Or if not that, then they want you to be something that you just aren’t, even though you might wish you could be. That’s worse.
-Kate in ‘Girl You Want’
My review of DEMO is here. Go on, read it. Then come back here and delve into this post.
I’ve mentioned Laura Mulvey’s theory on ‘the gaze’ in film before, and linked there to a good summation of her, plus some notes on reactions to her. Even more basically, she posits that film assumes a male spectator who takes pleasure in looking-at. She differentiates between “voyeuristic” looking, which asserts control over the person or thing looked at, and “fetishistic” looking, which turns the object of the gaze into something pleasing in and of itself–a fetish.
I wrote a paper deconstructing this a bit back in the day, threw some Kristeva in there, and was given a pat on the back and a department award.
But I’ve never seen a better examination of this whole theory, and how it leaves the movie theater and comes into our lives, than DEMO #5, ‘Girl You Want.’
(If you haven’t read it yet and you think you want to, go, buy the new collected edition, and then come back and read this. If you have read it, or you probably won’t but want to see what I’m on about, keep reading.)
Refresher/fill-in/spoilers here: DEMO is loosely based around young people with ’superpowers.’ Except they’re not really superpowers, and they’re certainly not treated as such in the stories. They’re more stories about what would happen in the real world, not the Marvel or DC universe, if we had strange powers. Kate is a young girl who changes her appearance–not when she wants to, but when other people want her to. When people look at Kate, they see what they want to see in a girl, but more importantly, she actually physically changes. Her body becomes what they want it to be.
The very embodiment, of course, of the controlling and fetishizing gaze. She is literally acted upon by their looking at her. Despite her attempts to not be sexualized–wearing baggy clothes and hiding behind shaggy hair, in Becky Cloonan’s drawings very androgynous–she just can’t help it.
We all receive this projection, and to some extent we even internalize it, but here it’s externalized.
Think for a minute about shapeshifting. Then think about having your body change against your will. It’s part of what’s so terrifying about puberty (and if I still have a mind to later on, maybe I’ll take on another DEMO story that embodies that fear so well). Imagine this happening at the will of that guy who looks at you funny when you walk past him on the street.
We’ve all known what it’s like to have someone assume things about us that are completely wrong. Women (and men!) know what it’s like to be sexualized whether we like it or not–and Brian Wood and Cloonan here do a great job of articulating that feeling, a drawn-out answer to the ‘Well, you dressed like that, you must’ve been asking for it’ line that’s so damn tired.
It’s taking the feeling of entitlement to another person’s body a step further and turned it to literally invading and manipulating that body, all with a gaze.
And this could be done right in no other medium but comics, which have been targeted even more exclusively to the male gaze than film for most of their existence. Comic book women are completely unnatural, as are the men. And as was pointed out, actually, by the writer of this comic, the comic-book men are oddly de-sexed–check out a spandex-clad crotch–no bulge, even while the women are hypersexed.
Here, though, the characters actually look like real people. Kate is pretty, but not gorgeous, and she is transformed into all sorts of embodiments of male fantasy–a visual pun on the male-fantasy nature of (mainstream) comics. And because comics, like film, are a visual and narrative medium, the reader is implicated in the enjoyment of these fantasies. Because Cloonan’s art does turn Kate into the lush librarian, the cheerleader, the punk rock girl, and makes her pleasing to look at, we all objectify her and then get called on it.
And then in another twist, Kate gets called on her own gaze. She doesn’t learn from what she deals with in her own life, and she turns and does the same thing to another girl. She doesn’t sexualize her, though–she projects romantic fantasies instead. “What if she’s the one?”
All because this person didn’t have a fantasy when she looked at Kate. She saw Kate, physically, as she is.
Kate switches from the passive, looked-at role here to the voyeuristic viewer–literally, as she follows the girl home from work one night. And with this swap again the story critiques the false dichotomy between romantic fantasy and sexual fantasy: the idea that romance is ‘good’ and sex is ‘bad.’ Because though Kate and the boy at the beginning of the story have much the same intentions–”I just wanted to ask you out for coffee or something!” the boy calls after her–Kate is disgusted by his fantasy of her, but fails to realize that her own expectations of love at first sight are just as unrealistic.
It could be said, even, that Kate is turned off by the realization that the girl IS sexual, with the living embodiment of that sexuality appearing in front of her: a child, irrevocable proof that the girl’s had sex–with a man.
Kate’s gaze, while controlling, doesn’t have the same effect on the girl as other people’s do on Kate, and this could be read as being because they’re both female. Mulvey would argue, of course, that pleasure-in-looking is inherently masculine, and that the girl cannot transform Kate because she is not male. And that Kate’s gaze is not sexual for the same reason.
But Kate is clearly taking pleasure in looking, taking it to the extreme, really, by following the girl home. She does step into the male-spectator role, helped along by her androgynous looks, and she even takes the girl’s image into her own hands, drawing her over and over again. The mention of “I just wanted to ask you out for coffee or something!” at the beginning notes that just because the boys have sexual fantasies about Kate doesn’t make them all evil, and makes clear that Kate is no better than they are.
Kate is fetishized by the men at the beginning, quite literally, as each girl she turns into is a fetishized object: librarian, goth girl, Asian girl, cheerleader, punk rock girl. But she in turn becomes voyeur. And at the end, we get all those gazes crashing down around her as she realizes she’s no better than anyone who looks at her. This story critiques objectification from every angle, implicating the heroine as well as the reader, and also critiques the idea that women don’t look, that sexualizing someone is inherently the worst thing you can do to them, and the whole notion of romantic perfection.
Instead, it continues a theme that runs throughout DEMO, and throughout Wood’s work, really: that real life is messy, uneven, fucked up, and more beautiful that way anyway.
Links to Brian Wood and Becky Cloonan. Buy their other stuff. It’s awesome.
It is interesting, although I think it’s really just the evolution of the shapeshifter. After all, don’t all shapeshifters conform to what other people want to see? That’s how they get their way, or even how they get by. For example, the shape-shifter (or illusionist, it was never completely clear) on Heroes season 1 made herself look like a hot woman because that’s what people wanted her to look like. Sure, it wasn’t directly controlled by their thoughts, but the indirect control is still present.
I think it’s always interesting to deconstruct what super-powers really are and how people use them in stories/would use them in real life. Definitely what I liked about Demo, and definitely something I could see done more and even just to a further degree. Thanks for getting me thinking about it!
Bravo! I’ll definitely check this out.
thanks for writing about this in a way i never could