note: I won't always just put up film class essays. this one, however, I'm particularly proud of. also, writing about films in relation to Laura Mulvey is fast becoming a new favorite activity.
Women in cinema have long received the short end of the stick. They are abused, disrespected, ignored, and objectified. They are constantly used as either bland pillars of male emotional support or as bland objects of male sexual desire. Alfred Hitchcock’s film Vertigo exemplifies the trend well: his main character falls in love with the erotic image, or idea, of a woman, mistreats and manipulates her throughout the film, and ultimately leads her to her death when she asserts her own identity and tries to become the maker of her own meaning. In her 1975 essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Laura Mulvey explores such cinematic misogyny. Her essay lays out a number of points regarding female sexuality, agency, and visual representation onscreen, often intertwining with Freud’s ideas about castration anxiety. She explores themes of spectatorship, dominance, and motherhood, working to destroy the patriarchal pleasure encoded into cinema’s DNA. Recent cinema is often more subtle than Vertigo, but the issues Mulvey explores are still glaringly obvious: woman is frequently portrayed as little more than a passive object, present only to provide erotic interest to the male protagonist and with little independence or individuality of her own.
Many films unknowingly comply with these tropes; some, however, approach Mulvey’s ideas head-on, working to examine and often challenge concepts of female punishment and woman as receiver of the gaze. One such film is Lars Von Trier’s Nymphomaniac. Over the course of this essay, I intend to use Nymphomaniac to explore how Laura Mulvey’s ideas about female agency and punishment are relevant to female sexuality in modern cinema. In her essay, Mulvey writes, “It is said that analyzing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the intention of this article” (200). I believe that modern cinema operates upon a similar idea. While modern filmmakers such as Von Trier are clearly aware of Mulvey’s ideas, often acknowledging and examining them, they simultaneously work to subvert and counteract them, continuing the work Mulvey begins with her essay.
Before I delve into this film, I need to briefly discuss Laura Mulvey’s use of the phrase “determining male gaze.” Nowhere in the essay does she address the concept of non- heterosexual sexuality. The fact that the “determining male gaze” intertwines significantly with the ideas of the active male, passive female, and the power structures involved, however, means that the gaze must be that of a heterosexual male - the gaze of the theoretically more dominant figure, and one that sexualizes women, not other men. Of course, Mulvey’s focus on this dichotomy is problematic in other ways, as well; gender is a spectrum, not a binary, and Mulvey’s thoughts make room only for the gender binary. So as to operate within the framework of her essay, I will also be writing exclusively about the binary; I acknowledge, however, that this line of thinking is inherently flawed, and has great potential to be improved upon in the future.
The determining male gaze is absolutely present in Nymphomaniac, a film that aggressively explores female sexuality. Split into two films, Nymphomaniac tells the story of Joe, a self-described nymphomaniac who begins her story as a child but narrates it entirely retrospectively, as an adult. Over the course of the story, she describes her experiences with love, motherhood, and sex addiction, particularly the consequences of the latter. The relationship between sex and power figures prominently into her narrative - both in the ways characters wield sex as power and in the power Joe’s sex addiction holds over her. The very fact that she uses her sexuality as a form of power at all, however, already challenges one of Mulvey’s assertions: whereas Mulvey states that woman’s visual presence “tends to work against the development of a storyline, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation” (203), it is frequently Joe’s presence and identity as a sexual being that advances the story. By making his protagonist a hyper-sexual woman, Von Trier nods to Mulvey’s ideas while simultaneously superseding them.
Another major theme Von Trier borrows from Mulvey is the idea of guilt and punishment. Throughout the film, Joe continually asserts her extreme guilt and self-blame, just as Seligman, her audience and the man who helps her recover after he finds her beaten and unconscious, argues against it. Joe seems convinced of her own guilt: in the beginning of the film, she states, “I’m just a bad human being,” and after she seduces an unwilling married man, she tells Seligman, “I discovered my power as a woman, and used it without any concern for others. That’s completely unacceptable.” Finally, much later, she rejects the leader of her sex addiction support group, saying, “All you are is society’s morality police, whose duty is to erase my obscenity from the surface of the earth… I love my cunt, and my filthy, dirty lust.” Even as Joe takes pride in her identity as a nymphomaniac, she still views it as an obscenity; she still describes her lust as filthy and dirty.
