The camera focuses on a red, unopened door at
the end of a long, black and red hallway. The opening notes of
AC/DC’s “Back in Black” begin to play as the
camera creeps closer to the door. After a moment, the door opens,
framing a beautiful woman decked out in black lingerie, a riding
crop in her hand. The camera slowly pans up her body, and she
begins to walk, slowly, like a runway model making her way down
a catwalk. The camera moves once to catch her from behind before
she reaches her destination: an overweight man with a pockmarked
face who sits eating shrimp drenched in cocktail sauce. As she
stands before him, he orders her to “try the red one,” and
though a brief look of what looks like challenge or annoyance
flashes in her eyes, she obeys, leaving him briefly to change
into red lingerie and begin the catwalk again.
A television viewer flipping through channels during the first
minute and a half of Alias Episode 2-13, entitled “Phase
One,” would see the same thing they have seen on many other
television shows in the past: a highly sexualized female performing
for a fully clothed male. Watch for even a minute more, however,
and the viewer will see something different: the sexualized female
taking control, pinning the male to the bed, and demanding what
she wants – which, by the way, is not sex, but access to
his computer. The woman is Sydney Bristow, and she is an agent
for the CIA. What’s more, Jennifer Garner, the actress
bringing her to life, is the undisputed star of Alias, which
premiered in September of 2001 and ended its five-season run
in May of 2006.
In the 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura
Mulvey explains that the typical female character in a traditional
Hollywood narrative is subjected to three “male gazes”:
the gaze of the camera, which often only focuses on specific
body parts, thus reducing her to an object; the gaze of the male
main character, for whom she is usually the object of desire;
and the gaze of the viewer of the film, who, through both filmic
techniques and narrative structure is positioned to identify
with the male main character and objectify the female love interest.
Further, she states that “the determining male gaze projects
its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly.
In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously
looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong
visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote
to-be-looked-at-ness” (19). She goes on to state the following:
As the spectator identifies with the main male protagonist, he
projects his look onto that of his like, his screen surrogate,
so that the power of the male protagonist as he controls events
coincides with the active power of the erotic look, both giving
a satisfying sense of omnipotence. A male movie star’s
glamorous characteristics are thus not those of the erotic object
of the gaze, but those of the more perfect, more complete, more
powerful ideal ego conceived in the original moment of recognition
in front of the mirror. (20)
In the years since Mulvey’s article has been published,
it has been widely anthologized and the source of much scholarly
debate, largely because, as Brenda Cooper notes, “Mulvey’s
articulation ignored any notion of a feminine spectator”;
Cooper also notes that many scholars have additionally “rejected
the argument that women identify with film narratives only within
the masculine parameters suggested by Mulvey’s concept
of male gazes” (418). Such scholarship suggests that even
if a “male gaze” does exist, spectators do have the
capacity to view the text in alternate or resistant ways. Other
scholars have argued that being the object of the gaze might
even be empowering; as Kathleen K. Rowe contends,
…
visual power flows in multiple directions and…the position
of the spectacle isn’t entirely one of weakness. Because
public power is predicated largely on visibility, men have traditionally
understood the need to secure their power not only by looking
but by being seen—or rather, by fashioning, as author,
a spectacle of themselves. Already bound in a web of visual power,
women might begin to renegotiate its terms. (77)
Thus, the “male gaze” does not always or necessarily
completely limit either viewer or “object.” For that
reason, texts can no longer be examined simply to determine whether
the “male gaze” is present; rather, scholars must
ask how the gaze operates in a particular narrative, how a particular
narrative text complicates, challenges, or utilizes what Mulvey
has termed “the male gaze,” and what the implications
of the way the text is employing the gaze are.
With that in mind, if we simply ask whether Alias’s Sydney
Bristow is the object of the gaze or whether, like the traditional
male hero Mulvey describes, her “glamorous characteristics” are “those
of the more perfect, more complete, more powerful ego conceived
in the original moment of recognition in front of the mirror,” we
do neither Laura Mulvey nor Sydney Bristow justice. Instead,
we must ask how Alias, in Rowe’s words, “renegotiates
the gaze’s terms.” In this paper, I examine the ways
in which Alias positions the viewer to identify with Sydney while
simultaneously sexualizing and feminizing her; I further examine
the potential consequences for the way the gaze is renegotiated
in this particular narrative.
