Uploaded 1 March 2001

Introduction

This paper is an exploration of the pleasurable aspects of the visual and narrative dimensions of Jane Campion’s cinema, especially for women. In what is a landmark essay in feminist film criticism, “Visual pleasure and narrative cinema”, Laura Mulvey persuasively argues that visual pleasure in classical narrative cinema emerges from the construction of a voyeuristic relationship between an assumed male spectator (the voyeur), whose gaze is active, and a passive female object of that gaze. [1] This relation allows no possibility for either a heroine-subject who commands the narrative, or a genuinely female spectator position (because a woman can only watch as if she were a man, through the lens of the male gaze, or in a narcissistic identification with the heroine-object) Woman herself becomes equated with the visual whilst the narrative is the province of male control. In other words, the pleasure of film-watching is sexually coded and therefore, from a feminist perspective, ideologically suspect. Mulvey’s analysis of the patriarchal codes of spectatorship embedded in popular cinema seemed to demand of feminist film-making a pleasure-denying anti-aesthetic. As the antidote to mainstream patriarchal cinema, this reaction was doomed to be marginal in the sense that it promoted an avant-garde, political cinema in which women need not, even should not, be good to look at, and the drive to know, characteristic of narrative, should be denied. [2]

Despite her eccentricities and daring, Campion is nonetheless a popular film-maker who makes pleasurable narrative films in which the women are, on the whole, good to look at, and the action unfolds, the plot progresses, in a more or less orderly and comprehensible fashion. But it also true to say that these eccentricities and daring enable her to transform both the visual and narrative dimensions of film beyond the sexual polarities which Mulvey described, and in ways which maintain an appeal to a mass audience. One of her great talents as a director lies in her ability to enlarge the field of what looks good and to film women who look good as more than to-be-looked at; another is her construction of quest narratives which are driven by the interaction between male and female desires and projections and which maintain an unusual degree of interpretative openness, or inconclusiveness.

The Look: Imaging Women

I have never seen Nicole Kidman looking as plain as she does in the first close-up she presents to the screen in Jane Campion’s The Portrait of a Lady (Britain 1996). Playing the part of a young American woman of marriageable age, Isabelle Archer, her face is pale and slightly blotchy without its usual make-up and flattering lighting. Her hair is gathered into an unbecoming Victorian bun from which her trademark curls – now frizzy rather than tamed – are untidily (rather than deliciously) escaping. Her nose is red from the cold and from sniffling. She is still undoubtedly beautiful, but in an ordinary way, stripped of the customary star presentation. Holly Hunter was presented with similar realism as Ada in The Piano (New Zealand-France 1993). Her hair is oiled rather than shampooed and conditioned into a high modern gloss, her hairstyle is severe, her costume austere. In neither film does Campion provide concessions to contemporary Western images of feminine style and beauty. She is uncompromising in her depiction of women as they might have appeared in their time and place.

But there is also more to this cosmetic and costume presentation than a faithfulness to historical truth, more than simple realism. There is, in Campion’s films, an aesthetic at work which aims at re-visioning and refashioning images of the feminine, refusing to censure the actions of her women in the interests of upholding the ideal of the classical body with its limited repertoire of gestures, poses and expressions. When Isabelle cries, her nose dribbles; there are scenes in Sweetie (Australia 1989), The Piano and Holy Smoke (USA 1999) where women are shown pissing; in what could easily have been filmed as a grotesque scene, (and indeed Sweetie is grotesque in the eyes of her appalled family), a completely naked and mud-painted Sweetie, having regressed to the role of naughty child refusing to come out of her tree house, presents her bum to her would-be rescuers – and the camera – and farts; Janet (An Angel at my Table [New Zealand 1990]) tentatively sniffs the blood of her first menstrual period and thereafter stuffs the used ‘rags’ behind the headstones in the cemetery. Campion’s aesthetic of the female body is one which opposes the repetitive, standardized and homogenous images of decorous female beauty manufactured by Hollywood and circulated routinely throughout other visual media such as television and magazines.

