Representation Of Women In Mainstream Film Studies Essay

According to Laura Mulvey “women stand in patriarchal culture as signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his fantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning”. This argument can be seen in countless movies across generations and cultures. Mainstream Hindi film industry churned out countless movies where women represented as bearer rather than maker of meaning. However, the film No One Killed Jessica seems to be a departure from this trend.

The film is based on the true murder story of Jessica Lal. In a crowded nightclub, Jessica Lal, a model working as a celebrity bartender, refused to serve Manu Sharma and two of his friends. Incensed, Manu Sharma pulls out a gun intending just to give Jessica a scare shoots her dead. More than 300 people were witnessed the event at the exclusive nightclub when Jessica was killed, but nobody came forward to tell the truth in court. The family of Jessica Lal fought legal battle against the rich and powerful for more than a decade and finally got justice.

The film, “No One Killed Jessica” was purposively chosen keeping in view of its commercial success and audience acceptability. Its successful run at the box office implies most of the audience identifies with the film’s representation of society and individuals. As per general perception through various news media, it had a strong impact on the society regarding the changing image of women. The film can be clearly established on a syntagmatic level; the director (Raj Kumar Gupta), the script (amalgamations of fiction and reality), the director’s relationship with his earlier film Aamir (2008). In addition to that, there were snapshots of ‘today’ in the film in the form of models, fashion, glamour, journalism, sting operations, even stereotypes. All in all the film was a total explosive concoction. The most integral aspect was successful completion of process of making a film as a paradigm in itself.

 No One Killed Jessica perhaps one of the rare films where the male gaze is absent, largely because there are no male protagonists, no song and dance sequences, and no overt sexualisation. The female lead is represented in a very masculine form. The film paved the way for newer films to represent women and their everyday issues in a positive light by breaking the existing stereotypes.

‘Bollywood’, considered to be among the top three film industries across the world, has time and again successfully adapted to new dimensions to understand and reflect the relatively quick changes in the evolving culture of Indian society. It also reaches Middle East, South Asia, Africa and among South Asian diasporas, world over. This further marks the study of mainstream commercial Hindi film as essential. The study can be taken as a critical base and can be re-examined for upcoming films.

Theoretical Framework

In mass media, representation is often perceived as the ‘construction’ of reality in a virtual medium. Such a notion of representation is analogous to the mistaken assumption of a one-to-one correspondence of every word with its referent – a language-world isomorphism (Saussure, 1983). Representation in cinema begins with building up of concepts of reality that include human beings, objects, places, cultural identities, and events and extends to the establishment of abstract concepts. In classical aesthetics, Plato identified representation as mimesis i.e. imitation without narration, somewhere close to theatre and differentiated it with the concept of diegesis i.e narration without imitation. Aristotle went further in his seminal work Poetics and suggested that mimesis can never reach the truth because on one hand the audiences are required to feel distant from it so that they can experience catharsis and on the other hand it has to strive hard to imitate reality as close as possible. In fact, Aristotle exclaimed that,

“Mimesis involves a framing of reality that announces that what is contained within the frame is simply not real. Thus the more ‘real’ the imitation the more fraudulent it becomes. (Gebauer and Wulf, 1992)”

The modern aestheticist M. C. Beardsley (1958) proposed a classification of Representation as Depiction (i.e. representation of a type of object), Portrayal (i.e. representation of an individual), and Symbolizing (i.e. representation through a suggested or non-literal meaning). Incorporating all these typifications, representation can be approached from two standpoints. Towing the line of Aristotle’s interpretation of mimesis, Constructivists tend to believe that cinema is a construction of reality, where reality as an object can be perceived, consumed and witnessed in still as well as moving images and texts but with a catch – this perception will always be plagued by cinematic alteration and manipulation and therefore, will always be distinct from reality itself. In other words, our perception of a film will be dependent on our body of knowledge i.e. epistemology, especially our knowledge that this is a film and therefore cannot be real. Thus, Myra Karn is able to portray Jessica Lal because the spectators have agreed to a suspension of disbelief about this fact. However, once this agreement is reached, it immediately leads to a subconscious apprehension that ultimately this is not the complete truth.