Mulvey addresses ideas of guilt in describing one avenue through which the male unconscious can escape castration anxiety:
What is interesting here is that it is Joe, not Seligman, who asserts Joe’s guilt. Joe punishes herself here more than anyone else punishes her: she alienates herself from her family, seeks out physical abuse as a form of sexual exploration, and constantly deals with feelings of self-loathing. Seligman, meanwhile, argues against her guilt throughout the film, justifying her actions to her every time she blames herself for them. Perhaps it is because of Seligman’s asexuality and celibacy that Von Trier chooses to reverse these roles. Whereas typically the aggressively sexual, active male is preoccupied with the guilt and subsequent punishment of the passive and less autonomously sexual female, here the opposite is the case: Joe, the female, is the more sexual and more active character, and her sexuality and autonomy are the qualities that link her with placing guilt upon the woman. Seligman, meanwhile, is generally the more passive and definitely less sexual character of the pair, and is preoccupied with defending and saving the woman. In a way, they could also represent the two avenues Mulvey describes for dealing with the guilty party: Joe subjects her through punishment, and Seligman subjects her through forgiveness.
Mulvey and Von Trier also both explore the ideas of motherhood, particularly the meaning motherhood provides for a woman. Joe experiences motherhood twice in Nymphomaniac: first with her accidental biological son, Marcel, and second with a parentless teenage girl, P, whom she takes under her wing with the intention of training as a successor to her debt collection business. Joe loses Marcel when, as she becomes more and more focused on her outside sex life, her lover Jerome forces her to choose between that sex life and her family. Meanwhile, later on, P transitions from Joe’s protege to her lover before finally betraying and abandoning Joe to be with Jerome herself. Twice Joe takes care of a child, and twice she loses that child. The entire time, however, she struggles with the idea of motherhood: she states that she never feels like her love for Marcel is being returned, and later has extreme qualms about attempting to take P under her wing.
Laura Mulvey explores some very Freudian concepts in regards to motherhood. In her essay, she writes:
What’s interesting about Joe’s experiences in regards to Mulvey’s ideas is that whereas Mulvey suggests that woman desires a child, so as to provide her with temporary meaning, Joe never actually wants one. Perhaps, if we imagine that Joe is already a maker of her own meaning, children serve the opposite purpose: they fetter and castrate her, forcing her away from her focuses - her sex life and her career - and into roles she rejects: domesticity, vulnerability. Granted, Joe is clearly upset at losing both her children. When she describes Jerome’s placing Marcel into foster care she becomes briefly angry, shouting and smashing her teacup against a wall. When she is abandoned by P, she attempts to leave, saying, “I couldn’t stay in this town with her and him. I had cowardly made a plan to escape and head south, like from some ice age I didn’t have the guts to turn around and face.” Joe lambasts sentimentality throughout the film, repeatedly asserting that it is not genuine. Every sentimental relationship she forms, however, ends poorly, suggesting that her contempt for it - and her sadness at losing her children - stems not from a fear of loss of meaning, but from a fear of vulnerability and loss of connection.
The final major parallel between Mulvey’s writing and Von Trier’s film is the most prominent: the idea of the bearer versus maker of meaning. As noted before, Mulvey describes the dichotomy between male and female characters in this way: the male is active, and the female is passive. But she also constantly brings up the idea of woman’s meaning, her significance within the film:
One thusly unexamined tension in Nymphomaniac is that between Joe and Seligman, as each competes to interpret Joe’s story. Throughout the film, the same pattern repeats itself: Joe tells a segment of her story; Joe asserts her own guilt; Seligman interprets her story; Seligman reassures her that she is not guilty. In one analysis of Nymphomaniac, blogger CS Bhagya describes this cycle very well:
This competition is fascinating in that Von Trier seems to both comply with Mulvey’s observations and then counteract them. In regards to every other element both Mulvey and Von Trier explore - woman’s visual presence, the placing of guilt, motherhood - Von Trier reverses Mulvey’s ideas. Female sexuality typically pauses the narrative, yet Joe’s sexuality is what drives it forward. Yes, society blames Joe for certain actions, but primarily, it is she who places the most guilt upon herself. And whereas Mulvey asserts that woman needs a child to make her own meaning, Joe’s children remove her meaning. But here, finally, Von Trier’s plot points align with Mulvey’s ideas: man fights to make meaning, to interpret Joe’s life for her. Man forces Joe to bear the meaning he makes.
