Sex Roles (2009) 60:745–747 DOI 10.1007/s11199-008-9573-5

MEDIA REVIEW

The Critical Eye: Whose Fantasy is This? Dreamworlds 3: Desire, Sex, and Power in Music Video. Directed by Sut Jhally, Northampton, Massachusetts, Media Education Foundation, 2007. 60 min. $250.00 (University price). ISBN: 1-932869-12-3 Harmony B. Sullivan & Maureen C. McHugh

Published online: 25 February 2009 # Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2009

Women have been reduced to their body and the female body has been dismembered, commodified, and sexually objectified in the media for entertainment and marketing purposes (Bartky 1990; Basow 1992). This restrictive presentation of women as subjective beings who exist solely to be ogled and desired by men has been shown to exert a powerful effect not only on women’s psychological well being but also on men’s perception of women (Basow 1992; Fredrickson and Roberts 1997; Killbourne and Jhally 2001). In the film, Dreamworlds 3: Desire, Sex and Power in Music Video, director Sut Jhally seeks to expose how the music video medium uses this same narrow, objectifying perspective of femininity and the female body to tell a story. His campaign is to alert the audience to messages that they may have unwittingly accepted. Jhally manages to deliver this message in a way that avoids being dry or preachy. He seeks to show and not tell, so to speak, by using music videos themselves to reveal their message of manipulation. Dreamworlds 3 is an extension of Jhally’s work in Dreamworlds 1 and 2, with updated images from more recent music videos as well as the incorporation of video and photographs showing violence against women at the Puerto Rican Pride parade in 2000 and at Seattle’s 2001 Mardi Gras celebration. If you appreciated the earlier analyses of Jhally in Dreamworlds, and in Dreamworlds 2 then you are likely to value his updated version; critics of previous films will find his current offering equally problematic. Jhally, who is a professor of communications at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, uses an analytic technique similar to that employed by Jean Kilbourne H. B. Sullivan : M. C. McHugh (*) IUP, Indiana, USA e-mail: [email protected]

(Kilbourne & Jhally, 2001; Kilbourne, Vitaglione & Stallone, 1979; 1987) in her Killing Us Softly series. Both of these series use a large collection of media images presented with narration to raise the consciousness of the viewer to the impact of these images. Jhally’s analysis is of music video images of women as sexual objects and men as sexual aggressors. Similar to Kilbourne, Jhally emphasizes the feminist socio-cultural perspective that gender is socialized, not innate, and that this socialization occurs through the stories we tell about ourselves as well as the stories told to and about us that are woven into our cultural narratives. Studying these cultural narratives allows us, in Jhally’s words, to “see how our culture teaches us to be men and women.” Following from this, it seems that both Jhally and Kilbourne share the overarching goal of teaching and encouraging media literacy to an audience primarily of young adults and adolescents. Although Jhally’s film uses a similar analysis to that of Kilbourne, the two films exhibit qualitative differences due to the media on which they focus. While Kilbourne analyzes popular advertisements from magazines and prime time TV, Jhally is looking at music videos that are inherently more sexually explicit and graphically violent. While both Kilbourne and Jhally talk about the use of pornographic images, Kilbourne injects far more humor into her commentary. In Dreamworlds 3, on the other hand, there is very guttural feeling of danger that is evoked partly because the music video clips are so full of sound and movement that they engage all of the viewer’s senses therefore eliciting a more visceral response. Additionally, Jhally’s very authoritative commentary weaves over and through the videos like a floating, bodiless narrator who sees through the glitzy surface into the deeper more frightening depths. The fact that the viewer never sees Jhally reinforces the message that the videos themselves

