Perseus vs. Medusa = Defensive Masquerade... Medusa’s Head as a protective weapon against the male spectator.The phallocentric society dictates that the hero inside the narrative story needs to survive (in one way or another).
When a female appears in the role of a film director in the phallocentric male dominated film industry, she too is left with no choice but to wear the double-faced mask of Phorcys/Perseus concealing her “castration” (threat) and “non-identity” (Mulvey, 1989, pp. 14-26). This contributes to the continuation of the confrontational masquerade not only on the outer social level, but also on the inner psychological level.The Film Director (Perseus) holds the woman’s cinematic image (Medusa’s Head) in front of him, hiding behind it (hiding behind the film screen) (Pict. 3). The act of head in hand shows to others that he is the hero (Perseus rendered his name immortal by his conquest of Medusa, (Modern American Poetry)). He is the one who killed the monster, and the one who now possesses a double strength (male and female power). Taking into consideration that we live in a society where “under capitalism power and money have become commensurable qualities” (Benjamin, 1978: 114), it is of no surprise that being a film director is a desired profession (adding to this the fact of the hero’s immortality). Therefore, a lot of young people nowadays, in the era of accessible filmmaking equipment, dream of becoming a film director. The success of the established mainstream film director, among other factors, depends on how good he/she is in the roles of Phorcys and Perseus and how powerful are his Medusa’s Heads; in other words, how good he is at fetish object construction and how sadistic he is in forcing a change in it.
“The sight of Medusa’s head makes the spectator stiff with terror, turns him to stone” (Freud 1940: 2 (85)). Here Freud compares stiffening with the erection. The film director, with the possession of the Medusa’s Head, possesses the ultimate power over the male spectators, regulating and programming their moments of erotic contemplations; putting them into a dependent position. The film director controls the erotic fantasies of the male spectator.
However, if we consequently follow our comparison between the film screen and Perseus’s shield (mirror), we can state that, similar to Perseus, the audience is looking not at the actual Medusa’s Head, but at its reflection. Therefore her sight cannot be harmful for the spectator. Nevertheless, due to the fact that “the cinema unreels in an imaginary space which demands participation and identification” (Bazin 1971: 174) the spectator in the dark room begins to identify himself with the male hero. The male spectator forgets about the screen. He goes “through” it, and by identifying himself with the hero, faces the actual Medusa’s Head, experiencing the moments of erotic contemplations. That is how André Bazin describes his experience as a male film viewer: “The actor winning the woman gratifies me by proxy. His seductiveness, his good looks, his daring do not compete with my desires – they fulfill them” (Bazin 1971: 174). The film director can never obtain the role of the male spectator in the full scale, since he always remembers the process of working behind the screen (killing Medusa); he holds Medusa’s head and keeps a distance (Pict. 3), remembering to protect himself and killing his rivals. Here we can reference Bazin, who confirms that “death is the negative equivalent of sexual pleasure, which is sometimes called, not without a reason, “the little death” (Bazin 1971: 173). The identification with the hero in the narrative space is, at the end, harmful for the spectator.
