Looking at Looking: Psychoanalysis and The Spectator in Film, Photography and Painting

January 27th, 2010 § 0

The Psychoanalytic Framework of Looking

In order to understand the act of looking as socially structured, we must first embrace some concepts of psychoanalysis that relate to the constitution of human sexuality in childhood. The first concept, Fetishism, is known to all of us and our understanding of it is not far from Freud’s theory. A second notion is Lacan’s mirror stage as a formative function of the I. At this point, it is too early to jump to an explanation of these concepts, but I will resume with their theoretical considerations further on in this essay. We will see how Freud’s idea of Fetishism, influences scopophilic desire and voyeuristic tendencies in adulthood, and how Fetishism and the Fetish can be expanded into the realm of photography and film to understand the psychological and sociological processes of looking which occur in the spectacular apparatus, but also how these two types of media have been used to reflect upon it’s own condition. Furthermore, we will see how Lacan’s “mirror stage” can be used to understand subconscious processes of spectatorship in the cinematographic spectacle through ideas of desire, sexuality and identity. After this has been laid out, I will conduct an analysis of Canadian artist Michael Snow’s work Powers of Two, and present considerations on how the gaze and the notion of spectatorship work in classical Hollywood film, taking Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window as an example.

To start with, I will develop on how Freud’s idea of Fetishism can be used as the bases for this theory as understood in photography and film. In his paper, Freud explains fetishism as a displacement that the male child carry’s out when he is visually confronted with the fact that the female (his mother in this case) is deprived of a penis. The child believes that this lack of a penis is a consequence of castration; therefore, given the significance that his penis has for him as part of his masculine identity, he fears castration:

“What happened, therefore, was that the boy refused to take cognizance of the fact of his having perceived that a woman does not possess a penis. No, that could not be true: for if a woman had been castrated, then his own possession of a penis was in danger;” (Freud, 1977, p.352)

This is known as the castration complex and is the departure point for fetishism and the fetish object. From here on, the child is faced with a truth, which he disavows, and hence there is the need to substitute what the boy believed to be the woman’s penis, for an object that can replace it and thus, in his mind, remain unchanged. As Freud goes on to explain, “the last impression before the uncanny and traumatic one is retained as a fetish. Thus the foot or shoe owes its preference as a fetish (…) to the circumstance that the inquisitive boy peered at the woman’s genitals from below, from her legs up.” (Freud, 1927, p.354). Therefore, the fetish object takes the place, in the mind of the child, of the penis which he believed his mother to posses. At the same time, this fetish object must posses the quality of being timeless and durable, as it must be carried forward in time in order to satisfy its purpose.

With this in mind, we can now expose photography as a fetish object. Like the fetish object that develops through the child’s discovery of the female genitalia, photographs posses the quality of timelessness. They freeze reality so to speak, into an object that can stand in for reality itself. Its chemical and physical qualities, those of light being captured by a sensitive chemical surface, make it an imprint of reality, which can be accessed at will. Moreover, the qualities of the photographic take are “immediate and definitive, like death and like the constitution of the fetish in the unconscious, fixed by a glance in childhood, unchanged and always active later.” (Metz, 1990, p.158). More important than the timelessness and durability shared between the photograph and the fetish object, is that both of them are a way of replacing something. We have already seen how this works in sexuality. With photography this concept can be further expanded, as the photograph becomes an object that replaces that which has been lost: It seizes the moment, it keeps close the people who are no longer with us, and in Metz’s words, it cuts off a piece of space and time and keeps it unchanged (Metz, 1990, p.159).

At this point, it becomes necessary to carry out a flow of thought that takes us closer to the core of this essay. I will start by asking a question: How is it then, that fetishism relates to photography as part of the structure in which societies look, glance and gaze? If we think about photography and it’s practitioners throughout it’s brief history, it’s not hard to see that most of them have been men. Furthermore, many of the photographs available in abundance, in the past and today, are of women. The camera has been used to look at women, from the nude, to advertising. The photographic apparatus – all which it encompasses, from the subject, the camera and the print – have been fetishized. The camera, as an extension of sight becomes the fetish object which photographers and people choose to view reality through. It replaces their eyes and creates a safe barrier between the victim and the perpetrator of the photographic act. In addition, the camera creates a distance between the viewer and the viewed that satisfies the voyeuristic and scopophilic desires of the male photographer. Additionally, it creates a distance between him and his desired subject, between him and the woman who he photographs from a safe distance. As we have seen, although the child unconsciously has represented the threat of castration, desire has also arisen from the moment when he realises that his mother doesn’t posses a penis. As Freud explains, although the child still believes his mother possesses a penis, this one is no longer what it was, and the interest that was previously appointed to his own penis, now is shifted to his mother’s with a reasonable increase in interest. Hence, we can say that the camera is a tool that aids men to gaze and scrutinize women from a safe distance and, what’s more, it permits the creation of a fetish object (the photograph) that replaces the actual woman, thus eliminating completely the threat of castration.

