Psychoanalysis, Cinema, and Symbolism

Film scholar and gender theorist Linda Williams begins her article “Film Bodies: Genre, Gender and Excess,” with an anecdote about a dispute between herself and her son, regarding what is considered “gross,” (727) in films. It is this anecdote that invites her readers to understand the motivations and implications of films that fall under the category of “body” genre, namely, horror films, melodramas, (henceforth referred to as “weepies”) and pornography. Williams explains that, in regards to excess, the constant attempts at “determining where to draw the line,” (727) has inspired her and other theorists alike to question the inspirations, motivations, and implications of these “body genre” films. After her own research and consideration, Williams explains that she believes there is “value in thinking about the form, function, and system of seemingly gratuitous excesses in these three genres,” (728) and she will attempt to prove that these films are excessive on purpose, in order to inspire a collective physical effect on the audience that cannot be experienced when watching other genres.

Even though Mulvey presents some intriguing points on how psychoanalysis affects the way gender is viewed in regards to the look, her writing is restricted and one-dimensional in comparison to Constance Penley’s article, “Feminism, Film Theory, and the Bachelor Machines” (1985). Penley begins by focusing on the idea of the “bachelor machine:” a practice used from approximately 1850-1925 where “numerous artists, writers, and scientists imaginatively or in reality constructed anthropomorphized machines to represent the relation of the body to the social, the relation of sexes to each other, the structure of the psyche, or the workings of history.” It is a perpetually moving, self-sufficient system that, as Michael de Certeau states, has a chief distinction of “being male.” It also includes common themes of, “an ideal time and the magical possibility of its reversal (the time machine is an exemplary bachelor machine) electrification, voyeurism, and masturbatory eroticism, the dream of the mechanical reproduction of art, and artificial birth or reanimation” (Stam and Miller, 456-457). This leads Penley to discuss a similar theory, that of the cinema as an apparatus itself, which focuses on the same characteristics of the bachelor machine. This theory is discussed through the writings of Jean-Louis Baudry and Christian Metz, but Penley points out that their works close off essential questions about sexual difference.

Mulvey, Laura."Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in Sexuality/Screen. London: Routledge, 1992.

Film, as a product of patriarchal ideology, reflects a stereotype of women’s unfairness in reflecting women’s lives. Therefore, in the face of the oppression of male hegemonies film work, feminist films are intended to interpret women’s issue from a feminist point of view to explore women’s activities and women’s theme. However, there are stereotypes of female characters in traditional films. The image of women in traditional films often appears to be over-reliance on male and the role of women is limited to the unselfish dedication of the wife and the perfect mother. Moreover, women’s body shape is

Psycho by Alfred Hitchcock is a horror film that debuted in 1960, starring Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh. (IMDb) This horror film changed the horror movie genre, helping to develop it into what it is today. This film tells the story of a woman who runs off with $40,000 stolen from her boss. On the run, she checks into an abandoned motel for the night where she dines with the owner, a young man with an overbearing and controlling mother. She never checks out. Her family and friends embark on searches for her, and come across the abandoned hotel where she checked in, under a false name. The movie ends with the revelation that the hotel owner’s mother died, and he suffers from multiple personality disorder. Both he and his mother share his body, with the mother personality becoming more dominant. When he dined with the lady who checked in, the mother became jealous and kill her, leaving the son to clean up the mess left behind.

Flitterman-Lewis, Sandy “Psychoanalysis, Film, and Television,” in Channels of Discrouse: Reassembled ed. Robert C. Allen ( University of North Carolina Press: 1992) 2nd Edition. 203-246

Mulvey says matter-of-factly "the fascination of film is reinforced by pre-existing patterns of fascination already at work within the individual subject and the social formations that have moulded him" (Mulvey 519). She goes on to say that those pre-existing patterns boil down to the "phallocentric order" that is present in society. The fasci...

Film Analysis of Psycho When ‘Psycho’ was first screened in New York on 16th June 1960, it was

Performance artist Patty Chang creates pieces that deal with scopophilia or voyeurism, best described as “the love of looking”, a topic that goes hand in hand with the issues of gender roles in society that Chang also represents in her work. Chang particularly addresses issues of gender roles through her confrontation of female representation in art, film and popular culture as a whole. In Chang’s video clip entitled, “Shaved (At a Loss)”, she sits herself on a chair in front of her audience, hikes up her dress to expose her vagina and then proceeds to, very roughly, shave off her pubic hair. The entire duration of “Shaved (At a Loss), Chang is blindfolded. In this piece Chang presents consumer culture’s fetishization of the ”flawless” female figure, which is outlined by the unattainable body ideals that are portrayed not only in most mainstream pornography, but also in almost all media connected to our society’s popular culture sphere.

State and Main and My Week with Marilyn are the two movies I will be analyzing through the context of film language. I will be examining the relationship between both films through thematic similarities and cinematic elements. It is my goal to explain how the two films relate in sexuality, masculinity in crisis and meta-cinema. At the same time showing how the use of cinematic elements like cinematography, costume and set design help provide support in the story telling that allows the themes to come across.