Week 2 Blog - The male gaze in cinema
So I'm taking the class Feminist Film Studies. So far a few of the things have been really overlapping. I just did two readings- Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema by Laura Mulvey and Is the Gaze Male? by E. Ann Kaplan. They were both dealing with the pyschoanalysis involved in how women are portrayed in cinema and women's sex roles in life in relation to the cinema. I thought these were really relavent, especially for when we begin studying film and other media like music videos.
LAURA MULVEY
A politically and aesthetically avant-garde cinema is now possible, but it can still only exist as a counterpoint.
(on getting lost in movies and self recognition) “The sense of forgetting the world as the ego has come to perceive it (I forgot who I am and where I was) is nostalgically reminiscent of that presubjective moment of image recognition.� (before you recognize your own image in the mirror)
Page 42: As the man identifies with the male protagonist as the leader and controller of that imaginary space, even if the woman is not displayed obviously as a sex object, if he possesses her, the entire audience (male spectator) possesses her in their relation to the male protagonist.
Cinema can shift the emphasis of “the look.� The place of the look defines cinema, the possibility of varying it and exposing it. This is what makes cinema quite different in its voyeuristic potential from, say, strip-tease, theatre, shows and so on. Going far beyond highlighting a woman’s to-be-looked-at-ness, cinema buildis the way she is to be looked at into the spectacle itself. Playing on the tension between film as controlling the dimension of time (editing, narrative) and film as controlling the dimension of space (changes in distance, editing), cinematic dcodes create a gaze, a world and an object, thereby producing an illusion cut to the measure of desire.
SECOND- E ANN KAPLAN
Women represent two things in cinema, according to Freud-
Voyeurism- linked to male pleasure in his own sexual organ transferred to pleasure in watching other people having sex. It is the desire of little boys to peep through keyholes, adult men look at films, the screen is framed just like the peep hole. Not only during sex scenes, but all views of women in cinema
Fetishism- men have dread that women may be their undoing. (this is found all over in literature) Men have a fear of castration, and without a phallis, this is what women represent, and why they are feared. To combat this fear men create fetish for women so that the feelings of fear and dread turn to feelings of pleasure
But have these two psychoanalyses been used as a tool to make women accept their place and roles in the lives of men?
Page 126: “If she [any woman] is to have sexual pleasure, it can only be constructed around her objectification; it cannot be a pleasure that comes from desire for the other (a subject position)- that is, her desire is to be desired.�
Most sexuality is expressed in dominant-submissive roles.
Even when the gaze is reversed and women are the ones making men the object, the woman then must take on a role that is dominant and removes all her caring, warm, motherly qualities. She must take on the Masculine role. Western society is very focused on having two sex different together. This benefits men because their desire usually carries power while a woman’s does not.
One way to fight this role as subject is to look at motherhood. In motherhood theories say that the mother is finding phallus in the child, or SELF in the child. But one interesting thing comes in single mother households. If there is no father for the woman to be the object of, and she is the subject for the child, new symbolic roles are created for that child.