On the other hand, Realists take an almost opposite viewpoint, best described by Bazin’s notion that film as a medium is subject to reality by the very incorporation of this capacity of capturing reality in the film-making process itself (Bazin, 1967; pp 21). Bazin went on to establish that there is a style of filmmaking which may be termed as realist which he ascribed to the likes of Jean Renoir, Orson Welles and Italian neorealist Roberto Rossellini – all following techniques which render the projected image as close to reality as possible.

With time constructivism went on to incorporate structuralism, Barthesian textual analysis, Marxist ideological analysis, Lacanian psychoanalysis, etc. leading to the foundation of cine-semiotics. This led to the birth of feminist film theory which incorporated feminist ideological criticism, cultural studies, psychoanalysis etc. According to Feminist Film Theories, cinema has been an important path on which debates, culture and identity is talked about and even challenged. There have been major theoretical developments and frequent discussions on ‘woman’ as an object of desire, female spectatorship and cinematic pleasure. Many theorists have contributed to this school of thought. Mulvey in her essay, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1973, printed in 1975), highlights the concept of women as passive role players in films. According to her it baselines the concept of film as visual pleasure. She further stressed that such roles make women as tools of erotic visual effect for male voyeurism. Mulvey points that in Cinema a woman’s representation is being a carrier of the meaning rather than making the meaning. Molly Haskell in ‘From Reverence to Rape: The treatment of women in Movies’ (1974), analyzes how women are portrayed in films, the stereotypes depicted, the extent to which women are projected as passive or active. She also comments upon the amount of screen time given to women. Doane (1987), searches for the type of women representation in the women-oriented films. She insists that women refer to signifier of modernity, rebellious sexuality. According to her, woman as object is single terminology in systems of positioning. Linda Williams (1988) tells us that understanding of spectatorship is a result of representation through three-sided meeting – historical and physical subjectivity; contradictory meanings; positions and pleasures. Julia Kristeva (1982) uses the term ‘abject’ in direct contrast to Lacan’s ‘object petit a’ (object of desire) to refer to the spectator’s reaction of horror towards a possibly endangered deconstruction in the meaning caused due to the loss of power. Post-structuralist feminist philosopher Judith Butler theorized that gender is different from sex and while the later is biological, gender is actually ‘performative’ – and this performance is driven by rules put in place by strong patriarchal hegemonic structures (Butler, 1999).

However, Feminist film theory has also met with strong criticism from various detractors, prominent being Christine Gledhill, who argues for a realist epistemology to underline contemporary feminist film theory (Gledhill, 1984). This follows from the premise that if a feminist film theorist asks the question whether a particular representation in a film is true to women’s condition and nature, she has automatically assumed that there is a reality of women’s condition and nature (Casebier, 1991; pp 121). In this paper, we attempt to provide a subtextual realism to applied feminist film theory principles using relevant phenomenological theories – for example, Benjamin’s ‘Angel of History’ and Heidegger’s ‘Poiesis’.

Inspired by French Revolutions in 1789, 1830, 1848 and the Paris Commune of 1870, Walter Benjamin interpreted Paul Klee’s painting, ‘Angelus Novus’ (1920) in his seminal work, On the Concept of History (1940). ‘The Angel of History’, as Benjamin dubbed it, has its face turned towards its past and sees a single catastrophe of revolutionary events, a pile of rubble on its feet even as it is caught up in a storm that drives him towards the future. Benjamin labeled this storm as progress. Further [1973 (1935)], he argued in favor of death of ritual with the birth of camera and mechanical images.

Heidegger, M. [(1977) 1954], in The Question Concerning Technology, insisted that the “essence of technology is not technological” He used the term ‘poiesis’ to find out forms of ‘authentic production’, one where every aspect of production process – right from the creator to created is dependent and entangled with each other. As a result, there is a loss of being, individuality and freedom. It brings humanity to a position of servitude. Due to this a person speaks something but thinks absolutely differently. Heidegger takes the example of a fast and free-flowing river ‘The Rhine’ – when the river is controlled by a dam, which is built by humans, leads to curtailment of the river’s freedom. However, it also results in servitude of humanity because now they have to manage the dam as an additional work bound to their lives.