Freud’s text on the subject, “Medusa’s Head” (written 1922-1923, org. publ. 1940), can be seen as a bridge between psychoanalysis and the feminist symbol. A careful study of the text reveals that Freud’s interpretation of the ancient myth is partial, concentrating on the comparison between the image of Medusa’s Head and the terrifying genitals of the mother. Freud does not mention anything about the heroic deed of Perseus, about Medusa’s death, or the fact that Medusa’s head was first used by Perseus as a protective weapon, before he presented it to Athena (Perseus used Medusa’s head to protect himself and his loved ones from male rivals.) Most importantly, he used Medusa’s head to protect his mother Danaë from king Polydectes, who wanted to marry her against her will.According to the ancient myth, Perseus beheaded Medusa by looking at her image in his mirrored shield, and then used her head as a defensive weapon (Modern American Poetry). The head of the Medusa is feminine and can be viewed as a mask, a defensive mask. Mary Ann Doane states (referencing Joan Riviere) that in the phallocentric society, the spectator of film undergoes a “masculinization”. This, in turn, affects the sexual development of the intellectual woman and forces her to wear femininity (womanliness) as a defensive mask to hide her obtained masculinity, namely Transvestism (Doane, 1982). Therefore, we are presented with a situation where the feminine defensive mask (the visual presence of a woman on the screen) in the hand of Perseus (the film director) is confronted by its counterpart –the feminine defensive mask in the hand of an intellectual woman. This confrontation brings us to a discovery of the double role of the womanliness as a powerful defensive weapon (masquerade) in the phallocentric society, that is used confrontationally by both men and women. The woman-spectator uses femininity as a defensive masquerade to conceal her masculinity, while the male film director holds the female defensive mask in front of him to protect himself (his masculinity, to protect the unconscious film form of the phallocentric society).In order to understand the relationship between the Medusa’s Head and the female spectator we need to reference Freud: “the woman is constructed differently in relation to processes of looking […] the woman has a problematic relation to the visible, to form, to structures of seeing” (Doane 1990: 47). The woman is lacking the distance between seeing an image and at the same time understanding it (Doane 1990: 47). According to Doane “the body which is so close continually reminds her of the castration (which she wants to get rid of by obtaining the penis – the symbol of power). Here we can argue, that if female spectator saw the Medusa’s Head up close (the close up of the woman’s image on the screen Pict. 1, 2) she is unconsciously considering the power it possesses. This power is coded in the enlargement of the physical proportions on the screen image. Therefore, the mask of the Medusa coincides with the face of the female spectator and female spectator becomes infused with the Medusa’s Head’s power. The fact that the male hero inside the story is seeing Medusa’s Head (experiencing stiffening = the erotic moments of contemplation), it is absolutely guaranteed that the female spectator will find a satisfaction in experiencing the hero’s admiration (in all possible fantasies she can imagine). The problem emerged (around 1970s or even earlier), when the intellectual, “masculinized” (Mulvey 1989) woman started to look at the screen in a state of “oscillation between a female position and a masculine position, invoking the metaphor of the transvestite. Given the structures of cinematic narrative, the woman who identifies with a female character must adopt a passive or masochistic position, while identification with the active hero necessarily entails an acceptance of what Laura Mulvey refers to as certain “masculinization” of spectatorship” (Doane 1990: 48).
The transvestitism of contemporary female audiences forced the male dominated film industry to refine the image of Medusa, namely to assign her more elaborated masks to confuse the female audience (in the state of confusion the woman loses her power). Today we see female images on screen in the form of giant animals (cat in Avatar, etc). And if the new elaborate masquerade confuses the female audience, the male audience has no problem learning to identify the cause of the castration threat (the lack of penis).
Another problem arises when the female spectator wears glasses. “There is always a certain excessiveness, a difficulty associated with the woman who appropriates the gaze, who insists upon looking” (Doane 1990: 50). A woman wearing glasses is wearing a reflected shield, which protects her against herself. Glasses signify the fact of seeing as opposed to being seen. The intellectual woman looks and analyzes, and in usurping the gaze she poses a threat to the entire system of representation” (Doane 1990: 50). Nevertheless with the new generation of 3D films, which force all spectators to wear glasses (Avatar) the woman is losing her distinctive powerful look.The phallocentric society dictates that the hero inside the narrative story needs to survive (in one way or another). This fact dictates that Medusa’s Head needs to be eliminated. Film directors give the hero in diegesis the power to get rid of the seductive powers of the Medusa’s Head (the spectator can indirectly do this too). As the narrative progresses, Medusa’s Head “falls in love with the main male protagonist and becomes his property, losing her outward glamorous characteristics, her generalized sexuality, her eroticism, her show-girl connotations; her eroticism is subjected to the male star alone. By means of identification with him, through participation in his power, the spectator can indirectly possess her too” (Mulvey 1989 : 21). Here we see the obvious parallel with the myth: “drops of blood fall to earth and are changed into poisonous snakes which reduce Medusa’s lethal power (Ovid, op. cit., IV. 618)” (Modern American Poetry). To this we can add that all the female characters, who are not suitable to potentially fulfill the motherhood function with the hero (in one way or another to succumb to him), are always eliminated from the film narration in the end (killed, alienated, put in the mental institutions, etc.)
