여성 관객은 무엇을 원하는가?: <악마는 프라다를 입는다>에서의 동일시 문제를 중심으로

Abstract

This essay examines the movie The Devil Wears Prada, specifically focusing on the woman’s desire to become another woman and on the identification between the main female character and the woman spectators. For this, we appropriate Laura Mulvey’s notion of the position of women spectators and Lacan’s idea of the hysteric subject. Mulvey suggests that woman spectators identify themselves with the main male character who leads the narrative and let female characters be objects to be seen. However, the notion of the identification between female spectators and a male character in the movie can be problematized. While Mulvey criticizes the erotic representation of women images in the melodrama of the mainstream Hollywood cinemas, erotic women images are still dominant in the mainstream movies. The Devils Wears Prada is one of such examples. For an affirmative feminine identity in the cinema, we examine and revise Mulvey’s theory of the feminine identity with the eclectic appropriation of Jackie Stacey’s notion of women’s homosexual identity in the female cinema spectatorship. Stacey points out the homosexual pleasure among women in the movie and the difference between a female star and a female spectator. With the introduction of Lacanian subjectivity, we conclude that the vision of female spectators is more like that of the hysteric than that of homosexuals. The female hysteric seems to desire for another woman, as is the guise of her desire for love of her father or The Other. The eye of female hysteric shows that her essential interest is what women want and what the feminity is. The question of feminity is what the desire of the Other is.