Across media discourse, Laura Mulvey can be used as a stimulus to explore the concepts and ideals surrounding the male gaze (1975). The male gaze, as we understand it, presents a rather ‘fixed’ two-dimensional perspective in which the intention is to solely and objectively objectify women in a remotely sexual frame. ”Unchallenged, mainstream film coded the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order.” (Laura Mulvey,1975)
For this to happen, the audience is to be positioned from the perspective of the cameraman and the director behind the scene—what is known as the narrative position. This tends to be a common sequence throughout films and Hollywood in which the camera slowly pans over the female body parts to highlight their desirability.
However, what exactly does this mean for women?
This means that women are often constricted by and trivialised by these conceptions. Essentially, representations across film and cinema do not reflect the complexity and agency attributed to them as human beings, and more so women, in these particular scenarios.
Along with gratifying the male eye gaze, this perspective is generally accompanied by the ‘damsel in distress’ ordeal. This genre has established a classic literary and film character whereby usually a young, beautiful woman needs rescuing or protection by a man of some kind. The damsel serves a clear and well-articulated paradox contrasting the main character, in which she ultimately propels the main character as a heroic figurine while simultaneously acting as the consequent reward for their brave action.
Judith Butler illustrates these ideas as social agents in the construction of performative gender roles. Compellingly, these gender representations are rather artificial and conventional ”acts that are renewed, revised, and consolidated through time”. By no means is actual concrete reality but more so mediated by society and a heteronormative standpoint.
Vance Joy – ‘Riptide’ Official Video
Vance Joyce’s Riptide Music video offers many interesting reflections and examples of women on screen. Throughout the montage, the video frames the woman (an obvious love interest) from an unsuspecting viewpoint. standing at the beach, undressing in her bikini.
The audience is positioned as the male character to receive sexual pleasure in observing and admiring the female protagonist, unknown to her. An inclination towards scopophilia—the love of looking. ”At the extreme, it can become fixated into a perversion, producing obsessive voyeurs and Peeping Toms, whose only sexual satisfaction can come from watching, in an active controlling sense, an objectified other.” (Laura Mulvey,1975)
However, progressively, the video presents women as much more than spectacles but instead as objects of violence and victimhood. In several shots, we see disembodied body parts, a chase in the woods, and a female singer whose appearance gradually becomes more and more ravished as she continues to ”sing the words wrong”.
In the end, we arrive at the consensus that she was not saved. The video openly invites different interpretations of these kinds of visualisations of women across the media. It may be critical and even almost satirical of the ways that women are portrayed. Arguably, it is perhaps adopting the essence of the ‘female gaze’, which seeks to give women greater credence than just their relative body parts. A step away from trivialisation.
References
Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Screen, Volume 16, Issue 3, Autumn 1975, Pages 6–18, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/16.3.6 [Accessed: 05/12/2023]
Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre. Ed. Sue-Ellen Case. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990. [Accessed: 05/12/2023]
https://youtu.be/uJ_1HMAGb4k?si=fvp1Taz7wKuGGpCu [Accessed: 05/12/2023]
https://resource.download.wjecc.co.uk/vtc/2016-17/16-17_1-28/riptide.pdf [Accessed: 05/12/2023]
