Case Study 1
Jenny Chernansky
Throughout history the feminine is either condemned as a vixen or subjected as a victim of violence, the damsel in distress, the virgin incapable of defending herself. Young women today are fraught with images of overt sexuality and at the same time labeled as whores. The expectation leaves many women to feel like the only value they have is sexual and that they are only valued by being objectified. Then they are condemned by doing so. This exists within our own society as well as the world at large - and arguably throughout human history. Religious icons like the virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene represent these principles. Almost every contemporary religion, myth and story is based around a male figurehead, with female ‘sub-figures’ often in the form of mothers, wives, virgins, and the opposing seductresses or demons. These views are almost always coming from a male perspective.
Roman Polanski is a French-Polish film director, producer, and writer whose work has often explored aspects of the woman as victim or vixen. His own personal history is fraught with debate. He was born in 1933 and was raised in a concentration camp during WWII where most of his family was killed. His wife Sharon Tate and unborn child were murdered by the Mason family in 1969. He was accused of sexual abuse of a minor where he pleaded guilty to statutory rape and fled the country and is still a fugitive. Although he has made many movies, I would like to concentrate on Rosemary’s Baby from 1968, The Ninth Gate from 1999, and most significantly Venus in Furs from 2013 in order to show the dichotomy between women being viewed as ‘victim’ or ‘vixen’.
The role of the woman as image and man as bearer of the look is argued in Ways of Seeing by John Berger. In the text Berger argues that men look at women, and women see they are being looked at and this is a foundation of the depiction of women in art.
In Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Laura Mulvey notes:
“In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female form which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness. Woman displayed as sexual object is the leit-motif of erotic spectacle: from pin-ups to striptease, from Ziegfeld to Busby Berkeley, she holds the look, plays to and signifies male desire. Mainstream film neatly combined spectacie and narrative…
…As Budd Boetticher has put it:
‘What counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents. She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act the way he does. In herself the woman has not the slightest importance.’" (p.10)
The concept of women as image and man as bearer of the look (as explained by Berger and made relevant by society) is itself a man-made concept and refutes the idea that women themselves can be the ones to ‘look’ and men can be looked at. It is just not acknowledged.
Kaja Silverman argues that the problem with the idea brought up by Berger ‘since the gaze always emerges for us within the field of vision, and since we ourselves are always being photographed by it even as we look , all binarizations of spectator and spectacle mystify the scopic relations in which we are held’ basically because the Gaze sees everyone, both men and women become the spectacle and the spectator, and because it is never a complete vision, neither can be masters of it. (qtd in Rose, 123)
Director Roman Polanski has made many films which display aspects of the virgin/whore dichotomy through the male gaze, while also holding onto the feminine as a symbol of power. He also uses a lot of religious imagery, playing on themes of demonology and Satanism. Rosemary’s Baby demonstrates the woman being victimized by a group of Satanists, the primary figure being ‘innocently’ led astray by her husband and neighbors to give birth to son of Satan. In The Ninth Gate, there are two female roles, both embodying the ‘demonic female’. One is a leader of a Satanic cult, who seduces and kills in order to gain power. The other plays a more ambiguous role in the beginning, acting as a savior for the lead male character, later to be revealed as what may be the embodiment of Satan or the whore of Babylon.
Venus in Furs, the French movie from 2013 by Roman Polanski is a great example of the idea of the male gaze turned on itself. It is loosely based on the original novel by Masoch and revolves around the multiple layered relationship of an actress and director, eventually resulting in the actress being revealed as the embodiment of Venus.
According to Camille Paglia in Sexual Personae, “Masoch hails ‘the tyranny and cruelty that constitute woman’s essence and her beauty.’ She explains that Masoch’s description shows Masochism as “a realignment of sexual orders”. “Eros parodies or recapitulates the sacred because... sexually, even at its most perverse, is implicitly religious. Sex is the ritual link between man and nature”. (p.436)
The role of Vanda and the actress auditioning for the role with the same name, along with the male role and the director, become more and more ambiguous. The actress and the role blend together while she takes on the role of a dominatrix or dominant female goddess, while simultaneously commenting on the sexism portrayed in the writing of the script. In one scene Vanda reads from the script “Don’t you see? You will never be safe in the hands of a woman. Of any woman. [breaking character] That line is so sexist! It makes me want to scream!” She even comments that the original text ‘Venus in Furs’ by Masoch is sexist: “That ain’t Titian babe, it’s s & m porn. The whole thing is one big cliché’”.
