Max Op(h)uls Fashions Femininity

GAYLYN STUDLAR Max Op(h)uls Fashions Femininity As PAM cook and other feminist film scholars have argued, costuming is a neglected but important element of mise-en-scène in the cinema (41; Gaines 7). This relative neglect is an overdetermined phenomenon: costuming is often regarded as tangential rather than central to the creation of received meaning; it is associated with frivolous "feminine" ornamentation rather than with a serious "masculine" narrative; there is also the perception that costuming is subordinate to other more dominant and transparent carriers ofnarrative and meaning that have well-established critical vocabularies to describe them. Even within feminist film criticism, the relative neglect of costuming may be related to the perception that the specifics of costuming are not worth looking at very carefully since their broader functions seem so obvious. In this line of thinking, costuming is largely a tool for women's oppression : it satisfies the fetishistic gaze of the male and turns the woman into a fetish object. Laura Mulvey implicitly articulates this theoretical position on costuming in her seminal 1975 article, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," when she argues for the fetishistic effect of the female image on film's male spectators (6-18). According to Mulvey, all (heterosexual) males who view the cinema function psychologically as fetishists who, according to Freud, require a fetish in order to make the "castrated" woman into an "acceptable" sexual object. The fetish is the object through which the male subject holds at bay his knowledge of the woman's anxiety-provoking castration. The woman's castration is disavowed in an "I know but nevertheless" psychological formula that follows the pattern first set in childhood when the boy discovers the mother's castration and disavows it with a magical formula that attributes a phallus to the mother through the fetish: "In this fetish she has a Arizona Quarterly Volume 60, Number 5, Special Issue 2004 Copyright © 2004 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-1610 66 Gaylyn Studhr phallus" (Freud 215-17). Mulvey's theory of the cinematic function of the woman's body logically extends to costuming as part of cinema's fetishistic treatment of women. Her argument makes all spectators participate in the gaze ofthe psycho-sexually anxious male. For him, alone, suggests Mulvey, the cinema—and female costuming—is constructed. Mulvey's views on male spectatorship in relation to the cinematic image of woman have been subject to extensive revision in the intervening years, with some theorists (including myself), arguing that the woman, even as fetish, is not necessarily just the passive object of the male's controlling, sadistic, and voyeuristic gaze (Studlar, in the Realm 38-41; Gaines 23; White 143-44). Theories incorporating notions of the masquerade that draw on the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan and/or Joan Riviere have also incorporated a consideration of costuming , in that they examine the process whereby the woman uses the signs of "womanliness." Those signs include those provided by costuming as well as social behavior as the means of disguising the fact that the woman has masculine attributes (intellect, assertiveness, etc.) for which she might be punished by patriarchal society (Doane, Femmes 17-32, 33-43)· In some film theory formulations of the masquerade, women's assumption of costuming is offered as a way of changing identity and confusing the male gaze. Costuming is implicated in women's appropriation of something originally intended to fix their identity, erotically and socially. Instead of fixing identity, costuming helps in the process of transforming femininity into a triumphant transgression of identity categories (Studlar, "Masochism" 229-49; Cook 43-46). Nevertheless, inescapable is the basic observation that costuming in the cinema functions generally to build up the beauty of the woman, especially that of the female star, to make her an attractive sexual object to the male. However, as I will argue in this essay, the situation can be more complex than this generalization may lead us to assume—even in classical Hollywood cinema. At this point, it is important to define two key terms. Costume and fashion are not synonymous. They are obviously both terms that apply to clothes, and they are both designed products, but fashion...