24
Popular Culture Review
the latter (“I don’t speak moron”) and so decide to “throw it to the chickens.”
That is, all of the secretaries in the office are herded into a room containing rows
of tables and chairs, the door is pointedly locked behind them, and the women
are asked to pick their favorites from the collection of lipsticks, try them out,
and answer survey questions asked by a stem German woman. The trick is that
all of the men in the series, including their boss, Roger, are hidden behind one
way glass in a room with a full bar and lounge chairs. That is, all of the men
with the exception o f Draper. At various points, one man circles and x’s the
faces of women who are obliviously using the other side of the glass as a mirror,
another asks is anyone minds if he takes off his pants, and the main secretary
Joan (a bombshell redhead who knows what’s going on) seems to look directly
at them through the glass, turns her back to them, and then bends to lean over a
table. The men stand and salute.
Here we have an exact performance of the classic male gaze proffered by
Laura Mulvey, where:
The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female
figure, which is styled accordingly. In their traditional
exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and
displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and
erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-lookedat-ness. (1175)
This standard understanding of the male gaze posits that the viewer identifies
with the male characters as they watch women. I would suggest, however, that
this almost perfect rendering of Mulvey’s gaze in fact undermines her
understanding via the introduction of the one-way glass, so that what our
attention is drawn to—what makes this scene uncomfortable (and a scene that
simply wouldn’t work in a contemporary setting for all sorts of politically
correct reasons)—isn’t what/who the men are looking at but how they are
viewing, separated by a distance, hidden in a way that “beats the hell out of xray specs.” Quickly, the one-way glass becomes a representation of the
television screen and, instead of enjoying the masculine specular fantasy
Mulvey calls gaze, we are confronted with our own participation in such
fantasies and must instead recognize therein our desire to watch. That is,
Mulvey’s gaze is really something else, fantasy, and the gaze is to be found
elsewhere. Todd McGowan counters Mulvey’s formulation by claiming that
“[t]he gaze is a blank point—a point that disrupts the flow and the sense of the
experience—within the aesthetic structure of the film, and it is the point at
which the spectator is obliquely included in the film.. . . As the indication of the
spectator’s dissolution, the gaze cannot offer the spectator anything resembling
mastery” (8). This gaze is, according to Lacan, the object cause of desire as it is
rendered visible (105). Thus, Slavjo Zizek makes much the same point as
McGowan when discussing the “zero-level pornographic picture” as “that of a
woman displaying her genitals and defiantly returning the gaze___The