A current advertisement for moisturiser running on television shows a sequence of beautiful women from different countries lamenting, in their various languages, the appearance of wrinkles on their otherwise gorgeous faces (it is actually hard to believe that any of these women really have been touched by the blight of wrinkling). The German woman even identifies the double standard which allows wrinkles for men but not women. “Unfair,” she sighs. The remedy, all agree, is this new product. Face after face reappears, the subtitles spelling out the thanks and praise of universal woman to the cream which will allow them to successfully comply with the unfair rules of the double standard. The potential for difference between these international women is erased in their common pursuit of the mask of beauty. The women do not, in fact, represent diversity (as the advertisement pretends) but its defeat in the universal feminine ideal.

Unlike these narcissistic women, the norm in our consumerist age, Campion is critical of the social and cultural pressures which dictate this preoccupation with how women look. Her interest is in women’s desires and in finding a film language for its expression. For instance, when Ada (The Piano) gazes at her reflection in a hand-mirror she is not so much scrutinizing her appearance for its effect on other eyes as she is trying to fall through her image into a release of her passion. In kissing the mirror she uses her reflection as a means of transporting her back to the remembrance of sexual desire (she has been forcibly separated from her lover). In contrast to this scene is one in Sweetie where Kay and Louis sit opposite each other talking about the lack of sex in their relationship. “I’m thinking of getting my hair cut, like this,” says Kay, holding up her hair to display the effect. The apparent irrelevance and triviality of her remark provides an ironic counterpoint to their discussion. Kay is hardly even able to discuss desire, let alone feel it. Kay is not represented as a vain woman, but here, her narcissistic worry about her hair is symptomatic of a deeply blocked sexuality.

The insecurity underlying women’s culturally prescribed preoccupation with appearance, the way it erodes any firm sense of identity from which one’s action can develop unself-consciously, is brilliantly conveyed in An Angel at my Table, based on the autobiographies of New Zealand writer Janet Frame. Unlike Ada, for whom the mirror becomes a tool for sexual fantasy rather than an instrument of self-regulation, Janet uses the mirror in her search for a presentable self. In several scenes where Janet looks into a mirror, her self-scrutiny is shown to be a performance for the mirror. The taken-for-granted assumption that mirrors provide self-reflections is effectively debunked. As a university student Janet stands before her bedroom mirror repeating aloud the compliment paid to her by the psychology lecturer, John Forrest, with whom she is infatuated: “You have a real talent for writing.” As she speaks she adopts the pose of a sexually assured woman, drawing down one strap of her petticoat to reveal and stroke a glamorous neck and chest.

Searching for an outward form to reflect her desired identity as a writer and confusing it with her budding sexual desire, Janet fastens upon the unlikely, inadequate and conventional image of the idealised movie star. Ironically, John Forrest is at this same moment standing in the corridor outside Janet’s room, come with two other medical professionals to encourage Janet to seek a rest cure in the psychiatric hospital. An image of nervous insecurity promptly replaces that of the glamorous star when a knock at the door startles Janet from her fantasy. This fall from the mirror reinforces the notion of the mirror as ultimately disappointing, as unable to offer Janet a route to either self-confirmation or transcendence of the image. A little earlier her mirrored smile had thrown back the unflattering image of her rotten teeth. And yet the mirror continues to exert power. Even after she has become a published writer and is lauded by her publisher, Janet uses the mirror to practise the smile and demeanour expected of a successful writer and appropriate to the new hairstyle also adopted (under pressure) to mark her status.

What is striking about these mirror-scenes is the lack of confirmation of identity they provide and the limited cultural repertoire of images available to the artistically motivated woman seeking to build her social self. The mirror reflects a social mask, or the desire for one: it signals, ironically, the wide gap between the authenticity and originality sought after and the socially motivated self-construction. The sympathetic laugh of recognition offered by these scenes return the mirror images to their grounding in the frustrating limits of the lived body. In contrast to the cosmetics advertisement described above, the images resist a pull into narcissistic fantasy by making desire itself the focus.

