By: Keaton Wilder Marcus

In her 1975 essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey contends that the restrictions of our patriarchal society have ingrained themselves into the very structure of cinema. Employing psychoanalysis and leaning on the minds of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, Mulvey establishes how essential it is to more consistently represent the female form on-screen. Referencing Freud’s “paradox of phallocentrism,” Mulvey introduces the idea that “it depends on the image of the castrated woman to give order and meaning to its world.” In other words, male sexuality is dominant in our society largely due to the privilege that comes with the possession of a penis. Because a woman lacks a penis or phallic shape between her legs, her form is somehow incomplete compared to that of a male under Freud’s perspective. Through the lens of phallocentrism, the phallus signifies power and presence whereas a vagina is considered something lesser and inferior.

In addition, the phallocentrism Mulvey critiques and reconsiders sees that a woman “symbolizes the castration threat by her real absence of a penis” (Mulvey). In this formulation, men not only see a vagina as a lack of the penis that they possess, but also the result of a “castration” or the loss of their own proximity to power–thus a deep-rooted fear and resentment of women. In essence, “woman’s desire is subjected to her image as bearer of the bleeding wound,” so women lack meaning to men outside of a loss of power and the ability to service them with a child (Mulvey). A woman’s ability to bear children is tragically invalidated under the concept that pregnancy is a wound rather than the symbol of growth and life that distinguishes the female from the male. Here, because the phallus has been pre-determined as the norm, a lack of one is othered as “alien.” Under the lens of patriarchy, women are a loss, an absence, and the carrier of an unnecessary wound that men will never deal with. As a result, women are “the bearer of meaning, not the maker of meaning” (Mulvey). Men construct the very symbolism that diminishes the power of a woman.

That symbolism is framed by Mulvey’s titular introduction of “cinema” in order to depict how the dominant male culture has conquered the artform. She notes that the patriarchy is “unconscious” and even likens it to a “language” (“formed critically at the moment of arrival of language”). Male dominance and the alienation of women has been implanted in our sense of physical and emotional self since before any reader can remember. Cinema is a visual language–which makes it such a convenient target for the patriarchy. Humans love watching, men love watching. Watching brings a sense of control to the viewer and strips the agency of its subject, in real life or on the silver screen. Mulvey contests that the “dominant order” has seethed its teeth into the cinematic form, and so film has become advantageous for men to project the erotic pleasure they receive from the act of “looking.”

Mulvey further contends that due to the “dominant order” upholding patriarchal ideologies, it’s the woman that’s trapped as the “looked at” and never the “looker.” Observing the subject on-screen–or constructing fantasies about them in one’s mind–comes with a sense of safety and privilege that veils the observer from the observed. Mulvey, in close reference to Freud’s idea of “scopophilia,” (the sexual pleasure from watching), observes that this gaze produces “obsessive voyeurs and Peeping Toms whose only sexual satisfaction can come from watching, in an active controlling sense, an objectified other.” Mulvey is condemning the extreme nature of scopophilia because of its one-sided nature towards the subject. These “obsessive voyeurs” and “Peeping Toms” take pleasure in watching because it invalidates mutual sexual gratification with who they’re watching. There is a manner of control and a lack of consent that comes from the ability to fantasize about someone without them realizing they’re being fantasized about.

As a result, “in a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female” (Mulvey). The images we see on-screen are mere projections of the human imagination; the male-curated images of women we see on-screen are reduced to erotic fantasy by its maker and subjected to the voyeurism of the male gaze by its viewer. Women in this formulation can only be objects on display for the male watcher, stuck in a passive dollhouse waiting to be tweaked and toyed with to cater to the active male fantasy. As a product, a woman’s sexual power–or a stereotypically female characteristic that’s been legitimized by society–is defined by a man drooling over scantily-clad pictures of women. But the “dominant order” is not the only order, and cinema is increasingly a conversation–not a statement. What happens when a woman takes part in a cinematic conversation governed by men? What happens when she challenges, responds to, and frames a male gaze with her own recontextualization?

