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This paper is an
exploration of the pleasurable aspects of the visual and
narrative dimensions of Jane Campion's cinema, especially
for women. In what is a landmark essay in feminist film
criticism, "Visual pleasure and narrative cinema", Laura
Mulvey persuasively argues that visual pleasure in classical
narrative cinema emerges from the construction of a
voyeuristic relationship between an assumed male spectator
(the voyeur), whose gaze is active, and a passive female
object of that gaze.[1]
This relation allows no possibility for either a
heroine-subject who commands the narrative, or a genuinely
female spectator position (because a woman can only watch as
if she were a man, through the lens of the male gaze, or in
a narcissistic identification with the heroine-object) Woman
herself becomes equated with the visual whilst the narrative
is the province of male control. In other words, the
pleasure of film-watching is sexually coded and therefore,
from a feminist perspective, ideologically suspect. Mulvey's
analysis of the patriarchal codes of spectatorship embedded
in popular cinema seemed to demand of feminist film-making a
pleasure-denying anti-aesthetic. As the antidote to
mainstream patriarchal cinema, this reaction was doomed to
be marginal in the sense that it promoted an avant-garde,
political cinema in which women need not, even should not,
be good to look at, and the drive to know, characteristic of
narrative, should be denied.[2] [1]
Laura Mulvey, Visual and other pleasures (Bloomington
and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989),
14-26. [2]
Mulvey herself has moved away from this position in her
subsequent writings. In particular, she has gone on to
explore the role of curiosity in film spectatorship (the
Pandora myth is exemplary here, displacing her earlier
emphasis on the Oedipal - and sadistic- structure of
narrative) and the enigmas of masculinity. SeeVisual and
other pleasures , Citizen Kane (London: British
Film Institute, 1992) and Fetishism and curiosity
(London: British Film Institute, 1996). Despite her
eccentricities and daring, Campion is nonetheless a popular
film-maker who makes pleasurable narrative films in which
the women are, on the whole, good to look at, and the action
unfolds, the plot progresses, in a more or less orderly and
comprehensible fashion. But it also true to say that these
eccentricities and daring enable her to transform both the
visual and narrative dimensions of film beyond the sexual
polarities which Mulvey described, and in ways which
maintain an appeal to a mass audience. One of her great
talents as a director lies in her ability to enlarge the
field of what looks good and to film women who look good as
more than to-be-looked at; another is her construction of
quest narratives which are driven by the interaction between
male and female desires and projections and which maintain
an unusual degree of interpretative openness, or
inconclusiveness. I have never seen
Nicole Kidman looking as plain as she does in the first
close-up she presents to the screen in Jane Campion's The
portrait of a lady (Britain 1996). Playing the part of a
young American woman of marriageable age, Isabelle Archer,
her face is pale and slightly blotchy without its usual
make-up and flattering lighting. Her hair is gathered into
an unbecoming Victorian bun from which her trademark curls -
now frizzy rather than tamed - are untidily (rather than
deliciously) escaping. Her nose is red from the cold and
from sniffling. She is still undoubtedly beautiful, but in
an ordinary way, stripped of the customary star
presentation. Holly Hunter was presented with similar
realism as Ada in The piano (New Zealand-France
1993). Her hair is oiled rather than shampooed and
conditioned into a high modern gloss, her hairstyle is
severe, her costume austere. In neither film does Campion
provide concessions to contemporary Western images of
feminine style and beauty. She is uncompromising in her
depiction of women as they might have appeared in their time
and place. But there is also
more to this cosmetic and costume presentation than a
faithfulness to historical truth, more than simple realism.