It is unfortunate, but we have to admit that the function of a woman in forming the patriarchal unconscious doesn’t go beyond the symbolization of “the castration threat first and second by raising her child into the symbolic. Once this has been achieved, her meaning in the process is at end, it does not last into the world of law and language except as a memory, which oscillates between memory of maternal plentitude and memory of lack. Woman’s desire is subjected to her image of bearer of the bleeding wound, she can exist only in relation to castration and cannot transcend it [even using the masquerade]. She turns her child into the signifier of her own desire to possess a penis (the condition, she imagines, of entry into the symbolic)” (Mulvey 1989: 14).
Conclusion
“Using her decapitated head to turn his enemies to stone, he spreads death around him” (Modern American Poetry). The film directors in the roles of Phorcys/Perseus in the phallocentric society (both male or female directors) posses an ultimate destructive film power in their hands, namely the objectified woman’s image (the Gorgon Medusa’s Head). By its use they obtain the power to manipulate the unconscious of male spectators, using erotic stimulus. By assigning to Medusa’s mask new elaborative looks they try confuse the female spectator, thus eliminate her from the “battlefield”.
“Ovid, in particular, stressed the significance of the shield in which Perseus was able to see the Gorgon without being turned to stone, and which was given to him by Athena. Everything indicates that the mirror was the real weapon” (Modern American Poetry). Following our established parallel between the mirrored shield and the film screen, we can say that the cinema’s screen and what is projected on it possesses an extreme psychological power. The ultimate question is: in whose hands does this power lie? According to the myth, eventually Perseus presented Medusa’s head to Athena, who placed it on her shield, the Aegis. There might be a possibility that in the future we will be seeing the shield (film screen) in the hands of women. However, if the social rules will be based on the power of a genital’s presence (penis or vagina) it will be impossible for our society to achieve a peaceful democratic state of social development.
In order to continue the process of understanding the unconscious level of film formation and its impact on the spectator, it would be interesting to investigate not only the process of “masculinization” of the female audience, but also the “feminization” of the contemporary male audience. Further it could be beneficial to investigate the reasons why male and female spectators sometimes fail to identify with the images they see on screen.
Perseus vs. Medusa = Defensive Masquerade... Medusa’s Head as a protective weapon against the male spectator.The phallocentric society dictates that the hero inside the narrative story needs to survive (in one way or another).
When a female appears in the role of a film director in the phallocentric male dominated film industry, she too is left with no choice but to wear the double-faced mask of Phorcys/Perseus concealing her “castration” (threat) and “non-identity” (Mulvey, 1989, pp. 14-26). This contributes to the continuation of the confrontational masquerade not only on the outer social level, but also on the inner psychological level.The Film Director (Perseus) holds the woman’s cinematic image (Medusa’s Head) in front of him, hiding behind it (hiding behind the film screen) (Pict. 3). The act of head in hand shows to others that he is the hero (Perseus rendered his name immortal by his conquest of Medusa, (Modern American Poetry)). He is the one who killed the monster, and the one who now possesses a double strength (male and female power). Taking into consideration that we live in a society where “under capitalism power and money have become commensurable qualities” (Benjamin, 1978: 114), it is of no surprise that being a film director is a desired profession (adding to this the fact of the hero’s immortality). Therefore, a lot of young people nowadays, in the era of accessible filmmaking equipment, dream of becoming a film director. The success of the established mainstream film director, among other factors, depends on how good he/she is in the roles of Phorcys and Perseus and how powerful are his Medusa’s Heads; in other words, how good he is at fetish object construction and how sadistic he is in forcing a change in it.
“The sight of Medusa’s head makes the spectator stiff with terror, turns him to stone” (Freud 1940: 2 (85)). Here Freud compares stiffening with the erection. The film director, with the possession of the Medusa’s Head, possesses the ultimate power over the male spectators, regulating and programming their moments of erotic contemplations; putting them into a dependent position. The film director controls the erotic fantasies of the male spectator.
