Bruno Cornellier
Concordia University

“And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof and did eat; and she gave also unto her husband with her, and did eat. […] Unto the woman God said, ‘I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception: in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband and he shall rule over thee’ ”
- Genesis, as quoted in John Berger, p.47-48.

1. Gender Politics, Film Theory and Film Practice

At the offset and to summarize the theoretical basis on which is defined most anti-essentialist feminist film criticism (1), which will be the focus of our argument and analysis of Kubrick’s film, Mary Ann Doane states that “[s]exuality”, according to this approach, “is constructed within social and symbolic relations; it is most unnatural and achieved only after an arduous struggle [i.e. the oedipal crisis]” (p.89). Indeed, gender convention and identity, according to this conception, depends less upon matters of anatomical differences than upon cultural or conventional ‘agreements’ over difference. In a similar fashion, Whitney Davis proposes that “[t]he essential feature of gender in representation is not so much ‘difference’ as we are told, but ‘agreement’ ” (p.220), implying that gender systems and structures, as constructed through art, are unstable and multiple as they overlap different historical, geographical and cultural moments or environments.

And so, gender systems, as cultural and historical conventions of identity and mores, would therefore depend on and exist solely within an ideological background, upon which are constructed different norms and codes of agreements defining the different conventions, patterns and modes of representation active in our societies. Thus, it is not only the representation of women which is gendered around a certain exclusive dichotomy, but also the concept of representation itself as organized around an implicit political, historical and cultural gaze: “Historians confront gender systems that are up and running, a full-blown conventionality in, or ideology of, representation: because representation is gendered – because it is in wide ‘agreement’ with the marking of sex difference – the representation of any gender must be in agreement with gender of the form used for that representation”. (Davis, p.221) To conclude with Davis’s point of view, gendering may be seen as a process of transformation of agreement classes which are socially and hierarchically constructed according to certain sets of interests in order to designate sexual differences that are carried through representation. These sets assign a place to the (female) other within a given (western and patriarchal) linguistic pattern.

For British film theorist and feminist critic Laura Mulvey, this bipolar dichotomy around which sexual difference within patriarchal society is organized, is patterned within mainstream narrative cinema (2) in analogy with the primitive moment of the acquisition of language or, at the moment the child/spectator enters the realm of the symbolic, to use Lacanian terminology. Thus, representation in narrative cinema replays this primal fantasy (i.e. Lacan’s mirror stage) in the passive spectator’s mind and organizes itself according to an active/passive axis where man, as possessor of the phallus (the symbolic signifier of desire par excellence) acquires an active role within the symbolic universe he is entering. Meanwhile, the woman, representing the lack or absence of the phallus, constitutes the negative or passive side of the axis for instead of possessing language, she is submitted to it, to its construction and to its organization, from which she is excluded. As a result, according to Mulvey, “[w]oman […] stands in patriarchal culture as a signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his fantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer, not maker, of meaning” (p.35).
Consequently, the woman’s body, as a passive recipient of meaning in narrative film representation (“as bearer, not maker” of the look) freezes the flow of action by embodying an object of pure erotic contemplation (Mulvey, p.40). Put into display, the female is objectified, while the man, as active subject of representation (in opposition to the female as passive object), controls the narrative and, of course, the direction of the gaze onto the fragmented female body, which is thus liberated from the threat it represents (i.e. the absence of the phallus). Furthermore, according to E. Ann Kaplan, “[w]hat we can conclude […] so far is that our culture is deeply committed to clearly demarcated sex differences, called masculine and feminine, that revolve on, first, a complex gaze-apparatus; and, second, dominance/submission patterns” (2000, p.129). Kaplan therefore asks the following fundamental question: “Can there be such a thing as the female subject of desire?” (2000, p.122). This question, interestingly enough, could possibly be directed towards Stanley Kubrick’s whole filmography, which is the main object of our analysis, and in particular, to his latest and last opus, EYES WIDE SHUT, which explicitly deals with issues of sexual politics and fantasies.

