Wednesday, June 7, 2017

The Feminine Spectacle in Blue Velvet & The Night Porter

In the act of seeing, an active viewer attains power over a passive subject. We relinquish a certain self-determination to any stranger’s appraisal of our bodies on a city street; this fleeting objectification is exchangeable through the mutual ability to see and be seen. When a person becomes a spectacle, these terms acquire a heightened violence. As we walk down a street to reach a destination, we construct the street as a functional space; alternately, the spectacle occupies a non-functional space contrived by our visual consumption. If we are seen on a street by simple consequence of our corporeality, a spectacle is seen because it must be. Whereas two casual strangers can view and be viewed in equal measure, the spectacular subject is unequivocally viewed; dissociated into a hypervisible bodily presence, they accept a prolonged objectification. While the spectacular subject exercises the agency to engross an audience, this activity is ultimately obscured by that audience’s ocular stronghold.
In David Lynch’s 1986 film Blue Velvet, Dorothy Vallens is introduced as a feminine spectacle on a nightclub stage. Feminine presentation is culturally perceived as a means of embellishing sexuality: a feminine person is more visible because they are more sexualized, and thus becomes a nonconsenting spectacle even in casual settings. Dorothy’s onstage presence accordingly amplifies her femme-fatale physicality; being that feminine presentation is linked with passivity, her spectacular role moreover denotes her as doubly passive. Active spectatorship is gendered inversely, as Jeffery’s gaze establishes the audience as a masculine apparatus.
When we learn of Dorothy’s bondage at the hands of Frank, spectatorship takes on an expanded diction. In their first living room encounter, Frank’s fetishization of Dorothy’s blue velvet robe follows her “Blue Velvet” nightclub performance: Dorothy’s already-sexualized stage presence translates to the private sphere. Here, her forced hyperfeminine roleplay redefines the feminine body as a nonconsensually-eroticized site. Concurrently, Frank underlines violent masculinity by mobilizing his spectator role towards this more intimate dominion. As Jeffrey surveys the scene from behind a closet door, spectatorship evolves to further devise voyeurism. Dorothy is therefore reproduced as a spectacle both through Frank’s reference of her original visibility and Jeffrey’s transgressive consumption.
In Liliana Cavani’s 1974 film The Night Porter, Lucia Atherton’s cabaret scene modifies the spectacular model. Though a victim of Nazi persecution, Lucia dons an SS hat and exposes her breasts to perform a Marlene Dietrich song for several officers. The leering, pasty-white Nazis intensify spectatorship’s aggression: sight absorbs fascism’s extremes, relaying the ultimate lengths of a brutal masculinity. In adopting her audience’s costume, Lucia constructs her own victimization. She fetishizes herself by sexualizing the non-erotic hat, diverting desire to a manufactured pleasure center. The feminine subject is again rendered passive by masculine imposition; Lucia’s body acts as a medium through which the hat’s violence is invigorated, allowing her viewers to devour a feminine projection of their own atrocities. This dynamic inscribes the fetish with more resonant meaning than Frank’s arbitrary blue velvet infatuation. In effect, the cabaret scene imparts a particular voracity to the spectacular arena’s correspondence of power.



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