There is, in Campion's films, an aesthetic at work which
aims at re-visioning and refashioning images of the
feminine, refusing to censure the actions of her women in
the interests of upholding the ideal of the classical body
with its limited repertoire of gestures, poses and
expressions. When Isabelle cries, her nose dribbles; there
are scenes in Sweetie (Australia 1989), The
piano and Holy smoke (USA 1999) where women are
shown pissing; in what could easily have been filmed as a
grotesque scene, (and indeed Sweetie is grotesque in the
eyes of her appalled family), a completely naked and
mud-painted Sweetie, having regressed to the role of naughty
child refusing to come out of her tree house, presents her
bum to her would-be rescuers - and the camera - and farts;
Janet (An angel at my table [New Zealand
1990]) tentatively sniffs the blood of her first
menstrual period and thereafter stuffs the used 'rags'
behind the headstones in the cemetery. Campion's aesthetic
of the female body is one which opposes the repetitive,
standardized and homogenous images of decorous female beauty
manufactured by Hollywood and circulated routinely
throughout other visual media such as television and
magazines. A current
advertisement for moisturiser running on television shows a
sequence of beautiful women from different countries
lamenting, in their various languages, the appearance of
wrinkles on their otherwise gorgeous faces (it is actually
hard to believe that any of these women really have been
touched by the blight of wrinkling). The German woman even
identifies the double standard which allows wrinkles for men
but not women. "Unfair," she sighs. The remedy, all agree,
is this new product. Face after face reappears, the
subtitles spelling out the thanks and praise of universal
woman to the cream which will allow them to successfully
comply with the unfair rules of the double standard. The
potential for difference between these international women
is erased in their common pursuit of the mask of beauty. The
women do not, in fact, represent diversity (as the
advertisement pretends) but its defeat in the universal
feminine ideal. Unlike these
narcissistic women, the norm in our consumerist age, Campion
is critical of the social and cultural pressures which
dictate this preoccupation with how women look. Her interest
is in women's desires and in finding a film language for its
expression. For instance, when Ada (The piano) gazes
at her reflection in a hand-mirror she is not so much
scrutinizing her appearance for its effect on other eyes as
she is trying to fall through her image into a release of
her passion. In kissing the mirror she uses her reflection
as a means of transporting her back to the remembrance of
sexual desire (she has been forcibly separated from her
lover). In contrast to this scene is one in Sweetie
where Kay and Louis sit opposite each other talking about
the lack of sex in their relationship. "I'm thinking of
getting my hair cut, like this," says Kay, holding up her
hair to display the effect. The apparent irrelevance and
triviality of her remark provides an ironic counterpoint to
their discussion. Kay is hardly even able to discuss desire,
let alone feel it. Kay is not represented as a vain woman,
but here, her narcissistic worry about her hair is
symptomatic of a deeply blocked sexuality. The insecurity
underlying women's culturally prescribed preoccupation with
appearance, the way it erodes any firm sense of identity
from which one's action can develop unself-consciously, is
brilliantly conveyed in An angel at my table, based
on the autobiographies of New Zealand writer Janet Frame.
Unlike Ada, for whom the mirror becomes a tool for sexual
fantasy rather than an instrument of self-regulation, Janet
uses the mirror in her search for a presentable self. In
several scenes where Janet looks into a mirror, her
self-scrutiny is shown to be a performance for the mirror.
The taken-for-granted assumption that mirrors provide
self-reflections is effectively debunked. As a university
student Janet stands before her bedroom mirror repeating
aloud the compliment paid to her by the psychology lecturer,
John Forrest, with whom she is infatuated: "You have a real
talent for writing." As she speaks she adopts the pose of a
sexually assured woman, drawing down one strap of her
petticoat to reveal and stroke a glamorous neck and
chest. Searching for an
outward form to reflect her desired identity as a writer and
confusing it with her budding sexual desire, Janet fastens
upon the unlikely, inadequate and conventional image of the
idealised movie star. Ironically, John Forrest is at this
same moment standing in the corridor outside Janet's room,
come with two other medical professionals to encourage Janet
to seek a rest cure in the psychiatric hospital. An image of
nervous insecurity promptly replaces that of the glamorous
star when a knock at the door startles Janet from her
fantasy. This fall from the mirror reinforces the notion of
the mirror as ultimately disappointing, as unable to offer
Janet a route to either self-confirmation or transcendence
of the image. A little earlier her mirrored smile had thrown
back the unflattering image of her rotten teeth. And yet the
mirror continues to exert power. Even after she has become a
published writer and is lauded by her publisher, Janet uses
the mirror to practise the smile and demeanour expected of a
successful writer and appropriate to the new hairstyle also
adopted (under pressure) to mark her status. What is striking
about these mirror-scenes is the lack of confirmation of
identity they provide and the limited cultural repertoire of
images available to the artistically motivated woman seeking
to build her social self. The mirror reflects a social mask,
or the desire for one: it signals, ironically, the wide gap
between the authenticity and originality sought after and
the socially motivated self-construction. The sympathetic
laugh of recognition offered by these scenes return the
mirror images to their grounding in the frustrating limits
of the lived body. In contrast to the cosmetics
advertisement described above, the images resist a pull into
narcissistic fantasy by making desire itself the
focus. When I go to the
movies I often find myself sitting there in the dark
thinking more about the heroines' hairstyles, skin and
figures and wondering how I compare, than following the
action. This is not merely an attention fault on my part. As
Laura Mulvey pointed out twenty five years ago, one of the
most significant and disturbing aspects of the image of
woman in classical narrative cinema is its mesmeric quality,
the way it halts narrative and, object-like, absorbs the
gaze.[3]
The
beautiful heroine's actions take second place to her beauty.