Gender representation and Hindi cinema

As discussed earlier, construction of reality presupposes the establishment of reality. The basic premise of cinematic suspension of disbelief is the realization that all that appears real on screen is actually a construction of reality. Similarly, to take up the subject of representation of women in Hindi cinema, first we must try to comprehend the existing reality of women, their status in India. Numerous Indian mythologies have given great respect to women, to the extent of calling them ‘Mother Goddess’. The contextual reality though is quite different. Unlike many nations, India has a larger male population as compared to females. One of the major reasons is women die even before they can reach adulthood. A large number of them are murdered in their mother’s womb. The other important fatal imbalance is the mistreatment of these women. They do not have enough decision-making power and economic independence, face violence in and out of their families, face atrocities like murder, molestation, rape and every possible kind of sexual molestation to the extent that India stands at a miserable 56 rank out of 86 nations in the Social Institutions and Gender Index (OECD SIGI, 2012).

This reality of Indian women has found its way straight into the silver screen. Since beginning, women in popular Hindi Cinema have their set roles – somebody’s daughter, wife, sister or mother. A modern woman has been portrayed to possess a loose character. She can be bar dancer or a college student, who is not at all interested in her career. Rare are the cases when lead female characters are depicted as strong individuals. We hardly witness them to be lawyers, journalists, business magnets, doctors etc. Even if they are portraying these, they are supposed to be holy, cultured, catering to males need and wishes. Even the song and dance sequences demand them to be voluptuous and good dancers. Their maximum achievement in life looks to be a shift from song and dance in discs and pubs to escape in Hindi cinema and do the same around trees.

Woman as a maker of meaning:

Gender representation in “No One Killed Jessica”

An important precursor to the analysis of ‘No One Killed Jessica’ is the actual Jessica Lal murder case. Jessica was a professional model who happened to volunteer as a bartender at a socialite gathering and was shot dead by a politician’s son for refusing to serve him liquor at 2 am in the night. The case shocked Indian youth and generated a public outcry when the perpetrators were acquitted in a lower court. Subsequently, the media took up the case rigorously and managed to pressurize the higher courts to reopen the case and finally the guilty were put behind bars.

‘No One Killed Jessica’ starts in a format of a hard-hitting documentary. Later the glamour quotient seeps in reminding us of watching a mainstream commercial Hindi cinema. Still throughout, the film showed touches of serious cinema as well. This movie boasts of two main characters – Sabrina Lal (Vidya Balan) and Meera Gaity (Rani Mukherjee).

Sabrina is shown to be simple, calm, nerdy, and docile and appears to be contended in her own space. She takes a back-seat in all the aspects of life as compared to her sister (Jessica Lal) and many other female counterparts. She is media shy and far from the glamorous personality of Jessica and Meera. Her usual attire is dull colored loose shirts and straight fit jeans and doesn’t use make-up, establishing her as a person who tones down her sexuality.

Meera is a fictional character, loosely symbolizing sensational but powerful Indian electronic media of the new millennium. The character is built around the famous journalist from NDTV – Barkha Dutt, who had handled the case and is also the inspiration for the coverage of Kargil war and Kandahar hijack episode. Unfortunately, the film completely ignores print media journalists, who were among the first ones to uncover the truth and in fact, the sting operation was done by Harinder Baweja from Tehelka. In the movie’s credits, there is a caption congratulating Tehelka for their efforts but going by the general Indian film viewing standard, people do not sit back and watch credits. Ramani (2011) implored that the movie goes so far to accommodate the case for electronic media that it excludes and almost totally ignores contribution of main ‘heroes’ of the story, i.e. the print media.

Meera is established from the beginning of her film, first through her voice which delivers a monologue on Delhi’s inherent complexity and its fascination with power and then her credentials are established through her coverage of important but difficult news assignments like Kargil war and Kandahar hijack incident. From the very beginning, Meera’s character is celebrated as a woman of substance, but subliminally, it is established as a transgendered male performance, as if the lines and the role was written for a male character but the sex was changed at the last moment. Thus Meera goes to great lengths to establish her gender performativity as male using tropes like frequent verbal abuse; dominant and emotionally detached frequent physical relationships; absence of family issues etc. Her stance of sitting and drinking tea in the office, her behavior with her colleagues and her maid furthers this establishment. The contrast lies in, the real women journalists who actually went to great lengths to solve this case and is comfortable in their gender, e.g. Harinder Baweja frequently wears Saris and flaunts her femininity without any reservations, and is quite humble in her interviews.

