Normalizing Non-Normativity and the Masculinization of Unlikeable Women in HBO’s Girls

By Sophia Fijman, Edited by Ben Glickman

“I think I might be the voice of my generation.” (Dunham, “Pilot”)

In the pilot episode of HBO’s Girls (2012-2017), 24 year old Hannah Horvath (Lena Dunham), in the midst of her pursuit of being a professional writer in New York City, is financially cut off by her parents. She brazenly defends herself, declaring, “I don’t want to freak you out but I think I might be the voice of my generation. Or, at least, a voice of a generation” (Dunham). Hannah’s immaturity and self-absorption––here manifested in her unrealistic goals and initial lack of independence––has made her into one of television’s most contentious characters of the 21st century. Framed by her heavily gendered role within the series, her blatantly disagreeable personality and unlikeable traits exemplify a significant contempt for women acting outside what is televisually ‘normative.’ In fact, all four protagonists of Girls—and the men who move on the outskirts of their lives––are deeply flawed and often disagreeable. Yet, the show remains in critical discussion and has been routinely praised over the decade since its initial success. Its characters’ discordant audience reception is due to discomfort associated with their challenging of gendered expectations. Girls is not a masterpiece. It is, undeniably, a landmark in the modern media landscape in its normalization of that which was previously swept under the rug by television’s idea of a woman: the uncomfortable reality of a 20-something-year-old middle-class white girl’s life. In televising authenticity, Girls standardizes ‘unlikeable’ behavior and life experiences which previously appeared outlandish or even crude as a direct result of the history of straight white women in television, framed by the gender performance of its girls. 

In 1999, Judith Butler published an updated edition of their groundbreaking book, Gender Trouble. The new edition featured a preface detailing the evolution of their theory of gender performativity in the time since its initial publication in 1990 (Butler). The widely-acclaimed book posits gender as perceived via the actions of an individual. In revisiting this assertion, Butler cannot ascertain what exactly performativity is or is not, but that it changes over time, as gender itself often does. Yet they question whether it is a kind of self-fulfilling “interior essence”–– “an expectation that ends up producing the very phenomenon that it anticipates” (Butler xiv). They then discuss gender performance as revolving around this concept, suggesting that performance is the yield of gendered essence as anticipated outside the individual. In other words, ‘gendered’ daily practices are informed by assumptions associated with one’s outwardly perceived gender identity. Actions determined ‘male’ or ‘female’ by a society are self-actualizing: they set a precedent for themselves via a social association formed through repetition. Those actions, over time, create a fuller picture of an independent identity, as “performativity is not a singular act, but a repetition and a ritual, which achieves its effects through its naturalization in the context of a body, understood, in part, as a culturally sustained temporal duration” (Butler xv). To then perform differently from one’s perceived gender (and the implications of that distinction as set over time) unsettles the circular nature of gender anticipation and action. Disturbances in fictional characters create further expectations for their audiences—expectations subverted by the characters of Girls. 

“You don’t own a TV? What’s all your furniture pointed at?” (Crane, “The One in Barbados”)

Gender’s presence in the televisual sphere is layered, to say the least. The very nature of television as a medium––in comparison to film or literature––ensures its role in presenting its audience with ideological questions. The television set, inherent to its design, is an invasive species. It sits looming in the center of a living room, commanding the attention of the house’s inhabitants. Since the 1950s, the American living room has been designed with the television as its center, furniture placed accordingly. The experience of watching television is domestic, and therefore much more intimate. To watch a new series is to welcome it into the home––be it via a handheld device, computer, television itself. The television is empowered by its status in the household, and consequently plays a crucial role in conversation with its viewers’ lives: disseminating information, and often determining that which is ‘normal,’ albeit partially defined by villainized deviance. To ‘normalize’ behavior or action does not inherently imply that they are good––simply that they are real. Television is a signal of normativity, establishing and reinforcing it for mass broadcast audiences in the intimate setting of their home. This extends to the viewer’s expectations of greater society––encroaching on their ideology. 

Concepts of gender and the performance of it, in particular, fall into this category––on both sides of the screen. Preconceived notions of binary gender were established and largely reinforced by the nature of television and its reach––especially in American history. A small box suggested the role of the then-modern woman, playing for hours daily inside the homes of otherwise minimally stimulated female viewers. As a result, female characters of the 1960s and 70s might be considered foundationally feminist simply for existing. Perhaps the personification of the generation in question, actress Mary Tyler Moore’s stardom shaped American womanhood and second-wave feminism. She wore pants frequently enough on television that she is often claimed to be the first woman to do so (though she was not) and “broke new ground” in the sitcom world (Desta).

Multi-dimensional female characters were rare before Moore’s rise to fame. Her role on The Dick Van Dyke Show led to an even more influential position––a show named after her as a character with the same first name. The Mary Tyler Moore Show was trailblazing, normalizing the life of ultra-modern Mary Richards. Yet, it was limited in its progressive attitude––CBS wouldn’t allow her character to be a divorcee (Burns). Moore’s previous character on The Dick Van Dyke Show, Laura Petrie, had been married to Dick Van Dyke’s character, Rob Petrie. The network feared the controversy of the same actress playing a divorcee would make viewers associate her divorce with her previous role across Van Dyke, reflecting poorly on CBS and its content. Though she was considered progressive for repeatedly violating the dress code for women on television, Mary Tyler Moore was a figurehead––and therefore must comply with the expectations of her perceived gender. Her womanhood was a performance––“an expectation that ends up producing the very phenomenon that it anticipates” and did so via the domestic reach of the television (Butler xiv).

“Am I undersexed?” 

The Mary Tyler Moore Show may very well be proto-Girls-esque feminist media. Mary and her friends, namely Rhoda (Valerie Harper), celebrated female friendship and lived ‘realistic’ lives. Mary was single, working, and ‘on the pill’––allowed to finally imply that she was sexually active without the intention of monogamy or having children. Though the show never explicitly depicted intimate scenes, the sex lives of its characters were alluded to and even discussed––during Season Three, the show itself responded to criticism that Mary was ‘undersexed’ by having her ask Rhoda that very question (Butler, Bethonie). Yet, she was still more-or-less perfect, as declared throughout the show by her closest friend. The beloved supporting character was eventually given a spin-off largely due to her popularity among fans (Davies). Rhoda’s misanthropic, self-deprecating humor and tumultuous relationship with her body image stood in contrast to Mary’s flawlessness. Intentionally, the series’ writers were told to write from their own experience for both characters, with their opposing characteristics forming a complete multi-dimensional 1970s woman. Audiences who viewed Mary as a kind of unachievable ideal identified instead with Rhoda––so much that her popularity inspired a five-season spin-off series titled “Rhoda.” 

Non-normativity in the early 1970s can be framed by gender just as well as it can now. Mary Richards was a caricature of a woman (in every sense of the word) at the time––and was stepping lightly over the boundaries of her perceived role as America’s television sweetheart. Simply being more than supplementary to a man was revolutionary in and of itself. In the aftermath of the women’s movement and in conjunction with the surge of rights for women in the 1970s, Richards navigated gender in the workplace as an unmarried, independent woman. Judith Butler’s theory of gender anticipation frames the series as feminist text. In further performing her gender as a woman outside its associated expectations, Mary Richards appeared non-normative; her inherent visibility in turn normalized her behavior. Women watching her were faced with the question of whether there is anything actually non-normative about wearing pants. What at first may have seemed bold was quickly the model for the modern young woman as a direct result of the accessibility and intimacy of the television’s place in the home. 

“I don't like women telling other women what to do or how to do it or when to do it.” (Dunham, “Vagina Panic”)

The unlikeable woman on television is one who often appears non-normative because she is, in fact, very similar to a normal woman. She is unliked because she makes viewers uncomfortable in her challenge of gendered boundaries. Truly, HBO’s Girls was not the first series to embolden young women––Hannah Horvath and her friends are but a recent addition to a line of Rachel Greens (Friends) and Carrie Bradshaw (Sex and the City)––but it is deeply ingrained in a dramatic cultural shift. It embodies the peak of 2014 pop culture and the backend of ‘girlboss’ third wave feminism. Hannah, Jessa (Jemima Kirke), Marnie (Allison Williams), and Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet), the four protagonists of Girls, are constantly making poor relationship decisions and irrationally dealing with friendship and femininity––but they are also having full-blown mental breakdowns on screen, losing their virginity, and cutting their own bangs. They seem off-putting, but are indeed realistic for a specific demographic defined by upper middle-class audacity. 

No one in Girls is America’s newest televisual sweetheart, yet the series’ non-normative depictions of its characters are framed by how heavily gendered they are. Like Mary Tyler Moore, the characters’ relationships with things like marriage, careers, sex, and appearance are highlighted, and therefore interpreted in the context of their expected gender performance. It’s here that Butler’s aforementioned self-actualizing theory of gender performance should be considered. The women of Girls are performing gender on screen, as informed by associated assumptions. Negative reactions to their allegedly self-important behavior seem in turn to be the result of their transgressions. What’s more, these characters center themselves––women––while the men in their lives get traded around within their social circle. Multiple characters date others’ exes and it's barely acknowledged, nor is it a prominent issue, because these men are not the centers of their lives. The show repeatedly reminds viewers of this strange transgression of their socially anticipated behavior as women acting outside of the ‘norm.’ 

