Caught Looking: Articulating Gender Performance and the Gaze in Hitchcock and Sherman
[last edited: 6 April 2006]
Director Alfred Hitchcock’s film Rear Window and artist Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Still #6 explicitly articulate the gaze’s impact on subjectivity as a significant theme while also providing feminine responses to the gaze. Hitchcock’s films are generally taken to depict women trapped by narrative and cultural circumstances beyond their control. Sherman’s photographs (programmatically situated as “film stills”) also show trapped women, though they exist in frozen visual territories isolated from direct narrative interventions. Hitchcock and Sherman texts represent the templates of femininity dictated by modern western cultural standards, and in doing so they alert the reader to the ways that hegemony dismisses, dismembers, and de-animates feminine agency.
Much has been said about the power of the gaze in modern mediated culture. Theodor Adorno introduces it when formulating the public’s relationship with the “culture industry,” Jacques Lacan explores it in his psychological constitution of subjectivity, and finally Laura Mulvey and Judith Butler implicate it in their respective critiques of the mediation of gender. Despite different approaches, methodologies, and ultimate agendas, all find that the subject positions of seeing and being-seen substantially influence the performance of individual subjectivity. Consequently, they interrogate mediated culture as a hegemonic influence and articulate frames for cultural dissent.
Before examining representations of femininity in Untitled Film Still #6, a brief introduction to a key work of Laura Mulvey is appropriate. Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” describes the differential relationships between performer, filmmaker, and audience by focusing on the power of what she terms the gaze. Mulvey indicates that the gaze builds a framework of spectatorship in which the feminine can function as little more than an object (33). She says that female characters stand powerless before three aspects of the gaze: the camera as it fixes the actress and subdivides her into her constituent fetishized physical attributes; the audience as it views the product of the camera’s dismemberment and aligns itself with the agency of the male lead(s); and finally the characters within the frame of the film narrative (39). First, the female is dismembered by fracturing her celluloid body with tight shots, editing, and diffuse lighting (33-34). Next, the audience passively aligns itself to the protagonist on whose actions the narrative is driven and it subsequently subordinates the female to the status of prop. Finally, the characters on screen, themselves forging verisimilitude with reality, enact the codes of feminine paralysis (33).
The mechanics of the gaze informs Sherman’s work from 1977 through the early 1990s (Krauss ). Most of this work consists of self-portraits, although calling them ‘self-portraits’ immediately posits a very plastic notion of identity given the range of characters she wears. Her early untitled film stills put the role-playing artist into a complex play of reference-frames: she is at once photographer, director, and model and she thereby lends her work a unique window on how the gaze can be addressed through a visual artifact.
In Untitled Film Still #6 (1977), the figure is posed prostrate atop rumpled bedclothes wearing only underwear and a nightshirt that has fallen open. She closes one hand into a fist against her jaw while her other clutches a mirror, which faces away from the camera. Curiously, there is a game of hide and seek with her skin in this picture; her feet are beyond the frame and partially obscured by the blanket, her arms are covered such that her hands emerge from the near-camouflage of the sheets, and her breasts are blacked out (contrasting with her bright white knickers) by the bra she wears. These negative spaces, these black and white fields of high contrast amid the grays, mask her physical sexuality while also visually enhancing it for the viewer by setting it apart from the mid-tones of the patterned sheets (Avgikos 339). In this respect, the contrasting tones dismember the character’s sexual traits into discreet iterations for the camera.
Much of the drama of this piece owes to Sherman’s expression and her pose. Her eyes are turned upward beyond the frame; her jaw is relaxed, leaving her mouth and lips partly open; and her hands, though performing specific acts with fist and clutching the mirror, seem somehow limp and lifeless. In short, the model is arranged as though she were either a sort of doll or a lifeless victim. In either case, she is a mere object in this composition (Rice 25, 38). The only hint of agency we get in this image is the mirror, which indicates a reflective, narcissistic attitude that paralyzes the figure. Even the point of view of the photograph references the mirror. Seen from above in this way, we suspect that we are voyeurs on a scene in a seedy hotel room, where the woman in the photo is actually laid out for a mirror on the ceiling, from which point the audience gazes at her. The mirror in her hand, facing down, offers a visual clue that this could be the case.
Regardless of whether there is indeed a mirror on the ceiling, the point of view indicates that the camera looks down on her. This physical arrangement invokes a power relationship (Rice 39). The woman is on her back while the viewer, constituted by the mechanical voyeurism of the camera’s gaze, assumes the upright, superior position. This divide in perspective between looking up and looking down also indicates a hint of physical violence in this photo. The make-up on her face adds a flush to her cheeks, as though she’s been either shamed or assaulted. The fist against her jaw further invokes a measure of physical contact in the image, especially as her arm between the fist and her torso is partially obscured by the pattern of sheet and her draped nightshirt. The fist enters the scene iconographically from beyond the frame, and perhaps her gaze in the photo is shock at an unexpected assault. In any case, the consequences of the camera’s gaze are exposed as violent and paralyzing--so paralyzing that it disrupts the active narcissism implied by the clutched mirror.
