The Guest – Bitch Flicks

The Female Gaze: Dido and Noni, Two of a Kind by Rachel Wortherley

Directors Amma Asante and Gina Prince-Bythewood illustrate that when a story is told through the eyes of the second sex, themes, such as romance, self-worth, and identity are fully fleshed out. By examining an 18th century British aristocrat and a 21st century pop superstar, it proves that in the span of three centuries, women still face adversity in establishing a firm identity, apart from the façade, amongst the white noise of societal expectations.

Thelma and Louise: Redefining the Female Gaze by Paulette Reynolds

The violence may decrease as the movie progresses, but Thelma, Louise – and we – become comfortable about their actions as the film winds down, because they were now tapped into our veins, nourishing our battered spirits with acts that said, “See? We recognize your anger, cause we’re angry – and we’re not going to take it anymore.”

How Catherine Breillat Uses Her Own Painful Story to Discuss the Female Gaze in Abuse of Weakness by Becky Kukla

The female gaze is more than simply “reversing” the male gaze; it allows for a questioning of why the male gaze is so inherently built into cinema and why women are aggressively sexualised within cinema. With Abuse of Weakness, Breillat attacks both of these concerns whilst also actively encouraging identification with Maud – our female protagonist.

The Capaldi Conundrum: How We Attack the Female Gaze by Alyssa Franke

In any fandom based on visual media, fangirls are attacked because of the way the female gaze is misunderstood and misrepresented.

Murder Spouses and Field Kabuki: The Female Gaze in NBC’s Hannibal by Lisa Anderson

The show treats the bodies of living women with the same respect that it treats those of dead ones.

The Male Gaze, LOL: How Comedies Are Changing the Way We Look by Donna K.

The body is no longer a Lacanian reflected ideal, it is a biological mess that often exists beyond anyone’s control. The effect of this convention is two-fold–a bait and switch of expectations but also the creation of a sense of biological sameness: man or woman, everybody poops. By placing the body in a biological space instead of a symbolic one, physical comedy is questioning the visual tendencies of subconscious desire.

Please Look Now: The Female Gaze in Magic Mike XXL by Sarah Smyth

The trailer offers a kind of meta-advertisement, recognising the very marketing strategies that attracted people, including women, to the previous film. Cutting between clips of the men performing various routines, the trailer includes the line, “We didn’t want to show the best parts of the movie in this trailer but it was very very hard to resist,” before inviting the audience to #comeagain this summer.

No, You Can’t Watch: The Queer Female Gaze on Screen by Rowan Ellis

The desire to show a complex version of yourself seen with male characters in the Male Gaze, alongside a desire for a complex version of your partner seen with male recipients of desire in the Female Gaze, combines in the Queer Female Gaze to produce sexual and romantic relationships often rooted in friendship.

“Everything Is Going To Be OK!” – How the Female Gaze Was Celebrated and Censored in Cardcaptor Sakura by Hannah Collins

In other words, there was a concerted effort to twist the female gaze into a male one under the belief that CLAMP’s blend of hyper-femininity and action would be unappealing for the male audience it was being aimed at.

Catherine Breillat’s Transfigurative Female Gaze by Leigh Kolb

Breillat’s complete oeuvre (which certainly demands our attention beyond these three films) delivers continually shocking treatment of female sexuality presented though the female gaze. She wants us to be uncomfortable and to be constantly questioning both representations of female desire and our responses to those representations, and how all of it is shaped by a religious, patriarchal culture.

Jo March’s Gender Identity as Seen Through Different Gazes by Jackson Adler

The male gaze either holds Jo back from the start, or else shows an “educational” transformation from an “unruly” female into a “desirable” young woman who knows her place.

Pleading for the Female Gaze Through Its Absence in Blue is the Warmest Color by Emma Houxbois

The female gaze, such as it exists in a world that denies its existence, is an insular one that exists between Adele and Emma as opposed to how the film itself is shot. The film presents the case for the female gaze by examining what happens when it’s withheld.

Women in a Man’s World: Mad Men and the Female Gaze by Caroline Madden

In fact, many of the clients grow to appreciate the benefit of the female gaze, making their products truly (for the most part) appealing to women. This makes more profit than the false patriarchal ideas of a woman’s wants and needs. With the character of Peggy, Weiner is able to let us see the advertising world from the female gaze to criticize the falsehood that lies in selling female products with a male gaze.

Just Not Into It: Why This Female Gazer Opts Out by Stephanie Schroeder

I choose to only support women-centered film and TV efforts as a funder, promoter and, indeed, gazer, if the intent, casting, storyline, and other elements are female-positive. There’s really just too much misogynistic and women-negating/woman-hating media in the world for me to do otherwise.

A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night and Scares Us by Ren Jender

Amirpour’s camera (the magnificent cinematography is by Lyle Vincent) lingers over Arash’s beauty–his high cheekbones and large, long-lashed eyes under a dark, curly version of James Dean’s pompadour–in a way few male filmmakers would.

When the Girl Looks: The Girl’s Gaze in Teen TV by Athena Bellas

In this moment, then, Elena is completely relieved of the conventional position of girl-as-object, and is therefore able to occupy a different position as a desiring subject. By purposefully making herself invisible, Elena momentarily evades and perhaps refuses to be defined by the adult male gaze that governs girlhood.