“I [...] feel how everyone feels: which is I have three or four really great folk albums in me.” (Dunham, “It’s a shame about Ray”)

Ahead of the premiere of the sixth season of Girls, Vulture released an article detailing a comprehensive timeline of every controversy the show started––from shocked reviews of the first season, to concerns regarding Dunham’s capability to write male characters, to the University of Iowa refusing to allow the show to film on campus (Moylan). Gaging critical reception to Girls is not difficult––in the twelve years since its release, writers have pulled apart every point of contention and found reason to disagree with or celebrate each factor of the show. The few who have chosen to examine the series academically have pointed out that critics tend to ‘miss the point’––that the show is about “boring people with a limited outlook on life” and is not meant to be universally appealing or even a picture of what womanhood should be (Rogers). It examines what womanhood is for this specific type of entitled, middle-class, average white girl. In doing so, Girls garnered popularity. Even if viewers don’t like the characters themselves, there is a certain type of perspective that finds them relatable: a student writer at Yale published a slew of first reactions to an advance screening of the show in 2012. That same year, roughly 47% of undergraduate students at Yale were white (Yale). Their friends (and fellow Yale students) found that it was ‘smart,’ and “hit so close to home that it hurts.” One viewer claimed that they didn’t hate it, despite being “generally disdainful about most things, especially most things that target [their] demographic” (Serna). Girls is undeniably popular––despite excessive discourse in online forums (Reddit). Viewers, critics, and scholars are still attacking or defending it today. Yet the fuel to Girls’ pop culture fire seems under-examined. Hannah Horvath evokes realism for so many viewers, so why is she so divisive among audiences? The gendering of these four starring women and the men in their lives underscores their actions and, more importantly, their flaws. It brings up an interesting comparison to a show often hailed as its predecessor, one which Lena Dunham has acknowledged and was not attempting to replicate. Sex and the City is also about four women with modern lives, revolving around their sex lives in New York City. However, these women have seemingly unlimited money despite their middle-class status, unlike the characters in Girls––their seemingly normal lives are glamorized. Further, they are hyper-feminine, constantly wearing heels and fashion-forward outfits, and perform within the confines of their gendered roles. When people watch Sex and the City they’ll excitedly claim to be one of the characters, when people watch Girls they’ll grimace and admit they may relate to one of them. Lena Dunham herself views the series as filling a space left under-represented by the women of Sex and the City. The women of Girls were those who may not have had their work and personal lives figured out (Goldberg). What’s more, their cringe-inducing traits and the reason they are so disliked are often those typically more associated with men––Marnie’s priorities lie in career rather than love, Jessa’s neglect for empathy or long-term friendships––as if the girls of Girls are not performing femininity in a way which television has previously led audiences to expect. Hannah and her friends exhibit qualities distasteful in women that are often overlooked or even celebrated in men; their brutal honesty with one another confidence in self-serving behavior. What’s perceived as self-obsessed behavior for women might be acting in one’s best interest for men. The protagonists of Girls are thus masculinized by their flaws. These characters make viewers uncomfortable because they behave in ways which are considered abnormal on television, performing their gender identities outside of expectations and instead aligning with concepts of masculinity perpetuated by previous television. They are, in actuality, aggressively real for the specific type of viewer for whom it's intended. Not every negative review of Girls was a man’s (The Glass Eye Project) (Henderson) (Fessler). In fact, plenty of reviews by female writers targeted Girls’ misrepresentation of millennial women’s lives, failing to realize that the series was never intended as an all-encompassing portrait of young women. 

“A nod to my cultural heritage, which is white Christian woman.” (Tolentino)

This idea of ‘masculinized women’ is not unique to these characters, but rather often reflected in marginalized groups. Queer women and Women of Color are often treated as non-normative and masculinized––a crucial piece of context in labeling the white, straight and cisgender women of Girls as such in any way. It harkens back to the American ideal embodied by Mary Tyler Moore in her earlier days of television, when she and Dick Van Dyke slept in separate beds as a fictional married couple. There is a solidified vision of straight white American womanhood perpetuated by television, one that has existed since housewives starred on screen. Resentment toward women often centers on their masculinization; a kind of evolution of the subversion of gender identity posited in Butler’s Gender Trouble. There is a removal of femininity in lesbian spaces, and queer identity inherently subverts normative gender performance (Mishali). The correlated non-normative characterization of queer women is masculinized because they do not align with the conventional American ideal of a woman. Likewise, women of color––specifically Black women––are similarly masculinized in comparison to white women (Blake). Race and sexuality play significant roles in the ‘normative’ statuses of women. Dunham has taken a shot at that image by promoting non-normative behavior in straight white women, and supplements it by having those characters acknowledging their own race and sexuality a number of times. It begs the question of whether Girls would be so praised for ‘realism’ if its characters were queer and/or women of color. Perhaps a version of the cast featuring underrepresented communities would not have made it past the first script or even been greenlit. Dunham’s characters are masculinized, despite their white privilege and heterosexuality. In a subversive way, these outwardly unlikeable traits have disarmed television’s idea of a normative young white woman, her actions, and her behavior. 

“I have work, then a dinner thing, and then I am busy trying to become who I am.” (Dunham, “Pilot”)

Each of the characters of girls are archetypal enough that the HBO network itself has boiled them down to their most defining traits: the aspiring writer, the voice of reason, free spirit, and naive idealist with a heart of gold (HBO, “Growing Up with Girls”). They are, furthermore, heavily gendered simply by Dunham’s aforementioned intentions with the series and their own conversations about their womanhood. The ‘unlikeable’ parts of them should be viewed through the lenses of normativity and gender performance in order to inspect why they and the show are so universally contentious. 

What’s so groundbreaking about Hannah Horvath is that she is incredibly average. So much so that she seems to chase her more adventurous friend Jessa and keep her in her life because she wants to be her. Hannah often brings up her own insecurities, complaining about and making fun of her weight in exchange for the approval of more experienced writers. In the second season of the show, Hannah has a drastic OCD-related breakdown in a state of executive dysfunction until she horribly cuts her own hair and then cannot move. At one point, she shoves a q-tip so far into her own ear that she damages her hearing, and is so obsessed with counting that she purposefully does the same to the other ear. Her breakdown is uncomfortable and in-your-face; raw and compulsive and abnormal for the average viewer to see. It ends only when she accepts help and has become an acclaimed depiction of mental illness as agreed on by viewers and the International OCD Foundation alike (International OCD Foundation).

Hannah’s non-normativity is further amplified by her personality. She is (perhaps masculinely) very straightforward with her emotions, throwing blame and stating plainly how she feels. At one point, she infamously and abruptly says “You’re a bad friend” to Marnie’s face, and they proceed to argue about which of them is “the wound” (Dunham, “Leave Me Alone”). While the fight is not about their flaws, Hannah’s narcissism and Marnie’s validation-seeking tendencies are on full display. Hannah is also the most recent and extreme evolution of Mary Tyler Moore’s reference to birth control: she is repeatedly depicted nude and/or having unglamorized, non-productive and awkward sex. For the entire series, she isn’t seeking children or a family life, but rather her own pleasure and interests. Even when she does eventually become pregnant, it isn’t on purpose. Hannah’s long-term relationship with Adam is also particularly interesting. He is boyish and whiny, but in touch with his own emotions, while Hannah frequently provides for and takes care of him. At one point, Adam briefly dates Natalia––but returns to Hannah seemingly because sex with Natalia is too tame and she is too demure. 

Gender is pervasive for Hannah––she is surrounded by women and self-identifies as feminist––and it frames the raw pieces of her life. By the end of the show, Hannah is unmarried and pregnant––a decision which is incredibly divisive for fans and almost confusing in the context of her previously discussed gender performance. In becoming a mother, Hannah seems to step backward, meeting expectations by settling down. Yet she does so without a partner, something almost more scandalous in the realm of television. Lena Dunham shed light on what is actually deemed ‘normal’ in her decision to center that which was unconventional on television but true to life. The characters of Girls are deemed unlikeable because viewers are uncomfortable with their non-normativity, manifested in their transgressing of anticipated gender performance. 

“I'm a difficult person. Everyone's a difficult person.” (Dunham, “Boys”) 

Critics and viewers commonly attempt to label one of the girls the ‘worst character’ in the show––and each is a strong contender. Hannah’s friends can be positioned similarly as unlikeable, but they too should be examined with their individually gendered roles in mind. Marnie Michaels believes she is better than everyone around her and spirals when her life isn’t happening as she’s planned. She is arguably the most traditionally feminine-presenting character, and early in the series is having trouble with her ‘too soft’ (not masculine enough) boyfriend. Throughout the series, she pursues multiple men, but never for authentic romance. She craves the structure of marriage and eventually does marry, seemingly only because of that. Her manipulative tendencies and lack of growth, however, lead her to be touted as the ‘worst character.’ One article gives ten reasons why she progressively gets worse — although the first three are about how she treats men (Torn). It’s possible that she and Jessa––perhaps subconsciously––do the least to center men in their lives, once more uncomfortably regarding something completely normal for a real person, but strange for women on television (re: Carrie Bradshaw’s priority is her romantic interests in Sex and the City). Marnie’s hyper-femininity arguably makes her more ‘masculine’-perceived traits even more infringing on televisual womanhood. Jessa Johansson, the group’s British ‘it girl’ is the only other character to get married during the show. She does not pursue marriage and structure as Marnie does, but does marry for inauthentic reasons and does not care for the structure of family life. Jessa is impulsive, makes brash decisions, and has the most ‘life experience.’ She gets married to a man who sees her as wild for his money and quickly divorces him. She is anything but traditionally motherly, but works as a nanny at one point and ends up having sex with her employer, the child’s father. Jessa is also an addict, and her time in rehab is cut short because she cannot get along with other patients. Often presented as an antagonist in the lives of other characters, Jessa’s recklessness is seen as cool but damaging. And, though she is never confirmed to be queer, she is often speculated to be by critics and fans alike, perhaps as a result of harmful stereotypes. Her relationship with womanhood is not strained, but it is a bit cumbersome. Her cocky attitude towards life generally does not align with traditional femininity, and she is often labeled as problematic for her decision-making. 

Shoshanna Shapiro is, at the start of the series, Jessa’s college aged virginal younger cousin. If Marnie is the series’ most ‘woman’ character, Shoshanna is the most ‘girl.’ She is naive, as described by HBO, and innocent––and she loves Sex and the City (HBO). Most interesting about Shoshanna, though, is her refusal to participate in the toxicity of the other characters. She shares their sense of entitlement and selfishness at times, but will recognize and call out problematic behavior in her friends and, at the end of the series, finally cuts ties with them. She is frequently called the best character, and even declared the series’ ‘unsung hero’ (antiheroines) (Jacobs) (Rosenfield). Shoshanna has the most agreeable personality of the four women among audiences, likely because she performs womanhood in accordance with societal expectations and is seen as least assertive; Shoshanna is nervous and speaks quickly in a high-pitch ramble, and is repeatedly the most caring character. She leans almost fully in the opposite direction of Hannah and is celebrated for it. 

