In his work “Fetishism” Freud makes a bold statement where he announces that every fetish is a substitute for the penis, not just any penis but the woman’s penis. He gives an example of one of his patients whose fetish was the nose, he ruminates on why the fetishist (the patient) fetishizes the nose. His first assertion was that the patient simply refused his perception that women do not possess a penis which Freud immediately shuts down however his reason was not in any way conventional in regards to how me or you would think why this assertion is wrong. He says “No, that could not be true: for if a woman had been castrated, then his own possession of a penis was in danger.” Meaning that rather than it being something pleasurable or arousing for the boy which a fetish supposed to do in this context, the image of castration would quickly replace that feeling with revulsion or rebellion. Also, the reason why I believe he uses castration here is because if the boy refuses to believe that a woman does not possess a penis and thus believing that they do have a penis then that would imply that the woman has been castrated because it just isn’t there or not there anymore. His next assertion is that the boy “scotomizes” (forgets) his perception of the woman’s lack of a penis. However, this would not make sense because it also implies that his perception of a woman not having a penis would be entirely wiped out and as Freud rebuttals, “on the contrary, we see that the perception has persisted, and that a very energetic action has been undertaken to maintain the disavowal.” Thus assertion 2 isn’t correct either because rather than forgetting, the patient seems to be keenly aware of that fact a woman doesn’t have a penis but is also actively believing that they do. His third and final assertion is that the boy represses his perception of a woman’s lack of a penis by substituting it with something else. As Freud says “He has retained that belief, but he has also given it up…in his mind the woman has got a penis, in spite of everything; but this penis is no longer the same as it was before…Something else has taken its place… and now inherits the interest which was formerly directed to its predecessor” Meaning that the boy still believes that a woman possesses a penis but since doing so would put the image of castration in his mind, he instead focuses on the idea that maybe a woman does possess a penis but it’s not in the location that you would normally think a penis is located at, say, the nose for example and thus a fetish is born at least according to Freud. This however has a downside and it’s the aversion to the actual female genitals which is the symbol of repression that takes place within him.  

Mulvey’s essay was a difficult essay for me (not just me, I hope), but I wanted to try to break it down and contribute with a bit of my own experience. Apart from the very great detail Mulvey takes to break down the dichotomy between scopophilia and ego libido, what stood out to me was the discussion of camera work and the camera’s place in highlighting those two aspects of narrative film. The camera is human perception — at least it tries its best to replicate it — and its ultimate goal is to remove/blur the screen space so as to better integrate ourselves into the screen. This is essentially ego libido, as it gives the spectator a sense of power that the protagonist has. 

While reading this, it reminded me of Oppenheimer, and the “ideal” viewing experience instructed by the director, Christopher Nolan. Nolan said that the intended way to view the film was in 70mm IMAX, it was the most immersive formatting that would project you into the film in the closest way possible. However, I do not think that the tragedy of the atomic bomb is necessarily what Mulvey is arguing. For that, look at 2011’s Drive, where Ryan Gosling is a strong, silent stuntman-criminal who pushes Carey Mulligan into the corner of the elevator to kiss her before killing the hitman next to him. It feels as though the film epitomized Mulvey’s work to a tee, Mulligan is only seen as a mother in dresses and skirts, tending to her child and being submissive to her husband. Gosling, on the other hand, is domineering, literally driving the plot of the story (which revolves around him “helping” her without considering her desires). 

As a cisgendered, straight, white man, it took an embarrassingly long time to not only be made aware of this reading of narrative film, but it is truly only very recently where it has become apparent to me. Most teen comedies of the 80s (Fast Times, Sixteen Candles, etc.) revolve around the portrayal of women as strict, still images that are there solely for the attention of the male-centric audience and protagonists. Another unfortunately too-perfect moment is when Anthony Michael Hall’s character in Candles takes advantage of and rapes a drunk girl he was going to “take home.” That film supports Mulvey’s argument because of how awfully true it is, and why this analysis of narrative cinema needs to be more popular.

