Annoted bibliography.

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43 Film Matters Winter 2012 ➜

Mainstream Mulvey: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and (500) Days of Summer as Alternatives to the Feminist Avant-Garde By Brenna Claire Williams / k e y w o r d s : Laura Mulvey, female gaze, gender in film, scopophilia, romantic comedy, independent film

Gender politiCs in MainstreaM Hollywood films have been at the center of cinematic debates at least since 1975 when laura Mulvey wrote “Visual pleasure and narrative Cinema.” in the essay, Mulvey criticizes film for its subjectification of women and affirmation of dominant patriarchal constructs and ideals. Mulvey posits that the only place where these values can be eradicated is in radical avant-garde cinema, which “provides a space for cinema to be born which is radical in both a political and aesthetic sense” (Mulvey 716). However, since Mulvey first wrote her essay, and especially in the last decade, Hollywood films have created a new kind of female character that is able to hold the narrative and visual power that Mulvey said wasn’t possible. As seen in the films Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Gondry, 2004) and (500) Days of Summer (Webb, 2009), the female love interest in romantic comedies can not only be equal, but can also hold more power than her male counterpart. While these films were not widely released blockbusters, they were each distributed by the independent branches of major studios and earned decent box- office revenue, over $72 million and $60 million respectively (Box Office Mojo “‘eternal Sunshine’”; “‘(500) Days’”), providing a compromise between the mainstream cinema that Mulvey loathed and the avant-garde cinema that wider audiences overlook.

b e l o w Clem waves at Joel at the train station

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As seen in the films Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and (500) Days of Summer, the female love interest in romantic comedies can not only be equal, but can also hold more power than her male counterpart.

a b ov e Joel waits for Clem to come home a b ov e Clem and Joel on icy lake

a b ov e Joel alone on ice a b ov e Joel and Clem on tV

nontraditional narrative styles,1 self-awareness and play with visual coding, and disregard for and inversion of patriarchal gender roles make these films realizations of what Mulvey said film could be in a format that can communicate positive depictions of women to a wider audience than the avant-garde allows.

one of Mulvey’s most scathing criticisms of mainstream cinema is the divide “between active/male and passive/female” (Mulvey 719) with a woman’s “presence [tending] to work against the development of a storyline” (Mulvey 719). Eternal Sunshine and (500) Days work against this trend by making their female characters the ones whose desires and actions further the plot while men take reactionary roles, particularly when considering the directions of their

relationships. Clementine (Clem) in Eternal Sunshine takes control in almost every aspect of her and Joel’s relationship and, similarly, Summer is the one who begins, defines, and ends her relationship with tom.

throughout Eternal Sunshine, Clem dominates her relationship with her strong will and opinions. Both times she and Joel meet – first on the train from Montauk and later on the beach – Clem speaks first, pursuing Joel while he only looks at her from afar. Clem’s desires drive the beginning of their relationship both times: initially when she invites him to her apartment and later when they meet again and she leads Joel on their excursion into the beach house. Joel blindly follows her lead, listening to her when she tells him to call her and risking his life

on an icy lake where she is able to push him around because he is also physically passive. additionally, Clem ends her relationship by walking out on Joel and ignoring his attempts to get her back. Clem is anything but the “passive/female” character Mulvey attributes to Hollywood films.

similarly, summer is in complete control of her relationship with tom from beginning to end. Like Clem in Eternal Sunshine, summer follows her whims, even moving across the country because she wants excitement, while Tom, like Joel, leads a relatively static, passionless, and disappointing life. tom doesn’t admit that he has feelings for summer, even after she straightforwardly asks him. she is the driving force behind their kiss in the copy room

The most interesting parallel between these two films is the fact that they are both nonlinear, a characteristic that signals a denial of male power (Silvey 139). While both films follow male protagonists, the nonlinear narratives make it difficult for audience members to situate themselves within their lives and the world of the film, which foregrounds the women’s importance in them.

