In considering the way that films are
put together, many feminist film critics have pointed to the “male gaze” that
predominates in the classical Hollywood filmmaking. Laura Mulvey’s influential
essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” expands on the conception of the
passive role of women in cinema to argue that film provides visual please through
voyeurism identification with the on-screen male actor. In the essay, Mulvey argues
that the film creates such a space for female sexual objectification and
exploitation through the combination of the patriarchal order of society, and ‘looking’
in itself as a pleasurable act of voyeurism, as “the cinema satisfies a
primordial wish for pleasurable looking”.
Voyeurism: the sexual interest in or
practice of spying on people engaged in intimate behaviours, such as undressing,
sexual activity or other actions usually considered to be of a private matter.
Mulvey identifies three “looks” or
perspectives that occur in film which serve to sexually objectify women;
- the first is the perspective of the male character on screen and how he perceives the female character.
- The second is the perspective of the spectator as they see the female character on screen.
- The third “look” joins the first and second looks together: it is the male audience member’s perspective of the male character in the film. This thirst perspective allows the male audience to take the female character as his own personal sex object because he can relate himself, through looking, to the male character in the film.