Sofia Coppola’s 1999 directorial debut, “The Virgin Suicides,” an adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel of the same name, is what happens. The film is both a stunning audiovisual experience and a blistering commentary on society's ignorance towards teenage girls. Narrated by a group of neighborhood boys in a Detroit suburb, the subject of both their eyes and our eyes are the Lisbon sisters. The Lisbon sisters are five deeply complex girls–beautiful and almost angelic in appearance but entrapped by their strict Catholic parents to the confines of their home as well as to the shallow sexual fantasies that these teenage boys hold for them. The film has two different timelines. The tale of adolescent angst set in 1975 is spliced with documentary-style interviews 20 years later featuring the aforementioned boys, now men, reflecting on both their voyeuristic behavior towards the sisters as well as their successive suicides. Coppola and her cinematographer, Ed Lachman, parallel the boys’ perspectives of the girls by lulling audiences with a dreamlike, fuzzy aesthetic. The atmosphere paints a gorgeous veil that thinly hides the cufflinks of the male gaze and the aching depression that chains the Lisbon girls both figuratively and literally.

If Eugenides' novel is heralded as a male author reflecting on his own gender’s failure to understand the nuances of teenage girlhood, Coppola’s adaptation is the delicate, tragic response that depicts the lives of women behind the rose-colored windowpane that men see them through. Eugenides, reflecting on his book, disapproved of the idea that actors should embody the Lisbon sisters “because the girls are seen at such a distance” (Temple). Coppola successfully establishes the male perspective of the Lisbon sisters with a luminous aesthetic that stuns as much as it challenges the viewer to see past the sunny, sexualized, and god-like manner in which the girls are constructed in a teenage boy’s mind; be that with an oversized, superimposed image of Kirsten Dunst’s Lux breaking the fourth wall with a superficial smile and a dreamy wink or with the neighborhood boys clumsily translating the musings and chronicles of a girl’s life once they obtain Cecilia’s personal diary.

Mystery, or what gender frames the mystery, is an idea that the gaze of Eugenides versus the gaze of Coppola introduces. Eugendies may be similar to the male characters he’s crafted in the sense that he creates a false mystery by not attempting to understand the women the mystery surrounds. These boys observe girls for an entertainment value that consciously avoids the answer to the mystery, which, of course, ends up faulting the male gaze. In that sense, the voyeuristic quality of the male fantasy, in reference to Mulvey’s arguments on scopophilia, is akin to a detective intentionally incompetent at his job. It’s not simply the boys’ perplexed response when faced with the girl’s diary entries (or what they refer to as “data”), but their self-aggrandizing of the presence they have in them. Instead of respecting the entries with the rather mundane information they provide (whether that’s Cecilia’s passion for whales and trees or Lux’s fleeting crush on the garbageman), they assert themselves as storytellers for these girls. The narrator, reflecting on the diaries, explains that the boys “knew that the girls were really women in disguise. That they understood love and even death, and our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.” From what viewers are able to gather from the diaries, the girls don’t showcase much more than small, vulnerable snapshots into their lives, or even “fascination” with the neighborhood boys.

Take the key difference between the novel and the film’s depiction of the relationship between Lux and her male infatuation: Trip Fontaine. The homecoming dance is a pivotal moment in both texts, and so is Trip’s treatment of Lux after the dance. Eugenides depicts a secondhand portrait of Lux’s experience followed by Trip’s cold, blunt reflection. The two have sex on a football field after the dance, Trip wakes up in the middle of the night and abandons a sleeping Lux in the field. “I walked home alone that night,” he says. I didn’t care how she got home. I just took off…It’s weird. I mean, I liked her. I really liked her. I just got sick of her right then.” Examining the passage, audiences are forced to imagine the empathy for Lux that’s simply shown to us in Coppola’s film. Eugenides creates an unnecessary aura of mystery around Lux’s reaction to Trip leaving her because as a man, he’s unable to put himself in her position. Trip is oblivious to his loss of affection for Lux, and 20 years later, still mystified by why she asphyxiated herself in the garage. Coppola’s camera doesn’t leave anything up to imagination. She forces viewers to confront Lux’s first hand experience with an overhead of her figure sprawled out on the turf, isolated and unimportant; an extreme close-up of her tired face as she wakes, drenched in chilling blue lighting; a shot outside-in of the cab window she leans her head against with a piercing gaze that reeks of deadness and disappointment. Lux is a mystery. Lux is an idea. Lux isn’t a human being. Lux is your first wet dream. Wait till she takes her own life.

