Fish Tank: Ideology & Narrative Essay Highlighted

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An Exploration of the Oedipal Trajectory in Fish Tank

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Specialist Terminology

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An initial viewing of Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold, 2009) presents the spectator with a raw, uncompromisingly bleak vision of life on an Essex council estate. The narrative feels somewhat dislocated and episodic, with Mia, the film’s protagonist, having no clearly defined goal; rather, she seems – at least at first – to ‘drift’ from one scene to the next. This feeling of narrative rawness is complemented by the style in which the film is shot: Arnold, showing influences of Italian neo-realism and French new wave, eschews cinematographic ‘artifice’ in favour of handheld camerawork, natural lighting, semi-improvised performances and an entirely diegetic soundscape. Indeed, the film shares much in common with social realism, a genre popularised by directors such as Loach and Leigh, and one of the UK’s key cinema-as-art exports since the 1960s. Arnold would have us believe that Fish Tank is a ‘slice of life’; an intimate look at the ‘realities’ of what it means to be working class in modern-day Britain. Film, though, is artifice. Whether intricately plotted or ‘improvisational’, self-consciously crafted or ‘homemade’, it is a filmmaker’s representation of reality, and, to this end, open to ideological dissection.

From a Freudian/Lacanian narrative perspective, Mia might be said to undertake an Oedipal journey in the film. Seemingly at war with her mother, Joanne, Mia pursues, and is pursued by, her mother’s boyfriend, Connor. In Freudian terms, Mia is attracted to Connor because she is experiencing penis envy: seeing that Joanne cannot provide her with a penis, she turns to Connor. Connor’s function in the Oedipal narrative is binary, because he is able to fulfil the role of both father and substitute mate simultaneously. Paedophilic concerns notwithstanding (Mia is only fifteen), he offers a semi-legitimate sexual liaison with Mia because he is not her biological father. Mia’s association with him therefore plays on the notion that the Lacanian female child turns to the father to provide her with a penis in the form of a child, and thence to a substitute partner when she realises that the (biological) father is ‘unlawful’.

Arnold is a female director. Feminists argue that the representation of women in film is one of objectivity and passiveness: they are there to be pursued by men and attained at the film’s climax as the ‘prize’, enabling the male protagonist to complete his own Oedipal trajectory and achieve social stability. Freud himself focused on the male subject, and it is only comparatively recently that the female Oedipal trajectory has been hypothesised. Under Arnold’s direction, Mia’s positioning in the film is intriguing from a feminist ideological perspective, and the way in which the spectator is sutured into the narrative encourages identification with her as the protagonist. This is exemplified when Mia and Connor share screen time exclusively. It is noteworthy in these sequences that a subtle alteration is made to the classic shot/reverse shot suturing of mainstream Hollywood cinema.

An example of such a sequence is the meeting between Connor and Mia that takes place at approximately the halfway point of the film, leading to them having sexual intercourse on the settee – in terms of the classic three-act narrative structure, at the climax of rising action heralding the end of the second act. In this sequence, Connor is presented from Mia’s ‘perspective’ in over-the-shoulder, medium long and medium shots. As Mia is standing and Connor reclining on the settee, he is also viewed from Mia’s eye-line, with the camera angled down. The effect of this is one of Brechtian distanciation: the spectator is encouraged to identify with Mia via distanciation from Connor – he becomes object. In the cutaways to Mia, however, she is generally shot at three-quarter angle or profile, often in medium close-up or close-up, with Connor off-screen. Therefore, the effect is to suture the spectator into Mia’s sphere of action, thereby encouraging identification with her as subject rather than object – at a juncture of her character arc in which she loses her virginity. This is not to contend that Mia is not objectified in the film. Indeed, at times it almost feels as if Arnold is challenging the (male heterosexual) spectator through a conscious positioning of Mia as object – albeit one that discourages scopophilia. In the aforementioned sex scene, the spectator is not encouraged to view Mia as the Freudian Whore for sexual gratification; rather, she is presented as the victim of the Mulveyan male gaze.

