Do fetiche à subversão feminina : a construção do ethos discursivo no cinema de Paul Verhoeven

Abstract

In this research, we seek to unite the seventh art to the French Discourse Analysis by verifying how the construction of two female characters from the filmography of the Dutch director Paul Verhoeven happens, namely: Catherine Tramell from Basic Instinct (1992), or “Instinto Selvagem”, and Michèle Leblanc from Elle (2016), and also how the director's figure materializes in the meaning effects generated in this process. As it is a field whose language is unique and inseparable from the meanings in each film, we make use of several references to Verhoeven's work and cinema in general but always trying to articulate them from a discursive perspective. In the beginning, our hypothesis resided in a possible answer about the meanings produced in the films based on the ethos of the characters and also aspects that could be associated or not with Verhoeven - see the adjectives commonly associated with him and his work - however, throughout the research, we saw that, like the authorial question, the solution to this impasse is not so simple, since the analysis indicated that it is not about a dichotomy, but precisely the limit between these readings. To this end, we avail ourselves of the reflections postulated by Dominique Maingueneau (2018) regarding authorship, but mobilizing them from the literary field to a cinematographic one, as well as the notion of paratopia when looking at Verhoeven’s creative process and his figure as a director. We also name the notion of discursive ethos theorized for the AD framework also by Maingueneau (2018, 2020), in addition to a recent facet of the aforementioned category that he titles embedded ethos (2020); a dimension that concerns situations in which one ennunciation is representing another.