RESEARCH: THE GAZE THEORY

In the first half of today's lesson, we learnt about Laura Mulvey's gaze theory in her own

article, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.
The gaze theory was based on the fact that woman were gazed at, whilst men gazed at them in a voyeuristic way - which involves a controlling gaze.

Mulvey also looked at the works of Freud and how it had referred to scopohilia - the pleasure involved in looking at other people's bodies as (particularly, erotic) objects. In the darkness of the cinema it is notable that one may look without being seen either by those on screen by other members of the audience.

However, Mulvey argues that there are various feautires of the cinema viewing conditions that facilitate for the viewer, like the voyeuristic process of objectification of female characters and also the narcissistic process of identification with the ideal image and ego seen on the screen. She also states that in a patriarchal society the pleasure in looking has been split between both active male and passive female. 

This is reflected in the dominant forms of cinema. For example, narrative films in Hollywood not only typically focusses on a male protagonist but also assume a male spectator. In traditional, hollywood, cinematic films, men are presented as active, controlling subjects that treat women as passive objects. Women are treated as passive objects of desire for men. These types of films place women in relation to "the controlling male gaze" presenting them as objects of desire and as 'spectacle' for men to look at. Men do the looking, and women are there to be looked at.

After getting a better understanding of Mulvey's gaze theory, we looked at a prime example of this as we watched Miley Cyrus's music video Wrecking Ball, as she sexually sits on a large ball, half naked. She is represented as the desired object in this video.