Keywords

As several specialists have pointed out (Hardt, Bracke, McKenzie et al., Clough or Butler et al. among others), vulnerability as opposed to resistance and agency is a simplistic and reductionist opposition of the binary kind: vulnerability should be understood as a relational concept which challenges, among other concepts, the masculinist and (neo)liberal myth of the sovereign subject. If we agree with Teresa De Lauretis when she links gender to both representation and self-representation with “various social technologies, such as cinema” (1987, ix), then it seems just as natural that one of the best locations to problematize with gendered issues such as vulnerability, agency and the sovereign subject is the cinematographic text and, in this sense, Andrea Arnold’s filmography offers representative examples. This paper will examine Arnold’s Red Road as a case study of how to challenge these concepts.

What I wish to analyze specifically in this chapter in the first place is the way in which Andrea Arnold approaches the film narrative, applying the concept of the critical gaze used by Judith Halasz to her film and how she uses that self-conscious approach in order to open a dialogue with the spectator about the ambivalence of the characters in the film in terms of their vulnerability and agency. In addition, drawing from Teresa De Lauretis, I will pay heed to the technologies of gender and how Arnold inverts the roles traditionally assigned in film: while the female body is usually the object of the gaze, in Red Road it is the male character the one under Jackie’s scrutiny, a strategy which Arnold uses to question the myth of the sovereign subjectivity. Relying on theories by Butler, Clough or Mackenzie, Rogers and Dodds about vulnerability, my focus then will be on Arnold’s ambiguity when introducing the protagonists in the film, presenting them as both vulnerable but with full agency and never as victims.

A good starting point, thus, could be Laura Mulvey’s theories about the male gaze that structures all cinematic experience and question, indeed, whether there might be any kind of crack to resist that gaze: of course we know it is not enough having a female body as subject of the enunciation and/or focalizer in the narrative.1 Silvia Bovenschen wondered in the 1970s whether there could be something like a “feminine aesthetic” and the only possible answer she conceived of was “yes and no”: “Certainly there is, if one is talking about aesthetic awareness and modes of sensory perception. Certainly not, if one is talking about an unusual variant of artistic production or about a painstakingly constructed theory of art” (quoted in De Lauretis 1987, 127). Arnold’s style is a combination between realism and “an emphasis on appearance and representation” which, according to Moya Luckett, is characteristic of British cinema (Luckett 2000, 88). Her films have been labeled variously as “angry social drama”, “social realism”, “poetic social realist art cinema”, “post-social realist abstraction” or “art film”, but I agree with Jonathan Murray when he points out that Arnold’s “cinema could be said to manifest an almost adversarial relationship with the real, determined to see what lies beyond” (Murray 2016, 199). Andrea Arnold’s selected film, Red Road, might serve as a good example of how to challenge through a feminist critical gaze received assumptions about the cinematic form and also about traditional understandings of vulnerability and agency which constitute the focus of my analysis.

The short synopsis of the film included in the production notes tells us that “Jackie works as a CCTV operator. Each day she watches over a small part of the world, protecting the people living their lives under her gaze. One day a man [Clyde] appears on her monitor, a man she thought she would never see again, a man she never wanted to see again. Now she has no choice, she is compelled to confront him”. The melodramatic tones in which the conflict is introduced are remarkable but, as the cultural product any given narrative film is, its success depends on its popularity and the box office: we know Clyde has caused Jackie some terrible wrong though, contrary to genre conventions, we will not learn about it until the last part of the film. However, what I find particularly interesting in the synopsis above is the fact it is a female body the one who “watches over” and protects “the people living their lives under her gaze” in a “small part of the world”, and how it is a male body the one objectified under her scrutiny, setting the film at a far remove “from the traditional positioning of female characters in dominant Anglo-American cinema” (Bolton 2011, 1): Red Road, in this sense, belongs to that kind of films that “feature lead female characters who are unusual in their occupation of screen space and time. The emphasis is not on the physical appearance of the women; rather, it is on their interiority” (Bolton 2011, 1). We find thus an inversion of roles and a specificity about location which will be dealt with throughout the following pages.

