The Female Gaze & Feminist Film Theory on “Lady Bird”(Greta Gerwig, 2017)
Written and directed by Greta Gerwig, “Lady Bird” is about female protagonist Christine’s transition into young adulthood, the story is surrounded by her relationship with protective mother and journey to find herself. This female-driven story fights back with the norms of patriarchal Hollywood cinema, as well as pointing some problematic subjects of the gendered societal expectations. In the starting scene, Christine argues with her mother, and jumps out of the car to eliminate herself from the discussion, this automatically sets the tone for the movie, shows Christine’s wild, powerful figure. Christine refers to herself as “Lady Bird”, she says “I gave it to myself, it is given to me, by me.” when she is questioned about her name. This particular line indeed shows her determination to be herself even though she does not even know who she really is.
The feminist film theory criticizes the narrative and genre of the stereotypically represented females and their functions in movies and one of the key terms to define it is the gaze, which will be discussed in the article. The movie Lady Bird criticizes lots of subjects in the patriarchal world. For instance, there is a misbelief, males being more successful than females on math, which is extremely parallel to the tendency to associate specific genres with genders, for example even though the genre of melodrama has a purpose to deal with repressed societal content (Brooks, 1976), those associations about melodrama being more on the feminine side, social sciences being more on the feminine sides, exists in different industries and different contexts. In the scene where Lady Bird expresses her desire to become a math Olympiad, teacher tells her to stick to the drama. There is a scene where she reads a Playgirl magazine, there is a scene where she is on top during her first sexual intercourse. Also, in the scene where she shakes hands after meeting with the boy she likes, the boy replies as it is weird that she shakes hands. It is known that the case of abortion and reproductive freedom is one of the highly debated topics for feminism, in contrast, at the scene about an abortion seminar in school, she again narrates the story by saying what is true to her. Movies are a reflection of society and Mulvey created a psychoanalytic basis for the feminist film theory and it is important to acknowledge that movies are constructed in a male-dominated way that the stereotypic females are only portrayed to serve patriarchal needs, hence the female’s representations in the industry are only done by male’s ideas about females (Kaplan, 2004). Those scenes allow her bold feminist character to show up and her instinct to fight with the patriarchal world.
To discuss the female gaze, it is mandatory to explain the male gaze, Mulvey created the term to define it as females being objectified for male’s desire which created these voyeuristic patriarchal tendencies. As a response to Mulvey’s term, the female gaze is represented as the world is seen and told from her point of view and she is the only one who narrates her own story. Even though the female gaze is not exactly the opposite of the male gaze, due to the impossibility of females to objectify males, as stated in the feminist film theory, it is rather a fightback, that proves she holds the power since the gaze itself is associated with the power as who has power over the subject (McGowan, 2007), in this case, Lady Bird’s relationship with the world, the boys and her family is all driven by her action and her gaze. As the opposite of the classic Hollywood movies, Lady Bird’s body is not sexualized nor objectified and never is the center of attention, her lines in the movie are not driven by a male just to fill in the gap, rather she speaks her words which narrates and motives the story. On the other hand, the male gaze and the patriarchal world is interconnected in that the gaze not only defines the object it also defines an idealized woman, this idealized and desired woman is often passive, slim, almost “symbolic real” (Ravetto-Biagioli, 2011). The Lady Bird reflects on female bodies that are portrayed in the magazines on how they are taken example for the young girls, there is a scene Lady Bird and her friend looking through the magazine with sarcastic envy, there is also a scene where she sarcastically says that she wishes to have an eating disorder, indeed those scenes plays a key role to reflect the society’s unrealistic beauty standards and how she criticizes those as well.
Besides, due to the male-dominated industry, to reflect and understand such problematic subjects and deliver a female gaze, a female director is inevitably will be beneficial. Gerwig not only provides a not-usual female-oriented character, but she also portraits a female-oriented world. The most important relationship Lady Bird has is the one with her mother. These women to women interactions are so hard to capture due to their conflicted relationship that is filled with love, the movie does not allow a female versus female fight, it rather shows the reliable, true portrait of their relationship which is loving, complex, rich, and sincere that can be empathized mostly from a female perspective.
The movie does not allow a male gaze and doesn’t let male viewers enjoy a voyeuristic pleasure, since Lady Bird is never the center of the attention to the male desires. The dominant culture of pleasure when looking is separated as males in the active side and females in the passive side (Mulvey, 1975), is nowhere to be seen, hence there is no “to-be-looked-at-ness” as Mulvey states, the movie achieves this outcome not only by including a female protagonist, but having a criticization about every male-dominant societal norms, that eventually leads into a story of a strong female character, that is directed by a female and reflects the world of a female, without any objectification nor sexualization that is purified from such patriarchal Hollywood tendencies. Unlike the traditional style of the male gaze, the erotic fantasies of males on the female’s body and figure (McGowan, 2007) are not displayed, which prohibits and criticizes the voyeuristic pleasure. In conclusion, the movie reveals a story about a strong young woman building and protecting her own identity, reflecting her relationship with her dominant mother, it also reflects a teen’s development through different phases while pointing to the feminist subjects and criticizing patriarchy, and portraying females in the most realistic and reliable way, offering a female-oriented and female-directed coming-of-age movie.
References
Brooks, P. (1976). “The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Mode of Excess”New Haven: Yale University Press.
Kaplan, E. A. (2000). “Is the Gaze Male?” in Kaplan (Ed.) Feminism and Film. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McGowan, T. (2007). “The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan”Albany: State University of New York Press.
Mulvey, L. (1975). “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, Screen,16/3: 6–18.
Ravetto-Biagioli, K. (2011). “Vertigo and the Vertiginous History of Film Theory”, Camera Obscura, 101–141.