Eugenides, as he describes, or creates--his own portrayal of the Lisbon sisters, still upholds the qualities of the voyeuristic male gaze. He watches, like the teenage boys, from a distance. It is a case of the way men craft convoluted mythos and diagnosis in order to parse the mundanities of girlhood because women must provide a sense of “otherness” and the “alien” to distract them from their own lives. The troubling nature of a “gaze” as a concept is that it always intrudes but never embodies or relates–spying from a secondhand perspective like the boys do across the street with a telescope. Men witness and scratch their heads at women, but they’ll never experience being one. Femininity in “The Virgin Suicides” then acts as a humbling embodiment of the firsthand. If understanding the Lisbon girls is a puzzle, the female gaze is the missing piece that the male gaze is unable to acquire.

The argument that Susan Sontag makes, in her 1975 essay “A Woman’s Beauty–A Put Down or Power Source,” is less of a contrast to Mulvey and Coppola and more of a recontextualization. “To be sure, beauty is a form of power. And deservedly so. What is lamentable is that it is the only form of power that most women are encouraged to seek” (Sontag). Sontag does recognize the strength in beauty, but like Mulvey, she notes that “this power is always conceived in relation to men.” When a woman is told what to wear or how much make-up to apply or how her ass isn’t big enough–it’s to adjust herself for a man’s pleasure. Even when a woman dresses herself up how she wants or applies make-up because it makes her feel gorgeous–her looks will eventually come across the eyes of a man who doesn’t like how her clothes fit her figure, or who points out the ignorant falsity that make-up disguises a lack of beauty. Being called beautiful and acknowledging your own beauty under female agency is what Sontag refers to as a “flattering idealization of their [the female] sex,” but men still use a woman’s beauty and sexuality to nonsensically argue that good looks and competence are mutually exclusive.

Coppola’s gaze showcases the tender, tragically rare moments of girlhood that reflect a beauty unseen by men. It’s Coppola’s depiction of the dailiness of the Lisbon sisters’ lives that provides not only a response to the film’s omnipresent male gaze, but a demystification of the ignorance produced by that same gaze. Yes, Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon uphold strict Catholic ideologies that often confine the Lisbon sisters to their bedroom–stunting their sexual exploration and adolescence—but that very room is hidden behind doors of which men are unable to poke their eyes, or rather are too threatened to enter into. Coppola is constantly framing the unglamorous moments of femininity with the utmost glamor; splashing moments of the girls merely lounging around their room with flashes of popping pastel and placing them in mise-en-scene that treats improvisational hang-out spaces like they’re meticulously planned Vogue photoshoots. Glamor, to Coppola, is Cecilia’s crippling depression that goes over the heads of male doctors, or Lux’s yearning for Trip Fontaine; perhaps it’s various snapshots of the sisters doing their nails or geeking out over fashion magazines or even menstruation. Glamor is clusters of communal female memory in a bubble decorated with sparkling, glitzy camouflage as a disguise from male surroundings. If Sontag and Mulvey contend that the image and beauty of a woman is passivity conceived in relation to its active male creator, Coppola takes a camera and actively shows the feminine in a colorful, floral, and sensitive nature.

In all of its allure, however, it’s appropriate to challenge Coppola’s framing of girlhood as something grounded in magic and fantasy. She soberly establishes that the boys are able to fantasize about these girls as long as they’re seen as complex, “alien”, and ultimately inhuman–but what was her intention when splicing images of a unicorn with shots of the girls as they narrate their diaries? Is Coppola commenting that even in the quieter moments told from the female perspective, girls are still chained to a male vision of them? Or is Coppola herself stuck in relation to the male gaze? Is this even truly the male gaze, or something that the male gaze has re-purposed for its own pleasure? There’s an ironic touch to the visual style of the golden-tinted, fantastical aesthetic that serves as the backdrop for the unflinching honesty in the voiceovers. Perhaps we’re just supposed to sit back and gaze, not understand.

Mulvey argues that the concept of beauty has been poisoned too deeply by the male gaze, and therefore should be “analyzed and destroyed” because it’s been turned into a male-oriented idea. Sontag’s response deals with the fact that under female agency, beauty can be reclaimed as a powerful symbol of sexual prowess and femininity in general. “The Virgin Suicides” doesn’t neccessarily take a definitive stance with either argument–and that’s because the issue can be reduced to anything but just two sides. The boys featured in the movie fantasize about the girls on a purely physical, surface level; whether that’s in the intrusive “diary entry” scene as they obsess over Lux’s sexual exploration as a teenage girl or when one of them imagines a whimsical road trip sequence with a girl-on-boy ratio that’s gratifying to their erotic fantasies.