“I just wish someone would tell me, like, this is how the rest of your life should look.” (Greenberg)

In discussing the sheer influence of these characters, it is worth considering once again the format in which they were presented to their target audience. Hannah, Marnie, Jessa, Shoshanna, and those that moved in and out of their lives are television characters specifically. They exist in the intimate space of the home, broadcast onto a small screen and returning weekly to viewers during their on-season for upwards of five years. HBO is a particularly interesting vehicle for Girls because, as pointed out by Lara Bradshaw during her studies as a doctoral student, HBO is a premium channel that has made itself allegedly home to ‘quality television.’ There is an expectation associated with the content broadcast by HBO. In merely airing Girls, the network is declaring its prestige. And, as one of few female showrunners, Dunham was “key in developing the network’s more recent branding and focus on a younger and hipper [...] demographic” via her “young, female-centered narrative” among HBO’s slate at the time of Girls’ release (Bradshaw). What Bradshaw does not mention, however, is that access to the channel is behind a further paywall from basic cable and public television. The kind of person paying for HBO is already someone more privileged and therefore falls at least partially into Girls’ middle-class demographic. What’s more, Girls occupies space among dramatic, almost voyeuristic depictions of private, shameful moments on television. HBO’s series have notoriously catered to straight male gazes, the network employing the intimacy of television in its business practices. By adding Girls to a repertoire which featured The Sopranos and Game of Thrones, HBO spotlit the unromanticized lives of these women––in their mental breakdowns and complicated, for-pleasure sex lives––and deemed them of the same scopophilic quality. In doing so HBO welcomed its uncomfortably realistic moments into its brand. Not only were these unlikeable and non-normative women normalized, but worthy of the title of sophisticated entertainment. 

Further relevant in the context of HBO’s reputation: there doesn’t seem to be a thematic equivalent to Girls made for men. While some of the network’s series featured young, all male casts living in the city, shows like Entourage have never been as focused on authenticity as Girls––arguably because Girls tackles such non performatively masculine topics as emotional vulnerability. For Girls, gender is controversy: in its simple status as a series for women, the masculinized perception of its non-normative female characters, and even its thematic concerns with coming-of-age and personal growth. 

Hannah Horvath is in fact the voice of a generation, that being privileged straight white women acting on personalities deemed more acceptable in men––a generation previously starved of the grimy reality of being this way in your 20s. Girls cannot tell its target viewer what the rest of their life will look like, but it can frame what a certain demographic’s life looks like right now and, in doing so, re-shape their idea of what’s ‘normal.’ In finding the characters of Girls annoying or even ‘the worst,’ the common viewer is likely not considering Butler’s philosophical concepts of gender. Yet, the brash, awkward, and self-obsessed traits pointed to as evidence of these characters’ unlikeability are underscored by the audience’s ideas of binary, gendered performance. In performing outside of gender expectations established by their predecessors, the women of Girls are unwillingly masculinized. Their televisual non-normativity and subversion of gender makes viewers uncomfortable, and they are hated for it. It’s crucial to see that Girls is a cultural landmark in its intense framing of its characters as girls. Hannah, her friends, and their actions were not intended to be revolutionary, only to be normal. Though they have their differences, Hannah Horvath is the most recent iteration of Mary Tyler Moore. She would agree.

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Khutsiev in Transition: Postmemory and Fragmentation from the Soviet Thaw to Stagnation

By Micah Slater, Edited by Sophia Fijman

The work of Soviet-Georgian director Marlen Khutsiev does not often appear in texts on the Soviet sixties. On the rare occasions it does, his name is usually relegated to lists for further viewing. Alongside the likes of Larisa Shepit’ko, Gennady Shpalikov, Kira Murakova and others, Khutsiev’s work has received comparatively little attention from academics. Despite this, Khutsiev’s filmography is populated by sophisticated, compelling, and complex films. Their international and domestic reception have varied widely, as have their content. However, due in no small part to Khutsiev’s interest in the everyday and its imbrication in contemporary politics, they emerge as particularly potent inscriptions of their times. 

Spring on Zarechnaya Street (Весна на Заречной улице, translit. Vesna Na Zarechnoy Ulitse, 1956), Khutsiev’s first film following his graduation from VGIK (the Moscow state film school), is a compelling exhibition of the beginning of the Thaw, a period generally defined as occurring between Stalin’s death in 1954 and Nikita Khruschev’s removal from office in 1964—or the Eastern Bloc invasion of Prague in 1968. His subsequent film, I Am Twenty (1965), subject to severe censors, re-edits, and an erratic and limited release schedule, situates itself firmly within the Soviet anxieties of the 60s Thaw. Finally, July Rain (Июльский Дождь, translit. Yulieski Dozht’, 1967), in its position at the very end of the Thaw, betrays the inherent unmooring that had occurred in the 60s Soviet protagonist, as well as the middle-class depression and disillusionment that precipitated and continued into the subsequent Stagnation period under Leonid Brezhnev. Across these three films, depictions and discussions of gender, urban space, and the social conditions of the Soviet sixties construct a striking portrait of the Thaw, simultaneously conscious of and born from the positioning and perspective of the first postwar Soviet generation. This paper will trace Khutsiev’s portrayal of the times through three of the dominant films of his oeuvre, exploring the fundamental anxieties of the Soviet people during the long sixties and their multiplicitous expressions. 

Since the founding of the USSR, the institutional and cultural positioning of film art was globally distinct, even from countries where the cinema was immediately an object of governmental interest. Author Marko Dumanċić notes, “Films [were] considered more than idle escapism” (Dumanċić 254). Beginning with Lenin’s famous 1922 (published 1925) declaration of cinema as the art most crucial to the Communist Party, the state’s involvement in filmmaking across the Eastern Bloc quickly took shape in two major forms. The first, the founding of dozens of film schools across the USSR, nearly fifty at their height. The second, a much more complex and contradictory state censorship system, which touted involvement at every stage from scriptwriting to post-production. Between the two, Socialist Realism emerged as the dominant style of the Union. Despite sustained interrogation and subtle subversion, the style was largely upheld for decades. Beginning with the death of Chairman Joseph Stalin in 1954, the Khrushchev Thaw—defined by loosening censorship, repression, and relative peace with neighboring nations, and named for Stalin’s succeeding Chairman—had significant impacts on the national cinema. Dumanċić describes the predominant emotions in the filmmaking and -going public as “hopes and anxieties” in tandem (Dumanċić 254). The style of Socialist Realism began to fall away, allowing for narrative and formal experimentations to spread through the work of established and emerging filmmakers alike. Khutsiev, as a member of the generation emerging into this context, was particularly subject to these changes. 

However, the cinema of the Soviet sixties is not unilaterally defined by the Thaw. Lilya Kaganovsky writes, “the Soviet 1960s actually covers two historical periods—the end of the Thaw and the beginning of Stagnation—and the films of the decade articulate the transition from one to the other” (Kaganovsky 237). The same can be said of the previous decade—Stalin’s death occurred not halfway through the fifties. Considering this, Khutsiev’s 1956 release of his first feature, Spring on Zarechnaya Street, is among the first to experience all stages of production under Khrushchev, not Stalin. Therefore, the film serves as a particularly potent epigraph of the early Thaw. It follows a young female teacher of Russian literature, Tatyana Sergeevna (Nina Ivanovna) on assignment to a night school for working adults in a small countryside village. One of her students, Sasha Savchenko (Nikolai Rybnikov), develops romantic feelings for her and begins a largely unsuccessful pursuit for her affections. The meeting tides of the coming Thaw style and the preceding eminence of Socialist Realism dominate the interrogations of Spring, notable in the collision of rural context and gendered conflict. The setting of a small village underpinned by an ambiguous industrial factory is a familiar one in Socialist Realism, as well as themes of edifying the adult working class. Working women, specifically in fields considered gendered or carework (such as Tatyana’s schoolteacher role) also feature heavily. Khutsiev’s education at VGIK during the Stalin years is clear in these his underpinnings, but that is where his glorification of the worker ends. Her students are largely prompt and invested, but do not exist as endlessly energetic, motivated, Socialist heroes. They write dirty messages on her chalkboard [00:44:12]. They fall asleep in class [00:26:13]. Sasha, the other principal character, is sent out of the classroom on the first day [00:21:58]. While other characters’ arcs through the film exhibit symptoms of these societal changes, his is the most apparent.

Sasha Savchenko is, fundamentally, a protagonist of the Thaw. He is a factory worker in a small village, but his existence is not one of the assured Soviet laborer. As scholarship has identified, the Soviet man of the Thaw is fundamentally destabilized: they “seemed unable to assert themselves in [the] world… perpetually in search of a compass” (Dumanċić 255). As early as two years into the Thaw period, social anxieties have taken an explicitly gendered form. Savchenko, unusually sensitive, unstable, insecure, and riddled with desire, centers the imagined panacea of his unmooring on his romantic interests in Tatyana, but she is far from his only source of anxiety. Helping his son with his homework, serving to emasculate adult education in parallel, he explains to the boy that their last name, Savchenko, doesn’t “sound” (звучить, translit. zvuchit’), but he wants it to [00:43:41]. Alternative translations of his word choice include the synonyms ‘ring’ and ‘resound.’ While Khutsiev—and other Thaw directors—would later go on to more prominently center masculine anxieties around the absent patriarchy, echoes of this sentiment are obvious here. Sasha’s confidence in his own masculinity is shaken—both down to and by—an absence of pride in his name, the one he has passed to his son. Later, he confides in a friend over his interest in Tatyana, and inability to express it to her in a way she seems receptive. The man throws his hands in the air and declares “Can’t you ask straight? Where’s your working pride?” (А спросить-то так, прямо не можешь, да, где твой рабочие гордость? Translit: A sprosit-to tak, pryamo ne moshesh’, da, gde tvoi rabochie gordost’?) [00:57:00]. Sasha’s unmooring as an individual man is implicated in larger crises here: because he is impotent in his personal life, he is no longer the proud worker of the Stalinist era. He has failed the tenets of his labor and employment through his uncertainty in himself. 

