My Eyes Are My Eyes Savannah McClendon College

“Marvin always gets the things he wants,” Miss Goldberg croons, in submission to her inexhaustible student. But what is it that he wants? Following the psychosexual torments of a teenage boy growing up in the American upper-class in the nineteen sixties and seventies, William Finn’s 1979 musical one-act In Trousers is a beautifully abstract non-answer, presenting to its audience an image of reluctant homosexuality and the misogyny that culminates as a result. The character of Marvin - a sadistic, “seizure” prone, sexually frustrated adolescent - is as complicated as he is rich, but is not incomprehensible. When presented alongside the hour long cacophony that is William Finn’s In Trousers, the thoughts outlined in Laura Mulvey’s 1975 essay “Visual Pleasures in Narrative Cinema” and Andrew Sullivan’s “What is a Homosexual?” can help to shed some light on Marvin’s desires and motivations throughout the show.

Laura Mulvey’s, “Visual Pleasures in Narrative Cinema” addresses the inherent misogyny of the movie-going experience through the function of gender dynamics and fetishistic and psychoanalytic structure. While her essay is specifically concerned with the cinema, Mulvey’s thoughts on male and female nature are social...