Mulvey suggests that the female lack of a phallic shape between her legs creates a “castration anxiety” within men. In “The Virgin Suicides,” the boys are able to quiet their fear of girls by not only reducing them to objects–but analyzing them in dismembered parts. Freud may not be as fashionable as he once was, but it is still possible to say that in rejecting women’s humanity, the male anxiety that a girl represents the loss of a phallus disappears. Instead, boys section off parts of the female body–whether that be legs and lips or breasts and butts–and repurpose their functions solely in service of their own fetishistic desires. In simply gazing upon them as stunning furniture (and blurting out lines like “girls make me crazy, could I feel one of ‘em up just once?”), girls represent the canvas on which the boys have free reign in smothering paint over. In Mulvey’s arguments, perversion from afar is the most representative description of how these boys interact with girls. Men who indulge in scopophilia do take pleasure in gazing upon the female body, but that’s because they’re threatened by what could happen during a genuine conversation–whether that be rejection or a personality that taints their misguided fantasies of women as unblemished decor.

Coppola depicts a striking male vulnerability in a scene that sees one of the boys wandering into the Lisbons’ bathroom while over at their house. He experiences the ethereal scents of femininity as he sniffs their make-up and perfume with an orgasmic expression on his face. But when he comes across a cupboard of tampons–a physical representation of teenage girlhood–his fantasy is abruptly cut short as he slams the doors closed, distraught. Male infatuation with the scents and aesthetics of a woman hit a fault when he realizes she’s a menstruating human being with her own pain, feelings, and desires. Women are taught that beauty is their sole purpose; an obligatory “face card never declines” privilege that recoups for a lack of stereotypically male characteristics like intelligence and independence. In this mindset, a woman’s beauty isn’t judged on her own accord. She’s told to analyze every section of herself: whether that be breasts or butt or hips–and degrade herself accordingly if it doesn’t fit a man’s image of a woman. She must be a fully shaved, skinny but curvy, unattainable masturbatory fantasy that deems a woman worthless if not flawlessly met. She is then told to compare herself to other women and discover the faults of her own body in relation to others. The oppressor thrives on the oppressed quarreling with each other–and so men thrive on women turning against women.

In turn, the minds of Mulvey, Sontag and Coppola must be put in conversation with each other rather than against each other; they must function as extensions and responses to one another’s arguments and not contradictions. If Mulvey establishes that women–and the concept of their beauty–is under an impenetrable government of the phallocentric male gaze, Sontag gives life to beauty as a realm of flattery despite its inherent relation to the patriarchy. Coppola’s seat at the dinner table is filled more than two decades later as she adapts a novel from the male gaze and challenges its purpose, validity, and influence over a group of teenage girls. Each singular text is without an answer to the question of women existing out of male jurisdiction, and each woman at the helm of the texts has an idea that another lacks. If three writers have seats at the table, let this fourth chair be a reminder that men clumsily trying to control and comprehend the female perspective pales in comparison to women in discussion with other women; the firsthand with the firsthand. Let the male gaze be a lens on a telescope, observing the female experience but never experiencing; and let women be the unattainable instead of creating the unattainable for them.

Works Cited

Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema Laura Mulvey [This article originally appeared in Screen 16:3 (Autumn 1975), 6-18.] Introdu, https://ia802801.us.archive.org/4/items/visual-pleasure-and-narrative-cinema/Laura-mulvey-visual-pleasure-and-narrative-cinema.pdf. Accessed 17 November 2023.

Coppola, Sofia, director. The Virgin Sucides. 1999, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRPXQ3XcpKc.

Johnston, Amanda, and Dan Sheehan. “Does The Virgin Suicides Hold Up 25 Years Later?” Literary Hub, 19 March 2018, https://lithub.com/does-the-virgin-suicides-hold-up-25-years-later/. Accessed 26 December 2023.

Sontag, Susan. "A Woman's Beauty--A Put Down or Power Source," by Susan Sontag (1975), https://www.wheelersburg.net/Downloads/Sontag.pdf. Accessed 17 November 2023.