Voyeurism and the Postmodern Cinematic Gaze

A turn to the pictoral seems to characterize contemporary literary studies. The late twentieth-century privileging of discourse, with its trend to read pictures and images as texts, seems now to have turned back upon itself, seeking the visual in the verbal, as well as vice versa. The roots of this might be traced to Foucault's work on the panoptic gaze, but that, for him, was purely a surveillance act, and thus more restricted than the broad view of the visual that I wish to adopt here. Vision implies both to see and to be seen, but not necessarily in an aggessive act of political, economic, or social domination. To look on a scene, in a voyeuristic sense, is, of course, associated with sexual deviance; but one may also look on a scene with sympathy, or horror, or detachment, or mere curiosity. It is this broader conception of seeing, not only as voyeuristic, but also as evidence of an interest in the other, that is the focus of the present chapter.

The postmodernist gaze, as understood here, arises out of theories surrounding that most characteristically contemporary of visual media, the cinema. According to Norman Denzin in The Cinematic Society, the voyeur is the iconic, postmodern self. Denzin regards the camera as a kind of voyeuristic ‘knowing eye’, which exposes the illusory structures of truth fabricated by contemporary society, thus broadening the concept of illicit viewing to embrace both social criticism and a form of cultural self-reflexivity in which the questions of who gazes, on whom, from where, for what motiviation, and with whose permission are paramount. The postmodern cinematic voyeur has adopted characteristics of the classic peeping-tom. He or she is socially abnormal, even paranoid, and is marginalized by the society upon which he or she casts an eye. But these features are fused with a social conscience that gives the contemporary watcher a particular insight denied to society at large. The classic voyeur has thus developed into a professional onlooker – the detective and the spy are the most obvious examples from popular culture, but there is also the psychoanalyst, the journalist, the photographer, the tourist, the anthropologist, even the modern writer.