Such anxieties are not unique to Sasha, or men, however: Tatyana Sergeevna illustrates the tensions and anxieties present between the urban USSR and its rural counterparts in ways far beyond the treatises of Socialist Realism. Of the characters in Spring, Tatyana at first appears the most conventional. She is a firm, stern, educated working woman, primarily appearing in crisp but plain skirt suits. She has no qualms with punishing her students, but is motivated by a genuine pride in her specialty. She has taken her post in the countryside in stride, determined to educate whoever the state has assigned her to the best of her ability. However, the resemblance stops there. The first scene of the film, and the first in which we see her, she is caught in the pouring rain and fails to catch a bus, instead paying for a ride into the town on a dump truck with a local man [00:01:43]. She admits to concerns about teaching adults, and is only further alarmed when the man tells her that the students “ran” the last Russian literature teacher out of town after only two weeks. “I carried her there, and I carried her back,” (И туда, и обратно; Translit. I tuda, i obratna) he says [00:04:12]. While this highlights the unconventional portrayal of Soviet laborers in Spring in the abstract, it serves to betray both Tatyana’s youth and anxiety. A recent graduate of the Moscow Pedagogical Institute, the premier school for teaching in the Soviet Union, she does not feel in any way girded by her experience and education with the state. Later, she is kicked out of her housing by one of the women she is staying with, who? is infuriated by her stealing Sasha’s affections. While moving to a new apartment, she breaks down crying. The friend who delivered her there, Nikolai Krushenkov (Gennadi Yukhtin), inquires what’s wrong, and she declares “What teacher? I’m just a girl to them. I never expected my students to give birth, drink vodka, grow a mustache” (Педагог, какой там педагог, когда это не просто девчонка? Разве я думала, что мы ученики будут варить стали рожать пить водку, отращивать усы? Translit. Pedagog, kakoi tam pedagog, kogda eta ne prosto devchonka? Rasvye ya dumala, chto mii’ uchenilo budut varit stali rozhat, pit’ vodky, otrashivat’ usii’?) [01:11:46]. Her anxieties, like Sasha’s, embroil her gender in her perceived failures as a teacher. Sasha’s repeated advances also fundamentally destabilize both her and the audience’s expectations for a Soviet man. He’s intelligent, but brash, popular with local women, and unwilling to behave at the night school. She has no idea what to do with him. Here, masculine anxieties permeate the lives of Khutsiev’s women as early as his first film, forecasting the coming storm of listlessness, insecurity, paralysis, and immaturity of the Soviet sixties protagonist.

Compared to the warm reception of Spring on Zarechnaya Street, which drew over 30 million Soviets to theaters upon its release uncut by the censors, Khutsiev’s next film was highly controversial. First cut in 1962, the film was titled Застава Иличка (Translit. Zastava Ilich’ka), of which competing translations abound. The most common, Ilich’s Gate and Lenin’s Guard, should make immediately apparent one layer of the film’s controversy. Film depictions of and references to Vladimir Lenin (middle name Ilich) were at the center of many Thaw and early Stagnation discussions of film, including the suppression of director/filmmaker Mikhail Romm’s humanist documentary on Lenin because the “leader of the October Revolution came off as insufficiently stern” (Dumanċić 259). As such, the controversy over the titling of Khutsiev’s three-hour piece becomes clear: the film directly implicates the founder of the Union in the lives of, as we will later discuss, superfluous, directionless, anxious young men. Even under the loosened restrictions of the Thaw, Premier Khruschev polemically decried the film and it was shelved. In 1965, after extensive recuts and a change of the title to I Am Twenty ( Translit. Мне Двадцать Лет), the film was allowed a limited re-release.

I Am Twenty follows three friends on their return to Moscow from a tour of duty with the Soviet army. As Kaganovsky points out, it is crucial to acknowledge that they are returning “not from the war but from mandatory military service” (Kaganovsky 240). This is the generation that has never experienced war, but the inscription of wartime trauma in the film is still extremely prominent. Kaganovsky brings in Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory to decode this inclusion. She writes: “the relationship of the second generation to powerful, often traumatic, experiences that preceded their births but that were nevertheless transmitted to them so deeply as to seem to constitute memories in their own right” (Kaganovsky 236). This trauma is most apparent in I Am Twenty’s principal protagonist Sergei Zhuravlyov (Valentin Popov), whose father died in “the war” (undefined, but nonetheless immediately understood to be the Eastern Front of World War II). In his absence, and in their social context, Sergei and his friends have become stunted, perpetually childlike, directionless men. As with other contemporary films, “the first thing you notice when you look at the screen heroes of the 1960s is their youth” (Kaganovsky 239). Intentionally reifying this is the three friends’ recurring meetup spot, a children’s playground outside of Sergei’s apartment block [01:08:53]. His companions, Slava Kostikov (Stanislav Lyubshin) and Nikolai Fokin (Nikolai Gubenko), experience their own anxieties and aberrations. Slava, now with a wife and child, neglects his family to wander Moscow and engage in idle pursuits with his friends, far and away from the responsible, mature, working man that the Soviet father and husband was depicted to be in the Stalin years. Nikolai refuses to be recruited as an informant at his job, and spends most of his time expressing baseless optimism and chasing women. As a supporting cast, they are ironically unable to support themselves or each other in becoming proper, well-adjusted Soviet men, as implied to be their fathers. 

Sergei’s own father appears to him in a striking, distinctly unreal scene at the very end of the film. This “dream of paternal authority” is welcomed and unquestioned by Sergei, whose filmic goal of a relationship with a woman has recently failed (Kaganovsky 238). He asks his father “And what must I do?” (А что надо; translit. a chto nada) seeking the paternal guidance of the conspicuously absent wartime generation [02:37:00]. However, his father has nothing to offer him—he died two years younger than Sergei is now, at 21. “Live,” (жить; translit. zhit’) is all he says [02:37:14]. It’s a woefully inadequate piece of advice, as Sergei has just been living. He asks his father how, and the man only answers by looking at two other of his hallucinated comrades, as if to illustrate that his life has been the front, and between his youth and conditions, he has no advice to offer his son. It is in this transmission from the Eastern Front of over two decades prior to the simplicity of postwar life and the liberalization of the Thaw that the descent into masculine uncertainty and anxiety becomes clear. For Sergei’s father, “just living” is a rote impossibility, and for his son, it is the source of his malaise. Further, his youth compared to Sergei’s emphasizes the necessity of maturation in the wartime generation, as well as the (primarily military) structures that would engender it—both of which have been lifted from the shoulders of his son and his peers. 

Without this purpose, and burdened by the postmemory of a war they will never see, the Soviet man of the 1960s has been set adrift. Masculinity in this context is imagined as a “series of traces,” in photographs of dead fathers and husbands, hung on walls in ways that evoke Russian Orthodox icons, in voice-overs, in old letters (Kaganovsky 244). The traces are framed as woefully inadequate, as throughout their conversation, Sergei repeatedly enforces that all he has wanted in his crisis is to talk to his father, to lean on him, to receive his input. However, the hallucination makes abundantly clear that there is no input to receive—the perceived eminence, maturity, and stability of the wartime Soviet man is only that, a perception. As he leaves, Sergei’s father says, “I envy you. More than anything else I would like now to walk through Moscow streets” (Я тебе завидую. Больше всего сейчас мне хотелось бы пройти по московским улицам; Translit: Ya tebya zaviduyu. Bolshe vsevo seichas mne holtelos’ bui’ proiti po moskovskim ulitsam) [02:38:10]. And, as the film ends, Sergei’s contemplative gaze out of his window transitions to the silhouettes of three Great Patriotic War-era soldiers, out of both time and place, walking a main thoroughfare of urbanized Moscow, fulfilling both Sergei’s dream of living with purpose and his father’s of walking Moscow’s streets again [2:40:22]. 

Moscow in particular became a centerpiece of Khutsiev’s late-Thaw filmography. As an urban space that underwent rapid postwar industrialization and growth, it is an “emphatic present that has not come to terms with either the past or the future,” reifying its young inhabitants’ lack of intergenerational connection, as well as their absent hopes (and even concepts) for the future (Coxe 31). Kaganovsky notes the “fragmentation” with which Khutsiev films the city, how his rapid cutting, extremely long takes, and lack of visual focus on his protagonists reinforce an “urban landscape that disappears (and is disappearing) as suddenly as it appears” (Kaganovsky 236, Coxe 31). As the capital of Russia and the political seat of the Soviet Union, the fundamental instability diagnosed by Kaganovsky and present in I Am Twenty here betrays a drastically deepened anxiety as compared to his work in Spring on Zarechnaya Street. Moscow is a source of comfort and stability for Tatyana, whose anxieties about her performance and gender are induced by interactions in the countryside. Her premier education in the intellectual and political capital of the Union fell short in preparing her to teach adult education to the working class, but the city itself is not the source of her conflict. In the years between Spring and I Am Twenty, Khutsiev’s reordering of the locus of youthful anxieties lands squarely in the city. All his remaining films made during the 1960s take it as their setting. July Rain, his last during the official years of the Thaw, is his most comprehensive picture of the era, using Moscow to highlight the depression and disillusionment of the Soviet youth and their bleak outlook as the Union descended into Brezhnev’s Stagnation.

July Rain follows another female protagonist, Lena (Evgeniya Uralova), through a largely (intentionally) directionless plot centered around the young Soviet intelligentsia in Moscow. She jockeys between her boyfriend Volodya (Aleksandr Belyavsky), their social circle, and telephone conversations with a stranger, Zhenya (Ilya Bylinkin), whose jacket she borrows during the titular rain and repeatedly fails to return through a series of missed connections. Over the course of the film she gradually begins to realize the vapidity of her sphere, becoming increasingly disillusioned with Volodya and their friends, until she ends the relationship and meets an uncertain future on the streets of Moscow. Coxe writes, “I see in July Rain the creeping fear of the end of the 1960s, a moment that has “somehow lost its dynamic momentum and simply awaits stasis” (Coxe 44). And, indeed, of the anxieties and depressions of Khutsiev’s Thaw protagonists, Lena’s is the most fundamental. Her job as a translator in a printing house highlights the emptiness of her life and work. She prints reproductions of Renaissance-era paintings, something that has evoked Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in multiple scholarships [00:26:01]. 

These images flash over the film’s opening montage of a downpour on a Moscow street, furthering Khutsiev’s filmic fragmentation of the city [00:04:17]. The intercut of the Renaissance paintings Lena is presumably copying “[destabilizes] any notion of fixed time and space or perspective: we have to ask ourselves where these portraits have come from” (Coxe 34). Other fragmentations occur in the soundtrack: the sound of a radio dialing to different stations heightens the anxiety of the opening montage, and music from Western Europe dominates the score. The film is oft-compared to the French Nouvelle Vague, and the inspirations are clear, but the sonic jumble of the film’s aural atmosphere exposes something deeper. The national identity, and even metropolitan identity of Muscovites specifically, has experienced a fundamental un-anchoring over the course of the 1960s, leading them to drift into adoption of other cultures. Coxe notes that Lena and her friends “dress like Westerners and listen to Western music” (Coxe 37). Kaganovsky writes of a deeper affective shift: The “new young actors copied the relaxed bodily gestures of Hollywood and European stars [...] In Soviet sixties cinema, tense back muscles are relaxed to show the body as liberated; slouched postures become a sign of antiauthority and nonconformity” (Kaganovsky 236). However, counterculture is not the focus of July Rain. Instead, it takes up the listless young intelligentsia, “the privileged on the potential verge of self-induced collapse,” and watches them slouch aimlessly towards absolutely nothing at all (Coxe 30).

