Freedom Driven Journey? or Sex Driven Journey?
“At this point he associated scopophilia with taking other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze” (Kaplan 37). This is referring to Freud’s explanation of the gaze. People are compelled to gaze out of curiosity and it takes over them. Some are controlled by the object of interest and some are the controller of their object. Women tend to be controlled by their gaze objects and men being in control of the phallus are the ones controlling their gaze objects: majority of the time are women. In the movie Woman on a Motorcycle, it is all about the male gaze. This movie reiterates the saying that the male is the action subject and the female is acted upon. When Rebecca knows that she was raped by a man she throws herself at him even more, she asks to be acted upon. She seeks freedom so therefore she rebels and starts to ride, but I question what the definition of freedom is to her when she wants to be controlled by a man in the end of her journey. In her narrative when she arrives at Daniel’s place she throws herself onto him and lets him take over. When she was sitting at the restaurant/bar she says that Daniel never gave her a role, never confirming his feelings or the status of their relationship. All Daniel wanted was her body. It bothers me that knowing all this she still yearns for him. She speaks out about how she is sicken by all the attention she gets from all the men, but her facial expression and body language tells another story. Even when Daniel tells her that he never asked her to come, she does not seem phase by the comment but moves even closer to him. I do not think she was searching for freedom but instead searching for someone to control her. I find this movie completely unliberating to women. Rebecca demonstrates that women are lacking and seen as castrated. This movie was entirely for the male audience, there was no part of the movie did I feel it was for women viewers.