Media 384
Prof. Cacoili
February 24, 2017
Power in Looking
The male gaze is a product of our patriarchal society, in which, according to Bell Hooks: "males are inherently dominating, superior to everything and everyone deemed weak, especially females, and endowed with the right to dominate and rule over the weak and to maintain that dominance through various forms of psychological terrorism and violence" ("Understanding Patriarchy" 18). Berger's understanding of the difference in power dynamics between the man and the woman are striking in his article, "Ways of Seeing." He notes that the main difference lays in the presence. A man's presence, or his power, "suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you" (Berger 46). However, a woman's presence, or her lack of power, "defines what can and cannot be done to her" (46). The active nature of the man's role and the passive nature of woman's role has been ingrained into our society and are highlighted through Berger's analysis of countless Renaissance paintings. The male gaze is ever present even in those paintings, in which a woman's body "is arranged the way it is, to display it to the man looking st the picture" (55).
The female body is still displayed and arranged in ways that are catered to the male gaze, the male spectator. Mulvey writes that "unchallenged, mainstream film coded the erotic into the language of the dominate patriarchal order"(835). Today's art continues to depict women as objects for the pleasure of men, especially for their sexual and sometimes, violent gratification, such as in the popular television series, Game of Thrones, famous for their gratuitous female nudity and violence against their female characters. The image below depicts Ros' death, a prostitute murdered by the sadistic king. Her death is a prime example of how the show treats its female characters. Her body is sexually displayed, with her clothes torn off, and the murder itself is in the midst of a sexual act. She is an object to be played with by the king and later discarded and displayed.
(Art by Robert Ball depicting Ros from Game of Thrones on HBO.)
The male gaze is powerful. It is ever prevalent and has persisted across time and cultures. Hooks writes that "there is power in looking" in her article "The Oppositional Gaze" (115). She explains that the marginalized Others, those outside of the "imperialist white-supremacists capitalist patriarchy" especialy black women, produced the oppositional gaze, "a longing to look, a rebellious desire" that resulted from their constant oppression ("Understanding Patriarchy" 17 and "The Oppositional Gaze" 116). She writes that "black women were able to critically assess the cinema's construction of white womanhood as object of phallocentric gaze and choose not to identity with either the victim of the perpetrator" (122). The Mary Sue critiques the Bond Girl and blaxploitation in Live and Let Die, using the oppositional gaze, pointing out the failures in a genre steeped in misogyny and racism. Cinema today continues its trend of casting heterosexual Caucasian men in standard heterosexual Caucasian male hero roles. However, there are a few movies that celebrate stories outside of the box office standard fare, such as Hidden Figures, a historical movie about black female mathematicians at NASA.
(Hidden Figures (2016). Starring three amazing black actresses that normally do not get starring roles.: Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, and Janelle Monáe)
In light of all this, there should be more women in the film industry. Variety examines what a female dominated box office would look like in "Female-Driven Movies Make Money, So Why Aren’t More Being Made?" Women directed movies with women leads aimed at the mainstream audience would enrich our current male gaze entrenched, misogynistic, patriarchal culture. By consciously opposing the male gaze, our society must question the films we watch and understand who is being catered to. Our power as spectators come from our ability to watch and by supporting female driven content and boycotting misogynistic media like Game of Thrones, perhaps we can create a more balanced film culture.
Works Cited
Hooks, Bell. "The Oppositional Gaze." Black Looks: Race and Representation. South End Press,
1992. pp. 115-131.
Hooks, Bell. "Understanding Patriarchy." The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love. Washington Square Press, 2004. pp. 17-33.
Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. Eds. Leo Brandy and Marshall Cohen. New York: Oxford UP, 1999. pp. 833-844.
No comments:
Post a Comment