When I go to the movies I often find myself sitting there in the dark thinking more about the heroines’ hairstyles, skin and figures and wondering how I compare, than following the action. This is not merely an attention fault on my part. As Laura Mulvey pointed out twenty five years ago, one of the most significant and disturbing aspects of the image of woman in classical narrative cinema is its mesmeric quality, the way it halts narrative and, object-like, absorbs the gaze. [3]  The beautiful heroine’s actions take second place to her beauty. Whilst this is never explicit in the sense of being part of the diegesis, the real drama will be, not so much what will happen to her, but what she will look like when it happens. As Mary Ann Doane has argued, this preoccupation with the objectifying and self-policing question “how does she/I look?” traps the heroine and female spectator in the static and sterile circuit of a mirror relation[4]  As a woman, watching Campion’s women is a huge relief. The pressure is off. Watching them I can watch what they are doing without the constant, yet unacknowledged, distraction of how they appear. In her illuminating essay on The Piano, Ann Hardy, making a slightly different point, describes the way in which the typical Hollywood film constructs its female beauties:

When female sexuality is the subject of investigation in film, as it so often is, male voyeurism is usually the means of investigation. A film arranged around the male gaze typically exhibits a proliferation of shots of female bodies arranged to prioritize their sexuality and large numbers of close-ups that offer the faces of women as texts to be scanned for desire and submission. In the full Hollywood close-up, with its backlighting, use of special lenses, and so on, filters and veils are sometimes added to the images as delaying devices, doubling ideas of beauty and adding mystery in the service of the representation of the seductive and duplicitous power of femininity. [5]

Hardy goes on to describe The Piano as a rare film in its successful rejection of this male gaze as the dominant gaze directing the audience’s view and in its construction of a powerful and sexualized female gaze, “an egalitarian situation that many feminist critics have imagined but few directors have ever produced on film” (81). Campion’s construction of an active female gaze is an important strategy through which she is able to invoke female desire as more than simply narcissistic, inwardly focussed and magnetic (in the sense of attracting the desire of others). But equally important is her construction of female images which do not paralyse the identifications through which female viewers enter the films at the border of appearances. In breaking the hypnotic spell of the female image Campion challenges the women in her audiences to identify instead with her female characters, to watch from an involved and close distance rather than to immerse and lose themselves in the spectacle.

As her fame and budgets have increased Campion has been able to cast international stars in her films, actresses renowned for their beauty as much as their acting. The little known actresses in Sweetie, Campion’s debut feature film, were followed by Kerry Fox as Frame in An Angel at my Table, Holly Hunter in The Piano, Nicole Kidman and Barbara Hershey in The Portrait of a Lady and Kate Winslet in Holy Smoke. Audience familiarity with these beauties in the later films could be taken for granted. The novelty of Campion’s treatment lies not so much in her rejection of the beautiful heroine per se (as I’ve said, she is appealing to a mass audience) but in her definition of beauty. Unlike popular fashion and celebrity magazines which delight in surprising and exposing famous women in ‘ugly’ moments (in a hip version of the before and after genre), Campion is able to reinterpret these ‘flaws’ and unguarded expressions, to present her beautiful women with their so-called imperfections.

Kate Winslet, who was infamously chastised and criticized by Titanic (US 1997) director James Cameron for being too fat and whose weight continues to be dwelt on by the celebrity press, hides nothing in a prolonged full-body shot of the naked Ruth (Holy Smoke). The sensuality of her youthful body is not scaled-down, sanitized or fetishised according to the formulaic codes and poses of nude photography. It is the vulnerability of the flesh we respond to here as Ruth walks towards the steady, unblinking eye of the camera (and towards her fully clothed “persecutor”, P.J (Harvey Keitel). The potential for idealisation in this Rubenesque type of image is broken by the sound of her urinating. The sound completes the image of unadorned vulnerability and is linked in the narrative to an erotic response as P.J succumbs to her seemingly guileless seduction (as it turns out, however, there was more guile at work than appeared: not even the ‘natural’ body is transparent in its meanings). There is nothing humiliating about this exposure of Winslet’s fleshy and abject body: indeed it is celebrated as natural and earthy.

There is nothing humiliating about the opening close-up of Nicole Kidman, nor about the fact that Barbara Hershey is allowed to look her age, her wrinkles clearly lit. This, the camera insists in its study of these famous faces and bodies, is beauty, not its embarrassing shadow-side. The use of star personas, already established beauties, enables Campion’s wrinkles-and-all style of filming to have a deconstructive effect: the audience is surprised, has a sense of seeing the woman revealed, anew, as she “really” is, registers her as an individual rather than as a representative of the feminine ideal whilst simultaneously registering, in a more conscious way than popular cinema generally allows, the lure of that ideal. There is more to the faces of Campion’s beautiful women than typically appears – more variety, more expression, more freedom to be seen in different lights. Her camera attempts to cut through appearances, to look deeper than the radiant and fascinating mirage which the Hollywood machine has been perfecting, to let her female stars really appear as actors. The overall experience, for the female viewer as well, is liberating.

