"Rewriting the Gaze: Hearing Sex in Cinema," an essay featuring Anomalisa

Lucy Benjamin has a deep essay on Maifeminism.com, looking at sex in cinema, and Anomalisais a reference throughout.

Here's the intro and a snippet.

The problem that orients this paper is straightforwardly simple: is it possible to dismantle the synonymy between the filmed body of the woman having sex and the subsequent (masculine) consumption of the body in question?

[...]

Situating claims that encompass film – though not purely visual – aesthetics, politics and philosophy within the narrative framework of Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson’s 2015 stop-motion film, Anomalisa, affirms the force of the voice and the aural as sites of political performance. The film’s abstraction of reality through the use of stop-motion puppets emphasises the presence of voice, a stress that is heightened by the film’s narrative preoccupation with voice and identity. All the film’s characters are voiced by Tom Noonan, the only exception being the protagonist Michael (David Thewlis) and the anomalous Lisa (Jennifer Jason Leigh), hence the film’s title – a portmanteau of anomaly and Lisa. The seemingly simplistic casting of three voice actors for the entire film complicates the spectator’s understanding of what it means to connect and empathise with a character. I argue that this disconnection is born in direct relation to the flatness of the character’s voicing, an opacity which is broken principally by the singularity of Lisa’s voice. (Source)

Thanks to Chay!

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