Whilst this is never explicit in the sense of being part of
the diegesis, the real drama will be, not so much what will
happen to her, but what she will look like when it happens.
As Mary Ann Doane has argued, this preoccupation with the
objectifying and self-policing question "how does she/I
look?" traps the heroine and female spectator in the static
and sterile circuit of a mirror relation.[4]
As a woman, watching Campion's women is a huge relief. The
pressure is off. Watching them I can watch what they are
doing without the constant, yet unacknowledged, distraction
of how they appear. In her illuminating essay on The
piano, Ann Hardy, making a slightly different point,
describes the way in which the typical Hollywood film
constructs its female beauties: [3]
Discussing Sternberg's films she writes: "The beauty of the
woman as object and the screen space coalesce; she is (...)
a perfect product, whose body, stylised and fragmented by
close-ups, is the content of the film". Visual and other
pleasures, 22. [4]
She writes, "becoming the image, the woman can no longer
have it. For the female spectator, the image is too
close - it cannot be projected far enough." Mary Ann Doane,
The desire to desire: the woman's film of the 1940s
(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press,
1987), 168-9. [5]
Ann Hardy, "The last patriarch", in Harriet Margolis (ed),
Jane Campion's The piano (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000), 80. Further references to this text
appear as page numbers in brackets. Hardy goes on to
describe The piano as a rare film in its successful
rejection of this male gaze as the dominant gaze directing
the audience's view and in its construction of a powerful
and sexualized female gaze, "an egalitarian situation that
many feminist critics have imagined but few directors have
ever produced on film" (81). Campion's construction of an
active female gaze is an important strategy through which
she is able to invoke female desire as more than simply
narcissistic, inwardly focussed and magnetic (in the sense
of attracting the desire of others). But equally important
is her construction of female images which do not paralyse
the identifications through which female viewers enter the
films at the border of appearances. In breaking the hypnotic
spell of the female image Campion challenges the women in
her audiences to identify instead with her female
characters, to watch from an involved and close distance
rather than to immerse and lose themselves in the
spectacle. As her fame and
budgets have increased Campion has been able to cast
international stars in her films, actresses renowned for
their beauty as much as their acting. The little known
actresses in Sweetie, Campion's debut feature film, were
followed by Kerry Fox as Frame in An angel at my
table, Holly Hunter in The piano, Nicole Kidman
and Barbara Hershey in The portrait of a lady and
Kate Winslet in Holy smoke. Audience familiarity with
these beauties in the later films could be taken for
granted. The novelty of Campion's treatment lies not so much
in her rejection of the beautiful heroine per se (as I've
said, she is appealing to a mass audience) but in her
definition of beauty. Unlike popular fashion and celebrity
magazines which delight in surprising and exposing famous
women in 'ugly' moments (in a hip version of the before and
after genre), Campion is able to reinterpret these 'flaws'
and unguarded expressions, to present her beautiful women
with their so-called imperfections. Kate Winslet, who
was infamously chastised and criticized by Titanic
(US 1997) director James Cameron for being too fat and whose
weight continues to be dwelt on by the celebrity press,
hides nothing in a prolonged full-body shot of the naked
Ruth (Holy smoke). The sensuality of her youthful
body is not scaled-down, sanitized or fetishised according
to the formulaic codes and poses of nude photography. It is
the vulnerability of the flesh we respond to here as Ruth
walks towards the steady, unblinking eye of the camera (and
towards her fully clothed "persecutor", P.J (Harvey Keitel).