The actress herself is in a submissive role and slowly gains dominance over the period of the story, eventually revealing herself as Venus incarnate. She assumes the role that is one of a male fantasy sex object, while taking control of the director who is asking her to play the role. This role reversal shows an example of the ‘male gaze’ being returned back by the female. By reversing the gaze and the power, the castration complex is either negated or realized in its fullest potential, except the castrator becomes the mother not the father. The end of the movie has the male character completed subjugated, tied to giant phallus dressed as woman, while Vanda has revealed herself as Aphrodite in the form of a ravaged Bacchanalian woman ready to devour her prey.
Mulvey uses the psychoanalytic ideas of the castration complex and the mirror stage in relation to cinema which creates ‘woman as image, man as bearer of the look’ (Mulvey, 19 qtd in Rose, 114) Rose explains “Her [Mulvey’s] use of both these concepts assumes a phallocentric scopic regime in which woman can only figure passively as a castrated man, and men appear as active and powerful, controlling the visual, the spatial and the temporal. This, she says, is ‘the way the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form’”
In the original novel Venus in Furs by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch:
"and take note of what I am about to say to you. Never feel secure with the woman you love, for there are more dangers in woman's nature than you imagine. Women are neither as good as their admirers and defenders maintain, nor as bad as their enemies make them out to be. Woman's character is characterlessness. The best woman will momentarily go down into the mire, and the worst unexpectedly rises to deeds of greatness and goodness and puts to shame those that despise her. No woman is so good or so bad, but that at any moment she is capable of the most diabolical as well as of the most divine, of the filthiest as well as of the purest, thoughts, emotions, and actions. In spite of all the advances of civilization, woman has remained as she came out of the hand of nature. She has the nature of a savage, who is faithful or faithless, magnanimous or cruel, according to the impulse that dominates at the moment. Throughout history it has always been a serious deep culture which has produced moral character. Man even when he is selfish or evil always follows principles, woman never follows anything but impulses. Don't ever forget that, and never feel secure with the woman you love.”
Mulvey wrote “The power to subject another person to the will sadistically or to the gaze voyeuristically is turned onto the woman as the object of both. Power is backed by a certainty of legal right and the established guilt of the woman (evoking castration, psychoanalytically speaking). True perversion is barely concealed under a shallow mask of ideological correctness – the man is on the right side of the law, the woman on the wrong.” (Mulvey qtd in Rose, 115)
When the male character describes his perspective of the play: “For me, it’s a play about two people united forever. They’re handcuffed at the heart.” Vanda retaliates, “by perversion” he says, “by passion” she says, “by his passion”. He says, “it is a chemical reaction” She says, “It’s a sex and class war”. They argue about who the character of “Vanda” is (The name of the character and the actress playing her), Vanda says “Maybe she’s just a woman. The play’s like an old anti-female tract. He makes her play along, then blames her.”
I would argue Roman Pulanski’s work shows an ability to reflect upon itself the limitations of the ‘male gaze’ as described by Berger. His work reflects the dichotomy often given to women as being put in the position of ‘victim’ or ‘vixen’. His work with Venus in Furs has evolved to where this limited viewpoint is acknowledged and questioned.
In the original Venus in Furs, Masoch writes: “Alas, woman is faithful as long as she loves, but you demand that she be faithful without love and give herself without enjoyment. Who is cruel then, woman or man?”
― Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs
Works Cited
Berger, John, and Michael Dibb. Ways of Seeing. London: BBC Enterprises, 1972.
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs
Mulvey, Laura. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975)
Originally Published - Screen 16.3 Autumn 1975 pp. 6-18
http://www.jahsonic.com/VPNC.html
Paglia, Camille. Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. , 1991. Print.
Polanski, Roman, dir. Venus in Fur. Perf. Emmanuelle Seigner, Mathieu Amalric. Lionsgate, 2013
Rose, Gillian. Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials. London: Sage, 2001. Print.