Baby, It's you!

A couple of thoughts about The Baby.
In class we talked about Laura Mulvey's Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema and we looked at examples of the male gaze in The Lady from Shanghai and Peeping Tom. Mulvey says, in part, "In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female form which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness. Woman displayed as sexual object is the leit-motif of erotic spectacle: from pin-ups to striptease, from Ziegfeld to Busby Berkeley, she holds the look, plays to and signifies male desire. Mainstream film neatly combined spectacle and narrative. ... The presence of woman is an indispensable element of spectacle in normal narrative film, , yet her visual presence tends to work against the development of a story line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation."

You can read Mulvey's essay here.

We then saw how in certain genres. specifically the western, it the male Westerner who is the sexual object, the erotic spectacle. We then looked at narrative devices within the genre that might serve to thwart the homo-erotization of this figure. In the case of The Beguiled, we run the gambit, from putting him in a dress (night shirt) to ultimately castrating him (at least symbolically).

Which brings us to the Baby and fetish night at the Egyptian. Thought no.1 -- When Laura Mulvey is writing about visual pleasure, she's not accounting for some of our fellow audience members last night. There were clearly people there last night that experienced the images of "Baby" differently than we did (which is a problematic statement itself, in that I am assuming all of you experienced it the way that I did). Mulvey's theory becomes suspect as concepts like fetishes intrude, and her apprach suddenly seems as over;y broad as the structuralism we looked at the week before.

Thought no.2 -- At the same time, the spectator of last night's film was clearly positioned to experience a voyearistic experience by spying on Baby, and he, asd object, was both hard to watch and fascinating at the same time. I'm not sure I would call him the object of MY desire, but he is clearly the object of my gaze in the film. The character lacks the capacity to gaze back, as he has little control over his body so it's impossible to see the film from his eyes. This is most clear in the babysitter nursing sequence. If this were a typical horrror film, we would have shifted into his viewing position at this moment and had a voyeuristic opportunity to see the babysitter's breasts. In this film, however, we are kept out of Baby's head and we never see from his eyes, thereby foregoing the breasts and keeping Baby as the object of the gaze even with that scene. (Compare this with The Beguiled -- atlthough Eastwood is objectified, the film is mainstream in the way it shifts viewpoint to allow the viewer visual pleasure at Carol's cleavage and nudity). This babysitter scene serves as a good example that this film is really outside film norms not just because of the content of the film, but on a deeper level. It screws with our expectations, it exposes traditional filmmaking by its deviations from it. Most viewers are not allowed visual pleasure at all, as we have to painfully watch Baby -- no relief like a traditional horror film would have -- in fact the daughters make heterosexual desire off limits by their sheer weirdness -- and the babysitter and her no panties comment render her potentially sexual, but like the westerner, she is severely punished for that potential) No, we are trapped into watching this alternative play out, and perhaps that's where the horror designation of the film lies. (By the way, the tagline for the film was "Horror is his formula.") On the other hand, for a select group, including some sitting next to me last night, I suspect the film worked very differently and that the film has nothing to do with the horror genre.

Regardless, I think the film shows how much we can learn from fringe cinema -- the stuff that falls into the cracks.

Your thoughts?