What is interesting is that even as Seligman does try to explain Joe’s life to her, he credits her for making her own meaning. In the final scene of the film, he compassionately summarizes everything Joe has just told him:
This speech seems to be Von Trier’s way of redeeming Joe’s actions - or not so much redeeming them as simply justifying them. So then why does he allow the character who has been aggressively explaining Joe’s life to her to make it? Why does it seem like Seligman has won, by making this final speech that reaches the heart of the entire film? And why, oh why, does Seligman undermine it two minutes later by trying to rape Joe while she sleeps?
One answer - the easiest - is that Seligman is as flawed as any other human. The truth is more complicated. Every action Seligman takes in the film - finding and helping Joe, explaining her story to her, forgiving her, even trying to rape her - fall squarely into the pattern Mulvey has detected, and the one that Von Trier works to subvert. Regardless of how kind Seligman is to Joe at any given time, he consistently asserts power and dominance over her. When he finds her at the beginning of the film, Joe is weak and injured; Seligman presses her in vain to accept help from the police before finally accepting her refusal and helping her into his house, into his pajamas, into his bed. Her insistence wins out, but she rejects one form of hospitality in exchange for another; she is still the weaker as he is the stronger. As CS Bhagya notes, he spends the entire film fighting for control over Joe’s story, patiently waiting for her to pause before reinterpreting the events she describes. And when he forgives her, it is in keeping with the pattern described earlier, Mulvey’s voyeuristic avenue of escape from castration anxiety: Seligman subjects the guilty person, Joe, through forgiveness. His kindness has nothing to do with his position as the dominant character; when he rapes Joe at the end, his lack of regard for her physical being is simply an extension of his earlier lack of regard for her intellectual autonomy.
Von Trier’s ending to the film has been criticized as obnoxious, cynical, a bleak joke, when in reality, it is entirely in keeping with his subversive patterns of before. By killing her would-be rapist, Joe reasserts her own autonomy - both sexual and intellectual - and acts as Von Trier’s vehicle to challenge Laura Mulvey’s assertions, to reverse her ideas about male cinematic dominance, and to fight back against the men of the cinema. By suspending this reversal until the very end of the film, by giving Joe the final word and making this counteraction to Mulvey’s ideas the final plot twist, Von Trier makes his statement that much more powerfully.
There is one more component to the film’s conclusion that I haven’t yet discussed. Just after Seligman’s speech and before he tries to rape her, Joe makes a speech of her own:
My concern with this monologue is not related to Mulvey specifically, but rather to Von Trier’s ideas about female sexuality. What does it mean for the character who has spent the entire film expressing her sexual autonomy, who has lauded her experiences and walked away from sex addiction therapy, to suddenly decide to abandon her life as a sexual being? Is it an extension of Joe’s apparently deep sense of right and wrong? Has Joe suddenly discovered the moral high ground? Yes, but not in the way one would think. Von Trier is not condemning sexuality here; celibacy is not the same as chastity. Joe’s decision is moral in the way she decides to help herself, in the way she chooses to step away from the force that has controlled her her entire life. Nymphomaniac respects and supports female sexuality, but it also respects its main character’s decision to take care of herself, even if that involves giving up her own sexuality forever. Here, in Joe’s decision to end her sexual life, is one more example of her autonomy. She is independent enough to lead life according to her own whims and desires, and she is independent enough to walk away from those desires that are harmful. Von Trier does not end his film with a denunciation of female sexuality; he ends it by empowering his main character further than before. Here is one final example of a woman who makes her own meaning - one final rejection of Mulvey’s observations.