The Action: Investigating Men

Where the quest for subjectivity and the self-defined expression of desire is a recurrent feature of Campion’s heroines, the possibility and problem of violence is rooted in the men she pits against them. Women are the principal subjects of Campion’s films, but when it comes to the issue of sexuality it is the men, rather than the women, who are probed in an effort to fathom the mysterious nature of their sexual desires. However, this is not simply a reversal of the typical scenarios of heterosexual romance dramas where the consequence of the investigation into female sexuality is the further layering of its unknowableness. Female seductiveness might be punished or tamed, but rarely demystified. The figure of woman remains enthralling, her sexuality measured in terms of the (fantastic) power she exerts over men. Feminist critics of Hollywood have seen in the dominant female figures of the femme fatale and the goddess, projections of the male imaginary bearing little resemblance to the forms of embodied sexuality which women might themselves describe.

In contrast, Campion’s investigations into male sexuality are driven by a preoccupation with the (actual) power which men have historically exerted over women and a desire to liberate men along with women through its unveiling. The veil itself connotes and produces the erotic and the possibility of a desirable body underneath.Where the veils removed from women generally serve to intensify the sense of mystery and seductiveness, constructing the woman as eroticised nude, for instance, the veils Campion removes from her men leave them naked and exposed, vulnerable in the face of their own desires (which, once admitted thus, might leave them open to rejection) and the desires of women. As Ann Hardy has written, drawing upon Doane’s work, Campion is unusual in her acknowledgement that what remains concealed when woman is finally unveiled is:

… the operation of male power and desire as symbolised by the phallus. Metaphorically, that suggests that that masculine authority, like whiteness, functions as the unremarkable norm. Literally, naively, it means that male bodies, complete with genitals, are almost never seen on screen: Power functions best when untroubled by the possibility of exposure. (81)

Campion’s men have bodies and the revelation of this fact profoundly affects our perception of their characters, principally by leveling them with the female characters who are striving to be more than just bodies (Ruth asks PJ, whom she has seduced, whether it is her personality or her breasts that he likes best. “Right now, it’s your breasts,” he admits). The images of naked men in Campion’s films are remarkable for their tenderness and humanity. Daring enough to show a penis on the screen in Sweetie, Campion composes an almost casual shot of the completely naked Louis lying on his back on a double bed, waiting silently and awkwardly for his girlfriend Kay to finish undressing. The camera remains perfectly still, refusing to emphasise or comment. In this scene the couple have arranged a sexual appointment in an endeavour to restart their sex-life. But nothing happens. They simply strip, lie down and wait, then dress again. Campion shoots this scene as an event, that is, emphasising the impasse they have reached in their relationship, rather than using it as an opportunity to arouse the audience’s voyeurism. Louis is just a man (with a male body) and Kay is just a woman (with a female body).

In The Piano, a much more sensuous film than the austere Sweetie, both main male characters are undressed. As Ada, herself clothed, runs her finger down her husband’s back and over his buttocks, searching out the crevice, the close-up of his exposed flesh, perplexed face and then his hand reaching for his trousers to cover himself allows the viewer, at this point, to empathise with his painful sexual humiliation and insecurity in an almost tactile way. Much has been written now about the famous scene in which the naked Baines, aroused by Ada’s piano playing and the sight and feel of her skin, gently caresses The Piano with his shirt. Later he describes himself to Ada as sick with longing for her. In this privileged view of his undefended body we witness the powerlessness of Baines’ desire. That he yields this spectacle of his powerlessness to Ada contributes enormously to transforming him, in the narrative, from a sexual menace (vise-a-vie the bargain he has manipulated with Ada) to a worthy lover.

