The scene I have chosen is from the movie Some Like It Hot (Wilder,
1959) in which the two male protagonists, and the audience, first see Sugar
(played by Marilyn Monroe.) In this scene, the two men are dressed as women,
trying to join a women's band to escape the Mafia as well as unemployment. They are
in a train station, complaining about their heels and their dresses, and how
self-conscious they are. Then they stop, and there is an eyeline match to a tracking shot of Sugar. Up to this point, there have only been diegetic sounds
of the train station bustle. As Sugar walks, provocative, non-diegetic jazzy
music plays, and her step is very bouncy. She walks with her mouth slightly
parted and a blank expression on her face. She passes the two men, and the
camera stays on them as they ogle her. Another eyeline match occurs, and
there’s a medium tracking shot of Sugar’s posterior. This shot directly
contrasts with some of the earlier shots of the two men walking awkwardly in
their heels. Sugar walks easily with a natural sway. Her entrance forces a
feminine ideal, thus adding to the gender binaries seen in the film thus far. Most
important, however, is that this shot of Sugar portrays her as a sexual object.
It foregrounds the men’s interest in her, and before she even speaks, the
audience is encouraged to view her as an object of lust.
The eyeline match has been used in cinema countless times and is a formal element that ends up being pretty sexist. We see the male protagonist (it's almost always a man) looking at someone, usually with some sort of awe in their facial expression. Then, it cuts to a woman, usually the man's love interest, looking dazzling in some way. Using this technique, the audience is forced to identify with the male protagonist and see the woman from his gaze, which inherently objectifies her as if she is there to only be seen.
In Some Like It Hot, Marilyn Monroe is certainly an object of lust. However, one of the men (who is dressed as a woman) also becomes an object of lust for another male character. Thus, the film uses these formal techniques to question them as well as gender ideology.
Wow! I loved your description of the scene, as I was reading it I could picture the scene directly in my head due to the vividness of your words. I completely agree that structuring a scene that way forces the audience to identify some characters as objects of lust. It was interesting how clear the direct contrast was between men dressed in women's clothing, and a woman like Marilyn being the epitome of womanhood. I also found it amusing that they choose to make another male character an object of lust, perhaps posing the idea of what it truly feels like to be an objectified woman.
ReplyDeleteFor those who don't know, Ayu's comments about the eyeline match as a mode of sexual objectification (the camera shows a man's eyes, and then cuts to a shot of a woman's body) are rooted in a tradition of interpreting "the male gaze" in popular cinema. This interpretative perspective owes much to the work of feminist film scholar Laura Mulvey. I'll put a link to her article "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" below, which is a longer reflection on what Ayu said above. If you haven't encountered it before, this article is key. Basically, Mulvey's thesis is that the formal conventions of narrative cinema are not gender neutral. These conventions are gendered male, meaning they assume that the spectator/audience is male and make specific choices to appeal to a masculine psyche. As Ayu points out, this is ideological: films that don't do this appear "unconventional" or even "subversive." And the really key thing is that Mulvey argues that this is not on the level of the narrative itself but the form of the narrative film: for this reason it tends to escape our notice.
ReplyDeleteGreat post,
B
http://screen.oxfordjournals.org/content/16/3/6.extract
ReplyDelete