THE PSYCHOLOGIST’S GAZE AND ACTION IN TARSEM SINGH’S THE CELL (2000)

This study focuses on narrative construction in the cinema produced by visual images. The theoretical consideration is based on the “act of looking” which is presented in Laura Mulvey’s thesis, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975), particularly in the context of Freudian scopophilia. A character’s act of looking can be analyzed through gendered power in the fundamental structure between the male subject and the female object. This binary structure is specified in the field of oil paintings, especially nakedness since the early Renaissance as “men act, and women appear” in John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972). In this context, this study addresses a gap in the existing literature by analyzing Indian director Tarsem Singh’s The Cell from the point of view of how the perspectives on gendered performance are produced and how his work deconstructs this binary structure through the psychologist’s gaze and action. This film presents the protagonist, Catherine Deane, a psychologist as an action heroine in terms of postmodern artistic characteristics since she enters the subconscious of the criminal and deciphers the schizophrenic memories from her perspective. The boundaries between the real and unreal, the conscious and unconscious become fluid whereby the surrealistic landscape is lent to the objects that are set in the film’s visualization of dreams.