SOURCE: "Why Does Oharu Faint? Mizoguchi's 'The Life of Oharu' and Patriarchal Discourse," in Reframing Japanese Cinema: Authorship, Genre, History, edited by Arthur Nolletti, Jr., and David Desser, Indiana University Press, 1992, pp. 3-55.

[In the following essay, Cohen interprets Mizoguchi's portrayal of the plight of women in Japan in his film The Life of Oharu using the Western concept of patriarchal control, concluding that Mizoguchi created a "fractured" character in Oharu, which strengthens rather than weakens the patriarchy he set out to question.]

There is little doubt today in the West that Mizoguchi's most important subject has been the plight of the Japanese woman. At the same time, we realize that Mizoguchi was a director of commercial films, and consequently, that his work represents an institutional discourse, the structure and ideology of which inform this subject matter. Thus in view of the general feeling that the women in his films are essentially powerless to affect their lives in the narratives, the concept of patriarchy offers a way to discuss the limitations placed on them at the level of discourse. It is here that we can approach the apparent ambiguities of his films and ask questions concerning the sources of pleasure in his texts, the function of women as object and icon, and the subjective positioning of both male and Cernale characters.

It is, therefore, the purpose of this essay to apply the Western theory of patriarchy to one of Mizoguchi's most prominent films about women, The Life of Oharu (Saikaku ichidai onna, Shin Toho, 1952). This late film seems especially suited for such an analysis, not only because the common interpretation of the film becomes increasingly doubtful under such scrutiny, but also because Oharu is an example of Mizoguchi's film style at its most enigmatic. It is largely a work in the director's characteristic style (long takes, great camera-to-subject distances, editing strategies based on a ninety-degree rule), but more important, it also includes several instances of the shot/reverse shot, which establishes a specific character point of view, and which is almost nonexistent in Mizoguchi's other films. What is most significant, of course, is that the reverse shot is the linchpin of classical Western film and the most fundamental structure of patriarchal discourse as it has been defined in Western film theory. Therefore, an evaluation of the ways the reverse shot functions in Oharu will tell us how well the film either confirms or contradicts the patriarchal implications underlying the Western film, whose conventions the Japanese understood so well.

The fate of Mizoguchi's heroine, for example, at the end of Oharu exemplifies the precarious interpretation that critics have offered for Oharu's becoming the itinerant priest. It is the consensus of opinion that Oharu triumphs in her unwitting battle to overcome an oppressive society. She is said to "transcend" her life on earth, and in Audie Bock's phrase, as the priest Oharu "prays for all humanity." Clearly this spiritual victory is one that is exclusively reserved for women in Mizoguchi, and in a revealing passage Dudley and Paul Andrew associate it with die woman's special vision.

Most frequently, the women in Mizoguchi's films scream with their glance. … They see through the system, through the audience, into the structure of an impersonal cosmos. Revolt thus leads the way to a kind of stoic contemplation, which in his late films Mizoguchi seemed to prize beyond all other goals.

The woman's access to vision notwithstanding, it is one of the functions of patriarchy to position women as objects of contemplation, as symbols for what they lack in the signifying structures of the narratives. Men , Dudley Andrew and Paul Andrew tell us, "initiate the actions … carry on the way of the world … are suited for action, progress." According to the theory of patriarchy, however, it is as active subjects of the discourse that men become the controllers of the look and vision that functions to objectify women as passive objects. It is, therefore, hard to maintain the view that Oharu triumphs at the end of the film when to achieve this position she is kept passive in the discourse, denied a sexual identity at the end of the film, and made to assume the guilt of others.

In the West, patriarchy has been a major subject of feminist theory for at least fifteen years. For this study, however, the works of two authors are especially important: Laura Mulvey and her pioneering essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," and Mary Ann Doane, particularly The Desire to Desire. The former essay and its subsequent elaborations have established the "system of the look" as the basic cinematic figure by which patriarchy structures male desire in the Western film and positions women as both "masculine spectators" and feminine objects of the screen spectacle. It is the essential instability of such structures of subject positioning and desire which has led feminist critics particularly to the issues that Doane addresses—namely, the characteristics of melo-drama conceived as a specific kind of patriarchal discourse where women are defined primarily in relation to forms of narcissism and neurosis. Doane's work in this area is exemplary for what it allows us to observe about Oharu's psychopathology and in relation to the unique tension between the forms of audience identification and distance that characterize many of the director's films.

Since psychoanalysis forms the basis of these concepts and their application, it is important to point out initially that there are at least two related aspects of Mizoguchi's film that have profound psychoanalytic consequences: Oharu's failed search for a stable identity, and the fact that she faints three times over the course of the narrative. Oharu traces the fall of the title character from her exalted life as a court lady through the separate strata of seventeenth-century Japanese society until she lands as a common street prostitute. Told largely in flashback from Oharu's point of view, the story portrays her life as a series of crises in which she is unable to establish herself in any socially defined role, whether it be as mother, daughter, wife, geisha, concubine, or nun. The flashback of these events culminates in Oharu's fainting for the last time. The convergence of these two occurrences thus authorizes an interpretation based on their cause-effect relationship, whereby Oharu's fainting must be seen as a reaction to the form and the content of her memory. Such a radical response on the woman's part suggests a desire to avoid deep-seated anxieties caused by the knowledge that her sense of self is not stable or secure. In Freudian terms, Oharu's predicament is succinctly described by Philip Rosen in the following passage:

Primary experiences of identity are constructed against a radical anxiety, summarized as castration anxiety. Processes of desire, sexuality, and fantasy are intertwined with consciousness of self, which is produced to counter against the founding anxiety and is always in dialectic with it. As a result, the normal experience of identity occurs only on condition that its basic processes are hidden from the " I " thus constructed. This is an essential Freudian point: There is always a fundamental misrecognition involved in the individual's desire to find—or recognize—his or her self as stable and secure.

