Dynamics of the “Male Gaze” in von Donnersmarck’s The Tourist (2010)

John Broughton

“Lacan complicates this understanding of the narcissistic view in the mirror by distinguishing between the eye's look and the Gaze. Gaze in Lacan's later work refers to the uncanny sense that the object of our eye's look or glance is somehow looking back at us of its own will. …We may believe that we are in control of our eye's look; however, any feeling of scopophilic power is always undone by the fact that the the materiality of existence (the Real) always exceeds and undercuts the meaning structures of the symbolic order.” (Felluga, n.d., p.1)

Male gaze leaning on a direct look, unreciprocated. Background audience of onlookers accentuates the general quality of the gaze (Lacan’s Hegelian ‘Other’), and the (hypo-paranoid) sense of being vulnerable to a general, judgmental inspection (the ‘synopticon’ in jagodzinski).

Averted, disinterested female look, dependent male look (“all wet,” “at sea”).Woman on solid ground, elevated above man. Camera foregrounds woman. Other man is there only to “help.” Arrow shape of clothing points to woman’s face (it is an imbedded “point of view”).

Wary/suspicious male look plus interested, expetant female glance (still averted from male protagonist) suggest offscreen presence of a second male look. Thus both subjects here assumed to be the objects of regard, not subjects; they are observed not recognised. Note that the address of both subjects is oblique, not direct; they are “looking awry” (see Zizek’s book with this title), out of the corner of their eyes – feminists have called this “looking on the slant.” Thus, rather than indicating elliptically a 3rd point of view (presumably a second, more powerful male look), the perspective from offscreen could be the transcendental gaze. Such a gaze implies that the woman is primarily object of regard, not subject. Her being seen and showing awareness of being seen (John Berger) suppress the subjectivity of her look, further buttressing the maleness of the gaze.Interest vs. wariness/anxiety splits the ambivalence we feel toward the gaze. Since the object of the two looks is indeterminate between person and thing, it remains impersonal, and the relationship the two characters bear to it may remain non-interpersonal, as well as ambiguous.

“Running Scared” * again: virtual 3rd party draws aversion of female glance,while camera still dwells on her face. Oddly, the matching hair raises the possibility that he and she are one?

Confident, self-conscious, posing woman (cf. Berger) with adjacent state-sponsored surveillance indicates tacit awareness of transcendent, official, impersonal, male gaze.

In this last image, the glass of the intact windshield moiety resonates with the windows of the fortified, intact building in the background. The reflections on such surfaces remind us that the woman is only an image – the imaginary or ideological stereotype superimposed upon her and occluding her “reality.”

The hole in the other half of the windshield, on the woman’s side, offsets the opaqueness of the shattered glass on that side. It has the paradoxical character of being a fenestration of the fenestra; it therefore facilitates a visibility the windshield was already providing. In addition, it is both an absence and a lack (of protection). The windshield wiper connotes spray, rain, or tears, which would imply sadness and perhaps loss (cf. the character’s name, “Elise” or elision).

The hole exposes the mid-section of the woman’s torso, even though we can see through a glass darkly that her hands, clutching the wheel, are positioned in front of her abdomen, interrupting the penetrating vector. The hole is shaped like an eye, suggesting that the boat itself is “looking” (albeit in only a monocular, 2D way).

“When you look at the (image), it at first gives you a sense that you are in control of your look; however, you then notice a blot …, from which point you begin to see that the blot is, in fact, … staring back at you. By having the object of our eye's look look back at us, we are reminded of our own lack, of the fact that the symbolic order is separated only by a fragile border from the materiality of the Real.” (Felluga, ibid.)

This is the looking back first intimated by Nietzsche: "If you look long enough into the void, the void begins to look back through you."** In this case, it would seem to be either the surveilling police, the virtual other, or even the audience that is “looked back through,” even though the audience (sure about its own looking) is supposedly engaged at this point in trying to “see through” the baroque convolutions of the film’s plot.

Since the hole implies a visual and perhaps projectile access to the woman, it could be taken as suggesting a Freudian or Sartrian*** male obsession with/fear of the “dark continent” of the female genital (jagged vagina dentata), or a Rankian notion of “birth trauma” with a concomitant ambivalence about returning to the space of the womb.This ambivalence would resonate with the noir theme of the “femme fatale” in the movie’s plot (cf. Body Heat, North by Northwest, etc.). The dangerous woman is also, from the male point of view, the castrating woman. The “uncanny feeling of being gazed at by the object of our look affects us in the same way as castration anxiety (reminding us of the lack at the heart of the symbolic order” (Felluga, ibid.). ****

For Lacan it would reflect the gap in the symbolic order that the woman’s body occasions for male rationality -- a blindspot, or a blot on the coherence and cohesion of the masculinist narrative. The perceptual imaginary of the (mirror) image is broken open to reveal the “Real,” the actual, unprotected, unformulated material of being-in-itself that embodies a visceral vulnerability at the same time as being mysterious, preconceptual, and resistant to understanding (an experience that many audiences had while watching this film).

Not only is the screen perforated, but the perforation “watches,” and its hole-ness links watching with aggression, even sadism. The viewer is encouraged to “break through” and X-ray the identity and motivations of this mysterious and unpredictable figure, just as the male protagonist would like to unlock the door to her boudoir, or perhaps even peek through the keyhole (as the camera does) when they spend the night in adjacent rooms of the hotel.

