WP3: The Man Behind the Female Mask — The Female Mind-Body Split
“Tragedy is when I stub my toe. Comedy is when you fall into an open manhole and die.” — Mel Brooks
Admittedly, this quote by Mel Brooks is a bit misleading as to what direction this paper’s actual goal is. Distance is something that we rarely perceive unless we’re trying to get somewhere; and sometimes when our final destination is intangible, it makes the distance of even more importance. This quote from Mel Brooks gives insight to how we view characters on screen in comedy, but the concept of distance isn’t held to a genre or even to one medium. The closer we near to a personal subject, the more it hurts when it’s in danger; but the farther away emotionally or physically that subject is away from us, the easier time we have of separating ourselves from caring about that subject’s wellbeing. Focusing on the highly-esteemed silver screen, we’ll analyze the distancing of the female self and body in sections by first grounding our topic in current reality, and analyzing this on the screen and in the scripts.
But first and foremost, why does this cryptic description of distance matter in the first place, and what does it have to do with the absurd title I’ve decided to give this piece of writing? I propose (although there is writing enough in the centuries before me to prove that I’m not the first person to think this) that women’s minds and bodies are in constant war with each other; that although science tells us the mind and body are one, the euphoric experience of truly feeling at peace as a female in mind and body is one that society has conditioned us to be deprived of.
For brief contextual understanding of where the idea of separation of the mind and self (from the female body) originated and for the sake of understanding the core of this piece, we go back to the Enlightenment period. During this time, the questioning of traditional structures in society like monarchical rule and the power of the church brought about the birth of empiricism, an idea that knowledge was derived through sensory experiences, and scientific thought began to replace the sacred explanations that were widely accepted. The “man” became centralized; and it was established that the existence of man, as a rational and thinking being, could not be contested. As Descartes so eloquently puts it, “I think therefore I am,” (Latin: cogito ergo sum). So, in beginning was the word, and the word may have been with God, but surely, the word now was Man. Descartes further develops the philosophy of mind-body dualism, which proposes that, “the nature of the mind… is completely different from that of the body… and therefore it is possible for one to exist without the other,” (Skirry). Disregarding the logistics of the mind and body existing independently, it’s easily identifiable that Enlightenment thinkers strove to make man have meaning as a distinct and complete being in whatever form he came in.
And just as easily identifiable in this slapdash account of the Enlightenment period provided above, is the absence of the word “woman.” If man is to be everything — God, king, self, citizen, etc. — then she must be everything he is not; and while man can exist in mind, body, or whatever vessel he so chooses, woman is neither whole enough to be a rational being, nor a part of any philosophical conversation. As Enlightenment is a concept is based off of knowledge and education, so is the idea of the independent self: so, without knowledge (through education), the self-determination of a person and citizen is nonexistent. As various women fought for access to the education that would validate their worth as that of the everyday man, the distinct separation of the private and public spheres and where women belonged in them only became more defined.
If we step back into our current era, we see that this mind-body dualism has presented itself in reality through a different means, this time solely as a method derail female self-determination and reformulate the centrality of her existence as that of being incomplete. You might ask, if man we to determine that they could exist both in mind and in body (and sometimes separately) how could the scripts possibly have turned around and made the mind-body division something directed at females? Which, is a very good question, one which I choose to avoid because I do not have the historical knowledge to trace back where and when this change started to take place and give the flippant answer of: I believe that as a male centric society, we will do anything to maintain the role of the submissive female, including misinterpreting Enlightenment ideas to make sure their subservient role continues to be fulfilled. I’m joking (but only a little bit), but while I don’t think that it was an active choice by some group of men to try and see how they could devilishly plot how to alienate women from their bodies and discourage female thinking and education, the underlying Euro-centric religious and monarchical ideas of women being lesser than men that are embedded in our culture always emerge, even if unintentional.
In The Metapatriarchal Journey of Exorcism and Ecstasy, Mary Daly speaks on methods that have been historically used to silence women, one of which is “Self-splitting,” in which the very grammar that women use to express themselves has been curated to a point where even the pronouns they use to identify themselves are methods to detach their physical bodies from a sense of self. In Middle English, the pronoun she was introduced after he; what followed was the pronoun she only being used for females, while he was used to refer to everything that wasn’t female. As she designates females, he designates everything living (including women), automatically othering she as non-male, but also non-human. The internalization of this linguistic separation then internalizes the system the language belongs to that maintains patriarchal structures.