Even if I do not intend to defend that the “true meaning” of a film can be found in the opening sequence, I do think that in this particular case Arnold sets the lines of her formal approach to the story, her “critical gaze”, in these initial moments. On a dark screen, we make out some lights out of focus which, after a few seconds, turn into blurred screens (0:00:15): far from the traditional understanding of the “visible” as direct access to knowledge in a transparent and unproblematic way, Red Road is a challenge to that “ideology of direct, devouring, generative, and unrestricted vision, whose technological mediations are simultaneously celebrated and presented as utterly transparent” (Haraway 1991, 189). Arnold establishes an audiovisual conversation, as Gianfranco Bettetini would say, that reveals her understanding of images as always mediated, as texts to be deciphered. Moreover, she includes Jackie as the subject in charge of that mediation,2 in a kind of mise en abyme structure which makes an implicit reference to the filmmaker. Furthermore, the way in which the main character is introduced is also noteworthy: the extreme close-ups set the film at a far remove from the realist representation and its ideological implications,3 perhaps underlining it is from the embodied experience and reality of this woman that we will get the situated knowledge about the events narrated in the film. Donna Haraway has claimed that

our insisting metaphorically on the particularity and embodiment of all vision (though not necessarily organic embodiment and including technological mediation), and not giving in to the tempting myths of vision as a route to disembodiment […], allows us to construct a usable, but not an innocent, doctrine of objectivity. I want a feminist writing of the body that metaphorically emphasizes vision again, because we need to reclaim that sense. (Haraway 1991, 189)

Placing a female body and her routines as holder of the gaze is understood in some quarters as a first step toward resistance, attributing “subversive qualities to the female body by viewing it as an epistemological resource through which to challenge patriarchal knowledge, meanings and values” (Howson 2005, 133). In case the “subversive qualities” of the female body as “epistemological resource” are not extraordinary enough, the length of the shots and the fact there is no sound adds to the strategy of estrangement used by Arnold: this “very camera technique, the mediated gaze, […] by lingering too long, reminds us ‘we are voyeurs’” (Halasz 2011, 31), making us uneasy as we are aware of our own look. That is, Arnold proposes an alternative ordinary, understood as “an intersecting space where many forces and histories circulate and become ‘ready to hand’ […] for inventing new rhythms for living, rhythms that could, at any time, congeal into norms, forms, and institutions” (Berlant 2011, 9) and offers alternative realities to those put forward by the male gaze. Arnold plays with opposed meanings and cinematographic conventions throughout the film, challenging easy assumptions not only about the cinematic form itself, but also about some key issues such as the agency and the vulnerability of her characters, putting on the table “a feminist theory of gender [which] points to a conception of the subject as multiple, rather than divided or unified, and as excessive or heteronomous” (De Lauretis 1987, x).

The camera in the opening sequence shows Jackie embodying the gaze, literally (0:00:44): what we see first are her hands (she is applying hand cream while observing the screens), shots of her fingers manipulating the cameras will often fill the screen and her body, dressed in her uniform as an officer of law and order, therefore with full agency, whose body moves with what she sees in the monitors. It is in this context, in the repeated extreme-close-up shots of Jackie’s face watching (0:0046), her hands controlling the cameras (0:01:05), her facial expressions (0:01:35), her body language and the way she moves forward when interested in something in particular, that Haraway’s “situated knowledge” (Haraway 1991, 111) gets full force, a knowledge that is sieved through personal experience and affects, at a far remove from the alleged objective distance of modern Reason.

Martha Nussbaum seems to share Haraway’s position when she contrasts the Kantian conception of personhood, based on our “capacities for moral reason and freedom” with a more “Aristotelian/Marxist tradition” that understands “human reason and morality [as] interwoven with human animality, vulnerability, and bodily need” (quoted in Mackenzie et al. 2014, 5). Arnold’s approach to Jackie as the focalizer of the narrative and the shots she uses to introduce her is in consonance with these postulates. Arnold, with Haraway, vindicates vision, which has been described as a “much maligned sensory system in feminist discourse”: contrary to this position, Haraway defends that “vision can be good for avoiding binary oppositions. I would like to insist on the embodied nature of all vision, and so reclaim the sensory system that has been used to signify a leap out of the marked body and into a conquering gaze from nowhere” (Haraway 1991, 188). Andrea Arnold wants to set a distance with the (post)modern gaze “that makes the unmarked category claim the power to see and not be seen, to represent while escaping representation, [a gaze which occupies] the unmarked positions of Man and White” (Haraway 1991, 188).4