In an earlier sequence in the film, Connor carries Mia to her room after she falls asleep on her mother’s bed. The diegetic, hyperreal sound of Connor’s breathing, along with the use of slow-motion, (relatively) fluid camerawork and softly-lit close-ups, differentiate this sequence aesthetically from much of the rest of the film. There is a something of a phantasmagorical quality to it, perhaps playing on the notion of the Freudian dream: Mia herself is merely feigning sleep, or is perhaps in a somnolent state, halfway between waking and sleeping, in which she views Connor as a kind of mythologised father figure, carrying out his paternal role whilst simultaneously being the object of her sexual desire – a manifestation of her subconscious need. As Connor lays Mia on her bed, the camera cuts to a series of close-ups of Mia’s body – her legs and crotch, specifically – that commodify and objectify her. This reductive fetishisation of the female body is one way in which the Oedipal male attempts to counter the threat posed by the female: by fetishising the body, it is denied its difference from the male. The use of Connor as diegetic audience to this commodified body also encourages the spectator to identify with Connor. Perhaps this is another way in which Arnold is challenging the gaze of the heterosexual male spectator: the spectator gazes upon Mia when she is a passive site and at her most vulnerable. It draws the spectator’s attention to the underlying ideology behind mainstream Hollywood cinema: that women are the object of the male gaze; passive sites for scopophilic gratification. But it is only when the object is passive that the Oedipal male feels unthreatened.

Compare the sequence early in the film in which Mia confronts a group of teenage dancers on the housing estate. Wearing heavily sexualised costumes (crop tops that ‘point’ to the crotch, emphasise the shape of the breasts and expose the midriff), the dancers are subject not only to the spectator’s gaze but also to the diegetic audience around them – both Mia and a group of shirtless men ogling them from the sidelines. The girls, though, ignore the diegetic audience. Instead, they break the fourth wall and dance provocatively to camera. They – and, by extension, Arnold – are once more challenging the voyeuristic male gaze. The male spectator feels threatened by this highly sexualised mating ritual[1].

Connor’s own Oedipal journey represents something of a crisis of masculinity – at least on the surface. By challenging societal (and class) norms, he endangers his own Oedipally-resolved social stability via the abandonment of his suburban, semi-detached house and nuclear family. His wife, briefly, kicks him out. But by the time Mia comes to find him, Connor’s wife (an invisible presence) has apparently taken him back: social stability has been restored. The female Oedipal child – Mia – must also conform with society in order to avoid ‘punishment’. Mia’s refusal to do this is borne out in her visit to Tilbury, the suburbia where Connor and his family live. Mia breaks into their house. The camera tracks with her in mid shot as she walks to the living room. A series of quick cuts reveal, via whip pan POVs and close-ups, the paraphernalia of childhood in the room. With Mia as diegetic audience, we share her perspective of this discovery: Connor has been leading a double life. Mia urinates on the living room floor and later kidnaps Connor’s daughter, Keira. In Oedipal terms, this represents the notion of conflict[2] in the Oedipal child when faced with the realisation that access to the father is unlawful. By kidnapping Keira, Mia is perhaps attempting to remove her as threat and take her place in the family unit. Urinating on the floor marks this as her territory.

Mia, though, is punished. Connor tracks her down. He pursues her across a dark stretch of open field, seizes her roughly and hits her in the face before disappearing into the night: crisis of masculinity resolved with the female object passive, subjugated, punished. During the chase sequence, Arnold uses her customary handheld camera, though the movements here are some of the more frenetic of the film. Initially, Connor materialises through a thicket in extreme long shot, and throughout the sequence he is shrouded in shadow. Again, a Freudian reading of this would point to Mia’s subconscious: she has committed an  ‘unlawful’ act with her ‘father’. This shadowy presence might therefore be read as a physical manifestation of Mia’s Oedipal subconscious inner conflict, or of the white, male, middle class hand of justice for those who dare raise a voice of dissent against the ruling hegemony. As a woman, it is Mia’s place to be passive and subjugated; to tow the societal ideological line.

Perhaps ironically – given the film’s feminist leanings – this is exactly what Mia does at the end of the third act. The Oedipal female child never fully relinquishes desire for her mother. Instead, in order to conform to society, she must simply suppress her desire. This can be seen in the dance that Mia and Joanne share; a mating ritual that in this case stands for the consummation of desire between mother and daughter. Mia becomes normalised in society.

In the final sequence of the film, Mia climbs into a car with Billy – a young traveller boy – so that she can accompany him to Cardiff. Billy, the owner of a white horse, is effectively her knight in shining armour – and she the damsel in distress. Mia has finally ‘come to her senses’: she has been punished for going against the dominant patriarchal society; she has suppressed her desires both for her mother and father; and she has gone off into the sunset with her male saviour. The Oedipal trajectory is complete.

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[1] Later in the film, we discover that this ‘ritual’ is the direct result of male hegemony when Mia auditions at a strip club under the scrutiny of a white, middle class man who runs the place.

[2] This Oedipal conflict is precipitated by Mia catching Connor and Joanne in the act of sexual intercourse. She becomes voyeur, spying on them through a crack in the door until Connor looks up at her. She runs off. It is noteworthy that Connor seems to take pleasure in being observed.