However, if we consequently follow our comparison between the film screen and Perseus’s shield (mirror), we can state that, similar to Perseus, the audience is looking not at the actual Medusa’s Head, but at its reflection. Therefore her sight cannot be harmful for the spectator. Nevertheless, due to the fact that “the cinema unreels in an imaginary space which demands participation and identification” (Bazin 1971: 174) the spectator in the dark room begins to identify himself with the male hero. The male spectator forgets about the screen. He goes “through” it, and by identifying himself with the hero, faces the actual Medusa’s Head, experiencing the moments of erotic contemplations. That is how André Bazin describes his experience as a male film viewer: “The actor winning the woman gratifies me by proxy. His seductiveness, his good looks, his daring do not compete with my desires – they fulfill them” (Bazin 1971: 174). The film director can never obtain the role of the male spectator in the full scale, since he always remembers the process of working behind the screen (killing Medusa); he holds Medusa’s head and keeps a distance (Pict. 3), remembering to protect himself and killing his rivals. Here we can reference Bazin, who confirms that “death is the negative equivalent of sexual pleasure, which is sometimes called, not without a reason, “the little death” (Bazin 1971: 173). The identification with the hero in the narrative space is, at the end, harmful for the spectator.
Freud’s text on the subject, “Medusa’s Head” (written 1922-1923, org. publ. 1940), can be seen as a bridge between psychoanalysis and the feminist symbol. A careful study of the text reveals that Freud’s interpretation of the ancient myth is partial, concentrating on the comparison between the image of Medusa’s Head and the terrifying genitals of the mother. Freud does not mention anything about the heroic deed of Perseus, about Medusa’s death, or the fact that Medusa’s head was first used by Perseus as a protective weapon, before he presented it to Athena (Perseus used Medusa’s head to protect himself and his loved ones from male rivals.) Most importantly, he used Medusa’s head to protect his mother Danaë from king Polydectes, who wanted to marry her against her will.According to the ancient myth, Perseus beheaded Medusa by looking at her image in his mirrored shield, and then used her head as a defensive weapon (Modern American Poetry). The head of the Medusa is feminine and can be viewed as a mask, a defensive mask. Mary Ann Doane states (referencing Joan Riviere) that in the phallocentric society, the spectator of film undergoes a “masculinization”. This, in turn, affects the sexual development of the intellectual woman and forces her to wear femininity (womanliness) as a defensive mask to hide her obtained masculinity, namely Transvestism (Doane, 1982). Therefore, we are presented with a situation where the feminine defensive mask (the visual presence of a woman on the screen) in the hand of Perseus (the film director) is confronted by its counterpart –the feminine defensive mask in the hand of an intellectual woman. This confrontation brings us to a discovery of the double role of the womanliness as a powerful defensive weapon (masquerade) in the phallocentric society, that is used confrontationally by both men and women. The woman-spectator uses femininity as a defensive masquerade to conceal her masculinity, while the male film director holds the female defensive mask in front of him to protect himself (his masculinity, to protect the unconscious film form of the phallocentric society).In order to understand the relationship between the Medusa’s Head and the female spectator we need to reference Freud: “the woman is constructed differently in relation to processes of looking […] the woman has a problematic relation to the visible, to form, to structures of seeing” (Doane 1990: 47). The woman is lacking the distance between seeing an image and at the same time understanding it (Doane 1990: 47). According to Doane “the body which is so close continually reminds her of the castration (which she wants to get rid of by obtaining the penis – the symbol of power). Here we can argue, that if female spectator saw the Medusa’s Head up close (the close up of the woman’s image on the screen Pict. 1, 2) she is unconsciously considering the power it possesses. This power is coded in the enlargement of the physical proportions on the screen image. Therefore, the mask of the Medusa coincides with the face of the female spectator and female spectator becomes infused with the Medusa’s Head’s power. The fact that the male hero inside the story is seeing Medusa’s Head (experiencing stiffening = the erotic moments of contemplation), it is absolutely guaranteed that the female spectator will find a satisfaction in experiencing the hero’s admiration (in all possible fantasies she can imagine). The problem emerged (around 1970s or even earlier), when the intellectual, “masculinized” (Mulvey 1989) woman started to look at the screen in a state of “oscillation between a female position and a masculine position, invoking the metaphor of the transvestite. Given the structures of cinematic narrative, the woman who identifies with a female character must adopt a passive or masochistic position, while identification with the active hero necessarily entails an acceptance of what Laura Mulvey refers to as certain “masculinization” of spectatorship” (Doane 1990: 48).