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Mainstream Mulvey

Perhaps the thing the films communicate most strongly is the idea that strong, unique, and independent women are unforgettable. They are something to hold onto, something that, despite what Dr Mierzwiak tells Joel, you will miss, for better or for worse.

a b ov e Clem and Joel at the flea market a b ov e Joel and Clem at the movies

b e l o w Joel and Clem on the couch b e l o w Clem sticks up for Joel

and defines their relationship when they kiss again at iKea. summer’s view of their relationship wins even after tom is hurt at the bar and tries to assert himself. Like Clem, summer ends her relationship with tom, operating as an active character from the beginning to the end.

this active/passive division, according to Mulvey, goes beyond gender power plays and is found even at the core of the narrative structure of films, with men “forwarding the narrative, making things happen” and serving as “main controlling [figures]” around whom films are structured (Mulvey 720). The most interesting parallel between these two films is the fact that they are both nonlinear, a characteristic that signals a denial of male power (Silvey 139). While both films follow male protagonists, the nonlinear narratives make it difficult for audience members to situate themselves

within their lives and the world of the film, which foregrounds the women’s importance in them. in Joel’s case, Clem permeates every part of his mind and memory, and in tom’s case, Summer defines 500 Days of his life.

Eternal Sunshine opens on the morning following Joel’s procedure and situates him and the audience in his bleak apartment and life, both devoid of the color Clem brings to them. Here, the film adds a visual component that works with the nonlinear narrative structure in order to signal to the audience how important Clem is in the film. the colors are neutral until Joel sees Clem in Montauk, which signals her as a strong visual and narrative element since she stands out from across a desolate beach. By the end of the nonlinear film, the audience knows that it is Clem’s imagined last words to Joel that brought him to the beach, affecting him and controlling the plot from the beginning.

Clem’s haunting personality wouldn’t have been as effectively communicated if this scene had appeared at the end of the film, as it would have had it played chronologically.

Throughout the rest of the film, Clem not only does what she wants to do, but also affects the narrative structure of the film by operating as the catalyst for most of the things that Joel does, both while conscious and during his procedure. She is the first to get Joel erased from her mind, doing so in an impulsive pursuit of her desires. in his mind, he tells her that he is only erasing her because she did it to him first. Within Joel’s mind during the procedure, it is his mental manifestation of Clem who has the idea of going “off the map” (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) when Joel doesn’t have a plan. Clem’s hold on Joel’s life, while they’re together, after they’ve split, and even while he is unconscious, continually reverses

The films are able to create a safer screen space for their main female characters by noting visual and narrative elements like fetishism, scopophilia, and the gender constructs to which those in a patriarchal society are accustomed.

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b e l o w Clem overpowers Joel on the beach

a b ov e Joel from afar at the beach

b e l o w the use of split-screen highlights the interplay between reality and Tom’s expectations

Mulvey’s assertion of male power throughout the film.

likewise, the nonlinear narrative style of (500) Days serves to deconstruct male power, but in a different way than it does in Eternal Sunshine. From the opening credits, the focus on and importance of both summer and Tom is introduced by their parallel montage sequences, visual signals of the fact that it is a story about both of them, not just Tom. The audience’s position in the story is guided both by a narrator and title cards with the day of summer each sequence depicts. While Eternal Sunshine flows between present, reality, subconscious, and past without pausing, (500) Days always tells viewers where they will be in Tom and summer’s relationship, with everything after Day 290 depicting the aftermath with title cards in shades of gray. the human mind does not replay memories back accurately or in order, something this film’s narrative reflects, which gives the audience insight into the way Tom sees the relationship. At first

tom and his audience miss the warning signs of Summer’s unhappiness, but this gives way to the realization and regret of missing them when both Tom and the audience replay memories more accurately during Tom’s healing process. The film poignantly and self-consciously highlights this interplay between reality and Tom’s expectations by splitting the screen between them when tom goes to summer’s party. the days of summer that the audience sees, like those in Eternal Sunshine, highlight the power that summer has not only over tom’s memory, but also in reality. Like Clem in Joel’s life, summer impacts tom’s life even when they are not together. Before she and tom start seeing each other, her attendance of the company karaoke party spurs tom to attend, and after they split, her insistence on Tom’s ability as an architect pushes him to pursue it again. summer, like Clem, serves as a counterexample to Mulvey’s points by making things happen and controlling much of the narrative.

Mulvey spends much of her article focused on the male gaze and accuses men of “taking people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze” (Mulvey 717) and deriving pleasure from looking, which gives them power. Both Eternal Sunshine and (500) Days consciously play with this “scopophilia” by sharing the gaze with their female characters and by robbing the men of the pleasure of looking. Mulvey assigns erotic pleasure to the male gaze, which the films also take up and critique in different ways: Eternal Sunshine makes male pleasure something that Joel is ashamed of and (500) Days has summer’s desires trump tom’s. Unlike the films that Mulvey criticizes, these films punish their male characters instead of their female characters (Mulvey 722).