Anxieties in Lena’s life are not based entirely around the men she spends it with, but they certainly do not help. Lena’s friend Zhenya seems to be just a “voice on the telephone, and her fiancé Volodya can be described only in the negative: Doesn’t drink, doesn’t lie, doesn’t chase after women” (Kaganovsky 244). Kaganovsky, on the films of the Thaw that centered female protagonists, cites them as “full of [...] languor and agitation. [Their] capricious, high-strung emotions came not from loneliness, from the absence of a concrete man, but from the suspicion that ‘man’ in general no longer exists in the world, that he has become a myth” (Kaganovsky 245). Lena certainly exhibits this: As the film progresses and she becomes increasingly disillusioned with Volodya, she turns to her phone conversations with Zhenya for comfort—and still finds none. “You know, you need to talk to a living being,”  (Бывает такая полоса в жизни, когда очень нужна. Очень нужна живая душа; Translit: Bivayet takaya poloca v zhizni, kogda ochen nuzhna. Ochen nuzhna zhivaya dusha) he tells her, betraying the anomie and isolation broiling within the Soviet man of the sixties [01:25:42]. Later, her depression and detachment culminates during a picnic outside of the city (preceded by three uninterrupted minutes of Moscow city streets, with no reference to or focus on Lena at all) [00:56:56]. At the picnic, she “witnesses the hypocrisy of her boyfriend, Volodya, the hypocrisy of her generation and its loss of ideals” (Coxe 43). The moment culminates in Lena disappearing from the picnic into the birch trees of the forest, later drawing a comparison between the undeveloped physical landscape of Russia and the foreign, unstable cityscape of Moscow. 

For Kaganovsky, July Rain marks the “end of the Thaw, with its hopes and utopian illusions of a new community that could be reforged after the crimes of Stalinism and the trauma of World War II” (Kaganovsky 243). There is no outpouring of grief, however; only a muted acceptance and quiet mourning at the concept of entering yet another unknowable time, one that promised even less than the Thaw had in the mid-1950s. Lena’s own identity disappears as she comes to that realization. She retreats into herself at social gatherings, expresses more and more limited emotions to Volodya. She has become lost, another wandering Soviet depressed under the deluge of social anxiety and uncertainty. During a montage of her phone calls with Zhenya, she says to him “Maybe you don’t exist. Well, not all of you. Just a voice” (Может быть, тебя не существует. Ну нет вас всё. Просто голос. Translit: Mozhet buit’, tebya ne sushestvuet. Nu net vas vsyo. Prosto golos) [00:53:46]. Lena’s relationship to the absent, non-existent man is heightened by the anticipated return of her father to Moscow, which sets her mother about renovating their entire apartment [00:28:57]. However, their celebratory anticipation is immediately destroyed when they learn of his sudden death [00:41:41]. The traces of masculinity as discussed earlier are still only that, traces. Lena has no paternal figure in her life, and her friends and partner offer similarly empty portrayals of manhood. Even her father, who would have survived at least World War II and likely some childhood experience of World War I in order to be alive at the start of the film, cannot return home. He is lost, gone, no longer able to foster stability and motivation in the younger generation. Like Sergei’s father in I Am Twenty, he is relegated to a photograph, an icon on the wall, an image that further evokes Lena’s endless reproduction in her job. At the very end of the film, after ending her relationship with Volodya, Lena wanders the streets of Moscow during preparations for the Victory Day parade [01:47:41]. Among the unearned swells of big band music, she disappears into a crowd of young men. Their faces close out the film; the lost postwar generation, the youth of the Soviet sixties, the aimless, superfluous men burdened with the postmemory of wars they will never fight.

The long Soviet sixties and the Khrushchev Thaw were a particularly singular time. The temporary liberalization of Khruschev’s censors allowed for filmmakers to interrogate the conditions of the postwar USSR in ways that would have been unthinkable during the Stalin years; and yet, the overwhelming social malaise of the generation led to those portrayals taking on a distinct tone of anxiety, fragmentation, and purposelessness. However, these protagonists did manage to prove that “even the most carefully maintained hypermasculine myths” cannot be maintained forever (Dumanċić 265). Despite their listlessness, the protagonistic men in these films are sensitive, contemplative, empathetic people, whose relationships to the women in their lives make them endure real, tumultuous emotions, establishing one of the main connections usually drawn between this era and other New Wave movements across Europe. Underpinning those emotions, however, are the social conditions of the Thaw, which engendered a collective and individual paralysis simply far too strong to endure. As the Stagnation approached, the fundamental psychological fracture of a generation with no past, no future, and a present that seemed to constantly reinvent itself into increasingly pedantic and abstracted versions of itself would only atrophy. Though Khutsiev would continue to release films until his death in 2019, he would never again produce a triptych of such an incisive nature. Between Spring on Zarechnaya Street, I Am Twenty, and July Rain, Marlen Khutsiev’s inscription of the Thaw remains one of the most dynamic and thoroughly humanist portrayals of the period, illustrating the depth of inherited traumas, lack of direction, and overall malaise of the first postwar Soviet generation, forecasting the conditions of the Stagnation with a prescience still remarkable today.

Works Cited

Coxe, Brinton T. "An Imprint of the Times: Marlen Khutsiev's "July Rain" and the End of the Thaw." Ulbandus Review, vol. 9, 2005, pp. 30–47. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org.libproxy2.usc.edu/stable/25748152.

Dumanċić, Marko. "Epilogue:; The End of the Long Sixties and the Fate of the Superfluous Man." Men Out of Focus. University of Toronto Press, 2021. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org.libproxy2.usc.edu/stable/10.3138/j.ctv1c9hmxv.12.

Kaganovsky, Lilya. "Postmemory, Countermemory:; Soviet Cinema of the 1960s." The Socialist Sixties. Edited by Anne E. Gorsuch, and Diane P. Koenker. Indiana University Press, 2013. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org.libproxy2.usc.edu/stable/j.ctt16gz7q4.13.

Directed by Khutsiev, Marlen. I Am Twenty, Mosfilm, 1965.

Directed by Khutsiev, Marlen. July Rain, Mosfilm, 1967.

Directed by Khutsiev, Marlen. Spring on Zarechnaya Street, Odessa Film Studio, 1956.

The Power of an Edit: Reality TV Wants You To Go Insane

By Quinn Jennings, Edited by Duncan Geissler

2025 marks the ten year anniversary of the genesis of the recurring sketch “The House” on Saturday Night Live which spoofed observational reality television, created by Beck Bennett and Kyle Mooney. Bennett and Mooney satirize the genre by continually writing themselves in dramatic arguments over mundane roommate conflicts and misunderstandings with celebrity hosts Will Ferrell, Chris Pine, and Chris Hemsworth. They parody the cliche happenings of reality TV, including flashbacks of things that happened 30 seconds before and intercuts of their accusatory declarations: “now I’ve really gotta figure out what’s going on.” Ten years later, their sketches are not too far off from the current reality television landscape. 

In the age of social media, it is harder for producers to curate a portrait of a contestant through editing. Attempts to encapsulate a digital image of the “crazy girlfriend” or “stubborn jerk” can now be refuted through Instagram story statements and TikTok lives. Reality television, including Love Island UK (2005–), Love is Blind (2020–), and Perfect Match (2023–) expand to a Marvel Cinematic Universe level of lore and, as a result, continually lose millions of viewers every season. Audiences can watch their favorite contestants (or participants in a Netflix “experiment,” in the words of Nick Lachey) on every device while also following them on Instagram, listening to their podcasts, and drinking their fitness teas. It is even harder to curate a captivating image of people who only submit themselves to these programs with the hope of being a star–or at least someone with more followers than you, the lowly viewer. 

The formulaic nature of competition shows with constant variables, such as cooking shows with repeated challenges, rely on editing portraits of individual personalities to keep audiences engaged. These shows continue to stay on air by imitating themselves; however, there is still spirit in these contestants. Chefs come with passion to prove themselves, drastically contrasting the vapid motivations and actions of many participants in reality dating shows. Observational reality television, including dating shows, are losing an authenticity that made the shows originally compelling, suggesting viewers craving an arc should turn to competition shows.

Out of an array of over twenty competition, reality, and travel television shows hosted by foul-mouthed celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay, Hell's Kitchen (2005–) stands apart. Inside the walls of Hell's Kitchen, Ramsay is not cooking dishes, renovating restaurants, or learning about different cultures: his job is to yell. For twenty-three seasons, Hell's Kitchen has brought chefs of diverse backgrounds and experience levels together to compete for a head chef position at one of Ramsay's acclaimed restaurants. The formula of the show remains consistent, with producers frequently repeating the same challenges, punishments, and rewards for the contestants; however, Hell's Kitchen remains fresh and entertaining for new and continuing viewers by highlighting the personalities of the chefs and the evolving complexity of food consumption. Although the show portrays a competition full of anxiety, anger, and tension, the show's approach to editing along with producer's attitudes towards contestants and Ramsay as the host create a chaotic and humorous atmosphere full of quips that proves itself as formulaic and therefore often satisfying to watch. 

Although Hell's Kitchen is a cooking competition, the majority of screen time portrays team dynamics, the personalities of contestants, and Ramsay's persona as an overbearing chef. A standard episode of Hell's Kitchen will be divided into two parts: a challenge that competitors must complete, ultimately earning either a reward or a punishment, and a dinner service in which the contestants work in teams to serve the dining room of Hell's Kitchen. The episodes follow a similar structure, with dinner service menus remaining the same and the challenges repeating throughout each season. Food serves as secondary to the subjects' personalities when forming a narrative in the show. In On Living with Television, Amy Holdsworth, a scholar in Film and Television Studies at the University of Glasgow, invokes the concept of patterned activities concerning food on television. She argues the process and "sequences of food preparation, consumption, and digestion can potentially rhyme with those of television" (88). The formula of Hell's Kitchen can remain consistent because it creates a well-structured television show. The strict patterns the contestants must follow when preparing food and creating dishes are enough to manufacture a functional organization for the events while still allowing the show to focus on contestants' psyches to create drama. The formulaic interactions the contestants experience with food guide the complex relationships and patterns of communication between themselves and Ramsay. 