We must first note that on Alias, the way the gaze is employed
is partly affected by the fact that Alias is a television show
and not a film. A film is over in only a couple of hours, while
a television series can stretch out over several years; this
means that the viewer has greater opportunity to identify with
characters. Further, Tania Modelski notes that some television
genres ask viewers to identify with characters in an entirely
different way than Mulvey notes that movie viewers are positioned
to identify with characters; she states that soap operas, for
example, do not ask the viewer to identify with a main male protagonist,
instead asking the viewer to take on the role of “ideal
mother: a person who possesses greater wisdom than all her children,
whose sympathy is large enough to encompass the conflicting claims
of her family (she identifies with them all), and who has no
demands or claims of her own (she identifies with no one character
exclusively)” (39). Nevertheless, the viewer is clearly
positioned to identify with Sydney Bristow on Alias; this might
have something to do with the fact that, as Charlotte Brundson,
Julie D’Acci, and Lynn Spigel note, “genres that
were once widely male identified” have begun placing females
in starring roles (1). Thus, since Alias is part of the spy genre,
which has traditionally been male identified, it makes sense
that the viewer is positioned to identify with Sydney, as opposed
to identifying with “no one character exclusively.”
In fact, the writers take multiple steps to ensure that viewers
identify with Sydney, as opposed to other characters. First of
all, viewers spend far more time with Sydney than with any other
character. For example, in the previously mentioned episode, “Phase
One,” the viewer sees Sydney out on missions, jogging,
attending meetings at work, and out at dinner with friends. No
other character is seen as often, or in as many different settings,
and when Sydney is not in a scene, the action is still almost
always related to her in some way. In one scene in the episode,
Eric Weiss (played by Greg Grunberg) and Michael Vaughn (Michael
Vartan) discuss Sydney and Vaughn’s burgeoning romantic
relationship. In other brief scenes, we see Sydney’s father
Jack Bristow (Victor Garber) captured and tortured. The producer
presumably assumes that the viewer will care about this because
Sydney cares about it; she is shown crying and acting upset about
it. The scenes featuring Jack Bristow’s torture also set
up Sydney’s eventual rescue of Jack; she kills his captor
and frees him from his restraints, giving the viewer yet another
chance to identify with her as the hero. No scene is provided
simply to allow viewers to get to know characters other than
Sydney better. Most scenes are intended to advance Sydney’s
main storyline in the episode – the takedown of SD-6, the
rogue spy organization Sydney has been working as a double agent
to bring to justice. Other scenes advance other storylines within
Sydney’s world, such as her romance with Michael Vaughn.
Viewers are also made complicit with Sydney by the fact that
they are constantly learning plot details along with her. At
the end of the show’s pilot episode, viewers and Sydney
found out, together, that Sydney’s father, who she had
always thought sold airplane parts, was also a CIA agent. In
Episode 1-11, “The Confession,” Sydney, along with
viewers, learned that her supposedly deceased mother, whom she
had always believed to be a literature professor, had in reality
been a KGB agent and the murderer of Michael Vaughn’s father.
Finally, when Sydney woke at the end of Episode 2-22, “The
Telling,” to learn that she had been missing and presumed
dead for two years with no memory of the elapsed time, viewers
were put in the position, along with her, of learning how the
people in her life had moved on in her absence, as well as having
to figure out the mystery of what had happened to her.
We might ask whether it is possible that some viewers, regardless
of Sydney’s status as main character and the various techniques
used to incite viewers to identify with her, might instead choose
to identify with another prominent character on the show, such
as Jack Bristow or Michael Vaughn; after all, scholars like Cooper
allow for the possibility of resistant readings. However, identifying
with a character other than Bristow would be difficult due to
the fact that the other characters are seen primarily through
Sydney’s eyes. Additionally, the fact that Sydney is constantly
learning new things about the people in her life means that the
viewer can never be quite sure how much they know about characters
other than Sydney, or whether what they think they know is correct.
At the end of the fourth season of the show, for example, viewers
still knew little about Michael Vaughn other than that Sydney’s
mother killed his father, a fact that was highlighted in the
Season Four finale, which ended with the line, “My name
isn’t Michael Vaughn.” Sydney’s identity is
much more stable; if there is something about her that the viewer
doesn’t know, it is likely because she hasn’t learned
it yet, herself.