Clem actively looks both times she and Joel meet, and the film draws attention to it. When Joel and Clem are in the cafe at the beginning of the film, Joel looks over at her. However, she looks back, embarrassing him and forcing him to turn his gaze elsewhere.

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above The film breaks Summer down into each part that Tom loves about her. Here, Tom talks about her smile above Tom talks about how much he loves Summer’s laugh

above Summer is the driving force behind their kiss in the copy room above Summer initiates the first conversation with Tom

She is able to look at him even though he is aware of it while he cannot look once robbed of his voyeuristic pleasure, which suggests that her gaze is more powerful than his or, at the very least, that she is less ashamed of it. at the train station, Clem is once again aware that Joel has noticed her and waves at him, effectively acknowledging his role as a voyeur and her role as a gazing and aware woman. on the train, Clem approaches Joel and says, “i’ve seen you,” a sentiment that is echoed when they meet for the second time and she sits down next to him at the beach and says almost the exact same thing. (500) Days reflects this assertion of the female gaze over the male gaze precisely when, at the end of the film, Autumn tells Tom that she has seen him before even though he hasn’t seen her. Both times Clem and Joel meet, the film highlights her agency, her gaze, and its power while diminishing his.

summer’s gaze in (500) Days is much more equal to Tom’s and goes a step beyond Clem’s gaze by allowing the audience to share in it. Mulvey says that women are, “indispensible [elements] of spectacle in normal narrative film” (Mulvey 719), but (500) Days takes the opportunity to make both Summer and tom elements of spectacle and the gaze of the other when they sing karaoke. When summer goes to sing, the audience gets a shot of tom looking at her with pleasure followed by a point of view shot from his perspective. similarly, when Tom sings, the film follows the same shot progression and allows the audience to see

through summer’s eyes and share in her gaze while tom makes a spectacle of himself. Additionally, the film makes Tom the object of a female audience’s gaze by having his sister’s friends stare at him. While it isn’t a fully realized erotic gaze, this example serves as another acknowledgement of the gaze and gives it to women. later, when tom gives summer an architectural tour of los angeles, the audience shares in another point-of-view shot. However, it isn’t clear whose point of view they are given, implying a shared ownership of the gaze and situating the couple, once again, in a gazing relationship that is equal.

in the same vein as the scopophilic gaze, Mulvey asserts that, “conventions of mainstream film focus attention on human form” (Mulvey 718). Both films directly reference fetishistic scopophilia, which Mulvey defines as the breaking down of the female form to overvalued parts (Mulvey 720). In Eternal Sunshine, Joel muses about Clem’s sweatshirt and wonders how he could be “drawn to someone’s back.” Joel also draws Clem in his sketchbook almost as a hobby, pulling attention to the male’s attention to the female form as well as the way he constructs his own view of it. Joel doesn’t photograph Clem, but draws her from his mind’s construction. The majority of what the audience sees of Clem is within Joel’s mind, exposing them even further to this construction.

on top of parodying the visual construction of women in Hollywood films,

Eternal Sunshine presents Clem, through her emotions, as a caricature of more typical female characters, revealing the ridiculous in those characterizations. Clem complains to patrick that she feels and looks old, a concern real and fictional women share. One of Joel’s favorite memories of Clem is one in which she asks if she is ugly and tells him about a preoccupation she had as a child with being pretty. While Clem is an extremely strong female character, these instances show that even the strongest woman cannot escape the always damaging and traumatizing effects of patriarchy’s demands, and the film demonizes those demands by imposing them on an otherwise relatable and admirable female character. By vilifying patriarchy in this way, instead of ignoring and escaping it the way the avant-garde would try to do, Eternal Sunshine draws the audience’s attention to the evils that Mulvey sees in patriarchy, which does more to educate it about the problems of conventional film in a palatable form.

(500) Days also deliberately parodies the breaking down of women into parts and desires. When introducing summer, the narrator breaks Summer down by discussing her height, weight, and shoe size and whether each is average. later, tom talks about the things he loves about Summer, including her smile, hair, knees, lips, and birthmark. The film breaks her down into those parts by both visually depicting them and through voice-over while noting almost nothing about her personality. This echoes

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48 Film Matters Winter 2012

Feature 08 Brenna Claire Williams

the idea presented and simultaneously judged by Eternal Sunshine when patrick falls in love with Clem’s unconscious body and not who she is. By using the same visuals of summer’s parts with a different voice-over of tom saying that he hates them, the film highlights the simultaneous adoration for and loathing of the female form that Mulvey discusses in her essay (Mulvey 721). In an interesting twist, (500) Days also alludes to female pleasure in looking by the breaking down of the male form when tom’s sister talks about “Brad Pitt’s face and Jesus’ abs,” which consciously highlights female fetishism of the male form – something that Mulvey ignores.