The broad agenda of any feminist project is to understand the sources of male power and to liberate women from its effects. Campion, however, is extraordinary and complex in her use of a sympathetic, or non-judgmental spotlight upon most of her male characters, especially as she is exposing the roots of violence in them. [6] As essentially feminist in its themes, her cinema could be described as unusually open and generous in its attitude towards men who are responsible for varying degrees of sexual oppression of women. This is not to say that she excuses them, but that a desire to fathom their destructive lusts outweighs a desire to judge or punish. Her patriarchs are often brought to their knees but there is usually a strong element of compassion surrounding the spectacle: For instance, in her latest “hero”, the professional cult-exiter, PJ Waters, in Holy Smoke, we have the most fully elaborated spectacle of the undoing of masculinity which, despite its comic and grotesque dimensions, is accompanied by a mood of pathos. PJ arrives in style on the screen. In parodic Western fashion, the opening shot of PJ is a close-up of his leather boot resting proprietarily on the airport baggage carousel as he waits for his suitcase. He slicks back his dyed black hair, suave. As the lyrics of Neil Diamond’s “I am, I said” swell climactically to this celebration of the self-sufficient male ego (“have you ever seen a frog who dreamed he was a Prince, and then became one?”) the visuals also mock-celebrate his self-assurance. Australians fawn and smile at the American, now impressively in command at the stack of baggage trolleys, as he sends trolley after trolley spinning gracefully into their grateful hands. The American has arrived and is ready to conquer!

By the end of the film, however, his masquerade of masculinity has been replaced by the garb of feminine drag. His sexual humiliation by his young “victim” (a woman he has been hired to de-program of a cult influence) is complete: ridiculous in a dusty red dress and lipstick, hallucinating in the Australian desert after his failed attempt to kidnap the young woman, he has not only failed in his assignment – to return the old Ruth to “normal” -but he has allowed his own borders of gender normality to be torn down. And yet it is not despite his ridiculous appearance but because of it that PJ evokes pity as well as condemnation. Similarly, Gordon in Sweetie, after the death of his grown-up daughter, stands in the backyard where she died, seeing her still as his little girl, his sweetie, dressed in a tutu and holding a fairy wand, singing a lovesong to him. This is a powerful and complex image with which to close the film. Gordon is clearly largely responsible for the ruination of this daughter and for the older daughter Kay’s sexual repression (there are strong suggestions that his relationship with daughter Dawn was incestuous and that Kay, probably unconsciously, knows this). But there is also poignancy in this acknowledgement of his bereft incomprehensibility. His “innocence” (all he knows or feels is his loss) cannot, in fact, be separated from his “guilt”.

Quests for knowledge, we now understand, are simultaneously quests for power. But power can take many forms and need not be crushing. Indeed it is Campion’s highly nuanced understanding of the dynamics of power between the sexes which differentiates her work from the more obvious polemics of feminism. Her films do not simply set out to empower victimised women (the innocent), nor to castigate the powerful victimisers (the guilty). [7]  In Holy Smoke, Ruth’s commitment to her chosen path to enlightenment is maintained, (under duress, admittedly), through a cruel manipulation of her sexual youth and attractiveness. She seduces the willing PJ only to abuse him afterwards with taunts about his inadequacies. She is being held against her will – in this way she is his victim – but she is also not without her own victimising defences. The same could be said of Ada in The Piano when she attempts to use Stewart as a sexual prop for her fantasy. Whilst Campion does not represent power as dividing neatly along gender lines nonetheless an understanding of the social formation of patriarchy does inform Campion’s films. Women may have their own kinds of power and men their own kinds of weaknesses but this does not imply equivalence. It is still men whose positions of inherited authority within patriarchy – as Fathers, Husbands, Libertines – allow them, ultimately, to wield more power than their personalities alone might suggest.

The goal of Campion’s narratives, in fact, is not so much to bring oppressive men to their knees as it is to face the enemy. The questions of who the enemy is and what he is capable of is equally as important as the questions of whether and how the heroine will survive. [8]  This need to know the enemy is related to a desire to construct a new couple whose love for each other is open-eyed rather than mystified by the projections of polarised gender identities. Campion’s narratives are driven by this will to free her lovers from the romantic merry-go-round of conflict and idealisation, letting them rest in a compassionate embrace. One thinks of PJ’s words to Ruth, “Be Kind”, words he writes upon her forehead in one of their sexual games. The pathos of this request breaks through Ruth’s defences where interrogation and lecture failed. She is surprised, wounded, touched in a way that she would not have been had PJ daubed her with a smutty label such as she was expecting. Until this point Ruth has only seen PJ as an adversary, a man defined against her own opinions, demands and desires. From here on she begins to appreciate his separate identity. Although she ultimately refuses to be with PJ and even after he has tried to force his will upon her, she is able to hold and comfort him, non-sexually, compassionately, after his final breakdown.

