Sitting across from me but far away, beneath the plastic hanging ivy, she sat. Copper and silver hair, singed, down to her waist in thin spindles that looked like a parched fern. I was at a restaurant I would never go to alone, with my boyfriend sat across from me, but closer, maybe two feet, dipping chicken wings into blue cheese sauce.
She was in a corduroy jacket, silver necklaces, carrying her skin like a tailored suit. I didn’t notice much about the man sat beside her other than the cotton t-shirt hanging from his shoulders, also eating chicken wings with blue cheese sauce. I could tell his t-shirt was soft, knew exactly how it felt on his body. I had always liked the way a well worn t-shirt feels on a body. Especially in a heated bar.
I wanted to be her at her age, maybe in her sixties, eating a burger in a bar in the middle of the day. It seemed better to be doing so than to be doing so at twenty six. I could have sworn she looked just like Diane Keaton in Annie Hall, but with different hair, different clothes, different skin, a different smile. It was only later, at night, at the computer, when I realised that she looked nothing like her. Yet they were the same in my mind somehow, and I welcomed their attachment.
My dad helped me dress up like Annie Hall when I was six years old for a local costume party in the village church. I wore a tie, a white button-up, a pair of brown trousers. I didn’t know who Annie Hall was but I did know, in a new way, who I liked being - or not being - or liked the idea of being - one day. I was dressed like a woman, who was dressing like a boy who was dressing like a man with clothes that were too big. I was dressing not as a real person but a character on a screen, and all of these links between character and sense daisy chained into a knot that was indiscernible. I didn’t know why it felt better to dress loose, big, boxy. I was strong though, tailored, and I felt important, which was frightening and exciting in equal measure. It was like the day a few years later, in Year Six, age nine, when I felt my lungs shrinking under the pressure of learning what air was. Lesson two, just before breaktime. I was just like Annie Hall, but nothing like her. I was a girl as a boy as a film star in a suit and tie. I was a character at a party and on screen. I was a character I had never seen. I was my dad, though he never wore suits. I was the image of power, but an image that wasn’t real in my life or memory. An illusion.
Then, when I was twenty years old, I said hello to Diane Keaton under the Manhattan bridge in Dumbo. She was wearing a hat like a photo frame, rigid and big. I told her that I loved her, and I meant it.
When I was at university I wanted to conduct the local school choristers as tall as my hipbones through a rendition of Forever Young by Alphaville. I didn’t, because I didn’t know how to conduct, and I didn’t know how to reach completion on my own artistic ideas, either. Instead, I sat in carpeted rooms as my friends smoked weed, painting amorphous blobs in lamplight, thinking about the sort of character I would be if I were a film character. Whether I would be an Anderson, Allen, Kubrick or Tarantino kind of woman. Whether I would be mesmerizing. Who I would mesmerize.
I let my stomach fold over my underwear now, as I eat toast at his breakfast bar in his kitchen. I let my boobs fall low. My posture curves. I direct myself to be comfortable in his home. I free bleed on his wooden chairs and wipe it up an hour later. I show my whole self to the cameras that don’t exist until they don’t exist at all, even in my imagination. I don’t hold in my stomach ‘just in case.’ I don’t brush my hair, ‘just in case.’ I don’t stand for the cameras or the eyes - even the ones in my own head - that I’ve played up to for as long as I’ve watched television. I bare myself to myself. From all angles. I do this because, if I have to be a character, it best be directed by me. Written by me. I can be anyone. A Morrison kind of woman.
I get up and walk towards the window, to look through the gauze. Nipples wrinkling up in the cold, hairs on end. I watch a man leave a pizza restaurant, crossing the street. He covers his stomach with his coat, wraps it tightly around himself. He walks by a clean car and notices that his fringe has strayed from his parting, so aligns the threads in a neat direction. His sunglasses sit on top of his hat as he heads down the road, past the house. I can see my window in the reflection of the shades, as the gauze ripples in the wind.
I learned about the Male Gaze in my early twenties. I remember the lecture well because a woman in my class sat next to me and told me, halfway through the slides, that I needed to sort out the hair that was growing, and still grows, from a mole on the left side of my face. I laughed at her and she laughed back even she wasn’t being sarcastic. Our laughs were misdirected, like arrows flying in the opposite direction.
There is a muddy, sinuous, elastic, fraying line between romanticizing your own life, and acting for the male gaze. There is also, a difficult definition of romance that has been defined by male actors. These notions we have on romanticizing our own life, then, are determined, or framed often by the cinema we watched growing up, and the cinema, film and music we watch now. Even the cinema our parents watched, the cultural references glued to our families and circles.
When I romanticised my own life as a university student, it often involved performing a version of myself that was mapped out to me in the films I had watched as a child. The women directed by men. The Annie Hall’s, and the sexy women with the shiny legs, and the hair. I will always be far too talkative to reflect their linelessness, but I would be lying if I said that I haven’t tried. The posturing, posing, tucking in. The foregrounding of male characters. The prioritisation of my own costume, makeup, hair - it all played into it.
Camera one. Camera two.
He walks on, past my house, to his own car by the junction. Gets in and turns the heating on. Warms his hands up on the fan that shoots air onto his face and windscreen. The hat stays on. So do the sunglasses. He looks to his lap for a while at his phone before finding the right song. Turns it on. Is it the opening scene, or closing scene? He winds the window down so that everyone looks at him, catches a glimpse, but no one does. He is the main character, and this time, I am watching.
The male gaze in cinema is a trap even the best-intentioned of them can fall into. Take John Sayles' Passion Fish. It's the female protagonist's story until she falls asleep and dreams of the man she desires, and then, in a dream sequence, her story becomes his. Some habits are more resistant than others, I guess.