Hook and Eye: Violence and the Captive Gaze

Dickson, Lisa.
Camera Obscura, 56 (Volume 19, Number 2), 2004, pp. 74-103 (Article)

Published by Duke University Press

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/co/summary/v019/19.2dickson.html

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Catherine ( Jennifer Lopez) as subjected beauty: the viewers full prize, in The Cell (dir. Tarsem Singh, US/Germany, 2000)

Hook and Eye: Violence and the Captive Gaze

Lisa Dickson

Man . . . may, in a certain sense, be afrmed to consist of two parts, the external and the internal. The form which his actions assume is one thing; the principle from which they ow is another. With the former it is possible we should be acquainted; respecting the latter there is no species of evidence that can adequately inform us. William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice

With her trademark twist of verbal wit, Margaret Atwood turns loves metaphors to reveal their cutting edge in her well-known poem, you t into me:
you t into me like a hook into an eye a sh hook an open eye1

Copyright 2004 by Camera Obscura Camera Obscura 56, Volume 19, Number 2 Published by Duke University Press 75

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These words are especially apropos to a discussion of Tarsem Singhs science-ction feature, The Cell (US/Germany, 2000), and to what Linda Williams refers to as the difcult pleasures of spectatorship, for the pleasures of the lm are indeed difcult.2 The seduction of spectacle and the dangers of spectatorship together constitute the snare of cinematic beauty, the hook that catches painfully in the eye of a spectator seduced into a contradictory complicity with the lms aestheticization of bodies and, through them, of violence. From the repeated images of eyes, lifeless or distanced by various lenses (cameras, television monitors, still photos, microscopes, mirrors, screens, and doorways), to the heightened visual language that denes the inner world of a psychotic killer, the lm is emphatically about the implications of looking and of being looked at. An artist whose works are the bleached and preserved bodies of drowned women, the lms villain, Carl Stargher (Vincent DOnofrio), is himself a victim of abuse and a fatal form of schizophrenia.3 He literally objecties women turning their drowned, bleached bodies into dolls but it is only in the labyrinth of his mind that this project can be actualized, for the medium (human esh) falls short of fullling his grandiose personal vision. We explore this interior domain with a therapist, Catherine ( Jennifer Lopez), by way of a machine that allows her to extend her analytical gaze into the psyche of the killer as she gradually exposes the conjoined mysteries of two missing victims: Starghers latest work, a woman trapped in a ooding chamber (one of the cells of the title), and Starghers innocent child self, trapped, with Catherine, in Starghers diseased mind. To be sure, there is a delineation of pathological and corrective gazes in the lms moral discourse: Starghers objectifying obsession is explicitly identied as sick, while, at the other end of the spectrum, Catherines clinical gaze is ideally curative and, in the nal baptism scene, ultimately palliative. Poised with the clinical focus on the individual psyche is the socially oriented investigative gaze of the FBI agent, Peter Novak (Vince Vaughn), which is aligned with truth seeking and punitive justice. However, there is a structural relation subtending these differently motivated gazes that is compelling and loaded. All are consumers of

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images, and, through their acts of looking, all stake out territories of agency and meaning on which power is exerted and contested. Signicantly, this relation crosses the boundary of the screen to include us; as consumers of the cinematic image, we, too, are implicated in a powerful act of gazing through which the roles of witness and participant are, to some extent, collapsed. The arousal that Stargher experiences through the consumption of images of women in peril is aligned with the arousal that we experience through the consumption of images of women in peril on the screen. At least this arousal is offered up by the lm; we are hailed by it as we experience the erotic thrill of suspense in tracking Jennifer Lopez through Singhs grotesquely beautiful cinematic landscape. Through its emphasis on those difcult pleasures of spectatorship the desire for beauty, knowledge, and power that is manifested in the devouring of images the lm suggests an unsettling relation between the gaze that is clearly identied as psychotic and antisocial and the normal gaze of an audience that participates, collectively and socially, in this pathological looking. And while we are ostensibly offered a choice of alignments with a variety of perspectives, the lm relentlessly collapses these options, working to efface differences in intent, insisting on similarities of structure, and, at its climax, subsuming all into a sick gaze that literally saturates the space of the lm. In its broader implications, the lm, regardless of ones opinion of its quality as art or entertainment, provides an interesting opportunity to explore the imbrication of violence and vision, a question that is at its heart epistemological and social. The lm, as popular eye candy of Saturday night entertainment, participates in a circulation of discourses through which power is produced and negotiated. For instance, relying at a surface level on the threat of rape for its suspenseful impetus, the lm exemplies Sarah Projanskys assertion that rape is one of contemporary US popular cultures compulsory citations . . . embedded in all of its complex media forms, entrenched in the landscape of visual imagery.4 Thus, she concludes, the pervasiveness of representations of rape naturalizes rapes place in our everyday world, not only as real physical events but also as part of our fantasies, fears, desires and consumptive practices. Representations of rape form

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a complex of cultural discourses central to the very structure of stories people tell about themselves and others (3). Furthermore, in addition to its implication in this particular complex of cultural discourses, the lm and its horrors exploit what Mark Seltzer calls wound culture, that public fascination with torn and opened bodies and torn and opened persons, a collective gathering around shock, trauma, and the wound.5 On an epistemological level, this horror derives from the fungibility of key categories as bodies and minds are violently opened by the gaze: art/ science, beauty/grotesqueness, sympathy/repulsion, evil/illness, living/dead, subject/object, self/other. The penetrating gaze puts such categories into ux, deconstructing and challenging boundaries on which identity is based and through which social power is produced and maintained. Manifestly, the lm is fairly typical fare with a sciencection twist: a bad man hurts women, and the heroes, using technologies that permit them to enter the killers mind, work against time to keep him from hurting other women. On a deeper level (whether intentionally or not is a question left to others), the lm is about the gaze, its power, its violence, its dangers, and the ways that it participates in, is shaped by, and produces technologies of knowledge through what Teresa de Lauretis calls the violence of rhetoric, a concept that I expand here to include a rhetoric of vision. Extrapolating from the Foucauldian notion of a rhetoric of violence, an order of language which speaks violence names certain behaviors and events as violent, but not others, and constructs subjects and objects of violence, and hence violence as a social fact, de Lauretis posits a reverse notion of a language which, itself, produces violence, a violence of rhetoric.6 In extrapolating this notion to include a rhetoric of the visual, I suggest that seeing, the act of producing knowledge through the opening up of the subject to sight, participates in just this process, generating discourses through which social categories and social power are contested and maintained. In other words, seeing is a violent act within this paradigm, and bodiesimperiled, exposed, exploited are a key site at which this relationship among knowledge, vision, and power can be explored. Furthermore, because