The redistribution of power between the sexes, which is a common narrative and visual goal in Campion’s films, also attempts to salvage a redeemed figure of masculinity from its wreckage. Campion’s men are taken through rites of passage which, if they allow themselves to be metaphorically stripped, can lead them to the rewards of a domesticated sexual fulfillment. PJ, after his sexual-spiritual “trial” in the desert is reborn in the postscript ending to Holy Smoke, revealing in a letter to the newly and more deeply enlightened Ruth that he is leading the life of husband and father. Baines, in The Piano, re-enters his previously abandoned culture and settles into the role of (second) husband. [9]

In Sweetie we have Louis, Kay’s boyfriend, a quiet and gentle man who, nonetheless, betrays Kay in several ways. First, he succumbs to the seductions of Kay’s sister, Sweetie, and next, aroused and emboldened by this act, is led to an even worse betrayal when he creeps into Kay’s bedroom – she is sleeping – and performs a crude mock-rape upon her unresponsive body. (In this way Louis can be seen as a precursor to Stewart in The Piano. Both men are provoked to violence by the “frigidity” of their respective partners. Though Louis shows more self-control than Stewart, his frustration at being repulsed and the impulse to assert sexual dominance over his “lover” are clear enough.) Ultimately, however, Louis is reunited with Kay, and at the film’s conclusion there appears to be a new balance between the pair. In comparison with Dawn and Kay’s father, Gordon, whose weakness is an essential and enduring aspect of his shadowy authority, Louis is a more transparent character, more open about his frustration, and in the end, more open also to equality. [10]

The Portrait of a Lady is less obviously concerned with reconstructed masculinity than these three films. Isabelle’s husband, the dilettante Gilbert Osmond, is unremittingly oppressive. His brutality deepens over time and is supported by a complacency which reveals no cracks. Of all Campion’s men Osmond is the closest to evil. He seems to be completely without conscience, love or compassion. He is certain of his authority and means to be intimidating. The two scenes in which he physically assaults Isabelle, first by standing on the back of her dress as she walks away from him, second by picking her up and roughly seating her on a stack of pillows, then slapping her face with a glove, are chilling in their mixture of measured violence and restraint. In contrast to her other male-female couples whose sexual sparring is eventually equalising, Isabelle and Osmond have no possible harmonious future. Isabelle’s attempts to break through his icy veneer to some emotional truth simply bounce back. “You know how we live”, Isabelle baldly despairs at one point. Disingenuous sarcasm is his reply. He refuses to acknowledge her meaning.

But The Portrait of a Lady is also about choice. There is an early scene, before she has met Osmond, where Isabelle fantasises about three other men, two of them suitors, the other her cousin. Of these three only one remains at the films end. The penultimate scene sees Isabelle kissing Caspar Goodwood, the would-be husband who has waited many years for her. Goodwood, in fact, frames the narrative, being the lover she initially fled, believing herself worthy of a greater adventure than marriage. Whilst not, in himself, a redeemed character (his is a constant character and he has done Isabelle no greater harm than wishing to marry her), he presents a strong contrast with Osmond, clearly the worst choice Isabelle could have made. Goodwood is faithful, passionate, frank. However it is Ralph Touchett who is most transformed by his encounter with Isabelle. His initial ‘crime’ is a kind of cynical carelessness. He falls in love with his beautiful young cousin soon after meeting her. However, convinced that his love for her is impossible and as a substitute for declaring his love, Touchett turns voyeur, creating the conditions whereby her romantic life may be a vicarious spectacle for his enjoyment. It is not as amusing as he expects. What began, for him as an idle game leads to Isabelle’s disastrous, unhappy marriage and to his own loss of her friendship and potential love. Isabelle’s ultimate flight from Osmond, to be with Ralph at his deathbed, does redeem Ralph, who also declares his love and laments his role in Isabelle’s tragedy, but it also reveals the path which was not taken.

When one thinks of characters such as Gordon, Stewart, PJ, and Ralph, it seems that Campion is able to extend compassion to her fallen patriarchs because she is able to look at them evenly, intently, without fear and without hysteria (and, even more surprising when thinking about the usual tendencies of the so-called woman’s film, she does this whilst looking from a woman’s point of view). Consequently, there is less of a mythical, fantastic or idealized dimension to her men than is common in women’s melodrama (the genre which perhaps comes closest to describing Campion’s films). Whilst they can be viewed in terms of broadly discernible types, her men are, first and foremost, ordinary, fallible, and, (unlike the character-types of genre film) unpredictable individual humans.

