Popular Culture Review Vol. 2, No. 2, July 1991 | Page 33

Lessons From Hollywood

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audience used to voyeurism would feel motivated to pay good money
to participate in dialectics or detachment), that knowledge is
pivotal. Its importance makes it all the more surprising that an
adequate similar analysis (one, that is, with an adequate critical
base) has not been attempted within the live theatre.
Sue-Ellen Case, one of the few scholars to apply ideas from
feminist film theory to the live theatre, has pointed out the
applicability of Lacanian theory. Despite being careful to point out
"whereas in film the principal means of organizing the gaze is the
camera, a different set of dynamics applies to the stage,"(3) Case
shows the close relation—at least in feminist terms—of the two art
forms. The idea of the male "gaze" can certainly be effectively
applied to the theatre, as Case aptly demonstrates:
a play induces the audience to view the
female roles through the eyes of the male characters.
When the ingenue makes her entrance, the audience
sees her as the male protagonist sees her. The
blocking of her entrance, her costume and her lighting
are designed to reveal that she is the object of his
desire. In this way, the audience also perceives her
as an object of desire, by identifying with his male
gaze.(4)
Case rather glosses over the fact that much of the film theory
she draws upon was derived from an analysis of the dominant film,
and she has trouble identifying a corporate body of the live theatre
that can function as the antithesis of all that is feminist, in the
manner of the ubiquitous Hollywood products that were once easily
attacked. She argues that the texts of various classical dramas—from
Hamlet to The Glass Menagerie—are told (textually) from the point
of view of the male protagonist, with weak female characters, but
one could question the extent to which Shakespeare or even Tennessee
Williams make up the true commercial, or dominant, theatre. It
would have made more sense to analyze the more popular play of the
last twenty years (the work of Neil Simon or Alan Ayckbourn, for
example) if the translation from film to theatre were to be strained as
little as possible. Such playwrights, of course, lack academic
legitimacy, which perhaps accounts for Case's reluctance to consider