Halasz applies the concept of “critical gaze” to a film by Godard, but I think the definition fits Arnold’s strategies perfectly well:

The critical gaze foregrounds certain ideological structures [inviting] the viewer to critically engage with what they see, both in form and content. […] The critical gaze induces dialectical spectatorship, in that it keeps pleasure and displeasure simultaneously in play. In a reflexive moment, this returns our gaze back onto ourselves. Viewing the object compels us to acknowledge how our subjectivity […] is predicated on object relations [...]. Subject and object are constantly playing off each other. This produces an active engagement with the text and makes spectatorship a more reflexive, self-conscious activity. (2011, 30)

As a result, we could say Arnold portrays Jackie and Clyde not so much as (sovereign) subjects and (passive) objects, but as “quasi objects/quasi subjects”, because while “objects and subjects have attributes and form categories, […] quasi objects/quasi subjects have tendencies and affects” (Gilbert 2007, 95). In this sense, the spectator is drawn into the film not so much by an easy identification with a main character but, quite the opposite, by the invitation to an active reflexion in Brechtian fashion.

Arnold problematizes the agency of the characters and their individual and situational contexts but also her own gaze. Therefore, Arnold’s film may be defined as an act of resistance to hegemonic cinematic representations and the traditional understandings of individual agency “in terms of impermeable plenitude and sovereignty of selfhood” (Athanasiou 2016, 275), as opposed to vulnerability. As Sue Thornham points out, “if Jackie’s screens position her above and outside the city, […] then her use of those screens is very different, seeking always to approximate the intensity of touch, with an empathy that is enacted through her body” (Thornham 2016, 141–142). Arnold seems particularly interested in challenging the binaristic distinction between mind and body, so dear to modern thinking and scientific objectivity, and adopts “the philosophical system of Baruch Spinoza [whose] notion of affect inhabits an unresolvable tension between mind and body, actions and passions, between the power to affect and the power to be affected” (Athanasiou et al. 2008, 6). Furthermore, the filmmaker seems to apply Gilbert’s view when she points out the assemblage produced between “the seen and grasped object, one unit of eye-brain-hand-brain-object time describing the unit of time in which one sees and grasps an object and thus knows it. This moment of being cannot be subdivided into the time it takes to know as separate from the time it takes to see and the time it takes to grasp” (Gilbert 2007, 92); Arnold shows us how Jackie knows through her body and her body, her self, is informed by her knowledge.

If Jackie represents the embodiment of the gaze, the male body in the film is associated in a straightforward way with location: not in vain, the male protagonist, Clyde, is named after the river which gave Glasgow and Scotland a notorious position as an international trade port since the eighteenth century. By giving that name to the male protagonist, Arnold turns the world of Modernity upside down once more, as it has been the female body the one which has been traditionally used as a metaphor of new lands to be explored by the European male in the colonial quest. Furthermore, the Clyde can be understood not only as a metonym for Scotland, but also as the myth par excellence of the modern Scottish nation: in addition to the romantic tropes of the Kaylyard and Tartanry, Donald Petrie defines “clydesidism”, as a myth which deals with “the very different set of concerns that informs the representation of urban Scotland as a site defined by industrial activity and working-class leisure” (Petrie 2000, 8–9), a myth that is typically embodied by “a skilled male worker who was man enough to ‘care’ for his womenfolk” (Petrie 2000, 7). In Red Road, however, Clyde, unemployed as he is, is far from the myth of the skilled, male worker and closer to the epithet “Clyde-built” which, in contrast to the ship-building guarantee of a glorious Scottish past, became a synonym of “a particular kind of hard-living, hard-drinking, working-class masculinity” associated more and more “with violence and criminality rather than hard work” (Petrie 2000, 80).

Arnold turns Clyde’s body into the object of the gaze, and it will be through Jackie’s eyes that we will know about him: he has been in prison for ten years (although the reasons are not explained until the film is well advanced) and he is currently unemployed and living at Red Road flats, two huge towers in Glasgow which were once the tallest buildings in Europe, where refugees, asylums seekers and the disenfranchised used to live.5 In short, the way in which Clyde is introduced in the narrative speaks of his vulnerability and objectification, with Jackie watching him having sex in a plot of waste ground, deprived of any human dignity (0:15:15). Lance Hanson, who has analyzed the representation of this kind of spaces in Andrea Arnold’s films, defines them as “edgelands”, liminal spaces “that exist at the interstices of the built, urban environment and the wildscapes beyond. Perceived as a threat to the norm and to the stability of the psychic, social and geographical body, they are often codified as abject spaces” (Hanson 2015, 2): in this case, Arnold seems to be establishing a relation between Clyde and Julia Kristeva’s theory about the abject.6 Clyde’s animalization (with all the racist implications related to colonization) further contributes to this, and it is a constant throughout the film: after recognizing him on the screen, Jackie tries to keep track of Clyde and sees instead an urban fox crossing the street, establishing an evident parallelism (0:17:00); later in the film, one of his girl friends will call him a “fucking beast” while he licks a dish lasciviously (0:38:00).