The potential for idealisation in this Rubenesque type of
image is broken by the sound of her urinating. The sound
completes the image of unadorned vulnerability and is linked
in the narrative to an erotic response as P.J succumbs to
her seemingly guileless seduction (as it turns out, however,
there was more guile at work than appeared: not even the
'natural' body is transparent in its meanings). There is
nothing humiliating about this exposure of Winslet's fleshy
and abject body: indeed it is celebrated as natural and
earthy. There is nothing
humiliating about the opening close-up of Nicole Kidman, nor
about the fact that Barbara Hershey is allowed to look her
age, her wrinkles clearly lit. This, the camera insists in
its study of these famous faces and bodies, is beauty, not
its embarrassing shadow-side. The use of star personas,
already established beauties, enables Campion's
wrinkles-and-all style of filming to have a deconstructive
effect: the audience is surprised, has a sense of seeing the
woman revealed, anew, as she "really" is, registers her as
an individual rather than as a representative of the
feminine ideal whilst simultaneously registering, in a more
conscious way than popular cinema generally allows, the lure
of that ideal. There is more to the faces of Campion's
beautiful women than typically appears - more variety, more
expression, more freedom to be seen in different lights. Her
camera attempts to cut through appearances, to look deeper
than the radiant and fascinating mirage which the Hollywood
machine has been perfecting, to let her female stars really
appear as actors. The overall experience, for the female
viewer as well, is liberating. Where the quest
for subjectivity and the self-defined expression of desire
is a recurrent feature of Campion's heroines, the
possibility and problem of violence is rooted in the men she
pits against them. Women are the principal subjects of
Campion's films, but when it comes to the issue of sexuality
it is the men, rather than the women, who are probed in an
effort to fathom the mysterious nature of their sexual
desires. However, this is not simply a reversal of the
typical scenarios of heterosexual romance dramas where the
consequence of the investigation into female sexuality is
the further layering of its unknowableness. Female
seductiveness might be punished or tamed, but rarely
demystified. The figure of woman remains enthralling, her
sexuality measured in terms of the (fantastic) power she
exerts over men. Feminist critics of Hollywood have seen in
the dominant female figures of the femme fatale and the
goddess, projections of the male imaginary bearing little
resemblance to the forms of embodied sexuality which women
might themselves describe. In contrast,
Campion's investigations into male sexuality are driven by a
preoccupation with the (actual) power which men have
historically exerted over women and a desire to liberate men
along with women through its unveiling. The veil itself
connotes and produces the erotic and the possibility of a
desirable body underneath.Where the veils removed from women
generally serve to intensify the sense of mystery and
seductiveness, constructing the woman as eroticised nude,
for instance, the veils Campion removes from her men leave
them naked and exposed, vulnerable in the face of their own
desires (which, once admitted thus, might leave them open to
rejection) and the desires of women. As Ann Hardy has
written, drawing upon Doane's work, Campion is unusual in
her acknowledgement that what remains concealed when woman
is finally unveiled is: Campion's men
have bodies and the revelation of this fact profoundly
affects our perception of their characters, principally by
leveling them with the female characters who are striving to
be more than just bodies (Ruth asks PJ, whom she has
seduced, whether it is her personality or her breasts that
he likes best. "Right now, it's your breasts," he admits).
The images of naked men in Campion's films are remarkable
for their tenderness and humanity. Daring enough to show a
penis on the screen in Sweetie, Campion composes an
almost casual shot of the completely naked Louis lying on
his back on a double bed, waiting silently and awkwardly for
his girlfriend Kay to finish undressing. The camera remains
perfectly still, refusing to emphasise or comment. In this
scene the couple have arranged a sexual appointment in an
endeavour to restart their sex-life. But nothing happens.
They simply strip, lie down and wait, then dress again.
Campion shoots this scene as an event, that is, emphasising
the impasse they have reached in their relationship, rather
than using it as an opportunity to arouse the audience's
voyeurism. Louis is just a man (with a male body) and Kay is
just a woman (with a female body). In The
piano, a much more sensuous film than the austere
Sweetie, both main male characters are undressed. As
Ada, herself clothed, runs her finger down her husband's
back and over his buttocks, searching out the crevice, the
close-up of his exposed flesh, perplexed face and then his
hand reaching for his trousers to cover himself allows the
viewer, at this point, to empathise with his painful sexual
humiliation and insecurity in an almost tactile way. Much
has been written now about the famous scene in which the
naked Baines, aroused by Ada's piano playing and the sight
and feel of her skin, gently caresses the piano with his
shirt. Later he describes himself to Ada as sick with
longing for her. In this privileged view of his undefended
body we witness the powerlessness of Baines' desire. That he
yields this spectacle of his powerlessness to Ada
contributes enormously to transforming him, in the
narrative, from a sexual menace (vise-a-vie the bargain he
has manipulated with Ada) to a worthy lover. The broad agenda
of any feminist project is to understand the sources of male
power and to liberate women from its effects. Campion,
however, is extraordinary and complex in her use of a
sympathetic, or non-judgmental spotlight upon most of her
male characters, especially as she is exposing the roots of
violence in them.[6]
As essentially feminist in its themes, her cinema could be
described as unusually open and generous in its attitude
towards men who are responsible for varying degrees of
sexual oppression of women. This is not to say that she
excuses them, but that a desire to fathom their destructive
lusts outweighs a desire to judge or punish. Her patriarchs
are often brought to their knees but there is usually a
strong element of compassion surrounding the spectacle: For
instance, in her latest "hero", the professional
cult-exiter, PJ Waters, in Holy smoke, we have the
most fully elaborated spectacle of the undoing of
masculinity which, despite its comic and grotesque
dimensions, is accompanied by a mood of pathos. PJ arrives
in style on the screen. In parodic Western fashion, the
opening shot of PJ is a close-up of his leather boot resting
proprietarily on the airport baggage carousel as he waits
for his suitcase. He slicks back his dyed black hair, suave.