Finally, we should note that the figure seems to find escape from the gaze only in directing her eyes to the top margin of the picture plane. This flight of the figure’s focus to an area concealed beyond the limit of the picture indicates a programmed response to the violence directed at her by the iconography of the image. In calling attention to this abdication of subjective agency, this representation of a template of vulnerable femininity alerts us to the ways that popular media--especially the kinds of films Sherman references by situating this work as a film still--de-animates and summarily dismisses agency from the figure (Grundberg 170).
Clearly, Sherman’s photograph is iconographically situated to allow an application of the gaze in its critique, despite the fact that Mulvey was indicating narrative film and not still-photography with her essay on visual pleasure. Since Sherman’s photo is programmed as a “film still,” though, it demonstrates many of the key points Mulvey associates with film’s power over female agency and subjectivity (Krauss ).
Judith Butler’s work Gender Trouble does not concern film specifically, but like Mulvey’s essay it provides an interdisciplinary entry point for discussing a cultural artifact--in this case, Alfred Hitchcock’s film Rear Window. Butler is concerned primarily with gender performance and gendered cultural codes. Gender performance, for Butler, is linked neither to physiological sexual determinants nor to any foundational gendered psychology. Rather, gender performance is a process, a system by which the frontiers of the body, subjectivity, and agency are articulated.
The basis for Butler’s analysis of gender is that “...representation is [a] normative function of a language which is said either to reveal or to distort what is assumed to be true about the category of women” (3-4). With this statement, she indicates two main points: first, that representations of women provide both examples of existing codes for femininity and examples of culturally desirable norms to which performances of femininity should continue to conform; and second, that these coded norms represent neither necessary nor entirely stable templates for feminine identity (4). Indeed, Butler says that hegemony has the power to produce the very subjects that the culture industry tries to represent as always already established (4-5). As a result, the body can be understood as a “passive medium” constructed and inscribed such that the fictional stability of gendered performance’s repetition supports the very hegemonic powers by which the performed codes are legitimized (164, 172). Butler frequently responds to this false stability by stating that since the performance of available identity codes is actually predetermined by power relationships, the only way to effectively reveal the fabrication and find agency is by noting the transgressions of parody and other failures to faithfully reproduce the desired codes (179).
Analysis of the Hitchcock film Rear Window (1954) provides a basis for evaluating gender roles and relationships as defined by a successful Hollywood production of the 1950s. The main character L.B. Jeffries is a temporarily wheelchair-bound photographer who makes his living--based on a panned tour of his flat--shooting action scenes around the world. Attending to him in his infirmity are two women: first, a street-smart and talkative nurse provided by his insurance company; and second, his girlfriend Lisa Carol Fremont who is a socialite and fashion writer with exceptional smarts and beauty. Despite Jeff’s irritability and restlessness after being chair-bound for 6 weeks, the women are very quick to meet all of his needs. The nurse’s massages and Lisa’s fancy dinners and amorous overtures are never withheld, and both women largely humor Jeff’s voyeur habit.
The women in the film are represented as extensions of Jeff’s ego rather than free agents in the film--they are limited by the roles they are culturally determined to inhabit. Even the intelligent, beautiful, and independent Lisa is not exempt from forced conformity. To begin, Lisa and Jeff’s relationship as unwed lovers is not strictly appropriate according to the standards of the day, and she appears to hold some equal footing to Jeff in the relationship--as evidenced by her comfortable navigation his apartment as though it is her own. She is even the more physically demonstrative of this pair and initiates all of the film’s intimate contact.
The cultural standards are never fully undermined, however, thanks to repeated masculine interventions. He cuts off kisses or fails to respond to Lisa’s intimate gestures early in the film, and later on Jeff’s hard-boiled friend Doyle seems to question the propriety of the relationship with his pointed glances at the evidence of Lisa’s intimacy. In this way, despite the apparent flaunting of cultural conventions, the hegemony (in the guise, intriguingly, of a cop) steps in and asserts a glaring disapproval of Lisa’s wanton role in Jeff’s life. In this way, the film alerts the viewer to the conventional behaviors that ought to correspond to the genders of the characters while also challenging the same conventions by showing alternatives to those prescribed codes.
