Week 6 - Male Gaze

Prologue:
First, I want to apologize for my previous blog entries. At first I misunderstood the purpose of the blog, thinking it more a place to reflect candidly on the past weeks topic, impressions thereof, and let that send me in a related direction plotting my learning process. Subsequent weeks' entries carried forward my initial confusion in the first week and I think the intent of the assignment was a little lost. Perhaps it is the medium of a blog, too, that I have grown familiar with as a less formal environment and sounding board, a place to put all ones thoughts on the table and explore different modes of thought, rather than a place for immediate close reading and polished scholarly endeavors. From here on out, I will strive to use it as such.

I will be taking a few extra days (as allotted to the animators this past week) to polish my entry and to make sure I have done all I can to ensure high quality and fully explore the subject. Right now I can say that I will be examining Le Mépris dir. Jean-Luc Godard. It was a close call between that and The Conformist, which is a little noteworthy as both films are based upon novels by Alberto Moravia. Common threads in his works are sexuality, social alienation, and existentialism, which lend themselves very well to an examination of the male/female gaze and inversions thereof, as they are not exactly reciprocal.

Update, Tuesday 20 Nov: Tonight I was fortunate enough to be able to see a remastering of Lawrence of Arabia at a theatre. It has long been a film I admire and I think it presents an interesting challenge for examining the Male Gaze, so I will do that.

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Lawrence of Arabia, directed by David Lean in 1962, is a unique example of the Male Gaze in film for a few reasons. First, it is based on the life of a real man, T. E. Lawrence, so there is a kernel of truth beneath the layers of epic cinematography, sweeping score, and story. Second, the real and portrayed Lawrence have had their sexuality questioned and so may be implied as non-heterosexual. Third, the objective Male Gaze is not upon a female, per se, but a feminized male, the character of Lawrence. Though women are excluded from the film, the feminine tendencies are preserved. Lawrence is the films "heiroglyphic", both Freudian and as originally intended. He is at once indecipherable and immediately recognizable if one knows how to read him. I will be looking in particular at two scenes at different points in Lawrence's feminization and self-discovery over the course of the film, one at the onset and one toward the end.

"The woman's relation to the camera and the scopic regime is quite different from that of the male" (Doane, 76). What, then, happens when a male character is treated by the camera as a female object? If "the very logic behind the structure of the gaze demands a sexual division," then it can be inferred that Lawrence is being made less male than he who is looking upon him (Doane 77). Lawrence is created as a feminine object because of his 'otherness' to both the British and Arabian sides. The British soldiers see him as feminine due to his affectations and eventual wearing of Arabian costume, like a woman's dress by western standards, and believe that their own trousers and Western habits are the epitome of masculinity. The Arabs see him as feminine because of his English nationality and think him soft because of it, while their own hardy Bedouin lifestyle and customs are the most masculine and honorable. He appropriates the exotic as his own and is the perennial "other," becoming woman to both sides and is available to all as the female subject of a male gaze.

The first instance of gender-bending via the Gaze that I want to illuminate takes place shortly after Lawrence falls in with a band of Harith. In film, "curiosity and the wish to look intermingle with a fascination with likeness and recognition," which in this appear both as the British and Arabian fascination with Lawrence's simultaneous 'otherness' and familiarity and also Lawrence's own earnest examination of himself and his own identity or lack thereof (Mulvey 9). The night before this scene takes place, Lawrence reveals to the Harith Ali that he is a bastard child and would never inherit any title from his father. If the implications of Lawrence's past are that his mother "turns her child into the signifier of her own desire to possess a penis [...] Either she must gracefully give way to the word, the Name of the Father and the Law, or else struggle to keep her child down with her in the half-light of the imaginary" (Mulvey 7). Lawrence, first as the child of a woman and with no father present father, has only her name, which he casts off when he enters the desert as Ali explains that he is "free to make his own name." His old clothes are burned and he is presented with the robes of a Sherif of the Beni Wejh Harith. He rides off to try them out. Thinking he is alone, Lawrence indulges in vanity, gazing upon himself reflected in his dagger as his new costume billows in the breeze. Alone and having recently discarded any old identity, Lawrence is naked. As we explored in class, John Berger muses that to be naked is to be oneself, whereas to be nude is to be inferred as naked by others. Soon, he is startled to find he has been watched by Auda, leader of the Howeitat tribe.