As the lyrics of Neil Diamond's "I am, I said" swell
climactically to this celebration of the self-sufficient
male ego ("have you ever seen a frog who dreamed he was a
Prince, and then became one?") the visuals also
mock-celebrate his self-assurance. Australians fawn and
smile at the American, now impressively in command at the
stack of baggage trolleys, as he sends trolley after trolley
spinning gracefully into their grateful hands. The American
has arrived and is ready to conquer! [6]
Gilbert Osmond is the exception to this rule. I discuss his
character later in the text. By the end of the
film, however, his masquerade of masculinity has been
replaced by the garb of feminine drag. His sexual
humiliation by his young "victim" (a woman he has been hired
to de-program of a cult influence) is complete: ridiculous
in a dusty red dress and lipstick, hallucinating in the
Australian desert after his failed attempt to kidnap the
young woman, he has not only failed in his assignment - to
return the old Ruth to "normal" -but he has allowed his own
borders of gender normality to be torn down. And yet it is
not despite his ridiculous appearance but because of it that
PJ evokes pity as well as condemnation. Similarly, Gordon
inSweetie, after the death of his grown-up daughter,
stands in the backyard where she died, seeing her still as
his little girl, his sweetie, dressed in a tutu and holding
a fairy wand, singing a lovesong to him. This is a powerful
and complex image with which to close the film. Gordon is
clearly largely responsible for the ruination of this
daughter and for the older daughter Kay's sexual repression
(there are strong suggestions that his relationship with
daughter Dawn was incestuous and that Kay, probably
unconsciously, knows this). But there is also poignancy in
this acknowledgement of his bereft incomprehensibility. His
"innocence" (all he knows or feels is his loss) cannot, in
fact, be separated from his "guilt". Quests for
knowledge, we now understand, are simultaneously quests for
power. But power can take many forms and need not be
crushing. Indeed it is Campion's highly nuanced
understanding of the dynamics of power between the sexes
which differentiates her work from the more obvious polemics
of feminism. Her films do not simply set out to empower
victimised women (the innocent), nor to castigate the
powerful victimisers (the guilty).[7]
In Holy smoke, Ruth's commitment to her chosen path
to enlightenment is maintained, (under duress, admittedly),
through a cruel manipulation of her sexual youth and
attractiveness. She seduces the willing PJ only to abuse him
afterwards with taunts about his inadequacies. She is being
held against her will - in this way she is his victim - but
she is also not without her own victimising defences. The
same could be said of Ada in The piano when she
attempts to use Stewart as a sexual prop for her fantasy.
Whilst Campion does not represent power as dividing neatly
along gender lines nonetheless an understanding of the
social formation of patriarchy does inform Campion's films.
Women may have their own kinds of power and men their own
kinds of weaknesses but this does not imply equivalence. It
is still men whose positions of inherited authority within
patriarchy - as Fathers, Husbands, Libertines - allow them,
ultimately, to wield more power than their personalities
alone might suggest. [7]
It is Campion's representation of power, especially in
relation to sex, which divided feminist critics over The
piano. See my discussion in "Lips and fingers: Jane
Campion's The piano", Screen 36, no. 3 (Autumn
1995: 277-87. The goal of
Campion's narratives, in fact, is not so much to bring
oppressive men to their knees as it is to face the enemy.
