Castration anxiety in 'Sacrilege'

As a music fanatic, so to say, I was thinking about music videos in which the ‘gaze’ was particularly remarkable. The first one that came to mind is one of my favourites, ‘Sacrilege’ by The Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Artistically, the video reminds me a lot of the film Memento (2000), since the video is reversed, with very small parts in chronological order. What I like about it, is that the video leaves plenty of room for interpretation, because of the way it is filmed and this has a lot to do with the ‘look’. The visual story, in chronological order, can be seen in two ways.

In short, it opens (so in the video it ends) with a wedding, where a couple is being married by a priest. This is followed by  images suggesting that the bride sleeps with basically the rest (mostly men) of the town. The last person she sleeps with is the priest that married her and her husband and they are caught by the other villagers. The villagers literally hunt them down, put a mask on the priests face and in the end of the story they burn them at the stake while the villagers watch. Optically, this can be compared with the way they look at her at the wedding. The ambiguous thing about it is though, you don’t know if the woman actually slept with all the villagers or if they only desired to sleep with her. This is somehow suggested by the way they look at her at the wedding, as if they are fantasizing. The moral of the story, of course, is about hypocrisy, because all the villagers punished them by killing them, even though they all wanted to sleep with her, a married woman (whether or not they actually did it).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmRI3Ew4BvA&spfreload=5

Throughout the video everyone keeps looking at the married woman and as the spectator, you are forced to follow this gaze. The gaze which is full of objectification. Especially the way the villagers look at the wedding shows that, like Fanon said, this look is not neutral at all. It fixes the woman right away. It is clear from the video that this look is not aimed at either her husband or the priest she cheats with and it is all about the male fantasy. The voyeurism basically comes back to the three main events: the villagers looking at the woman at the wedding, the villagers looking at the woman while having sex with the priest and the villagers looking at the woman getting burnt.

Lastly, in a stream of consciousness, I wondered what masculinity could have to do with this scenario. I immediately thought of what Mulvey describes as the sadistic strategy of dealing with castration anxiety, in which she uses Rear Window as an example. Specifically:

 “Jeffries is the audience, the events in the apartment block opposite correspond to the screen. As he watches, an erotic dimension is added to his look, a central image to the drama. His girlfriend Lisa had been of little sexual interest to him, more or less a drag, so long as she remained on the spectator side. When she crosses the barrier between his room and the block opposite, their relationship is re-born erotically.”

Lisa going to ‘the other side of the screen’ and being punished could be compared to the woman in the video getting married, where there is a voyeuristic female body, but no castration anxiety. Meaning, as the woman gets married, she becomes a sexual object that is controlled or tamed/punished.