ABSTRACT
In an essay on the face of Greta Garbo, Barthes distinguishes between an “intelligible face subject” and an “admirable face object.” The former is psychologically legible or intelligible, a proverbial “window unto the soul”; the latter is an object of erotic fascination and fetishization. In my introductory chapter, I argue that classical Hollywood cinema stages an aesthetic and ideological struggle between these competing understandings of the female face. Laura Mulvey maintains that woman connotes “to-be-looked-at-ness,” and scopic objectification is conventionally held to be intrinsic to the patriarchal oppression of women. Classical Hollywood cinema suggests, however, that women have more to fear from subjectification than objectification, more to fear from a hermeneutics of “to-be-seen-through-ness” than an erotics of “to-be-looked-at-ness.” The former is clearly the ascendant force, but there is no “great paradigm shift,” as Eve Sedgwick says in a different context; the erotics of “to-be-looked-at-ness” does not simply concede the cinematic field without a struggle. Rather, classical Hollywood cinema acknowledges the uneasy co-existence of the two, which is the source of my interest in it: although I contend that the subjection of the face to a hermeneutics of the gaze is at one with the formation of a disciplinary society, I nevertheless address those “admirable face objects” – Greta Garbo, Gloria Swanson, Elizabeth Taylor – that, in their different ways, resist a coercive and normalizing knowledge. What I term, following Deleuze and Guattari, “the regime of faciality” seeks to take dominion everywhere, but it has a particular investment in rendering the socially marginal and the sexually deviant psychosexually legible. The socially marginal and the sexually deviant, in turn, have a particular investment in resisting the regime of faciality’s normalizing hold. My first chapter addresses classical Hollywood cinema broadly; it includes, for example, sustained analyses of Griffith and blackface, several major films by Hitchcock, and Citizen Kane.