2. Kubrick and Women

To begin with, E. Ann Kaplan, about Orson Welles’s THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI (1946), states that this film uses female sexuality as a liberating mechanism from patriarchal domination while at the same time, turns this act of liberation into degradation, immorality and murder. The film thus becomes an attempt by the male protagonist (played by Welles) to regain control over the narrative. Here, a similar parallel could be drawn to Kubrick’s film, EYES WIDE SHUT, all the while acknowledging the uniqueness of his work and the limited scope of our discussion, which allows for only a very superficial account of an extremely complex film in relationship to methodological and theoretical issues of equal complexity, i.e. feminist film criticism. As already demonstrated by a great many film critics (3), Kubrick’s obsession about sexual politics within western civilization predates EYES WIDE SHUT by many years, even decades. From DR. STRANGELOVE’s (1964) ironic account of nuclear warfare and technology as an empowering substitution to man’s impotence, to FULL METAL JACKET’s (1987) US military training and invasion of Vietnam as symbolic signifiers of the repression of mothering and of the female other, male sexual self-destructive instincts constitute a major subtext within his films from the 1950’s onward. EYES WIDE SHUT, while exempt of any explicit military setting, still pursues similar paths and issues.

To continue with the film’s narrative, as in Kubrick’s earlier 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968), it can be schematized as a five-act story: 1) Bill’s initial illusion of empowerment and possession over the female discourse (Alice’s); 2) Bill’s journey into the dark grounds of female sexuality and fantasies (to borrow Freud’s expression (4)); 3) the manor sequence as macroscopic signifier of the id of western man; 4) the journey in reverse towards Bill’s symbolic impotence; 5) the artificial restoration of the initial illusion. The film, which might be described as a threatening discovery by Western man of woman’s subjectivity and sexuality and his attempt at restraining or punishing her, therefore suggests, as did FULL METAL JACKET twelve years earlier, a reflexive depiction of the conventional (constructed and unnatural) order imposed by Western patriarchal civilization over female discourse and fantasies.

Thus, it is when Bill (Tom Cruise), while smoking marijuana with his wife Alice (Nicole Kidman), makes an apparently inoffensive remark about her sex-appeal to other men - who saw her as an exquisite and consenting bearer of their look - that emerges the threat of female subjectivity (and not merely as an object of fantasy). Hence Alice’s incisive and empowering words which echo throughout the entire film: “If you men only knew”, after which she tells Bill about a fantasy she had a while ago involving a naval officer for whom she would have given up everything if he had accepted to spend a single night with her.

So, from this point onward, Bill’s journey takes a decisive turn, moving abruptly from certitude and security towards impotence, insecurity and futile revenge. Obsessed by these black and white harrowing images of his wife’s imaginary affair, which he masochistically projects over and over in his conscious mind, his journey takes him into the realm of the uncensored id, in the manor where desire faces death in a Freudian dialectical pattern. In this realm of fantasy of power and submission, homosexuality and heterosexuality assemble into an undistinguished, eclectic sexual catharsis, where Bill’s own subjectivity is threatened when his illicit presence is unmasked. Led into a circle of masks, he is “invited” to remove his mask and clothes, as hundreds of hidden pairs of eyes (in parallel with the spectator’s eyes) threaten to transform his subjectivity into a mere naked and impotent object of display for the gaze of all. This situation constitutes a source of anxiety as much for the spectator as for Bill since, according to Mulvey’s logic of the film screen as equivalent of Lacan’s mirror, the represented figure (Bill’s body as ‘image’ in front of a double diegetic and spactatorial audience) is analogically linked to the narcissistic ideal-ego of the clumsy-child/immobile-spectator. Alternatively, it brings forth the anguish, guilt and threat caused by the anticipation of the homoerotic gaze onto the male body which can only be suppressed by sacrifice, violence and/or suffering (5). Rescued by a semi-naked woman who sacrifices herself in order to save him, Bill is sent back to the matrimonial bed where his wife, embodying the Judaeo-Christian fallen prostitute, is engaging in an orgiastic dream eventually leading to nightmare and anguish where she is “naked and ashamed, and fucking in a beautiful garden” (Kreider, p.44), reminiscent of the Eden of the Genesis.