Nymphomaniac challenges Laura Mulvey’s ideas in a number of ways. Whereas Mulvey claims that the image of the female body works against a film’s plot development, Joe’s body - and by extension, sexuality - drive the plot forward. Whereas man often punishes woman onscreen for her lack of a penis, it is Joe who punishes Joe the most. Whereas children provide woman with temporary meaning, Joe’s children remove hers. And whereas man is generally the dominant cinematic maker of meaning and woman the passive bearer, Joe fights to and succeeds in becoming her own maker of meaning. In many ways, Nymphomaniac is a triumph over the sexist conventions of the cinema.
But Nymphomaniac is not a kind film to Joe. She deals with guilt, punishment, self-hatred, loneliness, rejection, and judgement - many of which people only direct at her because, as Seligman points out, she is a woman living life with the autonomy and audacity of a man. Her character, her experiences, are often in direct opposition to the trends Laura Mulvey describes in modern cinema - but at what price? Why does Lars Von Trier choose to tell such a painful story, to make his protagonist an autonomous woman but then watch as the world beats her down? Why does he even try to counteract Mulvey’s observations in the first place? To me, it’s because Nymphomaniac symbolizes the fight for gender equality. In 1975, Laura Mulvey identified the sexist patterns of the cinema. In 2014, Lars Von Trier worked to subvert them. He made a film about a character fighting against patriarchal judgment and oppression, and used the pain and difficulty of Joe’s journey to represent the difficulty of creating gender equality in the cinema. In this day and age, Laura Mulvey’s ideas are far from obsolete. Nymphomaniac is simply a film that makes a traditionally silent battle more external.
LAURA MULVEY & NYMPHOMANIAC: AN INTER-MEDIUM CONVERSATION
Many films unknowingly comply with these tropes; some, however, approach Mulvey’s ideas head-on, working to examine and often challenge concepts of female punishment and woman as receiver of the gaze. One such film is Lars Von Trier’s Nymphomaniac. Over the course of this essay, I intend to use Nymphomaniac to explore how Laura Mulvey’s ideas about female agency and punishment are relevant to female sexuality in modern cinema. In her essay, Mulvey writes, “It is said that analyzing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the intention of this article” (200). I believe that modern cinema operates upon a similar idea. While modern filmmakers such as Von Trier are clearly aware of Mulvey’s ideas, often acknowledging and examining them, they simultaneously work to subvert and counteract them, continuing the work Mulvey begins with her essay.
Before I delve into this film, I need to briefly discuss Laura Mulvey’s use of the phrase “determining male gaze.” Nowhere in the essay does she address the concept of non- heterosexual sexuality. The fact that the “determining male gaze” intertwines significantly with the ideas of the active male, passive female, and the power structures involved, however, means that the gaze must be that of a heterosexual male - the gaze of the theoretically more dominant figure, and one that sexualizes women, not other men. Of course, Mulvey’s focus on this dichotomy is problematic in other ways, as well; gender is a spectrum, not a binary, and Mulvey’s thoughts make room only for the gender binary. So as to operate within the framework of her essay, I will also be writing exclusively about the binary; I acknowledge, however, that this line of thinking is inherently flawed, and has great potential to be improved upon in the future.
The determining male gaze is absolutely present in Nymphomaniac, a film that aggressively explores female sexuality. Split into two films, Nymphomaniac tells the story of Joe, a self-described nymphomaniac who begins her story as a child but narrates it entirely retrospectively, as an adult. Over the course of the story, she describes her experiences with love, motherhood, and sex addiction, particularly the consequences of the latter. The relationship between sex and power figures prominently into her narrative - both in the ways characters wield sex as power and in the power Joe’s sex addiction holds over her. The very fact that she uses her sexuality as a form of power at all, however, already challenges one of Mulvey’s assertions: whereas Mulvey states that woman’s visual presence “tends to work against the development of a storyline, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation” (203), it is frequently Joe’s presence and identity as a sexual being that advances the story. By making his protagonist a hyper-sexual woman, Von Trier nods to Mulvey’s ideas while simultaneously superseding them.
