Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power Review: Dubiously Scrutinizing the Male Gaze

In her 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey coined the phrase “male gaze” to indicate a relationship between images of women on the screen and the “masculinization” of what Mulvey calls the “spectator position.” In the nearly 50 years since, many writers and scholars, including Mulvey herself, have revised and expanded the notion of spectatorship in myriad directions. The line of argument in Nina Menkes’s Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power, though, ignores all of that in favor of reinforcing Mulvey’s original notion through its own thesis: that the male-dominated visual language of cinema has a direct and tangible impact on both employment discrimination and cases of sexual assault against women.

The problem with Brainwashed isn’t so much this linkage, which has its truths, but that Menkes insists on drastically simplifying what’s clearly a complicated subject, especially at the level of the image. Menkes, an independent filmmaker and professor, structures the film as a lecture, standing in front of an auditorium of students and showing clips that exhibit a supposed offense. Intercut with this are interviews from non-cis male filmmakers and scholars (Mulvey included) that further articulate Menkes’s basic idea that shot construction and even sound design, in films both past and present, often typify a heterosexual male experience which, in turn, negatively impacts women’s roles and opportunities within the industry and beyond.

Brainwashed feels thorough in its scope, given its use of 175 clips ranging from 1896 to 2020. But in her essentially dogmatic conception of how the visual language of cinema works, Menkes commits numerous logical fallacies along the way. Namely, the clip selection lacks for context: If a series of shots shows a man looking at a woman, for Menkes that’s evidence enough of a film’s problematic nature. Clips from films as different as Buffalo ’66 and Phantom Thread are lumped together as offenders; even the opening shot of Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation is, for Menkes, just a replication of the male gaze because it fragments and objectifies the female character’s body. Stranger still, Menkes points to Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland winning Oscars for best picture and best director as “a sign of real change,” though when Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker won the same awards a decade prior, it didn’t indicate an identical shift because, according to Menkes, that film was about, and predominately made by, men.

Crucially, Menkes rejects the notion that filmmakers can interrogate the act of looking through any means other than oppositional tactics that undermine classical image construction. Therefore, Alfred Hitchcock, Jean-Luc Godard, Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, and Quentin Tarantino—all dragged here to various extents—reinforce the male perspective, whereas Agnès Varda, Chantal Akerman, and Menkes herself (“In my own fiction films, I try to express cinematically how it feels to be a sexualized object”) undermine it by trying to find the “inner life” of their female characters. By omitting clips that could complicate or even dismantle Menkes’s broader claims (films from outside of North America and Europe are almost entirely ignored), Brainwashed comes dangerously close to inhabiting its own title.