Eternal Sunshine and (500) Days also share their acknowledgement of the idea of an ideal female form, but in different ways, with Eternal Sunshine deconstructing the ideal and (500) Days presenting it as something that every male holds in his mind. Eternal Sunshine presents an image of Clem that is anything but the idealized Hollywood construct of the female form. she often dresses in a baggy orange sweatshirt or in multiple heavy layers, drawing away from her figure and intentionally playing down her beauty instead of accentuating it the way most films would. The film draws attention to the purposeful construction of Clem’s look, changing her hair to unnatural hair colors and assigning her “personality in a paste.”

Conversely, (500) Days presents its audience with a specimen of the perfectly beautiful and classic woman. The narrator tells the audience that summer averages 18.4 double takes on her daily commute, a part of the phenomenon the narrator refers to as the summer effect. the summer effect, the film claims, is something that every man has encountered by falling under the spell of a beautiful woman. Interestingly, the film then attempts to deconstruct the idea of the perfect woman, both when Tom and summer discuss each other’s imperfections and when each of the male characters are shown, as if on 35 mm film, talking about their ideal woman. Notably, Tom doesn’t have a conclusion and paul admits that the perfect woman simply isn’t a reality.

The films share a high degree of self- awareness, communicating a sense of purpose in everything they do, especially in their depictions of women. this self- awareness in Eternal Sunshine is probably best exemplified in Joel’s memory when he and Clem appear on the television in their apartment. At that moment, the film acknowledges an awareness seen throughout the film that Clem is a cinematic or, in this case, televisual construction of femininity like any other woman on film or television.

(500) Days contains a similar moment that functions almost as a parody of Mulvey’s ideal avant-garde in addition to the acknowledgement of film as construction. tom goes to the movie theater after he and Summer split up and projects his feelings onto the screen in the form of an art film. the scene displays the characters in (500) Days as the movie characters they are while almost taking a jab at Mulvey’s elevation of the avant-garde as the only cinema that can communicate truth. (500) Days itself is certainly more enjoyable than the avant- garde film within it.

The final way that Eternal Sunshine and (500) Days reinterpret their depictions of gender is by inverting or calling attention to the dominant patriarchal gender roles that Mulvey sees in film (Mulvey 716). At times, each film switches the gender roles within its couple, emasculating and feminizing the men while empowering the women. additionally, the female characters themselves call attention to the way films portray normal female characters by embodying two sides of the spectrum of contemporary female characters.

Eternal Sunshine invests Clem with multiple stereotypically masculine personality traits, such as aggression, which she is able to play out upon a passive, quiet, and femininely coded Joel. The first time they meet in the film, Clem makes jokes about seducing him, an idea that clearly makes Joel uncomfortable. Clem talks about living her life to the fullest, aggressively taking advantage of the opportunities the way male characters often do, while Joel lets life happen to him. When Joel gets home, he anxiously waits by the phone trying to wait an appropriate amount of time to call Clem the way a teenage girl might do in another romantic comedy. this image is mirrored in Joel’s last memory of Clem, when he sits in the same chair waiting for Clem to come home, nagging her “like an old lady” (Eternal Sunshine) when she arrives. This interesting juxtaposition between teenage excitement and elderly patience ties Joel to a range of feminine traits. While Clem is at times used as a caricature of female emotions, Joel is anything but stoic throughout the film, often getting upset and crying in his childhood memories, where Clem is notably collected and in charge, all the way up to his present- day adulthood.

similarly, (500) Days goes out of its way to consciously make summer aggressive and self-assured, coding her as masculine, while making tom idealistic and unsure, coding him as feminine. The beginning narration makes the audience aware that

the film is “not a love story” ((500) Days) in the traditional sense by painting Tom as a hopeless romantic – The Graduate’s (nichols, 1967) fault, we’re told – and Summer as unattached and guarded because of her parents’ divorce. tom falls for summer at first sight and overanalyzes everything she says and does to him before they start seeing each other, which feminizes him the same way Joel’s anxiety does in Eternal Sunshine. Summer believes that love isn’t real and that it’s better to be guarded and safe, traits usually assigned to male characters. summer and tom want different things, and in the end summer’s masculine desires for detachment dominate tom’s stereotypical feminine desire for attachment and mutual dependence.