Viewers are further discouraged from identifying with the male
characters on the show by virtue of the fact that the male characters
are often asked to see the world through Sydney’s point
of view. On a typical episode, Sydney goes on a mission either
alone or with a partner (sometimes Michael Vaughn, sometimes
her father, sometimes another character) while another CIA agent
provides backup, talking to her from a remote location over a
headset. For example, in the previously mentioned “Phase
One” episode, the viewer, in the first scene, sees Sydney
in lingerie, trying to get access to a man’s computer.
The scene ends on a cliffhanger, with the man regaining consciousness
and pulling a gun on her; he pulls the trigger, and the scene
fades out to the opening title card, followed by an aerial view
of a city during the day and captions that read, “Los Angeles,
24 Hours Earlier.” Later in the episode, the opening scene
is replayed – this time from the point of view of Vaughn
and Weiss, who are watching from a remote location. They are
viewing the action via a hidden camera in Sydney’s earrings;
thus, while in a traditional generic text, the male characters
would gaze at the female character, in this situation, they are
gazing with her, and therefore, put in the position of the
ones being gazed at. Unlike Sydney, however, they are helpless to
do much other than be gazed at – while Sydney can, and
eventually does, physically attack the man gazing at her, Vaughn
can only make the standard protective boyfriend comments (calling
the man a “son of a bitch” when he asks Sydney to
change into the red lingerie) and offer advice to her by way
of the speaker she wears in her ear. It is Sydney who can choose
to take or ignore the advice at her own discretion and Sydney
who is responsible for carrying out the mission and getting herself
out of the situation – which she does. So will the viewer – even
the male viewer – take the viewpoint of Vaughn, who is
helpless to do anything but give advice, or the man gazing at
her (who is overweight, ugly, and is ultimately beaten up and
eventually killed)? Far more appealing is the viewpoint of Sydney,
who ultimately triumphs in the situation.
In Narrative and Genre: Key Concepts in Media Studies, Nick Lacey
explains, “In most generic texts the function of the central
female character is to be the ‘princess,’ who needs
rescuing, and the reward (usually with sex) for the hero at the
plot’s conclusion” (148-149). This begs the question,
then – if Sydney is the “hero” in this story
(as we have established that she is), does that mean that Vaughn,
as her love interest, is fulfilling the narrative function of “princess” and “reward”?
Not quite. Yes, Sydney does often take the more active role in
missions (though from the second season of the show on, it became
more common for the two of them to work as partners). And, yes,
Vaughn is occasionally sexualized, shown without a shirt or in
a provocative disguise (as in Episode 3-18, “Unveiled,” in
which a mission in a goth club required him to dress in head-to-toe
leather, complete with eyeliner and a lip ring, or in Episode
4-4, “Ice,” where Vaughn was disguised as a “fallen
priest,” of sorts, drinking and flirting with a young woman
in order to get information from her). Yet, as Tom Soter, author
of Investigating Couples, notes, stories in which a male and
female work together are less likely to follow the conventions
of a traditional “hero” story (in which the “hero” works
to save the “princess”) and more likely to follow
the conventions of a “screwball comedy” (25). As
he explains,
In these comedies, there is a heroine who is either smarter than
the guy, daffier than the guy, or colder than the guy. In the
course of the movie, she will sequentially despise him (but still
get entangled in his affairs), come to admire him (even as she
fights with him), and finally realize that she loves him. In
the process, she will also change from spoiled or cold or daffy
to concerned or warm or slightly less daffy. Then there’s
the hero. He’s either a surface cynic…or else hopelessly
repressed and befuddled. In the first instance, the heroine brings
out the romantic in the hero, as he comes to realize that there’s
more to her than he thought. In the second case, the hero realizes
that there is more to life than being straitlaced…The unlikely
pair will find themselves thrown together…and then face
various obstacles to their true love. (25)
This model best explains the roles of Sydney and Vaughn in Alias,
with Sydney as the “cold” heroine who eventually
warms up (though throughout his tenure on the show, he remained
more likely to verbalize his feelings for her), and Vaughn as
the “straitlaced” hero who loosens up under Sydney’s
influence.
