The Implications of the Image

I started reading Pauline Kael's I Lost It at the Movies last week, a collection of her reviews and essays from 1954 to 1965. It's giving me a lot of perspective. Most books I've read from that period, books that commentated on contemporary life, had a mostly progressive or liberal perspective while Kael seems to have been much more conservative. Although she praises Marlon Brando and The Wild One, Streetcar Named Desire, and On the Waterfront, she nonetheless decries a general trend of "delinquent" cinema.

The romance of human desperation is ravishing for those who wish to identify with the hero's amoral victory: everything he does is forgivable, his crimes are not crimes at all, because he is so terribly misunderstood. (And who in the audience, what creature that ever lived, felt he was loved enough?) This is the victory that we used to think of as a child's fantasy: now it is morality for nursery school and theater alike.

I wonder what she'd have thought of Joker.

More amusing, and slightly embarrassing, are her comments on how women were increasingly being portrayed, arguing a "Calendar Girl" aesthetic was infiltrating art-house cinema.

This female image is a parody of woman--lascivious face, wet open mouth, gigantic drooping breasts. She has no character, no individuality: she's blonde or brunette or redhead, as one might consume a martini, an old-fashioned, or a gin and tonic.

Now I am told that even the junior-high-school boys of America use photographs like these as pinups, and that this is their idea of the desirable female. I don't believe it. I would guess that they pretend to this ideal because they're afraid they won't be considered manly and sexy if they admit they find this image disgusting.

No, Pauline, they really thought these pinup girls were beautiful, I can guarantee it. And boys feeling disgust? I wonder if she thought bug collecting and the scatological humour of 14 year old boys were but poses. If she wanted boys to be disgusted by images of women, she should have shown them pictures of matrons serving broccoli and asparagus.

I recently reread Laura Mulvey's essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", the essay that introduced the term "male gaze" along with Gaze Theory. I was struck again by what an overrated essay it is, and certainly the concept of "male gaze" is no original thought. Even Pauline Kael, writing fifteen or twenty years earlier, wouldn't have been the first to comment on women in media being depicted so as to gratify male lust. I suppose one key difference between Kael and Mulvey is that Mulvey implies the impulse to degrade women is a genetic trait carried by all men while Kael felt it was societal conditioning. Which makes Mulvey sound like the right-winger and Kael the left-winger.

I would agree that women are portrayed degradingly in a lot of media. I would say men are, too, for the satisfaction of women, though less prevalently. The suffering delinquents in the movies Kael talks about would be an example as would, I'd say, the male figures in the Twilight series. Heterosexual men and women want to see the opposite sex degraded. It gives the viewer a sense of superiority, yes, but I think very often that sense is sought for an impression of safety. When the handsome, wounded boy looks up at his beautiful saviour, she doesn't have to worry about him deceiving her into going to bed with him. That mysterious creature on the other side of daily existence suddenly becomes a known quantity, that attractive shape suddenly becomes more easily obtainable.