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Almost Famous opens with a young male hand holding a pencil scratching the names of the actors across a yellow legal pad, as the camera pans the room for evidence of the fast paced, grueling life of the road-concert tickets, hotel room keys. Counter these print and visual images with, in just the fourth scene in the film, a "minitrack condo," a representation of home life, and an eerie sense of serenity of a Southern California cul de sac. While such a scene of peacefulness is disrupted soon enough by an effluvia of human exchanges in one of these houses, the residence of Elaine, Anita, and William, the binary between outside world, the life of the road, with the interior landscape of home is already in play, and so inscribed are the intertextual associations between inside/out, home and world, and the clearly and neatly defined roles of gender.
In this paper, I argue that the filmic tropes of Almost Famous-as for example the synecdoche of the writing hand, a stand-in for the male gaze of the omniscient narrator in his quest for truth-reminisce a time when men were the stuff of rock legends, while giving the appearance of destabilizing such myths by showing the strength and resilience of its female characters. The gaze of the writer, as an overarching framework for this film, reconfigures, counters and stabilizes the representations of women and their power. The male gaze as truth seeker in Almost Famous, works to uphold the binaries of mind and body, with its appeal to objectivity. Not without some slippage, some nod to the possibility for the subjective, but only enough to remain tenable. Ultimately, however, the film positions women as, if not wholly powerless and dependent, then at lease constructs them in relation to the male as the true locus of power. In so doing, Almost Famous reproduces dominant themes about literacy, specifically writers and writing. Truth, ultimate truth, a privileging of mind over body, as ultimately delivered by an omniscient narrator/writer is the thematic thread running throughout the film.
Just moments in, amidst household tensions between a mother and daughter, about ground rules for living, William, the film's lead and narrator, learns that he has been lied to about his age,...