On Aerial Photography and Secret Tunnels

by Iris O’Connor

During my first semester at college, I was given Laura Mulvey’s essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” to read. It did not feel easy. I hadn’t encountered film theory or psychoanalysis in high-school English courses, and Mulvey’s writing is academic, analytical, and theoretical, using words like “heterogeneous, phallocentric” and “oscillatory.” As I listened to my classmates stumble over her sentences, I felt my mind twist and turn like a corkscrew. 

“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” was written in the 1970s, a period marked by heightened feminist consciousness and activism within the realm of film studies. Mulvey psychoanalyzes a viewer’s relationship to the screen and the pleasure they seek, a pleasure shaped by the female figure in early Hollywood cinema, roughly from the 1930s to the 1970s. Mulvey uses “the male gaze” to describe the way in which a directorial eye objectifies women on screen, reducing them to simple objects of desire for both the (male) characters within the film and the audience watching it. Mulvey quotes Budd Boetticher, an American film director: “What counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents. She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, or who makes him act the way he does. In herself, the woman has not the slightest importance” (qtd. in Mulvey 11). In the films Mulvey cites, I immediately understood her reference to Marilyn Monroe, who for Mulvey was an “…erotic object for the characters within the screen story, and an erotic object for the spectator within the auditorium . . .” (11). In films like To Have or Have Not and The River of No Return, Monroe was, Mulvey writes, “isolated, glamorous, on display, sexualized” (13). I’d say Monroe’s body was detached from her personhood, like a lamp with no bulb. 

I didn’t understand Mulvey fully when I first read her essay, but I understood enough to realize how I had internalized the male gaze for much of my life—or at least since I had started watching films. Her theory doesn’t only apply to twentieth-century cinema. Gaida Gavazzi, in her article “Male Gaze and Female Objectification in Contemporary Cinema,” easily applies Mulvey’s lens to films such as the Transformers series, Blade Runner 2049, and The Wolf of Wall Street, none of which shy away from creating lead female characters that suit the male gaze. The physical presence of these women is fundamental to the films, but their role is less to “[develop] a story line” than to “freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation” on screen (Mulvey 11). I know these films. I know the slow pan-up Megan Fox’s body in Transformers. I knew it was silly, and I’m sure I laughed at it, but I hadn’t thought much about how this kind of camera work might be structuring my own gaze. Reading my own gaze through Mulvey’s lens was like meeting a friend’s parents for the first time. Seeing their relatedness, the friend you know so well is suddenly both newly strange and more understandable, all at the same time. 

Once I understood Mulvey’s argument—or at least, when I could accurately summarize the main points—I started to notice what she didn’t say. While she is effective in her description and explanation of the male gaze, she doesn’t necessarily establish herself as a woman in the text, nor does she articulate how she feels its effects. She argues that the portrayal and reception of women in film is big, bad, and ugly, but she doesn’t make the reader aware of how it can impact an off-screen woman like herself. Instead of using vernacular like “I,” she uses “we” and uses “we,” as in society, not “we,” as in women. This could be the rhetorical mode of her moment—after all, she was writing almost fifty years ago. It could be that she wanted an essay that was directed at men. But part of me, as I started to understand what was at stake for me in her essay, wanted to understand what was at stake for her, woman to woman. 

My discontent with Mulvey’s essay was clarified when I read Anna Badkhen’s review of Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s novel Flights, titled “The View From 35,000 Feet.” Badkhen starts out by naming the similarities between her and Tokarczuk’s anonymous female narrator: both grew up in Eastern Europe with psychology or psychotherapy in their backgrounds, both travel a lot (and alone), and both write about movement and migration. When she read Flights, Badkhen writes that “[she] became giddy. It was like looking in the mirror.” But soon enough she noted a distortion in her reflection. The travel in Tokarczuk is “the stuff of airport hotels and dinner vouchers,” whereas the travel Badkhen witnesses happens under duress: “exodus, the tribulation of exile, flight from violence or famine” (Badkhen).  Throughout the novel, Badkhen observes, Tokarczuk’s narrator uses the language of “pilgrimage” and “pilgrim,” but never the words “refugee” or “migrant” (qtd. in Badkhen). Even as Tokarczuk’s characters travel along the paths used by refugees and migrants, the latter are never seen. Reading Tokarczuk, Badkhen likens this authorial vantage to an aerial view, which has its advantages: “From 35,000 feet in the sky, you can see 235 miles away. Media outlets often photograph mass migration from the air to emphasize its magnitude” (Badkhen). But for Badken, this detachment can also serve to accentuate “beauty” while obscuring “horror.” Borrowing a question from the novelist José Eduardo Agualus, Badkhen asks: can’t we do both?

