Andrew’s HUM/WST209 blog

Mayne article!

There was a lot of different things going on in this article and it was hard to find the authors voice. Mayne was taking many different views and making something out of them. I was not able to find a paradox but many paradoxes. To try to apply this to a film I have watched as part of this class. I will use Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. I really like this movie, because there is a sense of fun and entertainment, but it also I find it highly educational for film theory in sexuality and heterosexuality and even lesbian buddy films, and the way of dancing and musicals… In other words, it is more than entertainment! It can be used to what we as humans find entertaining and what we desire. I like this quote because even though the two women are close and hate each other and be with each other, there is a need for a man, not a want. “The insistence upon sexual difference has had a curious history in film studies, by collapsing the shifting terms of masculinity and femininity into a heterosexual mater code”(169)

A movie in the past that I watched is The Virgin Suicides and it is by Sofia Coppola (my director I choose for research). The part that I was fascinated on was the section on desire and how there is a desire for castration. I really did not understand this in our other readings that it is a desire, but I looked back at The Virgin Suicides and saw this clearly. The boys in this movie were reading a girls diary and traveling in her world. There was a line in the movie that said they were becoming girls, and looking at the world in a new light. Thus a fantasy about women or girls is seen though a man or boys eyes, but it is only subtly sexual. “Despite the claims to anti-essentialism of many apparatus theorists, there is a consistent tendency to conflate literal gender and address its subject as male, then it is the male viewer who is thus addressed. The reading of cinematic fantasy allows no such reduction. (167) Even though the main characters are female, they are seen through a male eye.

This brings me to the “viewing experience” that I have seen. One of my favorite movies is Evita and I have seen the stage version, both apply to a narrative, but sense the blog post said “viewing experience” I want to talk about the play because it is more obvious on stage. The story is about Evita who rose to power basically by her sexuality and her choice in men. She is a real women, though she is dead. What is interesting about the movie and that also goes with the quote above is that the story is seen through Che a revolutionary. And it is not about her, but the idea of her. And though the story is about a woman in power, she is criticized about it by a man. Also, this is a musical and this is told through song and dance. The most insight from the show was when Evita and Che dance and sing about politics in a waltz. On stage, there is a sexual and aggressive tension between them and they never touch. In a quote form the article ”Gender is blurred and sexual preference less homogenously heterosexual” There is a desire on stage to be in control of Evita but she does not aspect the female role as be dominated. In the movie, however, she plays a female role and only on tension in the movie, is that they look like they will have sex at anytime or at least kiss. The stage shows a gender blurriness about it, because the male wants the power, but she will not let him and she fights back. In a moment on stage there is no gender. On movie, Evita is aggressive but in a masochistic sexual way. Anyway, I hope I made some sense of this article and films.