Madonna and Desperately Seeking Susan: Transforming how gender is constructed and represented
Within the Western literary world, one of the earliest and most prominent female character recorded in our written history is of course, Mother Mary. However, in celebration of International Women’s Day, I’d like to consider yet another Madonna, being the Material Girl herself, and how a more inclusive form of female empowerment had been carved out through her stardom. More specifically, following from my attempt at film analysis in my last article, I would like to look into Madonna’s film debut in Susan Seidelman’s Desperately Seeking Susan (1985) and read it against Laura Mulvey’s seminal paper on male gaze theory to consider more broadly the film’s impact on how gender had been constructed and represented.
Primarily concerned with Roberta, a bored housewife, and her fascination with the enigmatic Susan who appears to defy all societal expectations, this is a film that rebels against dominant expectations of women. However, Desperately Seeking Susan does not neatly subvert the tropes that Mulvey had identified ten years earlier as it fluctuates between adherence and divergence from her paper. This is in my opinion, attributable to a shortcoming within Mulvey’s paper which is its dichotomized notion of gender, such that it is limiting to examine how gender is constructed and represented within the film through this lens alone. The film plays with this false binary in many different ways but a key way by which the limitations within Mulvey’s framework becomes evident is through the fact that the face of the film is Madonna herself whereby her image is intimately tied with her socio-political influence. As the boundaries between Susan the character and Madonna the celebrity becomes blurred, the fascination with Susan within the diegesis becomes equated with the public’s interest in Madonna’s stardom and her disruptive impact. As such, by understanding the celebrity dimension and bringing this in tandem with Mulvey, I hope to make possible a broader understanding of gender through my reading of the film.
Subverting Mulvey
Mulvey’s discussion on voyeurism and the pleasure taken in looking at another person as an erotic object insists upon an active male watcher but Seidelman subverts this as Roberta is the one bearing the gaze. From the get go, the film shows how its fascination with Susan is driven by Roberta — a woman in the distinctively female role of the housewife — by having Roberta recount how Susan moved to “Mexico City, then Seattle” just from following the messages Susan and Jim put up on the tabloid’s personals section. Further emphasizing Roberta’s femininity is the way this conversation takes place in a salon while she is getting made up alongside other women, situating her squarely within a traditionally female domain. Following which, Roberta’s status as the “bearer of the look” is crystalized, through her pursuit of Susan at Battery Park, first from how she follows Jim’s identification of Susan and later from the point of view shots of Jim and Susan embracing through the pay-slot telescope Roberta uses. The film thereby challenges Mulvey’s paper by showing how women partake in voyeurism as well.
Similarly, Mulvey’s assertion that men shoulder the active role of forwarding the story is also frustrated by the film as it features not just one, but two female protagonists who are both crucial in furthering the narrative through their decisions and actions. Motivated by her interest in Susan, Roberta shows agency as she follows Susan to Battery Park and later to the vintage store where she buys Susan’s jacket. Thereafter, Roberta similarly furthers the narrative through her own initiative by placing an advertisement on the tabloids so as to return the locker key to Susan. Meanwhile, Susan also actively works towards answering key questions such as the truth behind Roberta’s unhappiness and Roberta’s disappearance altogether. Considered together, these subversions of the tropes raised by Mulvey connotes the male gaze theory’s diminished importance in understanding how gender is constructed and represented within a film.
Negotiating Mulvey
Even though the film subverts the active male watcher trope that Mulvey discusses, her theory remains useful for understanding the construction and representation of gender within the film as women remain the object of voyeurism. Setting the mood and tone of the film is the opening shot featuring a woman’s bare legs. The following shots similarly feature close-ups of disembodied body parts, lending towards Mulvey’s theory of how women are reduced into pure visual pleasure that work against the narrative. However, by reading the opening sequence as a whole and considering it as a depiction of the beautification process, Mulvey’s framework can be nuanced. By showing the waxing of legs, the painting of nails, and the steaming of hair, Seidelman can be said to be forming a narrative centred on the steps taken by women to get themselves ready. This thereby suggests that what women experience and go through, in itself, can also be considered as stories in their own right. Such a portrayal of women as more than just scopophilic pleasure appears to disrupt Mulvey’s theory but the film does not dismiss Mulvey altogether. Instead, the film links narrative to visual pleasure as the story plays upon the importance of a women’s appearance on two separate but related instances. The first being the use of one’s appearance as a form of resistance in response to their unhappiness as seen from Roberta’s choice to style herself after Susan, and the latter through the film’s central conflict where Roberta disappears after she had been mistaken for Susan. Though the film moves beyond Mulvey’s paper by showing how a woman’s physicality may be a narrative in its own right, the theory cannot be disregarded altogether due to the subliminal presence of the gaze whereby objectification is nonetheless shown to simultaneously happen.