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the principal gazer of The Cell, the ostensible hero of the lm, is a woman, this gaze is implicated in, again to use one of de Lauretiss useful terms, technologies of gender. De Lauretis identies a blind spot in Foucaults radical politics and anti-humanist theory, asserting that gender difference, even if constructed, nevertheless has a social reality embodied in a system of social practices and cultural forms that position women and men in antagonistic and asymmetrical relation, a social reality that cannot be reconciled rhetorically (38). Thus in the case of Catherine, the clinician whose gaze is marked as powerful and penetrating, her status as a woman challenges her mode of seeing with a mode of being that marks her as vulnerable, contained, and subject to the will of another. And, as de Lauretis suggests, quoting Wini Breines and Linda Gordon, violence is in many ways a sign of a power struggle for the maintenance of a certain kind of social order.7 Following their lead, then, we can posit that the violence produced by Catherines contention with Stargher over ownership of the gaze is part of the struggle to maintain a social order in which subject and object, agent and victim, cannot ultimately be confounded, in spite of the lms relentless deconstruction of such categories. Someone will win in the lm, and these categories will be reied, but, I suggest, while gender stereotypes will ultimately be reinstated and reinforced, the basic issue of the violence of the gaze itself will remain fruitfully, disturbingly unresolved. In each of the modalities of vision and knowledge that we encounter in the lm the clinical, the investigative, and the pathological the gaze is mapped out in a way that links knowledge, violence, and the literal technologies that mediate experience, and all are expressed in terms of penetration, wounding, and the probing of interiors. The Y-incision of the autopsied victim, the microscope, and the CAT scan associated with the investigative gaze are analogous to the futuristic clinical apparatus that allows the therapist to enter into the closed space of the mind. At the same time, the technologies themselves produce a kind of distancing effect, a virtual reality that is predicated on the opening up of the self to speculation yet yields only a map, a representation, an illusion of intimacy. We see the eye grotesquely enlarged

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by a microscope lens; Starghers brain laid out in colored cross sections on an MRI screen; a graphic representation of the transfer of consciousness from one mind to another as the therapist enters the psychic world of the patient; and nally the experience of this reality itself given physical shape by the electronic input of the stim suit, a full-body virtual reality apparatus with its millions of sensors responding to the electrical activity of the brain and converting this into physical sensation. In each case, the technology exhibits the contradictory pull of intimacy and distance, the desire for the real and the true and the acknowledgment that this truth is available only through the genius of illusion, the interposition of the lens. In this sense, the technologies of knowledge are voyeuristic in nature; depending on this tension, they are charged with erotic potential and the will to power. This contradictory dynamic is present as well in Starghers mediated experience of death, in which it is the video representation, not the actual reality of death, that is key to his arousal. In one brief scene, we follow Stargher into his underground bunker where we see a woman oating in a glass tank lled with water. She has drowned and hangs in the blue light with arms outstretched in an attitude of crucixion. As Stargher leans against the glass, gazing at this strange serenity, the woman begins to thrash in the nal spasms of death. Terried, Stargher ees from the struggles of the real woman in the tank to hide himself behind his bank of television monitors that depict the same scene from a variety of angles. Later we see him suspended from chains attached to loops embedded in his skin, hovering over the bleached body of this victim as he is overcome by orgasm while watching this death replay on video. It is not intimacy with death that he seeks but rather the safely framed intimacy of speculation, of cinema. This structural similarity to the technologies of investigative and clinical speculation represented in the lm is further highlighted by the staging of Starghers artistic manipulation of the esh, culminating in the bleaching and evisceration of the womans body, which takes place on a metal table resembling an autopsy table in the FBI morgue. Emblazoned with the manufacturers name, Carver, the table with its insignia forms a neat visual metaphor for the complex structural conations effected in the lm,

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linking as it does butchery, medical/criminal investigations, and the sculptors and the lmmakers art, all of which reify and objectify the female body through technologically mediated speculation. The alignment of the clinical, investigative, and pathological modes of seeing goes further as the lm deploys the elements necessary to the construction of suspense. While the cell of the title is not explicitly identied in the lm, we are offered some interesting possibilities, the most obvious being the waterproof tank in which Stargher imprisons his victims. But the advertising for the lm works against this single association insofar as it is Catherines clinical apparatus that is featured prominently in trailers and advertising. Here again the similarity between these two environments is striking. In both, a beautiful woman is suspended in a sacricial pose before a wall of glass through which she is monitored and framed by screens. The lighting of the clinical cell recalls the watery blue of Starghers bunker. Like Starghers victim oating in water, Catherine, wearing the stim suit and connected by sensors to the apparatus, hovers in the air, observed, recorded, exposed. However, the wires by which her body is suspended in the stim suit also recall the chains by which Stargher suspends himself while he watches the video replays of his victims deaths. The visual grammar of the two scenes depicting cells, and more specically Catherines interface with the clinical apparatus, evoke a complex series of identications. Most obviously, Catherine is linked to Starghers victim: the woman in peril in a technologically monitored glass room. The lm has not been shy in foreshadowing Catherines victimization by Stargher through several telling juxtapositions of scenes that draw a visual equivalence between, for example, the woman stalked by Stargher in a park or his victim on the autopsy table, and Catherine sleeping under a thin sheet in her underwear. Asleep, or oblivious to the stalker watching her from his car, or dead, naked, and staring sightlessly upward, each woman is explicitly offered up as a sign of vulnerability and imminent or accomplished violation. In each case, the womans gaze is foreclosed while she is opened to speculation. This association between past, present, and future victims

