difference between the film star and the audience and confusing the boundary between

self and other. In the cinematic relationship between black audience and white film stars,

the alluring images of white film stars often function to manage racial difference in such

a way as to instill white supremacist ideologies into black viewers. Thus, in The Bluest

Eye, Pauline, fascinated by the enticing looks of white cultural fetishes, learns to despise

her own race and to identify with white images by viewing, taking in, and becoming

them. Sitting alone in the dark with her hair done in Jean Harlow's style, Pauline

cultivates her love for the white world. Pauline's fascination is no different from Pecola's

obsession with blue eyes. Whereas Pecola tries to orally incorporate the ideal white

beauty by drinking milk from the Shirley Temple cup or by eating Mary Jane candies,

Pauline attempt to visually take in and be the white beauty by visiting the movies as often

as she can or by emulating movie stars' looks.

 Noteworthy to mention here is the fact that cultural fetishes or icons are not

randomly chosen. Friedberg asserts in her theory of cinematic identification that "any

body"(italics original) projected on the filmic screen becomes the object of

"identificatory investment, a possible suit for the sub stitution/misrecognition of self."104

But she is only partially right. The cinematic gaze is never ideologically neutral or

innocent, so that any body can be the target object of identificatory investment. The

unacknowledged cinematic "gaze"105 is not only male-determined, as Laura Mulvey has

argued in her seminal essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." The carefully

constructed cinematic gaze is also white-determined, and the viewer is interpellatedd," in

Louis Althusser's sense, to adopt a certain subject position in cinematic discourse.