The Female Gaze in The Guest: What a View! by Deirdre Crimmins

Pinning down what makes the camera use a female gaze can be a little tricky, as we have all lived within the male gaze for so long. It is commonplace to see women on display disproportionately while male characters go fully clothed. The gaze’s assumption of heterosexuality also carries over to the infrequently used female gaze, making it slightly more visible. It is this consumption of the male body in The Guest which initially establishes the film’s gaze as female.

Shishihokodan: The Destructive Female Gaze of YA Supernatural Action Romantic Comedy by Brigit McCone

Recognizing the function of Ice Prince/Wolf in YA SARCom implies the continual defeat of the Whore as structural necessity in male writings also – as a pursuing character she must be resisted to generate sexual tension, regardless of whether the male author is Team Madonna or Team Whore. The destructive impact on the self-image of female viewers is pure collateral damage, just as our SARCom is poisonously emasculating for male viewers.

This guest post by Deirdre Crimmins appears as part of our theme week on The Female Gaze.

Whether you consider it an homage to 1980s thrillers, or a throwback to action films of the 1990s, it is clear that The Guest has much more meat in it than your typical fast-moving fun flick. Watching the film unfold before you—with both literal and metaphorical guns blazing—it feels intentionally crafted to simultaneously occupy the same space as action films and to also coyly toy with the audience’s expectations of those films. One of the ways that The Guest intentionally subverts audience expectations is its assumption of the female gaze.

Dan Stevens plays the main character, David. Stevens was most well-known to audiences as the romantic and strong cousin Matthew in Downtown Abbey. Matthew made many women in the television show swoon with his soft blond hair and blue eyes. Stevens’s role in the program was decidedly British. From the accent to the tuxedos to living in an honest castle there was a level of exoticness to him. His casting in The Guest adds a level of this “otherness” to a firmly American character.

Just your average American psycho coming home from war.

David is a good old boy. Returning home from Afghanistan he first visits the family of a fallen soldier to pay his respects and carry out the dying man’s wishes. While staying with the Peterson family David quickly establishes himself as their protector, whether they want the help or not. The daughter, Anna (Maika Monroe) seems uncertain at first, but one thing wins her over to David’s good graces: his body.

A quick encounter in the hallway before heading out to a friend’s birthday party put Anna face to pecs with David’s patriotic and glistening muscles. He was just getting out of the shower before dressing for the party, though his timing seems more intentional than fortuitous. David’s towel is slung low, below his hips, and the hot shower has left his body shining in the hallway lights. Anna stutters and can barely get a few words out before recoiling to her bedroom.

With David in his towel the camera’s gaze is firmly female. Not only does it linger across his body, slicing him up into distinct regions of rippling muscle rather than showing him as a whole person, but the entire experience is filmed with sympathy to Anna’s experience. It is in Anna’s reaction we see to the hunk in the hallway. The editing and music in this scene are clearly geared toward aligning with Anna’s pleasure in the sight. She is delighting in seeing this beautiful man in her own home. Though she is slightly embarrassed by her inability to concentrate when faced with such a specimen, she is not ashamed by her desire. Anna’s sexual longing for David’s ripped abs, paired with the audience’s similar want, is presented as a certainty.

This is the most striking visual representation of the female gaze in The Guest, but there are elements in the story that also align the audience with the female characters, rather than the male characters.

When we first meet David he is running. Running down an empty road, toward the Peterson’s house. The mother, Laura (Sheila Kelley), is the only one home to meet him for the first time. As David is an outsider coming in to their town and home, the film establishes itself as coming from the perspective of Laura. The first shot we see of David is from her view of opening the door to meet him. The film’s frame is the same as Laura’s gaze. During their first conversation we follow Laura in and out of her kitchen and we too are initially suspicious of this handsome stranger. As David wins over Laura with his charm and stories from her dead son, we too are won over.

Near the end of The Guest, the film’s tone shifts from that of a thriller with escalating tension to something that resembles a slasher film. It never fully mutates into the horror genre, but the final stand-off between Anna and David is very similar to a cat-and-mouse chase that you would find between serial killer and final victim. Shifting Anna from an actively sexual female gaze to being a near final girl works especially well here because she was never the one being objectified in the film. The audience has always associated its gaze with that of Anna. The typical final girl story first associates itself with the killer, but then pivots to identifying with the last living character. This final girl then bests the killer, with the support of the audience. But in The Guest we have never associated with the killer. We have always kept an emotional distance from David and seen the story from the female perspective.

It is not surprise that The Guest takes on a female gaze, given the history of the filmmakers. Director Adam Wingard and writer Simon Barrett have collaborated on many films over the last five years. They first worked together on A Horrible Way to Die and more recently on You’re Next. You’re Next has been widely discussed as not only one the best horror films of the last decade, but also one of the most feminist.

Wingard and Barrett’s creation of these feminist films (that are still damn good and fun too) can be read as refreshed vision of films made by filmmakers with the female gaze. The female gaze in The Guest makes for a more natural story than the converse. (Objectifying and being seduced by David, the exotic “other,” in the secluded hometown has more likely narrative flow than gazing on Anna or Laura.) And in the end, that should be the goal for any filmmaker. Have enough respect for the story and belief in both your characters and the audience to tell the story as it should be told, from the appropriate perspective, regardless of the gendered gaze.

Deirdre Crimmins lives in Boston with her husband and two black cats. She wrote her Master’s thesis on George Romero and is a staff writer for All Things Horror. You can find her on Twitter at @dedecrim.

Tag: The Guest

The Female Gaze: The Roundup

The Female Gaze in ‘The Guest’: What a View!