The film also constantly discusses the adoption and construction of gender roles. the narrator tells the audience that “there are only two types of people in the world: women and men,” an idea that (500) Days plays with continually. in the diner, summer compares herself and tom to sid Vicious and nancy spungen, the rock star and the girlfriend he stabbed to death. Tom notes this and automatically assumes that summer is implying he, as the man, is sid and she, as the woman, is nancy. However, summer says that she is sid, a conscious reversal of gender roles and an outing of the assumptions about them. In the first karaoke bar scene, Summer discusses her dating policy with tom and McKenzie, saying that she doesn’t like attachment and she is happy being independent. McKenzie responds by asking if she’s a lesbian, which communicates an awareness of the cultural assumption that there is something Queer about strong and independent women. When summer says that she wants to save serious relationships for later, McKenzie goes a step further and drunkenly accuses her of being a man. Summer, who the film again makes masculine through her ideological alignments with McKenzie, serves as a foil to Tom, who the film feminizes through his ideological opposition to summer and his traditional male friend. interestingly, when tom adopts summer’s nonchalant, non- labeled view of relationships, McKenzie tells him that he sounds gay, even though he attributed the same traits to masculinity when he saw them in Summer. By both making the audience aware of cultural conceptions of inherent gender traits and by inverting those traits in its two protagonists, (500) Days is able to communicate the impermanence and hypocrisy of the gender constructs of the patriarchal order that the audience has undoubtedly accepted, for the

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Film Matters Winter 2012

Author Biography Brenna Claire Williams is a 2012 Television Studies graduate of the University of Notre Dame. Her research focused on religion and the media, culminating in her senior honors thesis about South Park’s treatment of minority religions. She now resides in Washington, DC where she has written for NPR and works for NBC News.

Mentor Biography Jim Collins is a professor of film and television and a concurrent professor in English. He specializes in media theory, contemporary narrative, and digital culture. His most recent book is Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture (2010).

Department Overview Majors in film, television, and theatre at Notre Dame get more than an excellent liberal arts education – they also have the advantage of being in a department with a high degree of student-faculty interaction, a wide variety of hands-on courses, and state-of-the-art work and performance facilities.

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most part, without question. This once again communicates something Mulvey would likely agree with in a more palatable way than the radical avant-garde.

Overall, the films Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and (500) Days of Summer are able to formulate some of Laura Mulvey’s main critiques of mainstream film for an almost mainstream audience. The films are able to create a safer screen space for their main female characters by noting visual and narrative elements like fetishism, scopophilia, and the gender constructs to which those in a patriarchal society are accustomed. Clementine and summer are active, assertive, aggressive, and powerful, which affects the narrative structure of their stories and the lives and actions of the men who love them. Both films parody or deny male pleasure and the male gaze by sharing or completely handing power over to the women in many cases and depicting them in a positive light that even Mulvey might approve. While the films are not the perfect realization of feminist cinema, they are palatable to a large audience, and being able to get a feminist message to a wider audience is a very large first step in a positive direction. I would much rather be Clementine or summer than any disney princess or Marilyn Monroe character – and let’s be honest, they get to wear some amazing clothes – because they communicate that it is okay to have opinions, be different, and to be whimsy incarnate. Perhaps the thing the films communicate most strongly is the idea

that strong, unique, and independent women are unforgettable. They are something to hold onto, something that, despite what dr Mierzwiak tells Joel, you will miss, for better or for worse. / e n d /

Works Cited

(500) Days of Summer. Dir. Marc Webb. Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2009. DVD. / Box Office Mojo. “‘(500) Days of Summer’ (2009).” 3 Dec. 2011. Web. / Box Office Mojo. “‘eternal sunshine of the spotless Mind’ (2004).” 3 Dec. 2011. Web. / Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. dir. Michel Gondry. Focus Features, 2004. Film. / Mulvey, laura. “Visual pleasure and narrative Cinema.” Critical Visions in Film Theory: Classic and Contemporary Readings. ed. timothy Corrigan. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2011. 713–25. Print. / Silvey, Vivien. “Not Your Average Love Story: Film techniques in ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.’” Screen Education 53 (2009): 139–144. Academic Search Premier. Web. 3 Dec. 2011. /

Endnotes

1 For this article, the circular plot of Eternal Sunshine will be considered in plot, not story, order.

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