Thus, placing a female in the central role in a story does not
necessarily mean that there will be a role reversal – nor
does it mean that the female is any less likely to be shot parading
around in her underwear, the camera slowly lingering over each
curve of her body. It must be said, however, that though Sydney’s
disguises are often – though not always – sexy and
revealing to some degree, it is extremely rare for her to be
clad quite as scantily as she is in the opening scene of “Phase
One”; it is also rare for the camera to linger quite as
provocatively over her body as it does in this scene. It seems
quite important to note that “Phase One” originally
aired on January 26, 2003, directly following that year’s
Super Bowl, and that in commercial breaks during the Super Bowl
itself, as Brian Hindo noted in the next day’s online edition
of Business Week, “Frequent split-screen views of scantily
clad Jennifer Garner…blended in with gratuitous shots of
bikini babes for the All-Star Sunday football and ice hockey
specials” (“Super Bowl Ads”). One must not
forget, then, that though a show about a female CIA agent with
a genius IQ who speaks multiple languages and can physically
defeat virtually every opponent might be appealing to young female
viewers on premise alone, young female viewers are not the only
demographic the show is hoping to reach.
It is certainly not uncommon for a female character to be sexualized
as a consequence of television’s need to appeal to as wide
of an audience as possible. According to Dawn Heinecken, “images
of female heroes are frequently contradictory” for this
exact reason (23). As she notes in The Warrior Women of Television, “shows
from the seventies like Police Woman, Get Christie
Love!, Charlie’s
Angels, and Wonder Woman departed from existing television representations
of virginal white womanhood”; however, while they were
positive in that “they did break barriers for women, placing
both black and white females in leading roles,” they were
also “part of a ‘jiggle’ phenomenon” (23).
Thus, the women on such shows “simultaneously appealed
to proponents of the women’s movement and served as eye
candy” (23). The multiplicity of audiences that television
is trying to reach, then, provides one explanation for Sydney
Bristow’s sexualization.
Laura Mulvey would likely provide another. Under her model, Sydney,
as a woman, “connotes something that the look continually
circles around but disavows: her lack of a penis, implying a
threat of castration and hence unpleasure” (21). Therefore,
she might explain Sydney’s sexualization as “complete
disavowal of castration by the substitution of a fetish object
or turning the represented figure itself into a fetish so that
it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous” (21). Cristina
Lucia Stasia would likely agree; in her discussion of the 2001
film Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, she argues that the title character’s
femininity “functions to remind the audience that while
she may fight men, Lara is still there for erotic pleasure. Clearly,
this new female action hero is as titillating as she is threatening” (177).
It seems that female action heroes, then – whether on film
or TV – must be sexualized to remain appealing and non-threatening
to certain audiences.
It is not just female action heroes who are sexualized for this
reason, however; in Black Sexual Politics, Patricia Hill Collins
notes that “WNBA players are sexualized in the media in
ways that never apply to men”; during the 2002 season,
a series of ads “aimed simultaneously to celebrate and ‘feminize’ their
athleticism by showing women in action and showing their navels” (136).
Something besides sexualization was done to make the players
less threatening, however; the players were positioned “within
traditional gender ideology concerning motherhood and the family” (136).
With this in mind, we might note that similar measures are taken
to position Sydney within traditional gender ideology. The show
consistently places the primary emphasis on her relationships – both
with Michael Vaughn and with her parents – as opposed to
the show’s more action-oriented aspects. Furthermore, in
the final season of the show, Sydney becomes a mother (albeit
to accommodate Garner’s real-life pregnancy); the final
scene of the show’s final episode skips ahead to show the
viewers her future, in which she, while still involved with the
CIA to some extent, is married to and raising a family with Michael
Vaughn.
We might see both the sexualization of Sydney and the focus placed
on Sydney’s relationships as attempts to make her less
threatening and more appealing to male viewers, then. We might
also see the emphasis on relationships, however, as something
that sets the show apart from many other stories in the action
genre – and one that makes Sydney Bristow more appealing
to female, as well as male, viewers. Though Sydney might be sexualized
and aggressive on missions, at home, she is not so different
from many other women. She occasionally wears glasses. When getting
ready for bed with Michael Vaughn, she is far more likely to
wear pajama pants and a tank top than sexy lingerie. She makes
plans for weekend getaways that never quite happen, thanks to
her busy work schedule. In the last season, she is even shown,
like many women, struggling to balance motherhood and career.
