Implications of the Masculiune Gaze in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

Renowned feminist film theorist, Laura Mulvey, explores how classic Hollywood cinema is shown through a masculine perspective that fetishisizes women as objects of desire. This perspective is also known as the “male gaze”, which creates a voyeuristic and scopophilic layer to the viewing of film. According to Mulvey, “in their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness.” One of the staples of classic Hollywood cinema is women consistently being put or made into a visually erotic role for both the male characters on screen, and the audience. This staple is of course found in 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

Through exposure, the role of women as a visible visual icon, such as cinematic mechanisms fetishism serves to convince the position of the male audience as an absolute subject.

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

The author, Jackie Stacey is a British feminist film historian. The main goal of her research is to understand the specific pleasure and engagements of British cinema audiences in the 1940s and 1950s. Stacey received 350 letters from women who went to the cinema 2-3 times a week during this period of wartime as cinema going was at an all-time high. Within the book, Stacey discusses Laura Mulvey’s Male Gaze and how Mulvey’s analysis of the pleasures of Hollywood cinema led her to conclude that the spectator position offered is a ‘masculine’ one. She talks about how there are 3 looks within the dominant mode of Hollywood cinema; the camera(man), the editor and the director. She emphasizes on how all of these looks work together to create the effect of seeing the female characters as objects of desire through the eyes of the male characters.

In Sturken and Cartwright’s essay Modernity: Spectatorship, Power and Knowledge they discuss the gaze and that it is to “look or stare, often with eagerness or desire”(76). Sturken and Cartwright also use Laura Mulvey’s idea of the male gaze as an example. Mulvey proposed “that the conventions of popular narrative cinema are structured by a patriarchal unconscious, positioning woman represented in films as objects as a male gaze”(76). The male gaze is closely related to the stereotype of the dumb blonde. The character of the dumb blonde is always represented as highly sexual and attractive and is, therefore, the misogynistic male viewer.

In this story the author portrays men in a way that they view women as objects of desire. You can see that when the men in the story make comments about the women in the story in a sexual light. For instance, when the author says “I see the girl has what could be an attractive body…” (Tiptree 255). showing that without even meeting the women that the author is commenting on the character is already making comments on her looks. Also, when the author makes the comment “The women doesn’t mean one thing to me, but the obtrusive excessiveness of her, the defiance of her little rump eight inches’ form fly – for two pesos I’d have those shorts down and introduce myself” (Tiptree 263). During the 60s “there was seldom justice for women who had been raped… she had been inviting the rape by wearing revealing clothes or tight dresses” (Coontz 13). Reviling the nature of the time that women had very little sexual rights during this time in “seventeen states in 1963 is was still restricted that women access to contraceptives…Massachusetts prohibited the sale if it” (Coontz 11).

Mulvey’s main argument in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” is that Hollywood narrative films use women in order to provide a pleasurable visual experience for men. The narrative

Mulvey approaches the concept of psychoanalysis as the idea of a political weapon, which is then used in the way to expose patriarchal unconsciousness in both films and how certain structures in society are formed. A woman can not be the maker of meaning, but can only be the bearer of viewership within this structure, she is the object that is to be viewed in an erotic form. To be the object of pleasure for the male gaze, men take this satisfaction from watching to fulfill their own innate sexual desires (Mulvey, 1975). Her existence is based solely on how the patriarchal society views her, in which she has no choice but to be gazed at. Moreover a woman cannot be a true spectator because of the male dominant culture she is surrounded in.

Feminist film theorists have argued that in classical cinema, the spectator’s pleasure revolves around images of the female body. Within the diegesis, the woman often appears as an object to be looked at and acted upon, while the male protagonist is usually granted a more active role, both in terms of his agency in the narrative, and in terms of his enunciative authority. This hypothesis is backed up by elements of two films studied this semester: His Girl Friday by Howard Hawks (1940) and Double Indemnity by Billy Wilder (1944). This is seen through the supporting role that the main female characters take in the movies, the power that the male characters have over the females, and the way ‘that the woman’s image is used to draw attention to specific aspects of the plot.

The cinema offers pleasure of scopophilia where ‘it can be fixated into perversion, producing obsessive voyeurs and Peeping Toms whose only sexual satisfaction can come from watching, in an active controlling sense, an objectified other.’ (Mulvey: 1988, p. 31)

Characterizing Maria Alejandrina Cervantes in a seducing manner, intrigues the reader to her persona draws them to the idea of prostitution. By portraying her as a respectable, honorable woman, Garcia Marquez manages to gain sympathy from the reader regarding

The male gaze puts his fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled, in a unique sort of way. In this traditional exhibitionist, role women are continuously being looked at and their appearance is delivered to the male gaze in such a way as a strong visual and erotic impact and provides male desire. The presence of a woman in a normal narrative film is the key of the movie. However, the key of the narrative film works against the development of the story-line and stops the action due to the erotic gaze. Butt Boetticher said: “What counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents. She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act the way he does. In herself the woman has not the slightest importance”.

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).

The presentation of women on screen is another highlighted issue in many of the gathered sources. Because men were ultimately in control of what went on the screen much of what the audience perceived were women from the male imagination or fantasy. Bernard Beck elaborates in his article Where the Boys Are: The Contender and other Movies about Women in a Man’s World that, “…women have been used to dress up a male story or motivate a male character” (Beck 15). Women were often insignificant and trivial characters. Although, Kathe Davis disagrees to a point. In her article, Davis offers a dissonant opinion to the fore-mentioned insignificance of the female character. She instead describes many female characters as “predators,” and analyzes the roles of lead women in three prominent films of the nineteenth century. In each film, she finds parallels and similarities of cases of “female emasculation” and instances where “women are turned into objects of male desire” (Davis 47-48). Davis does not perceive female characters as being insignificant, just stripped of their power and misrepresented. She discusses how females of power are often portrayed as crazy