Essay:Studies in Queer Becoming//Objectivity and Subjectivity in Chantal Akerman's Je Tu Il Elle

Objective and Subjective Orientation in Chantal Akerman’s Je Tu Il Elle

Chantal Akerman plays Julie, the main character, in her first feature-length film, Je Tu Il Elle, which translates to I...You...He...She in English. The film is divided into three movements. The first shows Julie in self-inflicted isolation in her room. She rearranges her furniture, eats spoonfuls of sugar repetitively, dresses and undresses, writes and rewrites a letter to someone she refers to as “you”, and lays down lethargically, narrating her actions before they occur or sometimes without subsequently performing them. She remarks that it has been almost a month, and when the snow melts and she sees someone outside, she departs. She hitches a ride with a truck driver, initiating the second movement of the film. Inside the car, the truck driver puts her hand on his penis and instructs her to masturbate him. He drives Julie to her destination, marking the third movement of the film. Julie arrives at the house of her ex-girlfriend, who tells Julie that she cannot stay but nonetheless agrees when Julie asks for food. After a long, urgent, and passionate sex scene between the two women, the film ends with Julie leaving the room in the morning.

While this film may be interpreted as a coming of age story, illustrating Julie's abrasive journey through a heterosexual world to find a more authentic love with another woman, Julie’s experience is more complex. In an article in Hyperallergic, Douglas Messerli reflects,

..the women seemed to me to be passionate in each other’s embrace....Presumably she will remain with the woman she had mistakenly left. It is clear that, at last, Julie has returned home to someone with whom she can create a life.

I will argue against Messerli’s view, as his argument does not consider Julie’s desire for the truck driver and her inarticulate sexual relationship with her ex-girlfriend. I am interested in how Julie is oriented and displaced by heteronormative structures in both interior and exterior spaces, and also how her subjectivity reorients these structures through the writing and haptic filming of Chantal Akerman. In Western capitalist film industries,  we expect a protagonist to find their singular romantic other, which is what Messerli urges for.  And while Messerli argues for Julie’s success, I will argue that Julie fails at integrating herself into a heteronormative world and also fails at sharing an articulate vocabulary with a woman. But failure, in Simone de Beauvoir’s existential ethics, as articulated by Ros Muray, is not in vain. The ambiguity between the opposing structures of being objectively oriented and subjectively orienting (being both object and subject) makes room for an existential revelation of becoming bisexual, rather than succeeding at it.

In Sara Ahmed’s book, Queer Phenomenology, she states, “Heterosexualilty is not simply an orientation toward others, it is also something that we are orientated around...” Julie’s orientation in travelling and domestic spaces speaks to how she is oriented physically and linguistically by a heteronormative world. While she is in domestic spaces: her body is captured in the frame, and she and her ex-girlfriend are completely in the frame in the sex scene. In Atlas of Emotion, Giuliana Bruno explains that the “the fixity of binary systems” have “immobilized [the woman] and effaced her from the map of mobility.” And  “ladies traditionally played a role in the shaping of the house” which is seen as a place of stasis, where a male voyager expects to return to. Julie is visible and situated in domestic space but unable to integrate herself with the space according to expected modes of domesticity, as her eating and undressing manifests as repetitive, obsessive, and unproductive. Similarly, she is unable to integrate herself with her ex-girlfriend through productive communication. Though her relations with her ex-girlfriend are passionate and caring, they barely speak. Maureen Turim writes, “The body is in turn nearly mute, able only to ask for food and drink, able to ask for a touch only with an awkward gesture…” Their inability to communicate alludes to the displacement of a woman’s experience from the Lacanian symbolic order of a dominant patriarchal language, and Julie is double displaced from language by being both a woman and bisexual.

Julie’s physical relationship to in-transit spaces objectively orients her outside of a patriarchal world where men are accustomed to voyage. With the truck driver, she is often situated halfway in the frame or in the shadow, and we see her reflection in the bathroom when she observes him shaving. When she masturbates the truck driver, we see him put her hand on his lap but then she is subsequently entirely out of frame during the act. He instructs her as he describes his own bodily experiences. Following this scene and in the second long take, he talks about the freedom of driving fast, where there is “nothing.” Referring to when he picks up women on the road, he says that “there’s no tomorrow, just the moment, so I ask them [the women] and we do it back there in the bunk.” The truck driver has the privilege to travel and to live under an assumption that his wife and kids will still be there for him when he returns. He is able drive forward and fast through desolate landscapes where city structures are no longer; to believe that he is fully present and to integrate himself into an outside capitalist world. As Julie presumably cannot understand the American radio of sports and advertisements, she is also foreclosed from coming to understand, or to be a part of this outside world of men.