Another major theme Von Trier borrows from Mulvey is the idea of guilt and punishment. Throughout the film, Joe continually asserts her extreme guilt and self-blame, just as Seligman, her audience and the man who helps her recover after he finds her beaten and unconscious, argues against it. Joe seems convinced of her own guilt: in the beginning of the film, she states, “I’m just a bad human being,” and after she seduces an unwilling married man, she tells Seligman, “I discovered my power as a woman, and used it without any concern for others. That’s completely unacceptable.” Finally, much later, she rejects the leader of her sex addiction support group, saying, “All you are is society’s morality police, whose duty is to erase my obscenity from the surface of the earth… I love my cunt, and my filthy, dirty lust.” Even as Joe takes pride in her identity as a nymphomaniac, she still views it as an obscenity; she still describes her lust as filthy and dirty.
Mulvey addresses ideas of guilt in describing one avenue through which the male unconscious can escape castration anxiety:
Preoccupation with the reenactment of the original trauma (investigating the woman, demystifying her mystery), counterbalanced by the devaluation, punishment, or saving of the guilty object… Pleasure lies in ascertaining guilt (immediately associated with castration), asserting control, and subjecting the guilty person through punishment or forgiveness (205).
Mulvey and Von Trier also both explore the ideas of motherhood, particularly the meaning motherhood provides for a woman. Joe experiences motherhood twice in Nymphomaniac: first with her accidental biological son, Marcel, and second with a parentless teenage girl, P, whom she takes under her wing with the intention of training as a successor to her debt collection business. Joe loses Marcel when, as she becomes more and more focused on her outside sex life, her lover Jerome forces her to choose between that sex life and her family. Meanwhile, later on, P transitions from Joe’s protege to her lover before finally betraying and abandoning Joe to be with Jerome herself. Twice Joe takes care of a child, and twice she loses that child. The entire time, however, she struggles with the idea of motherhood: she states that she never feels like her love for Marcel is being returned, and later has extreme qualms about attempting to take P under her wing.
Laura Mulvey explores some very Freudian concepts in regards to motherhood. In her essay, she writes:
[Woman] first symbolizes the castration threat by her real absence of a penis and, second, thereby raises her child into the symbolic. Once this has been achieved, her meaning in the process is at an end… [Woman] can exist only in relation to castration and cannot transcend it. She turns her child into the signifier of her own desire to possess a penis (199).
The final major parallel between Mulvey’s writing and Von Trier’s film is the most prominent: the idea of the bearer versus maker of meaning. As noted before, Mulvey describes the dichotomy between male and female characters in this way: the male is active, and the female is passive. But she also constantly brings up the idea of woman’s meaning, her significance within the film:
Woman stands in patriarchal culture as signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his fantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning (199).
When Joe starts losing patience with Seligman’s interruptions, it indicates the more coercive moments of Seligman’s relentless analyses, a moment when Seligman reveals himself to be little more than a sophisticated mansplainer, instructing Joe on the meaning of the occurrences of her own life, not allowing her the final authority to have a conclusive say in what her own life means to her.
What is interesting is that even as Seligman does try to explain Joe’s life to her, he credits her for making her own meaning. In the final scene of the film, he compassionately summarizes everything Joe has just told him:
You were a human being demanding her right. And more than that, you were a woman demanding her right… Do you think anybody would have raised an eyebrow...if a man had led the life you had? ...You had to take on a guilt, a burden of guilt, that could never be alleviated. And all in all, the blame and guilt that piled up over the years became too much for you, you reacted aggressively - almost like a man, I have to say - and you fought back. You fought back against the gender that had been oppressing and mutilating and killing you and billions of women.