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points disturbingly to our own potential alignment with Stargher as consumers of the erotic charge that is, suspense that this anticipated peril provides. Each reference to Starghers past or present victims heightens our anticipation of his victimization of our own primary object of interest, Catherine (or more precisely, given her star treatment, Jennifer Lopez), as we extrapolate the conventional three-step pattern (past action present action future action) of the suspense drama. In this sense, the cinematic juxtaposition of images is key to the construction of suspense, for this secondary layer of meaning, the connotative meaning in a semiotic sense (Catherine is Starghers ultimate victim), distorts and doubles the signs of the denotative or manifest meaning (Catherine at home in bed is safely distant from his predations). As Pascal Bonitzer notes, this awareness of the tension between denotative and connotative meanings comes at a price: The audience, which is thus no longer able to cling naively to the apparent reality of the image, and knows what is being woven below the surface, has suffered a loss of innocence.8 This loss is articulated as an alignment with the desires of a gure clearly identied as monstrously pathological. I will return to this issue of audience complicity, but here I would like to explore a key element of this visual trap, namely, a structural conation of modes of speculation on an epistemological level. As I noted earlier in the description of the visual congruence of the wires and chains within the two cells of the lm, Catherine herself shares in our uncomfortable identication with the killer. Suspended by wires within a machine that enables the scopic penetration of Starghers interior, Catherine undertakes a clinical agenda that is visually and structurally analogous to Starghers own project in that both use the scopic technology of a cell to gain mastery, to exert their wills over another opened unwillingly to the gaze. Working within the denotative moral vector of the lm, which distinguishes good or compassionate socially oriented looking from bad, egomaniacal, destructive looking, the conations and identications effected by this assertion of will, or the will to mastery, run as a kind of countercurrent and are key to the lms insistent paralleling of the clinical and the pathological

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gazes. It is here that the relation between knowledge and wounding becomes most explicit and rests (as I have argued elsewhere) on what Luke Wilson calls epistemological resistance.9 Knowledge of the bodys secret interior depends, Wilson argues, on an understanding of the body as something injured, of injury as the necessary precondition of knowledge about the self that is otherwise limited to an experience of a visible surface. Thus the wounding of the body is part of a process of revelation. However, this revelation is problematic, as Wilson observes:
But precisely this space [our bodies as substans extensa] is marked out by an epistemologically resistant natural margin; we originally caught sight of the inside of the body only by violence and at the risk of pain, either for ourselves or for some other creature. In order for the body to function properly, and thus to be what we believe it really to be, it must deny us access to it to our selves in other words either literally or analogically. (62)

The whole body then shrouds a necessary mystery; the exposure of the secret of life to the anatomists inquiring gaze marks lifes tantalizing dissolution. Vision, knowledge, and violence thus act together in a necessary and contradictory relationship, because violence enacted literally in physical wounding or guratively through electronic penetration is a necessary condition of the knowledge of the hidden interior of things, a knowledge at once enabled and thwarted by the violent penetration of the body by the gaze. In this sense, then, the body as object of speculative inquiry is a site of paradox. In his concise tracing of changing attitudes toward the judicial use of torture from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century, Steven Bruhm notes that tormentum (to torture) is etymologically linked to torquens mentum, the twisting of the mind in order to wring out the truth. 10 In a medieval context, the bodys pain was considered to be a point of direct access to truth. Later, post-Cartesian judicial attitudes challenged this notion of transparency, for, as Bruhm argues, after Elizabeth Hanson, Cartesian dualism wreaked havoc on the institution of legal enquiry by reifying the schism between interior motivation the

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real site of guilt and the body that displayed this guilt (26). Thus the bodys surface, its trials and physical signs, were no longer sufciently yoked to truth. The outraged repudiation of judicial torture by later thinkers, such as Cesare Beccaria in the eighteenth century, was aimed, Bruhm asserts, at the states wilful intrusion into the private human body (26). Such an outrage demonstrates the reication of the boundaries between inner and outer worlds and necessitates the reconceptualization of the concept of violence in relation to truth. No longer, as in the medieval context, is violence a means of revealing the congruence of interior and exterior experience, a way of demonstrating that there is no real difference between a hidden and a visible reality articulated in a single plane of meaning: the bodys surface. In the post-Cartesian paradigm, Renaissance torture displayed not only a crisis in enquiry, in that the body could no longer be counted on to speak the truth, it also displayed a crisis in epistemology, in that it constructed the internal subjective space which it then could not violate (26). Thus Beccaria argued in An Essay on Crimes and Punishments (1764) that the horror, the violence, of judicial torture was grounded in an insupportable deconstruction of categories: It tends to confound all relations to require that a man be at the same time accuser and accused, that pain be made the crucible of truth, as if its criterion lay in the sinews of the wretch.11 Yet it is the reication of categories that ensued from such arguments that has led to the guration of the inquiring gaze as epistemologically violent rather than merely physical as in the medieval context. Indeed, this guration works to reinforce the sanctity of that interiority by necessitating violence as its only mode of expression in the outside world; it is true precisely because it has been violently exposed, scopically violated. Nowhere is this relation of exposure, knowledge, and wounding more apparent in The Cell than in the technology of psychic exploration itself the virtual reality stim suit, which, with its congealed blood color and striated contours, resembles nothing so much as a body ayed of its skin. (Singh himself refers to the visual effect of the suits as lleted bodies in his commentary for the DVD edition of the lm.)12 The copperplate engrav-

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ing by Nicolas Beatrizet from Juan Valverdes sixteenth-century anatomical text Anatomia del copre humano13 nicely illustrates the anxiety provoked by the epistemological paradox that Wilson describes and that the visual language of The Cells stim suit evokes. In the image, the muscle man, his body mapped by carefully inscribed symbols, stands regarding his skin, which he has apparently just removed himself using the dagger in his left hand. The muscle man is fully exposed, mapped, and objectied, and he should be dead, but he stands, fully sentient and apparently capable of agency. Striking this conventionally dramatic pose (note that the dagger is a traditional Renaissance icon for tragedy, and specically for the revenger, perhaps leading us to question: On whom has he taken his revenge here?), the muscle man circumvents the limits of anatomical speculation by being alive when the act of self-exposure should have reduced him to the state of ultimate reication: death. This impossible state of being also makes him a nice illustration of Beccarias torture victim, trapped in a conict of interest14 that makes him both accuser and accused. A more contemporary example that attests to the persistence of this paradox and its attendant horrors is the controversy surrounding Gunther Von Hagenss now infamous Human Body Worlds exhibitions featuring plastinated human corpses ar. ranged in a variety of lifelike poses. In fact, one Web site promoting Von Hagenss work features prominently an exhibited gure that is an obvious tribute to Beatrizets drawing: A man a real man, his uids and fats replaced by a plasticizing compound stands holding his skin his real skin over his outstretched arm.15 Drawing enormous crowds in Europe, Asia, and the United States, the Human Body Worlds exhibitions have also drawn much controversy and debate centering largely on the question of whether Von Hagenss gures are to be properly considered art or science or merely exploitation and degrading spectacle. Von Hagens has been careful to emphasize the scientic aspect of his anatomies and other performances, insisting that its no fun, its no mockery. Its earnest science.16