She is, then, not so hard for a viewer to identify with – especially
since, as Subhash C. Lonial and Stuart Van Auken tell us in the
article “Wishful Identification with Fictional Characters,” “identification
with a fictional character…is likely to be based on wishfulness
(i.e., a desire to be like a hero or heroine) instead of similarity” (5).
Thus, if a viewer isn’t quite as capable of defending herself
as Sydney Bristow is, the “wishfulness” factor only
makes her more appealing.
Sydney Bristow remains, then, a complicated example through which
to further examine Mulvey’s concept of “the gaze.” As
the hero of the story, she is placed in an atypical role for
a female, at least as compared to the female described in “Visual
Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” and though she is often
sexualized, she is always shown as remaining in control of her
sexuality, using it for the purpose of completing CIA missions
and casting it off when necessary. Her personal life and her
relationships do not closely match the personal life and relationship
of the typical male action hero; in this context, she and her
romantic partner share a much more equitable relationship. We
might argue that placing a female in the lead role makes it necessary
to renegotiate how the gaze is employed, then. We might further
argue that it is also necessary to examine why the way the gaze
is employed has changed so drastically since the publication
of Mulvey’s essay in 1975. A look at feminist scholarship
can provide some insight on this topic.
One possible explanation is that the perception of women’s
sexuality and femininity has changed – and is continuing
to change. As Rebecca Munford notes in the 2004 essay “‘Wake
Up and Smell the Lipgloss’: Gender, Generation and the
(A)politics of Girl Power,” for many women, “‘femininity’ is
not opposed to feminism, but is positioned as central to a politics
of agency, confidence, and resistance” (148). Kristyn Gorton
further notes that today,
Popular representations of feminism in the
media sell: whether in music, film, or television, images
of independent women appeal
to a wide audience. One has to only look at recent chart hits
such as Destiny’s Child’s “Independent Woman” (2000)
or Kelly Clarkson’s “Miss Independence” (2003),
films such as Charlie’s Angels (2000) or Lara
Croft: Tomb Raider (2001), or fictions such as Bridget
Jones’s Diary (1996) to appreciate
that women’s “liberation” is
a marketable commodity. (154)
Though the author’s decision to place the word “liberation” in
quotation marks makes it clear that she feels the actual feminist
potential of the works listed is questionable, the point made
from the variety and number of examples is clear: women characterized
as “strong” sell today, whether that strength is
packaged in the form of a pop star, an action heroine, or a single
woman looking for love. And while Gorton argues that “throughout
these representations it is implied that women have achieved
the goals of second wave feminism – financial autonomy,
a successful career, sexual freedom – and, therefore, that
the demands associated with the movement of the 1970s have been
superseded,” she further notes that “the pleasures
women take in these representations…suggest a continuing
dialogue with earlier feminist concerns” (154-155). Thus,
from the viewpoints of both Munford and Gorton, we can infer
that though young women who enjoy such performers and characters
as Kelly Clarkson and Lara Croft – and, for that matter,
Sydney Bristow – have different ideas of what it means
to be feminist than previous generations did, they still are
interested in watching, listening to, and reading about women
that they consider to be strong and independent.
Stasia agrees, noting that “although girl power, within
mainstream hegemonic popular culture, is a severely diluted and
over-simplified form of feminism, it is not necessarily anti-feminist.
It provides a model of empowerment that has taught girls to say ‘girls
rule’ and to see the joys of sisterhood instead of ‘I-want-to-be-a-Mrs-hood’” (182).
Michele Byers sees television as a particularly potent potential
tool for providing this empowerment:
Television viewing, certainly, has become very ritualized, and
television has created a vast number of contemporary myths. Some
of these myths have to do with the emergence of a new vision
of girlhood and young womanhood that may not be explicitly claimed
or coded as feminist but can be linked to feminist agendas that
support and encourage girls and young women to be strong and
independent (183).
Even with Alias’s 2006 cancellation, then, it seems that
there is potential for television to positively influence young
women to be strong and independent.
And, of course, to continue to challenge and complicate Mulvey’s
notion of “the male gaze.”
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