The questions of who the enemy is and what he is capable of
is equally as important as the questions of whether and how
the heroine will survive. [8]
This need to know the enemy is related to a desire to
construct a new couple whose love for each other is
open-eyed rather than mystified by the projections of
polarised gender identities. Campion's narratives are driven
by this will to free her lovers from the romantic
merry-go-round of conflict and idealisation, letting them
rest in a compassionate embrace. One thinks of PJ's words to
Ruth, "Be Kind", words he writes upon her forehead in one of
their sexual games. The pathos of this request breaks
through Ruth's defences where interrogation and lecture
failed. She is surprised, wounded, touched in a way that she
would not have been had PJ daubed her with a smutty label
such as she was expecting. Until this point Ruth has only
seen PJ as an adversary, a man defined against her own
opinions, demands and desires. From here on she begins to
appreciate his separate identity. Although she ultimately
refuses to be with PJ and even after he has tried to force
his will upon her, she is able to hold and comfort him,
non-sexually, compassionately, after his final
breakdown. [8]
The playful question-mark ringlet on Louis' forehead, which
Kay reads as a sign of their predestined relationship, can
also be seen as a sign planted by the film-maker, playfully
signifying the mysteriousness of male identity. The
redistribution of power between the sexes, which is a common
narrative and visual goal in Campion's films, also attempts
to salvage a redeemed figure of masculinity from its
wreckage. Campion's men are taken through rites of passage
which, if they allow themselves to be metaphorically
stripped, can lead them to the rewards of a domesticated
sexual fulfillment. PJ, after his sexual-spiritual "trial"
in the desert is reborn in the postscript ending to Holy
smoke, revealing in a letter to the newly and more
deeply enlightened Ruth that he is leading the life of
husband and father. Baines, in The piano, re-enters
his previously abandoned culture and settles into the role
of (second) husband. [9] [9]
It is tempting to read PJ as another and more modern version
of Baines, especially as both characters are played by
Harvey Keitel. In Sweetie
we have Louis, Kay's boyfriend, a quiet and gentle man who,
nonetheless, betrays Kay in several ways. First, he succumbs
to the seductions of Kay's sister, Sweetie, and next,
aroused and emboldened by this act, is led to an even worse
betrayal when he creeps into Kay's bedroom - she is sleeping
- and performs a crude mock-rape upon her unresponsive body.
(In this way Louis can be seen as a precursor to Stewart in
The piano. Both men are provoked to violence by the
"frigidity" of their respective partners. Though Louis shows
more self-control than Stewart, his frustration at being
repulsed and the impulse to assert sexual dominance over his
"lover" are clear enough.) Ultimately, however, Louis is
reunited with Kay, and at the film's conclusion there
appears to be a new balance between the pair. In comparison
with Dawn and Kay's father, Gordon, whose weakness is an
essential and enduring aspect of his shadowy authority,
Louis is a more transparent character, more open about his
frustration, and in the end, more open also to equality.
[10] [10]
However the character of Louis is not clearly developed, and
his redeemed sexual stature at film's end seems more given
than explained. The problematic of a weak masculinity
housing a violent sexuality (in this case incestuous) is
more fully explored through the character of Gordon. After
the death of Sweetie the subtle, disavowed power Gordon
holds over Kay mysteriously dissolves and her sexual desire
is freed. Louis' role seems necessary to the expression of
Kay's release, rather than worked through in its own right,
in relation to his own motivations and growth. In this way
he is a less successfully realised character than the male
leads in Campion's subsequent films. The portrait
of a lady is less obviously concerned with reconstructed
masculinity than these three films. Isabelle's husband, the
dilettante Gilbert Osmond, is unremittingly oppressive. His
brutality deepens over time and is supported by a
complacency which reveals no cracks. Of all Campion's men
Osmond is the closest to evil. He seems to be completely
without conscience, love or compassion. He is certain of his
authority and means to be intimidating. The two scenes in
which he physically assaults Isabelle, first by standing on
the back of her dress as she walks away from him, second by
picking her up and roughly seating her on a stack of
pillows, then slapping her face with a glove, are chilling
in their mixture of measured violence and restraint. In
contrast to her other male-female couples whose sexual
sparring is eventually equalising, Isabelle and Osmond have
no possible harmonious future. Isabelle's attempts to break
through his icy veneer to some emotional truth simply bounce
back. "You know how we live", Isabelle baldly despairs at
one point. Disingenuous sarcasm is his reply. He refuses to
acknowledge her meaning. But The
portrait of a lady is also about choice. There is an
early scene, before she has met Osmond, where Isabelle
fantasises about three other men, two of them suitors, the
other her cousin. Of these three only one remains at the
films end. The penultimate scene sees Isabelle kissing
Caspar Goodwood, the would-be husband who has waited many
years for her. Goodwood, in fact, frames the narrative,
being the lover she initially fled, believing herself worthy
of a greater adventure than marriage. Whilst not, in
himself, a redeemed character (his is a constant character
and he has done Isabelle no greater harm than wishing to
