The shared look is not an illusion nor is it mentioned

Laura Mulvey argues that there are three different looks associated with cinema: “that of the camera as it records the profilmic event, that of the audience as it watches the final product, and that of the characters at each other within the screen illusion." Mulvey’s definition is not just about looks associated with cinema but implies an association of looks both guided by and guided towards film audiences. Certain looks are scopohilic in nature and use another person or image as an object of sexual stimulation. Any scopophilia in cinema is an association of a series of looks arranged for and by the audience. Other looks are narcissistic and require the viewer to identify with the person or image on the screen. Characters and audience members relate through a series of implicit and explicit occurrences of looks with the goal of recognition and identification.

Mulvey’s exploration and arguments about the use of women as objects to stimulate not only pleasure but the process of the gaze in film seem accurate. Woman is image in film for the sexual pleasure of men and women and the definition of woman in general. It is not that men are not objectified by the technology of looking in cinema; it is that women are used specifically to grease the technological gears and to re-enforce cultural norms. I find troubling that we have a tendency to overlook sound, for example, and super-focus on sight. Nevertheless, I am interested in using the accepted engendering of film equipment, roles, audiences, and technique to discuss how complex looking in cinematic productions is—how the production is as much defined by the audience as the producers.

I will begin with the association of three looks that Mulvey’s rhetoric requires. In only the third look is illusion mentioned as an essential characteristic. The first look deals specifically with materials and technology—tools for making the film itself, for producing a “profilmic event.” Mulvey’s second look shows rather than produces and depends upon people who buy tickets, an audience that watches the screen rather than other audience members, and technology that projects rather than records. Whereas the first look deals with the association of looks from the point-of-view of the camera, the second look deals with the association of looks between an engaged audience and cinema itself. The third look, then, deals with the characters on the screen or in the film and the illusion that they are looking at each other. The third look is crucial for cinema to work, to be allowed to work. Mulvey correctly implies that cinema is a set-up, a gag, a trick, an illusion. Actors pretend to be people who talk to and care for each other in ways that writers, directors, and producers have learned audiences will comprehend. Comprehension in this case does not refer to taking in but being taken in. However, the illusion of cinema is not a screened illusion. Audiences know that filmic events aren’t real. While a screen illusion as such exists, I believe that illusion is important between the character and the audience looking for (and frequently at) one another rather than characters looking at each other.

Certainly, directors have toyed with this idea explicitly. Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo is a good example: the characters in a film and the members of an audience carry on a romance that is not real but very effective, a romance that is illusion yet feels right. Audience openly criticize the looks characters give each other and very often elide the looks that characters and audiences share. Such looks are uncomfortable and exploit both character and audience. In Lars Von Triers’s Breaking the Waves, Triers leaves his camera running well after a scene is finished. Emily Watson is drawn out of character and Watson-as-Bess looks into the camera. Her looks are exploited by the director to implicate the technology. After all, while not an official entry into Dogma, Breaking the Waves is a film that calls attention to itself. The truth Dogma aims at lies in a look shared between producer and audience that develops a techno-awareness. Yet such a look, as critical as it intends to be, does nothing to examine the look between characters/actors and audience. An audience buys tickets hence an illusion; Triers’s experiment in uncovering the brutality of truth-filmed and woman-degraded implicates the audience not the film and filmmakers. Even with all of Dogma’s honesty, Bess’s public humiliations, rape, and death lift the audience to a state of emotional self-awareness to promote a catharsis through her and then sends them home resituated in the symbolic order.

We should try the following contrast: looks between characters and the audience are illusions while looks between characters in a film are real. Jeff Daniels steps out of the screen to be with Mia Farrow yet he looks like he is still in the film. Emily Watson looks to the camera exhausted from her emotional portrayal and appears to look at the audience. Relying on a structure to justify the reading of a masculinist symbolic order—a feminist reading of film technology and economy—may oversimplify a detailed discussion of the association of looks in cinema. I think of Valie Export’s film The Practice of Love. We often think of how the male gaze, in this case men looking at women, dismembers the female body as it focuses on specific erotic parts. Plenty of film out there cuts women into pieces through angling and editing. A scene in Export’s film problematizes this construction of the look of the male gaze. From inside a sex-worker’s enclosed space, a woman strips. Men observe her body through a wall that distinctly separates the men from the woman, the spectator from the object of the gaze. The masculine gaze that the camera constructs is destabilized outside this look—not because we return the gaze but because the gaze is used to watch the men looking. Over or through the woman’s body, we see parts of men watching. The gaze is de-gendered (not neutered) because it refuses to comment on the look. I could argue that this is because a woman is directing the look, but that would in itself re-enforce the masculine structure before allowing a critical inquiry to begin. This is not a Godard moment where we hear commentary. This isn’t like Cordelia’s silence in King Lear either where the father chokes on his order as it unravels because this is not a decision by a man directing but a woman practicing… .