Accordingly, Oharu's fainting at the end of the flashback represents the failure of this process of "misrecognition." Since fainting itself is often taken as a corollary for blindness where the individual displaces a perceived psychic threat onto the site of the body, Oharu's fainting can be taken as a neurotic response to her memory where castration anxiety threatens to enter the text at the end of the flashback. The woman's narration of her past therefore can be analyzed as Oharu's Oedipal journey, and her fainting suggests its irresolution. Patriarchy, however, has a stake in the outcome of the discourse, and it is through this influence that the Hollywood film regularly represses the full expression of woman's sexual identity. Similarly, in Mizoguchi's film we will try to apprehend an analogous system of patriarchal influences that can explain the repression of the Japanese woman and the conversion of her body into the symptoms of her cinematic illness.

In the Hollywood film, patriarchy asserts itself most conspicuously through the subordination of the female characters by the controlling gaze of the male. According to Laura Mulvey, because men are the central characters of most Hollywood films, it is through an identification with the male protagonist that the spectator enters the action of a film. Point of view, and particularly the shot/reverse shot, place men in a position to control the narrative by possessing the gaze that marks them as subjects who look and women as objects to be looked at. Pleasure is established for the character, and by identification for the spectator, in looking at women as objects of a male desire. Men thus actively control women and the narrative by controlling the look.

In Oharu, there are two series of reverse shots that position Oharu as the subject of the look, and both bracket the woman's flashback. In the opening sequence in the famous hall of Buddhas, there are four shots of Oharu looking at the statues intercut with three point-of-view shots of what she sees. In the last, her gaze rests on one statue, and over this figure the face of Katsunosuke, her first lover, is superimposed twice. At the end of the flash-back, we have a similar series of POV [point of view] shots that establish Oharu in relation to the statues. From a medium long shot of Oharu inside the hall, there are two shots of her looking at the statues and two PO V shots of what she sees. In the second, the statues go out of focus, and in the following shot of recognition, Oharu projects a great sense of fear and then she faints.

In these examples Oharu assumes the position of the subject, whose look objectifies the man, Katsunosuke. According to these series of shots, we have two potentially subversive moments within the discourse if it is actually being governed by the laws of patriarchy. Ac cording to Mulvey's characterization of the woman in patriarchy as possessing a "to-be-looked-at-ness," Oharu's active look constitutes a reversal. There are several issues, however, in Oharu which govern the woman's access to the look and foreground her essential "to-be-looked-at" position. Most of these center around the polarities set up in the text between the possibilities of seeing and being seen.

First off, the interior of the temple acts as a certain haven for Oharu, given the fact that throughout the film she is forever being banished from place to place, turned out, as it were, from areas associated^wjth stability and belonging to those scarcely offering safe repose. It is in this inner chamber that Oharu has her fullest access to vision. It is here, too, that she has access to her memory, which recalls her past and her relationship with Katsunosuke, the retainer of lesser rank, who is beheaded for his affair with her. Therefore, there is little doubt that Oharu's gaze inside the temple is an erotic look that sets up her pleasure as a major signifying element of the text. Simultaneously, it is Oharu's very access to vision and the accessibility of her past, of Katsunosuke, and her self, which are rendered problematic throughout the film. This is clearly specified in Oharu's gesture of ceremoniously removing her scarf during the first temple scene, at the precise moment she realizes that one of the Buddhist statues reminds her of Katsunosuke. Here she reveals herself openly and freely for the first time in contrast to the opening shots of the film where, as a common street prostitute, Oharu conspicuously keeps her face hidden.

The contrast further reveals not only that the film will be about Oharu's inner journey, but also that her desire for knowledge will take precedence over her relations with the world around her. This is clearly specified through the inner/outer dichotomy where outside the temple Oharu recoils from her feminine position as someone who is seen—the prostitute who shuns revealing her face—but inside, she actively positions herself as the subject who sees. Since the text establishes that this latter desire is indistinguishable from Oharu's desire for Katsunosuke, her self-image is inexplicably bound up with him. Oharu's position in the text at the threshold of memory thus places her as the voyeur, as someone who wishes to see without being seen. This position, which is denied to women in terms of psychoanalytic theory, points to the possible explanation that Oharu suffers in the film because she possesses a desire forbidden by its overriding patriarchy. It is almost as if her gesture of removing the scarf is the key which unlocks a Pandora's Box of memories that inauspiciously culminate in her fainting at the end of the flashback.

Additionally, the shot/reverse shot preceding the flash-back is characterized by Katsunosuke's fundamental absence from the film's historical present. He is objectified only within Oharu's imagination. Oharu, therefore, retains an essentially feminine position by becoming the subject of a daydream. Doane raises this issue in her discussion of what she calls the "medical discourse films" of the Hollywood cinema during the 1940s, in which she refers to Freud and Breuer and their study of female hysteria: "For it is daydreaming which instigates the illness in the first place—an uncontrolled and addresseeless daydreaming."

Oharu thus seems to have access to a subject position only in relation to Katsunosuke as an object of fantasy. It is consequently only in this position that Oharu as the woman may become active within the discourse. Throughout the rest of the film, in both the flashback and the action after she faints, Oharu is represented passively, as the object of the desire of others.

