Travelin' Thru: Mona As A Disruption Of Phallocentricism
"And yet, surprisingly, the dismal rambling of this apathetic, nihilistic drifter becomes the starting point...for a uniquely polictical criticism of French culture and French national indentity...She passes through the lives of various characters - that is, through a landscape as much social as it is literal - provoking various reactions" (Laderman 266).
In the 1985 film, "Vagabond," Agnes Varda successfully counters the power of the male gaze through the story of Mona, a drifter and hitchhiker in France. This narrative embraces those of feminist counter-culture cinema in that Mona is the driving force behind the movement and action of the film. Unlike "Girl On A Motorcycle," where Rebecca was driven by the male gaze, Mona is driven by herself. Her cause for moving is her own doing, and not a result being objectified and under the permanent gaze of a man. When Mona is living at the goat farm, she is offered a place to live, land to work, but as she is turned off by stability, she doesn't take advantage of this. As the fatherly goat herder attempts to point out her character flaws and make her do something with herself, she calls up the driving force inside her, moving on. This shows that she is in no way captured by the phallocentric world, but rather she is living and moving for herself. There are moments in the film where men objectify Mona's body, but as she does not recieve their male gaze, their objectification falls short and becomes meaningless (example: when some boys are taunting her at the water hose, she flips them the bird and they quickly forget her).
Besides being immune to the gaze of men, Mona's force in this film changes all that it touches, making Mona a social change as well. Her drifting takes her to many different places, and in turn she encouters all levels of social class: from sleeping with goats to drinking brandy in a mansion. As she encoutners each status, she touches the person she is with. Yolande was the most noticable touched by Mona. Mona's stealing of private property from the house Yolande works in ultimately caused her termination in the social sense. However, Mona also touched Yolande in a personal way, making her realize that her boyfriend is a shit, that she wants the kind of love she imagined when she saw Mona and her current man sleeping together. Yolande's life is one of many examples in which Mona's mere presence changed lives and outlooks. In doing this, Varda gives Mona a power greater than phallocentricism and cultural precedents, she gives her the power to touch and to continue to move. Giving this power to a woman is a sure mark of feminist counter-cinema as she has the power to touch, change, and abolish the power of the male gaze and objectivity, at least when it comes to her own body. This is illustrated further in Yolande's realization that her boyfriend is an asshole. As Mona, a walking disruption to the male gaze, is able to deobjectify herself, so Yolande is able to take some steps toward deobjectification in realizing that what she has is not what she wants. Overall, by making Mona a power in so many people's lives, and by giving her the power to move when SHE feels, Varda gives power to the female body, disrupting the make gaze and creating feminist counter-cinema.