Film Studies - Mulvey and the male gaze - research

Laura Mulvey is a feminist film theorist, best known for her essay on Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Her theories are influenced by the likes of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan (by using their ideologies as “political weapons”) whilst also including psychoanalysis and feminism in her works. Mulvey is predominantly known for her theory regarding sexual objectification on women in the media, more commonly known as The Male Gaze” theory.

Mulvey states that “the gender power asymmetry is a controlling force in cinema and constructed for the pleasure of the male viewer, which is deeply rooted in patriarchal ideologies and discourses.” This means that the male viewer is the target audience, therefore their needs are met first and that this problem stems from an old fashioned, male-driven society. Her theory on how women are portrayed in film and the media is just as prevalent today as it was in 1975 when her text was first published.

Mulvey believes that women are in fact “the bearer of meaning and not the maker of meaning,” which suggests that women are not placed in a role where they can take control of a scene, instead they are simply put there to be observed from an objectified point of view. In addition, she believes that this way of watching film is never alternated so that the men are in fact the ones who are being viewed in this manner. This inequality enforces the ancient and outdated idea of “men do the looking, and women are to be looked at.”

However this has changed with both a change in time and a change in cinema dice the 70's with films such as Magic Mike (2012), we see the reverse happen where it is not the male looking at the female but the female looking at the male, or in some cases with the LGBTQ+ community, male looking upon male and female looking upon female.

The Male Gaze theory, in a nutshell, is where women in the media are viewed from the eyes of a heterosexual man, and that these women are represented as passive objects of male desire. Audiences are forced to view women from the point of view of a heterosexual male, even if they are heterosexual women or homosexual men. From the feminist perspective, this theory can be viewed in three ways:

How men look at women,
how women look at themselves
how women look at other women.

Typical examples of the male gaze include medium close-up shots of women from over a man’s shoulder, shots that pan and fixate on a woman’s body, and scenes that frequently occur which show a man actively observing a passive woman.

Although as of recently, movies like Frozen (2013) and Suffragette (2015) do Mulvey justice in highlighting women’s independence and empowerment, breaking away from the Male Gaze, decades later we still see the same broken record playing, with films like The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) and Star Trek Into Darkness (2013) revealing women in extremely sexual and somewhat unnecessary manners.

One reason for this is simply that the movie companies producing these films are male-dominated, as cinema is predominantly a male-run industry, and just like when Mulvey originally wrote this critical analysis of film, producers are still churning out the same work that has proved to be successful in the past with audiences as they invest to make profit. They believe that they are giving the public what they want, when that isn’t necessarily true. They are giving audiences what a proportion of males want, and what the rest of society has been brainwashed to accept.


Overall, it is clear that Mulvey‘s theory can be applied to a vast amount of films, for example Spring Breakers (2012), the Lara Croft movies (2001-2003), The Avengers(2012) and some less obvious movies, such as Aladdin and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). Not only do we see this outdated portrayal of women in movies, but also in advertisements, music videos and in daily life.

Mulvey has shone a light on the old-fashioned and repetitive style of cinema we see every day, and her ideologies have helped create a more modern and truthful version of cinema as we now have more realistic portrayals of women than ever before. For example, the films Spy (2015) and The Hunger Games franchise (2012-present) allow audiences to have a refreshing look at women in strong and powerful positions without a man by their side, thus enforcing the important message that women do not have to be put in a box and objectified, they can play a variety of different, versatile roles and they can be considered through the eyes of society in a way that doesn’t patronize and sexualise them via the Male Gaze.


FILM THEORY 101: Laura Mulvey, Available at: https://www.filminquiry.com/film-theory-basics-laura-mulvey-male-gaze-theory/ (accessed 06/01/2020)