Subject, Object, Camera: Photographing Women in The Unbearable Lightness of Being
[In the following essay, Green discusses aspects of female objectification, sexual difference, and the significance of photography in a scene from the novel and film, The Unbearable Lightness of Being.]
Two women meet for a photography session. Tereza, the photographer, is married to Tomas, a surgeon. The other, Sabina, is his long-standing mistress. Tereza begins to take photographs of the naked Sabina, but the one behind the camera soon becomes its subject following an exchange of roles:
It took Sabina some time before she could bring herself to slip out of the robe entirely. The situation she found herself in was proving a bit more difficult than she had expected. After several minutes of posing, she went up to Tereza and said, “Now it's my turn to take your picture. Strip!”
Sabina had heard the command “Strip!” so many times from Tomas that it was engraved in her memory. Thus, Tomas's mistress had just given Tomas's command to Tomas's wife. The two women were joined by the same magic word. …
… Tereza took off her clothes. There she stood before Sabina naked and disarmed. Literally disarmed: deprived of the apparatus she had been using to cover her face and aim at Sabina like a weapon.
Undoubtedly the most erotic scene in the movie, this extract from Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being has such strong sexual overtones that at its reading we may feel like voyeurs. Print for its readers has a certain quality of anonymity comparable in some ways to the secrecy enjoyed by movie-goers. In the movie theater we sit admittedly in company but isolated by the darkness. We see without ourselves being seen. We read without being read.
Thus the safe anonymity of film and print serves us much as photography serves the defensive Tereza. For her the camera is “both a mechanical eye through which to observe Tomas's mistress and a veil by which to conceal her face from her.” The ambiguity of the double “her” (both women are alternately revealed and concealed by the camera) mirrors the ambiguous position of the female reader/audience. Is she to identify with what Ann Kaplan calls “the male gaze,” or must she align herself with the women who seem to be performing for that gaze? Are there any alternatives to this limited choice?
Kaplan has observed that, “Many male fantasies focus on the man's excitement in arranging for his woman to expose herself (or even give herself) to other men, while he watches.” In the episode quoted above, the performance appears staged specifically for its invisible male audience (Tomas, who originally spoke the magic word “Strip!”)—and, by implicit extension, for its tacitly male reader. However, while both the literary and cinematic texts operate within, or out of, male fantasy, the film version simultaneously and powerfully subverts it. This ostensibly male-oriented piece of theater is somehow smashed, made kaleidoscopic, by the actresses who perform it.
Used as a phallic weapon, the camera in this scene provides an object of male substitution (first Tereza “takes” Sabina, then Sabina “takes” Tereza); but it is also a means, made explicit in the film, by which the two women form a bond no less creative artistically for its sexuality. Indeed, the sexuality of their friendship, despite originating out of a patriarchal fantasy (two women performing for one man, both aroused by invoking the authority of his word), asserts the women's independence from Tomas. In fact, what is at play here is an inversion of the historical exchange of women, in which women are passed between men. Tereza and Sabina turn an economic paradigm into a sexual and artistic game by exchanging the symbol of Tomas (penis-camera) and by using it to forge a bond between them.
In the novel's version of this episode, however, the camera has a sinister significance, being described, as we have seen, first as a mechanical eye, a veil; and then as a means of subjugation, which Tereza is startled to find she enjoys:
She was completely at the mercy of Tomas's mistress. This beautiful submission intoxicated Tereza. She wished that the moments she stood naked opposite Sabina would never end.
I think that Sabina, too, felt the strange enchantment of the situation: her lover's wife standing oddly complaint and timorous before her. But after clicking the shutter two or three times, almost frightened by the enchantment and eager to dispel it, she burst into loud laughter.
Female response to this scene is frequently uncomfortable: we are, after all, viewing it from the perspective neither of Sabina nor Tereza, but from the male narratologic standpoint; thus we may assume this scene to be an example of a particular kind of literary prurience in which women act out for a keyhole audience what it is that their author imagines women do when they are alone together. The narrative strategy, one might argue, determines a reading in which the camera provides not a bond, but a barrier between the women, a means of distancing them by having them watch each other while ultimately being watched. The controlling force is Tomas, or more precisely, the voice of Tomas supplying context and a semantic framework within which the women act out a parody of themselves as sex objects. The women are thus displayed for the reader as enemies, delighted not by the revelation of each other, but by finding themselves, their fear of being the subject, displaced onto the other. Each reaffirms her loyalties to Tomas by alternately assuming his role in the structure of relations; and each perpetuates that structure by alternately acting her own role. Photography in this reading is really in the service of the secret police, which uses its pictures against the individual as incriminating evidence. Rather than being representations of the self (expressions), they are projections (invasions).