Like Badkhen’s criticism, Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” aims to address injustice. Where these writers differ is in their sense of the appropriate distance from that injustice to take. Mulvey’s essay is like the aerial photograph: she gives us a sense of scale in the injustices of the heteronormative male perspective of women depicted in cinema, but to depict its enormous scope she also reveals the distance from it she’s chosen to take. Mulvey is a white woman, a feminist, a cinemagoer, a film theorist, and a filmmaker, but in this essay, she relies only on her authority as a film theorist. I feel her lack of roots in her physical and emotional proximity to her argument. It’s one thing to believe in something, and another to feel it shaking in your soul. Reading Badkhen, I’ve realized that while an aerial authorial view allows us to look at a problem’s scale, we can also lose sight of the humans involved—ourselves included. So what, then, is the proper, most dignified way to view the world’s complexities? How can we grasp its barbarity? Do we fly, or do we stay on the ground, close enough to see our subject’s pores?

One experiment with distance and the female body is German filmmaker Harun Farocki’s 1983 short film An Image. For twenty-five minutes, the viewer watches a Playboy magazine photoshoot from beginning to end: the first thing we see is the carpenters building the set, and the last thing we see is the same men breaking it down. However, the bulk of our time is spent watching a naked woman—nearly always at mid-range—posing in front of a fireplace, being photographed by a team of men who are assisted by other women. We see, literally, the production of the male gaze: a woman being photographed by a man so that she can be looked at by other men. As she sits motionless while the staff on set analyze her physicality and move her limbs around like a Barbie doll, we see the full picture. Farocki makes us into peeping Toms. We watch the men, the women, and the model, until eventually we are also watching ourselves. We see the fallacy of the male gaze, its impurity, and its manipulation of the model. Watching it, we feel the act of looking become one of intrusion. 

For me, the intrusion was exacerbated even more because I didn’t come to the film on my own. My professor—the same one who gave me Laura Mulvey to read—showed it on a wide-screen TV in class. She warned us of the guilt we might face, but still, it was intense. I didn’t want to be watched while watching this. My eyes didn’t know what to focus on. In that class, my shame turned from a gas—where it can be so easily overlooked—and crystallized into a solid that my classmates and I could suddenly weigh. 

In my own frame of reference, a movie that tries to bear witness to beauty and denounce horror—to do Badkhen’s “both”—is Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides. The film follows the Lisbon sisters, five adolescent girls in the suburbs of 1970s Detroit, all of whom commit suicide. Coppola’s films typically express the inner workings of femininity, and the camera lingers on signs of it in The Virgin Suicides, from the girls’ rooms and bathroom that are messy with perfume bottles, records, and small trinkets loosely scattered on the floor, to Lux Lisbon writing her crushes’ names on her underwear. In other words, it gets up close and personal. In high school, I would return to the film in search of the feeling left by the soft pink and pastel blue hues, the hand-written overlays, the montages of fluffy clouds sitting solemnly under the blanket of the light blue sky, and the way the girls have an emotional attachment to the tree in their yard. But I was also watching the film to see the girls being so adored, so meticulously admired by the boys across the street. The film is really from their point of view; it’s not really about the girls as much as it is about the boys’ interest in the girls. They pass each other pairs of binoculars and a telescope to stare through the girls’ second-story bedroom window and gaze diligently into their lives through small cracks in the curtains. The knowledge we have of the girls—even if it looks intimate—is also always at a distance. 

This would appear to be a pretty on-the-nose depiction of Mulvey’s male gaze. The Lisbon girls are primarily cryptic figures for the boys to interpret. Their watching anticipates and structures our watching; voyeurism is so explicit that it becomes a plot device. At the end of The Virgin Suicides, the narrator—one of those boys, now adult—says, “It didn’t matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them” (01:30:24–01:30:35). Coppola couldn’t say it more directly. The film’s “fluffy” aesthetic aligns with the boys’ perception of the Lisbon sisters as they deliver us, the audience, the objects of their desire on a mystical and dreamlike platter that makes it clear how we—and every character in the film—never understood them. Our lack of understanding is the tragedy. Those perfume bottles mock us; we thought we were getting close, but we never did.

When I first watched this film I was thirteen years old, the same age as the youngest sister, Cecilia, and I watched it uncritically within the confines of the boys’ narration and consciousness. As I became the age of the other sisters, I paid more attention to each of their characters in turn: a girl at fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. I saw the film differently at eighteen. I don’t know whether it’s a disgrace that I didn’t see it earlier, or if it’s what Coppola wanted: for me, as a teenage girl, to fall into the trap of the camera lens, and then, as I grew into womanhood, to understand. Now after reading Mulvey, I see how precisely Coppola aimed our gaze. We see the pores of her subjects and can zoom in all we want, but we cannot escape our own distance and can never quite make the jump from the observer to the subject. 