Campion also understands men’s power in relation to, and in fact inseparable from, their fears, impotencies and vulnerabilities. Gordon cannot talk about his wife’s desertion of him (“I get bad” he tells Kay); he breaks down and cries about Dawn’s expulsion from the family; after her death he sits in the fairy chair still preserved in her childhood bedroom, fairy light turned on, grief for his own child self entangled in the tragedy he has made of his daughter’s life. PJ is vain, especially about his aging. His sexual promiscuity and assurance masks his fear of becoming irrelevant. There is also a suggestion that he fears both impotence and homosexuality – during his own experience of cult membership when he was younger, the guru attempted to have sex with him. “I couldn’t get it up,” PJ tells Ruth. There is a mixture of pride (this proves he’s not homosexual) and shame (the failure to have an erection; the threat of rape) in this confession.

Ralph Touchett, like Gordon in his lack of self-understanding and underestimation of his power, though less self-pitying than Gordon, constructs himself as an ineffectual man. As a consumptive he uses his debilitating disease as an excuse for withdrawing from moral responsibility, as if he sees himself as already dead, ghost-like. This allows him to play God, invisible and aloof from the sphere of action, but pulling the strings. His actual and initially disavowed power expresses itself in this distanced way rather than through the cruder forms of physical contact. Through influencing his dying father to leave Isabelle a fortune in his will, Ralph has unwittingly, and yet not innocently, thrown her to the wolves. His role in constructing Isabelle as bait for the fortune hunting Gilbert Osmond, however, is dependant on his seeing himself as impotent.

The Future?: Between the Sexes

Despite the repeated scenarios of sexual cruelty throughout Campion’s films – from incest to attempted rape within marriage – a horizon of hope and future for the heterosexual couple and family continually frames her films. The early short films, Peel (Australia 1982) and A Girl’s Own Story (Australia 1984), are less hopeful than the later features. Peel concludes with a black-comedic scene of familial collapse and violence. A young boy, who has been punished by his father for throwing orange peel out of the car window, now redirects his own anger against his aunt. She has been waiting impatiently in the car while her brother marched the boy back down the road to pick up the offending peel. As the father and son return to the car the boy notices that she has been peeling an orange. In imitation of his father he orders her to pick up the discarded peel. The camera studies the budding oppressiveness in an uncomfortably close and distorting close-up of the boy’s sneering face. The final image is of the boy jumping on the roof of the car, the father sitting on the bonnet, the woman sitting inside, imprisoned and figuratively crushed.

A Girl’s Own Storyis even bleaker in its conclusion. The young teenage girls, who have featured in the loosely interwoven stories of their disenchanting sexual initiations, sit on a stark linoleum floor, dressed only in singlets and pants, huddled for warmth around inadequate radiators, singing “I feel the cold”. This is a film which does not set itself the task of envisaging a way forward for the sexes. Instead it charts the ways in which the naïve sexual fantasies of pubescent girls are manipulated and railroaded by the sexual interests and goals of boys and men: incest, rape and adultery are brute realities which cut short their childhoods.

However, with Sweetie Campion begins to direct her films towards endings which are also new beginnings. After a long period of estrangement Kay and Louis re-ignite their sexual relationship at the end of the film. From a shot of entwined and exploring feet in socks we cut to a medium shot of Kay’s relaxed body reclining on the bed. She is wearing a plain cotton singlet. Her soft and satisfied smile, the first we’ve seen, is the intimate concluding image we have of her. As an image of sexual fulfillment this is interesting for its gentleness, domesticity and utter lack of sexualisation. The camera asks us to see her happiness. Her pleasure, whilst signaling something akin to a rebirth for herself, marks the ending of both the narrative and the visual dimensions of the film for us. There is no pressure to search out its meanings.

Interestingly though, this future couple is getting more shadowy, rather than more distinct, in each successive Campion film. In Sweetie and The Piano the heroine is paired with one of the major protagonists and the significant work of the film has been to prepare the way for their future love. In the last two films the heroine’s partner is a question mark: in The Portrait of a Lady Isabelle hovers on the threshold of choice (to return to Osmond? to be alone? to accept Goodwood?); in Holy Smoke a boyfriend is announced in Ruth’s voice over (reading a letter to PJ) but not seen.

