初めに、と映画「お嬢さん」（The Handmaiden）
自分語りが好きな割に物を書くのが苦手でまともな自己紹介もできないのですが、いきなり長々しい文章だけを投げるのは無粋な気がするのであいさつ代わりとして2019年秋学期履修の「Women and Film」というジェンダー学と映画論を掛け合わせたような授業からの期末課題を載せます。
2016年に公開された「お嬢さん（The Handmaiden）」という韓国映画に関しての分析レポート？で、映画自体は韓国でR19に指定されたり、GYAOでの配信時には途中、画面の1/3がモザイクになったような作品です。
こんなに性を描くのかと見るのが厳しくなるシーンもあれば、その性描写を芸術的な画で圧倒したり、とにかく衝撃的な上にただの謎解き映画としても本当に面白いのでぜひ見てください…
私の専攻は人類学社会学（Anthropology & Sociology）で、どちらかというと人類学寄り。副専攻はGender and Women's Studies（Gender StudiesやWomen's Studiesではない）で、熱意は専攻よりこちらが強いです。第二副専攻は未定。
Google Doc.に置き去りにされ忘れられていくのがもったいないと思った課題と、自分の自由研究のメモみたいなものを載せていきます。課題は英語ですが自由研究は日本語です。久しく日本語で長い文章を書いていないので変な言葉や文法を使う時があるのですが、「ああ日本語もまともに話せなくなったんだな…」とぬるい目で見てあげてください。
特に堅苦しい研究課題を載せたいわけではなく、イメージとしてはお道具箱や机の中でくしゃくしゃになってた宿題を広げてしわを伸ばして見せてる感じです。こう、お道具箱と机の間にプリントが挟まってぐしゃってなったことあったよね…あんな感じ…
私は知識も十分にないので、すごく間違ったことや筋が通らないことを言うことも多々あるかもしれないのですが、「リベラルアーツの米国文系大学生はこんなことをやっているんだなあ」とか、「こんな学問があるのかあ」と、少しでも興味を持ってもらえたら嬉しいです。間違いや疑問は指摘してもらえると助かります。
では、以下挨拶。
（映画見てないと半分も面白くないし挨拶としてだめなのではと思ったけどもうここまで書いてしまったのでこれで挨拶とします。）
“I’m afraid that in real life, no woman feels pleasure at being taken by force”
Interrogating The Gaze In The Handmaiden
In film history, women have been represented based on the male gaze as a kind of sub-character either as an object to be desired by men or as a femme fatale like a problem for them. Mulvey argues; “Woman then stands in patriarchal culture as a signifier by a symbolic order in which man can live out his fantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer, not maker, of meaning,” (59). Women have not been able to be a subject in films, and the position of the female spectator is therefore complicated. Does the female spectator even exist? A recent Korean film, The Handmaiden does, however, portray its women characters differently from mainstream films while also challenging the traditional male gaze. Its reception was interesting. This film was widely welcomed by the audience in Japan, a country with a lot of cultural similarities with South Korea, with its artistic representation of female sexuality and active female figures resulting in a happy ending. However, in South Korea, a number of religious people protested against it due to its extreme sexual scenes despite it being critically acclaimed. There is a “large and vocal Christian community” against the recent open attitudes towards sexuality in South Korea (Benjamin Haas). In the West, this film has been widely praised and won prizes internationally including Foreign Language Film of the Year by The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics (IMDb). In this paper, I want to lay out ways in which The Handmaiden has successfully critiqued more traditional films grounded on the male gaze and upsets patriarchal structures by focusing on the narrative of the bonding of two female characters. At the same time, I want to also offer a caution, suggesting that the representation is not always as positive as some critics would have us believe.
Notably, this film certainly has a number of scenes of female characters portrayed in a way that we have seen in old films many times. The traditional representation of female characters as dependent women demonstrates the problems of patriarchal society. But the portrayals of women in this film change as the characters develop, and the narrative becomes much more progressively. Kathleen R Karlyn, introducing the argument of Carolyn Heilbrun, says: “women’s lives can be narrated only within the boundaries of heterosexual love, motherhood, and loneliness” (157). The representation of women in the first part of this film is as traditional as Heilbrun argued decades ago. These women cannot make their own decisions because they are the property of males. The life of Hideko was decided by her uncle, and her life is narrated with a heterosexual “love” with him, the loss of her mother, and the solitude of being left alone by her family. The narration of her life is deeply traditional.
