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Don’t Gaze Now: The Male Gaze and Self-Refexivity in Don’t Look Now EDDY WANG Eddy Wang was born a philosopher. At some point in his life, he discovered cinema. Hypnotized by the images he saw, he felt his conception of himself as a philosopher disintegrate. Eddy decided the only way to maintain a consistent ego was to think philosophy through cinema and cinema through philosophy. 33 3 DON’T LOOK NOW (1973) directed by Nicolas Roeg positions a straight, white, cismale, John Baxter, as the protagonist of its diegesis. However, looks can be deceiving. Don’t Look Now is a work of counter cinema that employs the male gaze, as theorized by Laura Mulvey, only to critique and negate it. The film ofers an example of alternative cinema Mulvey postulates at the start of her seminal essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In other words, Don’t Look Now “conceive[s] a new language of desire” by “leaving the past behind without rejecting it, transcending outworn or oppressive forms” (Mulvey 8). Surprisingly, the film denies voyeuristic scopophilia and complicates narcissistic scopophilia, particularly through its self-reflexive representation of temporality displayed in the photographs of the church and John’s dead body. Through its rejection of voyeuristic and narcissistic scopophilia, the film eschews the sadistic and fetishistic paradigms of female representation to thereby provide a new way of imagining the world (Polan 670). In addition to Mulvey’s insights on the male gaze, Dana Polan’s “A Brechtian Cinema? Towards A Politics of Self-Reflexive Film” provides insight into how self-reflexivity in Don’t Look Now succeeds in imagining the alternative cinema Mulvey contemplates. Thus, examining Don’t Look Now through the lens of both Mulvey and Polan reveals first, that the film estranges the voyeuristic and narcissistic modes of scopophilia that male-centric films commonly operate on, and second, how that estrangement occurs through its self-reflexive operations of temporality that fissure both the film’s form and narrative—to thereby facilitate the film’s women characters means to transcend the oppressive roles they 1 My use of the word “men,” “male,” and “male gaze” do not refer to the universal category of men qua men. For example, gay and racialized men have a diferent relationship to the gaze than straight white men. Not all men participate in the “male gaze.” Furthermore, women can be conduits for the male gaze in films. More so, my use of “men” and “male gaze” is a catch-all term to refer to an oppressor who confers an identity on women defined by their lack of a penis. This forceful imposition of an identity by the oppressor on women becomes the source of anxiety, eroticization, and violence against representations of women for that oppressor object of the look (11). 34 DON’T GAZE NOW occupy. Before embarking on an analysis of Don’t Look Now, unpacking Mulvey’s terminology is necessary. Mulvey’s feminist theory responds to Christian Metz’s apparatus theory. Notably, Metz claims that cinematic identification operates on two levels. Primary identification occurs when the spectator identifies with the “pure act of perception” (Metz 51), while secondary identification arises when the spectator identifies with the contents of the film (50). While Mulvey builds on Metz, she understands that identification transpires from a male perspective that posits women as castrated. Mulvey uses psychoanalytic language in order to explore a theory of pleasure and unpleasure that lies within the nexus of the male gaze and female representation in films. For Mulvey, men1 define women by their lack of penises (Mulvey 6). As a result, for men, women are “a threat of castration and hence unpleasure” (13). To escape this castration anxiety, women are either punished/forgiven or fetishized (14). In other words, the woman either dies/is arrested (i.e., punished) or repents (i.e., asks for forgiveness), or becomes the subject of over-valuation. The fulfillment of both “ascertaining guilt” (14) and turning the woman into an object of fetishism results in pleasure for the male. In this way, women are both the source of unpleasure and pleasure for men. For Mulvey, the cinema provides the pleasures of both voyeuristic scopophilia and narcissistic scopophilia (9-10). The term voyeuristic scopophilia is defined as the pleasure an individual derives from watching someone who is unaware that the specific individual is watching them (9), while narcissistic scopophilia is described as the pleasure one derives from recognizing and misrecognizing themselves in the image on the screen (10). These two types of scopophilia have a gendered connotation. Voyeuristic scopophilia turns the female character into the object that is watched, while narcissistic scopophilia erects the male character as the person in whom the spectator identifies with on the screen (11). Thus, man