Gone Girl, Vertigo and Mulvey

I recently watched Gone Girl in theaters, and I realized that the movie had many stylistic similarities to Vertigo. However, I think Gone Girl both agrees and challenges Mulvey’s “male gaze”. It also appears to point out that gender (and ultimately marriage) are performative, just like Butler claims.

In the opening scenes of Vertigo, there is a picture of a woman’s eye gazing at the audience. This is similar to Gone Girl, where Amy Elliott turns to gaze at the audience as well. The pictures of these two scenes are below.

However, both are very different in how they are presented. What could this mean? I think that the Vertigo reinforces the male gaze. The shot just features an eye – just a body part. This is in line with the body part objectification that Mulvey discusses in her essay. At first, The image from Gone Girl appears to fit the same mold. The scene is Amy’s husband looking at her, wondering about her. However, the rest of the movie suggests to me that this shot is meant to suggest otherwise.

If you haven’t seen Gone Girl yet, please don’t read any further (spoiler alert!). Amy Elliott spends the first half of Gone Girl as the perfect woman. She’s blonde, beautiful, poised – everyone loves her. The camera often focuses on her face a little longer than any other character. She is shown in a bathtub and having sex.  She is deemed “America’s Sweetheart” by the media when she is kidnapped. Her picture is shown many times by the media and for the viewer, forcing the audience to fixate on her. Her parents even write children’s books about how perfect she is. The audience falls in love with Amy, thinking her a victim, suggesting that we are viewing her through the male gaze.

However, quite the contrary turns out to be true – we find out that Amy was never kidnapped and that she had manipulated the whole situation from the beginning. In fact, she has manipulated the viewer into viewing her through the male gaze in the first place. When she reveals her “true self” to the audience (when she is in hiding), she is never seen in a “beautiful” or “sexual” way again. In fact – she is quite repulsive. She gains weight, has bruises on her face, her hair is a mess, and she’s even covered in blood a large part of the movie. The male gaze no longer exists, and we see this character for who she actually is. I remember watching this part of the movie and feeling disgusted by the sympathy I had for her at the beginning – it’s almost like the director was trying to subvert the male gaze and make the audience realize how disgusting and deceiving it can be. I don’t think any viewer likes her by the end of the movie.

Coming back to the scenes I discussed above, I think the Gone Girl scene puts Amy in a position of power, not in a male gaze. This shot shows her whole face, not just an eye. The last scene shows her gazing at the audience just as she had originally – which suggests she is gazing at you – she is the one really in control. We know that she is watching Nick’s every move. This repetition of showing the same shot of her at the beginning and the end bring new meaning, reinforcing the idea that Amy is in control.

Audrey Elliott

There are constant themes throughout the movie about how marriage is performative. Amy’s husband has to “act” in front of the media to bring Amy home. He has to “act” around his friends when he is having an affair. Amy and him “acted” like the perfect boy or girl so that they could attract each other. She becomes the “cool girl”, even though that’s not her at all. He had to act the part of the husband (and her, the innocent wife) and the end of the move, although he feared for his life.

The Signifying Monkey and the Art of Misdirection

“Signifying is verbal play – serious play that serves as instruction, entertainment, mental exercise, preparation for interacting with friend and foe in the social arena. In black vernacular, Signifying is a sign that words cannot be trusted, that even the most literal utterance allows room for interpretation, that language is both carnival and minefield.” – John Wildeman, New York Times

After reading “The Blackness of Blackness: A Critique of the Sign and the Signifying Monkey”, I wasn’t sure if I had completely grasped what the implications of “Signification” were in Gate’s eyes. I found an article in the New York Times archive that reviews and summarizes Henry Louis Gate’s claims, and it was incredibly helpful. I’ve included the link at the end of this blog post for those who may be interested in reading it!

I think Gate adds a valuable new perspective on the role of signification. I don’t think that it cancels or conflicts with Saussure’s definition of signification, but it opens the door to the possibility of more than one kind of signification existing. In fact, I think it adds more weight to Lacan’s theories of signification and metonymy. After all, human society often struggles with choosing the proper method to interpret the written language. In politics, for example, there are some people that believe a law should be read very literally, while others believe there is room for interpretation and implicit meaning. There is even disagreement within humanity about how to interpret holy texts, which are some of the most important forms of writing from a historical perspective! For example, some Christians take the text of the Bible literally, while other Christians believe the Bible is meant to be interpreted figuratively.

Maybe this is generalizing too much, but perhaps there are two types of ways that humans finding meaning through language. Both of these methods are pleasurable for a person, but in very different ways. One method involves the literal interpretation of the signified. The sign is directly linked to the signifier. The sign determines the signifier, etc. This method is based in Saussure’s claims. The benefit of this method is that it is repetitive. It is familiar. It assumes a certainty and absolute truth that appears comforting to an interpreter (regardless if this certainty or absolute truth exists in actuality). Some may choose a literal interpretation of the Bible, for example, because they feel this is a secure way to live in God’s good will. There is no room for error or anxiety if one follows exactly what is written. On the other side of the coin, humans love to play and are curious. They like puzzles; they like a challenge. The form of Signification that Gate discusses loves to disassemble and question and poke fun. The space between the written text and the WAY the text is used allows for implicit meaning. Just like the “space in-between” that Barthes mentions, there is bliss in breaking with certainty and decoding what this slippery implicit meaning can be. In fact, this Signification harkens to Lacan’s mention of metonymy in signification – there is no implicit meaning without a conflicting or binary force between the text and the way is conveyed. Kids love to play with building blocks because they can create things in pleasing patterns, they like the repetition of stacking, and they have created something seemingly sturdy and certain. However, kids often take even more pleasure in destroying and disassembling to release their emotions, and this is what Gate’s signification is.