The film situates more than just Jeff and Lisa’s relationship patterns at the fore. Through Jeff’s voyeurism, other relationships are disclosed to the scrutiny of the watching masculine hegemony. One odd couple sleeps on a balcony, another evidently happy newlywed couple vanishes behind a pulled blind, Ms. Lonelyheart performs courtship rituals alone in her apartment, the exhibitionist Ms. Torso puts her barely-clad form on display and later entertains several suitors in the privacy of her flat, and finally a drunk libertine pianist entertains wild gatherings of friends. The most important relationship to the film, however, is that of the traveling salesman Thorwald and his invalid, nagging wife. Jeff takes a particular interest in this relationship as he ponders the possible negative articulations of married life, only to witness what he believes is evidence of a homicide (Cohen 20-21). This ultimate transgression of relationship boundaries becomes a foil for Jeff’s own voyeuristic transgression of privacy codes, thereby establishing a privileged subject position for Jeff’s panoptic centrality to the plot (Zizek 126). Furthermore, Thorwald becomes an exhibitionist in this scenario, breaking with the masculine code of privileged watching and becoming instead a fetishized object, much as the bared skin of Ms. Torso captivates Jeff’s gaze.
Toward the end of the film, one more character transgresses the gender boundaries: Lisa. As suspicions of Thorwald reach critical heights, and as Ms. Lonelyheart prepares for a dramatic exit from her miserable loneliness, Jeff and Lisa give voice to their wish to do something about matters. This precipitates a substantial change for Lisa in which she leaves the apartment for a quick look through Thorwald’s place. It is possible to construe this as a gender reversal in the relationship of Jeff and Lisa, especially as she turns around and watches Jeff and the nurse in their peeping window--although it is difficult to separate Lisa’s newfound agency from her previous submissions to Jeff’s will (Wood 104). Were he healthy and able, he would be the one investigating; and had he not involved Lisa in his suspicions she would never have taken such an initiative at all, one would guess (Wood 69). (Earlier in the film, Lisa leaves in a huff over future plans but indicates that she will be back anyway the next day to care for Jeff.) Given this analysis of Lisa’s character, and given that Jeff is the first to expresses his inability to act on Thorwald, Lisa is situated not as having found agency, but as acting on Jeff’s spoken wishes as his proxy.
Lisa’s appearance beyond Jeff’s window introduces a curious articulation of the masculine gaze. Until the Thorwald crisis, Lisa had not been capable of commanding Jeff’s total attention, but after she enters the frame of his window he becomes fascinated. For the first time, Lisa has become spatially independent of Jeff and yet the process translates her into just another performer for his gaze (Zizek 126, Wood 101). Here, the film explicitly entertains the implications of performance and the gaze, and it introduces a meta-commentary on the events of the film--a characteristic which is also at work in Sherman’s film still (Morris 21).
Performances of hegemony’s dictated gender expectations, as portrayed in gaze-inflected cultural artifacts like films, are designed for verisimilitude with the audience’s “so-called natural conditions” (Mulvey 34). But since the illusion of film as a reflection of lived experience posits cultural expectations while always already guiding ideology and behavior, there are significant implications for Lisa’s entrance into the frame of Jeff’s window. (Likewise for Sherman’s presence in her own lens.) Lisa becomes more real than the real Lisa, and in the process she inhabits a territory that reflects the power of the gaze over the objectified feminine. In short, once she becomes an object, Jeff can take notice of her from the safety of his superior subject position as the gazing agent.
Sherman’s photo works similarly to the film with regard to the gaze. By positioning herself in a role, she submits a provisional identity to the performance-hungry gaze for consumption (Krauss ). Moreover, her performance of the frozen figure does not grant her subjectivity except as an agent of the hegemonic order that regulates while it simultaneously represents. While the film still is positioned as a commentary, and almost a parody, of past representations of the feminine, it also disrupts the relationship of masculine gaze to the performing feminine through its very artificiality (Krauss ). This is not a true still-frame from a film, rather, it is a grainy simulation that in turn references past film-simulations of lived experience. In this echo chamber of simulation the gaze, the performance of vulnerable femininity, and the verisimilitude of film to reality feed back on each other and create a space for interrogating the cultural dictates deployed in narrative and visual media.
The plot conventions that build suspense in Rear Window expose gender codes to relativist evaluation and destabilize the order of hegemony’s masculine imperatives. In the end, however, the plot contrives to reestablish the behavioral norms and then punish the transgressors: Thorwald is lead off by police and Jeff manages to break his good leg and imprison himself for another six weeks in the doting care of Lisa. Despite the restoration of hegemonic order, however, Rear Window’s exposure of transgression, both in the frame of the film and in the frame of Jeff’s window, alerts the audience to the slipperiness of established normative behavior in much the same way that Sherman’s photo destabilizes the multiple orders of the gaze (Wells 325).