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It is the lifelike presentations that provoke the most vocal and, in one case in which a man took a hammer to one of Von Hagenss gures, violent responses. A runner takes off from the starting line, his muscles apping behind him; a pregnant woman lounges seductively on a couch, her womb visible; another man works at a computer; another, his head split in two to expose the brain, mounts a fully ayed, preserved horse. Each exhibit is designed to demonstrate the workings of the various organs of the body in action. But, articulating a common theme of the debate, one reviewer of the exhibition objected that the scientic value of the exercise is diminished by the fact that the lifelike gures, which should reveal the complexity, size and also vulnerability of the human body, are instead suffused with emotions. Looking at the pregnant woman, Dietmar Henning observes: She gives the impression of lying on a bed or couch in expectation of her lover. Her pose made her seem very real. And that made me think of her fate. . . . This plastinate evoked not so much fascination as repulsion.17 Hennings repulsion derives not so much from the fact that the woman is dead but that in death she seems alive, suffused with emotions that deconstruct not only the mutually exclusive categories of life and death, but seemingly art and science. Corpus, a spin-off cultural project based on the Human Body Worlds concept, is a musical black comedy that exploits this very horror.18 Premiered at the University of Leeds Student Union in February 2003, it also appeared to good reviews at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival (in the same city that refused to provide public space to Von Hagens for the display of some of his gures in July of that year). Featuring singing and dancing plastinates, the show is based on the conceit that in seeking immortality, humans undergoing the plastinating thereby preserve themselves for all time. Having done so, however, they become trapped in their plastinated selves, eternally conscious while at the same time eternally preserved in immobile bodies, unable to communicate with the real world, with itchy feet and getting bored, indenitely bored.19 Thus the horror of confounded categories subtends both Corpus and the Human Body Worlds exhibitions, which, in their presentations, raise questions about art and its relation to life and death.

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In a gesture strikingly similar to the construction of suspense in the scenes of the lm discussed above, art, in the case of Beatrizets drawing and its modern tributes, steps in to realign the terms of the relation between the anatomist and the object of his or her reifying gaze by representing the impossible coexistence of total exposure and continued life. In The Cell, it is just this realignment that both the stim suit (with its analogues in the lm, the CAT scan and the MRI) and, tellingly, Starghers artistic project attempt to effect; the stim suit and its related apparatus allow Catherine to enter into the subject without killing him (to ay him while he remains sentient and capable of agency). Likewise, Starghers artforms, as Catherine encounters them in his mind, are lifeless dolls mechanically manipulated to imitate living, if perverse and masochistic, action. More tellingly, Starghers obsession with video representations of the dying moments of his victims suggests a similar intervention of art into the paradox of anatomical speculation, for only on video can he suspend his victims between life and death by watching them die repeatedly once the body itself has succumbed to the processes of total violent exposure on his butcher/autopsy table. Here again our spectatorship verges on an interesting complicity that threatens the moral delineation of pathological and normal looking within the lm and within the culture that forms its context. As Seltzer observes, modern Western culture, with its fascination with the shock of contact between bodies and technologies, has become the pathological public sphere, characterized by just such obsessive repetition: the exhibition and witnessing, the endlessly reproducible display, of wounded bodies and wounded minds in public.20 In a metadramatic context, then, the audience also benets from the interventions of art in the service of the will to power. Ushered through the experience of violence by the conventions of the thriller, we are able to identify Catherine as Starghers future victim through the artistic juxtapositions of frames and images; the foreshadowing accomplished by these juxtapositions thereby allows the audience, too, to occupy a position of visual mastery, a perspective from which Catherine can be seen to be safe and whole and simultaneously

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imperiled and violently penetrated and exposed. For Bonitzer, the suspense created by this doubleness is an anamorphosis of cinematographic time, which shifts the audience towards that point in the picture where, in the oblong form of which the characters are unaware, it will recognize a deaths head.21 Aye, theres the rub, for the only other such forward-looking, anamorphic gaze we nd in the lm, as I will demonstrate, is the psychopathic gaze of the killer himself. As the grotesque gure of the selfexposing muscleman suggests, epistemological mastery also entails the risk of self-loss, even for an audience whose mastery is simultaneously, as Bonitzer asserts, a loss of innocence. It is this bizarre coexistence of subject- and objecthood that structures the horrors associated with vivisection, in which the chilling reminder that the object is also a sentient subject reinforces our perception of the violence attendant on speculation. Explicitly drawing on this horror latent in its visual grammar, the lm stages a scene of vivisection that, like the scenes discussed earlier, is laden with complex identications that say a great deal about both the struggle of wills that drives the plot and the epistemological pitfalls inherent to this struggle. In this scene, Catherine follows one of Starghers personas, that of his younger self (Boy Stargher), through the labyrinth of his psychic landscape, which resembles an M. C. Escher drawing with its stair. cases and uid perspective. Finding the boy in what appears to be a hospital or veterinary operating room, she nally makes contact with him, talking over the neck of the horse that stands in the middle of the room. Instead of being comforted by the animal and Catherines sympathetic presence, the boy repeatedly checks the loudly ticking clock with increasing agitation. Suddenly he pushes Catherine out of the way, just as razor-sharp panels of glass drop from the ceiling, slicing the horse into sections. The horse, vivisected, displayed between sheets of glass, is still breathing, its grotesque continued existence in this state a signal both of the distorted reality of the killers psychic space and of the extremes of violence that characterize that space. But the horse has also clearly been identied with Catherine and with her own clinical gaze in the lms opening sequence in which she rides across the desert of a catatonic boys mind to begin the therapeutic ses-

