Don't Gaze Now: The Male Gaze and Self-Reflexivity in Don't Look Now
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Don’t Gaze Now:
The Male Gaze and Self-Reflexivity
in Don’t Look Now
EDDY WANG
Eddy Wang was born a philosopher. At some point
in his life, he discovered cinema. Hypnotized by the
images he saw, he felt his conception of himself as a
philosopher disintegrate. Eddy decided the only way
to maintain a consistent ego was to think philosophy
through cinema and cinema through philosophy.
333
DON’T LOOK NOW (1973) directed by Nicolas Roeg positions a straight,
white, cismale, John Baxter, as the protagonist of its diegesis. However,
looks can be deceiving. Don’t Look Now is a work of counter cinema that
employs the male gaze, as theorized by Laura Mulvey, only to critique
and negate it. The film offers an example of alternative cinema Mulvey
postulates at the start of her seminal essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative
Cinema.” In other words, Don’t Look Now “conceive[s] a new language
of desire” by “leaving the past behind without rejecting it, transcending
outworn or oppressive forms” (Mulvey 8). Surprisingly, the film denies
voyeuristic scopophilia and complicates narcissistic scopophilia,
particularly through its self-reflexive representation of temporality
displayed in the photographs of the church and John’s dead body.
Through its rejection of voyeuristic and narcissistic scopophilia, the film
eschews the sadistic and fetishistic paradigms of female representation
to thereby provide a new way of imagining the world (Polan 670).
In addition to Mulvey’s insights on the male gaze, Dana Polan’s “A
Brechtian Cinema? Towards A Politics of Self-Reflexive Film” provides
insight into how self-reflexivity in Don’t Look Now succeeds in imagining
the alternative cinema Mulvey contemplates. Thus, examining Don’t
Look Now through the lens of both Mulvey and Polan reveals first, that
the film estranges the voyeuristic and narcissistic modes of scopophilia
that male-centric films commonly operate on, and second, how that
estrangement occurs through its self-reflexive operations of temporality
that fissure both the film’s form and narrative—to thereby facilitate the
film’s women characters means to transcend the oppressive roles they
1 My use of the word “men,” “male,” and “male gaze” do not refer to the universal category of men qua
men. For example, gay and racialized men have a different relationship to the gaze than straight white
men. Not all men participate in the “male gaze.” Furthermore, women can be conduits for the male gaze
in films. More so, my use of “men” and “male gaze” is a catch-all term to refer to an oppressor who confers
an identity on women defined by their lack of a penis. This forceful imposition of an identity by the
oppressor on women becomes the source of anxiety, eroticization, and violence against representations
of women for that oppressor object of the look (11).
34DON’T GAZE NOW
occupy.
Before embarking on an analysis of Don’t Look Now, unpacking
Mulvey’s terminology is necessary. Mulvey’s feminist theory responds to
Christian Metz’s apparatus theory. Notably, Metz claims that cinematic
identification operates on two levels. Primary identification occurs
when the spectator identifies with the “pure act of perception” (Metz
51), while secondary identification arises when the spectator identifies
with the contents of the film (50). While Mulvey builds on Metz, she
understands that identification transpires from a male perspective that
posits women as castrated. Mulvey uses psychoanalytic language in
order to explore a theory of pleasure and unpleasure that lies within the
nexus of the male gaze and female representation in films. For Mulvey,
men1 define women by their lack of penises (Mulvey 6). As a result, for
men, women are “a threat of castration and hence unpleasure” (13). To
escape this castration anxiety, women are either punished/forgiven or
fetishized (14). In other words, the woman either dies/is arrested (i.e.,
punished) or repents (i.e., asks for forgiveness), or becomes the subject
of over-valuation. The fulfillment of both “ascertaining guilt” (14) and
turning the woman into an object of fetishism results in pleasure for the
male. In this way, women are both the source of unpleasure and pleasure
for men.
For Mulvey, the cinema provides the pleasures of both voyeuristic
scopophilia and narcissistic scopophilia (9-10). The term voyeuristic
scopophilia is defined as the pleasure an individual derives from watching
someone who is unaware that the specific individual is watching them
(9), while narcissistic scopophilia is described as the pleasure one derives
from recognizing and misrecognizing themselves in the image on the
screen (10). These two types of scopophilia have a gendered connotation.
