Feminism and Visual Texts 10/14

In the Opening Scene of Rear Window, the “masculine gaze” is extremely apparent. Much of the man’s focus is on the woman in her apartment who is changing, bending over, and dancing around in her room in an oversexulized manner. It is clear in this scene that the man is the subject and the woman in her apartment is the object, and you can tell that this objectification of the woman is occurring because she adds no real purpose to the scene other than to be something for the male character to gaze at. On page 175 of Parker, he discusses the idea that in film objectified women are often seen through a door or window frame to accentuate the idea that they are static or picturesque. We see this idea in this scene where the male protagonist is looking at the woman through both window and door frames.

In “The Shower” scene from the movie Psycho, while the female protagonist is being killed, the camera shoots from angles that show her being nude. The scene is supposed to be a horror, but the woman is still being seen as an sexualized object to the male viewer because the way the scene is filmed is constantly reminding us that the woman is nude in the shower.

QCQ: Visual Pleasure at 40

Quote:

“You’ve all said very touchingly and wonderfully that the essay still lives now, but going back to its groundedness in the 70’s, it’s status to my mind as documentation of its time. It also seems to me that it’s necessarily been rendered archaic by changes in technology that no longer do we normally sit in a wonderful cinema like this and become absorbed in darkness in the screen” (Mulvey 19:07-19:47).

Comment:

I think what Mulvey was trying to say here is that although there are ideas that were in her essay still hold up today, the world is constantly changing and the things that were true about most film in the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s, are not necessarily true in film today. The technology we have and the ideas people come up with are much different so while there are aspects of early film in today’s film scene, it is much different than old Hollywood. That isn’t to say that the idea of masculine gaze has gone away as it is still very much alive, but more and more films are beginning to stray away from that technique.

Question:

I wonder if Mulvey thinks there is a female or feminine gaze? Of course it wouldn’t be as prominent in film as the masculine gaze, but I do wonder what her take on this would be.