Thus, she mirrors the “How do I look?” which introduces her into the film and submitted her to Bill’s (and to other men’s) gaze, replacing this representation of herself by an opposite overt fantasy of self-aware nakedness and orgasm, all the while laughing violently in the face of her now victimized husband. From this point onward, Dr. Bill’s wealth and Medical Board Card, which previously served him as a key to power, domination, authority and fantasy, now unlock the doors of death and impotence exclusively. Indeed, orgasm with Marion and Domino, who previously proposed to engage in sexual intercourse with Bill, is now postponed by the intervention of a faithful husband and by the threat of AIDS. Bill then returns to Lilith (Henry, p.9), his wife, to whom he is obliged to painfully recount his adventures. After a night of weep and confessions, they finally return to the original illusionary order, as did Private Joker in the conclusion of FULL METAL JACKET. Indeed, if Private Joker acknowledges that he is “living in a world of shit” yet accepts lucidly but passively to live in it anyway (6), so do Bill and Alice, who plunge back into the status quo. For even if they admit that “no dream is ever just a dream”, as Bill says, they “have learned nothing; for all their incoherent talk about being ‘awake’ now, their eyes are still wide shut. Reconciled, they plan to forget all this unpleasantness soon in the blissful oblivion of orgasm” (Kreider, p.48).

Finally and to conclude with the narrative of the film, women’s fantasies and subjectivity in EYES WIDE SHUT are, according to this premature analysis, clearly associated with threat and anguish for the male other. However, this destabilizing presence never attains the pretention of a complete liberating mechanism for female’s overt sexuality. To the opposite, as will now be demonstrated, this complex journey into the undifferentiated id of Western civilization offers nothing other to the female figure and discourse than a futile attempt at subversion since she remains, in her depiction, a mere eroticised object for the male’s gaze and phallocentric fantasy. Hence, there is a fallacy in form (the gender in representation and the gender of representation), since it is only organized through male subjectivity, fantasy and voyeurism.

3. EYES WIDE SHUT and the Gendering of Representation

On the representation of women in Western artistic tradition (ranging from the first pictorial depiction of the Genesis to Twentieth Century photography), John Berger proposes a specific distinction between ‘nudity’ and ‘nakedness’, a distinction which he defines in the following terms: “To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself. A naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become a nude. (…) Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display” (p.54). Consequently, according to Berger, the image of women, in this context, is destined to appeal not so much to ‘her’ sexuality, but to ‘his’: Towards the male’s eroticised look, within a compositional pattern which directs the gaze towards the female body as the central element of the composition. The woman then becomes a mere object of display which serves to feed the appetite of a second, main protagonist who lies outside the frame - i.e. the male viewer in place of the ideal spectator who is classically assumed to be male. Berger then concludes that “[w]omen are depicted in a quite different way from men – not because the feminine is different from the masculine – but because the ‘ideal’ spectator is always assumed to be male and the image of the woman is design to flatter him” (p.64). Or, to nuance Berger’s incomplete statement, it might be added that female spectatorship is possible on the condition that her relationship to the picture is a narcissistic one, identifying herself with the submitted, objectified figure of secure erotic display.

Which bring us back to Kubrick’s film and to Whitney Davis’s argument about ‘agreement’ and the gendering processes of representation, which is related more specifically to filmic representation as such, by using Laura Mulvey’s passive/active patterning of the implied gendered gaze of representation. The opening shot of the film is indeed explicitly constructed around this pattern when Alice, seen from behind, tosses her dress out of the frame with her black high-heel shoe, revealing her flawless naked body to the bearer of the look – i.e. the implied, unseen main character. The columns behind which she is undressing then serve a double compositional function: they segregate the unseen voyeur’s space from the space of the object of the gaze (Nicole Kidman’s body) while directing this gaze to the centre of the frame, as would do the semi-opened curtains of a theatre stage, giving this body a mere status of a non-confronting, passive, eroticised object of display for an implied male, or narcissistic female, voyeur. But whether or not we give credit (contrary to Mulvey and Berger) to the possible existence of a female gaze or spectatorship, this look is clearly geared towards a male-mediated fantasy where women, excluded from language (as we have seen earlier), occupy a passive role within linguistic and visual construction. Equally, this shot can be compared to another a little later in the film after the mirror sequence, where the camera slowly tilts upward on Alice’s naked body, seen from behind once more (she does not confront the gaze posed on her body), while attempting to put on her brassiere. Her body, lightly bended over in a seemingly uncomfortable pose, is clearly revealed as an object of contemplation – her “too-be-looked-at-ness” to use Mulvey’s expression - freezing the narrative flow, and not so much as a narrative element. Another example would be the depiction of the overdosed prostitute, lying naked and unconscious on Ziegler’s (Sydney Pollack) couch, while the empowered Dr. Bill tries to awaken and save this vulnerable, desirable woman. Her status as a pure eroticised object of male domination (an ex-model who became a luxury prostitute for wealthy men) is cloned by a painting of a self-conscious nude woman hanging on the wall behind her, who shows-off her female attributes in a complicit pose.