Arnold plays constantly with the fluidity of the subject/object functions and with the concepts of agency, vulnerability and sovereign subjectivity as applied to her characters in relation to the technologies of gender7:

If nothing acts on me against my will or without my advanced knowledge, then there is only sovereignty, the posture of control over the property that I have and that I am, a seemingly sturdy and self-centered form of the thinking “I” that seeks to cloak those fault lines in the self that cannot be overcome. […] Is this not the masculinist account of sovereignty that, as feminists, we are called onto dismantle? (Butler et al. 2016, 23–24)

This is precisely what Arnold does, dismantling that “masculinist account of sovereignty” and questioning “the received definitions of vulnerability as passive (in need of active protection) and agency as active (based on a disavowal of the human creature as “affected”)” (Butler et al. 2016, 3). Michael Hardt expands this idea when he points out that “every increase of the power to act and think corresponds to an increased power to be affected —the increased autonomy of the subject, in other words, always corresponds to its increased receptivity” (Hardt 2007, x). It is in this context where the concept of relational autonomy gains full force, contrasting as it does with a liberal understanding of the autonomous, sovereign subject.

As Mackenzie puts it (Mackenzie et al. 2014, 42), relational autonomy is “committed to a social ontology of persons”, an idea of the individual as “embodied” in “social practices” and “social group identities” which opposes clearly the “normative individualism” of (neo)liberal discourse. Thus, while it is true Clyde is a candidate to embody the average, sovereign male subject, portrayed as he is, full of vitality, throwing parties and as a hard-drinking, sexually over-active man, his independence and empowerment is put into question: he is unemployed, becomes the object of Jackie’s obsessive gaze, and he will be framed by her with false evidence to put him back in prison. If Arnold can play with the concept of vulnerability it is because, as humans, vulnerability is inherent to our embodied selves but, at the same time, vulnerability is situational specific, “caused or exacerbated by the personal, social, political, economic, or environmental situations of individuals or social groups” (Mackenzie et al. 2014, 7). In addition to his condition as unemployed and the restraining order from his daughter, Clyde is subjected to those technologies of gender that make Jackie see him (and us through her eyes) as representative of the toxic masculinity known as “clydesidism”. As Patricia T. Clough states, while “the matter of the body is dynamic, its dynamism is the effect of the productivity of a cultural form imposed on the body. The nature of bodily matter is culturally or unnaturally formed” (Clough 2007, 8): that is, “what the body is thought to be […] is a matter of a historically specific organization of forces brought into being by capital and discursive investments” (Clough 2007, 16).

The fact that Clyde killed Jackie’s husband and her little child in a car accident while he was on drugs makes him the object of Jackie’s obsessive surveillance, an obsession that leads her to play the masculinist role of the “lone avenger” and put him back into prison with false evidence.8 Before going on, I want to make clear that Clyde will not be treated in my analysis as object of pity, nor is he portrayed as the victim in the film (or that, by extension, men are as oppressed by patriarchy as women are). As the Spanish Association of Men for Equality claims, it is fundamental to understand that in no case can we treat men as “victims”, in the sense that “gender constructions are as harmful to us [men] as they are for women. The wrongs that many men suffer in trying to adopt hegemonic gender roles are just one side of the coin of the privileges and advantages we enjoy for accepting those very same roles while, in the case of women, gender constructions situate them in a position of subordination and inequality” (VVAA 2017, 34. My translation). In this sense, Clyde deserves in many ways everything that has happened to him. Nevertheless, despite Arnold’s sympathies are explicitly with the female character and her suffering, she is also critical when Jackie behaves as a sovereign subject.