Professionally, Meera comes out as a hard-hitting reporter. Her character is smart, dynamic, selfish, bitchy, successful, and manipulative. In fact, it seems as if the director of the film has a deliberate intention of creating such contrasting characters on the same platform. The downside of such a contrast is that, when played with the mise-en-scène and sequence of events, the film impresses upon the audience that, a successful woman tends to have man-like attributes; at least her perfomative gender should be male. Otherwise she will absolutely fade away in the harsh realities of life. In an establishing scene, while returning from the Kargil war zone, she hurls expletives at a fellow male passenger – something that is employed to make her representation adhere to the stereotypes of ‘cool’ and ‘bitch’, as there appears no visible reason for such an outburst.

However, we must give due respect to the makers of the film that they have not aimed at creating ‘perfect heroines’, although all these characters are seen to reflect certain exciting stereotypes. Jessica Lal, the omnipresent character throughout the film, even after her death, is the actual anchor of the story. Her character evolves as a young model – free-spirited and modern – an individual who is not scared to pick a fight while protecting her sister (Sabrina) against harassment. However, the stereotyping does not leave her ever. In the scene where she fights the street harassers, one can observe a multitude of gender and class representations. The harassers are on a cheap bicycle and apparently symbolize members of the lower economic class. Whether or not this scene is fictional, it reeks of class irony – she was shot dead by a higher economic class male while these fellows were projected to be weak in front of her rage and verbal abuses. Another irony is that the verbal abuses that she used are themselves misogynist. Further on in the film, her ‘modernity’ is objectified in pure Kristevan (1982) sense by establishing her vulnerability as a vilified girl who likes to have a nice time, parties hard, drinks heavily and stays out till late. So in the film there are a number of scenes where Jessica’s character develops against Sabrina in a contrast of bad vs. good. In one frame, Jessica invites Sabrina to a party which symbolically implies the one where she was shot dead and she is wearing a mini-skirt while Sabrina is in desexualized jeans and an oversized shirt. At the sequence leading to Jessica’s murder, there is frequent jump cut between Sabrina sleeping in her bed while Jessica is serving drinks in the party. The dance sequence reeks of voyeuristic male pleasure with head to toe camera movements amplifying a mini-skirt clad female figure montage with extreme close-up shots of drunken men trying to get too close to her – the sub-text is clearly pointing out that this image of a girl dancing in a short dress is ‘easily approachable’. The paradigm in the series of shots and the delicate imagery tend to establish a dangerous line of thought – those who try to move away from the patriarchal hegemonies in place will have to face the brunt one day – the audience is prepared to see Jessica get the bullet! This moment is the very mimetic driver that will lead the audience to witness the fight for justice and the road to catharsis, the final judgment in favor of justice. But the montage and the mise-en-scene establishing this mimesis subliminally also feed the stereotype of the vulnerability of the female gender. The conflict scene between Jessica and Manu is a more serious effort and focuses on her mid, close-up and extreme close-up shots as well as a good performance by Myra to highlight Jessica’s strong personality. The audience senses the danger even more closely as the first gunshot goes off and yet another – Jessica is hit in the head. Her fall in slow motion takes its time to ensure that the moment is mimetically established and mourned in the subconscious of the viewers. Phenomenologically, this moment is akin to Benjamin’s ‘Angel of History’ where the angel is looking at the past and has no hope for the future. The storm from paradise has ensured that all progress lies in the rubble of history. As with Benjamin’s catastrophe of the Holocaust, the audience is forced to have a full gaze at the tragedy that unfolds on-screen.

Although Meera Gaity operates on similar thoughts of rebellion and modernity, she is shown to have a different end – a victorious one! Her male performative attributes have been discussed earlier as well. She uses the ‘f’ word like her second skin and is abusive in speech just like any of her male colleague journalists. She does not pay any heed to the so-called moral police of the society – sleeps out of wedlock, smokes frequently and is at top of her career by climbing certain manipulative ladders. In order to come out in the top league, she is not afraid to pull the right strings and take help of the crooks themselves. Her frequent use of abusive language and behaving very manly recreates the stereotype of women can be successful only when and if she behaves like a man. Her dialogues like when she says “screw ethics” confirms her revolting personality. She is shown to be rude both to her colleagues (she often call her colleagues ‘bitch’), and even to her maid at home. Further Meera confirms her male performance by saying sentences like, “this is the time to give back to those sons of bitches”; “let’s nail the bastard”; “that bastard should be in jail and not at the next happening party”; ” I think I deserve a much bigger and better story” and many more. Despite all this, throughout the film Meera is no less than a “hero”.

