36. The Piano

Jane Campion, 1993

“The voice you hear is not my speak voice, but my mind’s voice.”

The Piano stars Holly Hunter as Ada, a girl who has been unable to speak since childhood. She does however have a young daughter, Flora, played by Anna Paquin, and an incredible talent and affinity for the piano. Since she doesn’t talk, she’s considered quite the oddball around Victorian England and, so, she is shipped off to New Zealand to marry Sam Neill. While there, she also meets and slowly falls for Harvey Keitel, playing an Englishman who’s gone a bit native with the local Maori.

On it’s surface, the film is a haunting, complex love story and a sort of post modern bodice ripper. It is, to some degree, comparable to Picnic at Hanging Rock, number 87 on this very list. What goes on just beneath the surface, though, is a rather surprising and thorough examination of feminist film theory. Director Jane Campion (a woman director?!) seems to be working from the scholarship of well known (at least to us uber-nerd film students) feminist theorist Laura Mulvey. Mulvey’s principal idea, and forgive me if I don’t get the whole argument down, it’s been a while, is that the cinema is an intrinsically male, voyeuristic tool. Film for her is all about the “male gaze.” Take for example the character of Miss Torso, the ballerina who lives across the alley, in Hitchcock’s Rear Window. When Jimmy Stewart’s character looks at Miss Torso he sees her as one thing and one thing only: a sex object. According to Mulvey, this is the essence of the woman in cinema, to be looked upon at all times and in every essence as a sex object. Further, women in the audience have no choice but to look at the women on the screen in the same way. Mulvey argues that since the camera’s gaze always takes the perspective of the male gaze, a woman has no choice but to view women on screen through the filter of the male gaze. Thus cinema becomes a demeaning, voyeuristic tool. Now, there is more to Mulvey’s argument than I am presenting here and it has been some time since I’ve considered it in any length. Further, I’m a bit biased as I don’t particularly agree with Mulvey’s ideas. If you’re interested in her full argument, and why wouldn’t you be, check out Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema by Laura Mulvey. There’s a sort of critical approach to that work from John Haber at this site which might explain things better than I have. http://www.haberarts.com/mulvey.htm

In the meantime, it seems clear watching The Piano that Campion is, in part, replying to these ideas. That certainly seems to be at the root of Ada’s inability to speak. She cannot relate to the world around her as it is the world of the male gaze. The film continues to be full of this sort of thing, continually putting Ada into positions of subjugation at Neill’s hands, her relationship with her daughter, and her being denied her own piano. Where Campion begins to differ though and where I really begin to like the movie as something more than haunting, vaguely Victorian romance comes with giving Ada power. She has power over Keitel and, slowly, over her own fate. Campion then begins to change the conventional language of cinema, recreating Ada’s index finger as a clear phallic symbol. What begins to happen is that she starts to confuse the gender identities of Ada and Keitel, giving one certain conventionally masculine characteristics and the other feminine. This, then, seems to be a refutation of Mulvey’s central idea that men and women cannot communicate and that the male gaze controls all. What develops here is a clear notion that men and women must work together and that the female is capable of as much power as the male when she is willing to take it.

So, pretty heavy stuff I know. But I am back. Expect more updates next week. I promise the next couple will be less thinky.