Pronouns, then, are deceptive for women. Because they are so easily manipulated and undermined, when a woman uses ‘I’, the words she uses to identify herself are subsumed in male culture under the guise that ‘I’ is genderless when the entire language she is speaking in separates her from her own identity in her mind and orients itself in the conditioned male perspective. Through this, “the Inner Voice of Self’s integrity is silenced… when the Self tried to speak out her true depths, the pedantic peddlers of “correct” usage and style try to drown it in their babble,” (Daly, 149). The male perspective becomes a necessity; it’s the only perspective that can possibly be had to survive because it is the only one we have been allowed.
So, how does this mind-body distancing manifest itself in cinema?
Before answering this question, let’s pose another: are women able to find and express true female joy in cinema? Audre Lorde in Uses of the Erotic, “The Erotic as Power,” proposes that the erotic is not always the sexual, and that, “The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling,” (Lorde 87). The erotic has been misconstrued as a method of instilling fear and submission into women, and because it is so often confused with its opposition, the pornographic, we refuse to recognize it as a rich source of knowledge that is acceptable to explore. Lorde says, “For once we begin to feel deeply in all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of,” (Lorde 89,90). It has been understood then, for centuries, that the erotic is not something to be explored. But as Lorde reframes this perspective, we recognize the erotic as a source of power in which can we continue to discover our true wants, desires, and know true joy.
Let’s look at a recent trend of “Girlboss” or “Good for Her” movies to take a step in the direction of ‘what does female joy look like in cinema?’ In most cases, we find that the emotional goal of these “good for her” moments is to achieve the same satisfaction that male desires in film manifest themselves. Looking at a few films that most often fall into the “Girlboss” category in cinema, we’ll see that the distance created between the female mind and body is co-opted into a completely male sense of self and satisfaction.
In Gone Girl, directed by David Fincher, a woman (Amy) goes missing on her wedding anniversary and her husband becomes the main suspect in her disappearance. The audience soon finds that their perception of both husband and wife continue to change, but the change comes most drastically when it is revealed that Amy has planned her disappearance as a way to exact revenge on her husband. The film is meant to be a critique on the irrational desires men have for their wives and women in general, and show a worst-case scenario of just how human and real a woman can be. And yet, it devolves into a showcase of male machismo, only this time, rooted in a body that happens to be female. During her famous “Cool Girl” monologue, Amy says, “I will admit: For someone who likes to win, it’s tempting to be the girl every guy wants.… And I made him smarter, sharper. I inspired him to rise to my level. I forged the man of my dreams,” (Flynn).
But is this an expression of the un-silencing of women? The admission of guilt by Amy saying what her desires were and what she did to achieve them don’t strike me as true female desire, it seems more akin to performativity of masculinity. Competitiveness and improvement can be traits that certain women have, but the characterization of Amy is completely male and at the same time, is deeply misogynistic as its subliminal messaging through saying women aren’t all “Cool Girl,” is that all women are like her, they are scheming, revenge-hungry male desires packaged into a woman’s body. Lorde proposes that power can be found in the exploration of unexpressed emotion and feeling devoid of the cultural male perspectives that deem what women’s true desires are. Although we are made to believe that Amy has found power through manipulation and deceit because she’s “figured out the system” and is using it to her advantage, there is no pursuit of reclaiming space or emotional experiences as a woman she has been deprived of to find the true joy of being as a woman. She is a male mind moving through a female body.
Promising Young Woman, a movie about a woman (Cassandra) seeking revenge on everyone who turned the other cheek when her friend was raped, was written and directed by Emerald Fennell. In an interview with the LA Times, Fennell says, ““…I wanted to write something that felt like a revenge journey a real woman might go on,” (Fennell). It’s rare that women can say a movie is made for them, that they are truly the intended audience of a piece of media. But Fennell says it herself, this film is made to explore the ways in which women can terrify, how women take their revenge journey. But during multiple instances during the movie when Cassandra is playing out her plan for revenge, she doles out her revenge plot by putting other women in danger (or at least making them feel threatened). So, we return to the question: is this what a true female narrative is? Is this what true female joy is?
While the term, “Girlboss” will lack nuance by anyone who tries to define it, is most succinctly summed up in this definition: “the lady entrepreneur whose success is defined in opposition to the masculine business world in which she swims upstream” (Spencer), but note that the term is not always used in economic-related situations. But nevertheless, this term embodies the concept of a capable woman who will stop at nothing to achieve her goal, which in most cases, ends up being a materialistic and most times, immoral. When we look at these examples and the meaning behind the term, it’s difficult to unsee that the mindset that these women on screen are encapsulating are solely male, but what becomes even more detrimental in some ways, is that it is framed as the female perspective. Fennell stated that the purpose of her film was to portray a “real woman” and the journey she would take. But does the redefining of the female arc in narratives include the endangerment of other women? Does female joy, through the ‘erotic’ or not, present itself through violence like it does in both Gone Girl and Promising Young Woman when the main female characters murder other people?
