A lot has been said about the male gaze in cinema, and the ways it is used to visually track and sexualise female characters in a predatory manner. However, one of the less discussed, but possibly most horrific, ways this is utilised is in how the dead female body is portrayed. Glamorous, languorous, lips and thighs slightly parted, titillating. None of these are thoughts that would pass through our minds when confronted by a dead body, yet this is where emphasis lies in the way the dead female body is framed on screen.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in Nick Roeg’s film, Bad Timing (1980). Spurned by its own distributor as, “a sick film made by sick people for sick people,” it deals with the story of how one man’s obsession leads to his lover’s attempted suicide.
Alex (Art Garfunkel) displays a growing paranoia of Milena (Theresa Russell) having affairs with other men, and acts as a voyeur throughout the film. He acknowledges this behaviour himself in an aside to his students, where he claims, “We are constantly in isolation, watching, spying on everyone around us.” This may not be true of everyone but is certainly true for him; often lurking on the edge of a wide shot, hidden in the background as she goes about her day, or filling centre screen with his furtive glances through café windows and in rear-view mirrors. Her privacy is constantly intruded upon by his hawk-like gaze, which constructs her as a sexual object, searching for proof of illicit behaviour.
Despite the focal point that Milena occupies in the film, she is repeatedly vilified by being represented as erratic, hysterical, and promiscuous. It is not too big of an assumption to make that we are seeing her through Alex’s eyes, as he negates her interiority, believing the entirety of her time is spent seeking out sexual partners. Images of nude women from art history pervade the film and, called John Berger’s sentiments as expressed in Ways of Seeing quickly and easily to mind, “We can discover some of the criteria and conventions by which women have been judged as sights.” The camera similarly invites judgement of Milena through spectatorship, rather than by the sparse dialogue she is allowed, which makes her reasonable desires known to him and the audience. Time and again she protests, “I want my own life, my own time,”and “I want to eat when I want, drink when I want, f*ck when I want.” Her biggest crime, in the eyes of her lover, seems to be a pursuit of personal agency and desire.
Throughout the film, close-up reaction shots clutter the frame as the dark green and brown colour palette creates an oppressive atmosphere to conveys how stifled Milena feels. This reaches its pinnacle when aggressive clips of her near-death body are shown defibrillated, pumped, and swabbed for rape, juxtaposed with images of Alex handling her body during sex. The implications are clear: his scopophilic gaze led to violence and a breach of her bodily autonomy on more than one level.
The idea of “necromanticism”, something academic and author Michele Aaron discusses, explores the way women are beautified in death in Western cinema to appear erotic and non-threatening. In death the female body is finally completely subjugated; she has no agency left. She is unable to move, breathe, control what she is wearing, or divert attention elsewhere. Her body is finally a completely passive receiver of the predatory male gaze. Milena is resuscitated from her attempted suicide, but while in a coma the audience observes the harmful effects of this gaze. The camera lingers on her breasts and thighs, sexualising her the way Alex does throughout the film, the lacy sheer lingerie she wore to die opening her up to scrutiny one more time. This culminates in a horrifying scene where Alex enacts his will on her powerless body. Shocking and subversive, Bad Timing demonstrates the drastic consequences of offering the dead bodies of women up for the male voyeur’s gaze.
Written by Anita Markoff for Cinema Rediscovered.
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