Final Project
For my final paper I discussed the representation of women in the cinematic adaptations of Frank Miller’s comic series Sin City and 300. Obviously, blatant stereotypes about women run rampant through Miller’s fictionalized worlds, but I was more interested in the ways in which these films expressed ideas of performative gender and the female gaze.
I studied gender as a performance in Sin City, noting in particular how Miller creates female characters as not just objects, but totems of feminine ideals: The Martyr [Wendy], The Angel [Nancy] and The Whore [Gail] (Note the conspicuous lack of motherhood, or the ideas of parenting at all). In the reviews and articles I read, many people defended Miller against the “feminist backlash� by claiming that the women had power in their own right. But when I really broke it down, the female characters used their power to stay in the sexualized realms they were already in. The prostitutes had guns to defend their rights to be prostitutes. Wendy uses her sexuality to gain a protector. These women perform as a certain type of woman in order to conform to the male narrator’s ideas of what is worth protecting/fighting for/etc.
In 300, I was most interested in the idea of the female gaze. Women went to this movie specifically to see Gerard Butler’s bulging pectoral muscles, or to see men running around in leather speedos sticking phallic objects into each other. But the characters in the movie followed this pattern as well. The very first scene is a male baby being examined to see if he is healthy or strong enough to be considered ‘good enough’ to live. I could go on and on, but the point is that by showing such an extremely polarized version of masculine vs. feminine, what Miller really did was create men as objects to be gazed upon.
A couple sources for this paper were Kaplan’s Is The Gaze Male? and Mulve’s Visual Pleasure in the Narrative Cinema, as well as various interviews and reviews of Miller’s two films.