While we have seen that fetishism is one of the avenues out of the castration complex, in her influential essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative in Cinema, Laura Mulvey identifies what she names fetishistic scopophilia, which is none other than the “aestheticization”, in Wollheim’s words, of voyeurism. This is the process by which the male unconscious escapes the original trauma by “investigating the woman, demystifying her mystery (and) the erotic instinct is focused on the look alone” (Mulvey, 1987, C.1). Voyeurism, or fetishistic scopophilia, is one of the processes that Mulvey has identified as crucial in the act of looking and defines the structures of looking as binary, where there is an active/male and a passive/female. In society and traditional representation, the man is the one who looks, and the woman the one who the gaze falls upon. This is part of societies sexual ordering, where the woman is represented erotically “and can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness”
(Mulvey, 1987, III A.), and this in turn builds up a sexual objectification of woman. In traditional narrative cinema, women are portrayed as desirable for the exclusive gaze of the male spectator, a gaze that in the context of the cinematic spectacle implies a voyeuristic gaze. The cinema is constructed in such a way that the spectator find’s himself looking in the dark, from a distance, at the female heroin who’s entire purpose is to be the object of male sexual desire. But the spectator is not the only one to desire her as Budd Boetticher explains: “She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act the way he does.” (Quoted in: Mulvey, 1987, III A.). There is an obvious parallel here, between the hero of the movie and the male spectator; they both share the same desires, as if the main character in mainstream film was the mirror reflection of the spectator. This here is a crucial idea that was first coined by Laura Mulvey, but originates in Lacan’s psychoanalytic text The mirror stage as a formative function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience, which he introduced in 1936. In short, what Lacan explains in this paper, is how the child, when facing his own reflection in a mirror identifies himself, but sees in this reflection a more complete, perfected and coordinated self which Lacan denominates the Ideal-I. This occurs at a stage where the motor capacities of the child are uncoordinated, but the ideal self that he sees in the reflection surpasses his own motor skills. This process, as Lacan explains, works both in establishing the I, but at the same time “prefigures its alienating destination; it is still pregnant with the correspondences that unite the I with the statue in which man projects himself” (Lacan, 2002, p.5). This process of mirror identification opens the doors then, for future adult identification and social relations, and as Mulvey has explained, for the identification with mainstream film characters. Thus, the male hero, is the perfected version of the spectators self, his alter ego, or more precisely his ideal ego, through which his voyeuristic and fetishistic desires are carried out.

So far I’ve given an account of spectatorship that is centred on a not-so-symbolic-phallus. Most of the texts available on spectatorship theory have their core in Freud and Lacan’s psychoanalytic theories. They revolve around the idea of power relations and domination of the male over the female through the gaze, and binary placement of the lookers as active and passive. Despite this, there are texts that have tried to unveil the mysteries of the female spectator. These texts appear to take two positions: the first one breaks out from the phallocentric theories that we have been discussing so far; the second revolves around feminist theories of spectatorship. I would like to focus my following thoughts on an essay that takes into account both view’s. Mary Ann Doane, in her essay Film and The Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator raises an interesting point when she writes:

“It is precisely this opposition between proximity and distance, control of the image and its loss, which locates the possibilities of spectatorship within the problematic of sexual difference. For the female spectator there is a certain over-presence of the image – she is the image. Given the closeness of this relationship, the female spectator’s desire can be described only in terms of a kind of narcissism – the female look demands a becoming.” (Doane, 1992, p.231)

In this paragraph, Doane very simply accounts for ideas of female spectatorship as linked to proximity, a binary opposition to the idea of voyeurism. Most importantly, the idea of proximity and nearness is a key quality of women that is inherent, from the moment when the female child must become the object of desire through identification with the mother, and later in pregnancy. Naturally, a woman’s body, from about the age of twelve, is ready to carry a child. From this point, she must be physically and mentally prepared for the child she must carry in her womb, she must embrace this proximity; transcending identification and into the realm of assimilation. The moment of birth as well is important in the woman’s constitution, as it is a moment of extreme satisfaction and closeness to her child, but at the same time is extremely painful. This, in a way, can be seen as a masochistic nature of women. For Doan, “the woman who identifies with a female character must adopt a passive or masochistic position”, meaning that she must become the female character, who is victim of the gaze and object of sexual desire, in a narcissistic manoeuvre. It is a masochism that derives from narcissism, as women are expected to look attractive in ways which accommodate to the current status of beauty: “A narcissistic identification is supposed to take place; women like looking at glamorous and highly sexualized images of other women because these images are meant to function like a mirror.” (Coward, 1984, p.79). Once again, we can see that this is rooted in Lacan’s mirror stage, and that the only result that this act of looking will produce is disappointment, because, in reality, these images are not a mirror.

There is more to feminist spectatorship theory than what I have here elucidated, but for the purpose of this essay, what I have said is enough, as the work that I have promised to discuss comes to being by challenging the phallocentric theories of spectatorship.

