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evolve (M. Smith, 1995: 84-85). The sequences also guide viewers to recognize in him the
embodiment of the cynicism which contemporary society increasingly uses to relate to human
dignity and suffering.
With his emotional aloofness, Lisca embodies one of the two kinds of voyeurism
displayed in the film, specifically the role of the detached voyeur who perceives women as
commodities. In this respect his visual exploitation of Lucy, his female 'victim', reflects
Griselda Pollock's analysis of women's images within mainstream magazines. She suggests
that 'Notions of patriarchal ideology engendered by a recourse to psychoanalysis are on their
own inadequate and insufficiently historical and the issue must be located in terms of
capitalism and bourgeois ideology for [...] one of the dominant significations of woman is
that of sale and commodity' (Pollock, 1995: 142). Pollock considers Mulvey's interpretation
of the male sexual gaze as directly connected to the Freudian formulation of the castration
complex as outdated, due to the widespread 'directness of vaginal imagery' (Pollock 1995:
142), a position that is partly shared by John Ellis (Ellis, 1995: 159-161). In a later work,
Mulvey herself acknowledges a 'formal relation' between contemporary capitalism and the
aesthetics of Post-modernism (Mulvey 1996: 14). Lisca represents the most updated version
of a capitalism which, having erased the notion of the individual value of human labour, now
has the impersonality of knowledge in its sights, and seeks to establish the supremacy of the
mass media over all aspects of intellectual thought. The lack of consideration for the
specificity of the individual has reduced people to mere marketing targets for desirable goods
and services which appear in every channel of mass communication, charged with symbolic
meaning, to be sold, consumed, and disposed of. This dehumanizing process results in a
dramatic loss of contact between people and reality, as Lisca's cynical exploitation of Lucy s
obliviousness while asleep, his indifference towards wars, to the death of Lucy's mother and
people in general, indicate.
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