How and why do certain films make the viewer feel that they are being followed? Shonima N. analyses two recent Malayalam films to examine how they play with the male gaze to unsettle the spectator.
Shonima N.
In the movie Varathan [Outsider] (2018), when Priya (Aishwarya Lekshmi) walks through her ancestral home in a short sleeveless dress and the camera follows her closely behind, we as spectators are not voyeuristically watching her move. Instead, we are haunted by an unsettling feeling of being followed, even when we are the ones ostensibly following her. As she moves around and finally comes to realise that no one was actually following her, the anxiety that this scene produces in us makes us question the age-old male gaze offered by the camera and leaves us with many unsettling questions. Who was following Priya before she realised no one was following her? Are we the spectral gaze that followed her? If yes, then why were we not aware of its presence before realising that no one was actually following her? And most importantly, why does Priya’s realisation make us feel like we were also being followed?
To answer these, we have to take a detour to understand how the male gaze is constructed by the cinema camera and also examine the space occupied by the spectator in this construction. In this article, through the films Ozhivudivasathe Kali [A Holiday Game] (2015) and Varathan, I try to throw some light on the ways the male gaze is put in action and how the male gaze is subversively made to spill beyond the narrative through cinematic techniques.
The Classic Male Gaze
It is with Laura Mulvey’s seminal text ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ that the term ‘male gaze’ came into the common tongue. The male gaze tries to present women as sexual objects for the pleasure of the heterosexual male viewer. Considering the patriarchal dimension of spectatorship, Mulvey argues that the male gaze in film operates through three perspectives. The first perspective is that of the camera which records the events, the next perspective is of the audience who are complicit in the act of looking that the camera offers, and the last perspective is of the characters in the narrative who interact with each other. Film as a cultural form has managed to activate our deepest fantasies since its inception, and the question of the gaze continues to remain prominent in any film-viewing experience, particularly because the gaze offered by the cinema camera coincides with the spectator’s own gaze. This also means that if the film offers us a male gaze, which voyeuristically tries to devour a female body, then we as spectators are willingly or unwillingly forced to participate in it.
The 2015 film Ozhivudivasathe Kali is about five men from different backgrounds getting together for a booze party on a holiday in a remote house, attended by a lone female cook. In the first half of the film, we see the male gaze in action when the female cook Geetha (Abhija Sivakala) is being objectified through the male characters’ gazes framed by the camera. The first time we see Geetha is when she is sweeping the makeshift kitchen, but this scene does not activate the male gaze; the male characters are yet to see her, and the spectator is also provided only with a wide shot where the female subject is not close enough to offer anything to the (male) gaze. The first instance that enables the male gaze is when she gathers wood and is being watched from upstairs by one of the men who later comes down to talk in the hopes of prying into her private/sexual life. Later in the film, we are shown a similar scene when another one of them tries whistling to get at her. In the third instance, the most authoritative of the men, Dharman (Nisthar Sait, who also plays a role in Varathan), watches her from the balcony as she is stooped down doing her chores.
All these three scenes are composed of juxtaposed shots of the unaware, and thereby passive, cook and the voyeuristic gaze that is projected onto her by these men. There is also another scene where Dharman goes after Geetha as she is leaving and tries to molest her. Here, the voyeuristic male gaze turns into outright patriarchal dominance where the woman becomes an object to be physically conquered. Throughout the film, the narrative structure and the camera position are such that looking becomes an active male role and being looked at becomes the passive role embodied by the woman. Such a view ultimately frames the spectator as an effect of the cinematic apparatus, thus reinforcing patriarchal gender roles.
The Spectral Gaze
It is in the second half of Ozhivudivasathe Kali that the concept of the male gaze becomes complicated. As Geetha leaves at the end of the first half, angrily spurning their advances, the intoxicated men are left with no other source of distraction or entertainment. It is at this point that they decide to play the children’s game of kallanum policeum (thief and police) and it is through this game that their psyches begin to unwind in search of someone else to dominate. Under the pretext of the game, the group gangs up on Dasan (Baiju Netto), the only Dalit man in the group. Throughout the film, Dasan is made to feel like an outsider within the group of men. The others also objectify his Dalit body when they repeatedly make comments on his dark skin, assign him to do menial tasks, and make jibes at his political affiliation.
The functional basis of patriarchy is based on the social pairing of the passive-object woman and the active-spectator man. Here, the Dalit body assumes the passive-object position and the patriarchal function of the male gaze plays out on the marginalised body. Till now, patriarchal domination through the male gaze stays in the realm of narrative, especially at the point of interaction between the characters, and does not make itself explicitly known through the camera’s framing. This is because the voyeurism associated with the male gaze has to remain under the heterosexual masculine perspective. Any attempt at sexually objectifying the male Dalit body through the direct framing of the camera gaze would go beyond the heterosexual discourse and may collapse the whole structure of the male gaze itself. Yet, in the film’s final scenes, it is exactly the daunting task of collapsing the male gaze that the camera’s gaze tries to take up by becoming ‘spectral’.
