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

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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. There are two instances when a photograph operates to confuse our understanding of the normative temporal fabric of the filmic medium. First, a photograph of a church is introduced at the film’s beginning as an enigmatic object crucial to the narrative. It establishes the query “what does this photograph mean?” as well as its self-reflexive corollary “what do photographs mean?” Only at the film’s conclusion do we realize that John dies in the same location where the photograph was taken, and that the blood that oozes from the picture is his own blood. Second, a temporally mismatched photograph of John depicted as dead is in evidence on the investigator’s desk while John reports that Laura is missing. At first viewing, one might miss the strategic placing of this photograph, but it is nevertheless underscored when it appears again in John’s death scene. In this way, the photograph reveals an unsettling dimension of a future that exists in the present. Whereas a look is subject to delusion (i.e., some of what John sees could be a figment of his imagination), this particular photograph signals a snapshot of an event that really happened (or, in this case, will happen). Truth-value is thus assigned to a photo that is not assigned to looking. As a result, the eerie presence of the future in the photographs present in the film signals a world in which the male, and the spectator, cannot make sense of now. When John takes out the photograph of the church during dinner and stares at it, we realize that the photograph forces him and the viewer to contemplate its meaning as opposed to inscribing a (sexist)

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meaning to it through the gaze. Simply put, the photograph conveys that there is a mystery to the machinations of cinema: an unreachable place beyond the male gaze. Both photographs indicate that the cinematic image is ungraspable for both John and the spectator; the photographs indicate that films are not necessarily bound to representing linear time continuously. The narrative discloses that John, the architect, penned a book entitled Beyond the Fragile Geometry of Space, indicating that he comprehends that photographs (and relatedly, the cinema) can transcend space. When he sees red spill on the photograph of the church, he is immediately cognizant that his daughter Christine is in danger outside their house. However, John does not grasp how the photograph is temporally capacious; it can make time fluid. The twist at the film’s end rests on the assumption that the spectator believes that the photograph resides in a strict linear temporal order. At the film’s conclusion, it is revealed that a photograph can represent a future event. As a result, the assumption that the camera only records the present problematizes the patriarchal unconscious of the camera’s gaze. While the male gaze tames space—the man sexualizes the woman even if they occupy diferent spaces—time eludes the male gaze. The male gaze can ‘suture’ a dislocated space; a viewer watching images of a woman flash by might get increasingly anxious of who is gazing at said woman. When a film sutures, that is, stitches into the fabric of the fiction—a viewer looking at a woman—the viewer’s anxiety of looking at that woman is put into relief. Guilt about engaging in fetishistic looking is thus abated because it is not them looking, but the male gaze. In its forging of opposing temporalities, Don’t Look Now does not allow us to disavow anxieties of looking, but forces us to confront them and their patriarchal assumptions. This temporal property of cinema is underscored in the scene that crosscuts the act of sex with the future event of dressing for dinner. The male gaze cannot engage in the voyeuristic act of looking at sexual activity while also processing the narrative information about dressing for dinner. If the erotic presence of a woman (in this case Laura) traditionally “freeze[s] the flow of action” (Mulvey 11), Don’t Look Now unfreezes “erotic contemplation” (11), by ushering in the future during the sex scene. Instead of “combin[ing] spectacle and narrative” (11) to keep narrative consistency (12), the film cuts back and forth between spectacle and narrative, efectively undermining both as processes of female objectification. The sex scene and the narrative act of dressing for dinner cannot be ‘combined’ because they exist in a fragmented temporal order. At the same time, the sex scene cannot exist outside 38 DON’T GAZE NOW of time because the future event of dressing for dinner encourages the spectator to consider the film’s temporality. One can also argue that the narrative itself, which details John’s gradual mental decline, disrupts the male gaze. The reliability of John’s look becomes questionable when he unwittingly sees his own funeral. Only through the openness of time does the possibility that John could be mistaken about the sisters—and Laura’s belief in their authenticity—emerge. This casting of doubt—that John is possibly mistaken—invariably produces a critique of the male gaze. If films “are contracts” (Polan 665) with viewers, promising that everything shown on screen happens in a specific order dictated by the logic of linearity, then Don’t Look Now breaks its contract. As Polan argues, by breaking the filmic contract and transgressing the system, art is able to expand its own codes (665). In this way, the photographs that bend temporality are self-reflexive in Polan’s sense because they “[define] the process of art” (666). Self-reflexive art reinvents the rules of art, and the self-reflexive photographs in this film reinvent a cinema which is not bounded by linear time. For Brecht, as cited by Polan, showing the possibilities for a new alternative is pleasurable (670). Based on Polan’s filmic contract there is an assumption that films cannot show future events in the present, but by the film’s conclusion the possibility that “the world can be remade” (670) is suggested by virtue of this new temporal dimension. Relatedly, the pleasure is also derived from knowing that a sex scene can “[do] things never thought possible” (Polan 670): firstly, that film can represent cunnilingus, an underrepresented act in popular film, and secondly, that it can represent a future event simultaneously during a sex scene. Not only do the film’s self-reflexive photographs speculate new temporal potentialities of cinema, but they also ofer new possibilities for female subjectivity. The tension between the woman who “freeze[s] the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation” (Mulvey 11) and the demand for narrative progression result in the teleological demand for her punishment. This punishment depends on temporal linearity. The woman only needs to be punished if her erotic display occurs in the past. However, if time is disordered, then the male gaze loses its power to punish the woman. As such, one of the ways the male gaze ends up constituting the subjectivity of women is put in disarray, resulting in the potential for women characters to explore their subjectivity in ways that needn’t abide by the logic of a male gaze punisher. Near the conclusion of Don’t Look Now, after it is discovered that John’s male gaze is not a reliable source of knowledge production, Heather is freed from her role