The last film I will relate to the text is Chantal Ackerman’s Je, Tu, Il, Elle, as it is a great example of alternate cinema that Mulvey states will break up this traditional pleasure-driven view of cinema. In the film, a depressed girl, recently broken up with her girlfriend, removes all the furniture from her apartment except her mattress, walks around the room naked, and eats sugar from a bag while trying to come up with a letter to send to her ex. character finally gets to see her ex again, in which the film cuts to a fifteen minute sex scene between the two characters, ending with Ackerman being kicked out once again. A perfect example of how cinema does not have to be pleasure-driven, as the full frontal nudity of the final scene is very raw but certainly not glamorous. It does not portray one dominating another, it does not even portray a man and a woman. It is just sex, the authentic experience of emotion, and does not attempt to sexualize it in any way. Bringing it back to camera work, which Mulvey finds so profound (as do I), it is fixed, only switching angles sparingly. Unlike most sex scenes, which highlight the bodies of women in gross ways and attempt to make the viewer feel that he is the one taking control over the woman, Je, Tu, Il, Elle pairs the often-isolating nature of sex with the emotional intimacy it provides. The fixed camera angles only keep the audience away from that moment because it is not our moment, it is theirs and theirs alone.

I hope I did not stray too far from the text, but I am minoring in film and combining it with my English major scratches the analytical part of my brain.

As promised, here are answers to the midterm questions. I didn’t have a very good key from prior terms, and I asked a lot of new questions on new texts, so I had to “take” my own exam, answering all 18 questions.

Uh, it was pretty tough. Be sure to check your iffy answers against mine, and feel free to reach out if you’re still puzzled on anything. Good review for the final exam, which will emphasize the new material from Freud onward but will also bring back some of this older material.

I hope you’re all recovering from the challenging midterm: I’ve rolled up my sleeves and am grading now (which is definitely on the “alienated” side of any prof’s labor).

Meanwhile, I came across a review of a book by Yanis Varoufakis, a Greek economist, arguing that we have entered a new phase of economic development that represents a return of sorts, a “technofeudalist” era. The article rightly points out that there’s a wave of analyses at present making parallel arguments–the article mentions McKenzie Wark’s Capital is Dead, and I would add Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism–that, whatever their differences, believe that we have reached an inflection point where the development of global capitalism out of the ashes of medieval feudalism to the present is giving way to … something new.

We just took a little sip of Marx, and you’d need some big gulps from Capital to properly contextualize Varoufakis’s book, but the bit from Capital we read together, with its attempt to show the distinctiveness of capitalism and the use of money as “universal equivalent” by contrasting it with feudal barter, Crusoe’s self-accounting, and the idealized communist collective organization of labor through planning, give us enough light to read by in assessing these recent books.

See you Thursday, when we’ll reel back the histori-o-meter to 1900 or so and run it back again, looking at the development of theories of the psyche and the subject from Freud onward.

In “The Fact of Blackness,” an excerpt from Black Skins, White Masks, Franz Fanon discusses how Black people are viewed by white allies and by people who take pity on them, challenging both the assumption that there is nothing unique about Black people and the assumption that there is something deficient about Black people.

Fanon refers to Jean-Paul Sartre, an ally, who asserts that Black people are the same as any other working-class people, thus erasing the uniqueness of the Black identity and the struggles undergone by Black people. Fanon writes: “[…] he was reminding me that my blackness was only a minor term. […] Jean-Paul Sartre had forgotten that the Negro suffers in his body quite differently from the white man. […]” (1359). This refers to the centuries of structural discrimination and oppression suffered by Black people that makes the Black experience fundamentally different from the experiences of white people. While it is true that working-class white people have their own struggles, it would be intellectually dishonest to claim that Black people do not uniquely suffer on account of their race, something that white working-class people do not have to experience. This is something that is relevant even today, not just when it comes to the opinions of white liberals but also with regard to the people who claim that there is no such thing as systemic/structural discrimination. The history of oppression of Black people has to be taken into account before naively and insensitively claiming that there is a level playing ground and anyone can achieve upward mobility through hard work. In the racialized American society, there are various other factors with regard to race that need to be considered before coming to conclusions such as this.

While Fanon makes a strong case in favor of the struggles that the Black experience comes with, he strongly asserts that such challenges do not constitute shortcomings. He says: “[…] I refuse to accept that amputation. I feel in myself a soul as immense as the world, truly a soul as deep as the deepest of rivers, my chest has the power to expand without limit” (1360). He takes pride of his Black identity even as he stresses the systemic discrimination that Black people experience in white-dominated societies.

Fanon’s positions have a lot of relevance in American society today. We need to celebrate literature, art, cinema, and music by Black people. We need to make the teaching and learning of history more comprehensive so that the rich history of Black people is included in it. This will help students learn more about the unique challenges faced by African American people while also acknowledging their contributions to American society. The fact that systemic/structural discrimination exists needs to be understood so that people realize that the existing socio-economic structure is not working for everyone and for people to have equal access to opportunities, a lot of things need to be fundamentally changed and reshaped and for that we need to understand the roots of the many inequalities we find in American society.