Film Notes - Laura Mulvey

Laura Mulvey - Male Gaze Theory

Laura Mulvey was a producer, director and actor in the early 1970s as well as being a film theorist. Her early work showed the investigation on spectatorial identification and it's relationship to the male gaze.
Her ideas and clear proof of misogyny in films allowed a lot more people to see this theory as well and this eventually helped the issues around gender that were present in many films.  Laura Mulvey quoted herself that women are "the bearer of meaning and not the maker of meaning." suggesting that women aren't placed in roles where they can be in control of a scene and everything going on in the scene, instead they're placed in that role to be observed and seen as a 'nice view' for the audience viewing the movie, objectifying the woman playing the role to be seen as a prop or object. These ideas are more enforced becuase typically the films are shot from a heterosexual males point of view/filming it so in a way the audience is forced to view it all from his eyes, making them look at the woman a certain way.

This became a social norm because it was being placed into out films and people were not noticing it at first so it because normal, this then led to the male gaze correlating with normal day to day life. Stuff such as advertisement: 

This advertisement  is in a subway and it's promoting weight loss protein shakes but any people who view this advert may be negatively effected by this advert because they don't look like this woman because her job is most likely keeping her body fit and healthy so that's all this woman focuses on unlike the everyday person who uses the subway all the time. As well as this many people then get an idea that this advertisement is the idea woman that they must strive to have even though this image is probably heavily edited and very unrealistic.

This is another example of how the media use woman to gain attraction from audiences by not even recognising them as a human being and completely wiping their identity so all they are to the public is a body to be looked at and sexualised. This is also a very common marketing technique  lots of big media companies use, is that they only have the body parts that appeal to the majority of the public on display to sell a product because the admired body is being associated with product.

I believe this technique of using images of headless or no identity women so it allows the audience to let their imagination go wild and picture whoever they want to sexualise with the body. This soon became recognised and even had a twitter hashtag of #Headlesswomen trending on twitter because it had gone unnoticed for far too long.

Although the theory of 'male gaze' is becoming more recognised and slowly decreasing in film with women now being independent and strong willed, not being objectified in films as much. This isn't the case for all films, such as 'The Wolf Of Wall Street' - 2013, this film contains lots of scenes and imagery of women being sexualised and objectified throughout the films. Another example of a film would be 'SpringBreakers' - 2012, this film is known to be overly sexualised towards the women featured in it and is highly controversial because of basically the whole focus of the movie is revolving around the girls.

Multiple examples of different male gaze examples in films.

This scene clip is from the movie Bombshell and it represents how multiple females on Fox news came forward about how they were sexually harassed by the sexual predator Roger Ailes ( John Lithgow). From this clip is it very visibly uncomfortable to watch but also the camera is placed in a way that the audience can notice that Kayla ( Margot Robbie) is obviously being victimised during this scene. This can also be proven by the cameras angles as they are in specific placements and have particular framing that has us the viewer identifying with the sexual predator instead.

Whereas recently the roles started to become reversed, like this example scene of the 2016 Ghostbusters, the roles of the original male group are all swapped for females and then the only male of the group is lusted after throughout the entire movie which would normally be the other way around. However because of this, the film was criticised quite badly as because it was essentially making fun of the normal structure of a movie, people did not like that, so they reviewed it badly.