Constance Penley's 'Feminism, Film Theory, And The Bachelor Machines'

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Even though Mulvey presents some intriguing points on how psychoanalysis affects the way gender is viewed in regards to the look, her writing is restricted and one-dimensional in comparison to Constance Penley’s article, “Feminism, Film Theory, and the Bachelor Machines” (1985). Penley begins by focusing on the idea of the “bachelor machine:” a practice used from approximately 1850-1925 where, “numerous artists, writers, and scientists imaginatively or in reality constructed anthropomorphized machines to represent the relation of the body to the social, the relation of sexes to each other, the structure of the psyche, or the workings of history.” It is a perpetually moving, self-sufficient system that, as Michael de Certeau states, has a chief distinction of “being male.” It also includes common themes of, “an ideal time and the magical possibility of its reversal (the time machine is an exemplary bachelor machine) electrification, voyeurism, and masturbatory eroticism, the dream of the mechanical reproduction of art, and artificial birth or reanimation” (Stam and Miller, 456-457). This leads Penley to discuss a similar theory, that of the cinema as an apparatus itself, which focuses on the same characteristics of the bachelor machine. This theory is discussed through the writings of Jean-Louis Baudry and Christian Metz, but Penley points out that their works close off essential questions about sexual difference.
Firstly, Penley informs her readers that, “in Baudry’s Freudian terms, the apparatus induces (as a result of the immobility of the spectator, the darkness of the theater, and the projection of the images from a place behind the spectator’s head) a total regression to an earlier developmental stage in which the subject ha...

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...ual difference.” Also, by introducing the concept of fantasy, Penley asserts that, “film analysis, moreover, from the perspective of the structure of fantasy, presents a more accurate description of the spectator’s shifting and multiple identifications and a more comprehensive account of these same movements within the film: the perpetually changing configurations of the characters, for example, are a formal response to the unfolding of a fantasy that is the filmic fiction itself.” Thus, Penley’s final sentence states that, “the feminist use of the psychoanalytic notion of fantasy for the study of film and its institutions can now be seen as a way of constructively dismantling the bachelor machines of film theory (no need for Luddishm) or at least modifying them in accordance with the practical and theoretical demands of sexual modernity” (Stam and Miller, 470-471).

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