Hollywood Film Analysis

Mulvey, Laura. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975) - Laura Mulvey. Thesis. N.d. N.p.: Laura Mulvey, 1975. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975) - Laura Mulvey. NG Communications, 2006. Web. 20 Feb. 2014. .

She argues that black female spectators neither wish to identify with a white woman subject objectified by the “male gaze” nor identify with a black male perpetrator of this “male gaze”. hooks asserts that black men, unconcerned with gender, were able to “repudiate the reproduction of racism in cinema…even as they could feel as though they were rebelling against white supremacy by daring to look”, specifically at white women (118). By being allowed to look at white women, black male spectators were able to ignore inherent racism in cinema in order to participate in a form of the “male gaze”, hooks states. Because black female spectators were unwilling or unable to ignore both the racism and sexism of this “gaze”, hooks states that “black female spectators construct a theory of looking relations where cinematic visual delight is the pleasure of interrogation” (126). While black female viewers may not take pleasure in the film narrative, hooks argues that through the “oppositional gaze” they are able to take pleasure in resisting this narrative

In conclusion, the film She’s the Man shows the audience how gender gets represented in films. It shows the traditional femininity as well as the traditional masculinity. This illustrates that gender has impacts on power and gender relations to contribute gender inequality. Gender norms are enforced in films which maintain the power inequality difference between both genders. These issues confine the way modern films represent gender and gives a direct effect to the

Several film theorists have used a variety of tactics and view points to analyze feature films since their inception. One of the most prominent theorists of those that analyze films from a feminist perspective is Laura Mulvey. Mulvey is famous for her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” which presents an array of theories involving the treatment of women in films. Arguably the most notable idea presented in Mulvey’s work is the existence of the “male gaze” in films. This essay will examine Mulvey’s theory of the male gaze in relation to Alfred Hitchcock’s film, Vertigo. Vertigo does not fit the criteria of a film that

Laura Mulvey understands Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills as to be rehearsing this structure of the ‘male gaze’, “The camera looks; it captures the female character in a parody of different voyeurisms. It intrudes into moments in which she is ungraded, sometimes undressed, absorbed into her own world in the privacy of her own environment. Or it witnesses a moment in which her guard drops and she is suddenly startled by the presence, unseen and off-screen watching her.”[v]

Today’s filmmakers have three areas to focus on: the event or theme of the film, the audience who will be watching the film, and lastly, the individual characters and the roles they play and how they are portrayed and interpreted. Many of these films bottom line objectives are to focus on the “erotic needs of the male ego.” The focus on fetishistic scopophilia tend to slant the view such that we see the world as being dominated by men and that woman are

Women in classical Hollywood films has been historically often portrayed as from the typical patriarchal perspective. The traditional representative of women in cinema is often shown to be the ideal feminine character or as a character that strengthens the ideology of femininity in women and masculinity in men. Women in film have been objectified and cast aside as secondary characters that only relate to a male character while the ideal masculine character is often depicted by an attractive, strong male that is capable of solving any obstacle that comes his way. A “woman’s film”, identified by Molly Haskell, are melodramatic scenes that are supposed to appeal to women because of the implication that women are more emotional than men. It belittles the problems of females and shows them as insignificant little emotional problems that women are overly emotional for. These types of representation that are often found in traditional Hollywood films perpetuate the gender norms in cinema and reinforces the patriarchal view in which the man is superior to the woman. Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone (2010) subvert traditional representations of women in Hollywood film and the archetypal “women’s film” by portraying women in a different light compared to the traditional gender norm of a feminine woman and a masculine man. The film shows representation of women in a way that defies the traditional, patriarchal

Since the 1940’s, movies have predominately portrayed women as sex symbols. Beginning in the 1940’s and continuing though the 1980’s, women did not have major roles in movies. When they did have a leading role the women was either pretreated as unintelligent and beautiful, or as conniving and beautiful: But she was always beautiful. Before the 1990’s, men alone, wrote and directed all the movies, and the movies were written for men. In comparison, movies of the 90’s are not only written and directed by women, but leading roles are also held by older and unattractive women. In this paper I will show the variations and growth of women’s roles in movies from the 1940’s though the 1990’s.

