Video Review: Dreamworlds 3

DREAMWORLDS 3: Desire, Sex, & Power in Music Video

The Media Education Foundation:

Written and narrated by Sut Jhally

Produced: 2007

Category: Gender

Chapters: 7

Distribution: http://www.mediaed.org/

This is the third video within the Dreamworlds series from the Media Education

Foundation (MEF), an organization producing and distributing documentary films critiquing the impact of mass media on society. The writer and narrator, Sut Jhally (who is also the Executive Director of MEF), continues to return to this topic, updating its content and expanding on the discussion of the reciprocal influence music videos have on society and that society has on the making of music videos. At the core of this ongoing discussion is the role women’s bodies play in this media form and how it has impacted our culture.

This video starts with a much-needed warning to viewers on the graphic nature of what lies herein. I would warn potential viewers that no matter how one prepares oneself to watch this video, the images would still be shocking and disturbing, especially to women.

The narrative throughout the video is concise in its analysis of current trends in video making. Cleary Jhally has given great consideration to the social implications of our video generation. Many questions are posed. What do these images tell us about what it is to be normal? What messages do they send to men and women about female sexuality and male power and privilege? Whose views, ideas, fantasies, and realities do we really see when we are exposed to such images, and who benefits from perpetuating these images?

The narrator takes us on a journey through the Dreamworlds highlighting these questions and trying to offer answers that are based on a social observation model akin to those used by sociologists who distance themselves from the subjects they are observing. Sut Jhally creates a framework for this model in several chapters, Constructing Femininity, The Pornographic Imagination, Ways of Looking, Female Artists Trapped, Masculinity and Control, and Real Life Enactments.

As it progresses Dreamworlds 3 makes one thing clear, from its early inception with the launch of MTV in 1981, music videos have relied on women’s bodies to feed the insatiable imagination of a very small representation of our social schema: the teen-age boy. Music videos rely heavily not just upon the use of women’s bodies, but the fragmented use of women’s bodies. This is related directly to techniques being used in the porn film industry. More and more former pornography filmmakers and participants are crossing over into music video.  These techniques do not allow any woman to be seen as a whole and complete being. Instead women are reduced to mere parts by the use of camera angles. No longer a she, but an object useful for only one purpose: the satisfying of male desire. Over and over again images are shown in Dreamworlds 3 of women’s bodies that emphasize breasts, genitals, buttocks, and legs. In contrast, depictions of males usually show them fully clothed and in complete control of any woman and often hordes of women in their proximity. This is what Sut Jhally says is influencing our cultural beliefs about men and women, how women are to be regarded, and what continues to justify the misogyny in our society. It is further supported by the mass proliferation and accessibility of this form of televised media that it has become a perceived normalized cultural reflection for all age groups, spanning all musical genres.

I was disappointed that Sut Jhally stopped short of directly linking male misogyny and violence towards women with the influence music videos may have on the male psyche and their perception of women. I felt that as the writer and narrator he nearly made the connection, but his own positionality as a man forbade him from making that conclusion. He has the luxury of being able to address these issues from a purely intellectual framework. He does not have to fear that representations of his likeness will be reduced to mere a target of both consumption and disdain as they are in a disturbing scene in Dreamworlds 3. Women are taken backstage and stripped naked so members of a rock band can ogle then and throw slices of packaged lunchmeat on their naked bodies for recreation. As a female viewer I could not just detach my emotional self from what I was seeing, even with the thoughtful, intellectual narration offered by Jhally. I felt the tight feeling in my body that comes with knowing humiliation and hatred based on being female.

I would recommend this video, but with caution. The images are startling and upsetting. They fall barely short of being what I would most certainly call pornographic. Included as well are a few frames and photos of real-life assaults on women that play out the idealized teen-age boy fantasy of the supplicant woman from music videos. Although the writing and narration of Sut Jhally does raise important questions about how videos have played a role in perpetuating the horrid oversexualization of and misogyny towards women in our society. For me it still fails to draw fully what is an obvious conclusion: that imagery such as those used in videos is a direct representation of men’s beliefs about women. Those beliefs seen over and over again, reinforced and normalized by more rampant and expected use of pornography in music videos makes it very easy to keep women subjugated. The video does discuss, albeit in a removed fashion that women are little more than things to be used and consumed for men’s pleasure, even if it means total degradation, which includes female artists. No matter how much talent they possess it will always come down to how they look and how they “perform” for the watching man. Finally we come to the crux of the dilemma. Many young people will believe what they are seeing is true because it is on TV and the Internet. This is the medium of certainty for our youth. They garner their cues for social understanding and behavior from the images they see. Although this video may be useful for discussion of these issues, it falls short of equating the viewing of such imagery by men and women as s direct link to the dehumanization, hatred, and violence known by we women today.