Voyeuristic scopophilia turns the female character into the object that is
watched, while narcissistic scopophilia erects the male character as the
person in whom the spectator identifies with on the screen (11). Thus,
man becomes the active bearer of the look and subsequently the active
agent in the narrative, while woman becomes the passive.
Don’t Look Now mobilizes the male gaze to structure its narrative and
provide spectator identification, but then denounces that gaze as the
film progresses. In the film, the character John Baxter is the active agent
of the narrative with whom the spectator identifies, both the object of
John’s gaze and the source of his anxiety originate from the women
around him. First, John spends a large portion of the film actively
looking for his wife. He is the active force the normative male spectator
narcissistically identifies with, while his wife, Laura, is the passive
35EDDY WANG
object the spectator voyeuristically looks for. Second, John experiences
anxiety from Heather, a blind psychic character’s ability to see the dead
and foretell the future. Heather causes John to be anxious because she
reminds him of his ability to see the future and thus to interrupt his gaze
in the present. Similar to how psychoanalytic theorists propose that the
sight of women make men anxious because her lack of a penis suggests to
a man that he could lose his penis, so too John’s unease about Heather’s
psychic abilities reminds John that other temporal spaces can intrude
upon his vision, thus taking control of his ability to gaze freely. In other
words, the presence of Heather castrates John’s control over his gaze.
In order to dispel this anxiety, John—and therefore the spectator
who narcissistically identifies with John—demands that Heather be
sadistically punished. The film complies with this demand and Heather
is jailed. But then our narrative expectations get disrupted. John realizes
his misdeed, asks for forgiveness, and arrives at Heather’s jail cell to escort
her back to her hotel. Afterwards, John spots the elusive, mysterious red-
coated woman and, by following his gaze, he is “punished” and killed by
her. Therefore, the film appears to posit its narrative on the male demand
to punish women/have women ask for forgiveness, but then flips the
narrative at the film’s end to suggest that John (the male) was indeed
wrong and that he needs to ask for forgiveness for getting anxious over
women. Relatedly, he is punished for looking and pursuing his persistent
gaze towards a woman. Thus, the film rejects the normative mode by
which males deal with the unpleasure female presence provokes.
Additionally, the film formally denies voyeuristic scopophilia’s
fetishization of women. For example, voyeuristic scopophilia in the sex
scene between John and Laura is circumvented by intercuts between
the performance of intercourse and the post-coitus activity of dressing
for dinner. Prior to the scene, Laura disrobes for a bath; we would
conventionally expect a male character, like John, to gaze at Laura’s
nude body in an act of voyeuristic scopophilia. Instead, John joins Laura
in her nakedness. This egalitarian display of nudity privileges neither
male nor female as sex objects. As the music rises to crescendo we realize
that Laura’s sexual presence is not defined by her ability to pleasure
John. Instead, the couple engage in a process of mutual lovemaking—
this notably includes John preforming oral sex on Laura—dismantling
the “sexual imbalance” that Mulvey claims traditionally reduces
women to a conduit of “male desire” (Mulvey 11). On the formal level, by
intercutting post-coitus activity with sex acts, the spectator is robbed of
voyeuristic scopophilia; Don’t Look Now does not freeze action in “erotic
contemplation” (11), but instead, continues to reveal its story while
36DON’T GAZE NOW
representing sex acts. Interrupting sex on screen with additional visual
information that one must process challenges one’s erotic indulgence in
the cinematic image.
At the same time, the spectator may still derive pleasure on the screen
from the “pure act of perception” (Metz 51). The crosscuts between sex
and post-coitus activity are elegantly put together, making the editing of
the film a site of viewer fascination. In this way, one could argue that Don’t
Look Now’s “new language of desire” (Mulvey 8) erases the gendered
bias of the gaze, but preserves the pleasure of looking. In this sense, the
film “[plays] off our connections to [the] world” (Polan 670) in order
to pleasurably “defamiliarize the world” (670). Instead of procuring a
negative feminist aesthetic that Mulvey maintains denies the spectator
of the gaze, Don’t Look Now foregrounds the act of looking to such excess
that it breaks down the “patriarchal unconscious” (Mulvey 6) from within.
