Nicki Minaj's Anaconda Analysis

Set in an all-female jungle paradise, Nicki Minaj’s “Anaconda” music video features dancing, rapping, fruit, skimpy outfits, and endless bum-shaking. According to Billboard, music videos quickly became an integral part of pop culture after their debut on television in the early 1980s. In her article, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey explains how “cinema satisfies a primordial wish for pleasurable looking” (17) by focusing “attention on the human form” (17). Nicki Minaj’s “Anaconda” music video exemplifies Laura Mulvey’s theories of filmic pleasure because of its scopophilic nature and its portrayal of the relationship between men and women. The music video for “Anaconda” shows many cases where there is pleasure derived from looking and being looked at, otherwise known as scopophilia. In Mulvey’s article, she summarizes Sigmund Freud’s findings, stating that scopophilia is associated with “taking other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze” (17). According to Mulvey, three types of looks accompany cinema: the look of the camera, the look of the audience, and the look of the characters. However, these looks can sometimes go hand in hand. …show more content…
Deep focus, camera movements, and off-screen editing all add to its effects. In Mulvey’s article, she describes how certain types of shots shape a woman into a “perfect product” (23), and how her body, “stylised and fragmented by close-ups, is the content of the film and the direct recipient of the spectator’s look” (23). In “Anaconda,” there are close-up shots of women’s breasts and bottoms throughout. A prime example of this can be found between the 0:55 and 1:08 minute marks in the video, which show multiple shots of women’s bottoms. Most of these shots are less than one second in length, making them bite-sized morsels that leave viewers wanting