"If a film scene lasting a little more than a minute depicts oral sex performed on a woman without showing nudity, does the movie in which the scene appears merit an R rating or an NC-17? Both, apparently." - Steven Zeitchik, Los Angeles Times
Although Blue Valentine and Black Swan depict the same sex act, this analysis argues that the films received different ratings from the Motion Picture Association of America because each one produces a different knowledge of sexuality. Blue Valentine resists disciplinary surveillance by affirming female pleasure and challenging the conventional male gaze. On the other hand, Black Swan plays to the panoptical male connoisseur by reflecting a phallocentric gaze and reinforcing the disciplinary themes of madness, lesbian-spectacle, and the good-girl-gone-bad. Consequently, Blue Valentine's articulation of oral sex was initially rejected, while Black Swan's depiction of oral sex was sanctioned; Blue Valentine was subject to harsher disciplinary sanctions by the MPAA than Black Swan.
This study contributes to our understanding of the panoptical male connoisseur and highlights the role of the filmic gaze in resisting or reinscribing its disciplinary power. Considering the disciplining of women's bodies in contemporary society, Sandra Bartky (1988) explains:
As modern industrial societies change and as women themselves offer resistance to patriarchy, older forms of domination are eroded. But new forms arise, spread, and become consolidated. Women are no longer required to be chaste, or modest, to restrict their activity to the home, or even to realize their properly feminine destiny in maternity: Normative femininity is coming more and more to be centered on woman's body-not its duties and obligations or even its capacity to bear children, but its sexuality. (p. 81)
The disciplinary power of patriarchy increasingly targets female sexuality. Bartky draws special attention to visual media for its growing significance as a site of this disciplinary discourse and calls for more critical attention to the power of images in television and film (p. 229). This analysis responds to Bartky's observation and explicates how Hollywood film and the MPAA target female sexuality to reaffirm the power of the panoptical male connoisseur. This analysis also contributes to the considerable body of work on female spectatorship. While scholars have demonstrated the liberatory potential of a feminine vantage point, our analysis of the MPAA's different responses to Blue Valentine and Black Swan illustrates how disciplinary power may be wielded to undermine the shifts in power and knowledge threatened by a resistant feminine gaze. This analysis also contributes to research on Hollywood cinema as a powerful network of meaning and demonstrates this network's role in disciplining our cultural knowledge of sexuality. Pennington (2007) reminds us "Sex, in its complexity, unites and divides people. Some of sex's most common—and divisive—cultural manifestations are its representations in cinema" (p. ix). Our analysis underscores the importance of demystifying the dominant sex discourse perpetuated by mainstream film—a heteronormative sex discourse that privileges male pleasure, objectifies women, and marginalizes female sexuality.
In This Film Has Not Yet Been Rated (2006), Kirby Dick and Eddie Schmidt propose that explicit and/or graphic films are much more likely to receive a lenient MPAA rating if they show heterosexual and male-centered sex. This study demonstrates how the "lesbian-spectacle" falls squarely within this Hollywood tradition of sanctioning male-centered representations of sex. The comparison of the visual and narrative rhetoric of Blue Valentine and Black Swan also suggests that sensationalized depictions of sex are favored over more realist and authentic depictions. In fact, portrayals of sex that conform to heterosexual male fantasy are more likely to be rewarded with an R-Rating by the MPAA and they are also more likely to be embraced by a wide audience.
Additionally, the success of explicit comedies like American Pie (1999), Team America (2004), or Zack and Miri Make a Porno (2008)—all rated R—implies that explicit sex is also acceptable in the contexts of humor, absurdity, and ridicule. In contrast, independent films such as Kids (1995), Requiem for a Dream (2000), or Brown Bunny (2003)—all not rated—that portray explicit sex in the context of social realism and explore the consequences of unprotected sex and sexual abuse, have had limited commercial success in America. Derek Cianfrance, director of Blue Valentine, provides commentary that is instructive here. He explains, “We tried to treat sex in the movie with great responsibility and realism—like the rest of the movie is a realistic portrait of two people, so the sex is very realistic in our movie. It's not eroticized, it's just life" (Qtd in Rosen, 2010). Cianfrance identifies exactly what we believe the MPAA sought to penalize—a "realistic" approach to sex—separate from male fantasy—that validates the perspective and pleasure of a woman. While spectacles of male fantasy and portrayals of absurdity often include explicit portrayals of sex that are sanctioned by the MPAA, they do not threaten the dominant patriarchal order and our analysis demonstrates that this is what really counts.
We hope that our study of Blue Valentine and Black Swan encourages a more actively critical consumption of Hollywood film. Foss and Gill (1987) explain what is at stake:
When we are armed with knowledge of how power relations operate in a discursive formation, we are more able to choose whether or not to accept the influence of the power in the system, how to garner more power as rhetors in the system, and how to loosen the hold of that power over us. (p. 397)
This essay demonstrates how critical feminist analyses of film may serve an emancipatory function—exposing and unmasking discourses of power to "loosen their hold" over us. In the end, we believe that citizens can be more active contributors to the construction of sexual representations. As consumers, we can refuse to support films that reinscribe hegemonic sex-power relations and we can demand films that legitimate alternative vantage points and affirm marginalized perspectives. Clearly, vigilant attention to patriarchal discourses, within and beyond the screens of Hollywood cinema, is needed to expose the disciplining of female sexuality embedded in our cultural knowledge.