Analyze how Far From Heaven employ mechanisms of cinematic identification.

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Assignment 3

Student Number: XXXYAN001        

Name:  Yan Zhen Xu

Date:  27 September 2005

Course Code:  FAM201S

Tutor’s name:  Ian Rijsdijk

Title:  Analyze how Far From Heaven employ mechanisms of cinematic identification to position the spectator in relation to race, gender and sexuality.  Consider who the spectator is invited to identify with, how identification is elicited, and why is it ‘politically significant’ to analyze which characters spectators are encouraged to identify with in films.

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Far From Heaven

This essay will discuss how cinematic identification is used to position the spectator in relation to race, gender and sexuality.  

“The experience of being able to put oneself so deeply into a character -feel oneself to be so like the character- that one can feel the same emotions and experience the same events as the character is supposed to be feeling and experiencing” (Ellis, J,1982: 43).  

Cinematic identification involves two different tendencies.  Firstly there is the dreaming and fantasy that involves the multiple and contradictory tendencies within the construction of the individual.  Secondly there is the experience of the narcissistic identification with the image of a human figure perceived as other.  The spectator does not therefore ‘identify’ with the hero or heroine: an identification that would, if put in its conventional sense, involve socially constructed males identifying with male heroes, and socially constructed females identifying with women heroines.

Spectatorship is more complex than the simple in association with male or female spectators with masculine or feminine positions.  Some psychoanalytic film theories have presumed that spectators are moving away from only identifying with the single narrative figure, and towards the claim that he or she engages in a more complex identification with the overall narrative.  Far From Heaven invites the audience to identify with Cathy, and also at the same time, to sympathize for, Cathy’s gardener.  The narrative of the film provides the spectator with multiple and shifting points of identification.  Identification is therefore multiple and fractured a sense of seeing the constituent parts of the spectator’s own psyche parades before her or him.

There are many reasons why spectators tend to identify with certain characters.  Firstly the audience tends to praise a star’s difference from their own.  Secondly, the audiences’ wish to overcome the difference between herself and the star so that she can become more like the star and thirdly, the audience values the personality and behavior of the star, and sees the star’s power and confidence as providing her with a positive role model.  (Hollows, J and Janconvich, M, 1995).  The audience of Far From Heaven tends to identify with Cathy.  She has a strong character, she is very beautiful and she is adored by her friends and neighbors.  Everyone wants to be like her, even the audience.  And despite her weaknesses discovered later on, the audience tends to sympathize with her, secretly wishing she will find her happy ending.  Raymond on the other hand is a sympathetic character.  The audience can relate to him because of his difference to the audience.  The audience sympathizes for him and wants to see him happy in the end despite racial prejudice.  

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The audience will feel especially close to characters when they identify with them.  This normally happens when the character is going through times of stress, drama and crisis.  The audience sees Cathy’s perfect life crumbling, and the audience identifies with her.  This is also emphasized through Cathy’s point of view of her disgraced community who wants nothing to do with her when she they hear rumors of her and Raymond.

Human beings have been divided into biological groups known as races.  Race is socially constructed.  This idea dates back in history from the seventeenth century European colonial which ...

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