Nina Menkes’ broad-strokes, reactionary investigation of the male gaze is more interested in cherry-picking than it is insightful critique.
At the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, in the wake of the #MeToo movement, filmmaker Nina Menkes gave a presentation entitled, ‘Sex and Power, The Visual Language of Oppression’. It’s a bold and dramatic title, as is that of the documentary she’s made based on that talk, Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power. These words, along with the intense dread of Sharon Farber’s score, give the air of an industry-wide conspiracy about to be uncovered.
No such pomp and circumstance was given to Laura Mulvey when she published her 1975 essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, which is the underlying text of Menkes’ own thesis. Mulvey appears in Brainwashed, introduced as “the original gangster film theorist,” an epithet she seems unlikely to ascribe to herself. The essay was a watershed moment in film criticism, investigating the nuances of scopophilia and voyeurism commonly referred to as “the male gaze”.
Nuance isn’t Menkes’ strong suit. When showing clips, she seldom sets them up with any basic context. Instead she looks at cinematic images in isolation; an irony given her critique focuses on the fragmented framing of women’s bodies in cinema. Menkes never considers how the gaze is subverted by certain films within their narratives, aligning Apocalypse Now with Hustlers, for example, without discussing the difference between Francis Ford Coppola’s intent with that of Lorene Scafaria.
Without these distinctions, Brainwashed argues that all shots of women’s bodies are bad. Even Sofia Coppola and Julia Ducournau are guilty in their framing of women in 2003’s Lost in Translation and 2021’s Titane because they have been ‘brainwashed’ into creating “propaganda for patriarchy”. Menkes espouses a quasi-radical feminism wherein the sexuality and self-sexualisation of women only exists for the pleasure of men, positioned from her own cis heteronormative perspective.
The #MeToo aspect of Brainwashed, wherein Menkes goes several steps further than Mulvey, is to draw a direct line from “the male gaze” to employment discrimination of women and sexual assault. There is likely some truth to this claim, but the argument that women as actors and directors are complicit in this agenda is tantamount to accusing women of ‘asking for it’. Menkes ignores Mulvey’s work as a filmmaker and theorist expanding on and changing the ideas of her 1975 essay, and much of the work done by theorists including bell hooks and Teresa de Lauretis whom viewers would be better off reading.
At the end, Menkes gestures towards forms of subversion and difference, particularly within queer cinema. She acknowledges the difference between Abdellatif Kechiche’s framing of lesbian sex in Blue Is the Warmest Colour, Cheryl Dunye’s in The Watermelon Woman and Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire, although she isn’t quite able to articulate why. Menkes is in such a rush to get through the history of cinema to point a finger of blame at everyone except herself, ending with her own films as examples of a negation of the gaze. Nobody’s perfect.
Little White Lies is committed to championing great movies and the talented people who make them.
Published 10 May 2023
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