Julie fails to integrate herself physically and linguistically with the subjects she desires in interior and exterior spaces; however, Julie’s subjectivity as written by Chantal Akerman allows for alternative possibilities of self-revelation, which is a term used by Turim in her Personal Pronouncements article.  Bruno analyzes the male voyage as being defined by oedipal structures that entail circularity,

The beginning and the end [of the journey] are the same destinations. Or rather, they are asked to be the same, revealing the biological destiny behind the destination...The anxiety of the (male) voyager is the fear that, upon return, he may not find the same home/woman/womb he has left behind.

While  Julie is foreclosed from the outside world, this world also posits the truck driver as subject to oedipal structures of the symbolic order. In Julie’s displacement from the symbolic order, she observes from the outside.  Julie frames the truck driver with her subjectivity: the camera is from her point of view, or her subjectivity is present in the frame through her reflection or shadow gazing at him in his most exposed moments, such as when he uses the toilet. She thinks, “I thought I wanted to kiss him” and is interested in how he grooms himself. Secondly, his articulated experience when having an orgasm and his memories and fantasies are written by Akerman in the script. Muray talks about the moment of masturbation, “it is also the one moment where the trucker looks directly at the camera, briefly confirming her double status as both character and director.” Akerman’s doubling as writer and performer allows her to harness power in the subjectivity of the off screen while simultaneously positing herself as ostracized in the heteronormative world through Julie’s objective orientation.

While Akerman’s writing of subjectivity renders Julie’s power in the scenes with the truck driver, Julie’s subjectivity is also painted in domestic spaces through haptic modes of filming, allowing for a process of self-revelation in domestic space. Through her traversing domesticity and her ecstatic relations with her ex-girlfriend, there is a negation of expected modes of being in the home and thus an opening up for queer process of becoming. Bruno explains that nomadic forms of wandering:

...the nomad has a sharpened sense of territory but no possessiveness about it. For the voyageuse [female voyager] to exist as nomadic subject, a different idea of voyage and different housing of gender is to be sought: travel that is not conquest, dwelling that is not domination.

Thus a house can be a voyage for a female, and Akerman frames the space in a way that allows Julie to mobilize it. When Julie lays her letters out on the ground and proceeds by crawling over them and out of frame, she is spatially exploring the possibilities of her writings through non-linear associations. Turim recalls the coupled shots showing how she rearranged the furniture. Though following the establishing shot it seems as if the camera angle changes to a reverse shot, the camera angle actually remains the same, suggesting a subjective reconfiguration of space through rearranging furniture. And though Julie and and female lover fail at communicating, the sex scene between them expresses intense desire for one another in face of an oppressive world, marking a moment of queer immersion.  Muray explains that in this scene, “The ‘I’ and the ‘you’ switch positions at a dizzying rate, both literally and metaphorically, and the surprising frank way in which Akerman films their lovemaking marks both of them as she.” Also, their inarticulate relationship suggests jouissance in their being outside heteronormative expectations for performances of lesbianism. Turim states Akerman is “presenting lesbian bodies in an inarticulate sexuality, but one that also resolutely avoids the codes of lesbian sexuality as pornographic display for a third party, coded as a heterosexual male.”

In The Ethics of Ambiguity, Beauvoir explains that we experience a failure of consciousness in virtue of being oriented as subjects and objects. We have dreams and desires and express ourselves through freedom, but these acts of freedom are always restrained by our situation. Julie’s desires are structured and oriented by a heteronormative world that displaces her, but this does not negate her subjectivity. And while a successful ending of pairing off is encouraged in a heteronormative world, Julie exits each movement of the film.  The exit, though it could be seen as a failure, also expresses her mobility and her negation of female stasis, opening her up to fluidity. Julie’s subjective expressions of desire in face of heteronormativity and her tactility in typically static domestic space allows the pronouns in the title of the film to float freely between the unnamed characters she encounters. And these are characters that she desires but can nonetheless never come to know in virtue of being existentially oriented on the outside, denoting the  ongoing process of becoming within conditions of failure.