Oharu's subjectivity in this early scene also suggests another of Doane's observations. Like the illnesses which play a part in medical discourse films, Oharu's fainting, "implicat[es] woman's entire being." She is not merely an object of spectacle possessing a body that functions only to be looked at by men. When her entire being is at stake, the woman's body, in Doane's phrase, becomes "fully a signifier" of that which is invisible, by which she means that the woman's body signifies an illness. Her status in the discourse thus shifts from the "spectacular" to the "symptomatic." Likewise, Oharu can assume a subject position normally reserved in the classic cinema for the male subject without provoking a crisis in the film's overall patriarchy. This implies that patriarchy can be operating in Oharu even though Oharu's body escapes being "entirely" signified as "an object of male vision." Equally, it is possible that Oharu has access to the look in this early sequence only on condition that she remain castrated and other throughout the remainder of the film.

In the system of the look, as Mulvey first proposed, the woman is constituted as an icon for the pleasure of the male, but it is ultimately an ambiguous pleasure, for the woman in the classic text represents the threat of castration for the male spectator. To determine whether or not Oharu as an image represents such a threat requires an examination of two aspects of Mizoguchi's film. One is that Oharu is totally objectified during the course of the flashback, turned into an object of pleasure for a succession of male characters. The second stems from the fact that Oharu is treated differently under the law than her first lover. For the crime of sleeping with someone of a differing rank, Katsunosuke is condemned to die by be-heading, while Oharu is banished. Both sentences are established in the narrative as legal consequences of the patriarchal law in Japan that seeks to maintain the rigid vertical hierarchy of social relationships. Within the parameters set up in the discourse, the woman's "fall" is thus represented as a series of lesser banishments, where each time a relationship "fails," she is sent away, put, as it were, out of sight. In this way, Oharu receives special but unequal treatment and is punished by a law that is characterized by treating the woman's whole body as the offending object. Oharu is thus identified as a woman who, like her counterpart in the classic Western text, is represented as being "overpresent."

Being constituted as the female and singled out for special treatment and punishment, Oharu therefore symbolically represents that which must be repressed. As she moves through and is moved by the narrative during the flashback, she is "read" by each of the male characters after Katsunosuke's death as a feared object. Her banishment then becomes a series of textual positions that identify Oharu as the object of a desire whose goal is "not to see" the woman as a threatening presence. This goal is clearly the sole possession of the patriarchal forces that structure the text. What is demanded of Oharu by the male characters is in effect a complete silencing of her femininity and her complete exclusion from collective life. Oharu is thus compelled to give up her access to the look, thereby taking on the guilt of others and repressing her sexuality. All of this is played out against a series of conflicting positions centered around Oharu as both the desired and the feared object.

Each of these general tendencies of the Mizoguchi text suggests that Oharu's image in fact does represent sexual difference, and consequently the castration threat for the male spectator. Its clearest expression occurs in the nextto-last episode of her flashback. Earlier, on the same night that Oharu enters the temple as the aging prostitute, she is stopped by a man, who she thinks is a customer. She carefully covers her face to keep him from seeing her true age. They enter a cheap inn, and the man then leads her near a back room where several young pilgrims sit around a table. They all crane their necks to get a glimpse of Oharu's face, which she still keeps conspicuously hidden. With all male eyes toward her, the man removes Oharu's scarf and raises his lantern to give the others a clearer view of her. He says, "You want a girl. Take a look at this witch." The men stare and then look away self-consciously while the man tells them that if they wish, Oharu will lead them in a life of sin. He then thanks her and pays her off. She looks at the coins and then stops. Returning to the men, Oharu suddenly hisses at them with a demented air, hunches her back, and assumes the pose of a cat, clawing at them as if to pluck out their eyes. The men recoil from her, when again she stops, looks back at the money, laughs, and thanks them. She then leaves with the men's voices nervously laughing offscreen.

The first thing to notice is that this scene is consciously ironical. For this man, who so unabashedly uses Oharu as an object, is one of the few throughout the entire film to acknowledge Oharu for what she is now: a ridiculous aging courtesan. He restates her own self-knowledge about what she has become in order to survive. He therefore acknowledges her true feminine identity, but not only does he do it for the wrong reason, he does it too late. This fact is of primary significance because as Doane makes clear, "mistiming" is one of the fundamental requirements of pathos, part of what Franco Moretti calls the "rhetoric of the too late." The depth of Oharu's humiliation in this scene is a result of this mechanism which is "related to a certain construction of temporality in which communication or recognitions take place but are mistimed."

It is not only the man's "too late" recognition of Oharu that distinguishes this scene, but also the heroine's self-recognition of what she has become. This explains Oharu's sense of irony, while at the same time it provides her motivation for assuming the pose of the cat. This position refers back to the sequence where Oharu turns a cat loose on the merchant's wife, who has humiliated her by forcing her to cut off her long, beautiful hair. The moment in both scenes thus represents Oharu's castrating desire for revenge. The nervous laughter of the pilgrims in the inn signifies their half-realization of this threat. However, Oharu quickly realizes the futility of her gesture in the later scene, which suggests a further reference to Doane's comments on female narcissism:

In his article, "On Narcissism: An Introduction," Freud compares the self-sufficiency and inaccessibility of the narcissistic woman to that of "cats and the large beasts of prey" (as well as that of the child, the criminal, and the humorist). The cat is the signifier of a female sexuality which is self-sufficient, and, above all, objectless.

Oharu's primary position throughout her narration as the object of repression thus undercuts her aggressive stance as the cat. Her sexuality, which the man singles out for special consideration, offering it as a lure and a trap for the young men under his care, becomes blunted and "inaccessible." The viewer is made aware of these conflicts and their effects on Oharu's character precisely because of the pathos of the scene, and the distance separating Oharu from her original desires.

