"What is a woman in a film text?" Is it the object to be seen, the object of objectification, or the text itself with independent personality and full character. As we all know, in the traditional Hollywood narrative, under the "sexist" and "voyeuristic" viewing mechanism based on male desire, the status of women in video texts is only one of thousands of instrumental roles. . Sex, Lies, and Videotape, on the other hand, deals with women and men, marriage and sex with a sense of non-Hollywood alienation.
Feminist film critics use "passionate alienation" to advertise their position, and this "Sex, Lies, and Videotape" also happens to stand in this position to construct a relationship between "sex, lies and videotape". The story of the relationship between the two: the triangular relationship between a pair of sisters and a pair of old classmates, which was provoked by the videotape, contains a fact about the awakening of women's consciousness under the seemingly concise routine story-women use One's own sexual experience and sexual awakening to disintegrate men's stubborn extramarital affairs and voyeurism. "With the objective restraint of the videotape, the lies born of sexual incongruity are vividly displayed, thus touching on the lies and conflicts hidden in a surfaced and peaceful family; the silent gaze of women's rebelliousness alienates men. Self-exposing to the audience subverts the central authority of men in film and television."
Laura Malloway once put forward such a point of view: "The subconscious existing in the patriarchal society constructs the form of the film". The male field in the movies is always in the spotlight, he is often a symbol of strength, morality and authority. Women, on the other hand, appear as weak and castrated. She is just a symbol under male peeping, a carrier carrying referential meaning, carrying a part of male values, that is, what women should be like in the eyes of men. Ann in the film is a classic female image in mainstream male cultural values - virtuous and elegant, living by relying on her husband and maintaining family face. As an "other" who has been "aphasic", her efforts to cover up an unhappy marriage with elegant words are pale and powerless in the dual narrative system of sound and picture. She lost her inner voice, maintained lies, and even created lies, unknowingly incorporating herself into the male concept system and becoming a symbol of maintaining male authority. When she confirms her husband's infidelity and realizes that her beliefs and life are really nothing more than a lie, Ann chooses to tell the truth in front of the camera - using the silent gaze as a weapon to fight back against the male repressive gaze ( Gaze is a symbol of power and status, and it is also a resistance and challenge to authority), and consciously resisted and reconstructed with naked thoughts that showed the truth of the heart. In the end, she became a living "woman" who defined her own identity and existence in her own way, and dominated her own life, just like her sister.
"The feminist appeal in "Sex, Lies, Videotape" is accompanied by the juxtaposition of reconstruction and deconstruction. Both the character setting and the plot arrangement reflect the indiscriminate coexistence of the two. Women's self-confidence Along with the innate kinship factors and acquired social environmental factors, the film implicitly expresses the predicament of women in this reconstruction through non-Hollywood-style narrative methods, and deconstructs men to set off women's predicament Salvation in." Simple codes, gentle rhythms, no violent conflict, and no moral preaching. But it is in this simplicity and gentleness, in the process of slowly uncovering the fig leaf, that the emotional conflict deep within the characters is deeply depicted and intriguing.
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