The Psychology of Looking in Art

As we have seen in the first half of this essay, psychoanalytic concepts have been used as the framework for the theory of looking. Desire, voyeurism, fetishism, narcissism, masochism are all part of the unconscious drives that structure social relations through the gaze. These ideas have been used by artists, photographers and filmmakers in their work to reflect on how looking is structured.

Film has been presented as a voyeuristic spectacle ruled by power relations and theories of representation. Alfred Hitchcock, in his film Rear Window, has used these theoretical concepts as the subject of the film. The main character is a photographer who has had an accident and is temporarily confined on a wheelchair to his apartment, where he believes to have witnessed a crime, while gazing out the rear window of his apartment, with binoculars. With the help of a girlfriend, he is determined to uncover the crime. An interesting moment in the film is when the character played by James Stewart looks at Grace Kelly through the lens of his camera (Figure. 1). This is the point where he first acknowledges her beauty and thus, she becomes the object of scopophilic and sexual desire. It becomes clear, the analogy between the film’s plot and the cinema. Like him on the wheelchair, the spectator sits in the cinema without moving, and looking in the dark at the woman who exhibits herself. Once more, it is relevant to mention Laura Mulvey’s essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema where she talks of Hitchcock as a voyeur, both in the cinematic and non-cinematic. In addition, she mentions how Hitchcock, through the portrayal of the characters, play’s with ideological correctness of looking and how his “skilful use of identification processes and liberal use of the camera from the point-of-view of the male protagonist draw the spectators deeply into his position, making them share his uneasy gaze.” (Mulvey, 1987, C.2)

In Luis Buñuel’s film Le Charme Discreet de la Bourgeoisie we can uncover themes of fetishism underlying the main plot. In an early stage of the film, the character of Monsignor Dufour arrives at the Senechal seeking a gardener job. He searches through a shed for clothes that the old gardener used to wear, and looks satisfied when he finds a straw hat, which he looks at closely and feels with his hands before putting it on (Figure 5). Later in the movie, we discover that when Monsignor Dufour was a child, his parents were poisoned to death by the gardener that used to work for them (he does not discover it was the gardener in a photograph until later in the movie). What’s more, he’s cherished a photograph of his parents throughout his life, where the gardener who poisoned them appears in the background. The fact that he has retained gardening clothes as a fetish is directly connected to Freud’s conception of the fetish object where the last impression (the gardener) before the traumatic moment (his parents death) is retained as a fetish.

The photograph Powers of Two (Figure 2) by Michael Snow shares similarities with Rear Window. It is presented in the gallery as a transparency in four vertical sections in cinema screen format. In it, a woman lies naked in bed after having sex, with a man on top of her who’s gaze is averted and appears to be asleep. In the centre of the image we see a window with a view to the city, which is reflected in a mirror. The window in the reflection is awkward, as it occupy’s our space, the space of the spectator and we could expect to see ourselves reflected in this mirror. The spectator might find himself outside of the window, staring into the apartment, like in Rear Window. Also, in the reflection, we see a vase of pink roses sitting on the windowsill. The disorienting play which the artists presents here through reflection is a direct reference to the act of photography, and moreover, the vase with roses is a direct reference to the one found on Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergere (Figure 3) and reflected on the mirror at the right hand side of the painting. But this is not the only reference to painting, the woman who lies in bed returns the spectators gaze, much like in Manet’s Olympia (Figure 4). She looks well satisfied and her gaze is inviting to the male spectator who looks at her with desire, and is looked at with desire. But like in cinema, the desire of the spectator is satisfied by his Ideal-I, which in this case lies on the woman, already having carried out the sexual act. This seems to present a problem, for the photograph does not satisfy the sexual phantasy in the same way as cinema does and moreover, this phantasy has already been carried out at the moment the photograph was taken. Then, there is another possibility to satisfy the desires of the spectator that is implied in the love triangle of the woman, man and spectator. As in Freud’s theory when the child begins to gain interest in the mother’s genitals, and thus the child desires his mother, eventually there is the injured third party (the father):

“It is at once clear that for the child who is growing up in the family circle the fact of the mother belonging to the father becomes an inseparable part of the mother’s essence, and that the injured third party is none other than the father himself.” (Freud, 1977, p.236)

But in this case, the third party does not present a threat, and what’s more, the woman approves the sexual triangle. And it is this return of the gaze by the woman in the photograph that is tirelessly used in advertising billboards, and this is not a coincidence for it is echoed in the physical presentation of the photograph, which as in billboards, is composed of strips of the image put together. Like in Snow’s photograph, where the woman stares back at the male spectator, Manet’s painting resonates the advertising of its epoch, where women started being used for this purpose. In her study of the Bar at The Folies-Bergere, Ruth Iskin approaches the analysis of Manet’s painting comparing it to consumer display and objectification of women in the second half of the nineteenth century, where consumption of commodities was rising and changing:

“Associating goods with a beautiful woman and using both to lure spectators became a common strategy in the evolving advertising culture of mass consumption, and it is in this context that Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergere is best understood.” (Iskin, 1995)

Today, this is the most common strategy in advertising, where male desire for women and women’s narcissistic identification are the recurrent gumption to entice consumers.