In 2001, Michael Haneke directed a film called, The Piano Teacher. Haneke’s attitude, as conveyed to the spectator, is not to rail against pornography, per se, but to rail against its impact as generated by a capitalist patriarchal society. This stems from a similar modality of thinking introduced by Linda Williams in 1989, in which she “...moves beyond the impasse of the anti-porn/anti-censorship debate to analyze what hard-core film pornography is and does…” (Slade 656). Haneke’s method portrays and stays true to a patriarchal approach to a cinematic narrative and does so through the gaze of a woman and her scopophilic desires. “Scopophilic, arises from pleasure in using another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight...developed
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Mainstream movies generally show violence as the norm and sexuality as taboo, however, Haneke depicts hardcore pornography inversely. Heightened expectations, lets down the viewer in every sensuous scene to exemplify a truer nature of explicitness. “...[P]ornography is neither explained nor accounted for by its explicitness (...by leaving out elements, by heightening expectations), for the development of a feminist politics of pleasure it might be necessary to reverse the process and account for how the explicitness does operate” (Stern 217). A capitalist-patriarchal society that treats pornography as a fetish/commodity can skew the realities of how we should behave towards one another. If a society can alter the portrayal of sex and violence, it might be able to overcome the repressive states in which violence is the status quo and sexuality the taboo in the sense that it does not promote the stability of healthy …show more content…
Meanwhile, her higher faculties are based on musical aesthetic notions of a romantic formalist era long forgotten. However, this is a contradiction because she is playing out the role of the typical male/active protagonist, yet yearns for a time when men had full dominance over women. Her abnormal mother-daughter partnership skews her reality (schizophrenia) and her role in a capitalist patriarchal society. Understanding Erika’s psychology helps the spectator interpret her viewing of pornography as applied to relationships as illustrated in the porn
Mainstream movies generally show violence as the norm and sexuality as taboo, however, Haneke depicts hardcore pornography inversely. Heightened expectations, lets down the viewer in every sensuous scene to exemplify a truer nature of explicitness. “...[P]ornography is neither explained nor accounted for by its explicitness (...by leaving out elements, by heightening expectations), for the development of a feminist politics of pleasure it might be necessary to reverse the process and account for how the explicitness does operate” (Stern 217). A capitalist-patriarchal society that treats pornography as a fetish/commodity can skew the realities of how we should behave towards one another. If a society can alter the portrayal of sex and violence, it might be able to overcome the repressive states in which violence is the status quo and sexuality the taboo in the sense that it does not promote the stability of healthy …show more content…
Meanwhile, her higher faculties are based on musical aesthetic notions of a romantic formalist era long forgotten. However, this is a contradiction because she is playing out the role of the typical male/active protagonist, yet yearns for a time when men had full dominance over women. Her abnormal mother-daughter partnership skews her reality (schizophrenia) and her role in a capitalist patriarchal society. Understanding Erika’s psychology helps the spectator interpret her viewing of pornography as applied to relationships as illustrated in the porn