The scene's importance in the discourse, however, as the culminating episode of Oharu's reminiscence comes from the power of the woman to take over the control of vision. She is taken into the inn and used by the man as a visual sign of the forbidden object. In this way, she is offered to the pilgrims as an aberration of their sexual desires. Once Oharu sees the bitter irony of the situation, however, she sizes control and flaunts her "to-be-seenness," turning the men's aggressiveness back on them and mocking her position as the object of the look. To some extent, she thus holds out the threat of castration as a desirable position both for the pilgrims and for the male spectator. This ambivalence, however, is immediately dissipated again through Oharu's control of vision as she looks down at the money in her hand and laughs. The men's eyes follow her gesture, moving from the woman's body to the money. Through this move their discomfort is assuaged.

This gesture in effect relates Oharu to the money as a commodity which increases the pathetic nature of her degradation. It also represents an additional feature of pathos characterized by Doane as "a sense of disproportion—between desires and their fulfillment or between the transgression … and the punishment associated with it." Any sympathy the viewer may feel at this point in the text is derived from this sense of the disproportion between Oharu's original "sin" and these obvious consequences. These associations link Oharu through her aggressive behavior not only to the merchant's wife, but also to her liaison with Katsunosuke. Thus her whole life as portrayed in the flashback comes to bear on these few gestures, and it is Oharu's control of the trajectory of vision that makes this possible even without a shot/reverse shot structure.

Even though it remains an oversimplification to see Oharu's figure in itself throughout the film as an icon for the castration threat, the text acknowledges her sexual difference in this scene through the laughter of the men, which is kept off-screen. As Oharu walks away in silence, she comes to embody that difference and lack which the discourse sets up through the miseen-scène and its sound track. Through a unique form of suture, the men's voices create the perception of absence, which, like the suturing effect of the shot/ reverse shot, stimulates, as Kaja Silverman says, a desire "to see more."

According to orthodox suture theory, the breaking up of scénographic space into character point-of-view shots forces the spectator to become aware of the frame, and thus the limitations on his ability to control what he sees. "He discovers that he is only authorized to see what happens to be in the axis of the gaze of another spectator, who is ghostly or absent." This "absent one" is conceptualized as the "speaking subject," which is a position in the classic narrative that is never acknowledged within the film.

In the Mizoguchi text, which generally eschews the point-of-view shot, there are invariably elements of the mise-en-scène that force an awareness of the frame onto the spectator and the limits it poses on what he can see. Without articulating an absent gaze, the Mizoguchi text continually marks absence as a function of the controlling third-person view. Characters stand just off-screen during dialogue scenes which continue across the frame line or, as in the scene at the inn above, character voices emanate from an off-screen space before, during, and after the central action. In none of these constructions is there an explicit subject who is articulated as different from the speaking subject of the film.

We can theorize a difference, however, that is set up through the absence which is signified through off-screen space. The voices of the pilgrims at the inn signify this absent field, and it is the text's refusal to return to them that implies the existence of an absent, speaking subject. As Silverman shows in her reading of Hitchcock's Psycho, "The whole operation of suture can be made more rather than less irresistible when the field of the speaking subject is continually implied." This implication, I would argue, constitutes an essential structural tension that underlies a great many of Mizoguchi's most idiosyncratic scenes in terms of their difference from Western classical film. Held within the third-person, nondifferentiated shot, the movement and framing of characters continually articulates a system of discourse predicated on presence and absence, "unmediated, 'unsoftened' by the intervention of a human gaze."

An extreme example of this process occurs in Katsunosuke's beheading scene, in which the sword itself functions to center vision and structure absence without a human subject. In this one-shot scene, Katsunosuke dictates his final message to Oharu, and then the camera leaves the man and centers the sword in the frame as the executioner prepares to carry out the sentence. Through a series of camera and object movements, the blade enters and exits the frame as the central identifying presence until the camera pans up with it, and the blade slashes out of frame, leaving an almost blank sky to mark its absence. The executioner then steps back into frame, the sword with him, at which point the camera reframes the blade and then pans down its length until the scene fades to black.

Here there is no mistaking the symbolic power invested in the sword merely by its central presence in the discourse. Its movements establish its link to the castrating power of the law. Not only is the actual beheading accomplished offscreen, with the movements of the sword standing for Katsunosuke's death, but the articulation of excessive absences in such a scene of heightened spectacle no doubt intensifies the spectator's anxiety concerning what is kept off-screen. Without a shot/reverse shot, the scene powerfully manipulates the viewer's frustrated desire to see in such a manner that only the fade to black can reassert the viewer's right to control.

Not all of Oharu's reverse shots are as radical as this example. In fact, the initial scene inside the hall of Buddhas essentially duplicates the orthodox suturing process which introduces the field of the Absent One. Whenever we have a one-shot of Oharu looking at the statues, Katsunosuke, whose face has been superimposed there, becomes the signifier of absence. His absence from the frame alternated with hers creates this conventional suturing effect. What is further evident, however, is that at the end of the scene, Mizoguchi organizes the images so that they disavow this absence and lack as in the Western cinema, by producing again this desire to see more. In this case, the "more" is not another shot of Katsunosuke but the entire content of the flashback, which Mizoguchi places immediately after a final shot of Oharu looking. Her fantasy/daydream is thus tied to the hermeneutic code associated with Katsunosuke's presence in this early scene, and the spectator's desire to learn Oharu's story is substituted for Katsunosuke's absence in the last shot of the reverse-field figure.