One answer - the easiest - is that Seligman is as flawed as any other human. The truth is more complicated. Every action Seligman takes in the film - finding and helping Joe, explaining her story to her, forgiving her, even trying to rape her - fall squarely into the pattern Mulvey has detected, and the one that Von Trier works to subvert. Regardless of how kind Seligman is to Joe at any given time, he consistently asserts power and dominance over her. When he finds her at the beginning of the film, Joe is weak and injured; Seligman presses her in vain to accept help from the police before finally accepting her refusal and helping her into his house, into his pajamas, into his bed. Her insistence wins out, but she rejects one form of hospitality in exchange for another; she is still the weaker as he is the stronger. As CS Bhagya notes, he spends the entire film fighting for control over Joe’s story, patiently waiting for her to pause before reinterpreting the events she describes. And when he forgives her, it is in keeping with the pattern described earlier, Mulvey’s voyeuristic avenue of escape from castration anxiety: Seligman subjects the guilty person, Joe, through forgiveness. His kindness has nothing to do with his position as the dominant character; when he rapes Joe at the end, his lack of regard for her physical being is simply an extension of his earlier lack of regard for her intellectual autonomy.
Von Trier’s ending to the film has been criticized as obnoxious, cynical, a bleak joke, when in reality, it is entirely in keeping with his subversive patterns of before. By killing her would-be rapist, Joe reasserts her own autonomy - both sexual and intellectual - and acts as Von Trier’s vehicle to challenge Laura Mulvey’s assertions, to reverse her ideas about male cinematic dominance, and to fight back against the men of the cinema. By suspending this reversal until the very end of the film, by giving Joe the final word and making this counteraction to Mulvey’s ideas the final plot twist, Von Trier makes his statement that much more powerfully.
There is one more component to the film’s conclusion that I haven’t yet discussed. Just after Seligman’s speech and before he tries to rape her, Joe makes a speech of her own:
At this moment my addiction is very clear to me, and I’ve come to a decision. Even though only one in a million...succeed in mentally, bodily, and in her heart of ridding herself of her sexuality, this is now my goal. (S: Is that a life worth living?) It’s the only way I can live it. I will stand up against all odds.
Nymphomaniac challenges Laura Mulvey’s ideas in a number of ways. Whereas Mulvey claims that the image of the female body works against a film’s plot development, Joe’s body - and by extension, sexuality - drive the plot forward. Whereas man often punishes woman onscreen for her lack of a penis, it is Joe who punishes Joe the most. Whereas children provide woman with temporary meaning, Joe’s children remove hers. And whereas man is generally the dominant cinematic maker of meaning and woman the passive bearer, Joe fights to and succeeds in becoming her own maker of meaning. In many ways, Nymphomaniac is a triumph over the sexist conventions of the cinema.
But Nymphomaniac is not a kind film to Joe. She deals with guilt, punishment, self-hatred, loneliness, rejection, and judgement - many of which people only direct at her because, as Seligman points out, she is a woman living life with the autonomy and audacity of a man. Her character, her experiences, are often in direct opposition to the trends Laura Mulvey describes in modern cinema - but at what price? Why does Lars Von Trier choose to tell such a painful story, to make his protagonist an autonomous woman but then watch as the world beats her down? Why does he even try to counteract Mulvey’s observations in the first place? To me, it’s because Nymphomaniac symbolizes the fight for gender equality. In 1975, Laura Mulvey identified the sexist patterns of the cinema. In 2014, Lars Von Trier worked to subvert them. He made a film about a character fighting against patriarchal judgment and oppression, and used the pain and difficulty of Joe’s journey to represent the difficulty of creating gender equality in the cinema. In this day and age, Laura Mulvey’s ideas are far from obsolete. Nymphomaniac is simply a film that makes a traditionally silent battle more external.
Works Cited
Bhagya, CS. "If You Thought Fibonacci Had Nothing to Do with Lars Von Trier or Women’s Bodies, Think Again." The Ladies Finger. N.p., 3 July 2015. Web. 18 Dec. 2015.
Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader. By Philip Rosen. New York: Columbia UP, 1986. 198-209. Print.
Nymphomaniac. Dir. Lars Von Trier. Perf. Charlotte Gainsbourg, Stellan Skarsgård, Stacy Martin, Shia LaBeouf. Potemkine Films, 2014. Netflix. Web.
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