Japanese Animation and New Media
Week Twelve: Chapter Twenty: The Spiral Dance of Symptom and Specter
But another girl appears, which disturbs his visual pleasure. The girl is apparently spying on them. As Yota pursues her and grabs her hand, he wakes up grabbing the VCR and TV, which crash to the floor. This is precisely the sort of scenario that Laura Mulvey might argue presents the classic paradigm for male subjective positioning. As soon as the male’s sense of visual mastery is disturbed (especially by a female looking), he has to pursue her and will attempt to grab her, to objectify her, to keep in her the position of the object to be viewed.
But we’ve now got another object in the picture: the TV-VCR. And later we will learn that this other girl is Ai, the girl who leaps to life from a porn video.