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sion. This is Catherines clinical agenda: to peer into the living interiors of beings, to make these secrets available to knowledge and to the ordering, curative logic of her therapeutic gaze. In this scene, as she passes between the palpitating, breathing, but mutilated segments of the horse, her implication in the dynamic relation of violence, seeing, and knowing is made explicit. While furthering the alignment of the two modes of gazing in the lm the clinical and the pathological the scene also stages a contest of wills and marks the beginning of the saturation of space itself by a psychotic panopticism that subsumes all other gazes. Key to this struggle is the image of the clock, the accelerated ticking of which becomes a powerful gure for unseeable but controlling inevitability, which is, in this psychic landscape, an externalization of Starghers will to power. The vivisected horse is emblematic of Catherines own gaze, but the violent act of vivisection is perpetrated by Stargher as a sign of his power over her and as a warning to her that she, too, is vulnerable to violent rending and exposure. Starghers gaze is here naturalized in the all-encompassing, irreversible law of time that circumscribes Catherines own compassionate vivisecting gaze. And time is, within the conventional contours of the thriller, the inescapable limit of Catherines investigative quest, for in an unknown location Starghers latest victim waits in a glass tank while a clock governs the ooding waters that will turn her into a real-life work of art. This clock mechanism harnesses time to Starghers will and governs all of the actions of the drama. It is inexorable. In this context, even Starghers medical condition he is comatose, we are told, and dying from a terminal form of schizophrenia seems a part of his mastery over his opponents, for his death will mark the end of Catherines investigative quest, and the information she seeks in his mind will be lost forever once his body dies. The investigative and clinical gazes are by comparison belated: following a trail, deciphering clues and codes after the fact in a desperate attempt to catch up to, to beat, to be in time. The autopsy conducted in the FBI lab, for example, is a reopening of Starghers work, a retracing of an earlier penetration. In effect, the autopsy works backward in time as the forensic/ investigative gaze struggles to reconstruct the past in order to for-

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mulate present and future action. Likewise, Catherines therapeutic explorations within Starghers psyche lead her continually backward into Starghers abused childhood. Starghers gaze, by contrast, is panoptic, saturating space while itself remaining for the most part unseen. Figured in the visual opulence of his claustrophobic psychic landscape, this saturating gaze becomes almost a structural feature as Starghers psychic body blends with, comprises, and arises from the architecture itself. In one striking scene prominent in the lms theatrical trailers, he rises from a throne in his presence chamber, and we realize that the arras that covers the walls is in fact a giant cape harnessed to his body by way of loops embedded in his skin. His ego, grotesquely aggrandized, literally envelops space. While Catherine can look even into the most private spaces of the mind with the aim of exposing all to the knowledge-making gaze, Starghers gaze is everywhere, becoming physical and so challenging the will to power of Catherines technological surveillance; while she is contained and exposed, he is only incidentally a localized, trackable body. He is everywhere and nowhere, or rather, he is where, the condition of space itself. In this way, the presentation of space in The Cell gestures toward the conventional semiotics of gendered space, such as those evoked in de Lauretiss citation of Jurij Lotmans mythical typologies of plot-space. In Lotmans model as de Lauretis describes it, the hero is the masculine subject who moves through plot-space establishing differences and norms, while the obstacle is the feminine object present only to be overcome, a function of that space, a marker or boundary, and therefore inanimate even when anthropomorphized.22 The Cell appears on a supercial level to reverse these categories in that Catherine is the hero whose normalizing enterprise constructs Stargher, or at least his pathology, as the obstacle to be overcome, his psychic space as the plot-space through which she moves. It would be easy to see this as revolutionary, or at least subversive, as Catherines ventriloquizing of the masculine subject position implies appropriation and reinscription, and she contends from the masculine position of the subject with a feminized and objectied Stargher over ownership of the gaze.

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In a phenomenological sense, however, the lm exploits the gendered condition of lived space in Western patriarchal society and thereby recuperates this subversive potential in a way that reinstates, although not without discomfort, the subjective primacy of the masculine hero. It is almost axiomatic that the basic fact of the womans social existence as the object of the gaze of another is key to the phenomenology of gender.23 Iris Marion Young contends that the generic subject, as identied by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, is the founding condition of space itself there would be no space without the bodyas spatial coordinates are always relative to the subjects here. For Young, however, this generic subject can be differentiated from the feminine subject, who experiences in her bodily deportment in space a complex doubleness, where she is both a constituting subject and a constituted object positioned in space: Women frequently react to motions, even our own motions, as though we are the object of a motion that issues from an alien intention, rather than taking ourselves as the subject of motion. In its immanence and inhibition, feminine spatial existence is positioned by a system of coordinates that does not have its origin in her own intentional capacities (152). Thus Starghers all-encompassing presence in The Cell, his power to shape space around Catherine, his status as the condition of space itself, is manifestly an articulation of his pathologically aggrandized ego, but it is also phenomenologically typical, as is Catherines doubled status as both intentional subject and contained and surveilled object positioned in an alien space and subject to alien intention. Like the muscle man and the immortal plastinated consciousnesses of Corpus, Catherine inhabits the positions of both subject and object, and, as Starghers next victim, she is anamorphically both whole and violated. In this space of deconstructed categories, pathology and normal phenomenology converge in a way that highlights not only the extreme state of danger that shapes the grotesque ight of fantasy specic to this lm, but the normal endangerment that shapes feminine lived experience. Here again The Cells earlier presentation of the stim suit becomes an important visual cue in the production of suspense

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and in our developing understanding of the epistemological and phenomenological issues at stake. It is not just the patient, Stargher, who wears the suit as sign of exposure in the clinical cell, but Catherine, the therapist (the anatomist of the mind), as well. The visual parallel tells us early in the lm that the lines between observer and object will be dangerously fungible, that the mastery of the vivisecting gaze will be itself an object of contestation once Catherine enters into Starghers inner world. Her safe place of mastery will very easily be appropriated or transformed, just as she as objective observer will become the unwilling object of the gaze. At one point, for instance, Catherine wakes up in the cell, returning groggily to the real world. Everything is as it should be, except for a slight alteration in the mood of the lighting. Slowly, we, along with Catherine, realize that she is not awake or outside at all but is still within Starghers mind, in a perfectly rendered copy of the very site of Catherines purported mastery. The scale of the room is skewed, making Catherine appear small and childlike as she huddles in the corner. She then looks back into the room to see her own body suspended beside Starghers. She has become the object of her own gaze. Here the meaning of the stim suit and the clinical cell is hijacked by Starghers will; the sign of her scopic power of penetration has become evidence of Catherines exposure to a gaze that she cannot return, at least not without great risk to her own sense of self that is, at the risk of guring her self as object, of falling victim to Beccarias conict of interest in which she, like the torture victim, becomes both accuser and accused. The point is reinforced by a sudden transition in which Catherine nds herself trapped in a small glass cube reminiscent of the water cell in Starghers bunker. When she opens the cell, she plunges downward, saved only by the bizarre physics of the psychic world as she plunges into water that is not there. Escape from the gaze, it seems, leads only to further entrapment. Even more disturbing than this sense of Starghers panoptic surveillance is the way that the scene demonstrates an even deeper identication with the killers point of view. As Miran Bozovic observes, following Jean-Paul Sartre, it is dangerously easy for the voyeur to become the voyeur-vu: Gazing at another sub-

