How feminist theory and gender roles are used in film, literature and society.

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In “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey discusses the dominant, patriarchally-valid position of the male hero as pertains to Hitchcock’s films.  This structure results in the binary distribution of the male’s active sadistic gaze on the passive woman object, whose sole purpose is that of spectacle.  The male hero is the one who projects the image, subjects the female to his voyeuristic gaze and transforms her into the object of desire and the perfect source of visual pleasure.  His gaze is authoritative and legitimized by his position within patriarchal space, with his power “backed by a certainty of legal right and the established guilt of the woman.” Thus, the audience’s comprehension of the story solely depends on what he sees or fails to see.  In Vertigo, for instance, Scottie’s voyeuristic gaze and his obsession with the cut-to-taste object of desire, Madeleine, provide the narrative of the story.  He is on the right side of the law, a Chief of Police with his own financial means who has freely chosen a career that allows him to penetrate the secrets of others through interrogation and investigation.  Furthermore, his relationship with Madeleine/Judy is of a sadistic nature.  Not only does he secretly watch the woman when she performs the role of Madeleine, but in the second part of the film, when Judy’s performance is over, Scottie forces her into a passive, masochistic position by reconstructing the real Judy as his fetishized Madeline.  Through the sadistic re-enactment of the counterfeit Madeleine, Judy finally breaks down and her guilt is exposed.  The male hero wins through, exhibiting his omnipotent power in the midst of crisis.  The tainted woman is punished by death.  Thus, Mulvey summarizes Vertigo in terms of a gender-based, power structure with the male in the active, dominant position and the female in the passive, objectified and manipulated space created for her by the gaze of the male.

Breaking the film down into mutually exclusive gendered categories and a defined power structure, however, fails to account for the complexity of the characters and their variant relation as the narrative develops.  I propose to analyze Vertigo by temporarily dismissing Scottie’s role as the dominant male hero and focusing on his encounter with the feminine space in both its forms—the patriarchal, socially-accepted notion of womanhood and the threatening concept of the dark woman, connected to buried erotic desire and the simultaneous attraction/repulsion to the female body and maternal space of the womb.  Moreover, in lieu of the active male-passive female relation, we will explore an active male-passive male relation, established by the figure of Gavin Elster.  I believe him to be more determinant of Scottie’s position within the story than otherwise perceived.

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