the male glaze
phenomenology and the feeling real
23/01/2017
INTRODUCTION
How are current conceptions/appropriations of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology utilized to reaffirm and authenticate the female experience in current film? In this paper I will address contemporary film culture and its subsequent theoretical practices, specifically those that concern embodiment, physicality and sensuality. I will examine whether the current mode of phenomenology seen in film theory/philosophy that has been described as haptic visuality are a direct response to the ‘Male Glaze’ of the internet age – an age where the very presence of a woman in ‘the real’ is no longer a necessity in various phallocentric media forms – an unprecedented shift from female subjugation into erasure. Is there a critical attempt to re-embody the female form within film? Can a phenomenological reading be a feminist philosophical tool to combat this excision by providing filmic evidence of female sensuality?
THE POWERFUL LOOK
The fantasy or ‘phantasy’ quality of the screen has long been acknowledged by feminist scholars – most powerfully and importantly by Laura Mulvey in her seminal work ‘Visual Pleasure And Narrative Cinema’[1]. As Mulvey explains, there is an inherent issue with using the female body as a filmic spectacle. This is posited by way of Freud [2], whose influence on modern cultural understanding can be disagreed with but not denied – in a film, a shot of the woman simultaneously presents the primal desire of the scopophilic appraising look - the base libido and, still from a position of the pre-cognitively base - the anxiety of the castration complex. Therefore, the long, leering shots that gleefully ogle the contours of a female body in pauses entirely useless to plot or narrative, needs to somehow be constituted to ease this pre-conscious fear of loss. This is why there is always a male character to which the gaze of the camera is attributed – the male audience can, in their phallus-related panic, latch onto him as an avatar of their lust. By letting their lusts assume his projected form, their appendages remain symbolically attached. As Mulvey succinctly puts, “The man controls the film phantasy and also emerges as the representative of power in a further sense: as the bearer of the look of the spectator, transferring it behind the screen to neutralise the extra-diegetic tendencies represented by woman as spectacle.”[3]
Mulvey also addresses some elements of virtuality in this piece – a stunning prediction as to the current climate of inauthenticity surrounding the female body. Mulvey speaks of how the camera works to create an environment of complete believability through its movements and functions within fiction film. This blurring of the limits is what becomes dangerous in reality – specifically in regards to the transformation of the female character into a ‘fetish object’.
According to Mulvey, the castration complex in a male audience member can be avoided, or swerved around, is by presenting the female character not as an icon but as a ‘fetish object’. This creates, instead of a threatening castrated presence, a reassuring one. It denies power in the female character – transferring her into the sexual symbolic. Mulvey postulates that “as soon as fetishistic representation of the female image threatens to break the spell of the illusion, and the erotic image on the screen appears directly (without mediation) to the spectator, the fact of fetishisation, concealing as it does castration fear, freezes the look, fixates the spectator and prevents him from achieving any distance from the image in front of him.” [4]. This transformation, or at least the development of it that is now possible via technological leaps, is in conformity with Baudrillard’s concept of the ‘simulacrum’[5]– a world of the synthetic and invented.
LIVING IN THE FALSE
The screen is unavoidable. It is no longer necessary to attend the movie theatre to enter a ‘filmic’ new world; the new world is always present. We create ourselves on the web via media content that is directly inspired by filmic work –even our interior lives are not safe from becoming pieces of media-inspired performance. The screen is barely discernible from daily life, constantly interfering and influencing it in a disturbing symbiotic relationship. With the advent of Virtual Reality, the ‘real’ and the screen will become far more difficult to distinguish. This is the Simulacrum as described by Baudrillard – imitations of imitations of imitations until the original, or ‘the real’ is lost entirely.
THE MALE GLAZE
In its basic form, to look is to capture. To capture is to possess - especially when considering the element of film or photography that quite literally imprisons its subjects in a Sontagian media death [6]. To own is to replace any existing authenticity with a false narrative. Therefore, although it may not seem as if the connection between Laura Mulvey’s concept of the male gaze and the Baudrillardian simulacrum is that profound, there is a chain of development happening between the two – a descent into the false. As the act of looking can be patriarchal, so can the act of not-looking - of obscuring, of replacing with a simulated object. Overexposure becomes caricature – a distortion on reality and an attack on the authenticity of the female body.