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ject, I endeavour to determine him/her as the object; yet that subject can also, in his/her turn, deny me my status of subject and determine me as object. Now it is I who am the object which the other is gazing at and judging and appearing in the eyes of the other, as an object, makes me ashamed. In a word, being-seenby-the-other is the truth of seeing-the-other. 24 To look into Stargher, Catherine must herself be exposed to and diminished by the gaze of another, a diminishment and endangerment gured in her reduction in size relative to that of the room. In this scene, however, Stargher does not directly return her gaze, but rather Catherine sees herself as a watcher, her voyeuristic desires exposed, just as the rat is already included in the gaze of the moths eyespots in the eyes of those predators that do not prey upon the moth these eyespots are, of course, blind. . . . A moths eyespots are therefore made to see only in the eyes of the rat preying upon it (171 72). As Catherine looks back on herself, we see revealed her own desire for scopic mastery, that predatory aspect of the gaze that is hidden at the denotative level by her therapeutic agenda. Stargher, as his body lies suspended in the clinical cell, is blind to her gaze, but, like the eyespots of a moth, his presence in the scene is a manifestation of Catherines desire to look at and into him, just as the earlier scenes in which Stargher stalks his oblivious victim in the park reveal his own voyeuristic desire. A second scene, possibly the most disturbing in a lm aswarm with disturbing images, demonstrates this contestation of wills and further articulates the lms deconstruction of pathological and clinical looking. In this scene, Catherine has followed Boy Stargher into the past and into a house, where she nds the boy washing dishes. During their interaction, a plate drops and breaks on the oor, instigating a scene of violent abuse of the boy by his father. Thrust into a closet by the protective Boy Stargher, Catherine watches through the slats while Starghers father beats the boy and burns him with an iron for playing with dolls. The slatted door, like the microscope or MRI, is another framing device that fragments the image and interposes a kind of distancing lens in this case, according to Singhs commentary, reproducing the impotent recordation of the nanny-cam.25 Catherine can only watch impotently, for time is irreversible; no intervention in

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the past is possible. Bearing witness to violence as a precondition of knowledge, Catherine and her clinical gaze are again linked to vivisection: the violence she witnesses is not willed by her, but its (re)enactment is necessary to her epistemological quest to see, to know, trauma. Once again the parallel to Starghers project and the supremacy of his panoptic gaze are communicated through juxtaposition. Within the closet, a space of refuge and voyeuristic distance, Catherine nds herself at risk. Looking at her feet, she sees that she is standing in a basin lled with water and writhing eels or snakes. Like the vivisected horse, this image is a warning, for the snake stands neatly for the seduction and danger of forbidden knowledge. She then sees a photograph taped to the wall, an image of a blood-splattered room. In a reverse shot, we see that what was once a safe place of hiding, a place from which she could see without being seen, now opens into this very blood-splattered room, no longer contained and mediated by the photographic frame. Here Stargher is engaged in bleaching and eviscerating his rst victim, the scar from the hot iron of the childhood episode of abuse that we just witnessed clearly visible on his skin. The dissolving walls are clearly meant to link past abuse to present psychosis and violence, a link that complicates the moral landscape by producing a vertiginous oscillation between sympathy and horror. Just as clear, though, is the implication that Catherines sympathetic gaze is always already encompassed by and open to Starghers psychopathic one and, in fact, that it is just this sympathy that makes her vulnerable to its predations. Exploiting the risks attendant on this sympathetic gazing, the cinematic pice de rsistance of The Cell (the payoff promised by the theatrical trailers and the lms advertising) is a scene that represents not only the complete subsuming of Catherines gaze but also our own alignment with Starghers consuming panopticism. We are told early in the lm that one of the great perils of Catherines technological surveillance is the potential for selfloss: the observer risks losing track of the boundary between her reality and the virtual psychic reality she navigates. Penetration risks identication. In this sense, the clinical cell is a technologi-

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cal realization of Seltzers wound culture: [The] opening of relation to others, he argues, (the sympathetic social bond) is at the same time the traumatic collapse of boundaries between self and other (a yielding of identity to identication). In this way, the opening of a possibility of relation to others also opens the possibility of violence.26 Catherines sympathetic social bond, or what I have been calling her compassionate vivisecting gaze that opens Stargher to speculation, has likewise opened her to the violence of Starghers pathology. In this scene, we follow the gaze of the FBI agent, Novak, who has entered this psychic space to rescue the therapist, and we see Catherine revealed on a round bed, surrounded by shimmering chandeliers and satin sheets, wearing a revealing, semitransparent dress and chained by the neck to the bed frame. She has been captured and absorbed by Starghers pathological reality and has in fact become part of the opulent landscape itself, a work of art realizing in this space what Stargher could not accomplish with the esh of the real world. As this landscape has been demonstrated throughout the psychic episodes to be an articulation of Starghers ego, Catherines appearance as a feature in this landscape demonstrates her incorporation into more than simply his architectural space. Furthermore, the conations between Starghers project and her own that have been implied throughout the lm are manifest here. Actively attempting to seduce the FBI agent, Catherine whispers to him, Did Daddy do a bad thing? Here she is referring to the implication made early in the lm that Novak, too, experienced childhood abuse. The probing question is the same one that Catherine has been asking of Stargher since she entered his mind. Her clinical agenda has not changed, but, recontextualized by Starghers overriding will, it appears now as patently perverse and invasive. Yoked explicitly to erotic seduction, this exchange only highlights both the eroticism and invasiveness necessarily inherent in Catherines clinical agenda as it is represented in the lm. Like the conventional eroticism of the gaping garment with its play of secrecy and revelation, Catherines psychic exploration in the context of the conventional thriller is predicated on the partial and teasing revelation of hid-