How do we read this “progression”? Is it that the couple is becoming more unimaginable? Or that the sexual battle, as the means to establishing a more equitable relationship, is being abandoned? In The Portrait of a Lady, in contrast with The Piano, the attraction of the sexual battle (as it is played out between Osmond and Isabelle) is aligned with feminine naivety and immaturity, and also with romance but not marriage. Although Osmond is on his best behaviour during his courtship of Isabelle the signs of his ruthless authority are evident and Isabelle registers but chooses to ignore them. I am thinking in particular of the scene in which he announces his love: his appropriation of Isabelle’s umbrella and her trembling at his presumption prefigure the later pattern of domination and fear between them. The frisson of sexual tension Isabelle feels quickly dissipates after marriage and is replaced with boredom on Osmond’s part and nervous fatigue on Isabelle’s. The sexual contest between Ruth and PJ in Holy Smoke exhausts them both. Whilst their letters to each other declare that a bond still exists between them, that connection continues only in an imaginary way. In body they have gone their separate ways.

Perhaps we can read these endings more fruitfully as variations of the romance genre. When Gillian Armstrong made My Brilliant Career (Australia 1979) it seemed that women still could not have both independence (represented by Sybylla’s writing) and marriage. One or the other must be sacrificed. [11] For Campion, the achievement of woman’s self-determination is still fragile, embattled, still threatened by male sexuality. Whilst the possibility of a new couple is a significant shaping thematic in Campion’s oeuvre, the danger is in presenting it as the ultimate goal, the limited destiny of woman, as in the classic romance genre, over-riding the need of the heroine to explore her own identity. Unlike Sybylla in My Brilliant Career, Campion’s heroines do not have to renounce their sexual desires for men. But they do need to take care. And it is still a challenge to portray a happy marriage in any sustained way. I am curious to see her next couple.

Footnotes:

[1] Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989), 14-26.
[2] Mulvey herself has moved away from this position in her subsequent writings. In particular, she has gone on to explore the role of curiosity in film spectatorship (the Pandora myth is exemplary here, displacing her earlier emphasis on the Oedipal – and sadistic- structure of narrative) and the enigmas of masculinity. See Visual and Other Pleasures, Citizen Kane (London: British Film Institute, 1992) and Fetishism and Curiosity (London: British Film Institute, 1996).
[3]Discussing Sternberg’s films she writes: “The beauty of the woman as object and the screen space coalesce; she is (…) a perfect product, whose body, stylised and fragmented by close-ups, is the content of the film”. Visual and Other Pleasures, 22.
[4]She writes, “becoming the image, the woman can no longer have it. For the female spectator, the image is too close – it cannot be projected far enough.” Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987), 168-9.
[5]Ann Hardy, “The last patriarch”, in Harriet Margolis (ed), Jane Campion’s The Piano (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 80. Further references to this text appear as page numbers in brackets.
[6] Gilbert Osmond is the exception to this rule. I discuss his character later in the text.
[7] It is Campion’s representation of power, especially in relation to sex, which divided feminist critics over The Piano. See my discussion in “Lips and fingers: Jane Campion’s The Piano“, Screen 36, no. 3 (Autumn 1995: 277-87.
[8] The playful question-mark ringlet on Louis’ forehead, which Kay reads as a sign of their predestined relationship, can also be seen as a sign planted by the film-maker, playfully signifying the mysteriousness of male identity.
[9] It is tempting to read PJ as another and more modern version of Baines, especially as both characters are played by Harvey Keitel.
[10] However the character of Louis is not clearly developed, and his redeemed sexual stature at film’s end seems more given than explained. The problematic of a weak masculinity housing a violent sexuality (in this case incestuous) is more fully explored through the character of Gordon. After the death of Sweetie the subtle, disavowed power Gordon holds over Kay mysteriously dissolves and her sexual desire is freed. Louis’ role seems necessary to the expression of Kay’s release, rather than worked through in its own right, in relation to his own motivations and growth. In this way he is a less successfully realised character than the male leads in Campion’s subsequent films.
[11] In my teaching experience young contemporary women are frustrated by these mutually excluding options and find the ending (Sybylla completes and posts her manuscript) disappointing rather than quietly triumphant.