In general, the women in the film are trapped by patriarchy. They cannot go anywhere. Sook-hee, a handmaiden, is not allowed to move actively and needs to serve the superiors. With Hideko all the time as a handmaiden, her role is submissive. But Hideko is forced to be submissive and dependent as well. She is trapped in her house by her uncle and has never been out of the mansion. Her male teachers come to her house from outside. She has been educated by her uncle to please males. She does not even take off her clothes by herself. This traditional male-dominated patriarchal society is not working well. It seems a peaceful society on the surface, but there are people who suffer unreasonably. Patriarchal society creates unhealthy dependent women who come to resent their control over them.
But this film, as it develops, also portrays independent or masculine women, especially in the second and last part of the film. The presentation of these independent and ‘masculine’ women reveals opposition to patriarchal structures and the narrative gradually takes privilege from men and gives it to women. In some regards, the female characters in this film have equal relationships with male characters. For example, the relationship between the two female protagonists and Count Fujiwara is almost equal. Hideko makes a deal with him and they call each other “business partners.” She resists a relationship with Count, and she betrays him at the end. Sook-hee also has an equal relationship with him. They are also like business partners. Moreover, she is a rival of Count Fujiwara as Hideko’s partner. There is a triangle relationship among them, which is more traditionally constructed in the film as two males and an object female. Additionally, these female characters are able to decide with whom they have a sexual relationship. In traditional male gaze film or patriarchal society, the privilege of decision making about sexual relationships belongs to males, but now females have the privilege. Hideko has refused to have a sexual relationship with Count Fujiwara and escapes from her uncle before she has a relationship with him. On the other hand, she chose to start a relationship with Sook-hee. Since both women choose willingly to enter a relationship, they have assumed male privilege in this film. Notice also how the women ‘reframe’ props. In the film, the ownership of the steel balls, the representation of male power, is moved from males to females. At first, the balls are used by the male teacher to punish Hideko, but in the end, Hideko and Sook-hee use the balls as a sexual toy to have pleasure together. The representation of male power has become, reframed, a representation of pleasure. The women take that symbol of male power and use it to give each other pleasure. Hideko and Sook-hee appropriate male freedom and power.
Furthermore, Hideko and Sook-hee refuse the paternal figure. For example, there’s no mention of a father for Hideko and Sook-hee. Similarly, Hideko doesn’t marry her uncle or Count Fujiwara, who could replace the father. Most powerfully, before Hideko and Sook-hee leave the house, they trash the collection of pornography, a symbol of her uncle and his patriarchal world, and her obedience to males. This gesture could be interpreted as an Oedipal gesture, the killing of the paternal figure. According to the theory of the boys Oedipus Complex, a son kills his father to take over the father’s place. In this film, literally, they destroy the collection of pornography associated throughout the film with the objectifying of females by the extreme male gaze. In destroying the symbol of female obedience to males, male gaze, and objectified females, they also symbolically destroy the patriarchy, male gaze, and the status of females being objectified. Additionally, since they killed the father, they took over his place, dominator in society as Oedipus took over his father’s place. As spectators, we are on their side. We cheer them trashing the oppression of women, and are excited to see them going to be free from the oppressed world. The bonding of the two female characters trashes the traditional world. This is the female gaze. Since we’ve seen enough of the negative aspects of the patriarchal society and females struggling just to be free, we came to identify with them, and now we see the film as a female spectator.
Interestingly, questions of female spectatorship and empathy are also embedded within the film itself. There are scenes that deny the male gaze and a one-sided objectification of women and give women a degree of subjectivity. Throughout the film, Hideko rejects the one-sided objectification from males. When her uncle makes her read pornographic novels, she stares back at the male audiences while they stare at her. Moreover, after the reading party, she peeks at the conversation of her uncle and Count Fujiwara with her opera-glass, assuming her own unique gaze. Count Fujiwara describes how women avert their eyes from him when he looks at them in the eyes, then says he averted his eyes from Hideko during the party. In a sense, he is the woman in the relationship with her, losing the power of the male gaze and becoming an objectified male. Hideko is the subject with a female gaze. Since Count Fujiwara, an active male character, becomes an object, and Hideko gained a female gaze to objectify other characters, it allows the audience to have female spectatorship more easily.