As it has already been mentioned, Jackie is the focalizer of the narrative, a uniformed officer who watches over the city streets from a CCTV control room, a woman portrayed with full agency and nonetheless, we see her as a vulnerable individual, most of the times in silence, lonely and in a passive attitude, even in her sexual encounter with a married man in his car, in one of the most disturbing sequences in the film (0:06:20): we see Jackie’s face with a blank expression pressed against the car window and her breath fogging the glass, moving rhythmically, until the scene gets us inside the car and we see the man she is with reaching an orgasm and excusing himself for finishing so fast. It is a sequence that comes right at the beginning of the film, giving us a hint about her vulnerability and her affective numbness within her immediate social circle, but also reminding us of Butler’s “notion of ‘melancholic heterosexuality’ [and] the imposition of the cultural norm, or regulatory ideal, of heterosexuality” (quoted in Clough 2007, 7). It seems as if Jackie tries to lead a “normal” life by having this relationship, although in no way is she satisfied with it. Actually, by the end of the film, when her lover insists on having another encounter, she dismisses him by telling him to “go away and spend some time” with his family.

We will learn eventually that Jackie’s vulnerability comes in part from her guilt feelings due to the traumatic loss of her husband and child. According to the technologies of gender, she has failed at performing what she has been made to believe should be her first and foremost important role in life, that of being a good mother and a good wife. As Pat Brewer points out in relation to the conservative and traditional conceptions of women, “the policies bolster the acceptance that women’s ‘natural’ place is first or foremost in the family as the unpaid carers of husbands, children, the sick and aged and therefore their waged work is only secondary” (Brewer 2004, 8). Jackie’s guilt derives from the unbearable fact that the day her child and husband were killed, she was too tired from work. Her father-in-law (0:09:40) will recriminate her that the last time he saw his son (that is, Jackie’s husband), he was with their little child because Jackie was too tired and needed a break from her family duties, a sentence which will resonate throughout the rest of the film, because it was that day when Clyde ran them over and killed them. Later in the film (0:58:00), we will see her enacting her trauma, sleeping with her daughter and husband’s ashes first and then breathing in a bunch of clothes still with the smell of her daughter (1:35:00). Jackie refuses to celebrate a burial as her family demands: she thus reflects/embodies what Clough described as characteristic of the Lacanian subject who “submits to the law” and, at the same time refuses it: Jackie “is shaped around a lack in being […] which sends unconscious desire along a chain of signifiers in a blind search to recapture what is lacking. The subject is shaped around a void, a real that is always already lost and only leaves traces of its loss as traumatic effects” (Clough 2007, 5). She feels tortured by those technologies of gender that are not only about representation (as a film narrative is), but also about self-representation. As De Lauretis points out, gender “is constructed by the given technology, but also […] it becomes absorbed subjectively by each individual whom that technology addresses” (1987, 13). In relation to this, I find particularly useful David Staples’ concept of “thermodynamic capitalism”, given that Arnold denounces precisely this controlling “(re)productive labour”:

Ideologically, capitalism needs to make a claim on future natural resources and reproductive labor (more and more via biotechnology, waged home-based work, as well as the commodification of affective labor), especially when that labor in particular produces resistance, loss, decay, waste and dissipation within the patriarchal order. Thermodynamic capitalism, in the European and American social factory of the 1960s and 1970s, therefore needed to somehow transform or eliminate those entropic labor forces whose energy could not be put to work—the recalcitrant shift workers, the unhappy housewives, the social deviants, the rebellious colonials and so on. Jackie’s trauma derives precisely from being one of “those entropic labour forces whose energy” cannot be put to work as the capitalist, gendered hegemonic worldview proposes, as they produce “resistance, loss, decay, waste, and dissipation within the patriarchal order” (Staples 2007, 133–134).

