Essay on Male Gaze in Vertigo

In Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Laura Mulvey argues that the gaze in films can only be male. Mulvey claims that if there is any female gaze, it is done through male identification as women do not have gaze of their own. The aim of this essay is to explore the possibility of female gaze and how it depicts power and gender in both films; Vertigo and The Piano. In The Piano, the film is mostly seen from Ada’s point of view which emphasises the spectator’s identification with her. Ada’s lack of voice can be seen as a symbol of her withdrawal from patriarchal society and women’s historical role of not having a voice.

Instead of raising and taking care of his daughter, the roles are reversed, and Lindy is saddled with a parental role. As a result, contrary to Beauty, Lindy is hindered in developing as her own person, as she continuously thinks about her father and his safety first. While Beauty also does things for her father, her actions do not require to sacrifice herself to the extent that Lindy had to do throughout her life. Besides this, Beauty’s actions are regarded as a testament of her good-hearted character. Moreover, when Beauty’s father is left alone, he is just lonely, but when Lindy is away from her father, he gets himself into trouble, starts using drugs and even overdoses. The emphasis of Lindy as a maternal figure robs her of the ability to pursue her own interests and goals, hence her identity. For example, when Kyle and Lindy go to the lake-cottage, the viewer sees how she starts to acknowledge her feelings for Kyle, but she must abandon her romance and sexuality, in order to take care of her “screwed-up

Stereotypically, men and women have very different roles in the eyes of society. Gender roles and stereotypes have a history in religious, political, legal and economic systems. In reality, men and women are more alike than most people assume. Throughout the world there are struggles with identity, power, and violence occurring everyday between both men and women. The film Mean Girls, directed by Mark Walters, follows a young girl, Cady’s, transition from being home schooled to public high school. Cady enters the school’s group of mean girls, otherwise known as “the plastics”, which consists of Regina George, Gretchen Wieners, and Karen Smith. Throughout the film each character struggles with their true identity.

The reader knows that the couple were in love, but Mrs Midas now fears her husband because of

-I am God - Midge Kelly- Midge doesn't take "no" from anyone and always gets what he wants.

I think it is a 50/50 decision between Judy and Scottie and the decision of Judy’s fate in the movie of “Vertigo”. I believe Scottie was getting into her mind to make her pretend to be someone she is not. But then the question is posed was Judy and Madeline related. She is also responsible for her fate because she did nothing to try and stop Scottie or herself for being someone she is possibly not. The way Scottie acted from the beginning was a little off, and I don’t really get the point of Midge Woods character, but as she could be classified as a comfort figure for Scottie. Yes, I know Scottie started having serious phycological problems from the beginning because of the opening scene of him hanging from a building which gave him a new

There are many forms of conflict that Margie deals with throughout this play. As the play opens, we are thrown into a scene with Margie and her young manager, Stevie. Stevie

The same applies to the second time Scottie attempts to save the lady, as Judy climbs to the scene of Madeline’s death. As Scottie chases after the woman he believes to be Madeline, he, due to his acrophobia, ends up being the person in distress in the tower, placed in that position by the woman he is attempting to save and her lover/ director. Hitchcock tricks the audience into believing the scene as Scottie saw it by using traditional gender roles of the fragility of female mental health and the woman in distress tropes that the audience has been conditioned to expect. The traditional gallantry of the heroic actions of the male rescuer and the desirable passivity of the rescued female is not just flipped, for this is not a simple role reversal, but thoroughly twisted into a nightmarish event scripted to get away with committing murder. Yet in the same scene there is an actual woman in distress, or more accurately dead, i.e. the real Madeline, for whom this entire plot has been constructed but who never actually appears on screen, with the exception of a

The portrayal of women in film has been a largely discussed and debated topic over the previous few decades. One particular argument arisen by audiences, mainly feminist film theorists, is that women are viewed through a male-dominant gaze that objectifies the female characters, therefore overall affecting the treatment of women in the real world. The aforementioned ‘gaze’ is a term that describes how the audience/viewer engages with visual medias; a male gaze would imply that women are presented as an ‘object’ of a heterosexual male’s desire in a work of media. The film Thelma and Louise directed by Ridley Scott and released in 1991 was a large source of controversy and has provided many debates on the topic of female representation in film.