In a similar vein, even though the active role of forwarding the story is taken on by women, the way they further the narrative and the role the male characters play in relation to them also cast doubt on the degree Mulvey’s paper had been subverted. Exemplifying this is the way Roberta exhibits “classic feminine behaviour, [such as being] forgetful, clumsy, unpunctual and indecisive” and relies upon Dez, Jim’s friend who had mistaken her for Susan, to drive her around as she tries to trace Susan’s footsteps. This may however, be countered in at least two different ways. Given that Dez defers to Roberta and leaves the decision making to her alone, he is arguably little more than a vehicle for the furthering of the narrative than the driving force behind it. More importantly, Roberta’s desire to be like Susan casts doubt on whether Roberta had indeed lost her memory at all and invites questions as to whether she had been feigning memory loss just so she could create for herself an opportunity to find herself by tracing Susan’s footsteps.
Beyond this, the portrayal of Dez as Roberta’s love interest is also significant as it plays with Mulvey’s claim that women are framed as the object of voyeurism. Through the depiction of Dez in a romantic and even eroticized manner through his lovemaking scenes with Roberta, Dez can also be regarded as yet another subversion of Mulvey’s theory on how men cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification. The film in fact hints at this in an earlier scene, as Roberta’s husband, Gary, invites his guests to watch the advertisements which he himself appears in, thereby effectively framing himself as an object of desire though not necessarily in the same way the women he is featured alongside in the commercial. Given the film’s multi-faceted approach towards the construction and representation of gender, Mulvey’s theory must be rehabilitated such that it remains useful.
Expanding Mulvey
In considering how male gaze theory may be further developed, it is important to note that Mulvey had revisited her paper and clarified that the viewer is simply masculinized. Nonetheless, even when taking such clarification into account, this trope is still disrupted by Seidelman. Of note is the slippage between Mulvey’s theoretical spectator and a character of the film. Evincing this is the supposed masculinization of Roberta as she puts up an advertisement — the same way Jim does — so as to meet Susan whereby Jim himself makes the assumption that Roberta’s advertisement had been placed by another man.
Herein, Jim’s false assumption can be read as a satire of the male gaze theory and how it operates within a dichotomy with “only two significant categories for understanding the complex interplay of gender, sexual aim and object choice”. The film emphasizes this by explicitly querying Roberta’s sexuality on two occasions — first through Leslie’s asking of whether Roberta is lesbian and later during Roberta’s reunion with Gary at the police station whereby he thought it was necessary to ask Roberta that question again even though he had claimed to have known its answer previously. Given Roberta’s lovemaking scene with Dez, these questions are punctuated with dramatic irony. Accordingly, Roberta’s response (“Gary, you’re not listening to me.”) highlights the limitations of using male gaze theory to unpack how gender is constructed and represented within the film while emphasizing the need to hear her out so as to empathise with her as a person as opposed to a stereotype defined by her gender.
Further problematizing Mulvey’s dichotomized understanding of gender is the film’s depiction of Roberta’s interest in Susan. Herein, Mulvey’s theory falls short as it disregards the differences between how men and women may derive joy from watching the female form on screen. Unlike Mulvey’s assertions, Roberta longs to become like Susan, particularly through her purchasing of Susan’s jacket. Furthermore, by telling Gary how the jacket was previously worn by Jimi Hendrix — as asserted by Susan — and not Elvis Presley as claimed by the owner of the vintage store, her acceptance of Susan’s language disrupts Mulvey’s claim that the female form is styled accordingly to the male or masculinized through her rejection of the store owner’s male voice. Though Roberta’s interest in Susan may be influenced by a perception of Susan as sexually appealing, the mention of the two celebrities in addition to the presence of Aretha Franklin through her song, Respect, which plays throughout the scene as Roberta follows Susan into the shop and buys her jacket, brings attention to the fact that Susan is also played by Madonna, a star in her own right. Altogether, this suggests that Roberta might be interested in Susan simply because of who the latter is in itself and what she represents. Mulvey’s theory is thereby shown to be insufficient for unpacking how gender is constructed and represented within the film as it is mediated by Madonna’s celebrity.
