Laura Mulvey- The Male Gaze

The Male Gaze is a theory first published by Laura Mulvey in her paper 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' in 1975. The theory states that as an audience, we view texts from the perspective of a heterosexual male. In modern mainstream media, most protagonists are seen to be male, with only 12% of protagonists in 2014 being female. Much of the texts that contain a male protagonist contain fragmented shots of female bodies, with the sexualised parts of their bodies often being captured in extreme close ups, which can almost make an audience feel as if women are objects to be desired. Throughout narrative cinema, women are often only known for their marital status or their relationship to the character, for example in Alfred Hitchcock's 'Vertigo' (1958), the lead female role of Madeleine is the wife of an acquaintance of the protagonist, Scottie, and later becomes involved with Scottie. Most males, however, are seen in an active working role or are known for a job, such as in this text, with Scottie being an ex-detective, whereas we have no inclination that Madeleine has a job, so as an audience we just assume she is reliant on her rich bureaucrat husband, a typical stereotype for women in film. Women are often just displayed as just something to look at in media, with them often being used for voyeuristic and scopophilic tendencies. Throughout the classic British spy film series, James Bond, women are often used by James for sex, or for him to manipulate them into doing his bidding. Often, before Bond has even encountered these women face to face, we are shown shots of him watching them through binoculars or even stalking them, as often throughout the texts women are either working for the villain, or play no real part in the narrative and are just placed in the text for men to gawk at them. In 'Drive', Nicholas Winding Refn's 2011 film, there is a scene in which The Driver is torturing a man in the back room of a strip club, and in the background of this scene we are shown many topless women. A question that comes to mind is 'why did Winding Refn decide to shoot this scene in a strip club?' well the answer is obviously not for any real purpose in the narrative, but for male audiences to be appealed by the almost naked women surrounding the action.

However, there are other types of gaze we have to consider here, The Female Gaze, and The Queer Gaze. This type of gaze can quite clearly be seen in Magic Mike, with an array of fragmented shots of male bodies, and in 'The Place Beyond The Pines', the opening sequence is entirely fragmented shots of Ryan Gosling's bare torso as he works on his bike, shots that seem to be inspired by Kenneth Anger's 'Scorpio Rising', a short experimental film which clearly uses the Queer Gaze, due to the fact that this film was intended for Anger to express his homosexuality, but to also defy religion and democracy.