Mathew Dillman 9 June 2010 The Window, the Screen, and the Mirror: A Review of Mulvey Feminism and

Lukacs New Film Alfred Hitchcocks 1954 film Rear Window has long been analyzed for its representations of feminism, voyeurism, and psychoanalysis. This essay will formulate responses to each of these concepts, utilizing the works of theologians, artist, and philosophers including Lukacs, Althusser, Mulvey, Sherman, and Kruger to parallel the visual devices of the film. Voyeurism is a main theme of this film, where the leading male character Jeff is a photographer that has been injured and is left to himself in his room under recovery. Jeff returns to his scopophilic nature as he becomes obsessed with the happenings of his neighbors lives, which he views through the windows of the small apartment complex. There are several points to analyze in this configuration of the set. First, we can view the window, which Jeff looks out of as a screen upon which a narrative is constructed. These narratives are the fantasy work of Jeff, as he entertains himself in his injured state, and are the representations of the all knowing gaze of the viewer and the audience. This position can be attributed to a masculine position, an idea that we will return to later. In this sense, Jeff plays the role of Vertovs kino eye or camera eye as well as the pronoun I. His gaze is the apex of a triangular field of vision that is projected from the world (as an image) onto himself. The window, which he views the world from, is also representative as this apex position of the viewer. Everything in the world outside of this window is the image or the mirror, which is expressed by Jacques Lacans mirror stage (Lacan 621). The mirror stage involved the paradigm of the moment in which a child recognized his/her own image in the mirror to belong to its own body and ego. In the film, the characters Jeff and Lisa play with this idea of the mirror stage as Jeffs own fears and desires are expressed

in the windows of his neighbors, where the windows operate as mirrors; each mirror presenting a different fear. The relationship of the Thorwalds is most like the relationship between Jeff and Lisa, strengthened by the direct opposite orientation of their windows. Mr. and Mrs. Thorwald are happy newlyweds at the beginning of the film who become angry and combative. Mr. Throwald is left to take care of his wife, an invalid, who has shown to be irritating and ultimately unhappy. Jeff fears this relationship in the terms of his own relation to his fianc Lisa who is similarly left to take care of Jeff as the invalid. Jeff also views the boring lives of the couple above the Thorwalds whose only happiness comes from their dog. Feminists have found a great deal of material in this film to exemplify the power of film to parent us through image production. That is to say that our identities are constructed from images and our own conscious states are the result of the subject matter of these films. Althusser expresses that we acquire such identities as we are mirrored in the ideologies of film and that by being subjected in this way, we ourselves become a subject. This follows his notion of interpellation and hailing. To be hailed is to recognize ones self as a subject in the image of the hailer. Althusser distinguishes this as problematic in that it is a mis-recognitions of ones self to be allowed to transform into the subject of another when in reality we are all already subjects (Althusser 955). This theme conveys the passive and active roles in the film analyzed by Laura Mulvey. Mulvey contends that viewers of Hollywood film have been assigned conventional positions of gender in regard to the active and passive roles (Mulvey 983). This is an interesting point in the film that links to our concept of the camera eye position and the world as an image. The masculine position of the voyeurist would take the place of the viewer. Alternatively, the feminine position rests in the passive form of the screen of the exhibitionist. The duality of the male active voyeurist and the female passive exhibitionist is a film ideology of Hollywood film

that worked to impose these identities upon its viewers who could only identify or suture with the representations of these characters in the film. To say that the voyuerist is a male active position comes from the idea that a man remains as a spectator in society, staying out of view in the dark, and takes pleasure in the viewing of others. These are qualities of the character Jeff. An exhibitionist is just the opposite, where the female is passive in her position of the spectacle and is not to see but only to be viewed. Jeffs neighbors take on these roles. Though the table turns when the killer Mr. Thorwald comes to Jeffs room. Jeffs role is then transformed from male to the female as he is rendered as the passive spectacle when he is thrown through the window screen and literally moves into the image. Jeff takes back this role as the active when he blinds Mr. Throwald with his camera flash, reclaiming his male position of the unseen spectator. Lisa if of little interest to Jeff when she remains a spectator in his audience. Jeff finds a thrill of pleasure in Lisa only when she goes to find the wedding ring from Throwalds apartment, moving into his image of the narrative. When Lisa becomes part of this narrative he finds his true passionate feelings for her as she is transformed into a subject. Lisa, at this point, may be compared to the exhibitionist Ms. Torso, who parades around in her underwear dancing all day with the windows open. This talks about how women are constructed equally in life as in film. Furthermore they are constructed as a spectacle and as a symptom for male desire. Even if women are in the audience, they will identity with the male active eye. If women were colluding to this Barthesian myth as a weaker, passive sex, as exemplified in a scene from Salt of the Earth where a group a women speak to gain confidence and strength against their feminine position as incapable of anything otherwise masculine (Barthes 697). This gender myth is an active unconscious effect in contemporary society where when something that is highly conventionally constructed appears to be biologically or naturally constructed.

