In the era of classical Hollywood cinema, viewers were encouraged to identify with the protagonist of the film, who were and still are overwhelmingly male. Meanwhile, Hollywood women characters of the 1950s and '60s were, according to Mulvey, coded with "to-be-looked-at-ness" while the camera positioning and the male viewer constituted the "bearer of the look." Mulvey suggests two distinct modes of the male gaze of this era: "voyeuristic" (i.e. seeing woman as image "to be looked at") and "fetishistic" (i.e. seeing woman as a substitute for "the lack," the underlying psychoanalytic fear of castration).
Laura Mulvey
(1941 - )
Mulvey argues that classical Hollywood films invite a masculinist gaze that aligns itself with active male characters and voyeuristically looks at or fetishizes passive female characters (women do not cause the action, but they do move it forward through the narrative). Often, on her own, a female character has no importance; it is how she makes the male feel or act that is of importance. The male gaze leads to hegemonic (male superior / paternalistic) ideologies within society.
MOTIVATIONS / IDEAS
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Best known for her essay, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, written in 1973. Article is influenced by theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. This is one of the first major essays that helped shift the orientation of film theory toward a psychoanalytic framework.
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Prior to Mulvey, film theorists such as Jean-Louis Baudry and Christian Metz used psychoanalytic ideas in their theoretical accounts of the cinema.
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Mulvey's contribution inaugurated the intersection of film theory, psychoanalysis and feminism.
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Mulvey stated that she first intended to use Freud and Lacan's concepts as a "political weapon," then used their concepts to argue that the cinematic apparatus of classical Hollywood cinema inevitably put the spectator in a masculine subject position, with the figure of the woman on screen as the object of desire and "the male gaze."
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In classical Hollywood cinema, viewers were encouraged to identify with the protagonist of the film, who were (and still are) overwhelmingly male.
RELATED STUDY TERMS
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Male gaze – occurs when the audience is put into the perspective of a heterosexual man.
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Male gaze theory – denies women a human identity, making them into objects to be admired for physical appearance. Suggests that women can only watch a film from a secondary perspective and only view themselves from a male perspective – although a woman is necessary to mainstream film narrative.
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Visual pleasure – (scopophelia) related to the role of a female character as an erotic object for characters within the narrative and for film viewers.
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Objectification – people gazed at (objectified) treated as an object whose sole value is to be enjoyed or possessed by the voyeur. They are devalued and their humanity is removed.
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Voyeurism – obtaining sexual gratification from observing unsuspecting individuals who are partly undressed, naked, or engaged in sexual acts; broadly refers to one who habitually seeks sexual stimulation by visual means.