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as the stereotypical suspicious female psychic. The question no longer resides in whether or not Heather is going to be “punished” by John, because John no longer has the grounds to punish; instead, Heather can express her subjectivity on her own terms. Heather and John are able to have a tender conversation as John walks her back to her hotel, where John listens to Heather describing her life experiences. In addition to such “softening,” the normative assumption that John is supposed to rescue Laura, as a damsel-in-distress, is reversed: Laura takes on the role of rescuing John, searching the city for him. John, in losing his power to determine the subjectivity of women, loses his ability to take on the role of savior figure. The film’s self-reflexive form allows for the potential to break with sedimented tropes. In breaking the damsel-in-distress trope, Laura is given the space to express her own subjectivity, as opposed to having her narrative function determined by the demands that the male gaze imposes. In conclusion, the representation of other temporalities in the photographs displayed in Don’t Look Now imagines the possibility of a world where the relations between men and women are not based on voyeuristic and narcissistic scopophilia. Indeed, these photographs that represent future events push the limits of what cinema as a medium can show. The possibility of having the future in the present allows women on screen to be freed from the male gaze. As seen in the film’s sex scene, voyeuristic scopophilia is dismantled through the cross-cutting of present and future events in order to deny the spectator an unmediated access to the woman as a fetish object. Likewise, narcissistic scopophilia is negated when the male gaze is shown to be insufcient in making sense of the fluidity of time. The female characters of Don’t Look Now escape the sadistic demands of the narrative because the male gaze is under suspicion, losing the authority to dictate female subjectivity in a world where the future is conjoined with the present. All in all, the male gaze cannot even look now with “sentimental regret” (Mulvey 18) at the creation of a new visual pleasure in narrative cinema.

40 DON’T GAZE NOW Works Cited

Metz, Christian. “The Imaginary Signifier.” Screen, vol. 16, no. 2, 1975, pp. 14–76. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen, vol. 16, no. 3, 1975, pp. 6–18. Polan, Dana. “A Brechtian Cinema? Toward a Politics of Self-Reflexive Film.” Movies and Methods II, edited by Bill Nichols, University of California Press, 1985, pp. 661-672.

Filmography

Roeg, Nicholas, director. Don’t Look Now. British Lion Films, 1973.

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