A Quintessence
In Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, the author discusses ways in which cinema utilizes certain techniques that maintain power of the male gender over the female gender. One of the techniques Mulvey identifies is the use of ‘the male gaze”, in regards to filming female characters. Simply put this is a technique in which female characters are introduced in segments instead of a whole person as opposed to their male counter parts who are filmed, or at least introduced, in relatively whole shots.
These segments follow the male gaze, for instance in the opening of Alfred Hitchcock’s film, Vertigo, we are given no context just a set of lips, a pair of eyes, and a single eye that holds the title of the film. This woman has been reduced from an actress to a prop. This theme is not limited to the opening in, Vertigo, in fact the ‘the male gaze” drives the plot and holds the women in their roles. The plot of the film is a man watching a woman watching herself be looked at, everyone (including the director) shapes Judy just so she can reflect their idea of something else.
This plot is a fair example of John Berger’s statement in his book, Ways of Seeing, “…[M]en act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.” (p.46) In the film Judy acts initially as Tom Helmor’s wife’s doppelganger to make her death look like a suicide, she then lives out John ‘Scottie’ Ferguson’s fantasy of having his believedly deceased love back. The dialogue and acting involved in the reshaping of Judy to fit the role of Madeline is a quintessential example of ‘the male gaze.’ The film, The Vanity Tables of Douglas Sirk, gives a description of the effect on the female image that is had by the existence of such shallow representations of the female character.
Are there any films today that go beyond this representation, so far beyond to the point of breaking completely free from this image? What do the female characters within these films do to show their agency? Do they do anything at all now? Did they do anything to try to fight this representation back when there logistically was no other option?