Of course, it would be easy for an unconvinced critic to insist on the narrative necessity of this male-oriented voyeuristic pattern, at least in the beginning of the film. This argument would imply that this mode of representation was legitimized and rendered necessary by Kubrick’s depiction of western man’s fantasy later postponed by the emerging threat of female subjectivity: Alice’s unexpected declaration of imagined adultery. This argument, which implicitly assumes a direct link between Bill’s subjectivity and point of view and that of the narrator’s/author’s, can be easily dismissed by way of a short theoretical detour to narratology and/or film semiotics. These have previously shown how the emission pole of communication (the author, narrator, enunciator, etc.) is somehow autonomous from or unbounded by the content of the communication (7). To define Bill’s subjectivity as “maker of meaning” is therefore to misinterpret the author’s/narrator’s role or presence as organizer of significance and communication.

In hind forth, it can be assumed that the content of the work never depends on the character’s subjectivity but on a diegetic construction made of rules which are laid down by an external agent, author or signifying presence. Kubrick’s choice to gender representation around the male visual pleasure and linguistic/representational codes or schemata is therefore never a narrative or discursive necessity, but rather an authorial choice, whether it be conscious or unconscious. It is an aesthetic/authorial option which goes beyond the explicit initial pre-crisis situation anyway and finds its catharsis in the central manor sequence. Thus, this sequence as “metaphor of sexual ‘objectification’”, which becomes “literal” (Kreider, p.46), never achieves any critical or self-reflexive distance in relation to gender ‘agreement’ of representation. On the contrary, it becomes a pure formal, non-narrative moment of ‘sublime’ and contemplation over the objectified feminine figures. The spectator’s masked (therefore secured) gaze can now follow that of Bill, who engages and directs this spectatorial look. Hence this quote taken from Tim Kreider’s critique which, even though it does not explicitly recognize the exploitative nature of this gaze, nevertheless offers interesting insights about the direction of the looks: “The ritual prostitutes, who are themselves objects purchased for sexual use, wear masks that make them identical and interchangeable. Their nude bodies are unnaturally perfect, smooth and immaculate as mannequins, photographed with cold Kubrickian detachment that desaturates them of any eroticism. The sex we see consists of static tableau[x] as spectators (…) posed around mechanically rutting participants”. (p.46)

Again, to propose Kubrick’s cold detachment as freeing these images from any eroticism is to undervalue the vital flow of these extremely ‘aestheticized’ images and bodies, and the coefficient of sublime and contemplative affect attached to them by the director’s expressionism. However, to define Kubrick on this account as being misogynistic constitutes a misunderstanding of our argument, since he, for one, constantly struggles to underscore, in this film and in many others, the alienating structures of civilization’s codes of conduct upon human identity, repressed fantasies and unconscious desires. In this context, EYES WIDE SHUT embodies a clear attempt to provide women with subjectivity and with fantasies, and to reveal the deceit of man’s claim to power and domination. Yet, it seems that the political subversion of this film lies less in its account of female sexuality and in the mode of representation of this sexuality than in its depiction, as Kreider proposes, of “the shameless, naked wealth of end-of-the-millennium Manhattan, and of the obscene effect of that wealth on the human soul, and on society” (p.41). Even though women still remain as passive spectators…