In her theory of the female spectator, Mary A. Doane explains the difficulties of theorizing female spectatorship: “For the female spectator, there is a certain over-presence of the image - she is the image.” (135). Since the female audience has too much closeness to the female characters in the film, they are not able to objectify the characters and fully become a subject, a female spectator. This film also disturbs that dynamic by focusing on the lesbian relationship between two women. The relationship is portrayed quite artistically. For example, symmetrical compositions are frequently used when Hideko and Sook-hee have a sexual relationship. In the very last scene, their naked bodies and the room are line symmetry. This kind of artistic presentation gives the audience subjectivity as if they see a painting of the two women nude in the museum. Notably, their lesbian relationship is different from that of heterosexual couples’. It seems more equal, but more sexual. Their love scene in the middle of the film surprised the audiences with its extreme presentation of female sexuality. The female audience emphasizes with the female protagonists because the lesbian couple has a healthy relationship which the female audience often desires. Since females are not tortured in relationships, the female audience can have a closeness to the female protagonists. However, the audience cannot get too close to the character because otherwise, they would not be able to objectify the character, so the extreme sexual presentation produces a distance between the two. Since the love scene proceeds quickly and excessively, the audience is forced to take a step back from the film because they cannot catch up with the rapid change of the view and situation. It balances the distance between the female protagonists and the audience by giving them multiple contents that have contradicting effects. I believe this film succeeded in providing female spectatorship by producing a space between the female characters and audiences with its extreme sexual presentation and its artisticness.
When it comes to spectatorship, this film obviously gives the female (or lesbian) spectator a dual object to identify with. At first, everyone in the film is trying to escape from their role. The uncle is trying to be Japanese. Count Fujiwara is trying to escape his social class. Hideko is trying to escape from the role of pleasing males. Sook-hee is trying to be rich from a con man. However, only female characters who abandon patriarchal society succeed in this desire, sailing to the new world at the end. On the contrary, the uncle and Count Fujiwara die in the enclosed basement, trapped like Hideko was trapped before. The last line of Count Fujiwara before he dies shows his ongoing complicity with patriarchal expectations even as he dies: “At least I will die with my cock intact.” The penis, a key symbol for any patriarchal society, is still all that matters to him, more than death.
The happy ending of the women demands female and lesbian spectators to identify with them. As Mulvey argues that there are two aspects of scopophilia, the pleasure in looking. One is pleasure in using another person as sexual stimulation through sight, and another is narcissistic pleasure in identification with the image. As I described, the former pleasure is already achieved by creating distance between the female characters and the audience. The latter is achieved by praising the female characters while chiding male characters. The audience tends to identify with a character that gives them pleasure when they identify with him or her. Since the male characters are dispraised throughout the film, the audience prefers to identify with the female characters which resulted in a happy ending. In addition, their relationship is obviously lesbian, so lesbian spectators do not have to perceive if the relationship is just a friend or lesbian, but naturally identify with one of them. As I mentioned, their relationship is healthier than the relationship of heterosexual couples’ in the film, and this lets other female spectators identify with the female character because therefore they can feel pleasure in the context of two women resulted in having a desirable ending. I believe that the presentation of Hideko and Sook-hee running away from the house while laughing and their seemingly pleasurable love scene in the end, affirms what they carry with them; female bonding, lesbian relationship, and positive female protagonists. Therefore, the positive presentation of two women together enables the audience to have female spectatorship.
Yet for all of the film’s progressive aspects with gaze and spectatorship, it still has a problem with the gaze and male spectatorship. There are numerous scenes that represent the fetishization of females. For example, there are multiple close shots of the naked female body. In the scene in which Hideko and Sook-hee have sex, the camera shows multiple close-ups of Sook-hee. Additionally, when Sook-hee takes care of Hideko’s tooth in the bath, the camera lingers of the mouth, fingers, and elbow. Although it is an intimation of the beginning of their lesbian relationship, we see a lot of fetishization of the female body in the film. Considering that the director is a male, it seems highly sexist. Fetishization in this context is the objectification of females based on the male perspective, in other words, the male gaze, and this is for the male spectator. I personally did not like the bath scene since it has too many fetishizations in the nonsexual context. Contrary to the progressive style of criticizing the male gaze and male spectatorship, the visual presentation of females seems to be a little bit problematic. The Handmaiden displays the new portrayal of females, turns down the patriarchal structure, then offers the audience female gaze and spectatorship by managing its skillful presentation of active female figures and their bonding. It demonstrates the problems of traditional films created based on the male gaze and patriarchal society, which produced the foundation of traditional films. However, it reversed those progressive aspects of this film to just another sexist portrayals of females due to the unnecessary fetishization of female bodies. Since this film was enjoyable simply with its mystery-solving experience, I am disappointed to say this, but, this film almost could be an entirely new model for the film to serve the female gaze and spectatorship.
おしまい。
