Puesta en marcha del ROBOTINO PLUS

140 We knew it needed to be form fitting. We knew it needed to be attractive. We knew it needed to make everybody watch her walk by.35

This positioning of the character as attractive is emphasised through the editing of the opening sequence. A series of shots showing Robin’s walk down Wisteria Lane towards a neighbourhood party reveals the effect she has on heterosexual males, and exactly what it is they enjoy looking at. As we follow Benz’s progress, the script motivates fragmented tracking shots of her body (her legs, her breasts, and her hair), with reverse shots of male onlookers revealing the gazes to which she is subjected: those belonging to adolescent Wisteria Lane resident Parker (Zane Huett), a garden labourer, and a courier.36 These males become focal points when the moving camera halts each time, inviting the audience to view the men—and one boy—as subjects in the act of looking at the object Robin. Once at the party, the male protagonists of the series are also seen ogling Robin, forsaking their conversation with Katherine to surround the beautiful newcomer. These men apparently assume that Robin is at least interested in men, if not themselves in particular.

Yet it is not only men who read Robin as an unproblematic object of a male heterosexual gaze. During ‘Lovely’, Gaby (Eva Longoria Parker), Bree, Lynette (Felicity Huffman), Katherine and, later, Susan, read Robin as deliberately inviting the male gaze in order to return it. When Mary Alice’s voice-over states that, of those looking at Robin, ‘not everyone liked what they saw’, the specific implications of ‘not everyone’ are made immediately obvious by those framed within the shot: married heterosexual women do not like Robin. Demonstrably jealous of their husbands’ reactions to the character, the married women of Wisteria Lane see her as competition for their spouses’ attention.

In ‘Lovely’, Susan gets possessive of Mike following a scantily-clad Robin’s attempt to soothe his bad back with an amateur chiropractic session. Susan defends herself by asking

35 _Ibid.

36 _{Mulvey writes about how close-ups of women’s faces and bodies create eroticism by fragmenting the} human figure into something like an ‘icon’. She argues that this causes the ‘overvaluation’ of female beauty in (heterosexual) men, or ‘fetishistic scopophilia, [building] up the physical beauty of the object, transforming it into something satisfying in itself.’ See ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, pp. 28-40. Flawed as Mulvey’s argument might be in its strict adherence to Freud and strongly gendered division of desire, it is clear that the on-screen fragmentation of female bodies is certainly used to affect eroticism.

141 Robin ‘How was I supposed to react? You used to be a stripper!’, assuming that Robin’s former employment means the therapeutic session is intended to please Mike sexually. While such misunderstandings arise from assumptions about sex workers, Adair also made sure to emphasise Robin’s false threat to the women through costume design. While it is later made clear that Robin is not romantically or sexually interested in men, initially Adair needed to present the character as a believable rival and potential corrupting force. This was aided by the appearance of the actress, Benz. Adair pointed out that the natural appeal of the actress made her job very easy in this instance: ‘First of all she’s beautiful; she oozes a very specific sensuality before you start. You could put her in a paper sack, and she’d still ooze that.’37 Consequently, while the tiny gym shorts and sports bra Robin wears to work on Mike’s back are not commonly viewed as erotic garments, the expanse of flesh that they reveal—and in particular the slender, tanned, toned nature of that flesh—render the outfit potentially erotic and thus threatening from Susan’s perspective.

For one particular character, Adair needed to devise a specific strategy to render Robin a substantial threat. It is not a coincidence that Robin’s costuming strategy bears a striking resemblance to that of Gaby, a former model who puts much effort into looking desirable to men. Gaby is often dressed in form-fitting, cleavage-revealing, limb-baring outfits that emphasise her figure, offering it up for an appreciative gaze. In cut and style, Robin’s red dress is reminiscent of something Gaby might wear. Yet Adair went further than mere similarity, visually matching the two characters by using items that are almost identical to costume both actresses on occasion. In ‘Lovely’, when Robin encounters Gaby while out on a run, Robin wears tight black Lycra yoga trousers with a yellow top and a tight zip-up sweater. Gaby also wears tight black yoga trousers and teams them with a red version of Robin’s top and a red zip-up sweater. Although Gaby’s collar is turned up, the outfits are extremely alike, differentiated almost exclusively by colour. Also, in ‘Lovely’, Gaby and Robin appear to wear earrings from the same collection at various points in the episode. Robin teams her red dress with an elaborately designed pair, featuring nine flat metallic