The motivating forces behind the film's long flashback can thus be ascribed to those elements of patriarchy that function to disavow absence and lack, which, Mulvey proposed, imply the castration threat for the male spectator. Her two proposals for disavowal have to do with the ways narratives progress and the ways they are interrupted through fetishizing the female as an icon. Both strategies have their place in Oharu.

In the first instance, what Mulvey calls voyeurism, the patriarchal text attributes to the heroine characteristics that establish her guilt. In Oharu's memory of the events of her life, this is indeed the case. Katsunosuke offers her personal devotion and the promise of a true loving relationship through marriage. He first says to her, "I want to make you happy," and in his final message, he urges, "Please find a good man and have a good life with him. But, be sure to marry only when there is true mutual love." Then to the executioners, he says, "I hope the time will come when there is no social rank." This is the message Oharu takes away, when she questions her father, "I f we love each other, what if our ranks are different?" Oharu, therefore, explicitly believes in the philosophy which Katsunosuke voices, and her response to it is to faint in the man's arms the first time she hears it, thereby giving herself to him. In this way, with a show of feminine overemotionalism, she expresses her femininity, which makes her more susceptible to the ideal he represents. Throughout the flashback, Oharu is continually reminded of this ideal, if only in an abstract way. Only once does she again refer to Katsunosuke, even though the ideal he represents to her colors the spectator's response to her fall by its pathos. As indicated before, a sense of disproportion informs the pathetic discourse, a distinction "between desires and their fulfillment." Oharu's suffering and her "tragedy" throughout the subsequent episodes thus evolve in her memory as a consequence of her uncompromising moral stance and the restrictive social laws which make her liaison with Katsunosuke a "just" crime.

In contrast to this reading of the flashback, Oharu is not punished simply for being gullible, or for actually marrying a man of inferior rank, but for sleeping with him, for committing an error in conduct. Therefore, even though the disparity in their social ranks signifies the violation of the law, it is her sexual nature specifically for which she is punished. The patriarchal law exerts its control over her by banishing her from Kyoto and, consequently, by contributing to her loss of parental esteem, which has the effect of converting Oharu into an object of exchange. She is returned to her family in exchange for giving up her feminine "to-be-looked-at" nature. She is reconstituted as a daughter, and her return to her family, characterized by her father as the destruction of family honor, is the text's mark of the denial of her sexual nature. The text pushes her into a regressive position, and her words to her father, which combine the concepts of love and social rank, further deflect the spectator's attention away from Oharu's sexual guilt. Her "moral" crime and its extension in the betrayal of her father are thus the marks of disavowal characteristic of the voyeuristic strategy.

Oharu's return to the family's provincial home closes the opening sequence of the film and constitutes an essential paradigm for the subsequent action of the flashback. In each of the following episodes, Oharu enters into a new relationship as the object of an exchange, the purpose of which can be ascribed to the desire of patriarchy to control Oharu and her sexuality. In the sequence preceding Oharu's sojourn with Lord Matsudaira, for example, the "search for the ideal beauty" episode, Oharu is discovered dancing with a group of provincial daughters. In the only male point-of-view shot of the flashback, Oharu is singled out and taken away from the other dancing women. To cover over the immediate threat of castration this suturing instance signifies in classical narrative, Matsudaira's messenger falls to his knees and proclaims, "I'll buy her." Immediately, the merchant agrees to act as intermediary, and the narrative resumes with Oharu's father selling his daughter to the lord. In this way, the lack enunciated through the "Absent One" in the reverse shot of Oharu dancing is disavowed by the resumption of narrative which converts the woman into an object of exchange. She is selected for this position, as in each of the following episodes, because her femininity meets the needs of the men who purchase her. Likewise, she is eventually banished from each relationship when this femininity seeks expression and recognition through a sexuality that is invariably problematic.

This view of Oharu as a commodity is structured by the discourse itself, whose logic determines the actions and thoughts of the woman throughout the flashback. Thus in each episode of her fall, Oharu's problematic sexuality is expressed primarily through the woman's body. Most often it is her inherent "to-be-looked-at" nature which puts Oharu's social position into jeopardy, when the mere sight of her elicits a male desire that ultimately forces her away and down to the next level of degradation. Often, however, individual parts of her body are singled out for special treatment. Her hair is cut by the jealous wife of the merchant as a way to erase the visual attraction Oharu holds for her husband. In die Matsudaira sequence, it is the uterus, the center of female reproduction, which is the focus of her appeal—she is brought there to have a child—and when she is no longer needed, she is pathetically separated from the lord and her child. As a commodity, therefore, Oharu is represented exactly like the typical woman in the Western maternal melodrama, where

the texts bring into play the contradictory position of the mother within a patriarchal society—a position formulated by the injunction that she focus desire on the child and the subsequent demand to give up the child to the social order. Motherhood is conceived as the always uneasy conjunction of an absolute closeness and a forced distance.

This distance between Oharu and her child dominates the last part of the narrative and creates the great pathos of the film. We can see that the text, therefore, contains two major narrative threads: one which involves the social law and Oharu's relation to it, and another, the patriarchal law that controls her sexuality and her reproductive identity. Significantly, it is the commodification of the heroine through the discourse that transforms the first into the second. After Katsunosuke is beheaded, there is almost no mention of the social law and rank that he represents in Oharu's explicit memory. She becomes no social crusader for societal reform, no activist trying to make a martyr out of Katsunosuke and his courageous stance for the rights of the individual. Instead she devotes herself to the simple pursuits of happiness and personal satisfaction as a woman, and the fact that she acknowledges herself as a commodity in these pursuits represents the deflection of her desire from an identification with others to an identification with herself. To extend the former into the action of the flashback would mean a critique of the patriarchal basis of Japanese society. Since we can argue that the purpose of the flashback is to uphold the patriarchy of the discourse, it is the woman who is put at fault and not society.

