Core Post #2 – Pau Brunet – The Female Spectator

Film stars only exist because they are seen and experienced in many ways by an audience. The notion of the female spectator is essential to explore film stars and their impact and influence over female and queer audiences. While writing this post, I needed to include the second group because even in the first part of the century, queer individuals were on both sides of the silver screen. Moreover, the idea of the female spectator allows film scholars to observe and understand films and stars from before the second feminist weave in the 1970s. Miriam Hansen and Maria Laplace explore this idea of the female spectator in their articles about "Pleasure, Ambivalence, Identification" and "Producing and Consuming the Woman's Films." Hansen affirms that "female spectatorship constitutes a meaningful deviation [...] that has its historical basis in the spectator's experience of belonging to a group called women" (p. 261). Moreover, the scholar also includes the three ways this spectator can be analyzed: "historical spectator, the [...] spectator constructed through the film's strategies, and the contemporary female spectator with a feminist consciousness" (p.261). This notion is important because it acknowledges the transmitter (the film, the studio, and the star) but also the receptor (female and queer) and allows us to see films not as static objects but as one that changes over time. These notions appear to me as a way to implement what Laura Mulvey said in "Visual Pleasure And Narrative Cinema" and try to be fair to films such as Now, Voyager, All About Eve, A Streetcar Called Desire, or Ida Lupino's films like The Bigamist or Not Wanted. While Mulvey was right in pointing out not only the male gaze but the patriarchal dominance in Hollywood, it is also significant to locate ways to appreciate films that, even under that patriarchal dominance, were able to promote a subversive discourse against patriarchy (Laplace, p.139). With all that said, what is the role of stars and the female spectator? As we have been exploring in prior posts and conversations, film stars are a product of industrialized machinery and are intrinsically linked to capitalism. As Laplace states, female stars influence the audience to encourage consumerism, such as fashion and furniture and women's fiction, stories created by and for female audiences. In "Now, Voyager," Bette Davis's character shows well-being and social success through fashion and popularity. However, there is something else we need to include in this lecture on the "recovering" plot in the film that resonates even today. Davis's character recovery process is linked to popularity and accepting her desires, including independence from other men and women. This triumph in the times of the Production Code is unique not only for many of the elements portrayed in the film but also for the use of Davis's persona in the movie. She was known for many of the successes of her character. In the eyes of many female spectators, she represented modern feminity, intelligence, sophistication, and triumph in a male's world. As Laplace mentions, her legal confrontation with Warner was not successful in court, but it was mediatically. A radically different case is Valentino's success, but his success is related to something very characteristic of the pre-Code era and erased until our contemporary times: female sexual desire. While in Hollywood's Golden Era, the male gaze erased that sexual desire to focus on the commodity desire (fashion, furniture, way of life, etc.), in Valentino's time, the producers exaggerated the sex appeal of Valentino to sexualized levels never seen before or later. As Hansen points out, "he occupies the position of the primary object of spectacle," in this case, sex. However, as the scholar affirms, this sexualization seems to be created from a female gaze perspective rather than a masculine one, as Valentino's presence was feminized physically and dramatically. In this case, the film star becomes an interesting vehicle to explore sexualization, scholarly, but also popular, what women wanted to see on the screen and fall in love. Was Valentino's replaced by James Stewart or John Wayne? Yes, but that was a male gaze issue when even the sexual desire was designed by someone who does not have the same sexual desire. During that Golden Age, sexual desire was erased, and instead, the notion of a "gentleman" was installed – in some way, a technique to reshape the classic damsel in distress conflict that fitted better with the morals. In summary, sorry that I ended up being too long, the female spectator idea allows us to reinterpret films from the past that, even under the patriarchal sphere, contained many subversive messages that contain profound statements of success, well-being, and sexual desire.