(Spoilers to “American Beauty” ahead, just in case you haven’t seen it. In which case, where have you been the last ten years?!)
“The presence of woman is an indispensable element of spectacle in normal narrative film, yet her visual presence tends to work against the development of a story-line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation” (1176)
Here, Mulvey seems to be taking the Hollywood genre movie to task for its conception of the female form as a scopophilic commodity. In reading Mulvey and her theories on feminine depiction in film and masculine reaction to the feminine object (male fantasy-as-it-intersects with diegesis), I was reminded of this scene from the film “American Beauty.”
Kevin Spacey is going to a basketball game with his wife to watch their daughter cheer. However, his fixation with his daughter’s friend (played by Mena Suvari), interrupts what had, up to that point, been the story of a man with no self-esteem, a dead-end job, a stale marriage, and a daughter that hated him. With the alien presence of a sexualized object being inserted into the narrative, the story shifts to where it is now about Spacey wanting to possess that object. The constant dream visions of Suvari’s character envisioned by Spacey throughout the film serve to fetishize the sexualized object so that “it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous” (1177). However, at the film’s conclusion (which I couldn’t find online), right when he is about to possess her wholly, she reveals that she is a virgin. In effect, the sexual object is stripped of its mysticism, as up until that point Suvari had given the impression of being a sexually-experienced vixen of sorts, which informed Spacey’s perception of her, a perception that allowed for him to fetishize her.
I’ve tried to think of other movies that pull this sort of thing off as effectively as “American Beauty” and, outside of the few Hitchcock films Mulvey mentions in her article, I can’t think of any. Any know of any other films that implement the techniques Mulvey mentions? If those movies are any thing like “American Beauty,” I’d really like to know so I can check them out. Love that movie to pieces.