For viewers, Hell's Kitchen as reality television provides an opportunity to judge the skills of professional chefs from the comfort and isolation of one's home and without proving one's own cooking skills. Because the audience does not engage with the food, the food is only emphasized through "the body of the performer, [offering] a vicarious point of connection" (91). For many viewers, the contestant's point of view is their only connection to an imagined position as a chef in a high-stakes position. It can be difficult to envision an environment where so much emphasis is placed on the importance of perfecting food when minute judgment of food is seemingly inconsequential in people's everyday lives. Food often serves as a source of "pleasure and comfort," so Ramsay's strategy of "[mobilizing food] as ways to control and discipline the reality television participant" with the threat that a food mistake can ruin one's career can come across as irrational to the average viewer who does not share a chef's food or business experience (94). Hell's Kitchen plays upon this idea by further emphasizing the experience of the contestants as participants of the show rather than focusing on the food.

The editing of Hell's Kitchen often proves itself to be absurd, most commonly displayed in the show's inclusion of "coming up next" segments. The show customarily tricks viewers by ending episodes with previews of storylines that never occurred in reality and will never appear on the show, breaking up the conventional structure of the show's cooking portions. Editors chop up clips to depict relationships, injuries, and pregnancy scares that are never actually experienced by the contestants. To keep the formulaic competition entertaining for viewers, editors manipulate clips to dramatize experiences in the kitchen, attempting to incorporate the personal lives of the chefs into the restaurant environment to elicit emotional investment from audiences. In season eighteen, footage of a chef receiving bad news in a future episode was made to look as if they were receiving news of a loved one dying when in reality, they were being told that the risotto was being taken off the menu. Editors take the initiative to sensationalize repetitive footage of dinner services by taking a clip of an angry chef picking up a knife and suggesting he will murder a fellow competitor on the next episode or adding siren sounds to a clip of Ramsay with smoke in his face to make the viewer worry that he now has irreversible third degree burns. The act of eating and depictions of food on television have been theorized as "one that simultaneously reinforces and dissolves those boundary lines between the self and the world" (94). Viewers are aware they are watching Hell's Kitchen from the show's structure and cooking components, reinforcing their idea of the show's presentation of reality. However, the characterization of contestants and unpredictable presentation of situations permit Hell's Kitchen to push the boundaries of what is rooted in reality. The teaser segments also set a tone of absurdism for the series to include moments unrelated to the competition narrative–like when a chef slipped a disk in his back while going to the bathroom or title cards that appear in talking head confessionals subtly troll the chefs. The editing of shocking storylines keeps new viewers entertained while satiating the expectations of old viewers, many of whom would have gotten used to the style and enjoy the "coming up" segments for the playful stylistic choices rather than the excitement of viewing the next episode.

The emphasis on humanity and playful editing of Hell's Kitchen manages to create a comfortable viewing experience for long-time fans and accessible entertainment for viewers who tune in for a few episodes or even one season. The show is not exhausting or emotionally taxing for audiences, even though they are usually watching contestants be verbally berated; the patterns of structure that menus and food-related challenges create establish a gratifying viewing experience. Maybe it’s an age-old philosophy, or maybe it’s something viewers yearn for in a time of uncertainty and daily moral complications: simple sells. 

RuPaul’s Drag Race (2009–) and its several spin-offs follow a similar formula with repeating challenges, but these shows have some of the most intensive filming processes and expenses for contestants’ makeup and outfits. The nature of the competition makes the show less observational television and more focused on the personalities and talent of the queens. Katya Zamolodchikova (Brian McCook) appeared on season 7 of RuPaul’s Drag Race and season 2 of RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars. Although she did not win either season, she has become an internet personality alongside fellow contestant Trixie Mattel (Brian Firkus). The duo occasionally comment on Drag Race contestants in real time as the season airs on their podcast, The Bald and the Beautiful with Trixie and Katya. While discussing the series in March 2024, Katya says that all but one of the verses from the season 16 group number made her want to “immediately break a window and take the shards and stab them in [her] eyes and ears.” When co-host Trixie chortles that it sounds like AI, Katya counters: “it’s not Chat GPT, it’s a nonunion writer with a gun to their head.” Fans have deemed Katya’s section in a group performance one of the most iconic verses in Drag Race history for her quips and expansion of her drag persona. The queens in the season 16 group number had vague lines about equality and pride; Trixie and Katya recount their own experiences on the show where producers encouraged them not to be too ironic and made it hard to “take the piss” out of cheesy prompts in challenges. 

Trixie and Katya discuss Emily Nussbaum’s article “Is ‘Love is Blind’ a Toxic Workplace?” in the same podcast episode. Love is Blind has traveled across the country with the absurd premise and extreme stakes: fifteen men and women go on blind dates in “pods” and flirt with strangers through a wall until a few couples emerge engaged, sight unseen. They are supposed to stay together until reaching the altar–where they can say “I don’t.” And many have, in fact, said no, making for great dramatic television. The show settles in a different city every season and was recently renewed for its ninth iteration, continuing to frame itself as a sincere experiment of human intimacy and attraction. Trixie and Katya were not shocked by the long work hours and isolation the Love is Blind participants described, as the experience reflected the process of filming RuPaul’s Drag Race. They were, however, disturbed by the accounts of Nick Thompson and Danielle Ruhl, a couple featured on season 2 of Love is Blind. The couple describe the toll the filming procedures took on them physically and mentally, including Ruhl’s paranoia that there were hidden cameras watching her. In a desperate attempt to escape production, Ruhl locked herself in a closet with a bottle of wine, sobbing, while Thompson was unaware of her whereabouts. These details never made it to air, but the couple’s conversation in the direct aftermath did, with Ruhl’s statements about lacking trust in the situation edited to be referencing Thompson conversing with other women at a barbeque rather than the Netflix production itself. Thompson believes his separation from Ruhl during her time of distress was strategic by the crew to spark and convey conflict. The couple got married and later divorced, describing their experience on the show as “hell on Earth.”

Conflict on Love is Blind has flattened over time, as reunion episodes and Instagram story statements villainize partners for being on the show “for the right reasons.” This phrase is difficult for participants to describe besides accusing someone of harboring their intentions for social media fame, but it is easily identifiable on screen to viewers. The production has been accused of harboring “unsafe and inhumane” conditions and has faced several lawsuits throughout its runtime. The scientific filter Netflix haphazardly throws over the thesis that love really can be blind does not hold producers back from cruel tactics to stir up drama for good television, leaving participants feeling misrepresented or violated. Edits that air hardly reflect the actual reality. 

Drag Race challenges expectations and attitudes about gender in the mainstream without the self-involved declaration of their strides. RuPaul Charles keeps this ideology at the center of the shows. He believes there is a “sisterhood” present in all the seasons as a result of a “shared experience of being outsiders and making [their own] path” (Wortham). After every season, contestants continue to work together, live together, and travel together–Trixie and Katya being a prime example of the success the show can bring. In the Drag Race universe, being a good contestant directly translates to fame or acclaim in the aftermath based on talent in beauty and drag performance. Alternatively, the rising popularity of Netflix reality dating shows has attracted participants who are on the prowl for any TV exposure and influencer status they can get and know what will make an “iconic moment” go semi-viral on social media. Contestants know what viewers expect–or want–from them. Reality television is shaped by performance even though that notion feels contrary to its premise. The structured chaos of competition shows allow the true oddballs and their passions to shine, allowing human honesty to transcend the age old formula.

Works Cited

Hell's Kitchen. Created by Gordon Ramsay, Fox, 2005–. 

Holdsworth, Amy. “TV Dinners.” On Living with Television, Duke University Press, 2022, pp. 77–106.

“The House with Will Ferrell.” Saturday Night Live, season 43, episode 12, NBC, 2018, https://youtu.be/6rgavv2gM5w?si=CXtU1qNgVnPCuEnk.

Kale, Sirin. “Has Reality TV Lost Its Bite?” VICE, 27 July 2024, www.vice.com/en/article/has-reality-tv-lost-its-bite/. 

Nussbaum, Emily. “Is ‘Love Is Blind’ a Toxic Workplace?” The New Yorker, 20 May 2024, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/05/27/is-love-is-blind-a-toxic-workplace.

“Read U Wrote U.” YouTube, RuPaul’s Drag Race, 2 August 2018, https://youtu.be/PPTyqzM253Q?si=lBEKK1fbEM7-UlLX&t=131.

“We are the CEOs of Fierceness.” The Bald and the Beautiful Podcast with Trixie and Katya, 28 May 2024, https://youtu.be/wMoa1HOEBXY?si=UqrDy1kGoQJQipiU. 

Wortham, Jenna. “Is ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’ the Most Radical Show on TV?” The New York Times, The New York Times, 24 Jan. 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/01/24/magazine/is-rupauls-drag-race-the-most-radical-show-on tv.html.

“Neither Painful Nor Pleasant, Neither Easy Nor Difficult”: On the Audiovisual Ghosts of Colonial Malaise in Marguerite Duras’ India Song (1975)

By Matthew Chan, Edited by Edith Zhang

Marguerite Duras’ India Song (1975) follows Anne-Marie Stretter (Delphine Seyrig), the wife of the French ambassador to British Colonial India in the 1930s stationed in Calcutta. She spends her days in various states of indolence, despondency and decay, lounging around their lavish estate and indulging in various affairs with the men that roam through the house. As Duras herself remarked “India Song, the film, will be constructed first through sound, then through light”-this is the version of Duras’ film that can be taken from a distance, though it would be a gross oversimplification of a work composed of two distinct, overlapping worlds(Duras 169). When taken individually one can witness two different films, one that features an ensemble of French actors, model-like, dialogue-free and drained of outward emotion, posed in various tableaus in the rooms of the Château Rothschild in Boulogne, France and another of colonial malaise, as you hear four disembodied voices narrate and speculate about the complex shared histories of the figures depicted on screen and the collective ignorance they hold to the suffering of their colonial subjects. Accordingly, throughout the film there is a complete disconnect between sound and image, with any human presence, whether physical or auditory, being stripped of recognizable, common signifiers of humanity. The people on screen are not allowed to speak or emote, the voices off screen can never be shown. This sense of repression, which comes with an accompanying boredom, is what seizes Duras’ film, rendering it as an oppressive and intolerable portrait of the banality of the Western colonial project from the perspective of those stationed abroad. It is thus, from this historical vantage point, that we can interpret the film as less so a film about actual, existing people as much as it is a film about the ghosts of Western colonialism. As Michael Chion states in regards to the difference between the visual and auditory “One world is more ghostly than the other, and it's the world of sound,” and it is the voices, curious and omniscient, that act as a supernatural guide to excavate the spiritual rot at the center of the characters, while in a similar way the actors also function as specters, wandering through the detritus of a regretful past, finding no satisfaction in the corporeal world. (Chion 125) 