Auda on horseback dominates the screen in the foreground, showing his power over a small Lawrence, so far unaware, in the background. Lawrence is completely vulnerable and behaving completely un-man-like. It is also strange in that to Auda, Lawrence's Harith garb, that of a great leader and warrior, does not seem to match his identity as British and therefore, to Auda, more feminine.

Lawrence is most comfortable in the traditional Arabian garb. Even at the onset of the film, he seems uncomfortable in his British army uniform: his pants are too short, he is not decorated, he is less formal than others. In the middle of the film, he suffers a crisis of identity and changes back into Western clothing for a short while. Here, he is even more unsettled, partially owing to the fact that they are not his clothes and so do not fit at all. He does not really display transvestism in the sense that Doane describes, but masquerade. While the British forces see the Arabian tribes simultaneously as feminine in dress, yet brutish, the tribes see the British in a similar light, so Lawrence is never truly a transvestite. Rather, at one point he puts on airs to seem more masculine to each in different situations. This, however, is taken as cowardly and ultimately belies his true feelings.

The second scene I wish to analyze is perhaps one of the more controversial in the film due to both its content of torture and implied sexual abuse and also contention that the ordeal on which it is based was a fabrication created by the real T. E. Lawrence and never happened. Either way, it is incredibly pertinent to the discussion on the Male Gaze. "Spectatorial desire, in contemporary film theory, is generally delineated as either voyeurism or fetishism, as precisely a pleasure in seeing what is prohibited in relation to the female body" (Doane 76). In this scene, the Turkish Bey has captured Lawrence and is trying to verify his identity. Everything about the Turkish character is repulsive and lecherous: his manner, his ill coughing, his greasy countenance and mustache. And yet, because he is in a place of power, he is playing the part of the man to Lawrence's castrated woman.

Bey completely invades Lawrence's personal space and strips it away by forcibly removing his clothes. In this way, Lawrence's paleness is revealed. Though his face is tanned from the desert, Lawrence still has blue eyes, blonde hair, and very pale skin. This is immediately contrasted with the dark Turks and shows Lawrence as very feminine and, by association, Bey sees him as weak. Though Bey is shorter in stature, he is still able to dominate Lawrence by utilizing the power of the Male Gaze. He touches his chest and pinches his flesh, grinning suggestively, to which Lawrence reacts, nearly at the point of tears, by kneeing him in the groin. The interaction does not end here, though, but continues as Bey becomes a literal Peeping Tom.

The voyeuristic Bey watches from afar through the door as his smiling lackeys beat an unclothed Lawrence. The distance between us and the screen parallels the distance between Bey and Lawrence. Like us, he watches others touching Lawrence because he cannot or will not. He has others fulfill the fetish of his senses for him. The Turkish Bey's sexual instinct, harking back to childhood auto-eroticism, has been modified by his male ego and twisted into a perverted voyeurism, "whose only sexual satisfaction can come from watching, in an active controlling sense, an objectified other" as an analogy for his narcissistic self (Mulvey 9).

Doane invokes another theorist, Linda Williams, in describing an instance in the horror genre when "the woman's active looking is ultimately punished. And what she sees, the monster, is only a mirror of herself --both woman and monster are freakish in their difference-- defined by wither 'too much' or 'too little' (Doane 83). Lawrence sees his own bloodthirsty nature in that of his captor. He is not completely innocent, as he is still not only a soldier but an admitted masochist. Doane asserts that for a woman to identify with a female character, she must adopt a passive or masochistic position. Lawrence takes this a step further for us by filling both at the same time as being male and female from a filmic perspective. When asked how he lets a match burn down in his fingers, he says "certainly it hurts. The trick is not minding that it hurts." We see him seek pain and bloodshed time and again, simultaneously taking pleasure in it and growing aware and afraid of his mental degradation. He eventually does break with reality, seeing himself as a sort of messiah among men, indulging in his own masochism in the name of others.