At the end of the film, in the name of punishment for losing the game, the four other men strip Dasan and use his mundu as a noose to hang him from the balcony. It is in this scene that the camera turns momentarily voyeuristic—offering glimpses of Dasan being stripped—before turning into an anchorless gaze. The camera now offers a hauntingly floating perspective for the spectator where we assume the viewpoint of someone whom we cannot locate in the narrative at all. As the camera becomes increasingly detached from the characters, it fluidly hovers around like a ghostly presence with no one to anchor on. The camera floats through the house, passing a dozing man and a blaring TV, moves around the balcony, walks over to the gate on the upper floor, opens it to climb down the stairs and continues walking around, looking at the lush and peaceful surroundings, only to rest on the body of Dasan, stripped and hanging down from the upper balcony.
It is in these movements that we lose the role of the active spectator because we are unable to locate the camera’s gaze with any of the characters. This realisation disturbs the spectator because we now become fully aware of the spectre which was till now hovering around the periphery of the film. The eeriness surrounding the film throughout is reinforced through the context—the characters move into a lone house located far away from the bustling town—and also in the tone of the film that alludes to the presence of an unknown ‘other’, especially in the shots when we are shown something bubbling in the pond next to the house. The spectre remains dormant up until the end of the movie, with the camera offering us steady positions as observers. It is only at the end that we are jolted out of the steady positions we have been so accustomed to throughout the film. We realise anxiously that we are now taking up the perspective of someone who is not part of our filmic narrative, even though we are still in the narrative. The domination that the male gaze had been offering till now had placed the spectator in the active male role of looking, but when the spectral gaze comes in, we as spectators lose our active role of looking and dominating and become aware that someone else has been doing exactly that.
The All-Seeing Male Gaze
So, we come back to where we began and ask the question again: Why did we feel like we were being followed when we were the ones following Priya?
Much as we see in the climax of Ozhivudivasathe Kali, the spectral gaze that is offered in this scene of Varathan is a direct effect of the male gaze that has been pervading in the film from the very beginning. Priya becomes the central vantage point of the camera, not only through the number of eyes surveilling her with increasing intensity but also through the explicit portrayal of her uneasiness and discomfort. This puts the spectator in an equally anxious position from where we are forced to identify with both the voyeurs as well as the object of the voyeurism. Inside the house and away from the windows, we continue to feel her anxiety and fear of being watched as the camera skillfully follows behind her like a voyeur. The camera is a stalker and a palpable presence in Varathan; it traces her every step and follows Priya around like a spectre. The camera rarely rests comfortably next to her–in its movements, it always seems to track and haunt her, placing her in the position of the passive object (female) and the spectator in the active position (man) that offers the male gaze.
Unlike the perspective offered by the last scene of Ozhivudivasathe Kali where the spectral presence is very evident, in Varathan, the spectral presence makes itself known in a subtle yet distressing manner. As Priya is moving through the house, we think we are following the gaze of her stalkers, complicit in the male gaze. When it is revealed that no one in the narrative was following her, we realise that there was a spectral presence whose existence we discover only now. This spectral presence does not involve itself with the characters at the level of narrative, and the fact that we as spectators were not aware of its presence up until now confirms our suspicion that someone is indeed following us outside of the narrative. At this point, as in the last scenes of Ozhivudivasathe Kali, the male gaze and the spectral presence spills over the narrative and outside the film. The lack of an absolute point of origin for the gaze leaves the spectator in a position where we simultaneously take up the active male role of looking while being subjected to the passive female role of being looked at by an unknown other. When we follow Priya, we are being followed by the all-seeing male gaze, and there is no escaping it.
The camera that has been offering male gaze in both Varathan and Ozhivuduvasathe Kali moves beyond the narrative when it conjures up the spectral presence. This shift reminds us that the male gaze is a panopticon where everyone is being watched, even the spectators seemingly outside the camera’s gaze. The male gaze, like the panopticon, has a disciplinary power associated with it. It is in the presence of any disciplining power that a subject becomes subservient. The disciplinary power of male gaze that the camera offers us in these films reminds us of our own subordination and complicity as spectators caught up in the narrative. The spectral gaze takes this up a notch and offers the spectators a self-reflexiveness which enables us to think about what it means to be subjects of power in a society–how much we are subject to someone else by control and dependence, and how much we are subject to the conscience and identity that we have created for ourselves.
References:
- Varathan. Directed by Amal Neerad, Performances by Fahadh Faasil and Aishwarya Lekshmi, A & A Release, 2018.
- Ozhivudivasathe Kali. Directed by Sanal Kumar Sasidharan, Performances by Nisthar Sait, Baiju Netto, Abhija Sivakala et al, Bigdream release, 2015.
- Mulvey, Laura. 1999. ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’. In Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, 833-844. New York: Oxford University Press.
About the Author: Shonima N. is a PhD student at the Department of Cultural Studies, The English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad. Her research is focused on south Indian film cultures and Malayalam cinema. She can be reached at shonimanandakumar[at]gmail.com.
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