The Voyeur is one cinema’s most self-reflexive archetypes. He’s been a surrogate spectator for many of the greats: “J.B.” in Hitchcock’s Rear Window, “Jack” in De Palma’s Blow Out, “Jeffrey” in Lynch’s Blue Velvet. Each a muddle of fascination, desire, and repression, the Voyeur serves as a secondary artist. His function in cinematic narrative is similar to the director of the film itself. They both find their primary agency in gazing, be it through a lens or blinds, around trees or from outside windows. This fascination shapes the architecture of the film; it’s through the psyche of the voyeur/director we see the subject. Creator and subject are blurred. And when the audience’s vision is filtered so precisely, the object which holds our collective gaze demands to be compelling.
Dallas-ite Courtney Ware’s directorial debut, Sunny in the Dark, boasts a unique approach to the tale of the Voyeur. Firstly, the titular Sunny is a female spectator. Rarely, if ever, is a female given the agency of this privileged gaze. From Hitchcock to Antonioni, the one whose watching we watch is nearly always male. The approach prefers a certain set of desires, often a filter of erotic lust or savior-like machismo. In Sunny in the Dark, the archetype finds a strong feminine perspective, which yields a more tender, less salacious contemplation. Secondly, despite having a voyeur as one of the protagonists, the film is actually a tale of parallel isolation. The main perspectival lens is Jonah’s, a lonely, depressed, well-off therapist whose grief Ware and company let bleed through each and every frame.
The genre examination, while intriguing, arrests many of the thematic threads Sunny in the Dark explores. Before shifting the voyeur into view, the film begins as the study of loneliness’ architecture. Jonah is in the belly of isolation. He has recently seen the end of a long-term, committed relationship. He’s depressed and thus drained of life.
This we are shown by the film’s unfortunate reliance on a steely, cold palette. Jonah wears grays and dark blues. His new apartment is hardly a new start: it’s a sleek metallic cave set in a 100-year-old factory. Also, he’s a clinical and disbelieving therapist, the type who doesn’t know how to live by the pseudo-psychoanalytical platitudes he doles out. These signifiers of isolation are overt and brash. They are all the more heightened by the film’s widescreen frame which only ever screams alienation.
The slice-of-depressed-life approach to build Jonah as a three-dimensional character never quite coheres. He comes off more as a mannequin dressed in loneliness and never a character haunted by it. Things lay on the surface yet are never embedded. Before too long into this examination, the camera locates an eye peering down upon a slumbering Jonah. A crack in the concrete ceiling above him is a womblike split into his psyche. The Voyeur is present.
Sunny’s parallel story of loneliness is much more compelling. That’s partly because she is mysterious. It’s never clear if she is a true waif of the rafters or a figment of Jonah’s isolated malaise. She is a mousy, gaunt figure, dressed in a ratty white V-neck and pink, worn athletic shorts. A rat is her only friend. She takes incessant notes about Jonah’s every day activities when he is home; while out, she takes the opportunity to nibble through the fridge and peruse his bookshelves. The connection between the two is the film’s low-hanging loneliness, hosted by this shared cavernous prison.
The film’s greatest strength is its spatial awareness. Ware and cinematographer Jake Wilganowski deftly craft Jonah’s fateful, glossy $3000/month cave into the premiere bourgeois bachelor pad of crushing alienation the film needs. Hard angles and roving camera movements help to continually settle then displace the audience, yet the location never bears any thematic fruit. It’s the place where Jonah crumbles and where Sunny fulfills her Chungking Express-like jaunt, yet the inevitability of encounter never lives up to the strange allure of the concept.
The core longing of the film is that Sunny would find a respite from whatever strange place she’s come from. She is clearly a victim of some sort of abuse, be it emotionally, physically, or sexually, or possibly all three. So she finds solace in imagining life with another, with one who may need her. Yet Sunny in the Dark never truly finds its true subject, or, by the time Sunny seems to step into full view, she’s gone. That nagging flaw frustrates me. There’s no reason other than plot contrivance as to why Sunny would find her obsession in Jonah. Her relationship to him never illuminates, it just distracts, because she is ever the more compelling figure. Sadly, her (and the film’s) fascination constantly diminishes from exploring who the voyeur actually is. Her desire is impotent and yields any exploration into her psyche the same.
Part of seeing the world through the voyeur’s eye is to better understand the observer. What she looks at is what she longs for. The film’s best scene is one where Jonah is completely out of view as a material and mental presence. A funeral-via-toilet brews together Sunny in the Dark’s best qualities – the voyeur’s endearing naiveté, its situational absurdity, the shock of a situation suddenly gone awry, and raw emotional poignancy – for a brief moment of truth and brilliance. The film, unfortunately, can’t help but mimic its own voyeur by keeping its gaze too fixated on Jonah.
The task of shaping and realizing a female voyeur is ultimately mishandled, turning Sunny into more of a mixed-metaphor of a trope, an inverted Manic Pixie Dream Girl/Voyeur. She’s built from the story’s pretext of lonely necessity, not imagined by the protagonist. To be both the spectator and the dream girl demands more time be spent with Sunny and more nuance to the film’s gaze – from Jonah, Sunny, and the filmmakers. The film begins with a famous C.S. Lewis quotation: “Nothing is yet in its true form,” and that quote rings true at the film’s end as well.