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function as the proof and his own person is arbitrary to the process of analysis. The use of a bodiless voice as the narration device brings to mind nature documentaries, a similarity that may not be coincidental since nature documentaries are perceived to be unbiased and merely presenting facts. By using the same technique, Jhally may be hoping to inspire parallel perceptions. Separated into six chapters, Dreamworlds 3 begins by explaining the nature and purpose of objectification as particular clips from various videos are presented to illustrate the narrator’s points. Jhally’s ideas are consistent with the theory presented by Fredrickson and Roberts (1997), therefore the film could serve as an arresting and encapsulated introduction to the study of objectification theory in a college class. The second film chapter seeks to deconstruct the definition of femininity in terms of the major roles women play in most videos. Jhally presents clip upon clip of women as nymphomaniacs, desperately in need of a man, in the roles of cheerleaders, nurses, teachers, maids, librarians, and most notably strippers. It is during this section of the film that the meaning of the film title, Dreamworlds, becomes clear. The women presented in music videos have been taken, according to Jhally, straight out of the fantasies of adolescent males and the images of femininity are nothing if not wish fulfillment for young men. This dream world is not, according to the film, built from the diverse fantasies and dreams of all humans. Instead, it is the narrow fantasy of one segment of the population with the rest of the population forced to watch. In fact, we do not know that all adolescent males share this dream world. Perhaps boys learn quickly about the fantasies that they are supposed to have through repeated exposure to music videos and other media. This idea is reinforced in chapters 3, 4, and 5 with Jhally’s illustration of how video directors, some of who have also directed pornographic films, use deliberate camera angles focused on the parts of the female body that men find sexually arousing in order to present women as the object being watched. In the dream world that Jhally presents women are constantly victims of the male gaze. Jhally reiterates that analysis of the objectifying gaze of men offered by Fredrickson and Roberts (1997) and other feminist scholars. According to feminist theorist Bartky (1990) sexual objectification occurs when women’s body or body parts or sexual functions are presented as representing her or as separated from her person. While this can occur in interpersonal situations, it is most pervasive and insidious in American media where women’s bodies are sexually objectified in pornography and in mainstream advertisements (Basow 1992; Kilbourne and Jhally 2001). Jhally emphasizes the point that the gaze is androcentric, that is from the male’s perspective, which renders women sexual objects and men sexual predators.

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When the woman, even if she is the music artist, is consistently defined as the passive object of the camera’s lascivious gaze then it follows that she is never the one controlling the camera. This begs the question of who does in fact hold the power and control in the world of music videos. Jhally asserts that it is men who are portrayed as maintaining dominance, control, and even aggression in music videos. Through the use of several videos narrating stories of male stalking of and aggression towards women, the film links the distorted construction of sexuality and heterosexual relationships with the high rate of violence against women nationwide. This message is brought home even more forcefully when video footage of women being assaulted during the 2000 Puerto Rican Pride parade in New York City is shown to have a frightening similarity to images shown in certain music videos. Jhally poetically states that, unlike the women in the world of the music video who appeared to enjoy being stripped and molested, for the women assaulted in NY “this wasn’t their dream world, it was someone else’s and had turned into their nightmare.” To underscore the link between objectification of women and male aggression towards women, Jhally incorporates segments of Maggie Hadleigh West’s film, War Zone (1998). The film, which documents West’s repeated experience of being harassed by men as she walks down the street, fills a valuable space in the gray area between what some people view as harmless objectification and graphic violence. It elucidates how the dominant cultural narrative expressed in music videos and other media confers to men a sense of entitlement to comment on and even touch the bodies of women in public. Men are led to believe that women desire their gaze as well as their catcalls, because this is what they are told through the stories of music videos. In such a culture it should not be surprising, Jhally implies, that one in five college women is the victim of rape or attempted rape and a woman is assaulted every 2.5 min in the USA. An important aspect of Dreamworlds 3 is that it does not moralize about sexuality in music videos. As Jhally repeatedly states, he does not believe that sexualized images of women are necessarily hurtful in and of themselves. What is damaging is that this is the only image of women to which we are given access. Not only does this narrow portrayal of women’s existence “rob women of their humanity”, it also robs us of our voices, since our dreams, stories and fantasies are not told. When our voices are not given a venue to be heard in the narrative of pop culture, then women are not viewed as unique, feeling and thinking beings. Instead, women may be seen, by men but also by women ourselves, as decorative, dehumanized, and perhaps deserving of abuse. Within the broader context of the film’s examination of the portrayal of women in music videos, Jhally has a

