frame 73 | the look

Double Indemnity | Billy Wilder, 1944

Phyllis (Barbara Stanwyck) looks at Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) who watches the road. At the same time Phyllis looks at us, the audience. It’s not just that Walter doesn’t look at his love-interest, his eyes are out of frame altogether. He is stripped from his gaze.

There are three different looks associated with cinema: that of the camera as it records the pro-filmic event, that of the audience as it watches the final product, and that of the characters at each other within the screen illusion. The conventions of narrative film deny the first two and subordinate them to the third, the conscious aim being always to eliminate intrusive camera presence and prevent a distancing awareness in the audience.

Here Phyllis distorts the dominant look of cinema, by watching towards the camera, making us aware of the second look (our look). Her look may well be a coincidental slip of the eye, and it wouldn’t bother us were it not for the awkward absence of Walter’s eyes – which are our eyes:

An active/passive heterosexual division of labor has [...] controlled narrative structure. According to the principles of the ruling ideology and the psychical structures that back it up, the male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification. Man is reluctant to gaze at his exhibitionist like. Hence the split between spectacle and narrative supports the man’s role as the active one of forwarding the story, making things happen. The man controls the film phantasy and also emerges as the representative of power in a further sense: as the bearer of the look of the spectator, transferring it behind the screen to neutralise the extra-diegetic (*) tendencies represented by woman as spectacle.

(*) “diegetic” refers to things which exist within the “world” of the film’s narrative. Non-diegetic or extra-diegetic elements of a film do not exist or take place in the same plane of reality that the character’s inhabit. For example, presumably the characters within an action film do not “hear” the rousing theme music that accompanies their exploits. that music is extra-diegetic, but still part of the film. [definition from The All-Movie Guide's Film Glossary]

It seems as if Phyllis is asking Walter/ us: why don’t you watch me? Being an audio-visual fictional character, she needs to be looked at in order to exist. Being a female character in a ‘conventional narrative film’, she needs the look of her male counterpart, who is the bearer of the look of the spectator. So why isn’t Walter watching Phyllis? Why is his look out of frame? Why is he hiding his gaze?

It is the place of the look that defines cinema, the possibility of varying it and exposing it. This is what makes cinema quite different in its voyeuristic potential from, say, strip-tease, theatre, shows, etc. Going far beyond highlighting a woman’s to-be-looked-at-ness, cinema builds the way she is to be looked at into the spectacle itself. Playing on the tension between film as controlling the dimension of time (editing, narrative) and film as controlling the dimension of space (changes in distance, editing), cinematic codes create a gaze, a world, and an object, thereby producing an illusion cut to the measure of desire.

But in psychoanalytic terms, the female figure poses a deeper problem. She also connotes something that the look continually circles around but disavows: her lack of a penis, implying a threat of castration and hence unpleasure. Ultimately, the meaning of woman is sexual difference, the absence of the penis as visually ascertainable, the material evidence on which is based the castration complex essential for the organisation of entrance to the symbolic order and the law of the father. Thus the woman as icon, displayed for the gaze and enjoyment of men, the active controllers of the look, always threatens to evoke the anxiety it originally signified. The male unconscious has two avenues of escape from this castration anxiety: preoccupation with the re-enactment of the original trauma (investigating the woman, demystifying her mystery), counterbalanced by the devaluation, punishment or saving of the guilty object (an avenue typified by the concerns of the film noir); or else complete disavowal of castration by the substitution of a fetish object or turning the represented figure itself into a fetish so that it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous (hence over-valuation, the cult of the female star).

(all quotes from: Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema | Laura Mulvey, 1975)

It is no coincidence that both Phyllis (with her exposing look) and Walter (with his absent look) are film noir characters. But could it be that Walter tries to hide his look somewhere outside the frame, outside the narrative, perhaps even somewhere in the same extra-diegetic space he is called upon to neutralise (~ to neutralise the extra-diegetic tendencies represented by woman as spectacle)? And could this be because, at this moment – or: in this frame – Phyllis and Walter are very close to becoming a couple (the crime has just been committed at this time in the narrative – they go home now; cozy, though quarreling, together in the car), steadily adrift towards the bourgeois relationship that not only denies film noir expectations, but, more importantly, holds the risk of sublimating (i.e. making socially and culturally acceptable) the sexual difference that is the cornerstone of their existence (that is: of conventional narrative cinema)?

- A sublimation we’ve all had experience with, in our own relationships, and that transforms passion into the mundane, and fiction (romance!) into fact (the dishes…).