This explains why Oharu's memory is overwhelmingly preoccupied with feelings and experiences associated with being victimized. This too explains why Oharu is kept from her son at the end of the film. She is guilty, not, as Matsudaira's vassals contend, because Oharu has humiliated the clan by her life of degradation, but simply because she has lived her life as a Japanese woman.

At the same time the patriarchy of Mizoguchi's text invokes the mechanism of voyeurism to control the heroine during the extended flashback, investigating her guilt and meting out punishment, it simultaneously establishes the beauty of Oharu's position, overvaluing her through the mechanism Mulvey describes as fetishistic scopophilia. This form of disavowal converts the woman into a fetish object for the male spectator whereby her beauty is substituted for the threat she invariably poses as the signifier of sexual difference.

In many ways, the description of this mechanism in Oharu takes us to the heart of one of the most idiosyncratic aspects of Mizoguchi's style: the tension so often displayed in all his films between identification and distance. These are the moments when Mizoguchi's camera will hold the characters in long shots during moments of great emotional significance. In Oharu, these examples occur in an extreme form, sometimes functioning like a coda for the preceding action, and often followed by a fade to black. There are four instances of the technique: the scene of Oharu's attempted suicide after Katsunosuke's parting note, the last shot of the geisha house sequence, the last shot of Oharu playing the samisen after catching a glimpse of her son, and the last shot in the film of Oharu as the traveling priest. The examples are similar to but somewhat different from Mizoguchi's overall tendency to maintain a generally large camera-to-subject distance and do not indicate the full range of meanings that the technique entails. Their usage in Oharu, therefore, is a unique instance of Mizoguchi's style which functions to fetishize the figure of the woman within the specific patriarchal context of this film.

Most commentators on this aspect of Mizoguchi's work hold the concepts of identification and distance as binary oppositions. The typical features of Mizoguchi's distanciation are thought to weaken the spectator's identification with the characters on the screen, thereby increasing the viewer's autonomy and powers of discrimination. The Mizoguchi distance is thus assumed to be Brechtian in being a critical strategy which deconstructs the transparency of the traditional classical codes. These codes, in turn, are believed to support the fact that Mizoguchi's films are most often intense melodramas of extreme pathos. Distance is considered an antidote to the overemotionalism that his films constantly approach, but which often fails to materialize because of the lack of audience involvement with the characters. Conversely, however, as the examples from Oharu show, it is the very foundations of melodrama, its great emotionalism and its pathos, that the Mizoguchi distance intensifies in this film. Based on the concepts of disproportion and mistiming, these scenes make the woman into a fetish object, not by emphasizing distance over identification but by combining the two processes.

In each of the four scenes we take to correspond to Mulvey's second category of patriarchal disavowal, a sense of disproportion characterizes Oharu's relationship with something she lacks. It is this distance between Oharu and the object of her desire that provides the pathos of each scene. In the suicide attempt, it is Katsunosuke that Oharu mourns, and whom she attempts to join in death by trying to kill herself. The camera keeps her and her mother in long shot as they run through the bamboo grove, and their dialogue informs the viewer directly about these issues. The subject of the scene is thus Katsunosuke's death and Oharu's distant response to it. Likewise, in the geisha house, the subject of the entire preceding segment is money, its power to corrupt, and Oharu's refusal to succumb to its lure. In the last shot of this scene, Oharu stands in the extreme background as the counterfeiter is led away by the police. The restaurant owner and the others who are left in the frame throw down the bogus coins in disgust while Oharu stands above in all her geisha finery, representing her distance from money and power. Outside the temple after Oharu has been thrown out of the nunnery, it is her child from whom she has been separated. She watches him from afar, and then she sits in front of her samisen and cries. And in the final shot of the film, the long shot frames Oharu as the priest, her distance from any identifiable sexuality marked through her ambiguous dress.

In each of these cases, the spectator's ability to understand the emotions in the scene without the use of closeups comes from the relationship established in the text between the character and the explicit intent of the scene expressed through either dialogue or action. At times this relationship is easier to read than at others. In the suicide attempt, it is Oharu's loss of Katsunosuke that determines her emotions. In the scene following Oharu's viewing of her son, it is her separation from him that motivates her depression. At the geisha house, it is Oharu's lack of money in relation to the rest of her life; in the final shot, it is her lack of a feminine identity and more. It is less important, however, in Mizoguchi's discourse to know exactly what the character feels, because knowing less does not make the shot less emotional. In fact, the scenes often become unbearably emotional because of the distance that is represented between Oharu and what she desires. This emotion is, therefore, intensified through the mistiming that the sense of disproportion signifies. As Doane again observes, "Moving narratives manifest an unrelenting linearity which allows the slippage between what is and what should have been to become visible. What the narratives demonstrate above all is the irreversibility of time." It is this aspect of Oharu that results from its general picaresque form with its precise cause/ effect structure punctuated by these "interruptions" which heighten and foreground Oharu's position as the one who suffers. It is at these moments that the temporal aspect of Mizoguchi's film as melodrama functions to create the most intense feelings of pathos.

The lack of closeness between the spectator and Oharu in these scenes represents the lack that Oharu represents as a woman, and thus her position as the fetish object. This is established through the distance and temporality that are specific marks of the Mizoguchi text as melodrama. Simultaneously, the beauty of the compositions and the position bestowed on Oharu as an aesthetic object mark her as a fetish for the male viewer. Oharu becomes appealing both as a signifier of suffering and as an aesthetic object, "satisfying in itself," as Mulvey says. In this position, the woman comes closest to representing a sign of disavowal for the male spectator.