Tomas is palpable in his absence. He forms the subject matter for almost precisely a third of the chapter: he participates in the scene by being the one whose magic word is now articulated; by providing the hierarchical relation between the sexes pervading the novel; and by having acted it out with both women—not to mention that he is the reason for this photographic session in the first place: it is in an attempt to bind Tomas closer to her that Tereza approaches Sabina.
The path from such an understanding of this scene to its identification as soft pornography is a short one. Once so identified, small place remains for the female reader in which to produce positive critical responses to the representation of relations between the two women: the order to be naked, the inscribing of Tomas's word upon that which unites them, is synonymous with the order to remain silent. However, if we choose to exercise what Judith Fetterley has demonstrated to be a necessary practice, namely, reclaiming ostensibly male-oriented fiction through feminist rereading and resisting of the text, it is quite possible to read this scene as more than male fantasy: rather, as a triumph of female bonding. We can do this by refusing the invitation to view all events from Tomas's standpoint, by being conscious, for example, of the way in which our attitudes to the women in this work are shaped by a man who perceives his mistresses simply as “his way of living,” and by a narrator who tells us that “in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.” Resisting the text that would enjoin us to delight in a narratologic and imaginative authority indisputably misogynist, we can read the photographing scene according to linguistic rules that, broken, invoke the notion of trespass and transgression. The resulting eroticism illuminates those unspoken rules and undercuts their authority.
Sabina is enchanted by her displacement of Tomas, achieved not through rejecting the role he plays in her life but by assuming it herself. What we observe here is the duplication of a particular structure, which has its linguistic counterpart in the word “Strip!” (also a command and thereby carrying an assumption of hierarchy). Its symbol is the camera conferring the power of the gaze upon the one who wields it. The question is, does the power structure thus assumed through appropriation of the gaze belong only to Tomas (or to the secret police, or to the powers that forcibly occupy Prague in the spring of 1968), or can it be argued reasonably that Sabina and Tereza in some way reclaim the instrument and thus subvert its political and linguistic authority? The question is an important one, for on its answer depends the potential of real and represented women to break through frames produced by their objectification. Further, the answer is not to be characterized by the assumption that this reader merely seeks another reading permitting her to enjoy the book and feel politically comfortable at the same time. As I shall argue, the potential of the photographing scene to be viewed as a site of production and resistance is its own object, an object emphasized through the enactment of sexual difference.
The construct of sexual difference depends upon what Kaplan identifies as “a complex gaze apparatus and [also] … on dominance-submission patterns.” Although such patterning privileges the male, traditionally bearer of the gaze, women, says Kaplan, “have been permitted in representation to assume (step into) the position defined as ‘masculine,’ as long as the man then steps into her position, thus keeping the whole structure intact.” Yet the structure is surely preserved whoever steps into either position. In our title, for example, “Subject, Object, Camera,” the final word indicates through self-differentiation that it is standing in for something. We expect one word; we see another; and we retain both the given and the expected (“Camera”/“Verb”) to provide a commentary on each other and, of course, in that relation to provide the subject for this essay.
However, if one word or person may replace another without changing the relation described, does assumption of the structure indicate only a mere role reversal? If this is the case, we might conjecture its purpose to be at base reactionary, a mere nod to notions threatening the status quo. As Kaplan says, “Showing images of mere reversal may in fact provide a safety valve for the social tensions that the women's movement has created by demanding a more dominant role for women.” Yet where the novel describes the incident in terms of pure if interchangeable dominance and submission, the film's version of role reversal permits a greater tenderness, as the actresses use the camera first in cruel mock invasion, then as agent of sensitive portrayal. Tereza (Juliette Binoche) weeps as she takes her photographs, uncomfortable with the sensation of having become Tomas's alter-ego; Sabina (Lena Olin) holds Tereza's arm behind her, removes her underwear; but while Tomas's order to strip is echoed by both, each also asks the other to “look at me.” The gender roles are reversed, but they are also exchanged, and ultimately they are altered altogether. Thus it is what Kaplan calls the “patriarchal narcissism” of rendering woman “in likeness to man”—in this case, by allowing her to play at being the one who takes other women—that actually undercuts any implicit denial of the women's independent sexual and artistic selves. The supposedly masculinized images of Tereza and Sabina inadvertently become Kaplan's “resisting image for the female spectator; the male attire [gaze/camera] ‘permits’ female-female bonding … It allows … a form of sexual relating that excludes men and that thus subverts patriarchal domination while acceding to its symbolic force.”
