Marcel O'Gorman knows images and their effect on visual culture.  In fact, when it comes to images, moving or still, he can be trusted to approach the subject with a discerning and critical eye.

If Marcel O'Gorman had lived in the 19th century, before "moving pictures," he would probably have invented them.  Finding himself in the current world, however, allows him more of an opportunity to view the image phenomenon from his unique perspective as Director of the new Electronic Critique program at the University of Detroit Mercy. 

Electronic Critique (or E-Crit) stresses "perpetual technological innovation, the emergence of a visual culture, the "decompartmentalization" of knowledge, the deconstruction of traditional leadership roles, and the vigilant recognition and appreciation of diversity in all its forms."  E-Crit is concerned with critiquing all aspects of visual culture including film. 

One of the current ideas among philosophical thinkers who are paying attention to film and visual culture is the male (or female) "gaze" or perspective. Professor O'Gorman seemed to be the perfect person to talk with about this aspect of filmmaking for our Film Genres class (Professor Nick Rombes, ENL375), and we jumped at the chance to interview him. Who better to discuss the effects and defects of films and their gender related impact in society today? 

We conducted our interview via email.  This seemed the perfect medium of discourse about the subject.  As unseen "eyes," the interviewer and interviewee become the audience for each other.  We interact from a "hidden" observation point behind screens of image and text display. 

LP/SC: What is your favorite film?  Why is it your favorite?

MO:  That's a very difficult question. My "favorite film" is whatever film is most suitable to my current research interests.  For a while, my favorite film was Godard's "Two or Three Things I know About Her." The film is typically Godardian: metacritical, loaded with intellectual montage ("loaded" is an understatement), full of quirky surprises and tricks that test the limits of the medium. 

My favorite part of the film is the café scene in which a woman eyes a man who is eyeing his coffee cup. The man stares into the cup as he stirs it, while the narrator gives a lengthy metaphysical diatribe about how ineffectual language is, and how impossible it is to communicate anything to anyone with words. What does coffee have to do with all of this? Only the viewer knows. The cup of coffee becomes a sort of window onto the viewer's subconscious -- we have to fill in the visual gaps with our own thoughts. The coffee is also a sort of hyperlink -- maybe a hypericon -- that leads us to anywhere in the entire film, where these metaphysical questions are acted out by the cast.

LP: This scene sounds suspiciously similar to the café scene in Godard's "My Life to Live" where Nana is sitting with a Sartre look-alike discussing a similar topic.  I had the impression at the time that the entire film sort of branched out from this one scene. 

MO: This kind of scene is what I look for in a film -- a single, brilliantly shot and brilliantly thought-out scene that encapsulates the entire film. Godard was very good at this. So is Errol Morris, who directed another of my favorites, "Fast, Cheap and Out of Control." If you watch Morris's "Mr. Death," you will notice another coffee cup scene. It's iconic repetitions like this that really interest me.

LP/SC: What movie(s) do you think illustrate the concept of the male gaze? 

MO: The most obvious answer is, of course, any of the films by Alfred Hitchcock. A lot of critics have made a lot of noise about Hitchcock's phallocentrism. His name sort of gives it all away, doesn't it? In any case, films like "Dial M for Murder" and "Rear Window" are all about the male gaze. 

Still, I think it's possible to make too much of this. Once we start whipping out terms like "male gaze," it's easy to get caught in the trap of applying the theory like ointment to any film or advertising image or whatever. I'm more interested in the camera's gaze -- shots that are taken to compensate for the limitations of the medium. For example, Hitchcock's "Rope," (his first color film) is composed entirely of lengthy (10 minute) takes. Rather than make cuts, he creates "breathing space" by having the cameras focus momentarily on a blank space on the set. Most often, that blank space is the back of a male character. The camera will just sit there for a minute -- a super close-up of a section of some guy's tweed sports coat--then the scene will continue. 

What is this gaze all about? How does this shot, which is very boring to look at, affect our understanding of the film? Or our understanding of "film," in general.

LP/SC: Hitchcock was good at this sort of thing.  But, even with the back of a man's sports coat, if the camera is using this shot to dominate the scene, it still seems to me to be a "male" perspective rather than a softer, less intrusive use of the lens. Are there any films that you feel do a role reversal?

MO: I guess it would be easy to point out a more recent film like "Fatal Attraction" or "The Hand that Rocks the Cradle," and say "there, look, women can gaze and stalk and be evil too." 

But that's not the point. The very fact that these "crazy lady" films are a novelty says something about the way roles are cast in Hollywood. As far as I'm concerned, the gaze is a result of film direction and camera manipulation. Since most films have been made by men, and since most men work the cameras, and since the camera is seen by most of these men as an extension of their vision, as an extension of their desire and imagination, then hell, there's going to be some gazing. I need to see a film directed and filmed by a crew of women before I can say there is some kind of reversal.   I don't think it's about roles, really. The male gaze is built into the greater film apparatus itself: schooling, techniques, equipment, etc.

LP/SC: Yeah, I see what you mean.  It's like what Judith Butler says about opposing the social construction of the "I."  The "I" doing the opposing is still "... drawing from that construction to articulate its opposition."  In this case, men trying to oppose the use of the male gaze do it from a male perspective.  It doesn't work. 

What movie do you remember portraying the first really strong liberated woman?

MO: Another tricky question. Rather than point to a film, I'd have to refer to the 60's British television series, the Avengers.

Diana Rigg (Miss Emma Peel) was really the first woman I ever saw on film or on TV that I thought was "strong and liberated." 

LP: Great show!  I used to love it!