Throughout the film, the camera dwells on the wistful, enchanting eyes of the woman, which are liberally accentuated with unusually heavy eye-liner. The “eye” contour is also compatible with the “lips” contour – a secondary focus of the camera throughout the movie, not only in the brief kissing scene in the hotel but also in the way the woman changes lipstick shades, pouts, etc. Lighting technique is used to show the woman’s eyes and mouth as equally moist and glistening throughout. The link of the eye to the mouth is not only a natural

seductive sequencing, but also a reminder of the few perforations the bodily surface has, some of which are concealed, while another (like the ear) is partially concealed at the margins of the screen. Moreover, the privileging of the link between the looking eye and the non-speaking mouth***** allows the needy/greedy, consuming quality of orality to carry over into the visual system, underlining its desirousness (scopophilia).

But there is a reference external to the image too: the surreal “eye” painted negatively onto the now opaque, shattered glass (cf Magritte) alludes also to the gaze, the feeling of being under acute and critical surveillance that is captured poignantly in this particular image of the woman in the boat. This is a film that looks good, and the director (von Donnersmarck, whose previous claim to fame was a film about “Others”) dwells on the scenic and spectacular throughout, using Venice as his ravishing prop. The audience voyeuristically intrudes on the lives of these others, all the time aware that the abstraction and transcendence of the virtual gaze sutures them into its omniscient field of view.

ENDNOTES

* Roy Orbison’s #1 hit (co-writer Joe Melson, 1961) is perhaps the clearest cultural representation of this classic, male-perspective oedipal conflict – in this case, as in the song, without the required resolution and transition to the post-oedipal position that Freud mandated:

Just runnin' scared each place we goSo afraid that he might showYeah, runnin' scared, what would I doIf he came back and wanted you

Just runnin' scared, feelin' lowRunnin' scared, you love him soJust runnin' scared, afraid to loseIf he came back which one would you choose

Then all at once he was standing thereSo sure of himself, his head in the airMy heart was breaking, which one would it beYou turned around and walked away with me.

(cf. performance video: http://lyrics.wikia.com/Roy_Orbison:Running_Scared)

** "Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche." Quotes.net. STANDS4 LLC, 2011. 3 April. 2011. http://www.quotes.net/quote/16070

*** See Daigle and Golomb: http://books.google.com/books?id=LUVIOSwVWhEC&pg=PA38&lpg=PA38&dq=Sartre+vagina&source=bl&ots=6qBgA_cmgj&sig=OZ2P8YCaNz_X9FxKhx6Ng8tnAJU&hl=en&ei=xa6YTcnkAcyG0QHsp9j9Cw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBQQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=Sartre%20vagina&f=false

**** Certainly, the femme fatale treats the “tourist” in such a way that his travels, his pleasure, and his attraction to her are all interrupted by her erratic and deceptive actions, which put him in harm’s way, all the more when he is scantily clad and running across rooftops to escape Russian gangsters with guns. No coinicidence that their boss resorts to weilding a large knife in the climactic scene of the movie. The threat of interruption, privation, cutting off , or perhaps subtraction (since he is a math teacher) that allude to the vulnerable materiality of the male body can be linked to the very “cuts” and “gaps” that make up film as a medium, and its cinematic montage:

“This concept (of lack) has been particularly influential on a group of feminist film theorists who explore, on the one hand, how female objects of desire in traditional Hollywood film are reduced to passive screens for the projection of male fantasies, and, on the other hand, how the male desire for the mastery of the look is, in fact, continually undercut by a certain castration at the heart of cinema: the blank space between the frames that, only in its elision, can create the illusion of cinematic ‘reality.’ That blank space between the frames is analogous to the ever-threatening Real.” (Felluga, ibid.)

This chain from masculine power and sexual mastery to betrayal, loss, castration, and death is pursued in another recent film, Ben Affleck’s The Town, in which the hero, in the midst of an affair with the woman who eventually hands him over to the FBI, is threatened by the crime boss with literal castration, his father having been the victim of a prior “chemical” castration.

***** Soon after the hero meets the heroine, he confuses the word “ravishing” with the word “ravenous.” The male desire to ravish, and the woman’s substitution of that term for his oral lack, are thereby foregrounded from the outset -- but as an error, as a hole in language, a breaking through of the unconscious that converts normal attraction into a primitive impulse to devour the other.

Cinematically, this theme in the movie seems to borrow, as does the early scene in the train, from Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. In that classic, Cary Grant and Eve Marie Saint are strangers on a train who meet in the dining car, swap sexual innuendos while ordering a delicious meal, and contemplate the puzzling middle initial ‘O’ in his name, which he reassures her “means nothing.” A similar use of linguistic food/sex duplicity appears early on in Hitchcock’s Notorious.

REFERENCES

Dino Felluga - "Lesson Plans for Psychoanalysis." Introductory Guide to Critical Theory. Purdue University. http://www.purdue.edu/guidetotheory/psychoanalysis/psychplans.html

Ann Kaplan – ‘Is the gaze male?’ from Women and Film (Methuen 1983).

Ann Kaplan – ‘Gender address and the gaze in MTV,’ from Rocking Around the Clock (Methuen 1987), pp. 89-142.

Jacques Lacan – Seminar Eleven: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. NY: Norton and Co., 1978.

Jean-Paul Sartre – Being and Nothingness (Citadel 2001/1943), pp.777-781

Kaja Silverman – Male Subjectivity at the Margins (Routledge 1994).

Slavoj Zizek – Looking Awry (MIT, 1990)