“The determining male gaze projects it’s fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact…” (Mulvey, 1975, p. 19).
In Laura Mulvey’s ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Mulvey discusses women essentially being something that men ‘gaze’ at as “women (are) displayed as sexual object(s)” (Mulvey, 1975, p. 19) for men to desire over.
The idea of the male gaze is something that has continued to be prominent to this day still. This is commonly seen in teenage rom-coms, as the guys “sees” the girl for the first time.
An example of this is from the film She’s All That (1999) which follows a high school jock who makes a bet that he can turn an unattractive girl in the prom queen.
The male gaze is seen as Laney walks down the stairs as she is introduced as ‘the new Laney Boggs’ and Zack is seeing her for the first time.
The shot of coarse begins from her high heels, up her legs to her dress and finally to her face, which essentially gives the audience a shot of how Zack is ‘gazing’ at her. With the iconic song ‘Kiss Me’ by Sixpence None The Richer playing alongside the shot, it intensifies how the audience feels alongside Zack looking at the new Laney.
An older example of the male gaze as seen through cinema is shown in Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), which follows a former police detective as he wrestles with his personal demons and his obsession with a beautiful woman.
The male gaze is seen during the scene where John first sees Madeleine out to dinner, he is instantly entranced with her the moment he lays his eyes on her.
It’s as though he can’t look away from her for just a moment, as he is distracted by her beauty.
Essentially Mulvey says that the role of women is to satisfy the male gaze by ‘looking good’. It is something that has been seen through the early days of cinema and is still continuously being used in cinema today.
Reference
Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, Visual and Other Pleasures. Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1989 Pp. 19.
Screen & Sound 