Rachel Getting Married is the story of a troubled young woman, Kym, who leaves rehab for a weekend to go home to her sister’s wedding, where two families of different backgrounds merge ceremoniously. Kym struggles with battling many demons that haunt her: such as the fact that she crashed a car when she was 16, resulting in the drowning of her younger brother. She also is a recovering addict. Kym and her placement into the family dynamics of this movie will always keep you on your toes as a viewer. You can sense that there is love amongst them, but there are moments where the deep resentment between the two sisters arises. The simply fact that the film is titled Rachel Getting Married, when it actually follows Rachel’s sister Kym, says a lot about the way in which Kym has become a troubled part of the family.
In Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Laura Mulvey says that narrative cinema needs to create a distancing between the film and the audience, so that that audience has an awareness of the camera. Mulvey also says that the image of the female in film has become an intrusive fetish because of the way the female is displayed. (pg. 2912) The viewer becomes fixated and becomes unable to distance himself from the image. Mulvey hopes that radical film makers will learn to film in such a way that the audience can become more detached from what they are watching, and not feel like an invisible guest to the film.
Mulvey’s opinion is worth analyzing when discussing Rachel Getting Married. Does the camera treat Kym (Anne Hathaway) like she is an object, or does it allow for more attention to her dialect and her interaction with others?