The voices in India Song are what Chion describes as “paradoxical acousmetres those deprived of some powers that are usually accorded to the acousmetre” as there appears to be a limit to their omniscience. (Chion, 130) As opposed to a typical narrator in a film the voices seem to function interchangeably as the inner voices of the onscreen characters and as wholly detached third parties, slipping between perspectives, between subjectivity and objectivity. In the beginning of the film opening, over consecutive images of the estate emptied out of any human presence, one voice remarks “Where are we?”, while another answers “The French embassy in India”. (7:29-7:38) From the start the voices appear to collectively hold limited information, as if to suggest they are discovering the locale at the same time as the audience. The initial function of the voices may hence, appear to be expository, filling in the contextual gaps the image fails to communicate. However, there also appear to be challenges to the purported objectivity of the film’s sound. Early on over an image of the horizon a piano song starts playing. For the audience there is the partial expectation that the sound will be “de-acousmatized, when the film reveals the face that is the source of the voice.”(Chion 130) Or in this case a diegetic source of the music, and as we cut to the next image, that of a piano, it almost appears that this instinct has been validated, though it quickly dawns on the viewer that no one is actually playing the piano on screen, so the source remains mysterious. (4:43-4:53) Perhaps the clearest indication of the non-representational, non-diegetic quality of the film’s sound comes in the first appearance of an on screen actor. As the camera pans and settles on the image of three actors in the frame, the voices remark “I love you to the point of not seeing, not hearing, dying.” (11:39-11:52) If we were to continue to interpret the voices as an objective guiding force then it would appear that we are given a glimpse into the internal monologue of one of the characters. But there is no indication at all as to whose thoughts these are. The voices hence, do not operate in the realm of objective reality and direct representation and instead function based on a sort of poetic logic, as if dipping into a collective memory. We thus, do not understand the feelings of the individual but an abstract whole, as if to ascribe the same sense of longing to the entire image presented.

Another example of this disconnect comes in the scene of a party. The audio in the background consists of the overlapping chatter of party guests yet on screen, within a still shot that restricts the view of the audience, we only see the two inhabitants of the home and a servant who occasionally wanders in and out of frame. (34:19-35:00) Therefore, “audio and visual perceptions were divided one by the other instead of mutually compounded, and in this quotient another form of reality, of combination, emerged,.” as a new image is created in the minds of the viewer through the disconnect. (Chion 126) We are not viewing a party as much as we are observing the non-specific representation of a party, one that has invariably occurred multiple times in the characters’ past and will likely continue to occur in the future. Many such instances of poetic representation accumulate in Duras’ film to effectively sketch a portrait of the repetitive and banal nature of the life of the colonizer, separated from their native home, and forced to exist within a liminal and limited range of experiences. As remarked by one of the voices: “This general despondency. It’s neither painful nor pleasant to live in India. Neither easy nor difficult. It’s nothing. You see? Nothing” (55:43) 

The characters of India Song appear to exist not within any actual location by being seemingly suspended in space and time through the audiovisual disconnect, despite the constant complaints of the oppressive heat of Calcutta, but in Gilles Deleuze concept of “any spaces whatever”. (Deleuze 8) To Deleuze, post-World War II there saw a prevalence of these such spaces, which were “deserted but inhabited, disused warehouses, waste ground, cities in the course of demolition or reconstruction.”, in order to echo the destruction the war had brought. (Deleuze 8) It became less so about where the characters were physically but of the historical memories the places they occupied may have held and even more so the memories they themselves clung onto. Likewise Duras perceives the film's location as “both one of amnesia and of this defective memory, a place filled with contingencies of light, shadowy hollows, fractures and other zones of startling clarity.”. (Duras 162) Though they may appear to be in Calcutta where the characters, both on and off screen reside, is in memory, as they constantly recall and long for places elsewhere. 

Perhaps the clearest example of a character who exists in “any spaces whatever” is the beggar woman from Savannakhet, Laos who appears twice in the film. The film opens on the

title of “India Song” over a sunset yet we are immediately introduced to a contradiction, as the song that plays is in the Lao language and we hear the woman sing, speak and laugh. (0:00-4:26) The primary voices are introduced commenting on her incongruity and the mystery of her appearance in the Ganges, remarking that she had “Twelve children dead while she marked towards Bengal”. (0:00-4:26) The film is hence, in actuality composed of three prominent layers: the visual, the auditory world of the primary voices and a separate world only occupied by the beggar woman who appears ignorant to anything else surrounding her despite her geographical dislocation. She later crops up once more and is remarked to have actually entered the estate as the voices remark “I keep thinking it can’t be possible. We’re thousands of miles away from Indochina”. (1:02:15) As a figure the beggar woman only exists in song, which is repeated with every appearance, isolating her to a single vocal snippet. Unlike the primary voices she appears to lack agency, roaming in and out of the film like a benevolent spirit. Her persistent presence does the dual job of introducing a sense of intersectionality between the colonization of Laos by the French and India by the British, whilst representing the residual guilt the Stretter’s hold from their time in Savannakhet, which is referenced later in the film and is suggested by the devastation the beggar woman encountered which led to the death of her children. Moreover, zooming out even further one can interpret the fixation on Indochina to be reflective of Duras’ own personal history, having grown up in French colonial Vietnam. As she stated in relation to the parallels between her novel The Lover and India Song: “I have staged my obsession” (Duras, 172). A key line comes when the voices remark “Perhaps she follows you. Follows the whites”, which comes to suggest Calcutta as an “any spaces whatever”, as a locale that exists not actually as Calcutta but a microcosmic representation of colonial occupation. (1:03:10) Though it may appear reductive perhaps to Duras, Calcutta is Savannakhet is Vietnam, as an impossible, constructed space to work through her guilt and complicity to France’s colonial empire, a guilt further refracted onto her lifeless characters, perpetually haunted by the song of the beggar woman. 

Though what Duras also achieves through the audio-visual disconnect is a pervasive sense of dehumanization from any person depicted both on and off screen, through the deprivation of either sound, particularly dialogue, or image. In relation to her characters Duras stated “I wanted identification between actors and the real characters to be impossible”, though

this was referring to the characters on screen, as the actors, and the voices off screen, as the real characters, the resistance towards identification is witnessed throughout the film. (Duras 173) Perhaps the only outward display of contempt towards the Indian natives from the film’s characters comes in an extended dialogue between two of the primary voices. One questions “On the slopes, those dark places?” while the other responds “People. The highest density in the world.” (1:35:34) These lines are delivered with the same monotone inflection as any other that comes from the voices, though in this case there is an added callousness from the casual degradation of the Indian people off hand in this exchange, reducing them to an unidentifiable mass defined by their complexion. Though the irony of this scene emerges from the image the audio is juxtaposed against as you see the inhabitants of the estate draped in shadows locked motionless in tableau for an extended period of time, being deprived of movement as smoke from a candle emerges, indicating the extended length of the take. (1:35:34) The voices may be referring to the natives but perhaps the actors better fit the description of “dark places”, being fully objectified by Duras’ camera and being reduced throughout the film into models to be posed, with any opportunity for passion or emotion being completely suppressed. 

There is, however, a single instance of diegetic sound in the film, or at least sound that is implied to be diegetic. One of the few narrative threads within the film concerns the romantic advances of The Vice Consul of Lahore (Michael Lonsdale) towards Madame Stretter, which finds its resolution when he is pushed out by the men of the house. In response he steps off screen and at an incredibly loud volume screams “Let me stay! I am going to stay here tonight! With her! Just once with her!” (1:17:53-1:26:21) These screams continue to remain audible for the next 9 minutes of the film as he is gradually kicked off their estate and his pleas fade into the background. There is a visceral quality to the scream as it is the only vocal delivery permitted any passion throughout the film, providing a great release to the pent up emotion that accumulates prior within every character. The diegetic nature of the scream moreover, pierces through the heavy artifice which Duras constructs as if to suggest the inhumanity of her experiment and gesture towards how abnormal the construction of the film actually is. Only when we are allowed to perceive emotion do we realize how impossibly cruel it is to suppress it.

However, the lack of feeling carries out in the remainder of the film, with the closest thing to an emotional climax being a kiss between Stretter and her husband, which is conducted with a complete lack of passion, ending with Stretter glancing expressionless into the distance. (1:51:30-1:52:37) This choice to restrict emotion within the actors comes loaded with possible intent, in some respects it seems like Duras is trying to bestow the same dehumanization onto colonial leaders that they themselves bestow on the natives, while in others it seems like an effort to communicate the all encompassing banality of their existence which they reluctantly adopt. What the film presents may in fact be somewhere in the middle, with years of guilt developed from cruelty and misdeed curdling within the characters, emerging as a form of cognitive dissonance as they fail to reconcile the unfulfilling nature of their lives with the devastation they have brought onto the spaces they occupy. Or in Duras’ own words: “Anne-Marie Stretter is my hysteria. And for that very reason, it is impossible to represent her” (Duras, 173) 

Within Duras’ India Song the disconnect between sound and image is wielded towards various hostile ends, transporting the audience into a purgatorial state where they are forced to contend with the ghosts of western colonialism. A heaviness lingers in the air of each image as the geographical and temporal non-specificity of the voices transform the estate into a place of eternal remembrance, as a poetic representation of the repetitive, and ultimately banal life of the white colonizer. Though perhaps what cuts through the repression is the power of sound. As a character remarks “I came to India because of India Song”, stating that “The tune make me want to love” and that “I have never loved. I had never loved anyone”. (44:43) Sound provides a means of expression, which when yielded can create an opportunity for love, though this is an opportunity Duras denies her characters, just as the colonial project restricts their subjects’ ability to love. 

Works Cited 

Chion, Michel. Audio-vision: Sound on Screen. Edited by Claudia Gorbman, translated by Claudia Gorbman, Columbia University Press, 1994.

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema II: The Time-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta, Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. 

Duras, Marguerite, director. India Song. Sunchild Productions, 1975. 

Duras, Marguerite. My Cinema: Writing and Interviews. Another Gaze Editions, 2023.