In her summation of the ‘Male Gaze’, Mulvey notes that there are two contradictory aspects of the pleasure structures of ‘looking’. The first is the scopohilic look, the slightly perverse stare of the Peeping Tom who derives satisfaction, often sexually, from watching, uninvolved but omniscient. The second is the narcissistic look, the look that constitutes with ego – the look that identifies itself within the male image. In accordance with our current climate of falsehood, I propose a third look, the masturbatory look. It, like the second, involves recognition and identification, a pampering of the ego but not in an adjusted, transferred sense. Instead of identifying with the male protagonist, the male spectator instead identifies himself from within the female figure, the fully transformed ‘fetish object’. They see their fantasy object and they see themselves, reflected in a mirror of desire. Like libidinous Doctor Frankensteins, they admire the creature that has been composed from their collective lust.. As the male gaze is to look only at the fantasy, wilfully blind to the real.
The term ‘Male Glaze’ functions by troubling and obscuring the vision of the ‘gaze’ and referring to the subtle process of dualized desensitization and disembodiment that the internet can provide (thus the ‘glazed’ expressivity of the internet-addled audience). The gaze can no longer be separated into a camera gaze that we allow ourselves to inhabit – we are instead constantly inhabiting this gaze – media conventions now forming social ones.
I once came across a piece ‘click-bait’ about a young man, living in Japan, who had recently gained a place in the Guinness Book of World Records for the most consecutive acts of masturbation in one day [7]. When probed about the motivations for this act, he explained that he found ‘real’ women to lack the eroticism of the drawn form, adding that he thought them ‘dirty’ [8]. Why would a real woman be viewed ‘dirty’? It could not, surely, be the mere materiality of her skin, the smell of her body, the putrid humanness of her presence? Was the locus of disgust self-reflexive - a rejection of the base, crude nature of our bodies in an age that prioritises the sanitised, rational and virtual form above all? Or was it entirely patriarchal - rejecting the female body to deny it any authentic form, reinventing womanhood as male fantasy, the ‘fetish object’ embodied by employing even more blatant strategies than ever before. Of course, pornography is not symptomatic of all popular film genres, but it is an affective form that has great influence upon media trends – especially when considering the subjugation of the female body.
For me, the ‘glaze’ denotes the reflectivity of the screen to show ourselves and the blurred lines between the real and the false. The glaze has a sheen about it that means that whilst looking, whilst engaging in scopohilic pleasure, we are also watching ourselves taking part in them, witnessing our own place within the fantasy, our own ghosts becoming part of the machine. The glaze, like that on pottery, gives a shiny, finished affect to our eyes. We are one with our fantasy. The glaze also connotes the glazed eye of the viewer who no longer needs to place themselves as an audience in a temporal space - the screen is always present.
The male glaze is one that exists with woman not only constantly in the role of the ‘fetish object’ and becoming replaced by new versions of the ‘fetish object’ (like anime pornography) that no longer requires her presence. New virtual media now has the technology to neatly catapult over that nasty ‘castration complex’ issue, an unnecessary pause in pleasure for the demanding contemporary viewer. If the woman was never real, she never underwent such an unpleasant transformation. She was born wholly a hole, and nothing more.
HAPTICS
How is it possible, in such a media climate, for women to avoid this fetishization? How can we not only trouble the way in which films are being watched and experienced, but the very way that they are being made? How can we establish a form of female embodiment and sensual subjectivity within both the cinematic world and the social one? An answer could lie within a particular and prominent form of phenomenology: haptic visuality.
What does it mean to engage in haptic visuality as a form of film critique? It is at its simplest distillation a form of embodied spectatorship. It is to feel the film as a texture, to experience its touch, to understand that it exists separately from our world but to interact and engage with it as one would touch and feel an object to discern its shape and purpose. This is a development upon the thought of Maurice Merleu-Ponty, who, in his behemoth work ‘Phenomenology of Perception’, grounded consciousness in the intersubjective and the lived experience of the physical body, denying the mind-body dualism prevalent in the rationalistic thought of enlightenment era philosophers. Merleu-Ponty stated “I know that objects have several facets because I could make a tour of inspection of them and in that sense I am conscious of the world through the medium of my body.” [9]. In haptic criticism, the object with several facets is film and the concept is that the body plays a key part in our affective understanding of a film, as well as our conscious thought.