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special section devoted to the portrayal of black women and men. His analysis of limited images of black women available in our culture is consistent with those of Carolyn West (2008) and others. Jhally also makes a provocative claim that the current portrayal of black men in music videos is as racist as in “Birth of a Nation”, the Ku Klux Klan film from 1915 directed by D.W. Griffiths. Jhally then goes on to draw the parallel between contemporary hip hop videos and Birth of a Nation because, as he puts it, both that film and the music industry today are controlled by powerful white men who benefit in some way from propagating such distorted views of black culture. Although this claim is not without support, it does not seem to take into account the prevalence of African-American owned and run recording labels and conglomerates. In many ways, Jhally’s explanations oversimplify the much more complex issue of the role of African-American men in the media. As a whole, Dreamworlds 3, is a somewhat heavy handed and simplistic explication of how the narratives in pop culture shape cultural behaviors. Critiques made about the two earlier versions of the film are still valid for this latest edition. One aspect of the films that has been criticized is Jhally’s technique of analysis in which he presents a very short video segment that is disconnected from the context of the entire video. When presented with other similarly cropped video clips, the segment often takes on new meaning in the context of this new narrative. Jhally is able to hammer his message into the minds of his viewers by choosing a sample of provocative clips that may or may not be representative of the full range of music videos but, when presented all together, tell a new story. It could be argued that Jhally manipulates these images in the same way as the media is doing, according to his accusations. One example of how Dreamworlds 3 may circumvent the full truth in the interest of telling its own story is the emphasis Jhally places on Nelly’s “Tip Drill” video. Long segments from the video are shown in which women dancing in bikinis are showered with money and alcohol, slapped, ogled, and even used as credit card machines by Nelly and his cohorts. Jhally does not mention, however, that this video was actually removed from MTV and the song not released on the radio because it was deemed too offensive. This seems to be an important point since Jhally’s message relies on the assumption that large audiences watch these music videos and, therefore, these videos have become powerful, indoctrinating influences in our culture. Jhally also defines a “tip drill” incorrectly as a

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woman who has sex with many men in a row for money, when in fact urban dictionaries define it as a woman with a “great body and an ugly face”. This is not to say that Jhally is not correct in concluding that this video and others of its kind are harmful in their blatant disrespect and sexual objectification of women. However, it does illustrate Jhally’s manipulation of video clips to support his hypotheses and his lack of contextualization of such clips. While parts of his analysis may be vulnerable to criticism, we might agree with Jhally’s general mission of media literacy. Young adults are exposed to a barrage of media, including music videos, and they should be encouraged to critically evaluate the messages implicit within the medium. If this is one of your goals in the classroom, Dreamworlds 3 can serve you admirably. When we showed it to our Psychology of Women class, the film resonated particularly with black women, some of who expressed a general frustration and ambivalence toward hip hop portrayals of women. Several young women, as well as men, stated that the film has helped them to better articulate their own reactions to music videos. The film does not demand that the audience adopt Jhally’s conclusions, but instead asks that viewers begin to develop their own critical eyes.

References Bartky, S. L. (1990). Femininity and domination: studies in the phenomenology of oppression. New York: Routledge. Basow, S. A. (1992). Gender stereotypes and roles (3rd ed.). Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole. Fredrickson, B. L., & Roberts, T. (1997). Objectification theory: an explanation for women’s lived experience and mental health risks. In T. Roberts (Ed.), The Lanahan readings in psychology of women (pp. 84–116, 2nd ed.). Baltimore, MD: Lanahan. Kilbourne, J., (creator), & Jhally, S. (producer/director). (2001). Killing us softly: advertising’s image of women [motion picture]. Available from Media Education Foundation, 60 Masonic St., Northampton, MA, 01060 Kilbourne, J., (creator), Vitagliano, J., & Stallone, P. (producers/ directors). (1979). Killing us softly: advertising’s image of women [motion picture]. Available from Cambridge Documentary Films, P.O. Box 385 Cambridge, MA. 02139. Kilbourne, J., (creator), Vitagliano, J., & Stallone, P. (producers/ directors). (1987). Still killing us softly [motion picture]. Available from Cambridge Documentary Films, P.O. Box 385 Cambridge, MA. 02139. West, C. M. (2008). Mammy, Jezebel, Sapphire, and their homegirls: developing an “oppositional gaze” toward the images of Black women. In J. Chrisler, C. Golden, & P. Rozee (Eds.),Lectures on the psychology of women (pp. 286–299, 4th ed.). New York: McGraw Hill.