The Critical Eye: Whose Fantasy is This?

Women have been reduced to their body and the female body has been dismembered, commodified, and sexually objectified in the media for entertainment and marketing purposes (Bartky 1990; Basow 1992). This restrictive presentation of women as subjective beings who exist solely to be ogled and desired by men has been shown to exert a powerful effect not only on women’s psychological well being but also on men’s perception of women (Basow 1992; Fredrickson and Roberts 1997; Killbourne and Jhally 2001). In the film, Dreamworlds 3: Desire, Sex and Power in Music Video, director Sut Jhally seeks to expose how the music video medium uses this same narrow, objectifying perspective of femininity and the female body to tell a story. His campaign is to alert the audience to messages that they may have unwittingly accepted. Jhally manages to deliver this message in a way that avoids being dry or preachy. He seeks to show and not tell, so to speak, by using music videos themselves to reveal their message of manipulation. Dreamworlds 3 is an extension of Jhally’s work in Dreamworlds 1 and 2, with updated images from more recent music videos as well as the incorporation of video and photographs showing violence against women at the Puerto Rican Pride parade in 2000 and at Seattle’s 2001 Mardi Gras celebration. If you appreciated the earlier analyses of Jhally in Dreamworlds, and in Dreamworlds 2 then you are likely to value his updated version; critics of previous films will find his current offering equally problematic. Jhally, who is a professor of communications at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, uses an analytic technique similar to that employed by Jean Kilbourne (Kilbourne & Jhally, 2001; Kilbourne, Vitaglione & Stallone, 1979; 1987) in her Killing Us Softly series. Both of these series use a large collection of media images presented with narration to raise the consciousness of the viewer to the impact of these images. Jhally’s analysis is of music video images of women as sexual objects and men as sexual aggressors. Similar to Kilbourne, Jhally emphasizes the feminist socio-cultural perspective that gender is socialized, not innate, and that this socialization occurs through the stories we tell about ourselves as well as the stories told to and about us that are woven into our cultural narratives. Studying these cultural narratives allows us, in Jhally’s words, to “see how our culture teaches us to be men and women.” Following from this, it seems that both Jhally and Kilbourne share the overarching goal of teaching and encouraging media literacy to an audience primarily of young adults and adolescents. Although Jhally’s film uses a similar analysis to that of Kilbourne, the two films exhibit qualitative differences due to the media on which they focus. While Kilbourne analyzes popular advertisements from magazines and prime time TV, Jhally is looking at music videos that are inherently more sexually explicit and graphically violent. While both Kilbourne and Jhally talk about the use of pornographic images, Kilbourne injects far more humor into her commentary. In Dreamworlds 3, on the other hand, there is very guttural feeling of danger that is evoked partly because the music video clips are so full of sound and movement that they engage all of the viewer’s senses therefore eliciting a more visceral response. Additionally, Jhally’s very authoritative commentary weaves over and through the videos like a floating, bodiless narrator who sees through the glitzy surface into the deeper more frightening depths. The fact that the viewer never sees Jhally reinforces the message that the videos themselves Sex Roles (2009) 60:745–747 DOI 10.1007/s11199-008-9573-5