However, Andrea Arnold does not victimize Jackie. On the contrary, her position as “sovereign subject”, in the “sense of self-mastery and mastery over the environment” (Bracke 2016, 58), is more than questionable: we see her observing the citizens of Glasgow just as a pastime and directing the camera randomly to a man walking his dog (0:01:30) or watching a cleaner who is dancing to the music in her headphones (0:02:20). While that misuse of the CCTV cameras invading our privacy as individuals may be considered innocent nowadays, we cannot forget the debate about security cameras in public spaces at the time when the film was released in 2006. Accordingly, Arnold’s omnipresent CCTV cameras are the tangible symbol of Sarah Bracke’s “longing for security” and “securitarian politics” as “developed in the global North”, in clear connection with “Butler’s account of vulnerability” (quoted in Bracke 2016, 58). Once again, while the prevailing discourse is that CCTV cameras are used to protect us, they are a permanent reminder that we are citizens under permanent surveillance and that our privacy is more vulnerable now than ever.9 Arnold seems particularly worried about this and offers countless shots of Jackie misusing the camera for her own interest and not so much to take care of the citizens she is supposed to protect. There is, in fact, a sequence in which she is following Clyde compulsively with the cameras, while we see on another screen how a girl is being bullied and injured by some other girls (0:29:00). When Jackie realizes, it is already late and she can only send help a posteriori, feeling remorse for her neglect.

If affect is defined as the capacity to affect and be affected (Athanasiou et al. 2008, 6; Ash 2015, 2), Arnold's film seems a treatise on affect and the “outcome of the encounter between entities and how entities are affected by these encounters” (Ash 2015, 2); in the case of Jackie, first through CCTV screens and cameras, and later face to face in her encounter with Clyde. Jackie is the perfect embodiment of an entity shaped by what Ash defines as “inorganically organised affects”, that is, affects that emerge from “assemblages of manufactured components that allow an object to perform some kind of task or activity” (Ash 2015, 2). Moreover, according to Clough, “to be human is to be shaped by and immersed in technical affects” (quoted in Ash 2015, 6). Jackie's traumatic experience makes her an isolated individual who relates to the world mostly through the CCTV cameras and screens. What is particularly interesting is the fact that Arnold, with her repeated shots of Jackie watching the monitors and managing the cameras, seems to direct her critical gaze down to her own persona as filmmaker in a self-conscious manner, as the link with Jackie is more than evident: both of them affect and are affected by cameras and screens. As Haraway reminds us, “feminist knowledge is rooted in imaginative connection and hard-won, practical coalition –which is not the same thing as identity, but does demand self-critical situatedness and historical seriousness. Situatedness does not mean parochialism or localism; but it does mean specificity and consequential, if variously mobile, embodiment” (1997, 47).

What is more, Arnold’s self-awareness makes her very critical with Jackie’s sovereign subjectivity, as if she had in mind Haraway’s reminder about our “capacity to see from the peripheries” and the “serious danger of romanticizing […] the less powerful while claiming to see from their positions. […] The positionings of the subjugated are not exempt from critical re-examination, decoding, deconstruction, and interpretation” (1991, 191). In this sense, Arnold seems to explore “a vocabulary that breaks with masculinist models of autonomy without essentializing the feminine or idealizing vulnerability as an ultimate value” (Butler et al. 2016, 6–7). Thus, in order to stress the relational nature of the concept, Arnold situates Jackie between the vulnerable and the lone avenger character so intimately related to the myth of the sovereign subject. Only when she is fully aware of her vulnerability, of her capacity for being affected, will she empathize with Clyde who is trying to rebuild his relationship with his daughter and she will withdraw the charges against him that put him back in prison (1:35:00). As Michael Hardt (following Spinoza) states, there is “a correspondence between the power to act and the power to be affected. This applies equally to the mind and the body: the mind’s power to think corresponds to its receptivity to external ideas; and the body’s power to act corresponds to its sensitivity to other bodies. The greater our power to be affected, he [Spinoza] posits, the greater our power to act” (Hardt 2007, x).

To conclude, then, let me suggest that Arnold offers a bittersweet kind of ending: in a final meeting between the two main characters (1:37:00), Jackie and Clyde will face each other just to go on with their lives although, in line with Sarah Bracke’s criticism (61–62) of the ever more popular discourse of resilient bodies, there is no way in which Clyde and Jackie may “bounce back” to a previous state before their traumatic experiences, because theirs are “bodies haunted by memories of times lost and places left” (Clough 2007, 4). However, we see how Jackie and Clyde set aside their sovereign subjectivities and acknowledge vulnerability and their dependency on other bodies: while the film leaves open a real possibility of Clyde recovering the relationship with his daughter, we see Jackie visiting her parents in law and reconciliating with them, deciding together the location to scatter the ashes of her husband and daughter. By the end of the film, we see both characters resisting the technologies of gender that had shaped their lives so far and how they overcome “the social norms that precede us and that form the constraining context for whatever forms of agency we ourselves take on in time” (Butler et al. 2016, 18). Consequently, Arnold seems to embrace Haraway’s theories and sets her self-conscious, critical gaze on those “visualizing apparatuses of the disciplinary regimes of modern power-knowledge networks [that] can be as deadly as the all-seeing panopticon that surveys the subjects of the biopolitical state” (Haraway 1997, 51) although at the same time the filmmaker shares Haraway’s point of view about how “counting and visualizing are also essential to freedom projects” (1997, 51).

