Introduction:
Immanuel
Kant suggested a radical notion of the dichotomy of reality in his work on
transcendental aesthetics. According to Kant we can never experience reality,
rather we have access only to our perception of reality. Kant
followed Hume in believing that man’s ‘knowledge’ is necessarily limited and
distorted, because it is mediated by the senses
The dichotomy that this understanding generates
is that between “Phenomena” (which
constitute the immanent world of common experience) and “Noumena” (which constitute a transcendental world to which we have no empirical
access, which is reality.) The dichotomy is of importance to the study of the
construction gender in a phallogocentric system of meaning making.
Cinema is a medium that has had a stronghold over
the Indian population for the longest time. This visual medium surrounds
individuals and create a unified common experience of the world, which becomes
the perspective lens that people use to view reality.
The male language that structures cinema will be
studied in detail in this paper through a critical analysis of the Malayalam
movie Pokkiri Raja directed by Vyshak. The reason for the selection
of this movie is because of the evident nature of the construction of gender
power asymmetry in the movie and due to the popularity it enjoyed. The movie
was a blockbuster in 2010 and has been dubbed to Tamil (Raja Pokiri Raja) and remade in Hindi (Boss).
The paper will conduct an in depth analysis of
the scenes where the female lead appears in the film and study the manner in
which the woman has been objectified by this medium of communication.
Theoretical Framework:
Jacques Lacan in ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function I’ suggests that a
child undergoes a process of identification during the Imaginary stage, which
transfers her/him from the Real to the Symbolic.
The Gaze is a psychoanalytical term to
describe the anxious state that comes with the awareness that one can be viewed.
The psychological effect is that the subject loses a degree of autonomy upon
realizing that he or she is a visible object.
The Symbolic Order is phallocentric and hence the gaze
that constructs the individual is the male gaze and the female gaze is negated.
In her 1975 essay, "Visual
Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", Laura Mulvey introduced
the second-wave feminist concept of "male gaze" as a feature of gender
power asymmetry in film. Mulvey
stated that women were objectified in film because heterosexual men were in
control of the camera.
Film and
all other visual medium of representation that influence our perceptions of
reality are constructed in a male language where myths have been essentialised
and women, objectified.
Scene1;
Actor sees actress for the first time:
The actor is travelling in a bus along with his new neighbor
who is engrossed in constructing a novel around the life of the young actor.
The novelist suggests that the story will be incomplete without a heroin and
starts describing various physical aspects to describe a beautiful woman. The
actor who is gazing out of the bus window suddenly realises that the words
uttered by the novelist can be see in a girl who is walking down an alley. The
shot begins with the actor gazing out uninterestedly. The next few shots are
close shots of the actress; the camera captures her feet, fluttering strands of
hair, eyes and smile before we get a complete image of the woman.
The objectification of the woman occurs here at different
levels. The male gaze is established when the camera puts the
audience into the perspective of a heterosexual man. Here the woman is
displayed on two different levels: as an erotic object for both the characters
within the film, as well as for the spectator who is watching the film.
The camera lingers over the
woman’s body and creates a desire in the male spectators to attain the object
on screen. What is interesting is the female gaze is visually negated; women
viewing the ad are not exercising the ‘female gaze’ but rather they are viewing
the ad through the male gaze constructed by the camera’s gaze (directors gaze),
the editorial gaze (the editing that draws out attention to only certain
aspects) and the intra-diegetic gaze (the gaze of the male actor).
Scene 2; Anti-hero clicks a
picture of the heroin without her permission:
The gaze is not only that constructed by the hero’s
perspective but also that the anti-hero’s perspective. Here there is an evident
violation of the woman’s autonomy through a gaze, which is technological at two
levels. The anti-hero clicks an image of the woman using his mobile phone and
the viewers partake in this objectification through the viewing of the film.
The woman is gazed upon at different levels. The scene ends with the hero
rescuing the passive heroin. The passivity of the woman character is
established in this scene and it continues till the end of the film. The woman
is always depicted as a figure waiting ideally to be rescued by her man. This
is one of the myths that has become a fixity in dominant visual narratives due
to the phallogocentric language used in the production of cinema. These
fixities are often normalized and consumed by the audience as the unified truth
and it in turn distorts their perception of reality.
Other instances where the woman is constructed in passivity
are:
The hero’s brother barges into the heroin’s home and
challenges her father saying that he will make sure that the two of them will
get married whether the father likes it or not. The heroin appears on screen
only when she is called for and remains silent throughout the sequence. Her
responses are limited to gestures and her presence on screen is merely for the
purpose of ornamentation.
Scene 4:
The hero and his brother defeat the father’s goons and the
hero gets engaged to the heroin. The myth of the need for a savior and the
incapability to stand up for the self is glorified in this scene. The scene
ends with the brother threatening the father saying, “Nothing should happen to
the girl before the marriage”.
After a lot of drama the movie ends traditionally with the
marriage of the hero and the heroin. There is nothing fascinating about the
construction of the narrative as it is a classic Malayalam narrative that
involves a boy, a girl and relatives who make life difficult for them.
What fascinates the researcher is that the method of
objectification of the woman that this movie executes is similarly present in
most mainstream Malayalam movies. Aaraam
Thampuran by Shaji Kilas, Devasuram
by I.V. Sasi and Ravanaprabhu by
Ranjith are some typical examples for the construction of gender power
asymmetry in cinema.
Heteronormative Men are at a
considerably privileged position in this system of objectification and othering
because the loss of autonomy at understanding that they are susceptible to the
gaze is glossed over by the fact the gaze is male and that complying to the
system will allow autonomy of a kind, of course this is nothing but false
consciousness that stems from being closer to the phallic center.
Women and non-normative men on
the other hand are objectified and forever denied the hope of attaining autonomy
within the system. According to Kant the Phenomena is the only reality we know
and we have no access to the Noumena. This could be true insofar as we
understand that the phenomena is constructed in a particular manner and there
is always a possibility of deconstructing the normative and hegemonic
perceptions in favour of a new set of perceptions devoid of hegemonic gender
power asymmetry.
Being pushed to the periphery
has its advantages and disadvantages. It denies a position of autonomy with
this system and perception of reality but it also presents a fluidity that
results from the fading influence of the center, which affords space to
experiment and construct a new notion of reality using other sets of
perceptions. Feminists refer to this as play and by exercising their fluidity
have been able to write in a new language that deviates from the established
notion of reality.
The process is difficult but
not impossible, the visual world is entrenched in a male language and sees only
through the male gaze but the understanding that this is not a unified reality
and the questioning power that this provides could result in radical changes in
the visual medium.
Recent attempts made in the
Malayalam industry reflect these possibilities. 22 Female Kotayam by Ashik is one such
movie where the woman is not constructed in passivity. The initial phase of the
movie focuses on the traditional understanding of women and the later half
projects the possibilities that women can attain. The gaze remains male and the
notions are still constructed in the male language but breaking the myths
regarding the passivity of women propagated by visual media is the first step
towards changing our distorted view of reality into a more gender inclusive
perception of reality.
Scope:
Though the paper concentrates on the Malayalam film Pokkiri Raja to study construction of
gendered realities, the ideas discussed in the paper can be exported to almost
all visual industries in our nation. A structural analysis of the Malayalam
movie and its Hindi remake could throw light upon cultural differences and
similarities that inform visual representation of the same narrative in two
spaces.
Sources:
A History of Literary Criticism: From Plato to the
Present By M.A.R. Habib
Wikipedia
Youtube (Screenshots)