This applies not only to how the film appeals in affective means to our bodies, causing us to ‘feel’ in congruence with the narrative, often due to clever uses of camerawork and evocative cinematic strategies, but how the very texture and ‘object’ quality of film can be examined. Some film works are deemed more ‘haptic’ than others in the way that they can effectively transfer filmic affect onto their audiences. A ‘haptic’ work is understood to have a special focus upon texture and ambiguity – in some sense a more authentic worldview in which not only can feelings be translated directly onto our bodies but also how tastes can be tasted or scents can be discerned– a vivid and enthralling experience that unites the viewer in mind and body.
There are a number of film academics currently working within the field of haptic visuality, many of them female. The author and academic that I believe begs particular focus in this field is Laura U. Marks, who first conceptualised the term ‘haptic visuality’. Marks has a distinct approach to haptic critique that I feel is both tremendously accomplished and particularly in line with my argument towards a feminized troubling of the male glaze through the use of film criticism and philosophy.
In the preface of her 2000 work, ‘The Skin Of The Film’ [10], truly the bible of haptic criticism, Laura U. Marks defines her version of haptic visuality and explains the meaning of the title of the work – “vision itself can be tactile, as though one were touching a film with one’s eyes: I term this haptic visuality. Finally, to think of film as a skin acknowledges the effect of a work’s circulation among different audiences, all of which mark it with their presence.”[11] Marks’ acknowledgement of the ‘different audiences’ of film transcends her work to one of upmost importance as not only an interesting film text, but a politically important one. Her intersectionality refreshes what could be an esoteric concept into one of urgency and potency, particularly in light of our current culture of unquestioning acceptance of homogenization.
LABIAL AESTHETICS
By showing and performing touch and texture in a way that every woman can empathise with, haptic critics are unlocking a place of deeper physical understanding within the female sensual comprehension, an almost primal level of knowledge. Most people can watch a film that employs a deeply haptic visuality and feel suddenly, and quite facetiously put, ‘touched’ but the truth is that often, especially in the work of Claire Denis [12] and other female film-makers who use many ‘haptic’ conventions within their work - this haptic experience is one that seems to be explicitly female. This connects explicitly with films that centre around sexual experience and female sensual desire – films seem to be at their most haptic when portraying scenes of an intimate nature – haptic visuality is at its core an exploration of female sensuality that is subjective to her.
This assertion can be more firmly grounded when comparing the work of Laura U. Marks with the theorist and philosopher Luce Irigaray, specifically that which can be found in Marks’ ‘The Skin Of The Film’ and Irigaray’s ‘This Sex Which Is Not One’ [13]. Irirgaray’s effervescent text struggles and succeeds to discover what is a thrilling and monumental manifesto on unique, entirely subjective and profoundly subversive female sexuality. The echo between these two texts is so intense that it almost seems that they were written in harmonic conversation, with Marks’s haptics answering Irigarays call for the provision of a female-subjective understanding within social and media culture.
When describing ‘The Haptic’, the first sentence Marks’ uses is ‘touching, not mastering’ [14]– this conforms greatly to Irigaray’s text which also refers often to the importance of ‘touching’ within female sensuality – specifically ‘self-touching’. This is the ‘labial aesthetics’ – the ambiguous, pluralised female sensual touch that is so vibrant and present within works of haptic visuality – works that emphasise touch to embody a womans physical experience. Irigaray even writes that “Woman takes pleasure more from touching than from looking” [15]. This concentration upon the glancing touch, the lack of concrete ownership over an object, merely a brush against it that is temporal but deeply affective, has marvellous parallels within Marks’s work, as she claims that in her haptic critique “I try to move along the surface of the object, rather than attempting to penetrate or “interpret” is, as criticism is usually supposed to do.” [16]– the refusal to ‘penetrate’ denies the phallic element of typical critique and speaks far more to an Irigararian pluralised, touching – a Labial aesthetic.
