Cinema and politics

With their chins resting on their palms and in desperate search of the content that will fill their weekly Tuesday night feminist film club (TNFFC), Laura Mulvey and Rosalind Galt

lethargically flick through the seemingly endless stockpile of tasteless Netflix romcoms. One flick before all hope of their usual feminist cinematic grandeur seems lost, the poster of Stripped to Kill lights up their 65” 4K OLED television, and their retina’s along with it.

Rosalind jumps up from the couch and yells ‘This is it! This is perfect!’. Struck by disbelief,

Laura laughs and rolls her eyes, ‘This film is the embodiment of voyeurism, it is actually the antithesis of a feminist film’. ‘Let’s just watch it’, Rosalind objects, ‘there is power in the pretty, you will see what I mean’. That Tuesday night was the last time Laura and Rosalind sat in front of the same screen.

The reason for their split was simple: for Mulvey, Stripped to Kill is the perfect example of how cinema reinforces patriarchal power structures: the role of women in popular cinema is to be objectified and valued through desirability, both inside the narrative as well as outside by the viewer, who through the film’s representation of women is presumed to be male.

This clashes strongly with Galt’s more modern-feminist view of the film. The very

aspects of the film Mulvey finds problematic, such as the extensive striptease scenes where

women are ‘selling’ their bodies to the strip club’s audience, Galt finds empowering. While

Mulvey, in line with conservative feminist thinking, views visual spectacle as inherently anti-feminist and intends to disregard the foreground altogether, Galt considers aesthetics to be an important canvas for the creation and discovery of feminist empowerment. The decorative extravaganza of a woman undoing her bra, while doing a handstand on top of a motorcycle, on a neon-lit stage, could for Galt be a political act, i.e. an act that conveys a certain sociocultural ideology, that demonstrates feminine power and bodily autonomy. In fact, Galt perceives Mulvey’s rejection of spectacle as an anti-feminist position, a reinforcement of patriarchal rhetoric in which masculine mimetic films are regarded as important, and aesthetics and camp culture are devalued.

The political power of a film, for Galt, does not only reside in its representation of

ideologies through narration, but also the very outer layer of the film. Moreover, she believes sensational aesthetics have the potential to challenge cultural norms and critique this exclusionary idea of ‘serious’ cinema, of which cult-classic Pink Flamingos is a great example. For Galt, films can articulate themselves politically on aspects at each depth, front to back. The problem for Mulvey remains that films like Stripped to Kill seem to invite the viewer to sexualize the women involved and thus women in general. Embedded in such films is a patriarchal power dynamic in which women are reduced and commodified to passive objects of desire.

I think Stripped to Kill can be read from both Mulveyian and Galtian perspectives. The over-the-top, almost absurdly eroticized display of the female body lead me to believe the movie uses irony to critique voyeurism and in this way attempts to challenge patriarchal ideologies. However, the very last line of dialogue, ‘My thigh is not fat’, after which the female lead starts crying, left me at a loss. Mulvey might be right after all.