Gate mentions “…signifying is a “technique of indirect argument or persuasion,” “a language of implication”…”shows the monkey to be a trickster, signifying being the language of trickery, that set of words or gestures achieving Hamlet’s ‘direction through indirection’” (990). This statement created a funny image of Signification in my head (that may or may not be correct) – it reminded me of the magician’s art of misdirection. A magician entertains his audience with a trick. He appears to take the very laws of reality and interpret it in a new way, with a result that appears practically impossible. For example, the magician pulls a rabbit out of his hat. Why is this entertaining for an audience? Everyone knows that his interpretation isn’t a “literal” interpretation of the laws of physics/reality; it’s simply untrue! Our human experiences tell us there is no way the rabbit could have been in the hat, as a second before the hat was empty. There has never been anything in our life that has told us that the contrary could be true. In fact, the audience knows there is another answer behind his act of signification. He indirectly, in the space between the audience’s expectations of nothing being in the hat and pulling out a rabbit, suggests there is something outside the audience’s knowing. This space-in between, this implicit meaning through indirection, is what draws the audience to the theater and produces a kind of bliss in the viewer.

Post by Audrey Elliott

Breaking the Social Reflex: Looking through the Cracks of Bourdieu

When I first read Distinction, I had mixed feelings about the material. I think there is a strong validity to what Bourdieu is claiming. Class symbols are heavily pervasive in our everyday lives and in the history of literature itself. You only need to turn on the E! Entertainment channel to see news on celebrities detailing their extravagant affairs abroad, their luxurious fashion, or their fantastic apartments in New York City. People are obsessed with celebrities because they are the window into a world of high “taste” and riches that few people will ever come close to living. At the same time, these celebrities generate a sea of hate from their fans. Celebrities are constantly bombarded with negativity and judgment in social media. Looking through the lens of Bourdieu, this makes perfect sense, as people the middle or lower classes display “disgust, provoked by horror, or visceral intolerance (‘feeling sick’) of the tastes of others”. They can’t understand or have access to the ways these celebrities live, so they project a reflex of hate.

For an example of “distinguished taste” living in literature, the short story The Cloak by Nikolai Gogol surrounds a main character who struggles to fit in with those peers of the upper class around him. The main character Akaky originally owns a threadbare overcoat, which he is constantly bullied about by his work peers. He feels like an outsider, although he does his job well at the company. The character spends the little money he has on a magnificent fur coat – a status symbol of the rich since the environment of Russia itself is so cold in the winter. Any person of lower stature must suffer through the winter in threadbare clothes while the rich can wear their luxurious fur coats. As soon as he wears the coat, he is invited to a party of his rich work superiors, although they had ignored him and chastised him for years previously. When his coat is stolen from him, he dies from the cold and he loses his stature in the eyes of his peers. There are several instances of reflexive resentment from both classes in this story, and it acts as a perfect example of Bourdieu’s system and how you can have mobility in it.

These examples give life to Bourdeiu’s claims, and honestly made me feel a bit suffocated. I don’t think any human being likes the idea of their identity being pre-determined and created the way that Bourdeiu suggests. There is a positive side to his claims – this system gives us an identity and purpose in the first place. It is a survival mechanism that we’ve created to bring meaning into our existence and organization into our presence as a race. I couldn’t help wondering – are there cracks in this system in our modern world? Is this theory universal or are there ways for the human race to slip through the cracks

Bourdeiu claims“[t]astes in food also depend on the idea each class has of the body and of the effects of food on the body, that is, on its strength, health, and beauty… It follows that the body is the most indisputable materialization of class taste”.  He claims people of lower classes will prefer fatty foods. Sure, McDonald’s is the “taste” of the lower and middle class while a lobster is the symbol of the upper class…but I think this is a result of economic means and not “taste” chosen separately from the inherent properties of the food itself. I think anyone on the street would love to eat Lobster all the time if they had the means. Many may prefer this over a hamburger. Many people in the upperclass probably eat hamburgers themselves. Maybe they haven’t gone to McDonald’s, but I bet many of them eat “fatty foods” all the time. It’s the economic means that stand in the way of eating Lobster, not a distaste for it because you are not part of an upper class. People who are passionate about healthy foods may have been a trend seen in the upper class in the past, but in the 21st century you can find types of person almost in any class. Of course, my claims here are only based on the idea of the “dominant class” being a higher class economically – this may not be true if another ruling class is chosen.

I also realized that there are several things in society that aren’t labeled as a “taste” and are universally seen in a positive light – in fact, these seem to overcome the limits of class structure or differentiation entirely. For example, roses are a symbol accessible to everyone. There hasn’t been anyone I’ve met who has talked negatively or reacted in a reflexive way to roses. Water is universal. Sunsets and Views are admired by everyone.  Bourdeiu claims that “tastes” are chosen separately from their inherent properties. Smells have strong inherent properties that I feel class systems can’t overcome. What smells good, smells good. No matter what type of class you are. Sewage may be labeled as the symbol of the lower class, but no one who is surrounded by poverty and sewage is going to like it as their own personal preferred “taste”.

This may be a stretch so I would love to hear your thoughts.

Audrey Elliott