Page 163 - Cultural Studies A Practical Introduction

Visual Culture 147

In Fight Club , for example, Marla Maples, a headstrong and quite independ-
ent woman, is portrayed from Jack ’ s perspective as a “ ball - buster, ” while
women with cancer who want sex are portrayed as pathetic. No positive

women characters appear in the film, and men who are negative or oppres-
sive in some way for Jack, such as Bob, are portrayed as being feminized.
Bob is so fat he has breasts. The movie consists in many ways of a move away
from emblems of boys oppressed by emblems of mothers (IKEA shopping,
womb - like places, breasts, hugs) to assertions of masculine independence
from all things associated with femininity and maternal care.
An almost inverse narrative is constructed in Thelma and Louise , a fi lm
about two women who take a journey away from male power and authority
in society and in the family. That power is associated with sexual violation
by men. The narrative depicts a move away from oppressive men who
would be fathers to women, exercising authority without justifi cation,
toward a realm of freedom usually considered to be the purview of men
exclusively. That freedom is often associated with the Western fi lm genre,
and the women don cowboy attire as they move further toward independ-
ence and away from patriarchy. Unlike Fight Club , which makes dependent
emotional relations seem harmful to a healthy male identity, in this fi lm,
relations of mutual support and care are portrayed as positive alternatives
to discipline, authority, and violence – all things portrayed positively in
Fight Club .
Such thematic analysis only gets at a part of how visual culture operates.
What is called formal analysis (because it focuses on the form of the image,
how it is constructed, rather than what it is about) attends to the way the
different techniques for constructing images are used to built narratives,
construct characters, make meaning, and tell stories. These formal devices
of image, character, and narrative construction often infl uence what
meaning we assign to events and to people in visual narratives.
Consider how a woman who reaches for independence and social
authority is depicted visually in The Silence of the Lambs . Narrative fi lms
of this kind have two formal dimensions. One consists of the way each
image is composed; the other consists of how the images are strung together
through editing. Clarice Starling is portrayed as a woman who wrestles with
emotional limitations (the memory of her dead father) while striving to
become a rational FBI investigator. In an early image, she walks into an

elevator filled with men taller than she, and the way the image is composed
emphasizes her fledgling status within the organization. She in a literal

visual sense has a lot of growing to do. But emotions get in the way of her