TOUCH, DON’T LOOK
Why let sensuality and the intimate experience be what it should – amalgamous, strange, ambiguous, sensual and most importantly – socially human - when it can be as immediate as the loading time for a short video clip on redtube? To return to the body as a site of passion and sensuality seems archaic – but for a woman, it has political necessity. To halt our swift replacement through the glazed male lens of our current cultural forms we cannot stand, secular from the ripe, haptic material being made, and watch as we become subsumed by the simulacrum. Therefore, the message is – as a woman - we must touch, not look. We must allow ourselves to be embodied within haptic media and reaffirm our existence through the assertion of our authentic bodies into critical and filmic language.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Baudrillard, Jean. 1994. Simulacra And Simulation. 20th ed. Paris: University of Michigan Press.
Beugnet, Martine. 2004. Claire Denis. 1st ed. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Brian, Ashcroft. 2011. "World Masturbation Champion Prefers Anime Girls To Real Girls". Kotaku. http://World Masturbation Champion Prefers Anime Girls to Real Girls.
Foucault, M. 1978. The History of sexuality: Volume 1 an introduction (R. Hurley, Trans.). London: Penguin Books.
Garland, A. 2015 Ex Machina, Film
Ghost In The Shell. 2017. Film. Hollywood: Rupert Sanders.
Glaser, April. 2017. "The Scarlett Johansson Bot Is The Robotic Future Of Objectifying Women".WIRED. https://www.wired.com/2016/04/the-scarlett-johansson-bot-signals-some-icky-things-about-our-future/.
Glazer, J., A. 2013 Under the Skin, Film
Irigaray, Luce. 1985. This Sex Which Is Not One. 1st ed. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.
Jonze, S. 2013 Her, Film
Marks, Laura U. 2000. The Skin Of The Film. 1st ed. Durham: Duke University Press.
Marks, L. U. 2007. Immigrant Semiosis within Lord, S., and Marchessault, J. 2007. Fluid screens, expanded cinema. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice and Colin Smith. 2002. Phenomenology Of Perception. 1st ed. London: Routledge Classics.
Mulvey, L. 1975. "Visual Pleasure And Narrative Cinema". Screen 16 (3): 6-18. doi:10.1093/screen/16.3.6.
Peirce, C.S.1867. "On a New List of Categories", Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 7 (1868), 287–298. Presented, 14 May 1867.
Sontag, Susan. 1977. On Photography. 1st ed. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Sanders, R. 2017 Ghost In The Shell
"WATCH: How A World Champion Masturbator Spends His Day (NSFW)". 2017. The Huffington Post. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/21/world-champion-masturbator_n_1163576.html.
[1] Mulvey, L. 1975. "Visual Pleasure And Narrative Cinema". Screen 16 (3): 6-18. doi:10.1093/screen/16.3.6.
[2] Freud, Sigmund. "The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex." On Sexuality. Vol. 7 of Penguin Freud Library. Trans. James Strachey. Ed. Angela Richards. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976. 313-322.
[3] Mulvey, L. 1975. "Visual Pleasure And Narrative Cinema". Screen 16 (3): 6-18. doi:10.1093/screen/16.3.6.
[4] Mulvey, L. "Visual Pleasure And Narrative Cinema". P. 14
[5] Baudrillard, Jean. 1994. Simulacra And Simulation. Paris: University of Michigan Press.
[6] Sontag, Susan. 1977. On Photography. 1st ed. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
[7] "WATCH: How A World Champion Masturbator Spends His Day (NSFW)". 2017. The Huffington Post. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/21/world-champion-masturbator_n_1163576.html.
[8] Brian, Ashcroft. 2011. "World Masturbation Champion Prefers Anime Girls To Real Girls". Kotaku. http://World Masturbation Champion Prefers Anime Girls to Real Girls.
[9] Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (translated by Colin Smith). 2002. Phenomenology Of Perception. 1st ed. London: Routledge Classics.
[10] Marks, Laura U. 2000. The Skin Of The Film. 1st ed. Durham: Duke University Press.
[11] Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (translated by Colin Smith). 2002. Phenomenology Of Perception. 1st ed. London: Routledge Classics.
[12] Beugnet, Martine. 2004. Claire Denis. 1st ed. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
[13] Irigaray, Luce. 1985. This Sex Which Is Not One. 1st ed. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.
[14] Irigaray, Luce. 1985. This Sex Which Is Not One. 1st ed. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. XII
[15] Irigaray. Luce. 26.
[16] Marks, Laura U. 2000. The Skin Of The Film. 1st ed. Durham: Duke University Press.