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den and private places. The close relation of eroticism and violence is also explicitly exploited here as Novak is captured by Stargher and subjected to torture, his intestines winched out of his body while he looks on. Continuous with the invasion of Novaks private mind by Catherines questioning and of his body by her insistent sexuality, this turning of the secret inside to public view is horrifying because, in each instance, Novak is conscious, watching, resisting his reication, evincing in this way all of the horrors associated with vivisection, as the subject and the object are coextensive and sapient. While we are encouraged to see the scene as evidence of Catherines loss of self to Starghers will, there is also the more disturbing implication here that their projects and desires have in fact been at a fundamental level the same, that the clinical gaze has in some way been violent all along. As we have seen in earlier scenes, this expansion of pathology in the domain of gazing does not leave the audience untouched. Catherine, her neck immobilized, her face enclosed within an elaborate mask, is literally chained to Starghers reality, and she becomes the seductive bait in a trap set for the FBI agent and most disturbingly for us. As we gaze on her posed and alluring body on the bed, we understand instantly why this lm was categorized on the reviews page of Upcomingmovies.com, for instance, as both erotic and eye candy.27 It is a shot from this scene of Catherines or, more precisely, Jennifer Lopezs painted face that adorns the video box28 and stares out at us seductively from the movie posters (see opening image). It is this sculptured, immobilized image that lures us to the lm. Decontextualized in the advertising, both Lopezs beauty and her celebrity comprise the hook, the snare of visual pleasure. We are invited to consume her by consuming the lm. Furthermore, the saturating nature of Starghers gaze has expanded to include our own, aligning our consumption of Lopez with Starghers consumption of Catherine. Throughout the lm, we follow Catherine as she moves through his mind, aware that she is being watched at all times; a series of long shots and tracking shots highlights this sense of surveillance by an unseen watcher, and we are, of course, the most unseen of watchers. When we come at last to this image of Catherine bound

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to the bed, with its gold and red coloring, the aestheticized links of chain, its posed, subjected beauty, we reach the much-anticipated payoff promised by the lms marketing. We have purchased beauty, paid $12 for the full prize,29 and we are given it in the epitome of a serial killers artistic vision. The snare of the gaze is literalized at the close of this segment, as the camera pans down Lopezs shapely body to reveal Novak just as Stargher attacks him from behind, blinding him with a sack. As we have seen again and again in the lm, watching is a trap, one that opens us up to the violence of identication. Catherines penetration into this world has led to her absorption by it, and our speculation has led us to erotic collusion with a psychotic artist whose earlier horric failures are the clues and cues that lead us through the conventional twists and turns of the thriller to this moment of perfect achievement, where the talent earns her pay in the fulllment of the advertising tease. Here at the climax of the lm, the investigative gaze is foreclosed as Novaks invasive looking is blinded by a sack and repaid with violent, self-rending torture. All that remains in the scene is the single gaze of the pathological consumer of images disseminated in three locales: Starghers look, gleefully triumphant; Catherines look, serenely captivated and captivating; and our own look, trapped between the extremes of horror and pleasure. The denouement of the lm offers us a typical resolution that seeks to contain the disturbing implications of this deconstruction of good and bad gazing, allowing Catherine to move from the role of passive observer/object to active agent by taking up the role of the avenging Final Girl in Carol Clovers model of conventional gendering in the thriller/slasher genre. Catherine kills Stargher with arrows and a sword, emerging triumphant over him. As Clover is careful to note, however, the Final Girl who survives the predations of the killer, who nally uses the killers phallic weapons against him, is not really a girl at all, but a male surrogate in a discourse that reinforces rather than challenges phallocentrism. She concludes: To applaud the Final Girl as a feminist development, as some reviews of Aliens have done with Ripley, is, in light of her gurative meaning, a particularly gro-

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tesque expression of wishful thinking.30 As I argued about the use of gendered space, in which an apparent appropriation of masculine power and subject position reveals, in fact, feminine containment and contradictory experience, the resolution of The Cell thus offers up an image of liberation that is actually further entrapment in gender stereotypes. In the closing scene of the section dealing with the psychic world, Catherine brings Boy Stargher into her own mental space (through a process of reversal) in an attempt to console the boy in the nal moments of his life. She does so by assuming a monastic costume, its owing white and red robes and wimple projecting an image of calm and compassion. Of course, the adult Stargher invades this space, but Catherine takes on the avenger persona, clad in black leather with wild hair and dark makeup, wielding a crossbow and sword. She pins Stargher to the ground with her arrows and impales him with the sword (see closing image). However, in the child is the father to the man logic of the lm, she cannot kill the evil persona without also killing the boy, who exhibits the same wounds as his adult counterpart. As he dies, Catherine takes him into the water in a reappropriation of the baptism scene that is earlier associated with the onset of Starghers schizophrenia. As she does so, she reverses Starghers earlier appropriation of her scopic power in the duplication of her clinical cell by remaking the meaning of the central image of his psychosis, reinterpreting this nal immersion as a release from pain and the horrors of the adult Starghers world. Catherine is also released from pain and subjection here, the lm suggests, as it juxtaposes this baptism image with that of Starghers missing victim nally saved by Novak and crying in his arms. The earlier identication of Catherine and this victim culminates in their shared triumph over Stargher. Assuming these dichotomous personae Redeemer and Avenger Catherine ostensibly effects a separation of the therapeutic and violent aspects of her clinical gaze, a separation that has been foreshadowed by the fragmentation of Starghers personality into the innocent boy and the monstrous adult. The lm elides any image of the boy experiencing the violence that Cath-

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erine inicts on his counterpart; we see only the aftermath and only Catherines monastic, compassionate persona in the frame with the boys bleeding body. Visually the two aspects of the clinical agenda are carefully partitioned, even though Stargher himself insists that the boy and he are one and the same, and even though Catherine acts as both Redeemer and Revenger. But this separation is a trick of light, a resolution at the moral level, where, as David Slocum suggests, the depictions of violent behavior in lms invoke some of societys most central and guiding values, those which justify the use of force, illuminate the parameters of social order and demarcate legitimate from illegitimate action.31 Clearly Catherines avenging violence is delineated from Starghers antisocial violence in that she acts to save some good part of him while he acts to feed his evil desires. She kills the boy in killing the man, but her compassion for the child as she does so redenes the act as salvation and release. But at what price? Can such a separation be effected, given the relentless deconstruction of these polarities throughout the lm, which posits that the normal and the pathological are congruent in real and disturbing ways? In fact, this separation can be bought only at the price of the integrated identity. Catherine may be both Redeemer and Revenger, but she must be fragmented by the lms visual grammar, assuming contrasting costumes that reect the age-old dichotomous representations of woman as virgin and whore, nurturing mother and devourer, angel and bitch. Although she asserts, my world, my rules, she is nevertheless given a visual vocabulary that articulates only the schizophrenic condition of Western femininity. She may be released, but is she cured? What is the cure for normal femininity? Whatever the answer may be, it is not to be spoken in the language we are given. And what of the audience, that homogeneous, generic we who have been hailed and seduced by the lms visual artistry? Singh, typically a director of television commercials and rock videos, has no illusions about the allure of that artistry. Of course the visuals is [sic] what everybody pays to see, he asserts.32 Ever since my rst viewing of The Cell, I have been rankled by the question: Is the lm very smart in its exploration of the trap that it

