Does Woman Have an Unconscious? Cinema and the Fetish of Female Disorientation

Why Women in Film Must Be Lost to Be Loved

From surrealism’s fetishization of madness and innocence to Hollywood’s celebration of beautiful foolishness, women are repeatedly portrayed as fragmented beings—muses rather than subjects, spectacles rather than fully human protagonists. This essay traces how these portrayals, across art, literature, and film, reveal a persistent patriarchal investment in keeping women unmoored, unknowable, and safely contained within fantasy.

---

Across centuries, women have been depicted as untethered creatures—neither here nor there, floating between reality and madness, never still enough to grasp. In these portrayals of women,there’s an essential othering—a refusal to render women as fully human, instead positioning them as troubled, strange, and displaced objects. As psychoanalyst and philosopher, Luce Irigaray puts it in Speculum of the Other Woman: “Does woman have an unconscious or is she the unconscious?”

There have been many displays of women as either crazy, detached, melancholic, or all the above in experimentalist cinema like Possession (1981) to more mainstream hits like Fatal Attraction (1987), Girl, Interrupted (1999), and The Black Swan (2010). As well as this year’s additions to the rolodex, Die My Love and Frankenstein. Their mental toils are often presented as hauntingly beautiful, erotic, and poetic. This contrasts with another trope, Hollywood's ‘dumb’/‘ditzy’ blonde archetype. In this portrayal, a woman’s beauty is the main quality that compensates for her shortcomings, but that still doesn’t save her from being the butt of the joke. Arguably, a thread that runs through both characterisations is the fetishization and aestheticization of women as unrooted and fragmented in some sort of way. 

Surrealism, with its championing of the power of the unconscious and dreams, cemented the archetype of the dazed, untethered woman. Whether through the medium of art, literature, or film, surrealism has often displayed women as venereous and otherworldly. The female figure is canon to the movement, as Caws et al. poignantly state, “The Surrealists conceived of woman as man’s mediator…femme-enfant, muse, source and object of man’s desire, embodiment of amour fou, and emblem of revolution”. 

An interesting layer in the surrealist portrayal of women is the fixation with ‘crazed’ and ‘hysterical’ mentally ill women in particular. Author Justin Vicari comments on how, whilst modern art’s “allegiance” with certain forms of mental illness existed before and extends beyond surrealism, the movement is an “exemplary moment in the history of male artists being fascinated by the spectacle of insane women”. These women, who have been, as Vicari continues, “marginalized twice over”, are the “subject of a devious, even kinky adoration”. For example, the novel Nadja (1928) by the father of Surrealism, André Breton, centres on the titular character, a mentally ill woman’s mad’genius. Similarly, Salvador Dalí’s The Phenomenon of Ecstasy (1933) depicts ‘hysterical’ women in states of erotic pleasure. Breton and many other male surrealists in the 1920s and 1930s also had an unwavering fascination with the ‘femme-enfant’, i.e., woman-child. In their eyes, this was the perfect kind of woman: young, beautiful, and subservient. This veneration of innocence further shows an enduring mythologization of the dazed female archetype in other popular media. 

The gendered aspects of madness vs innocence can be seen in Yorgos Lanthimos’ surreal odyssey Poor Things (2023). The film tells the story of Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), a Victorian woman who is reanimated with the mind of her unborn child by mad scientist Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe) after she commits suicide. What ensues in Bella’s new life is a series of crazy nomadic adventures, involving various forms of indulgence, wild sex, food, and socialism. Six decades earlier, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Il Deserto Russo or Red Desert (1964), whilst the film sits within the realm of modernist cinema, also deals with the cradling of madness and innocence. Protagonist, Giuliana (Monica Vitti), is a wife and mother. Against the backdrop of modern Italian industrial wastelands, she loses her grip on reality whilst her husband climbs the corporate ladder at a local chemical plant. She’s one in the same with the ecological ruin around her, innocent nature whose madness and devastation are influenced in varying degrees by man’s hand. 

At first glance the haunted girl and the dumb blonde archetypes appear polar opposites – the haunted woman is inscrutable and tormented while the dumb blonde is legible, and charmingly foolish. Yet both are tangled in the same patriarchal aim: they must be disoriented in order to be desirable.  As writer Jody Amable states, “actresses of early film played mostly damsels in distress or wide-eyed young women, and by the time talkies took over, women were still portrayed as less headstrong, more head-in-the-clouds”. The 1950s were a definitive era of the ‘dumb blonde’ archetype, mostly popularized and played by Hollywood starlet Marilyn Monroe. Another prominent blonde of this era was Carol Channing, who in 1955 remarked in an interview, “I didn’t have to be bright…All I had to do was be blonde”. American 50s media sent an unmistakable message to girls and women. It was more valuable to be beautiful and blonde than intelligent. Similarly, Daisy Buchanan in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby, when expressing her hopes for her infant daughter, she laments, “I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.” Within the parameters of the ‘dumb blonde’ stereotype, her innocence stems from her childlike naivety and often childlike voice juxtaposed with a sense of madness, her sexual evocativeness. 

The dumb blonde stereotype extended beyond the millennia, with characters such as Karen Smith in Mean Girls (2004), Cindy Campbell in the Scary Movies franchise, and Phoebe Buffay in Friends holding a fortified position in modern pop culture. There have been subversions of the trope, with Legally Blonde’s Elle Woods being a prime example. However, “dumb” or “ditzy” women haven’t always had to be blonde in popular media; sometimes they can be redheads (Daphne Blake, Scooby-Doo) or brunettes (Haley Dunphy, Modern Family). What mattered most wasn’t necessarily always hair colour but the dual mandate to be beautiful and intelligent.  

British feminist film theorist and filmmaker, Laura Mulvey, popularised the term ‘male-gaze’ in 1975 to describe the phenomenon throughout the history of cinema, an industry dominated by men, where mainstream films have often objectified and sexualized female characters, offering up fragmented representations from their point of view. Ultimately, on both fronts, the dreamlike, haunted, and disturbed woman in movies from the school of surrealism and the beautiful yet “dumb” are a reflection of a limited patriarchal view of women and lean on their disorientation, whether with their identity, mental health, or with their environment. There’s also this fetishization of making their disorientation a spectacle. Similarly, Mulvey speaks about this kind of fetishization. She claimed, “born out of a refusal to see, a refusal to accept the difference the female body represents for the male. These complex series of turnings away, of covering over, not of the eyes but of understanding, of fixating on a substitute object to hold the gaze, leave the female body as an enigma and threat, condemned to return as a symbol of anxiety while simultaneously being transformed into its own screen in representation.” That is evident in these two portrayals of women. They are relegated to musehood—never granted the privilege of full humanity.