During the home invasion scene, how is the spectator implicit in the attack?
During the home invasion sequence, the spectator is given a range of different angled shots, including several point of view shots from the male victim, essentially being denied that of the female throughout. The female victim, who remains nameless in the scene, is dominated physically by the droogs, who are easily able overpower her in order to assault her, gaining sexual gratification from this power assertion. However, this is not the only way in which the woman is controlled in this scene.
At the start of the scene, when the doorbell rings, the female is instructed to answer the door by her husband, who clearly has a level of mental dominance over her, and from this point forth, every move she makes is dictated by a male. Her assault is posed as more of an attack on her husband, as they ransack his home and use his wife like the "possession" she is perceived to be by all of the characters within this scene. This is linked to the Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema theory by Laura Mulvey, who states that women are passive to the actions of men within cinema, and are posed as objects of sexual fantasy to both an interior and exterior audience.
For this reason, the spectator is encouraged to take a somewhat voyeuristic view of the attack as it happens. To implicate this idea of sexual gratification from the attack, the female is stripped slowly, revealing her body in sections to turn her into a fetishised object. Along with this, her face in the final shot of the assault has the potential to suggest a certain level of pleasure in the attack. Through these techniques, Kubrick allows the spectator the point of view of committing an assault, but never experiencing one, making the spectator implicit in the attack should they continue watching.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.