In Vertigo, Scottie is the lead and drives the narrative. The women in the film only play supportive roles. The other woman in Scottie’s life is Midge, a friend who he had previously been engaged to. It seems as though Scottie only ever interacts with her when he is in need of something. After tailing Madeline, Scottie comes to Midge’s apartment and, without even greeting her, asks if she knows any historians to aid his

The connection between the struggles of the two women involved in the film--Maria Luisa Bemberg and Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz--is impossible to miss, since the director has used Juana's character to voice her opinions on feminism and--indirectly--on mainstream filmmaking. Feminist film critics have largely agreed on the function of mainstream cinema in the control and objectification of women. One of the most famous essays on this issue was written by Laura Mulvey. In Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Mulvey argues that the mainstream film manipulates visual pleasure in a skillful way and it "code[s] the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order" (30). What is more important, Mulvey claims that mainstream cinema allows women only one spectatorial position--the passive, masochistic one--while the men enjoy the active--sadistic--spectator position. While this has been debated by other feminist critics, as the monolithic structure of mainstream movie (and patriarchy) is being slowly deconstructed at its fissures, Mulvey's essay is enough to show what Bemberg is trying to do with her film.

Laura Mulvey, a feminist film critic, is famous for her essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, in which she coins the term “to-be-looked-at-ness”, which refers to the obsession and fetish film has with looking at and focusing on women. This is why the majority of women are cast as performance occupations, such as actresses, singers, or dancers, because those are positions which warrant the act of watching. However, in It Happened One Night, there is, at the very least, a surface level reversal of Mulvey’s contention, with Peter in certain scenes being the one attracting “to-be-looked-at-ness”. When the two check in a motel room for the night and Peter does a kind of a strip tease for Ellie when she refuses to move to her side of a blanket dividing the room, which they call the “walls of Jericho”. It is then Peter’s body which is being looked at by Ellie, the camera, and the audience, when normally it would the Ellie in Peter’s position.

The monster sometimes has an indeterminate gender, or is, indeed, a woman. Further, when men and women ‘fight back’ it is largely in fear of life itself, and not wholly predicated on issues of sexual anxiety from either gender. Clover’s definition of ‘the final girl,’ therefore, in characters like Nancy in Nightmare on Elm Street (1985), Jennifer in I Spit on your Grave (1980) and Alice in Friday the 13th (1980) as a ‘phallic’ heroine

The classic bespectacled female characters in Hitchcock who illustrate this semiotic phenomenon are illustrations of how a woman’s difference will result in her eventual punishment or elimination-whether symbolically as with Midge being cast aside by Scottie or literally as with Miriam being murdered by Bruno. The semiotic power of “woman-in-glasses” have cut across film, literature, psychology, sociology, rhetoric and popular culture, commercialism and day-today lives. Tzvetan Todorov notices a conincidence between “themes of vision” and “images of sight”, usually involving the symbolism of the eyeglasses, which “permit penetration into our marvellous universe” (121). For this reason the eyeglasses-coupled with the mysterious Otherness

Vertigo is a psychological thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, with a key theme of voyeuristic fetish and erotic obsession. The male protagonist, Scottie is depicted as the dominator in a heterosexual relationship with two female characters: Judy, who fakes Madeleine to seduce Scottie and deceive him to make false testimony for a planned murder, and Midge, the confidante of Scottie who is secretly in love with him. Through the interactions with Scottie, Judy and Midge are portrayed as submissive to the male dominance. The complete submissiveness and obedience expressed by Judy and Midge are conspicuously unnatural. However, such deliberate depiction may be read as deliberate exaggeration for emphasis of patriarchy order in heterosexual