Lastly, while the film aligns itself with Mulvey with regards to what can be done when faced with the feminine, being the demystifying of their mystery, tension with Mulvey’s theory arises once more when such an investigation is carried out. The film pursues this enquiry on two levels, the first being the fascination with Susan as embodied by Roberta and second, Roberta’s mystery as tackled by Gary, Leslie and Susan, made overt through Susan’s question to Gary (“What do you really know about Roberta?”). Herein, the books in Roberta’s bed-side drawer is telling as the juxtaposition of Dr Ruth’s Guide to Good Sex alongside How to Be Your Own Best Friend and I’m OK — You’re OK suggests that Roberta is dissatisfied not just with her sex life but with herself in general. Given the complexity by which women are presented and constructed, Mulvey’s theory can hence be seen as limiting due to its reliance on a “framework of linked binary oppositions”. In light of this, how Gary first appears in that scene through a flipped point of view shot from Susan’s perspective in the scene where Susan reads to him Roberta’s diary becomes significant as it signifies the displacement of how men view women. Though Susan plays a vital role in deciphering Roberta’s psychology as emphasized by her declaration (“Fortunately for everybody, I’m here and I’m thinking”), the film does not offer any explicit explanation as to her fascination with Susan. Nonetheless, the fact that she was played by Madonna can be considered to further our understanding of how gender is constructed and represented.
Beyond Mulvey
Given that the film blatantly emphasises the parallels between Susan the character and Madonna the star, Madonna’s stardom and the politics that she represents is a factor that must be considered when participating in the discourse surrounding gender. Further to the similarities between their attitudes and the way they are styled, the film also plays Madonna’s Into the Groove at the discotheque where she first meets Gary and later in the end credits of the film. Further blurring the distinctions between the character and Madonna’s stardom is the use of scenes from the film in Madonna’s music video for the same song. In analysing the intersections between the film, Madonna’s brand, and what happens when one looks at an image of her, how Madonna “plays with the codes of femininity” by using it as a mask so as to “assert her own power and agency” is significant. This surfaces within the film as Roberta herself echoes this masquerade by hiding her self-help books amidst her lingerie such that she obscures her longing and desires behind a veil of femininity. Through the interaction between these objects, Siedelman can be said to be broadening our understanding of gender. Particularly, whether it is to merely frame and support a woman’s body, or as tools used to create an image of desire for men, the feminine is not divorced from the quest towards self-actualization, a concern that had been traditionally associated with the masculine.
The effect of this is multifaceted. While the creative interplay between masculinity and femininity emphasizes the limitations with viewing gender as a binary, it also gives credence to Mulvey’s theory as there is a need to first acknowledge the existence of a gendered dichotomy whereby particular traits are associated with particular identities before a broader and more inclusive framework can be established. Within this context, Susan’s first encounter with Gary becomes metaphorical as the plethora of characters, each flashily dressed and made-up, all serve to decentralize Gary and the masculinity that he represents. While he navigates through the discotheque, he and by extension, the film’s audience, vacillates through the plurality of gender expressions swirling fluidly into each other, visually experiencing the need to dismantle the perception of gender as a binary. Madonna’s presence within the film hence echoes non-binary activism, being the questioning of how gender is used as a classification system without destroying it altogether.
The tension this creates vis-à-vis Mulvey’s paper is significant. As opposed to being a dismissal of male gaze theory altogether, the disruptive impact of Madonna’s presence simply highlights the problem with holding on to restrictive notions of gender when trying to unpack how this concern is constructed and represented within a film. After all, Mulvey did speak to a truth that was very much relevant at the point in time where it was first penned such that without it, change like that as seen within Desperately Seeking Susan would not have been made possible at all. By considering Mulvey’s framework alongside the rest of the tools available to us for when approaching this conversation, Madonna’s stardom makes apparent the theory’s usefulness as a starting point from which broader ideas on gender may be extrapolated. Accordingly, the fact that the film does not neatly align itself with Mulvey’s tropes does not diminish its utility at all as her paper can be read as a snapshot of a past that has to be destroyed so as to develop a Hollywood system that is not male-centric. Mirroring this is the burning of the film reels in Dez’s theatre which becomes symbolic of how Seidelman is literally striving towards this construction of a new cinema. With this in mind, Seidelman can hence be said to be corroborating with Mulvey while also emphasizing the need to keep developing new frameworks so as to broaden our understanding of how gender may be constructed and represented through films, and also to respond to the changing needs of the society that cinema intends to speak to.
