Heroines of Gaze. Gender and Self-Reflexivity in Current Espionage Films — Page 5:
21 Yet, how is Shining Through going about in treating the scopophilia of the female spectator? The film is constructed around a BBC interview about women and their life during the Second World War. Linda Voss (Melanie Griffith) talks about her experience as an American spy in National Socialist Germany. How it came about that she ended up as a spy and what happened during her time in Berlin is being narrated with the help of flashbacks, either explained by her voiceover or made sense of by the the dialogues in the flashback sequences. Her only training in the field of espionage had been her early fascination with spy and war films. She used to identify with the heroic characters on screen, no matter whether they were female spies, resistance fighters or allied soldiers. She also dreamed of being dropped by parachute over Germany and of fighting her way through to her Jewish relatives to rescue them. The film depicts her sitting in a cinema watching films. Some extracts of these films the audience watches along with her, other extracts she mentions, but we do not see her watching them. The clips are taken from Espionage Agent (Lloyd Bacon, USA 1939) with Brenda Marshall and The Mortal Storm (Frank Borzage, USA 1940) with Margaret Sullivan and James Stewart and The Fighting 69th, (William Keighly, USA 1940).[11]Thus we see a woman not only entering the "Männerkino" (men's cinema), but also indulging in a genre usually spurned by women (Koch 19). In using a term like "Männerkino", Koch understands what Mulvey before her had understood about cinema's gender-specific ways of looking, but Koch argues not only psychoanalytically, but also cultural-historically and socio-politically (Koch 17). Thanks to these films, Linda recognizes her superior Ed Leland (Michael Douglas) as a spy. After she bluntly accosts him, he tells her she has been watching too many films. But she only replies: "Enough to know a spy when I see one." When he asks her how she managed to access so much information about him, she replies: "I might be a better spy than you are." In the course of the film this prediction proves to have been correct. By refusing to comply with Ed's orders, she is able to locate and microfilm plans for a rocket factory in Peenemünde. She then kills her friend Margarete von Eberstein, who had turned out to have been a double agent working for the Reich; with the help of Ed, Linda eludes the Gestapo and manages to smuggle the film into Switzerland. When other characters and later on the BBC interviewer ask her how she knew how to behave, she repeatedly refers back to the films she used to watch.
22 In addition to this narrative element of self-referentiality there are several striking visual elements. For example, in the opening credits sequence to Shining Through, a tracking shot inside a TV studio occurs (see fig. 10). The camera follows Linda Voss and her interviewer to the designated transmission area. The camera movements are jerky, the camera has to be re-focussed, they do a sound check, and the clapper-board claps for the interview scene. Also, during the flashback scenes, there are regularly cuts back to the interview situation.
- Fig. 10: Tracking shot in the studio
- Fig. 11: Camera out of focus
- Fig. 12: Camera in focus
- Fig. 13: Clapper-board
Moreover, the genuine and faked clips from films and newsreels of the 1940s are shown in standard black-and-white 1.33:1 format, whereas the interview and flashback scenes are shot in colour and in a wide-screen format. That some of these excerpts are also fake becomes only clear when we suddenly see Linda Voss in one of them. This dual framing is skilfully realised by means of screen enlargement and colouring.
- Fig. 14: Linda in the cinema
- Fig. 15: Skiing scene from The Mortal Storm
- Fig. 16: Documentary - excerpt
- Fig. 17: Fake documentary - excerpt with Linda
- Fig. 18: Screen enlargement and colouring of the above scene
23 Such designating of the apparatus, interruptions of narrative flow, juxtaposition of heterogeneous slices of discourse, as well as mixing of documentary and fiction are all efficient means of signalling reflexivity (Stam 16). Of course, such means can serve in a purely playful way without claiming to be emancipatory (Stam 16, Lewinsky 75), but here they are significant, as in Shining Through the female gaze is taken as an intradiegetic theme and explicitly being portrayed as gender specific. Linda Voss not only often refers to the cinema in her lines, but we also see her as a cinemagoer - and that not in the context of a social activity, but on her own. Gertrud Koch has suggested that going to the cinema by oneself, for women, is not considered to be a very high-minded leisure activity. This "latente Kinoverbot" (latent prohibition of the cinema) should keep women from experiencing scopophilia (15). Because the film depicts Linda in the cinema, the incorporated clips she watches are defined as point of view shots. Moreover, because of the framing as an interview situation, the flashbacks can even be understood as imaginary POV shots from her perspective.
Power of Gaze and Empowerment
24 The modern action heroine refutes Laura Mulvey's theory of the female figure as passive image. Her struggling, shooting, killing, riddle solving, and her ability to rescue herself and others from dangerous situations demonstrates anything but passivity. The modern action heroine carries the plot in a way that only male characters can - according to Mulvey. Yet, in the two example films, if the female protagonist's physicalness is revealed, it is not merely as sexual objectification; her trained and muscular body is predominantly functional, serving as a weapon: "The cinematic gaze of the action film codes the heroine's body in the same way that it does the muscular male hero's, as both object and subject" (Brown 56).[12]On the visual display of the male muscular body see Tasker 35-53, 73-152 and Dyer.
25 The figure of the modern female spy has an even greater potential for inversion when taking into account the self-reflective aspects. According to the representation system as described by Mulvey, a gazing woman constitutes a threat (Doane 27). Earlier films often outweighed this threat by increasing the spectacle of the female spy as the desirable and endangered sexual object. Examples for such films are Mata Hari (George Fitzmaurice, USA 1931) with Greta Garbo and Dishonored (Joseph von Sternberg, USA 1931) with Marlene Dietrich.[13]"Greta Garbo et Marlene Dietrich pratiquent I'espionnage comme une forme supérieure, quasi sacrée, de prostitution, où s'épanouit leur séduction naturelle." (Horvilleur 148) In Mata Hari, Garbo is introduced as an exotic dance attraction for Parisian society. The subsequent scenes depicting Garbo in the company of friends and admirers in nightclubs and private rooms offer space for a magnificent staging of the star.