Laura Mulvey

Laura Mulvey notes Freud’s term ‘scopophillia’ in relation to objectifying women on screen, because of the pleasure in looking and “taking other people as object, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze” (6). