Brainwashed

Nursing a nasty cold this week, I took time yesterday to watch Nina Menkes’s lecture documentary, Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power. I have followed the development of this lecture for some years. It came out of work she’d done in her CalArts classroom and became a presentation she toured with for some time, and now a documentary (available for download).

At its core, the thoughtful lecture discusses the “male gaze,” a term coined by academic Laura Mulvey in her 1973 essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” and which signifies the overwhelming point of view of film culture as the heterosexual male point of view. Men are the action-taking subjects of film narratives, while women are the static (fetish) objects of men’s action. Menkes expands on this idea by claiming and demonstrating that even the way films are shot reinforces the ideologies of power, typically, gendered power. Men are dominant, women are submissive, and we see this recapitulated ad nauseam in cinema’s dominant visual strategies.

A simple example, from the days of classic Hollywood, would be the way that male characters are lit in “3D light,” as Menkes says, meaning, they are lit realistically with light and shadow as if they were in a real place doing real things. Female characters, on the other hand, have traditionally been lit in “2D,” a look that flattens the image, reducing shadows, focussing on glamor and beauty above even attempting to place the character in the same “real” context as the male.

Among the effects of more than a hundred years of this approach, says Menkes, is that we culturally too often see women as body parts, without agency, and men as integrated actors upon the world. She connects this to the fact that the film industry is one of the absolute worst offenders in every measure of gender equity of any sector (apparently measurably worse than coal mining), to the MeToo movement, and to rape culture. In effect, she’s saying that boys and girls (and men and women) receive misogynistic messages about women from our films and TV that contribute to attitudes and behaviors that are illegal and dangerous.

On its own, no reasonably observant and educated person, apart from those with ideologies allergic to obvious facts, could really disagree with the basic premise. Our art, high and low, reflects and molds the attitudes and prejudices of the culture. Although we have by many, many measures made tremendous social progress in the last century, we still carry a deep-seated misogyny that harms women every day. Men and women are both susceptible—and we often need to be shown how this works because it’s so ingrained we don’t notice it.

So show us Menkes does. In clip after clip, she shows how a misogynist ideology informs so much of what we see and, to my way of thinking, it’s undeniable. I can see myself showing this film in a film class because, particularly for undergraduates, it’s an incredibly useful explication of cinematic point of view both in terms of camera technique and ideology. This is a tough subject to teach because, at first blush, film can feel deceptively naturalistic; that is, something that happens on film, we tend to believe, has “really” happened, which is great when trying to engage an audience but makes it harder to see how the artifice prejudices us.

I have two critiques, or questions. I say the film is useful for undergraduates. For students who have not really grappled with these truths, it may be hugely eye-opening and valuable. I also see an audience among the type of film fan that attends festivals but is unconnected to the industry, the film-literate audience. Also, perhaps filmmakers.

For advanced students, who are already aware of most of this (though they have likely not experienced such a fine curation of examples), there isn’t much more to get out of it. Menkes provides some counter-examples, as do plenty of female filmmakers (and filmmakers of color), of ways to challenge the visual power system. She also insists that she’s not here to shame anyone for filming sexuality. She is simply challenging filmmakers to break out of these dominant patterns.

The first question I have is What should heterosexual male filmmakers do? What is being asked of them?

Perhaps, first of all, to be aware of the messages they are sending? To not simply make films cynically and without examination? To be better at their jobs? Fair enough.

But this will not necessarily yield the differences Menkes underlines. Martin Scorsese, whose Raging Bull is analyzed in the film, surely understands and could articulate (at length) the argument she’s making. He knows what he’s doing when he crafts a scene. Jake La Motta’s point of view is that of a violent misogynistic thug. I suspect that Scorsese makes for a fine example precisely because he’s so good, because his visual narrative is so legible. We can see clearly—and hear, in one of Menkes’s more fascinating observations—how the narrative treats the Cathy Moriarity character.

It was interesting, but it didn’t suggest to me that Scorsese should have done something else. The crafting of the scene seemed appropriate to his subject—who is a pig. There are, of course, plenty of lesser examples in which there is much less thought put into what is filmed. Your typical slasher movie, for example.

A heterosexual male point of view is not inherently immoral, nor is the male gaze. I think the problem is when that point of view is presumed to be the “standard.” And the solution is way more women and others need to be given the chance to direct. This seems like a different matter altogether, really, like another order of importance. I don’t think we even know what the “female gaze” might be, because we’ve had so few examples.

Perhaps there’s no ask, or maybe the ask is simply to become aware of what you’re doing as a filmmaker. It’s hard to avoid the sense, though, that for Menkes and some of the other participants, the male perspective need never be seen again, so sick of it are they. This is understandable, perhaps, but surely the long term goal, if there is one, is parity. This where everyone—especially men in power—can take action by hiring women and making room for their stories and perspectives, actively.

The other issue for me is a conundrum. In a patriarchal, misogynist culture, isn’t our art going to naturally reflect that? Must we attempt to make art that somehow creates better people? Is that possible? Should we expect a popular form like the movies to be any better than we are?