marry her), he presents a strong contrast with Osmond,
clearly the worst choice Isabelle could have made. Goodwood
is faithful, passionate, frank. However it is Ralph Touchett
who is most transformed by his encounter with Isabelle. His
initial 'crime' is a kind of cynical carelessness. He falls
in love with his beautiful young cousin soon after meeting
her. However, convinced that his love for her is impossible
and as a substitute for declaring his love, Touchett turns
voyeur, creating the conditions whereby her romantic life
may be a vicarious spectacle for his enjoyment. It is not as
amusing as he expects. What began, for him as an idle game
leads to Isabelle's disastrous, unhappy marriage and to his
own loss of her friendship and potential love. Isabelle's
ultimate flight from Osmond, to be with Ralph at his
deathbed, does redeem Ralph, who also declares his love and
laments his role in Isabelle's tragedy, but it also reveals
the path which was not taken. When one thinks
of characters such as Gordon, Stewart, PJ, and Ralph, it
seems that Campion is able to extend compassion to her
fallen patriarchs because she is able to look at them
evenly, intently, without fear and without hysteria (and,
even more surprising when thinking about the usual
tendencies of the so-called woman's film, she does this
whilst looking from a woman's point of view). Consequently,
there is less of a mythical, fantastic or idealized
dimension to her men than is common in women's melodrama
(the genre which perhaps comes closest to describing
Campion's films). Whilst they can be viewed in terms of
broadly discernible types, her men are, first and foremost,
ordinary, fallible, and, (unlike the character-types of
genre film) unpredictable individual humans. Campion also
understands men's power in relation to, and in fact
inseparable from, their fears, impotencies and
vulnerabilities. Gordon cannot talk about his wife's
desertion of him ("I get bad" he tells Kay); he breaks down
and cries about Dawn's expulsion from the family; after her
death he sits in the fairy chair still preserved in her
childhood bedroom, fairy light turned on, grief for his own
child self entangled in the tragedy he has made of his
daughter's life. PJ is vain, especially about his aging. His
sexual promiscuity and assurance masks his fear of becoming
irrelevant. There is also a suggestion that he fears both
impotence and homosexuality - during his own experience of
cult membership when he was younger, the guru attempted to
have sex with him. "I couldn't get it up," PJ tells Ruth.
There is a mixture of pride (this proves he's not
homosexual) and shame (the failure to have an erection; the
threat of rape) in this confession. Ralph Touchett,
like Gordon in his lack of self-understanding and
underestimation of his power, though less self-pitying than
Gordon, constructs himself as a ineffectual man. As a
consumptive he uses his debilitating disease as an excuse
for withdrawing from moral responsibility, as if he sees
himself as already dead, ghost-like. This allows him to play
God, invisible and aloof from the sphere of action, but
pulling the strings. His actual and initially disavowed
power expresses itself in this distanced way rather than
through the cruder forms of physical contact. Through
influencing his dying father to leave Isabelle a fortune in
his will, Ralph has unwittingly, and yet not innocently,
thrown her to the wolves. His role in constructing Isabelle
as bait for the fortune hunting Gilbert Osmond, however, is
dependant on his seeing himself as impotent. Despite the
repeated scenarios of sexual cruelty throughout Campion's
films - from incest to attempted rape within marriage - a
horizon of hope and future for the heterosexual couple and
family continually frames her films. The early short films,
Peel (Australia 1982) and A girl's own story
(Australia 1984), are less hopeful than the later features.
Peel concludes with a black-comedic scene of familial
collapse and violence. A young boy, who has been punished by
his father for throwing orange peel out of the car window,
now redirects his own anger against his aunt. She has been
waiting impatiently in the car while her brother marched the
boy back down the road to pick up the offending peel. As the
father and son return to the car the boy notices that she
has been peeling an orange. In imitation of his father he
orders her to pick up the discarded peel. The camera studies
the budding oppressiveness in an uncomfortably close and
distorting close-up of the boy's sneering face. The final
image is of the boy jumping on the roof of the car, the
father sitting on the bonnet, the woman sitting inside,
imprisoned and figuratively crushed. A girl's own
story is even bleaker in its conclusion. The young
teenage girls, who have featured in the loosely interwoven
stories of their disenchanting sexual initiations, sit on a
stark linoleum floor, dressed only in singlets and pants,
huddled for warmth around inadequate radiators, singing "I
feel the cold". This is a film which does not set itself the
task of envisaging a way forward for the sexes. Instead it
charts the ways in which the naïve sexual fantasies of
pubescent girls are manipulated and railroaded by the sexual
interests and goals of boys and men: incest, rape and
adultery are brute realities which cut short their
childhoods. However, with
Sweetie Campion begins to direct her films towards
endings which are also new beginnings. After a long period
of estrangement Kay and Louis re-ignite their sexual
relationship at the end of the film. From a shot of entwined
and exploring feet in socks we cut to a medium shot of Kay's
relaxed body reclining on the bed. She is wearing a plain
cotton singlet. Her soft and satisfied smile, the first
we've seen, is the intimate concluding image we have of her.