In the service of dismantling the “patriarchal unconscious,” photographs
are self-reflexively mobilized, suggestive of competing temporal orders,
that, in Polan’s terminology, imagine a new world (670). Thus, Don’t
Look Now challenges our understanding of cinema by elevating the
photograph to an enigmatic object. There are two instances when a
photograph operates to confuse our understanding of the normative
temporal fabric of the filmic medium. First, a photograph of a church is
introduced at the film’s beginning as an enigmatic object crucial to the
narrative. It establishes the query “what does this photograph mean?”
as well as its self-reflexive corollary “what do photographs mean?” Only
at the film’s conclusion do we realize that John dies in the same location
where the photograph was taken, and that the blood that oozes from the
picture is his own blood. Second, a temporally mismatched photograph
of John depicted as dead is in evidence on the investigator’s desk while
John reports that Laura is missing. At first viewing, one might miss the
strategic placing of this photograph, but it is nevertheless underscored
when it appears again in John’s death scene. In this way, the photograph
reveals an unsettling dimension of a future that exists in the present.
Whereas a look is subject to delusion (i.e., some of what John sees could
be a figment of his imagination), this particular photograph signals a
snapshot of an event that really happened (or, in this case, will happen).
Truth-value is thus assigned to a photo that is not assigned to looking. As
a result, the eerie presence of the future in the photographs present in
the film signals a world in which the male, and the spectator, cannot make
sense of now. When John takes out the photograph of the church during
dinner and stares at it, we realize that the photograph forces him and the
viewer to contemplate its meaning as opposed to inscribing a (sexist)
37EDDY WANG
meaning to it through the gaze. Simply put, the photograph conveys that
there is a mystery to the machinations of cinema: an unreachable place
beyond the male gaze.
Both photographs indicate that the cinematic image is ungraspable
for both John and the spectator; the photographs indicate that films
are not necessarily bound to representing linear time continuously.
The narrative discloses that John, the architect, penned a book entitled
Beyond the Fragile Geometry of Space, indicating that he comprehends
that photographs (and relatedly, the cinema) can transcend space. When
he sees red spill on the photograph of the church, he is immediately
cognizant that his daughter Christine is in danger outside their house.
However, John does not grasp how the photograph is temporally
capacious; it can make time fluid. The twist at the film’s end rests on the
assumption that the spectator believes that the photograph resides in a
strict linear temporal order. At the film’s conclusion, it is revealed that
a photograph can represent a future event. As a result, the assumption
that the camera only records the present problematizes the patriarchal
unconscious of the camera’s gaze. While the male gaze tames space—the
man sexualizes the woman even if they occupy different spaces—time
eludes the male gaze. The male gaze can ‘suture’ a dislocated space;
a viewer watching images of a woman flash by might get increasingly
anxious of who is gazing at said woman. When a film sutures, that is,
stitches into the fabric of the fiction—a viewer looking at a woman—the
viewer’s anxiety of looking at that woman is put into relief. Guilt about
engaging in fetishistic looking is thus abated because it is not them
looking, but the male gaze. In its forging of opposing temporalities, Don’t
Look Now does not allow us to disavow anxieties of looking, but forces us
to confront them and their patriarchal assumptions.
This temporal property of cinema is underscored in the scene that
crosscuts the act of sex with the future event of dressing for dinner.
The male gaze cannot engage in the voyeuristic act of looking at sexual
activity while also processing the narrative information about dressing
for dinner. If the erotic presence of a woman (in this case Laura)
traditionally “freeze[s] the flow of action” (Mulvey 11), Don’t Look Now
unfreezes “erotic contemplation” (11), by ushering in the future during
the sex scene. Instead of “combin[ing] spectacle and narrative” (11) to
keep narrative consistency (12), the film cuts back and forth between
spectacle and narrative, effectively undermining both as processes of
female objectification. The sex scene and the narrative act of dressing
for dinner cannot be ‘combined’ because they exist in a fragmented
temporal order. At the same time, the sex scene cannot exist outside
38DON’T GAZE NOW
of time because the future event of dressing for dinner encourages the
spectator to consider the film’s temporality. One can also argue that the
narrative itself, which details John’s gradual mental decline, disrupts
the male gaze. The reliability of John’s look becomes questionable when
he unwittingly sees his own funeral. Only through the openness of time
does the possibility that John could be mistaken about the sisters—and
Laura’s belief in their authenticity—emerge. This casting of doubt—that
John is possibly mistaken—invariably produces a critique of the male
gaze.