Tereza's pleasure in being the object of Sabina's vision is the pleasure of the illicit: it depends upon a previously established power-relation rooted in a hierarchy, within which the one who watches is empowered by the status of activity (here both symbolized and realized by the camera). The activity of watching, but especially the activity of watching women, is, as feminist critics such as Laura Mulvey have noted, conventionally designated by our culture as belonging to the male, as being in some inherent and mysterious way “masculine.” By sharing and exchanging roles of subject-object in linguistic and sexual democratic play, Sabina and Tereza experience the enjoyably guilty response that is a function of its atmosphere of taboo.
The problematic response to the photographing scene is made more acute in its cinematic presentation. Its female audience is strangely licensed to participate in the activity of double vision: we as women see ourselves watching each other, but simultaneously we know ourselves to be watched by the masculine “I” of both text and movie camera; and, moreover, constrained by the authoritative “I think” of the narrator. Rather than allowing such fission to confuse (or silence) us, though, we should acknowledge the multiplicity of selves with which we compose our identities. In the movie the complexities of multiple and constrained vision are given emphasis through Sabina's studio being full, not just of reflecting glass of varying sizes, but of windows, photographs and paintings; there are even two long mirrors each cut in the shape of a naked female form. At the absurd moment when the two women are discovered together naked and laughing by Sabina's lover, Franz, Tereza is startled by her own self reflected in one of those mirrors. Her reflection seems accusatory, Other: as the novel tells us, since childhood it has been something “through” which she must look to see herself.
The “I” of both women is precarious, ill at ease, undefined. Throughout the novel its insecurity is manifest in Tereza's refusal to identify her sense of self with the body that she sees before her: like Carroll's Alice, she feels a loss of control over the flesh that is hers, a function of the confusion in this novel within subject-object relations, and she is alienated from that which is the object of the world's gaze when it identifies her as Tereza:
Even if Tereza were completely unlike Tereza, her soul inside her would be the same and look on in amazement at what was happening to her body.
Then what was the relationship between Tereza and her body? Had her body the right to call itself Tereza? And if not, then what did the name refer to? Merely something incorporeal, intangible?
The body-soul dichotomy is the classic dilemma between apparently independent realities. As philosophers, we see one thing; we know another to be also the case. We posit a relation between the two, between external and internal, but—like Tereza—we live as though we refuse to acknowledge the relation. Our view of the world, however, is far from monolithic: it is composite, a series of different images, the perceived and nonperceptual overlaid and subject to development and change.
The theme of all Sabina's paintings, as she describes it, is just this composite vision: “‘The meeting of two worlds. A double exposure.’” Of her first cycle of paintings, entitled “Behind the Scenes,” she recalls that
“On the surface, there was always an impeccably realistic world, but underneath, behind the backdrop's cracked canvas, lurked something different, something mysterious or abstract. … On the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, the unintelligible truth.”… Tereza … began to perceive that all Sabina's paintings, past and present, did indeed treat the same idea, that they all featured the confluence of two themes, two worlds, that they were all double exposures, so to speak. A landscape showing an old-fashioned table lamp shining through it. An idyllic still life of apples, nuts, and a tiny, candle-lit Christmas tree showing a hand ripping through the canvas.
If there were a metaphor controlling this essay, it would be this one, the “hand ripping through the canvas,” the metaphor of multiple exposure supplied us by the camera, as we engage in what seems to be the hopeless task of chasing the many refracted and splintered images of ourselves through an impossible semantic maze. What the novel tacitly offers us, and the film powerfully voices, is the potential of this double-exposure in the representation of female relations, albeit with the eye of the male author/director/audience gleaming through: it is the potential to explode the myth that when a woman is watched, it is a simple, one-way process. It is too easy and self-restricting to identify the gaze as unilaterally male. Women readers and viewers may and do participate in a gaze that is becoming collective, the product not of a hierarchical relation, but of an overlay of multiple visions.
But it is one thing to talk of gaze, another to talk of attitude. While we may assume (I think correctly) that in the novel Kundera writes man to man, and that we read, as it were, through the keyhole, or over the ideal reader's shoulder, we need not construct our own gaze upon the same model as Kundera's—indeed we cannot—although we may, and should, acknowledge the attitude of author to subject. Although that attitude is itself one of the structuring concerns of the novel, the attitude of the novel, it need hardly be said, is male. The story that it tells, undeniably, is male-engendered, the tale of a man unable to choose between the many women available to him. That is its attitude. Gaze, on the other hand, depends upon how we are able to respond to the objects of that attitude, whether we accept the attitude as valid and participate in it. Attitude is not negotiable, but gaze is a matter of choice.