MO: I think this might have something to do with the gaze. After all, she is a sort of spy. Part of her job is to gaze at men -- watch them, learn their tricks, and outwit them (or just beat the hell out of them).  Her admirable confidence, intelligence and knowledge of martial arts make her male companion, John Steed, look like a limp-wristed, umbrella toting, Brittsy-boy. And if she does all of this in a black rubber body suit, then no one is going to complain, right?

LP/SC: HAHAHA!!  There were a lot of little girls who benefited a great deal from the image Diana Rigg portrayed!  She was strong, all right, but she was also sexy.   She broke the mold of the stereotyped female role model of the day.  I don't think she ever cleaned house or baked a pie, did she?  She wasn't really the "Leave It to Beaver good housewife" type. 

When do you think gender roles such as the "good housewife" or the "working husband" changed on the big screen and what movie would be a good example of this change?

MO: I really don't think I'm qualified to answer that question. Are you talking about the Hollywood "Big Screen"? If so, then I could probably only provide some sort of terribly arbitrary answer.  Some might say that the absolute death of the nuclear family in Hollywood didn't really take place until "Kramer vs. Kramer" (Don't underestimate the Dustin Hoffman effect). After that you get a whole slew of trashy movies about "alternative family situations." But I wouldn't trust that concept. Housewives in film have never really been all that "good," and often exhibit signs of repressed anxiety. The working husband has never been a reliable character.

LP/SC: It does seem as if the nuclear family was taken apart during that time.  There was a change taking place in society that reflected this "death."  It seems there was a line that society crossed in the 70's that dissolved the Ozzie and Harriet ideal family unit forever. 

This change in focus wasn't the result of the "bad guys" turning good, however.  Those who lived outside of the social norms are still being "punished" in movies.  It's just that we seem to have adjusted our ideas of what those social norms are now. 

Why do you think that the people who go against society (bank robbers, independent women, hippies, "rebels" etc), always had to get "punished" or lose in the end?

MO: Before 1970, there was no evil in the world. That very year, all hell broke loose. And the cynicism brought on by the Vietnam War had nothing to do with it. 

LP/SC: Hm, are you talking about all those "devil" movies that were around during the early 1970's?  Maybe what we considered "evil" before 1970 had a face and was associated with war and other people.  After 1970, movies presented us with another answer to the question of "evil."

There was also the question of the "evil" unleashed by those who society labeled as against the establishment.  But, today, we're taking a closer look at what it really means to be part of that establishment in terms of gender roles. 
Do you see gender bias in children's films?  Can you give us an example of this?

MO: I'm not sure that I'm qualified to answer this one. 

LP/SC: You're a dad; that's qualification enough.  It's you job to sit through hours of children's movies.  (smile)

MO: As far as I'm concerned, children's films today are so incredibly saccharine (perhaps because they all come out of the Disney mill?) and politically correct that my mind goes numb when I try to watch them. "The Little Mermaid"? Please. I can't even get my 2 ½ year-old daughter interested in this whitewashed crap. 

One exception: Chicken Run, which I took my nephew to see last summer. This film is not only a feminist battle cry; it's also an incredible Marxist oeuvre. Proletarian, egg-laying chickens ban together to destroy the bourgeois, pie-making machine. They end up in some kind of agrarian paradise--which is disappointing because they're all happy. We all know that eventually one of those birds would take power and oppress everyone else. 

Then a bald eagle would fly in and drop off some kind of fancy, processed chicken feed that would make them all want more food than they could possibly eat. Then they'd overthrow the leader, stop laying eggs, and spend the rest of their lives figuring out how to manufacture endless eggs with a single chicken gene. Or something like that. 

LP/SC: Or maybe they'd get fat and then get killed off by some giant pie manufacturing plant in Japan.  Maybe there's a Chicken Run 2 in the works.  I haven't seen this movie, but it IS interesting that it's the hens who are the stars.
What sort of far-reaching effect do you see in society due to the way gender is portrayed in films?

MO: I think that advertising -- particularly print advertising -- has a far more powerful role in creating impossible body images and in crystallizing gender roles than film does. People see the unknown models in ads as something real; we all know that movie stars are beautiful, so we don't consider them as realistic role models. The multiple unknowns in the magazines, however, are far more dangerous. 

LP/SC: If you saw a film that was made with a blurring of gender and you couldn't tell which character was male and which character was female, how would this affect your response to the story? 

MO: How exactly would you propose to do this? What if the entire film was made up of genderless "blue people"? Like the Blue Men who sold out to advertise Intel Pentium Chips. Wait a minute, didn't the Smurfs already do that? Hmmm ... Oh no, even they had their "smurfette." 

I guess this brings me to my answer. A film like this would seem alien because in order to pull it off, you would probably have to create some sort of fictional world in which humans do not exist or in which they have been morphed into hermaphrodites.  In any case, a film like this would be very difficult to relate to. We can't help but relate to people by their gender. Either by finding familiarity in the gender role they play, or in defining ourselves against the roles they play. Even films with animals and space aliens have gender elements. It's part of living in the world. A film without it would be extremely abstract, and much less enjoyable than the Smurfs.

LP/SC: Film is a social phenomenon just as gender roles are.  By removing this element, it's interesting to see how we relate and interact with what we watch.  It gives us as viewers the advantage of watching ourselves "watch" -- noticing how we're affected and why.  We adopt our way of living in the world based on our roles in society.  Most of the way we learn these roles is through films.

Have you ever not been able to do something you wanted to do because of your gender? 

MO: I can't really think of any examples. The only thing I can think of is my inability to write real feminist theory or criticism. I can only approach it as a "colonizer". I think I could write decent feminist criticism, but I would lack the confidence or credentials to go all the way with it.  If I were a woman, I could be really cocksure about it.