If films “are contracts” (Polan 665) with viewers, promising that
everything shown on screen happens in a specific order dictated by the
logic of linearity, then Don’t Look Now breaks its contract. As Polan
argues, by breaking the filmic contract and transgressing the system, art
is able to expand its own codes (665). In this way, the photographs that
bend temporality are self-reflexive in Polan’s sense because they “[define]
the process of art” (666). Self-reflexive art reinvents the rules of art, and
the self-reflexive photographs in this film reinvent a cinema which is
not bounded by linear time. For Brecht, as cited by Polan, showing the
possibilities for a new alternative is pleasurable (670). Based on Polan’s
filmic contract there is an assumption that films cannot show future
events in the present, but by the film’s conclusion the possibility that “the
world can be remade” (670) is suggested by virtue of this new temporal
dimension. Relatedly, the pleasure is also derived from knowing that a
sex scene can “[do] things never thought possible” (Polan 670): firstly,
that film can represent cunnilingus, an underrepresented act in popular
film, and secondly, that it can represent a future event simultaneously
during a sex scene.
Not only do the film’s self-reflexive photographs speculate new
temporal potentialities of cinema, but they also offer new possibilities
for female subjectivity. The tension between the woman who “freeze[s]
the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation” (Mulvey 11) and
the demand for narrative progression result in the teleological demand
for her punishment. This punishment depends on temporal linearity.
The woman only needs to be punished if her erotic display occurs in the
past. However, if time is disordered, then the male gaze loses its power
to punish the woman. As such, one of the ways the male gaze ends up
constituting the subjectivity of women is put in disarray, resulting in the
potential for women characters to explore their subjectivity in ways that
needn’t abide by the logic of a male gaze punisher. Near the conclusion
of Don’t Look Now, after it is discovered that John’s male gaze is not a
reliable source of knowledge production, Heather is freed from her role
39EDDY WANG
as the stereotypical suspicious female psychic. The question no longer
resides in whether or not Heather is going to be “punished” by John,
because John no longer has the grounds to punish; instead, Heather can
express her subjectivity on her own terms. Heather and John are able to
have a tender conversation as John walks her back to her hotel, where
John listens to Heather describing her life experiences. In addition to
such “softening,” the normative assumption that John is supposed to
rescue Laura, as a damsel-in-distress, is reversed: Laura takes on the role
of rescuing John, searching the city for him. John, in losing his power to
determine the subjectivity of women, loses his ability to take on the role
of savior figure. The film’s self-reflexive form allows for the potential to
break with sedimented tropes. In breaking the damsel-in-distress trope,
Laura is given the space to express her own subjectivity, as opposed to
having her narrative function determined by the demands that the male
gaze imposes.
In conclusion, the representation of other temporalities in the
photographs displayed in Don’t Look Now imagines the possibility of a
world where the relations between men and women are not based on
voyeuristic and narcissistic scopophilia. Indeed, these photographs that
represent future events push the limits of what cinema as a medium can
show. The possibility of having the future in the present allows women
on screen to be freed from the male gaze. As seen in the film’s sex scene,
voyeuristic scopophilia is dismantled through the cross-cutting of
present and future events in order to deny the spectator an unmediated
access to the woman as a fetish object. Likewise, narcissistic scopophilia
is negated when the male gaze is shown to be insufficient in making
sense of the fluidity of time. The female characters of Don’t Look Now
escape the sadistic demands of the narrative because the male gaze is
under suspicion, losing the authority to dictate female subjectivity in a
world where the future is conjoined with the present. All in all, the male
gaze cannot even look now with “sentimental regret” (Mulvey 18) at the
creation of a new visual pleasure in narrative cinema.
40DON’T GAZE NOW
Works Cited
Metz, Christian. “The Imaginary Signifier.” Screen, vol. 16, no. 2, 1975, pp.
14–76.
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen, vol. 16,
no. 3, 1975, pp. 6–18.
Polan, Dana. “A Brechtian Cinema? Toward a Politics of Self-Reflexive
Film.” Movies and Methods II, edited by Bill Nichols, University of
California Press, 1985, pp. 661-672.
Filmography
Roeg, Nicholas, director. Don’t Look Now. British Lion Films, 1973.
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