Eyes Wide Open on the Female Subject in Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut Diplomarbeit zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades einer Magistra der Philosophie an der Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz vorgelegt von Magª Christine WILHELM am Institut für Anglistik/Amerikanistik Begutachter: Ao. Univ.-Prof. Mag. Dr.phil Klaus Rieser Graz, 2014 Contents 1. Introduction ................................................................................................................... 3 2. Feminism and Film ....................................................................................................... 5 2.1. Key Figures and Concepts in Feminist Film Theory ............................................... 5 2.1.1. Beginnings ....................................................................................................... 6 2.1.2. American Influence: Images of Women............................................................ 6 2.1.3. European Influence: Screen Theory ................................................................. 8 2.1.3.1. Marxism ..................................................................................................... 8 2.1.3.2. Semiotics and Structuralism ...................................................................... 9 2.2 Psychoanalysis: Freud and Lacan ........................................................................ 10 3. The ‘Gaze’: Ways of Looking ...................................................................................... 15 3.1. Men Looking at Women ........................................................................................ 16 3.1.1. The Male Spectator ........................................................................................ 17 3.1.2. The Female Figure ......................................................................................... 18 3.2. Forms of Visual Pleasure ...................................................................................... 19 3.2.1. Scopophilia ..................................................................................................... 19 3.2.2. Narcissism ...................................................................................................... 20 3.3. Scopophilic Aspects in Eyes Wide Shut ................................................................ 21 3.3.1. Voyeurism ...................................................................................................... 21 3.3.2. Fetishism ........................................................................................................ 24 3.3.3. Pornography ................................................................................................... 30 3.4. The Female Gaze and its Implications in Eyes Wide Shut ................................... 32 4. Film Narrative ............................................................................................................. 39 4.1. The textuality of film .............................................................................................. 39 4.2. Narrative, story and plot ........................................................................................ 41 4.3. The Narrative Construction of Eyes Wide Shut..................................................... 42 4.3.1. Kubrick’s last film ........................................................................................... 42 4.3.2. Plot summary ................................................................................................. 46 4.3.3. Subversion of the ‘Male Gaze’ ....................................................................... 51 4.4. Visual and Narrative Focalization ......................................................................... 53 4.4.1. Tom Cruise as William ‘Bill’ Harford ................................................................ 54 4.4.2. Nicole Kidman as Alice Harford ...................................................................... 56 5. Conclusion .................................................................................................................. 62 6. Bibliography ................................................................................................................ 63 2 1. Introduction This thesis deals with the representation of nude women on screen, and how cinema today constructs femininity, and gender relations. It is born out of interest in the contradictory construction of gender in films: confident expressions of female power alongside with sexualization of women and their bodies in public spaces. It seems as if feminist ideas have become part of societies’ common sense, however, at the same time feminism is neglected by the way women are often depicted in the media. Whereas some (like Germaine Greer 1999:14) argue, that today’s culture is a lot less feminist than thirty years ago, others (like David Gauntlett 2006:247) believe that the media is increasingly influenced by feminism. From my point of view, both sides are equally true. On the one hand a diversity of feminist ideas circulates a wide range of media and genres, but on the other hand sexism still exists in its most boring and predictable patterns. Due to these contradictory representations of women in the media, the topic is hard to grasp. Additionally, every feminist perspective and idea is – like gender relations – always changing and in constant transformation. This is why the present paper will approach the topic „Eyes Wide Open on the Female Subject” from different points of view. It has three aims. First, its particular focus is on the visual representation of naked women. Secondly, it seeks to provide an analysis of eroticized images of the female body across the media landscape, this is, the concept of female ‘objectification’ which presents women as passive objects from a male perspective compared with the narrative depiction of women as active subjects. Thirdly, this paper is interested in contrasting both conceptions on a visual and a narrative level by means of representative scenes from the film Eyes Wide Shut by Stanley Kubrick. The thesis opens with an overview of different representations of women throughout recent cinematic history. The first chapter also discusses key terms and concepts related to this matter, and contrasts them with each other. In chapter three, visual theories formulated in this paper, such as the Mulveian concept of the ‘male gaze’, as well as visual forms of pleasurable looking, like the Freudian term scopophilia, are examined. In a further analysis of specific filmic scenes, scopophilic aspects such as voyeurism and fetishism are the main focal point of interest. This chapter additionally considers the ‘female gaze’, that is, the ways of looking at women from a female point of view. 3 The second thematic part of the paper deals with film narrative. Next to a theoretical approach dealing with textuality of film, the narrative construction of Eyes Wide Shut serves in order to subvert the ‘male gaze’ as discussed in chapter three of the paper. The concluding chapter additionally proves the paper’s assumption that the main female protagonist functions as the film’s leading character who is in charge of the story rather than being subjected by the male protagonist and the patriarchal power suggested on a visual level. What I want to show with respect to my analysis of Eyes Wide Shut is that the visual impact given on the surface level is undermined by the underlying meaning on a deeper story level. This revelation is not only crucial for the understanding of the film but also for the understanding that all is not what it seems, or in other words, that nothing is what it appears in Eyes Wide Shut. 4 2. Feminism and Film Feminism as a movement tries to “analyze and change the power structures of patriarchal societies” (Chaudhuri 2006:3f.). This doesn’t entail that feminism is ‘against’ men, but rather that it is first and foremost concerned with women’s positions. A major reason why media became influential in shaping feminist ideas and critique during the ‘Second Wave’ of feminism was that in the late 1960s and 1970s the media daily confronted feminists with representations of womanhood and gender relations in all possible ways, for instance, on billboards, TV, and radio, in news, magazines and films. While feminist research in the early-to-mid-1970s laid the focus on ‘images of women’, from the mid-1970s onwards, the attention was drawn to ‘images for women’ (cf. Gill 2007:9f.). Based on the assumption that female representations are important since images and cultural constructions shape our way of thinking, and thus might be connected to inequality, domination and oppression of women, this chapter looks at feminist studies’ approaches dealing with the representation of women and the significance of the meaning of images. In doing so, the chapter turns to feminist film theory, important figures and concepts across Europe and the United States as well as its transformation over time, while the proximate chapter deals with the depiction of women by different ways of looking at them from male and female viewpoints. 2.1. Key Figures and Concepts in Feminist Film Theory Feminism’s ‘First Wave’, also known as the suffragette movement, took place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century when film industry was still in its beginnings but expanded rapidly, especially in America, where vast audiences were attracted to the new medium. Feminist film theory, especially in the early period, dealt with representation