Significantly, Mizoguchi's brand of fetishism does not break up Oharu's body into parts through separate shots, dwelling on her face or figure. Instead, it frames her whole body, which emphasizes its completeness, but places it against a background which seems more complete, more narratively significant than the immediate action implies. Noel Burch has commented on the "surplus of iconographic signs" in Mizoguchi's distancing shots where the environment included in the frame signifies elements seemingly extraneous to the narrative. Far from diluting the narrative at these points, however, Mizoguchi's distance intensifies it, especially in scenes such as the above, where what the heroine lacks in the fiction implies its completion through the overdetermined environment which contains her. Her whole body then takes on this symbolic aspect of absence and lack, and it is only through the long shots, through the various distancing devices, that Mizoguchi is able to accomplish this unique form of disavowal. More significant still is the fact, as Doane admirably demonstrates, that an identification between the woman and her body signifies a narcissism that is a specific pathological condition of women caught up in the male desire of most mainstream narratives.

By the logic that patriarchy imposes on Oharu's character, her memory gains the force of a psychic trauma which triggers her fainting as a hysterical attack. In Freudian terms, "the nucleus of an hysterical attack … is a memory, the hallucinatory reliving of the scene which was significant for the illness." This return of the repressed, again according to Freudian theory, takes the form of the projection onto others of the guilt an individual feels over the events in memory. This kind of distortion in the memories of victims of hysteria conforms to the pattern of guilt that places Oharu as the one who is wronged by others in her own personal narrative. The crucial point is, nevertheless, that "the returning portions of the memory are distorted by being replaced by analogous images from contemporary life; thus they are distorted only in one way—by chronological shifting but not by the formation of a substitute."

This explanation underscores Katsunosuke's prominence in Oharu's memory. Her relations with him, placed in her memory as the initial cause of her suffering, become the founding relationship of her psychic life and function as the paradigm for all Oharu's future relations with others. Katsunosuke becomes her ego ideal, which is a position in the actual chronology of her life that should be taken over by her father. In the logic of her "distorted" memory, however, Katsunosuke is substituted for her father, and his loss comes to represent her failed search for happiness, pleasure, and identity. Oharu's flashback, therefore, must represent her Oedipal journey, and its chronological distortions signify the fact that it remains unresolved. Her memory takes on the forces of a defense in which Oharu projects all her neurotic fears onto Katsunosuke. The social wrongs which plague her throughout memory become projections of her own internal fear that she has been wronged. It is this anxiety concerning Oharu's unresolved Oedipal conflicts, as well as her fear of having been castrated, which threatens her at the conclusion of the flashback and which motivates her fainting. Her defense is unsuccessful, however, for as Freud commented, "with the return of the repressed in a distorted form, the defense has failed."

This failure of Oharu's defenses suggests that Oharu's narration of her life as a memory is directly responsible for her fainting, and thus for the woman's illness. Doane's analysis of the medical discourse films, however, tells us that when a heroine becomes the narrator of her memories, the process can have one of two functions: it can be therapeutic or "disease-producing." In the American films, which so often include psychoanalysis within the narratives, the former is characterized by the presence of a doctor who listens to the woman's narration and interprets her illness, while the latter, as we have seen before, is associated with daydreaming. According to Doane, the daydream

feeds that narcissistic self-sufficiency to which women are always prey. The woman's narrative acumen is thus transformed into the symptom of illness. Her narrative cannot stand on its own—it must be interpreted. Narration by the woman is therefore therapeutic only when constrained and regulated by the purposeful ear of the listening doctor.

Oharu's narration thus seems disease-producing, while at the same time it is contained within a controlling discourse which "constrains and regulates" it. It therefore combines both functions. Her fainting after the flashback confirms her illness, while the signs of patriarchy within the discourse suggest how it is being controlled.

The containing discourse that regulates the woman's memory need not be the courtroom setting, the psycho-analytic session, or the hospital bed, which are the typical institutional arenas in the medical discourse films which guarantee that the male doctor will discover the "truth" of the woman's illness. As Doane makes clear, the controlling discourse is much more an issue of who controls the image. In Oharu, we remember that just preceding the flashback Oharu is positioned as the subject of the discourse, whose specific point-of-view shots project Katsunosuke's image onto the Buddhist statue. It is from this enunciating position that the woman's narration follows. It would seem, therefore, that Oharu's flashback controls the image, thus authorizing her point of view as the controlling presence of the memory; nevertheless, this is not altogether the case.

First there is the fact that Oharu's point-of-view shots, as well as the flashback, are framed by the film as a whole. In the classic text, the seemingly narratorless aspect of the discourse provides the "reality effect" of the film when the diegesis is introduced in the third person. This is the case in Oharu, which begins with the shot of Oharu walking alone on the grounds outside the temple. The flashback in such a context must be marked in some way differently from this surrounding enunciation. In Mizoguchi's film, as in the medical discourse examples, however, the woman's subjective point of view never returns as an explicit mark of enunciation once the flashback has begun. Thus the events of Oharu's memory are accorded the same value in the discourse as the surrounding action and are granted the same truth as the overall discourse itself; in effect the surrounding discourse validates the truth which it contains. This validation is strengthened by the fact that the last action Oharu remembers is a repetition of the opening shot of her on the temple grounds. It is marked in her memory, however, with an absence of sound—the words of the couple Oharu observes no longer appear on the sound track—and the implication arises that the woman's memory is somehow incomplete, lacking in relation to its more powerful, authoritative surrounding context.

