How Cinematic Identification is Used to Position the Spectator in Relation to Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Far From Heaven

How Cinematic Identification is Used to Position the Spectator in Relation to Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Far From Heaven

“The experience of being able to put oneself so deeply into a

character -feel oneself to be so like the character- that one can feel

the same emotions and experience the same events as the character is

supposed to be feeling and experiencing” (Ellis, J,1982: 43).

Cinematic identification involves two different tendencies. Firstly

there is the dreaming and fantasy that involves the multiple and

contradictory tendencies within the construction of the individual.

Secondly there is the experience of the narcissistic identification

with the image of a human figure perceived as other. The spectator

does not therefore ‘identify’ with the hero or heroine: an

identification that would, if put in its conventional sense, involve

socially constructed males identifying with male heroes, and socially

constructed females identifying with women heroines.

Spectatorship is more complex than the simple in association with male

or female spectators with masculine or feminine positions. Some

psychoanalytic film theories have presumed that spectators are moving

away from only identifying with the single narrative figure, and

towards the claim that he or she engages in a more complex

identification with the overall narrative. Far From Heaven invites

the audience to identify with Cathy, and also at the same time, to

sympathize for, Cathy’s gardener. The narrative of the film provides

the spectator with multiple and shifting points of identification.

Identification is therefore multiple and fractured a sense of seeing

the ...

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...n, 23 August 2005).

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