jelly, which sex has the real power in the universe?

Given this background, you can imagine my trepidation at being informed, on my trip to London in July for the British release of "The Birds," that Laura Mulvey and I would be going head to head about Hitchcock on a prominent BBC radio show. As I stood with a BFI official amid the streaming, early-morning crowd in the magnificent Art Deco foyer of Broadcasting House on Portland Place, I kept flinching as I imagined Mulvey bearing down on us -- one very tall battle ax with granny spectacles gave me particular pause as she grimly swept by.

So it is all the more striking that when Mulvey did appear, rushing through the great doors after being delayed in traffic, I liked her instantly! -- literally from the moment I saw her 20 feet away. She could not have been more generous and amiable, and our conversation on air was stimulating and substantive. Mulvey is a true intellectual, with whom I felt completely at home. Her in-person discourse is both lively and subtle. I kept thinking, "If only American professors were like this!"

Meeting Laura Mulvey (there were several other brief encounters at the Groucho Club reception for my book as well as at the BFI itself) was a remarkable experience. It dramatized yet again for me how terribly wrong American academe has gone in the past quarter century. Mulvey cannot be held responsible for the atrocious, doctrinaire use to which her ideas have been put by the philistines of the women's studies programs here. I cannot believe she would think it appropriate that freshmen and sophomores at Florida State University are being forced to parse her 1973 essay without the prior familiarity with Freud and Lacan that it demands.

When I sent your fascinating letter to my friend Robert Caserio (teaching this semester at the University of Utah), he tartly responded: "Laura Mulvey! She's nice, you say; but the numbers of bad essays written because of that misuse by her of Lacan's gaze! Gak! There ought to be a ten-year moratorium on reading that oppressive, totalitarian-minded essay. In Lacan 'the gaze' is not anywhere identified with any personal agency, nor is it identified with a human eye, male or female; instead, it's rather like a cosmic mal occhio ["evil eye"], a derangement of the sense that one tries to make of things and of one's self. Mulvey's usage is more a vulgarization of Sartre than anything adequately derived from Lacan. I have my own intelligent grad students at Temple who are sick to death of it. The Mulvey thing hangs on because it's a catchall easy substitute for analysis."

My implacable, wholesale rejection of poststructuralism is on the record (in "Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders"). Academic feminism, in my view, went wildly down the wrong road in its very unfeminist ass-kissing of absurdly idolized French males like Lacan, Derrida and Foucault. I despise the entire school of Saussure, which has compulsively imposed sterile verbal categories on sensory experience. Saussurean linguistics is a dead end. And social constructionism, which is blind to nature (the theme of "The Birds"), has become an evil religion.

Fifty years from now, no one will give a rancid fig about any of those Parisian nerds. But Alfred Hitchcock will remain. Far from being the misogynist that some feminists have claimed, Hitchcock was one of the great bards of modern sexuality. He saw the turbulence between the sexes -- between husband and wife or mother and son. And he captured on film the divine beauty of woman, who symbolizes both nature and culture.

Thanks to the success of my own reform wing of feminism, academic attitudes about sexuality have profoundly changed, as shown by Salon's report on the recent World Pornography Conference in California. Indeed, Mulvey herself began her 1989 essay collection, "Visual and Other Pleasures," by very ethically acknowledging that those articles "were not originally intended to last" and that she thought of her writing as "ephemeral": "I often sacrificed well-balanced argument, research and refinements of style to the immediate interests of the formative context of the moment, the demands of polemic, or the economy of an idea or the shape and pattern of a line of thought." She admits that the now-canonical essay you cite, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," was written "polemically and without regard for context or nuances of argument."

Throughout this decade, I have received numerous appeals, by letter or in person after my lectures, from women students from Toronto to Berkeley lamenting their inability to comprehend the feminist film criticism assigned to them. Isn't this all a ghastly waste of time and effort that would have been better employed in studying films and art works directly?

The one person who could save the day is Laura Mulvey herself. Now that 25 years have passed, would she not consider making a formal reevaluation of some kind of the state of feminist film criticism? Clearly, she has had second thoughts. There are thousands of students and professors who deserve to hear them.

Meanwhile, I will pray to Apollo that you and all like-minded graduate students will keep the faith and continue to evangelize for art!
SALON | Oct. 7, 1998

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