The second mark of the discourse which devalues the authority of Oharu's subjectivity occurs in the last one-shot of her just preceding the flashback. After Oharu is positioned as the subject of the look, and Katsunosuke is established as the object of her glance, there follows the shot of Oharu removing the scarf. This tight medium shot, the closest to an American shot in Mizoguchi, is characterized by an extremely self-conscious attitude on the part of the heroine. Her eyes focus inward after she slides off the scarf, and then she leans against a pillar in a repose of passive contemplation, her eyes falling down-ward. Simultaneously, the shot contains an overaccumulation of filmic codes, which, while signifying the transition to the past that takes place in Oharu's mind, also establishes the power of the discourse itself to place Oharu in this position. At the beginning of the shot, gagaku music is inserted to represent not only the transition into the flashback, but equally the courtly role that Oharu assumes in the following sequence. Second, the camera slightly reframes the character as the scarf slides off her head with an almost gratuitous movement, the beauty and elegance of which serve again to prefigure Oharu's courtly role and sensitivity. Third, there is a dissolve that punctuates the shift back in time.

The accumulation of these filmic effects marks the author's presence within the discourse and signifies the presence of the "speaking subject" of the text. Oharu's ability to control her flashback is thus undercut by this sign of her lack of power which keeps her as a symbol of difference and lack for the male spectator. Her memory is, therefore, a daydream by Doane's definition, but one which is itself subject to the control of the text's inherent patriarchy, the purpose of which, we can assert, is to confirm Oharu's basic narcissism. Her fainting at the end of the flashback thus authenticates her basic illness as a mark of disavowal. Like the woman's film in America during the 1940s, Oharu's illness is inscribed onto her body, and similar to her portrayal in the Western film, "the trauma of the woman is total."

The patriarchy that controls Oharu during the flashback also determines the course of the action after she faints by reactivating what Silverman has called patriarchy's "compulsory narrative of loss and recovery." After Oharu faints in the hall of Buddhas, the narrative resumes with her reunion with her mother, the news that her father is dead, the final recovery of her son, their separation, and her transformation into the traveling priest. Al l of the events are portrayed not only using the familiar motifs of visibility and invisibility, but also by invoking the logic of Oharu's guilt at it has been portrayed during her recollection.

The penultimate sequence of the film is Oharu's reunion with the Matsudaira clan. She returns to them in hopes of being reunited with her son, who has now become their leader. Instead, she is chastised by the Matsudaira vassals for behavior inappropriate for the mother of their new lord and is pronounced guilty of shirking her social obligations. She is again sentenced to banishment after being allowed one last look at her son. Her attempt to get near him is played out in a grand spectacle as Oharu rushes toward the boy, only to be restrained by the men, who are both horrified of her power and afraid of their own vulnerability. With koto rhythmically punctuating their chase, the men lose Oharu somewhere on the castle grounds. The sequence ends in a stunning deepfocus shot of the vassals charging back and forth in the background, while in the center of the frame sits Oharu's palanquin, the "mysterious basket," to borrow from Proust, which will presumably carry her off into a life in exile. Oharu has thus finally escaped her ultimate "to be looked at" position. Therefore, the film should end with this last shot of the sequence: Oharu, unseen, her whole body hidden from the gaze of the spectator, away from the eyes of the Matsudaira vassals, submerged in herself, in the basket, symbol of prison and the womb.

Oharu's complete banishment from the text, however, despite the fact that it is based on the logic of the feminine within the discourse, must be disavowed by its underlying patriarchy. This explains the necessity of the final scene, which places Oharu as the begging priest, to fulfill the desire of the narrative that she repent for her guilt. Her lack of sexual identity is thus made beautiful and "satisfying in itself" as Oharu is transformed and overvalued as the priest. Religion in this case becomes the mark of denial for the woman's narcissistic wound. She becomes a religious object only as a substitute for what she lacks as a woman in the discourse. Her so-called transcendence is thus an imaginary concept forced on the spectator, who must assume the position of the male subject.

There is still an ambivalence here that comes from the pathos of the scene. While Oharu's religious conversion signifies the male desire to disavow her ultimate castrated condition and by association his own, the use of gagaku music tends to undercut this position. When Oharu sees the pagoda in the distance after she leaves the houses where she begs, she stops to pray, and the music recalls her past life specifically with Katsunosuke. This aural signifier brings back Oharu's original transgression as an element of the discourse and serves as a reminder to the male spectator of the inescapability of Oharu's past. This juxtaposition of past and present, a result of the text's pathos, reaffirms, as we have previously seen, the "slippage between what is and what should have been" and solidifies the spectator's own position as lacking.

The composition of the scene substantiates Oharu as the beautiful object, the self-sacrificing woman, who is captured within an environment whose symmetry is meant to represent her completeness. The melodramatic requirements of the narrative, however, keep reminding the spectator of what has come before and what might have been in a manner that contests Oharu's completeness as a traveling priest. What comes back to the spectator is the sense of what Oharu now lacks, of what has become absent through her fetishized conversion into a religious object.

The beauty of such a position and the artistic consequences of Oharu's conversion finally tend to fetishize the distance Mizoguchi establishes between the spectator and the screen. This seems an inevitable mark of a Japanese desire that patriarchy control its own ambivalence. As Doane again observes, "In a patriarchal society, to desexualize the female body is ultimately to deny its very existence." Since women do exist in Mizoguchi and in Japan, but remain, at least in The Life of Oharu, representations of lack and desire, they are subject to procedures of disavowal which elevate them into symbols of suffering and beauty. Beautiful but lacking, whole yet fractured, women in Mizoguchi signify the fundamental misrecognition at the heart of the director's patriarchal discourse.