Male Gaze: An Urgent Hollywoodian Issue
Despite being one of the industries with the most power to create and excite change, the film industry still falls behind when it comes to social issues. Within this, the Hollywoodian film world remains notorious. Whilst appearing to audiences to be catching up with 21st-century values, notably by televising movements such as Me Too in awards ceremonies, if closely examined, Hollywood continues to display far too many examples of outdated views, that should have been shifted long ago.
One blatant example of such obsolete characteristics within Hollywood is the discrepancy between the number of male and female directors, and authors, who make it to awards. Within the 93 years of distribution of Academy Awards, the most important event in the industry internationally, only five women have been nominated to ‘Best Director’, with only one winner; Kathryn Bigelow, who directed The Hurt Locker. A consequence of that is a preponderance of the male’s view as the norm when it comes to films - the so-called ‘male gaze’. More specifically, the heterosexual male’s view, one which suggests a sexualized way of looking at women, seems to prevail.
Through the ‘male gaze’, the audience is forced, by the director, to see the world as he, a heterosexual male, sees it; a world in which women are an object of desire. Her own feelings, thoughts, and desires are unexistent, as she is there only to please men. Such representation satisfies not only the director himself but also the target audience, those who perceive the film through the same gaze: men. Accordingly, the female character assumes two display levels; “as erotic object for the characters within the screen story, and as erotic object for the spectator within the cinema auditorium.”
Author of the concept of ‘male gaze’, Laura Mulvey studies cinema through a psychoanalytical lens, exploring the voyeuristic nature of individuals. We watch movies because we enjoy watching people with whom we can relate, on screen. Accordingly, the male audience projects themselves in the main character of a movie, hence their idealized woman should also be onscreen. Mulvey reminds that, “in a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female”, which explains the way women are represented under the gaze. We repeatedly see the portrayal of the type of girl who would change everything about herself for her man, who is always there to serve him in any way, and complies with any and everything that suits him.
The male gaze can be spotted in a variety of films of all genres and likings. The first trope of girls represented under the male gaze is the ‘Manic Pixie Dream Girl’, an attractive, energetic, quirky free-spirited girl who is obviously there only to give new meaning to the sad, hopeless male character. Some examples are Manhattan’s Tracy, Elizabethtown’s Claire, and Garden State’s Sam. Another example is the controlling female counterpart, a woman who ends the hero’s life by seducing, controlling, and later dismissing him, just as Blue Jasmine’s Jasmine and Annie Hall’s Annie. There is also the girl who goes through a makeover to please men, only then becoming a “real woman”, and who may have done some unholy things before meeting her savior, the love of her life, a heterosexual male without whom she would have been nothing. She may be represented by My Fair Lady’s Eliza, Grease’s Sandy, and Pretty Woman’s Vivian. Last but not least, a girl who shaped old Hollywood cinema through most of Marylin Monroe’s roles, the Bimbo. A girl who lacks in intellect, which is balanced out by her physical attractiveness, as in Some Like it Hot’s Sugar Kane or Gentlemen Prefer Blondes’ Dorothy.
Justine Kurland’s “Toys R Us,” 1998
The objectification of women, however, is not done only through scripts and writing of a certain story or character, it also presents within cinematography, camera movements, and even figurine. In 2016, only 34 films had a female lead or co-lead, which is already alarming, but all the ways in which the male gaze can show up in a movie narrow even more acutely the possibility of women being represented as they are, and not through a men’s lens. Too frequently, even if a woman has a role, she has been placed there to be looked at. The camera conducts the audience’s gaze through the lenses of the main character, director, and aim audience - usually all male. In James Bond’s Die Hard, co-lead Jinx has to endure slow-motion closeups on her body, whenever she leaves the water or the beach, whilst when James Bond emerges from the water there is none of that.
It is clear that female and male representation in film are entirely different, even if they have equivalent roles in the same movie. Super-hero movies and comic books are also great examples of this paradigm. Whilst Marvel’s Black Widow is depicted in a sexual way in every single scene in which she features, the same fate cannot be imagined for Captain America; the audience would find it simply ridiculous. Cinema does not invite the audience to desire men’s bodies, only women’s – all the time.
Which, to some, does not exclude the idea of a ‘female gaze’... Is there such thing as a female gaze? The simple answer to that would be no, there is no female gaze equivalent to the male, as women depict other women in non-gaze-way. Photographer Justine Garland and director Sophia Coppola have amazing work representing women through what could be labeled a female gaze; “free, lovely, messy-haired adolescents, smoking, hanging out in meadows or in parking lots, in forests or in playgrounds, enacting their own mysterious routines”, as they are in real life. Female Gaze represents women as subjects, not objects.
The male gaze, on the other hand, creates a power imbalance. Laura Mulvey has been saying it since the 1970s, even if women were to make movies with a certain gaze, whether it be upon men or women, it would not be the same given the historical status quo in which society still finds itself, and the lens through which we still see the world: patriarchy. The male gaze contributes to the objectification of women in real life, and beyond that, perpetuates the social order which puts women under men, incites sexual violence upon women, and perceives that women are only there for men. Nicole Martins, a professor in the Media School at Indiana University Bloomington states that, “if the women are always sexualized and treated as objects (in film), then I don't think we should be surprised that we have men who treat women that way.”