The practice and politics of "freeing the look": Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs

Camera Obscura

Volumn 18, Issue 2, 2003, Pages 125-150

  Schopp, Andrew ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60950269794     PISSN: 02705346     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/02705346-18-2_53-125     Document Type: Review

References (29)

1. Demme's film is adapted from Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs (New York: St. Martin's, 1988).
2. Julie Tharp, "The Transvestite As Monster: Gender Horror in The Silence of the Lambs and Psycho," Journal of Popular Film and Television 19.3 (1991): 106-13;
3. Elizabeth Young, "The Silence of the Lambs and the Flaying of Feminist Theory," Camera Obscura 27 (1991): 18.
4. David Sundelson, "The Demon Therapist and Other Dangers: Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs," Journal of Popular Film and Television 21.1 (1993): 12-17.
5. Carol Watts, "From Looking to Coveting: The 'American Girl' in The Silence ofthe Lambs" Women: A Cultural Review 4.1 (1993): 72.
6. Diane Negra, "Coveting the Feminine: Victor Frankenstein, Norman Bates, and Buffalo Bill," Literature Film Quarterly 24.2 (1996): 193-200;
7. Stephanie Wardrop, "They Don't Have a Name for It Yet: Patriarchy, Gender, and Meat-Eating in Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs," LLT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory 5.1 (1994): 95-105.
8. Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 163.
9. Thomas Harris, Hannibal (New York: Delacorte, 1999).
10. Young, "The Silence of the Lambs" 7.
11. Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Screen 16.3 (1975): 18.
12. Halberstam, Skin Shows, 166. Halberstam makes specific reference to Valerie Traub's exploration of a queer gaze and to studies by Judith Mayne and Teresa De Lauretis that examine various aspects of a female gaze.
13. Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure," 16.
14. Linda Williams, "When the Woman Looks," in Re-Vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism, ed. Linda Williams, Mary Ann Doane, and Patricia Mellencamp (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1984), 83.
15. See Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983).
16. Mary Ann Doane, "Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator," Screen 23.3-4 (1982): 74-88;
17. Gaylyn Studlar, "Masochism and the Perverse Pleasures of the Cinema," in Film Theory and Criticism, Introductory Readings, ed. Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen, and Leo Braudy, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 773-90.
18. Williams, "When the Woman Looks," 83.
19. Carol J. Clover, Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992).
20. 13; In most slasher films, this fictional subject position meets the criteria Mulvey sets forth for the classic female object - beautiful, stylized, often fragmented, and the direct recipient of the spectator's look (Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure," 14).
21. Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure," 18.
22. For an explanation of the shot/reverse shot technique, see Silverman, Subject, 201-2.
23. Stephen Heath claims that editing processes constitute merely one of many techniques - for example, camera movement, movement within frame, offscreen sound, and framing - that create this sense of "lack" (Stephen Heath, "Notes on Suture," Screen 18.4 [1977-78]: 66).
24. For a further discussion of these phases, see Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage, 1988), 263.
25. Wardrop, "They Don't Have a Name for It Yet," 104.
26. Watts, "From Looking to Coveting," 68-69.
27. Mulvey's assertion that the only remedies for castration anxiety are punishment and fetishizing suggests that the male gaze desires a kind of violence enacted on the female object. Doane and Williams both clarify that the female who looks inhabits the "male" position and sees what he sees. Doane, "Film and the Masquerade," 83;
28. Williams, "When the Woman Looks," 85.
29. Wardrop, "They Don't Have a Name for It Yet," 101.