As an image of sexual fulfillment this is interesting for
its gentleness, domesticity and utter lack of sexualisation.
The camera asks us to see her happiness. Her pleasure,
whilst signaling something akin to a rebirth for herself,
marks the ending of both the narrative and the visual
dimensions of the film for us. There is no pressure to
search out its meanings. Interestingly
though, this future couple is getting more shadowy, rather
than more distinct, in each successive Campion film. In
Sweetie and The piano the heroine is paired
with one of the major protagonists and the significant work
of the film has been to prepare the way for their future
love. In the last two films the heroine's partner is a
question mark: in The portrait of a lady Isabelle
hovers on the threshold of choice (to return to Osmond? to
be alone? to accept Goodwood?); in Holy smoke a
boyfriend is announced in Ruth's voice over (reading a
letter to PJ) but not seen. How do we read
this "progression"? Is it that the couple is becoming more
unimaginable? Or that the sexual battle, as the means to
establishing a more equitable relationship, is being
abandoned? In The portrait of a lady, in contrast
with The piano, the attraction of the sexual battle
(as it is played out between Osmond and Isabelle) is aligned
with feminine naivety and immaturity, and also with romance
but not marriage. Although Osmond is on his best behaviour
during his courtship of Isabelle the signs of his ruthless
authority are evident and Isabelle registers but chooses to
ignore them. I am thinking in particular of the scene in
which he announces his love: his appropriation of Isabelle's
umbrella and her trembling at his presumption prefigure the
later pattern of domination and fear between them. The
frisson of sexual tension Isabelle feels quickly dissipates
after marriage and is replaced with boredom on Osmond's part
and nervous fatigue on Isabelle's. The sexual contest
between Ruth and PJ in Holy smoke exhausts them both.
Whilst their letters to each other declare that a bond still
exists between them, that connection continues only in an
imaginary way. In body they have gone their separate
ways. Perhaps we can
read these endings more fruitfully as variations of the
romance genre. When Gillian Armstrong made My brilliant
career (Australia 1979) it seemed that women still could
not have both independence (represented by Sybylla's
writing) and marriage. One or the other must be
sacrificed.[11]
For Campion, the achievement of woman's self-determination
is still fragile, embattled, still threatened by male
sexuality. Whilst the possibility of a new couple is a
significant shaping thematic in Campion's oeuvre, the danger
is in presenting it as the ultimate goal, the limited
destiny of woman, as in the classic romance genre,
over-riding the need of the heroine to explore her own
identity. Unlike Sybylla in My brilliant career,
Campion's heroines do not have to renounce their sexual
desires for men. But they do need to take care. And it is
still a challenge to portray a happy marriage in any
sustained way. I am curious to see her next
couple. [11]
In my teaching experience young contemporary women are
frustrated by these mutually excluding options and find the
ending (Sybylla completes and posts her manuscript)
disappointing rather than quietly triumphant.
7016 words
Abstract
| Printer
version
Introduction
The Look:
imaging women
When
female sexuality is the subject of investigation in film,
as it so often is, male voyeurism is usually the means of
investigation. A film arranged around the male gaze
typically exhibits a proliferation of shots of female
bodies arranged to prioritize their sexuality and large
numbers of close-ups that offer the faces of women as
texts to be scanned for desire and submission. In the
full Hollywood close-up, with its backlighting, use of
special lenses, and so on, filters and veils are
sometimes added to the images as delaying devices,
doubling ideas of beauty and adding mystery in the
service of the representation of the seductive and
duplicitous power of femininity.[5]
The action:
investigating men
... the
operation of male power and desire as symbolised by the
phallus. Metaphorically, that suggests that that
masculine authority, like whiteness, functions as the
unremarkable norm. Literally, naively, it means that male
bodies, complete with genitals, are almost never seen on
screen: Power functions best when untroubled by the
possibility of exposure. (81)
The future?:
between the sexes