While writing this essay, I talked now and then with my lifelong friend Celia. We grew up together; I used to see her most days. From the age of seven, we created tunnels of communication whose validity only existed in the confines of our minds and our speech. We matched words that don’t fit together and created pseudonyms from thin air to produce inside jokes, like using the name of a fruit to covertly reference a recent crush. These were words that could be said loud and clear in a library or restaurant, and no one would know their true meaning besides us. I wonder if it’s girls who tend to create this chamber of secret shared vocabularies that only we understand. Maybe boys can say exactly what they mean: there’s no need for them to carve out secret tongues, or rather, they just speak out into the world, expecting the world to understand. I think it’s what I loved when I first watched The Virgin Suicides—the movie contained signs of that subterranean existence, even if I couldn’t decipher them. 

Mulvey’s description of a “no man’s land” essentially embodies the power dynamics within film, where male characters can operate freely and hold dominance over the narrative, objectifying female characters and relegating them to roles without depth. By creating a subterranean space that the public is blind to, that’s only known to me and Celia, we allow ourselves to own something for once. We have to, in order to feel like we have some sort of right to our own autonomy. Celia and I now attend colleges on opposite sides of the country, and the intimacy we used to rely on has to change with this distance. But I shared this essay with her as I was writing it, and our shared language of code words has adapted to Google Docs comments. In these moments with Celia, I linger in the freedom we have in this confined space. We create our own power dynamics where we can operate freely and hold dominance over the narrative, where two female characters actually do have substantial depth. It’s like we’ve dug beneath the ground, and we’re nudging our way inch by inch, trying to make these tunnels of communication bigger, to expand the space we own and share as we navigate life up on the surface. There’s something about the way that when we occupy this secret dimension, where we just feel big and radical because so much of the real world makes us feel small and narrow. Mulvey has become part of our shared language, but I still wish I knew what her tunnels were—what lies beneath her essay. I wonder what friend she dug down with. 

When I started writing this essay, I placed my most private asides and wonderings, my comments directed at Celia, and the skepticisms I didn’t know how to use, into footnotes. The second paragraph of this essay, where I summarize Mulvey, might sound like I know what I’m talking about, but truly, I was alienated—something I admitted only in footnotes that, in retrospect, made writing this essay possible. What strikes me now was that my honesty was underground; even drafting and writing Celia, my ideas needed tunnels.  At some point, though, a tunnel has to come above ground. This terrifies me. This tunnel is surfacing into a road, and I don’t want to step out. It’s not that I never want things to end; I actually handle change very well. But in my mind, endings feel like abandonment, like isolation. Simran Kewlani’s blog post “Why do endings bring up our worst fears?claims that “Endings are painful, and the human tendency with them is to often personalize them, vilify the other or talk about luck/larger themes. The finality or end of something cuts very deep and the tendency to blame is strong at that time.” But I don’t want to blame Mulvey for her sense of distance. Maybe she needed to take that distance in order to articulate the problem, and I’ve certainly benefited from her view. My translation of her thinking only came after hours of work and my mind really did feel like a corkscrew while reading her, but I think that’s actually okay. A reading that changes you rarely goes in a straight line.

I now understand the importance of rewatching and circling the same territory from different distances, even as the aerial view and the close-up’s deceptive intimacy hold their own dangers. I feel much less captivated or connected to The Virgin Suicides than I did when I was younger, when it allowed me to romanticize and dream about becoming a teenage girl. Now that I’ve experienced that chapter, there’s less magical haze and the romanticization is more fake. These are not insignificant realizations for me, and I am hoping that once you read this essay, or once you read Mulvey’s essay, especially if you are a woman, you might feel a tingle in the bottom of your throat at least once. That tingle has meaning, no matter how small it might feel. I understand more clearly now how important my friendship with Celia is and how important it might be to make those friendships more visible, to bring our dialogue above the surface. I don’t want to end this essay because I don’t want to stop talking to you, but this tunnel has come to an end.  As we surface from this passage, I invite you to continue building those tunnels of curiosity both below and above ground. 


Works Cited

Badkhen, Anna. “The View from 35,000 Feet: Anna Badkhen.” The New York Review of Books, 26 June 2020, www.nybooks.com/online/2018/12/04/the-view-from-35000-feet.

Kewlani, Simran. “Why Do Endings Bring Up Our Worst Fears: Abandonment and Loneliness.” Guftagu Therapy, https://guftagutherapy.in/blog/f/why-do-endings-bring-up-our-worst-fears-abandonment-loneliness?blogcategory=emotions. Accessed 3 Jun 2024.

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Internet Archive, https://web.english.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Mulvey_%20Visual%20Pleasure.pdf. Accessed 29 Nov. 2023. 

The Virgin Suicides. Directed by Sofia Coppola, Paramount Pictures, 1999.