IS THAT A PHALLUS IN YOUR EPISODE, OR ARE YOU JUST HAPPY TO SEE ME?!
Okay friendslist,
As many of you know, I am an English major.
And as is terribly obvious, I possess a rampant love of Owen.
I was presented the opportunity to combine these forces on my final dissertation this semester, and I thought I'd share the proposal I forced upon showed to my professor earlier this evening.
Mind you, this is subject to veto, but he'd BETTER FUCKING APPROVE IT because I already wrote half this paper and COME ON, HOW AWESOMELY RIDICULOUS IS THIS?!
I want to bend renowned feminist Laura Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" to fit the Owen/Diane story arc in "Out of Time".
Mulvey says this: "Women stand in the patriarchal culture as a signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his fantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them in the silent image of woman still tied to her place as a bearer of meaning."
Diane, coming from what Owen thinks to be a sexually-repressed time period, has a thing or two to teach Owen in regards to sex, chivalry, and his womanizing ways. Eventually, he falls in love with her- something that has never before happened in his liaisons.
Owen's life pre-Diane was meaningless and frivolous; the background theme of the episode being Owen's redemption through Diane's arrival.
The episode is biased towards Owen's POV- a phallocentric 21st century view, impinging upon Diane, who comes from an arguably greater male-dominated society and time.
At the end of the episode, Diane leaves Owen, which symbolizes a whole bumpercrop of things, most notably Owen's FEAR OF CASTRATION.
Diane- the sole meaning in his life- --(HIS PEEN)--- is taken from him.