Comparing Laura Mulvey’s Essay, “Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema” to Luis Buñel’s Film, Belle de Jour

By Connor Pyne, Edited by Micah Slater

The arts, despite their ability to push boundaries, have historically been unable to avoid impulsively expressing biases against the expression of female sexuality. In her essay, “Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema,” film theorist Laura Mulvey explores how expressions of female sexuality are overlooked outside of the context of satisfying the fantasies of male characters, by proxy, male viewers. While Mulvey was famously the first to identify the “male gaze” and the secondary role female characters are forced to play, there are numerous cases of feminist films that preceded Mulvey’s highly significant essay. Filmmakers have been directly challenging patriarchal ideals since the release of what is widely considered to be the first feminist film, La Souriante Madame Beudet (1923). Coming out more than four decades after La Souriante Madame Beudet, Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour (1967) is an outstanding example of a film combining misogynistic tendencies within the cinematic form. While Belle de Jour does represent and reflect many of the issues Mulvey describes in her essay, Buñuel commits those sins intentionally, to draw attention to cinema’s biases against expressions of female sexuality. 

The characterization of Belle de Jour’s central character, Severine (Catherine Deneuve), as a masochist initially reflects Mulvey’s identification of the male gaze. Masochism is defined here as enduring pain as a way to derive sexual pleasure. One interpretation of Severine’s masochism sees the film as appealing to the sexual pleasure that male audiences derive from watching her submission and dehumanization. However, Buñuel does not frame Severine’s masochism as something for men to derive scopophilic pleasure from. We only get to see Severine perform masochistic acts in her fantasies. While this could be read as Buñuel framing Severine’s sexual acts in a way that is pleasurable for the male audience, it emphasizes Severine’s sexual autonomy. Severine dictates when the audience gets to see her perform acts of masochism. For example, in the opening scene of Belle de Jour, Severine upsets Pierre (Jean Sorel), her picture-perfect husband, by acting cold towards him. As a result, she is subjected to physical and sexual torture [00:03:08-00:05:35]. This scene seems to illustrate Mulvey’s argument that “the man controls the film fantasy and… emerges as the representative of power” (Mulvey). However, Buñuel reveals that the opening scene was not real: rather, it is Severine’s fantasy. The revelation that Severine imagined sexual assault completely reshapes the meaning of the scene: not only does the scene become inconsequential, but it also emphasizes Severine’s autonomous role in figuring her suffering. 

The idea of female masochists as inherently submissive people who unilaterally capitulate to the patriarchy fails to account for the fact that masochism is an autonomous sexual fantasy fulfilled by voluntary submission. In her book Female Masochism in Film, theorist Ruth McPhee illustrates this point: she writes that equating female masochism with patriarchal oppression  “denies the masochist her agency and refuses to acknowledge the commingled physical and psychical sensations and intensities of masochism” (McPhee, 17).  By neglecting the fact that Severine is the one fantasizing about the submissive role, one inevitably ignores the fact that Severine is capable of agency in the form of sexual fantasies. While Severine herself is theoretically capable of possessing sexual autonomy, cinema deprives her of this capability due to her status as a married woman. The audience hopes that Severine finds a way to inconsequentially fulfill her desires. However, Buñuel declines to grant the audience this wish to point out cinema’s biases against female sexual expression. It is not Severine’s sexual preferences that deprive her of sexual freedom, but rather her cinematic castration that punishes her for seeking the fulfillment of her sexual desires as a married woman.

It is also important to note that a male character, Professor Henri (Marcel Charvey), also possesses masochistic fantasies. Professor Henri, in his only scene, visits the brothel (Severine’s secret workplace) and pays a sex worker named Charlotte (Françoise Fabian) to carry out his masochistic fantasy. While Charlotte is playing the dominant role in the fantasy, Henri is still clearly in control: he corrects Charlotte inside the fantasy, taking back his flogger when she takes it from him too early [00:44:32]. Professor Henri is still granted sexual freedom despite, like Severine, being a masochist. The inclusion of Professor Henri illustrates that being a masochist alone does not prevent someone from having sexual freedom. Severine’s masochistic preferences do not serve to demean or devalue her. Buñuel does not seek to punish Severine for her unique sexual preferences. The film’s depiction of her fantasies reflects Buñuel’s ability to illustrate the nuanced sexual desires of his female characters. 

As mentioned before, Severine is completely in control of her fantasies, but the fundamental nature of her imagination is that it is not reality. In reality, Severine is sexless. According to Mulvey, “she can exist only in relation to castration and cannot transcend it” (Mulvey 59). She describes that all female characters are castrated by cinema, and Buñuel concurs by casting Severine’s society as her castrator.  Throughout the film, Buñuel utilizes the color red as a symbol for sexual pleasure. For example, in the opening scene where she fantasizes about her assault, Severine is wearing a red coat [00:04:33]. Later, when Severine and Renée are discussing brothels in a cab, the cab driver mentions that brothels are still around but that the red lights are out [00:12:01]. Through this line of dialogue, Buñuel explicitly communicates that the absence of red is equivalent to the absence of unsuppressed sexual expression. The brothels may continue to operate, but only in secret, much like how Severine is allowed to have sexual desires as long as they are not expressed in the real world. With this statement, Buñuel confirms that Severine is castrated, but she has been made that way. Therefore, Buñuel desexes Severine to draws attention to the forced repression of female sexuality on the screen, which serves to validate Mulvey’s claim about the castration of female characters in cinema. 

The narrative of Belle de Jour is overwhelmingly dictated by male characters. While Severine inevitably experiences conflict, male characters have the agency to set those events in motion. Henri Husson (Michel Piccoli), a friend of Severine and Pierre, is the first to tell her about Madame Anaïs (Geneviève Page), the woman in charge of the brothel, which eventually leads to Severine’s employment there. Additionally, Henri’s eventual discovery that Severine is working at the brothel contributes to Severine’s decision to leave. Another male character, Marcel (Pierre Clémenti), asks Severine to enter a relationship with him[01:14:23]. Marcel’s request is not given too much levity initially, but when Marcel shows up at her apartment [01:24:55], Severine is much more direct in shooting him down. Severine initially responds to Marcel’s request by explaining that she loves Pierre, and her relationships with both of them give her two different things. Pierre fulfills her emotionally, and Marcel fulfills her sexually. Severine is acutely aware that she is unable to have a relationship that fulfills her in both ways. This further emphasizes Mulvey’s point that cinema deprives women of sexual expression when they are married. Later, Marcel shoots Pierre because Severine refuses to leave him. Severine feels extreme shame over her part in Pierre’s shooting, and even though Marcel is the one who directly caused Pierre’s death, Severine is forced to bear the consequences of his actions. Aside from Marcel and Henri, less significant male characters also drive the story, and in turn, impact Severine. Marcel’s friend Hippolyte (Francisco Rabal) is the reason that Severine and Marcel even connect in the first place. Hippolyte brings Marcel to the brothel and allows him to have sex with Severine. Analyzing the narrative progression of  Belle de Jour through the actions of its male characters reflects Mulvey’s theory that cinema allows male characters agency, while female characters act as motivators and accessories forced to experience the consequences of their male counterparts’ actions. 

The audience watches the film mostly from Severine’s perspective. Therefore, we are forced to sit with Severine’s conflicted feelings of guilt and adrenaline. We feel for Severine as an outcast, and sympathize with her shame for desiring something ‘taboo’. Even though Buñuel does not argue that Severine is completely in the right, he endeavors for the audience to understand her and her motivations. She is more than a sex object for male audiences to gawk at: she has complex feelings and desires. A key aspect of Mulvey’s argument is that male characters act as surrogates for the male audience and that female characters are meant to bear the consequences of the actions of male characters throughout the film. Here, the male characters are given far less development than Severine. Depriving male characters of the development given to Severine prevents them from becoming surrogate characters. By preventing audience members from inserting themselves into the narrative via a surrogate, Buñuel forces us to view the narrative from a more objective lens, allowing us to notice aspects of the film that highlight cinema’s biases. We observe these biases impacting a character that we care about, which evokes both a feeling of empathy for Severine and anger towards the biases that cause her pain.

While the narrative of Belle de Jour does emphasize Mulvey’s theories, Buñuel uses it to communicate the film’s feminist message. Kyle Barrowman, in an essay contesting Mulvey’s criticism of the film industry, writes, “Can Hollywood cinema, classical or contemporary, be ‘saved’ for, or ‘useful’ to, the project of feminism, or must it be, in contemporary parlance, ‘canceled’? According to Mulvey... the answer was a resounding ‘No.’” (Barrowman 206). While Barrowman is right that Mulvey does not believe that Hollywood cinema in its current form can contribute to the feminist movement, she does not believe that cinema itself can never contribute to the feminist movement. Instead, Mulvey argues in favor of radical cinema that destroys the gaze. Belle de Jour is one such radical film that deconstructs the gaze. In order to solve a problem, the problem must first be acknowledged. Knowing this, Buñuel created a film that is both outside of what can be called “classical Hollywood” and that calls attention to the existence of the male gaze.

Laura Mulvey advocates for alternative cinema to combat the gaze, which Belle de Jour reflects by purposefully committing the transgressions that Mulvey describes in her seminal essay. Even though the film commits those transgressions, it still develops its female protagonist and advocates for her sexual autonomy. Depictions of women expressing unique sexual desires are not unilaterally patriarchal: Buñuel makes it clear that they are not inherently castrated, but are repressed in their expression by the dominant structures that Mulvey diagnoses. Reflecting patriarchal dominance over female sexuality, the male characters in Belle de Jour control the film’s narrative. Even as the male characters are dictating the narrative, Severine dictates the perspective from which we view the narrative. Buñuel does this intentionally to further the audience’s sympathy for Severine and her feelings of powerlessness.  The film Belle de Jour commits the sins described in Mulvey’s essay to raise awareness of cinema’s harmful biases, which would be further spotlighted in Mulvey’s monumental essay less than a decade later.

Work Cited 

Barrowman, Kyle. “Contesting Feminism: Pedagogical Problems in Classical Hollywood Cinema, Feminist Theory, and Media Studies.” Tandfonline.Com, 13 Oct. 2023, www-tandfonline-com.libproxy1.usc.edu/doi/full/10.1080/14680777.2023.2268305.

“Belle de Jour.” Paris Film, 1967. 

McPhee, Ruth. Female Masochism in Film, Ashgate Publishing, Burlington, VT, 2014, pp. 1–22. 

Mulvey, Laura. “‘VISUAL PLEASURE AND NARRATIVE CINEMA.’” Feminist Film Theory: A Reader, edited by Sue Thornham, Edinburgh University Press, 1999, pp. 58–69. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctvxcrtm8.10. Accessed 8 Apr. 2025.