This is most true of the film version, which takes the possibility of multiple vision, breaks the framing device of the keyhole, and relates a story of possible and conflicting gazes—the exclusive property of no one. I do not mean to suggest that the only way to (re)claim the gaze in the representation of the female is to put her on a screen. In this particular case it works because the novel itself concerns the politics of perception and the problems of self-representation. On film the issues thus illuminate themselves doubly as metacinematography, drawing our attention to the act of watching. To explain what it is that occurs when we watch a representation of a woman watching another woman in the act of making a representation of her, we need to turn to the power relations at play within the pre-existing language structures being appropriated here that account for our ambiguous response to this scene.
The actresses playing Sabina and Tereza are able to subvert the stereotype of the hierarchical gaze through physically producing a visible language of propositions. What does it mean to identify the photographing scene between the two women as a proposition? A proposition, loosely, is a sentence containing within it an assertion, be it implicit or otherwise. The explanation of the term is Wittgenstein's: “A proposition shows how things stand if it is true. And it says that they do so stand.” At the same time, because the proposition is clearly a linguistic possibility, it contains the possibility of being either true or false. Whether it is true or false depends upon the relation of the represented (world) to the representation (text, film). The proposition is nonspecific and therefore nonprescriptive; it offers a potential for generating meanings, rather than a method of determining, upon any one in particular.
Tereza and Sabina subvert the visual and linguistic hierarchy by showing how things stand if (x) is true, and by simultaneously claiming that (x) is true, by endowing the camera with the status of a verb, which they exchange. Their positions alter in the structure of the proposition but the verb is unchanged. The relation of this acted-out proposition to the world is one of possibility rather than one of truth or falsehood. Possession of the verb does not confer absolute power: it simply links the two other parts of speech (object and subject).
If the photographing scene is a sentence, what is its assertion? It asserts the freedom of both subject and object from tyranny of the verb. We cannot say for sure, reading Kundera's text, watching the movie, whose gaze(s) we participate in. But we can be sure that the scene of Tereza and Sabina taking pictures of each other represents the possibility of women undercutting the tyranny of any kind of gaze: this is its subject, its object, and its verb—in sum, its semantic whole, made clearer through its physical articulation by two flesh-and-blood women.
Judith Mayne writes that, “Some actresses seem to transcend their roles as sex-objects, to comment on the very nature of spectacle and voyeurism”; she refers to Silvia Bovenschen's comment that “amazingly, it seems that even those images of femininity constructed by men or by the male art industry, are turning against their creator in ever-increasing numbers.” How this Pygmalionesque revolution happens neither Mayne nor Bovenschen can explain. In the film The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the actresses’ parody of their roles, in which Sabina chases the shrieking Tereza around the studio with the camera out and ready for action, couches the entire scene between enormous, invisible, but unmistakable quotation marks. It is a form of what Derrida calls writing under erasure: “Since the word is inaccurate, it is crossed out. Since it is necessary [because it is part of the work], it remains legible.” The women do produce a spectacle of male fantasy, but using the handy, if timeworn, tactic of ironic distance, they pass comment on that visual spectacle, as their actions also pass comment on the hierarchical verbal relation that cannot contain them. Thus the self-consciousness of Tereza and Sabina allows the multiple vision of Sabina's paintings to become a physical reality: the hand does rip through the canvas; we do see the lamp shining through the landscape. Perhaps the task for the feminist reader here is not reclaiming the gaze, but rather recognizing that the gaze, like the object, is multiple.
When one is moving between written and cinematic texts, between words and images, it is easy to fall between the two: to lose sight of each medium and unwittingly construct an independent (and purely projected) series of happenings that then becomes subject for discussion. To keep the two versions of the photographing scene separate, I have referred initially to the novel, arguing that it is possible to read this scene as a positive representation of female relations if one can retain a consciousness of the attitude structuring the work and resist Tomas's voice. Moving then to the cinematic depiction of that episode, I have suggested that the resistance that must be brought to the text is already evident within the film, which works to resist the book in different ways: through the nature of film itself, a medium necessarily dependent upon the concept of the gaze and one which therefore provides an arena at once self-reflexive and naive, drawing attention to itself as subject while simultaneously affecting an invisible presence; and also, harder to define and most powerful, through the actresses’ ability to step beyond the frame of the male gaze through constant undercutting of visual and linguistic perspective.
In the novel the episode ends with the women laughing nervously and getting dressed. In the movie the episode really ends not with the arrival of Franz nor the departure of Tereza from Sabina's studio, but with Franz's appearance in the next scene and on the next day, to find Sabina gone, and nothing left of her but some fragments of mirror and some broken glass on the floor. Franz should not expect to find her waiting: he should know that Sabina does not function according to the hierarchical rules of language in which the man has exclusive rights to the active verb any more than she will allow herself to be represented as exclusively subject: she functions according to the rules of photography, which assert that betrayal of the hierarchy, any hierarchy, is a possibility.
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