Friday, May 31, 2013

The Girl with a Pearl Earring: The Gaze of the Impossible?

Director: Peter Webber
Cast: Colin Firth and Scarlett Johansson
The fantasy teaches us how to desire and it is desire which keeps us ‘alive’, in the sense of seeking an object in reality whose positive encounter, we believe, would satisfy our desire. According to Zizek, ‘a fantasy constitutes our desire, provides its coordinates; that is, it literary ‘teaches us how to desire’ (Zizek: 1997, 7) [1]. Fantasy decides how a man would act  in a relationship irrespective of what he consciously thinks of it, and directs him to develop a desire towards another human being (in the form of reality or virtuality). In short, fantasy possesses the capacity to regulate one’s desire and establishes the fact that there needs to be an intersubjective relationship for us to desire.  The desire can change a person’s fate especially when he finds the object of desire as a worthy cause of pursue of his existence. Man is capable of sublimating his desirous object (fantasy), when he could ‘de-sexualize’ it and place it where it becomes immoral. It will then be appreciated by millions of others in future. What we find ultimately in the movie ‘The Girl with a Pearl Earring’ is man’s infinite effort to abide by the above principle to sublimate his desire. What he could not ‘reach’ in penetrating the woman who carried his final fantasy (or, in other words, the Impossible), was made immoral through his aesthetic skills. His primary sexual energy was converted/ diverted to some sublime force to produce an object (in this case, a painting) which was further away from man’s reach.    

Griet, the protagonist of the movie The Girl with a Pear Earring (2003), comes from a poor family where her father is also a Delftware painter who is financially bankrupt now. After her father went blind and subsequently unemployed, she was sent to work in Johannes Vermeer’s household that is initially portrayed with some mysterious misunderstanding between the husband and wife, though not obvious.  She continues her duty honestly, while gaining the attention of some butcher boy to whom she responds slowly. Griet is sometimes treated harshly by Vermeer’s children and even Vermeer’s wife becomes a bit inquisitive about her going to the studio which she is never permitted to enter. Griet gained Vermeer’s attention one day when she busied with cleaning the studio after she made a comment about color of an on-going painting. After that they became acquainted and developed strong aesthetic attachment based on taste when Vermeer further encouraged her appreciation of painting. In the meantime, he used to give her lessons in mixing painting and related jobs. Her going to the studio and helping Vermeer was kept as a secret from his wife but Vermeer’s mother-in-law treated this affair in a pragmatic manner considering her usefulness to his immediate production of commercial painting. In the meantime, Vermeer’s patron Van Ruijven, having seen her beauty, demands for Griet to work in his household which Vermeer denies. However, he agrees to paint a portrait of Griet for Ruijven.    
Once Vermeer started painting Griet, their attachment further grew and she happened to spend more time in the studio. This is noticed by Vermeer’s children and later by Catharina (Vermeer’s wife) herself. Vermeer, while working on the painting, one day pierced her earlobe so that she could wear the earring for the portrait. Griet, taken by the surprise, ran to the butcher boy for consolation.  Griet is given the pearl earring which Catharina used to wear during the final days of the completion of the painting. Catharina, after found out that her pearl earring was worn by Griet, stormed into the studio she never set foot in before and demanded that she wanted to see the painting that Vermeer was working on. She was shocked to see Griet in the painting and wanted to destroy the painting since Vermeer did not consider her worthy of being painted.   Though she could not destroy the painting she managed to banish Griet from the house forever. At this point Vermeer becomes silent and Griet leaves the studio majestically. Later she is visited by the cook from the house carrying the pearl earrings and the blue headscarf as gift.

Griet gives her body to completes the journey that her father left unfinished in producing something ‘sublime’ to make his name ‘immortal’ (from a Western point of view). In that case, she is the instrument through which Vermeer creates the ‘gaze’ in his painting without which this work could have been just another drawing of no universal attention. Even his thin lip wife could not give that ‘inspirational’ look for him to see the world through, and for us see who he was. His wife could not give him this complex feeling about existence. That’s why he says, ‘you don’t understand’. Griet carries his fantasy to inspire that painting (which his business-minded mother-in-law understands) but such fundamental feeling cannot naturally be explained to his wife.  Vermeer starts a kind of intimate communication with her and that inter-subjective relationship made her to make a ‘sacrifice’ (pierce her ear=penetration) for the completion of the work. Vermeer does not agree to offer her to his rich client but makes a painting out of her body to make her beauty sublime for those who appreciate painting. This ‘meeting’ finally produced what man is ultimately capable of.  Through the reality of a maid, Vermeer travels back to fantasy and through fantasy he returns to a fictional element called a drawing. In this process, the maid became ‘more than herself’; a symbolic entity where even she does not have a control.

However, there is a clear line between the Phallus and the non-Phallus; the sexual enjoyment and ethical goals. Vermeer does not take Griet as a primary sexual object; the fate of any maid in a household. Instead, may be because of the contemporary Victorian family values, Vermeer sticks by his own values to be faithful to his wife. According to Zizek, ‘in the guise of professional obligations, he is forced to chose between woman and ethical duty’ (Zizek 1994, 152) [2]. What he scarifies here by being ‘public’ is his true happiness by being with her. This means that his genuine happiness is eared only through a relationship with her, and his actual personal fulfillment is achieved only this way.   Woman is always aware of this ‘element of sacrifice’ that man readily makes. She knows that his public movement is just a ‘compensation’ for his guilt of being unethical. What I suppose in this movie is Griet was aware of his need to be with her (at the same time, she was also ready to be his fantasy-object) and the her intensified feeling and readiness to be his love-object lead her to go to so called ‘lover’; the second- rated substitute who can never replace her original Phallic signifier; Vermeer. Because of the symbolic order, she cannot express herself to him, other than her comments about the paintings, but she could pour her inner complexity out to the ‘butcher boy’. In this case, she does not care what happens to that boy from the side of his desire. Simply misreading her expression as a desire for him, he gets caught in her dialogue which is not made for him.

‘The impossibility’ here is Vermeer’s ‘need to be with her’ (physical desires) and the strict Victorian values with which he runs the family.   The painting ‘The Girl with a Pear Earring’ is Vermeer’s sublimation of the impossible or unfulfilled fantasy- love towards Griet, and, on the other hand, how he penetrated her was just through her ear. Her loss of maidenhood was demarcated by submission to be the instrumental object of the painting. Hence, one can argue that she became a ‘matured woman’ (both physically and psychologically) through certain non-phallic involvement that finally produced a universal object of appreciation. From an ordinary point of view, he could not bear her ‘gaze’ and wanted to penetrate it. He found the right lips for his painting (or the right woman who carried the exact fantasy object). Vermeer’s replacement of his sexual energy to an immortal object made his existence meaningful to this date. In this case, we can say that both Griet and Vermeer found true love. They found it through the renouncement of the primary phallic or through the ‘de-sexualization’ of the relationship. That is how the painting ‘Girl with a Pear Earring’ hangs before us.
‘If we are to achieve fulfillment through phallic enjoyment, we must renounce it as our explicit goal. Or, in other words, true love can emerge only within a relationship of non-sexual goal’ (Zizek 1994, 152).   


[1] Zizek, Slavoj (1997) The Plague of Fantasies, Verso, London.

[2] Zizek, Slavoj (1994) The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality, Verso, London.