In The Resisting Reader, Judith Fetterley touches on this point: “American literature is male. To read the canon of what is currently considered classic American literature is perforce to identify as male,” (Fetterley xii). She points out that in American narratives specifically, the American experience is defined as being male and as such, becomes problematic when women read these narratives because, “to be excluded from a literature that claims to define one’s identity is to experience a peculiar form of powerlessness… more significantly, the powerlessness which results from the endless division of self against self… she is required to dissociate herself from the very experience the literature engenders,” (Fetterley xiii).
Even when these movie scripts or narratives are written by women, it becomes difficult to separate oneself from the conditioned masculine point of view. Audiences of an artistic works are subjected to the unconscious male; the systems in which these pieces of art exist and the way in which we engage with the art is from a male eye. The female voice is not only silenced, as Mary Daly explains, it is nonexistent. From the language that we use to the stories that we pass down visually through cinema, our perspective is male-oriented because the media that we have consumed and learned from for all of our lives have been structured to maintain patriarchal hierarchies and desires. Our bodies mean nothing if our minds are not a collective with them, and the separation of the two are what let patriarchies rule.
When the conversation of representation and portraying “real women” on screen is so relevant, it does well to remember that art, cinema especially, is the sensationalism of life and no representation in a non-real-life medium can be true representation (it’s more of a simulacrum [which I would explain further but it would turn this already ridiculous piece’s word count into an even more stupidly large size]). But, when the impression that these forms of art leave on a culture is so palpable, we must also keep in mind that the representations of women that we see are not always beneficial, but always superficial. The body may be hers, but the mind is male.
Distance once again becomes the main issue. Beyond classic literature and novels, the narratives that we create and perpetuate are male narratives. No matter the character behind the intent or the person who is reading into the intent of the character, both sides are seeing through the male gaze. The woman becomes a myth, as she so often does, and her existence is nothing but a fantasy because if a true representation of a woman could be achieved through a form of media, “…it would contradict the perfection of art and contradict the power of man over art at its most essential. It would render his art and his power to determine worthless and recognize the woman and her body as something unable to be defined by a generalized, man-made definition,” (Ewalt).
The distancing of the true woman (whatever that might mean) comes through narratives told by the man behind the female mask; what she should feel, what she wants, and how she wants it is told to her by the collective male experience she learns through various narrative mediums. The language that she uses is tainted by the self-splitting language that degrades her and invalidates her existence. This fight to reorient the female mind and body is not new, but it continues because even the narratives that are made for us, confine us to our male gaze.
When we analyze society through a male gaze, it’s easy to become lost and discouraged in our pursuit, because how can be break free from something so ingrained into our lives? As women, we have been estranged from our bodies for centuries (and it unfortunately continues in even more tangible ways than media in legislation and more). The distance that we put between finding the harmony of the mind and body cannot be recovered from the intrinsic need of society to separate the two.
There isn’t a clear answer for how to achieve this rejoining and subtract the male point of view we live with, and the point of writing this piece is not to find a solution. Not because it is unfathomable to see how deeply these roots are entwined into the female existence, but because as much as literature and media narratives have tried to inform us, the female experience is not the same. Women are not the same. The methods we can use to reclaim our own true meaning of self will vary greatly and though our journeys are vastly different, they are all beautiful and ongoing; and as long as we keep going at it, someday they will break free.
Works Cited
Skirry, Justin. “René Descartes: The Mind-Body Distinction.” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://iep.utm.edu/descmind/.
Flynn, Gillian. “Gone Girl Final Shooting Script — Daily Script.” Daily Script, Twentieth Century Fox, http://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/GoneGirl_Final_Shooting_Script.pdf.
Fennell, Emerald. “Painful, but Fun to Watch. ‘Promising Young Woman’ Is a ‘Poison Popcorn Movie.’.” Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Times, 9 Feb. 2021, https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/awards/story/2021-02-09/emerald-fennell-promising-young-woman-screenplay.
Spencer, Keith A. “‘I Care a Lot’ Is a Stinging Indictment of Neoliberal ‘Girlboss’ Feminism.” Salon, Salon.com, 28 Feb. 2021, https://www.salon.com/2021/02/26/i-care-a-lot-neoliberal-girlboss-feminism-critique/.
Ewalt, Payton. “WP1: Death and the Immortal Woman.” Medium, Writing 150, 20 Sept. 2021, https://medium.com/writing-150/wp1-death-and-the-immortal-woman-1094bb1903f7.
Daly, Mary, et al. The Mary Daly Reader. NYU Press, 2017. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/book/57437.
Lorde, Audre. Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic As Power. Brooklyn, N.Y: Out & Out Books, 1978. Print.
Fetterley, Judith. The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978. Print.
