Impact: Student Reflection
The first assignment for this class was incredibly hard. The challenge of not only pulling out a certain amount of core takeaways to present to an audience, but also trying to convince that audience that this text matters and they should spend their time reading it, all while constrained by an 800-word limit truly felt like being thrown in the deep end without a floaty. I had no experience in this type of writing. In high school I almost exclusively wrote analytical essays. It was strict: pick a theme, find quotes, and defend your thesis. But here, in this class, I was presented with the idea of an audience. Before, my audience was always my teacher and maybe a peer who would read over my work before submissions, but now I could imagine my work being engaged with by a different audience; the public. So I started trying to write for different people....I’ve never really liked writing in first person, mainly because I have never really liked reading first person, but due to many of the assigned readings in this class and my peers amazing works I was inspired to give first person a second chance, and I think it resulted in some of the best work I’ve produced so far. I am very thankful to this class and to the people in it for helping me to advance my writing skills. All in all, this class has done wonders for my development as a writer. Be it from the assigned readings, my own peers work, or the restrictions of the assignment itself, I really feel like I’ve broken out of my comfort zone in my own writing and can tackle any assignment given to me. —Ava Forn
Outcome: Student Work
“Jeanne Dielman – The Inherent Dread of Doing Your Dishes”
by Ava Forn, COLT 399, Spring 2026
The first time I watched Jeanne Dielman 23, Quai Du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles (1975) I was washing my dishes in a crummy communal sink. It was three in the morning, and I had this strange feeling that I had been dupped. Here was my type of movie—long, artistic, centering women and the home—yet I was left feeling confused and, gross? I couldn’t leave with this feeling, so at eight pm the next day I sat in my bed and stared at my screen for three and a half hours. I did nothing, didn’t move, barely blinked, just sat and watched a woman go about her daily life. In the end I was left a little less confused and with a name for that gross, dirty feeling.
A movie invites you to stare; to sit on your couch, grab a snack, some blankets and pillows, lie next to someone you care about, and watch people for hours. Sometimes you laugh, cry, feel pain, feel pleasure, but it’s all through the screen; through the simple act of seeing people live their lives. Jeanne Dielman 23, Quai Du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles is a movie that punishes you for this staring. You’re constantly wanting more, to be let into the scene, to know what is happening behind closed doors, between cuts, down dark hallways, and the movie knows this. It’s constantly playing with this desire, this voyeurism, and in the end, it punishes you with it.
The entire movie centers around one core idea; watching a woman’s daily routine. We follow Jeanne Dielman (Delphine Seyrig) as she cooks dinner, cleans her house, and runs errands. It is a mind-numbing display of household monotony, but sometimes, for just a moment, we are greeted with a hint of something wrong. Men come into the house and are led into closed off rooms. We can’t look in. We as the audience know something is happening, be we aren’t allowed to see. All we know is once it’s done Jeanne is left changed. The once machine-like woman begins to make mistakes, burns her food, looses her taste. But we couldn’t have that little peek behind the curtain.
Finally, after three hours of long grueling scenes where almost nothing happens, we are allowed behind that curtain. But it’s not what we want. The sex scene, what we’ve been wanting to see from the start, feels like rape. She claws out at the air, shoves her face in the pillows, it’s horrible to watch. Instead of some great emotional pay off, we sit and stare at a broken woman. We are left with one idea; “you wanted this.”
Jeanne Dielman is a double-edged sword. It’s rewarding to the attentive viewer, a true work of art for those willing to sit through chores and silence. There's commentary on women and the sexist monotony they are forced to live through (as many have pointed out before me). But it’s also a punishment. Jeanne Dielman forces you to sit with that part of you that wants to stare, to feel emotion through other people.
There is a voyeur in all of us, it’s why we like reality television and social media so much, we like to see how others live their lives, to feel their emotions without having to leave our homes. We walk around with this little voyeur, but we don’t like to acknowledge it. Jeanne Dielman forces you to recognize this voyeur, the part of us that wants to see build up and release through another person, to feel it through them. There’s a part of us that wants Jeanne to suffer, to snap, to fly off the handles and deliver us that beautifully cathartic scene where the beaten down woman finally fights back. But to get there the woman must suffer. We desire catharsis, so we desire pain. We stare, fine with the pain so long as emotional release comes after. It is only once that emotional release is denied to us that we grapple with how wrong that desire was in the first place.
I watched this movie doing my dishes in a communal sink, always wondering when someone was going to walk in. Wondering if people could see me through the window in the back of the room, a massive void hiding people I couldn’t see walking down the street. Was there someone staring at me out there, just out of view? If I were them, would I stand and stare in? Maybe, but all there’d be to see is someone doing their dishes.