In this way, answering the question at the beginning of this chapter about the “feminine aesthetic”, Arnold uses the apparatus to focus on gendered concepts such as vulnerability as opposed to agency and sovereign subjectivities in order to subvert them: she seems interested not so much in offering easy answers, but in what Lefebvre termed “complexifying”,10 posing questions and demanding the active participation of the spectators, in line with Boveschen’s “aesthetic awareness and modes of sensory perception” (quoted in De Lauretis 1987, 127), inviting us to engage critically with what we have just seen and, “in a reflexive movement, [return] our gaze back” (Halasz 2011, 30). Interestingly, as a final twist, the film ends with a shot of Jackie walking the streets of Glasgow as seen through a CCTV monitor while the final credit titles roll on the screen (1:45:00), leaving it open to our interpretation: maybe she is free from her trauma, but the technologies of gender still affect and frame her as they do the rest of us.

FormalPara Notes
  1. 1.

    In the fashion of, say, Lara Croft, Resident Evil or Marvel films, where super-heroines seem to offer the male cinematic dream experience par excellence, both in terms of (gendered) film genre and heterosexist, voyeuristic desires.

  2. 2.

    Mediation, as Allan Rowe notes, is “a key concept in film and media theory [that] implies that there are always structures, whether human or technological, between an object and the viewer, involving inevitably a partial and selective view” (90), and it is related in one way or another to Haraway’s “situated knowledges”.

  3. 3.

    Patricia Waugh opposes nineteenth-century realism, with its “firm belief in a commonly experienced, objectively existing world of history”, to modernist fiction and “the initial loss of belief in such a world”. Modernist fiction, in turn, is also different from contemporary “metafictional writing”, basically defined as “an even more thoroughgoing sense that reality or history are provisional: no longer a world of eternal verities but a series of constructions, artifices, impermanent structures […]: any attempt to represent reality could only produce selective perspective, fictions” (7).

  4. 4.

    And here, I consider necessary to establish a radical difference between postmodernism and transmodernity. The first, still Eurocentric, favours some sort of extreme relativism which both questions and accepts as valid at once and the same time any discursive positioning; a transmodern approach, even when adopting many of the postmodernist postulates, makes a clear distinction between a privileged elite (the white, middle-aged, middle and upper class man) and the long-time oppressed and marginalized groups of (post)Modernity which, because of their race, class, gender and/or sexual option, have been silenced and/or excluded from History. See Enrique Dussel or Ramón Grosfoguel for a deep analysis of transmodernity.

  5. 5.

    As it is explained in the production notes of the film, the flats were “soon to be demolished after a chequered history over the past five decades”, although what attracted Arnold was not the flats’ bad reputation, linked to marginality and delinquency, but “the visual possibilities” (13).

  6. 6.

    See Jaime de Pablos’ chapter in this collection for another approach to the concept of abjection.

  7. 7.

    According to Teresa De Lauretis, the “construction of gender goes on today through the various technologies of gender (e.g., cinema) and institutional discourses (e.g., theory) with power to control the field of social meaning and thus produce, promote, and “implant” representations of gender” (18, emphasis in the original): see also Chapter 1, “The Technology of Gender” (1–30), in particular, pages 3, 5, 9, 10, 12, 13 or 21.

  8. 8.

    For a deeper understanding of the figure of the “vigilante”, see Pérez Vides’ chapter in this collection.

  9. 9.

    Just as an example, take for instance the demonstrations at Hong Kong in 2019 or the use of cameras in drones to control the population during the coronavirus crisis.

  10. 10.

    According to Henri Lefebvre, “there is a tendency to expel the critique, complexity, and contradictions within modernity” (45–46) and, for that reason, he was more interested in a theory of difference that “implies an increasing complexity of the world and of society. Its opposite, reduction, appears as a theoretical, practical, strategic and ideological instrument of power that seeks to dominate” (27).