becomes the active bearer of the look and subsequently the active agent in the narrative, while woman becomes the passive. Don’t Look Now mobilizes the male gaze to structure its narrative and provide spectator identification, but then denounces that gaze as the film progresses. In the film, the character John Baxter is the active agent of the narrative with whom the spectator identifies, both the object of John’s gaze and the source of his anxiety originate from the women around him. First, John spends a large portion of the film actively looking for his wife. He is the active force the normative male spectator narcissistically identifies with, while his wife, Laura, is the passive 35 EDDY WANG object the spectator voyeuristically looks for. Second, John experiences anxiety from Heather, a blind psychic character’s ability to see the dead and foretell the future. Heather causes John to be anxious because she reminds him of his ability to see the future and thus to interrupt his gaze in the present. Similar to how psychoanalytic theorists propose that the sight of women make men anxious because her lack of a penis suggests to a man that he could lose his penis, so too John’s unease about Heather’s psychic abilities reminds John that other temporal spaces can intrude upon his vision, thus taking control of his ability to gaze freely. In other words, the presence of Heather castrates John’s control over his gaze. In order to dispel this anxiety, John—and therefore the spectator who narcissistically identifies with John—demands that Heather be sadistically punished. The film complies with this demand and Heather is jailed. But then our narrative expectations get disrupted. John realizes his misdeed, asks for forgiveness, and arrives at Heather’s jail cell to escort her back to her hotel. Afterwards, John spots the elusive, mysterious red- coated woman and, by following his gaze, he is “punished” and killed by her. Therefore, the film appears to posit its narrative on the male demand to punish women/have women ask for forgiveness, but then flips the narrative at the film’s end to suggest that John (the male) was indeed wrong and that he needs to ask for forgiveness for getting anxious over women. Relatedly, he is punished for looking and pursuing his persistent gaze towards a woman. Thus, the film rejects the normative mode by which males deal with the unpleasure female presence provokes. Additionally, the film formally denies voyeuristic scopophilia’s fetishization of women. For example, voyeuristic scopophilia in the sex scene between John and Laura is circumvented by intercuts between the performance of intercourse and the post-coitus activity of dressing for dinner. Prior to the scene, Laura disrobes for a bath; we would conventionally expect a male character, like John, to gaze at Laura’s nude body in an act of voyeuristic scopophilia. Instead, John joins Laura in her nakedness. This egalitarian display of nudity privileges neither male nor female as sex objects. As the music rises to crescendo we realize that Laura’s sexual presence is not defined by her ability to pleasure John. Instead, the couple engage in a process of mutual lovemaking— this notably includes John preforming oral sex on Laura—dismantling the “sexual imbalance” that Mulvey claims traditionally reduces women to a conduit of “male desire” (Mulvey 11). On the formal level, by intercutting post-coitus activity with sex acts, the spectator is robbed of voyeuristic scopophilia; Don’t Look Now does not freeze action in “erotic contemplation” (11), but instead, continues to reveal its story while 36 DON’T GAZE NOW representing sex acts. Interrupting sex on screen with additional visual information that one must process challenges one’s erotic indulgence in the cinematic image. At the same time, the spectator may still derive pleasure on the screen from the “pure act of perception” (Metz 51). The crosscuts between sex and post-coitus activity are elegantly put together, making the editing of the film a site of viewer fascination. In this way, one could argue that Don’t Look Now’s “new language of desire” (Mulvey 8) erases the gendered bias of the gaze, but preserves the pleasure of looking. In this sense, the film “[plays] of our connections to [the] world” (Polan 670) in order to pleasurably “defamiliarize the world” (670). Instead of procuring a negative feminist aesthetic that Mulvey maintains denies the spectator of the gaze, Don’t Look Now foregrounds the act of looking to such excess that it breaks down the “patriarchal unconscious” (Mulvey 6) from within. In the service of dismantling the “patriarchal unconscious,” photographs are self-reflexively mobilized, suggestive of competing temporal orders, that, in Polan’s terminology, imagine a new world (670). Thus, Don’t Look Now challenges our understanding of cinema by elevating the photograph to an enigmatic object.

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