Thinking Outside the Frame

In a 1985 installment of her comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, Alison Bechdel presents “The Rule.” A character in the strip will only see a movie if it fulfills three “basic requirements.” One, it must have at least two women in it who, two, talk to each other about, three, something other than a man. After applying them to almost every movie I’ve seen since reading “The Rule,” I find the criteria to be surprisingly strict. Feminist film theory has established as a basic property of popular cinema that women appear in film as passive objects, while men are active “bearers of the look” (Mulvey 873). Mainstream movies construct gender by denying women subjectivity and presenting a purely male sexuality (deLauretis 14). The way to deconstruct these gender categories is constantly to think about the fact that our real subjectivity is created in what deLauretis calls the “space-off.” In other words, feminists move between the patriarchal discourse that the technology of mainstream cinema perpetuates, and the spaces or “margins” that feminist theory and conversation construct.

It is a real challenge to find a movie that follows Bechdel’s Rule. Romantic comedies usually fulfill the first two requirements, but almost never the third; action/adventure movies often have just one blatantly sexualized woman character. But even the most acclaimed films fail the test. Between the two top nominees for Best Picture at the Academy Awards last year, There Will Be Blood and No Country For Old Men, there were about two female characters with any meaningful lines. Both movies were heralded at timeless stories with big themes, yet they barely touch on the subject of gender. Popular cinema enforces the common link between “universal” and “masculine” experience; thus a film with few or no female voices can treat complex issues, but a film that has a cast composed mostly of women has to have gender, romance, and sexual themes in the foreground. If not all films fail to comply with the Rule, truly most of them do.

Why is onscreen female agency so rare? For deLauretis and Mulvey, cinema is a technology of gender because it presents women as a sexual objects for the consumption of the male gaze, and so reinforces dominance of the male gender in real life. All sexuality is male, according to deLauretis, a reality most noticeable in cinema. The woman’s body is an “extrapolation” of the male’s, and her sexuality is defined in opposition to man (14). Male is “active,” so female is “passive”; the male gazes while the female is gazed upon (Mulvey 837). When one enters the world the film creates, one is stepping into a fully male-gendered space. If the camera is the male gaze and women’s presence serves only as a complement to the sexuality of men, then it makes sense that we are privy to so few scenes of women talking, not about men, among themselves. Women in mainstream cinema are never subjects, according to feminist film theory, and women who are only objects can only reflect the male, not create their own discourse.

Within the mainstream cinematic frame, representation of women is impossible. If masculine is universal, there is no room for women on film. And yet, of course, women do exist: so where can we represent ourselves? The answer, according to deLauretis, is in the “space-off,” a term she borrows from film theory, where it means the imagined space outside the frame (26). For feminists, the “space-off” can be an “elsewhere” in “the here and now, the blind spots, or…margins” of the everyday (patriarchal) discourses we tend to unthinkingly accept (25). Living in society while spending time in the “space-off” is the point of feminism, says deLauretis: it is the “practice of self-consciousness” (20). When we watch movies, we should be conscious that we are using a technology of gender, and we should practice or cultivate an awareness of ourselves as gendered viewers immersing ourselves a male-gendered world.

A visual example of this cinematic-feminist “space-off” can be found in Edouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergére. In this famous 1882 painting, perspective and spectatorship are totally destabilized. If the painting were a shot from a film, the frame of the shot would include the woman staring into the camera, straight at the viewer in front of her. But the mirror behind her reveals the space-off and the people it contains: the audience at the decadent Parisian variety-show hall, and the male viewer of the woman, both threatening presences (Jones). Similarly, the cinematic space-off includes the actor’s surroundings and the film’s audience. At the same time, though, the reflection is not accurate. The woman, who would have been read as a prostitute in Manet’s time and place, leans toward the male viewer in the reflection behind the bar, as if welcoming him (Jones). Meanwhile, in the main frame, she does not seem to lean forward; her unhappy demeanor, coupled with the fact that she holds the bar as if to steady herself, suggest that really she feels trapped in her situation, surrounded on all sides.

Observing this painting for long periods of time only makes it clearer that there is no one “true” or “correct” vantage point. It represents a sexualized woman, as movies do, but the “active” and “passive” roles are not as stable as they usually are in a movie theater. Manet’s painting raises questions similar to the ones feminists should ask themselves when they consume movies. How is the woman framed, and what does the frame not show us? In the painting, how can the viewer be reflected as male if I am female? In films, how can I resist being the sexual male subject when women are objectified?

As Manet represents the frame and its space-off in one painting, a feminist reading of a mainstream film would also “move between” the represented space and the “elsewhere,” in the words of deLauretis. Cinema is currently a technology of gender that works to reconstruct a male/female binary with male as the dominant gender. But it doesn’t have to be: movies can make visual “mistakes” like the one in Manet’s painting and reveal to the audience that women can be in two places at once. To combine Bechdel’s and deLauretis’ points, when more real-life women talk about gender construction in films, they could prompt changes in mainstream cinema that would lead to more, meaningful conversations between women onscreen.

Works Cited
Bechdel, Alison. “The Rule.” Dykes to Watch Out For. <http://alisonbechdel.blogspot.com/ 2005/08/rule.html>
deLauretis, Teresa. “The Technology of Gender.” Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film and Fiction. Indiana University, 1987. 1-30.
Jones, Jonathan. “A Bar at the Folies-Bergere, Edouard Manet (1882)”. The Guardian. 21 October 2000. 12 February 2009. <http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2000/oct/21/art>
Manet, Edouard. “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère.” 1882. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. 13 February 2009. <http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/manet_bar/>
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. Eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. New York: Oxford UP, 1999: 833-44. <http://imlportfolio.usc.edu>