Stranger by the Lake

Mulvey writes, in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” about how the gaze is structured is Hollywood films, specifically how we are encouraged to look at women, and how there occurs a kind of ‘masculinization’ of (all of) our spectatorship. She acknowledges that there exists a branch of filmmaking (a vast and varied branch!) which challenges the viewer to look in a different way. She states that this “alternative cinema provides a space for a cinema to be born which is radical in both a political and an aesthetic sense and challenges the mainstream assumptions of the mainstream film” (834). Here I will explore one such film which challenges, rather than reinforces, the norms and assumptions which inform how we look (and how we are encouraged to look).

The 2013 French film Stranger by the Lake (L'inconnu du lac), directed by Alain Guiraudie, is described as follows on IMDb: “A cruising spot for men, tucked away on the shores of a lake. Franck falls in love with Michel, an attractive, potent and lethally dangerous man. Franck knows this but wants to live out his passion anyway.” I will not be paying much attention to the plot of the movie - how it “joins sex and death, pleasure and guilt, pleasure and pain” (Brody), but rather will focus on how it works to structure the gaze of the audience.

Lit up by the lambent sunshine of southern France deep in the summertime, the film is populated solely by men; not a single woman is seen. Already this problematizes some of the ideas laid out by Mulvey in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema;” what happens when there are no women to be looked at? (Of course, as I stated above, Mulvey was writing specifically about a particular ‘genre’ of film). The question now is not about how we are encouraged to look at women; it is about how we are encouraged to look at men. 

Stranger by the Lake contains multiple long, lingering shots of naked men lounging about on the lakeside beach, and in the luxuriantly vegetated hills rising up beyond it. The audience watches as men stroll about, eyeing each other up - our gaze (that is, the audience’s) is filtered through the sexualized gaze of the cruisers themselves. Their sexuality is the first thing we see when we see the men, they are equal to their sexuality (and its complexity).

Where in mainstream film the “burden of sexual objectification” is rarely placed on the male figure [who] cannot bear [it]” (Mulvey 838), in Guiraudie’s film men are often presented as sexual objects, willingly on display. If “man is reluctant to gaze at his exhibitionist like” (838) then this film is sure to provoke feelings of discomfort and unease in its (straight male) viewers. Dryer states that “the penis can never live up to the mystique implied by the phallus” (71) and for this reason phallic symbols are usually inserted into images of naked men to compensate. Many of the men we see in Stranger by the Lake are not accompanied by any such symbols; they appear lying about in the grass or on the beach. In the patriarchal tradition women are often located ‘closer to nature’ - taking direction from desire, passion overriding ‘rationality’ - in this film this idea is inverted, the men appear ‘at home in nature.’  

References: (excluding readings from the syllabus)

Brody, Richard. "Silence Equals Death in 'Stranger by the Lake.'" The New Yorker, 2013. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/silence-equals-death-in-stranger-by-the-lake.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2852458/