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sets for us as it reveals our status as voyeur-vu, or is it rather very, very typical in its uncritical exploitation of the normal objectication that denes modern Western femininity? John S. Turner considers the fetishization of technologies of the gaze, suggesting that by converting the technologies and practices of surveillance into highly seductive cinematic images, images that border on the fetishization of such technologies and practices, popular cinema effectively frames an uncritical celebration of panopticism.33 On the one hand, it is possible to support this position, noting that on one level at least, The Cell stages a contestation of wills, of gazes, rather than a critique of the construction of those gazes themselves. The conclusion of the lm gives credence to this reading, as Catherine impales Stargher with the sword, the symbol of her penetrating gaze, determining him, as Bozovic would say, as the object and so foreclosing the return of the look. In this reading, it is a question of whose violent panopticism will be acceptable, not of the acceptability of violent panopticism per se. On the other hand, the deconstruction between good and bad gazing that comprises the lms subtext or countercurrent cannot be discounted, regardless of the conclusions manifest moral agenda. Nor is it necessary to resolve the tension between the two, especially since it is this tension between the visual splendor that the lm offers and the realization that the lm is looking back at us, transforming the voyeur into the voyeur-vu, that constitutes the difcult pleasures of spectatorship, the complex pleasures of mixed identication that Williams argues lie at the heart of the spectators response.34 It is this very difculty that brings the pathological structures of the normal into view, that hooks the hungry eye and captures us in our own desiring gaze.

Notes

1. 2.

Margaret Atwood, you t into me, Selected Poems 19661984 (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1990), 111. Linda Ruth Williams, An Eye for an Eye, Sight and Sound, April 1994, 14.

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3.

I thank Shawn Flynn for his interesting remarks on the link between art and violence in the lm, a link he sees as deriving partly from the tendency of art to reify the ux of the living in static, framed images. I also thank the students who watched scenes of the lm and gave me their impressions during the researching of this paper. Sarah Projansky, Watching Rape: Film and Television in Postfeminist Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 2. Mark Seltzer, Wound Culture: Trauma in the Pathological Public Sphere, October, no. 80 (1997): 1, mitpress.mit.edu/ journals/OCTO/. Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 32. Wini Breines and Linda Gordon, quoted in de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender, 32. Pascal Bonitzer, Hitchcockian Suspense, in Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock), ed. Slavoj Ziz ek (New York: Verso, 1992), 19. See my article, Tent Him to the Quick: Vision, Violence, and Penalty in Shakespeares Henry VI, Renaissance Drama 32 (2003). Here Wilsons insights into the conundrum that structures the anatomists gaze inform my own discussion of the limitations of the judiciary gaze in the plays where Shakespeares deployment of dramatic irony questions the status of truth based on bringing to light that which is hidden. Luke Wilson, William Harveys Prelectiones: The Performance of the Body in the Renaissance Theatre of Anatomy, Representations 17 (1987), 62.

4. 5.

6. 7. 8.

9.

10. Steven Bruhm, William Godwins Fleetwood: The Epistemology of the Tortured Body, Eighteenth-Century Life 16 (1992): 26. 11. Beccaria quoted in Bruhm, The Epistemology of the Tortured Body, 27. 12. Tarsem Singh, Directors Commentary, The Cell, DVD (Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2000). 13. Nicolas Beatrizet, Muscle Man, copperplate engraving, repr. in Michael Neill, Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 127. Neill provides an excellent discussion of Renaissance death

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culture, focusing on representations of deaths pageant in art and literature. 14. Bruhm, William Godwins Fleetwood, 27. 15. Gunther Von Hagens, Human Body Worlds (Korperwelten), www.korperwelten.de/index2.htm (accessed 4 November 2003). 16. The Show Goes On, This Is London, Evening Standard, www.rugbymail.co.uk/entertainment/art/articles/ (accessed 24 October 2003). 17. Dietmar Henning, The Human Body Worlds Exhibit in Cologne, World Socialist Web site (23 March 2000), www.wsws.org/articles/2000/mar2000/body-m23.shtml. 18. Jonny Berliner and Fintan OHiggins, Corpus, the Musical, dir. Ben Okrent, Modify the Van Productions, University of Leeds Student Union, February 2003. 19. Matt Warman, review of Corpus, by Jonny Berliner and Fintan OHiggins, Daily Telegraph (14 August 2003), www.modifythevan. com/corpus.html (accessed 24 October 2003). 20. Seltzer, Wound Culture, 1. 21. Bonitzer, Hitchcockian Suspense, 20. 22. De Lauretis, Technologies of Gender, 43. 23. Iris Marion Young, Throwing Like a Girl, Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 150. 24. Miran Bozovic, The Man behind His Own Retina, in Everything . You Always Wanted to Know, 170. 25. Singh, Directors Commentary. 26. Seltzer, Wound Culture, 4. 27. Greg Dean Schmitz, review of The Cell, Upcomingmovies.com, www.upcomingmovies.com/cell.html (accessed 6 March 2002). 28. Cover illustration. The Cell, DVD. 29. Schmitz, review of The Cell. 30. Carol Clover, Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film, in Feminist Film Theory : A Reader, ed. Sue Thornham (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 242.

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31. David Slocum, Film Violence and the Institutionalization of Cinema, Social Research 67 (2000), ehostvgw20.epnet.com/ delivery.asp. 32. Singh, Directors Commentary. 33. John S. Turner II, Collapsing the Interior/Exterior Distinction: Surveillance, Spectacle, and Suspense in Popular Cinema, Wide Angle 20 (1998): 95 96. 34. Williams, An Eye, 14.

Lisa Dickson is an assistant professor in the Department of English

at the University of Northern British Columbia specializing in renaissance literature. She has published articles in Renaissance Drama, Hamlet Studies, Modern Language Studies, and English Studies in Canada. Currently she is working on a book on violence in lm and stage versions of Shakespeares plays.

Catherine as Avenger