In contrast, Sabrina’s character is deliberately underplayed. She could have easily been made the ‘hero’ of the story. However she was shown to be easily dominated first by her sister, then by witnesses, culprit, media and Meera. Perhaps this was done to signify, that the good has to lean on the bad to fight and win over the ugly. That is, after she has literally broken down in her fight for justice for Jessica, Sabrina grabs the hand of Meera to fine the justice against the evil doers. As mentioned in the review of literature, psychologists Yassour Borochowitz, Dalit & Buchbinder, Eli (2010) discovered a couple of aspects that explains a female weakness to violence. They said that language is not the base to create a meaning; in fact, it is the crux to create concept of whole world. For example, the language of Sabrina is measured, slow, and subtle; revealing her desexualized personality. Her not going to her sister’s parties, her avoidance of drinks, her even stopping Jessica from fighting against goons who tease her, shying away from media and trusting the witness in vein. All these hint at her contrasting personality and the course of events in the film.

Despite these stereotypes, the characters of Meera and Sabrina are very important, especially for Hindi Cinema. Apart from the male mannerisms and extremities of the characters; both of them shown to be strong in their own right (Sabrina to start the battle of justice and Meera to finish it). In fact, Meera is projected to ultimately possess a conscience and in following that she leaves no stone unturned to get justice for Jessica’s murder case. There have been very few movies that show women in such revolutionary light. Also it is noteworthy that this movie again shows two female leads and males as supporting cast. It is a breather that we could see Vidya Balan in what she does best (no-glamorously glamorous avatar) after a long time. What was more like a water-drop in the desert is Rani Mukherjee’s fire-crackling role. Moreover women in this movie are shown to be focused on their respective goals and not just running around the bush to chase for their prince charming and night in the shining armor.

‘No One Killed Jessica’ is perfect example of globalization, digitization and repercussions. The mixed language used, slang, abusive words, are in a way helper for general audience to relate with the movie and the reality of the story. Moreover, it was Jessica that helped find her wings of freedom. However it was the same globalization and development that made her life so cheap so as to make her loose it just over one drink. This is where her ‘rubble of progress’ carries her from her past of hope to the future of loss in the effects and counter effects of ‘Justice for Jessica’, just like Benjamin’s concept of ‘Angel of History’.

Similarly, Heidegger’s ‘digitization has its own weight in studying the film. The whole movie screams of inter-mixing of technology and perceptions. For example the March for Justice at India Gate could be possible because of mass interconnectivity owing to the SMS/MMS revolution. It brought about the adoption of hacktivism in the movie. The positive side of this technological paradigm is seen as a march of change after people watch and get inspired by the movie ‘Rang De Basanti’ in a theatre. In a true Heideggerian irony, the movie subtly carries the negativity of Gestell or enframing as well. Over glamorization of digitization resulted in ignoring the essential facts. Print media was ignored and deprived of its due credit. (Ramani, 2011) The movie was biased in its promotion of sting operations and did not care to highlight the negative aspects of such acts. The overt projection of globalization made the urban city image as digital hurdle.

Above all, the woman in the film has been given an out of the box characteristics, making them look league apart from the rest. However, the reality is there stereotypes of images have been created and recreated consciously or unconsciously by the makers. The audience perception of the film is of applause, yet they in a way identify their stereotypical perceptions with the created reality in ‘No One Killed Jessica’.

Conclusion

To conclude, there is an obvious difference between the reality and representation. However, presence of stereotypes weakens the boundary of this differences and the line thins further to an extent of creating almost a complete identification with each other. The film commendably made an effort to break the gender stereotypes by projecting the image of women as a maker rather than a bearer of meaning in the mainstream commercial Hindi Cinema. However, many major instances prove that this change is not frequent enough. These efforts may be genuine, yet are not enough to overcome stereotypes. Hence the change is not strong enough to bring about a change in thoughts, outlook, perception, projection as well as representation. What we need is more frequency and refinement in order to break the existing stereotypes that even ‘No One Killed Jessica’ could not break in totality. Representation is there for sure. A bright future lies ahead for Bollywood – an opportunity to resist the natural instinct of creating and adhering to negative gender stereotypes with conviction and courage.