Conclusion

In an attempt to recapitulate, it has been shown that at first, Kubrick, in EYES WIDE SHUT, seems to render explicit the alienation of women sexuality and fantasies within the gendering organization of patriarchal linguistic, social, financial and political patterns. However, the film may suffer from a lack in form and in the long run, restrict women to a particular ‘agreement’ in representation which is built around a phallocentric gaze and mode of representation. Thus, if Kubrick’s films, as Hans Feldman general argument proposes, seem to build from Freud’s analysis of the discontent of Western civilization (8) which erupts from its failure to acknowledge the primal, instinctual bestiality (the id) of ‘Man’, feminist criticism might identify Kubrick’s fallacy in relationship to this particular modernist standpoint. Indeed, in trying to understand and deconstruct Man’s (reading Mankind’s) alienation from a universal and categorical stand, Kubrick fails to account for the racial, cultural and SEXUAL (i.e. feminine) plurality of human identities, therefore the plurality of their modes of domination and alienation.

Bruno Cornellier, Concordia University (Montreal, Quebec, Canada) for Cadrage

Special thanks go to Marie-Claude Mercier and Marcelle Bonneville for their precious help and critic on the first draft of this article.

Notes:

(1) Anti-essentialist feminist film theory proposes an exclusion of the female body from representation, rejecting any attempt at conceptualizing this body. Even though we will not go that far here, their argument about the arbitrariness of gender identities still relates to the core of our argument. See Doane, pp.96-97.
(2) And, we could add, within mainstream artistic representation in general.
(3) See, among others, Peter Baxter, “The One Woman” in Wide Angle, Vol.6, nr.1, 1984, pp.34-41. Michael Pursell, “Full Metal Jacket: The Unravelling of Patriarchy” in Mario FALSETTO (ed.), Perspectives on Stanley Kubrick, New York: G.R. Hall & Co., 1996, pp.317-326. Paula Willoquet-Maricondi, “Full-Metal-Jacketing, or Masculinity in the Making” in Cinema Journal, Vol.33, no.2, Winter 1994, pp.5-21.
(4) See Stéphane Lépine, « La nuit transfigurée » in 24 images, nr.98-99, Fall 1999, p.84.
(5) See Steve Neale, “Masculinity as Spectacle: Reflections on Men and Mainstream Cinema” in E. Ann KAPLAN (ed.), Feminism and Film, New York: Oxford University Press, 2000, pp. 253-264.
(6) See Bruno Cornellier, « Le sexe et la guerre. Le meurtre de la femme et la construction de la masculinité dans FULL METAL JACKET de Stanley Kubrick » in Cadrage.net: http://www.cadrage.net/v2/2002-01-01/fullmetaljacket.html
(7) See, amongst other works, Francesco Casetti, D’un regard à l’autre. Le film et son spectateur, Lyon, Presses universitaires de Lyon, 1990.
(8) See Freud’s Civilisation and its Discontent.

Cited Works:

BERGER, John, Ways of Seeing, New York: Penguin, 1977.
DAVIS, Whitney, “Gender” in Robert S. NELSON and Richard SHIFF (eds.), Critical Terms for Art History, Chicago/London, The University of Chicago Press, 1996, pp.220-233.
DOANE, Mary Ann, “Woman’s Stake: Filming the Female Body” in E. Ann KAPLAN (ed.), Feminism and Film, New York: Oxford University Press, 2000, pp.86-99.
FELDMAN, Hans, “Kubrick and His Discontents” in Mario FALSETTO (ed.), Perspectives on Stanley Kubrick, New York: G.R. Hall & Co., 1996, pp.191-200.
HENRY, Michael, “Eyes Wide Shut. La pénombre des âmes” in Positif, nr.463, Sept. 1999, pp.6-11.
KAPLAN, E. Ann, “Is the Gaze Male?” in E. Ann KAPLAN (ed.), Feminism and Film, New York: Oxford University Press, 2000, pp.119-138.
KAPLAN, E. Ann, “The Struggle for Control over the Female Discourse and Female Sexuality in Welles’s Lady From Shanghai (1946)” in Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera, London/New York, Routledge, 1983, pp.60-72.
KREIDER, Tim, “Eyes Wide Shut” in Film Quarterly, Vol.53, nr.3, Spring 2000, pp.41-48.
MULVEY, Laura, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” in E. Ann KAPLAN (ed.), Feminism and Film, New York: Oxford University Press, 2000, pp.34-47.