This paper examines representations of women in film through close readings of several texts, including the 1945 film Mildred Pierce, Kill Bill Vol. 1, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The analysis explores how Joan Crawford's real life paralleled her on-screen persona, how the Mildred Pierce trailer misrepresents the film's protagonist, and how Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill transforms the refusal of the male gaze into an assertion of female dominance. The paper also extends this argument to Joss Whedon's Buffy Summers and mythological figures like Medusa, showing how the refusal of the gaze operates across different media and genres.
Joan Crawford's life appeared to mirror the characters she portrayed on film in several ways. By analyzing the 1945 film Mildred Pierce, in which Crawford plays the titular character, one can see how Mildred's character is designed to reflect American perspectives of women.
For example, in the film and in real life, Crawford was able to reinvent herself and become more successful as time went on. However, despite her successes, society still maintained that in order for a woman to be complete, she had to have a man in her life, thus propagating the social stigma that a woman could not be independently successful. Allen writes, "in many of the woman's films what the heroine strives so hard to achieve is given up at the end of the film in favor of the 'happy ending'; a chance to be a traditional wife and mother." Another example is that women could be successful and climb the proverbial social ladder by marrying the "right" man, thereby raising her status in social circles and in the public's eye.
The trailer for Mildred Pierce does not accurately represent the film because it makes the protagonist appear to be a femme fatale in the classic film noir sense, and also suggests that her actions as an independent woman were undesirable because society expected her to be nothing more than a sexual object. For example, the trailer states that she paid for a love that she could never have; however, the film shows that when she did marry Monte Beragon, she was genuinely in love, and that their marriage eventually disintegrated. Moreover, Wally, in the trailer, appears to insinuate that Mildred is a tease, while in the film she continuously spurns his advances and never appears to lead him on.
Jessica Hope Jordan argues that the women in Kill Bill, Vol. 1 refuse the gaze and thus punish anyone who aims to objectify them. While this may be applicable in some instances, it can also be argued that these women remain spectacles. However, they are not spectacles in the way that women were spectacles in classic Hollywood cinema, because Tarantino celebrates their independence and intentionally makes these women unattainable, which allows them to assert their independence regardless of the cost and without social backlash.
The refusal of the gaze allows the women in Kill Bill, Vol. 1 to assert their dominance over men, while Tarantino simultaneously transforms them into spectacles of what he considers strong, independent women — figures he frequently celebrates in his films. Furthermore, the refusal of the gaze is not only used to assert dominance over males, but is also used to assert dominance over other women, thus blurring the lines between masculine and feminine ideologies.
"Buffy and Medusa as ultimate gaze-refusers"
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