Japanese Animation and New Media
Week Twelve: Chapter Twenty: The Spiral Dance of Symptom and Specter
We see an example of the tendency to associate men with the subjective shot and women with the objective shot in many manga. A prime example is Voyeur (Yamamoto Hideo, Nozokiya, 1994).
These pages are from an English translation that is mirrored to follow the conventions of comics read left to right.
The manga opens with a page that conveys voyeurism. There’s a couple in a parked car having sex, and we know they’re being watched due the use of dark irises to convey looking through an optical device, and then the last frame shows the device. In Mulvey’s terms, the optical device is positioned as subject, and secretive or illicit sex is positioned as object.
The exclamation mark in the last frame is in response to the next to last frame immediately above, in which we see a young man and young woman sitting in a parked car, not having sex! That’s the surprise. In effect, they are the object, but their behavior (non-sexual) resists objectification.
