Macharey, post class

In our classroom discussion of Macharey, I thought that his suggestion that there is always something more to say than what is initially presented helps to demonstrate the ambiguity of language. With this ambiguity, there is also the possibility of multiple interpretations from multiple perspectives in which the individual has the ability to make his own choices and create his own meaning from the language in what is presented as well as what is not presented. However, what really caught my attention in this discussion was the topic of the camera, in which the plotline is put in the hands of the director and the camera allows for only one interpretation for the audience to follow. With one shot comes one perspective, and no longer is the choice left to the writer, but instead, the choice is made by what shots are presented, from what angles, and in what context. In the end, the camera chooses for you. This idea immediately reminded me of Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” and her notion of the “male gaze”. The camera supports the “male gaze” and the concept of “voyeurism” in which film is catered to the male gender and is based on the assumption that the audience is a heterosexual male. The audience member has no choice but to take on this assumption, assuming a role of the voyeuristic male who is “doing” the looking. On the other hand, the female is put on display for the male spectator and is set up as a passive object to be admired and to be manipulated in a role of inferiority. Unlike an open literary text that allows for playful interpretation based on the individual reader, the advent of the camera and film initially supported only one main perspective that played on stereotypical gender hierarchies and gender relationships to be read from a mainstream position. Fortunately, with such things as feminist theory there allows for the possibility of an oppositional read that could open the doors for multiple interpretations.