Laura Mulvey claims a female in film is two things: An erotic object for the characters within the narrative to view and an erotic object for the spectators in the cinema to view. Schumer takes this idea and reverses it, truly changing the way we view film. She puts female voice first so it is no longer just an object of the male gaze, it is one of it’s own. She openly mocks stereotypes and breaks free of gender roles. When watching her show “You’re seduced by Schumer’s slutty, silly, superficial archetype, and while you’re doubled over in laughter, the message sinks its teeth in” (Sadaf Ahsan, 2015. N.P). Schumer is a hilarious under-cover feminist, which means she attacks these gender role issues and Male Gaze issues with comedy and satire, to make viewers laugh but also understand just how absurd the media can be when it comes to portraying women. The film industry needs the role of women to succeed, but usually put the second the man, always in the serving position. Movies such as Trainwreck, put women in the power position, where they have more say and can start to be viewed as equals to men, with the same mind set, instead of there just to be “hot”. Continuing forward,

Theorist, E. Ann Kaplan in her work, “Is the Gaze Male?”, analyses the portrayal of women in film using Laura Mulvey’s “Gaze’ theory and psychoanalysis. In addition, Kaplan states that historically, females have been the central focus on only the melodrama genre, and while melodrama exposes the constraints and limitations that the family places on women, at the same time, gets women to accept those constraints as inevitable and normal. Kaplan argues that our culture is deeply rooted in “masculine” and “feminine, and dominance-submission patterns. In the end, she concludes that the exclusion from male culture provides an avenue to affect change in film and society. I partially agree with Kaplan that some women take pleasure from being the object of the male gaze as I think that is not entirely true, and specifically, this generalization does not apply to lesbians.

Essentially, a woman’s place in society’s stratification is defined by the outward manifestation of her person, which is identified first and foremost by her gender. Simone de Beauvoir asserts that women are characterized as “others” or as “not male” . This distinction would not be possible if women were not recognizable by sight as not male. Due to this, it is relevant to look at film and its associations with visual representations of the woman and the male gaze. As John Berger recognises “men act, women appear…men look at women…women themselves being looked at” . This succinctly defines that the position of women in patriarchal culture depends on look and elucidates that women exist only in relation to men. Thus, this essay will explore to what extent women are controlled and guided by the patriarchal male gaze as is reflected in visual popular culture, in particular, narrative cinema, with specific reference to Laura Mulvey’s essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.

In the early 1990s Laura Mulvey’s thesis concerning the patriarchal structure of an active male gaze has influenced feminist film critiques and Hollywood. Mulvey’s project is to use psychoanalysis to uncover the power of patriarchy in Hollywood cinema. Patriarchal influence upon cinema is found primarily in pleasure (pleasure in looking) or as Freud’s has put it, scopophilia. Mulvey suggests that it may be possible to create a new for of cinema due to the fact that patriarchy power to control cinematic pleasure has revealed.

Filmmakers use traditional gender stereotypes to produce characters audiences can easily identify with by portraying conventional images of a person with identifiable characteristics. In previous years, the dominant representation of a women in film has been the passive, subjugated protagonist. However, through the development of female empowerment and added feminist representations of film, the female heroine transformed to become strong and independent women in her own right, as an individual character.

Since its humble beginnings in the later years of the nineteenth century, film has undergone many changes. One thing that has never changed is the filmmaker’s interest in representing society in the present day. For better or worse, film has a habit of showing the world just what it values the most. In recent years, scholars have begun to pay attention to what kinds of ideas films are portraying (Stern, Steven E. and Handel, 284). Alarmingly, viewers, especially young women, are increasingly influenced by the lifestyle choices and attitudes that they learn from watching these films (Steele, 331). An example of this can be seen in a popular trope of the “romantic comedy” genre in this day and age: the powerful man doing something to help, or “save” the less powerful woman, representing a troubling “sexual double standard” (Smith, Stacy L, Pieper, Granados, Choueiti, 783).

In society, women are often perceived as the weaker sex, both physically and mentally. In modern times women have leveled the playing field between men and women, and feminism is a highly discussed topic, but for years, women faced discrimination and prejudice both in life and in the workplace, due to their sex. This way of thinking flooded into the world of film. In their works, the authors of each of the various sources address the limitations and liberations of women both on and off the screen in nineteenth century Film and Cinema. Not every source is completely filled with information related to the research topic, but they do cover and analyze many of the same points from different perspectives. Prominent points addressed in each