This transitions into the work of Cindy Sherman and her Film Stills, which attempt to intervene in the conventions of looking. The photographs depict the artist herself in roles of classic female film characters. She mimics what she has seen in the movies, making a parallel to Mulveys idea that myth becomes the active unconscious in terms of forming gender identities (Mulvey 988). Cindy is represented as familiar yet doesnt not speak to any specific image. In this way, her Film Stills represent a simulacrum where there are no original and only copies of copies of copies. A Baudrillardian view would not like this because there is no original (Baudrillard 1020) but as Craig Owens expresses, this allows for an allegory, where two different meanings are combined to make another (Owens 1026). In this case, the meaning is that woman has no original. She is a reproduction of something that never existed but that was created by the desires of men. This can be exemplified in Andy Warhols image of Marylyn Monroe where his print was taken from a film still and not the real Monroe. This links to new film theory in socialist realist work. The idea was that conventional Hollywood film was corrupt. The British Avant Guard theorists in the 1970s were in contradiction to conventional film. They wanted to instead focus on the dynamics of the viewers gaze as Mulvey points out. Furthermore, they believed that film structured our psychological relation to reality, which is also another concept proposed by Althusser's model. Previous to 1973, it would have been the norm to study film theories. However, at this point and though the influence of the British film magazine Screen, interests moved into studying not how film is made but instead how film makes us in this very mirrored quality of identity through imagery and myth. Althussers Ideological State Apparatus operates as the material base of ideology Mulvey continues to talk about the Primal castration Anxiety as originally proposed by

Freud. Mulvey extends this term to operate for both males and females (Mulvey 986). This theory represents the woman-as-spectacle and the man-as-the-bearer-of-the-look. This event occurs at a young age that is not remembered. It terms the male as the phallus and the female as the lack and the bearer of meaning. An example is the variety of clothing available for women in contrast to the limited choices for men. This follows with the idea that women should act as spectacles, to dress up, and the men should remain removed and inconspicuous. Deferred action occurs when the child remembers the unconscious experience of the past, such as with the Primal Castration Anxiety. An example is when the father initiates a decision in gender when he threatens the son through words to not become the lesser individual in a sexist society. The film Rear Window was the exact film type that propelled Gyorgy Lukacs to argue for a specific type of revolutionary art form. That form would later be Socialist Realism and it worked to expose the true operations of class and gender in the world and not in its mythical apparatus form as it was in Hollywood film at the time. Lukacs wanted this form of film to break the conventional structures of gender and class. It should then appear to be a critic on the very concept of film and image production itself. This is much like the reproduction that Lichtenstein created of the schools schema for a portrait where he was more interested in created a representation of the scheme than following its conformities. In this way the work was self referential in its nature to make the subject speak to its own method of creation. This is slightly visible in the film Rear Window where Jeffs use of the camera lens to spy references the very acting of filming the narrative we are watching. In a sense this is also a simulacrum in that we are and audience watching another audience watching an image. Vertovs kino eye is represented in the shot where the killer is reflected in the lens of the camera as Jeffs masculine position is stolen. The social purpose of Socialist realist film functions to work against the conventional

operation of film at the time, which prevent the proletariat from gaining consciousness of its revolutionary position. And film ideology is a projection of the class-consciousness of the bourgeoisie upon the proletariat.

Bibliography

Althusser, Louis. Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. 1970. Barthes, Roland. Myth Today. 1965. Baudrillard, Jean. The Hyper-realism of Simulation. 1976. Hitchcock, Alfred. Rear Window. 1954 Lacan, Jacques. The Mirror Phase as Formative of the Function of the I. 194. Mulvey, Laura. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. 1973. Sherman, Cindy. Film Stills. Owens, Craig. The Allegorical Impulse. 1980.