The transvestitism of contemporary female audiences forced the male dominated film industry to refine the image of Medusa, namely to assign her more elaborated masks to confuse the female audience (in the state of confusion the woman loses her power). Today we see female images on screen in the form of giant animals (cat in Avatar, etc). And if the new elaborate masquerade confuses the female audience, the male audience has no problem learning to identify the cause of the castration threat (the lack of penis).
Another problem arises when the female spectator wears glasses. “There is always a certain excessiveness, a difficulty associated with the woman who appropriates the gaze, who insists upon looking” (Doane 1990: 50). A woman wearing glasses is wearing a reflected shield, which protects her against herself. Glasses signify the fact of seeing as opposed to being seen. The intellectual woman looks and analyzes, and in usurping the gaze she poses a threat to the entire system of representation” (Doane 1990: 50). Nevertheless with the new generation of 3D films, which force all spectators to wear glasses (Avatar) the woman is losing her distinctive powerful look.The phallocentric society dictates that the hero inside the narrative story needs to survive (in one way or another). This fact dictates that Medusa’s Head needs to be eliminated. Film directors give the hero in diegesis the power to get rid of the seductive powers of the Medusa’s Head (the spectator can indirectly do this too). As the narrative progresses, Medusa’s Head “falls in love with the main male protagonist and becomes his property, losing her outward glamorous characteristics, her generalized sexuality, her eroticism, her show-girl connotations; her eroticism is subjected to the male star alone. By means of identification with him, through participation in his power, the spectator can indirectly possess her too” (Mulvey 1989 : 21). Here we see the obvious parallel with the myth: “drops of blood fall to earth and are changed into poisonous snakes which reduce Medusa’s lethal power (Ovid, op. cit., IV. 618)” (Modern American Poetry). To this we can add that all the female characters, who are not suitable to potentially fulfill the motherhood function with the hero (in one way or another to succumb to him), are always eliminated from the film narration in the end (killed, alienated, put in the mental institutions, etc.)
It is unfortunate, but we have to admit that the function of a woman in forming the patriarchal unconscious doesn’t go beyond the symbolization of “the castration threat first and second by raising her child into the symbolic. Once this has been achieved, her meaning in the process is at end, it does not last into the world of law and language except as a memory, which oscillates between memory of maternal plentitude and memory of lack. Woman’s desire is subjected to her image of bearer of the bleeding wound, she can exist only in relation to castration and cannot transcend it [even using the masquerade]. She turns her child into the signifier of her own desire to possess a penis (the condition, she imagines, of entry into the symbolic)” (Mulvey 1989: 14).
Conclusion
“Using her decapitated head to turn his enemies to stone, he spreads death around him” (Modern American Poetry). The film directors in the roles of Phorcys/Perseus in the phallocentric society (both male or female directors) posses an ultimate destructive film power in their hands, namely the objectified woman’s image (the Gorgon Medusa’s Head). By its use they obtain the power to manipulate the unconscious of male spectators, using erotic stimulus. By assigning to Medusa’s mask new elaborative looks they try confuse the female spectator, thus eliminate her from the “battlefield”.
“Ovid, in particular, stressed the significance of the shield in which Perseus was able to see the Gorgon without being turned to stone, and which was given to him by Athena. Everything indicates that the mirror was the real weapon” (Modern American Poetry). Following our established parallel between the mirrored shield and the film screen, we can say that the cinema’s screen and what is projected on it possesses an extreme psychological power. The ultimate question is: in whose hands does this power lie? According to the myth, eventually Perseus presented Medusa’s head to Athena, who placed it on her shield, the Aegis. There might be a possibility that in the future we will be seeing the shield (film screen) in the hands of women. However, if the social rules will be based on the power of a genital’s presence (penis or vagina) it will be impossible for our society to achieve a peaceful democratic state of social development.
In order to continue the process of understanding the unconscious level of film formation and its impact on the spectator, it would be interesting to investigate not only the process of “masculinization” of the female audience, but also the “feminization” of the contemporary male audience. Further it could be beneficial to investigate the reasons why male and female spectators sometimes fail to identify with the images they see on screen.