Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power, or The Male Gaze for Dummies

I can remember where I first read Laura Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." An essential essay in cinema scholarship, originally published in 1975, it was - appearing to me much like this - part of a staggeringly large package of photocopies that SFU professor George Rosenberg used to give his students (I took both parts of The History and Aesthetics of Cinema that he taught, back in the early 1990s). The essay makes the case that cinema spectatorship is gendered, with the male as the "seer" and the female as the "seen." It was one of the most important experiences in film criticism I ever had, and while Rosenberg (and generations of subsequent feminist scholars) elaborated on the concept of "the male gaze" beyond what Mulvey ever did, it permanently affected my spectatorship and attuned me to the rare instances where women actually control the look, are granted actual subjectivity in cinema. Film and cultural studies professors have been drawing on these concepts heavily for the nearly 50 years since the essay came out...

...but none have done it quite like Nina Menkes, the director of Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power, which opens October 21st at the VIFF Centre for a short run, nicely building up to screenings of Peeping Tom, a highly self-reflexive film in which a man murders women with a weaponized camera, that lends itself so well to elaborating some of Mulvey's ideas - even though the film predates the essay - that Mulvey herself provided a commentary on the Criterion DVD of the film.

They don't actually run together as a double bill that I could see, but the two films - Brainwashed and Peeping Tom - make a perfect pairing, as Menkes takes Mulvey's ideas and illustrates them with film clips, which she narrates in suitably outraged fashion. I'm not entirely sure if she's a professor herself, or if this is some sort of one-off talk, or something set up solely for the film, but she actually presents many of these ideas in the context of a lecture, so that we see young film viewers (presumably some of them, like Menkes, filmmakers) being exposed to the concepts in Mulvey for the first time. It's such an obvious idea - to basically illustrate Mulvey's core concepts with the aid of film clips - that it's a marvel that this is the first feature film I've seen to do it (do correct me if there are others). If you haven't  previously thought about the possibility that the camera "eye" belongs to a male, that spectatorship in cinema as it is now constructed might serve to privilege the power and subjectivity of men while stripping women of the same, rendering them as passive objects - with all that implies for their employability, especially within the film industry, and their sense of themselves as agents - then you really needn't read further; these are very compelling, very interesting concepts, which will change the way you look at cinema forever, and you should definitely go see this film! 

The catch is, if you've done the slightest amount of reading of feminist film theory, if you know Mulvey's essay, if none of the above is actually new to you, Menkes'film is at times laughably ham-fisted in how it presents its material, from the overbearingly dramatic soundtrack, which would perhaps be suitable if illustrating a conspiracy theory video of the "9/11 was an inside job" ilk, to Menkes' breathlessly outraged elaborations on the key concepts, which are basically the same stuff that film-and-cultural studies professors have been discussing since, well, 1975 (and were probably discussing with less clarity before Mulvey, too). And while Menkes does make a couple of gestures at paying her dues (for example, by including Mulvey briefly in the film, and interviewing various female filmmakers - yay Penelope Spheeris - and one actress, Roseanne Arquette, who was assaulted by Harvey Weinstein, and whose own career has suffered due to industry sexism), she is also transparently self-serving in situating herself as the vehicle for delivering this news, since the core ideas are all presented by her, not Mulvey or any of a billion other film scholars who could have done as well or better. She even periodically points out how her own films (that is, Menkes' own fictional features) do incorporate and investigate female subjectivity. They're the only films that she mentions doing this, which gives the whole affair the feeling of a gigantic, sly informercial for her other movies and advert for her own significance as a filmmaker (maybe it's just me, but I'd never heard of her before). Finally, while there is no shortage of examples out there of male-gaze-privileging cinema, Menkes frequently uses as examples of evil, female-disempowering/ objectifying spectatorship the works of filmmakers who themselves are setting about to critique or de-stabilize the male gaze (Hitchcock's Vertigo is presented in bad light, several times, for instance, like it somehow is unaware of what it is doing; there are tons of other examples that are drawn on from self-aware arthouse cinema that seem to forbid any possibility that these films themselves are critically engaged with the same problems that Brainwashed is).

So that's the catch: Brainwashed isn't very good at what it does. It's not original; it's not subtle; it has a curiously self-serving narrowness of authorial voice; and it's not particularly judicious in which films it uses to score points. And yet it still is very potentially useful and maybe really interesting to a noob to the world of film theory, as I was in the early 1990's, when I first heard about these concepts. One has to start somewhere, and the key concepts are illustrated well enough - sometimes at the cost of great filmmakers, but who needs Alfred Hitchcock when you've got Nina Menkes? Were I a parent whose children - especially if they were daughters - had shown an interest in cinema, I would rush them to the theatres for this. It would surely make for lively conversation afterwards!

Then I'd maybe play them Vertigo and ask them what they think THAT film is saying about "the male gaze"....

Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power plays the VIFF Centre between October 21st and 26th; see exact showtimes and/or purchase tickets here.