Page 164 - Cultural Studies A Practical Introduction

148 Visual Culture

attaining the rationality she must achieve if she is to become both a suc-
cessful agent and a successfully de - feminized woman. The fi lm portrays
emotional vulnerability often associated with women (largely perhaps
because men have monopolized public power with all the apparent ration-
ality that goes with it) in a negative light. Clarice must move in the narrative
from a position of vulnerability in which she gets upset easily to one in
which she is able to use her reasoning abilities to capture the criminal. Like
him, a man who is uncertain of his gender identity, she is caught in between
two genders. In one editing sequence, for example, she is depicted getting

upset when a male inmate at an insane asylum flings semen at her; she runs
out of the building and bends over near her car. But an edit occurs, and

the next image we see is her firing a gun at the camera. That dramatic
switch, from an image of vulnerability to an image of competence and
violence, summarizes her entire transformation throughout the fi lm. This
is a film in which a woman becomes a man (if by those terms we mean the

conventional roles assigned each gender in traditional culture).

Student Exercise

Choose a contemporary film or a television show and analyze it

in two dimensions. First, discuss how it links to your particular his-
torical moment. How does it give expression to issues and problems,
fears and desires, and realities and fantasies that are current in your
world? How is the text social, historical, and even political? How
is it about differences in your culture over values, ideals, norms,
and roles? Second, discuss it as a tangible artistic object. How is the
narrative constructed? Does the narrative seem to have a thematic
direction embedded in it? Are images important to the way those
themes are worked out in the narrative? Can you isolate one or two
that strike you as especially important and say why they strike you as
being important?

Sources

See Marquard Smith , Visual Culture Studies ( London , 2008 ); Margarita
Dikovitskaya , Visual Culture: The Study of the Visual after the Cultural Turn