The Sculptor and the Professor: Two ages of objectification by the film spectator

Abstract

A paradigm shift has happened in the relationship between the spectator and the woman-on-the-screen. The shift from an analogue to a digital era implies that the dynamics of objectification have also shifted irrevocably. The two ages of voyeurism are characterized, respectively, through Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) and Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2014). The paper reads that the voyeur in the analogue frame of Rear Window (Jeff) is in a metaphoric relationship with the women-through-his-lens while the spectator ‐ post-2013-drawing from an archive of pornography is in a synecdochic relationship where the woman is, to invoke Shelley Jackson, a ‘Stitch Bitch’. The article posits that the telltale shift has caused a change in the materiality of the woman which has, technologically, gravitated from a celluloid frame to an algorithmic reconstitution. It means, in the digital era, the spectator‐voyeur’s relationship with and the objectification of the woman has been reset: From Pin-up to the Patchwork girl.