In terms of Mulvey and Butler, both Cindy Sherman’s Film Still and Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window fit neatly into a mediated tradition of women assuming roles that benefit the hegemony of the masculine gaze. This gaze is not a passive application of cultural pressure in either case. For the woman in the photograph, agency flees the scene through her upturned eyes that direct the viewer into an awkward “presence that is absent” whereby her body becomes an empty shell for the viewer to fill with whatever narrative constructs that the he or she expects (Krauss ). Lisa’s character only becomes an agent in the movie after she becomes an object of Jeff’s gaze--after she becomes the object of the salesman’s physical assault and the police intervention. Even then, she is acting on the basis of Jeff’s will after being drawn into the plots by his’s curiosity. Her character, finally positioned to receive the gaze, Then proceeds to locate the damning accessory--the wedding ring--and assert by proxy Jeff’s mastery of the situation.
The accessory, as the film repeatedly stresses, is a touchstone of femininity. No woman would willingly surrender accessories like a favorite handbag or a wedding ring. To do so would mean surrendering a large portion of female identity. The suggestion that identity could be inextricably linked to objects indicates an always-previous abdication to the prescribed normative performances of gender in the mid- 1950s. Sherman’s figure in the photo is likewise defined for- and by her accessories. The mirror, the bed and sheets, the exposed undergarments, and the lack of a wedding band seem to fetishize her into a wanton woman who must have practically asked for whatever unfortunate situation we find her in. She looks beyond the frame and thereby relinquishes her agency in much the same way that Lisa takes direction from Jeff by asking “what do we do” and constantly looking to him for self-confirmation throughout the film.
Hitchcock’s Rear Window and Sherman’s Untitled Film Still #6 are useful tools for interrogating the cultural portrayal of femininity via dismissal, dismemberment, and de-animation. Through their intersections with critical interdisciplinary texts by Laura Mulvey and Judith Butler they help illuminate the cultural applications of prescribed femininity. Indeed, unpacking the visual, narrative, and hegemonic content of the photograph and film can show how the representations of femininity both respond to- and determine the cultural codes that police the performance of subjectivity and agency. Truly, these discreet works--separated by almost 25 years--skewer the cultural and hegemonic negotiations that inform feminine subjectivity and agency during much of the 20th century while also providing the possibility for change by following Butler’s call to highlight codes via parody and failure to conform.
Analysis shows how both works disrupt the continuity of cultural behaviors through specifically targeted narrative and visual strategies. Seeded within the disruptions are subtle cues that highlight the circumstances by which femininity must be performed in the culture, and these cues provide a basis for critique. Hitchcock’s film responds both to the expectations of the viewing audience and the tradition of Hollywood plot and character conventions that determine the audience’s reception of the cultural behavioral norms. Sherman’s photo takes this critique to another level by commenting on how, even after 25 years and the emergence of a body of feminist critique, there has been little enough change in the compositions of identity and agency--thanks in part to the consumption of mediated representations of femininity distributed by the culture industry. Though the utility of the works is difficult to establish in terms of their respective impacts on reshaping cultural norms, both expose the hegemony and open new avenues for subjectivity by consciously subverting coded ideology.
Works Cited
Avgikos, Jan. “Cindy Sherman: Burning Down the House.” The Photography Reader. Liz Wells, Ed. New York: Routledge, 2003. 338-342.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990.
Cohen, Paula Marantz. “James, Hitchcock and the Fate of Character.” Alfred Hitchcock: Centenary Essays. Richard Allen and S. Ishil-Gonzales, Eds. London: British Film Institute, 1999. 15-27.
Grundberg, Andy. “The Crisis of the Real: Photography and Postmodernism.” The Photography Reader. Liz Wells, Ed. New York: Routledge, 2003. 164-179.
Hitchcock, Alfred, dir. Rear Window. Perf. James Stuart and Grace Kelly. 1954. DVD. Universal Studios, 2001.
Krauss, Rosalind. Cindy Sherman: 1975-1993. New York: Rizzoli, 1993.
Morris, Christopher D. The Hanging Figure: On Suspense and the Films of Alfred Hitchcock. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002.
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Issues in Feminist Film Criticism. Patricia Erens, Ed. Bloomington: Indiana U.P., 1990.
Rice, Shelly. “Inverted Odysseys.” Inverted Odysseys: Claude Cahun, Maya Deren, Cindy Sherman. Shelly Rice, Ed. New York: New York University, 1999. 3-26.
Sherman, Cindy. Untitled Film Still #6. 1977. Museum of Modern Art. The Complete Untitled Film Stills. NY: Museum of Modern Art, 2003. 143.
Wells, Liz. “The Photographic Gaze: Introduction.” The Photography Reader. Liz Wells, Ed. New York: Routledge, 2003. 324-26.
Wood, Robin. Hitchcock’s Films Revisited (Revised ed.). New York: Columbia U.P., 2002 (1989).
Zizek, Slavoj. “The Hitchcockian Blot.” Alfred Hitchcock: Centenary Essays. Richard Allen and S. Ishil-Gonzales, Eds. London: British Film Institute, 1999. 123-139.
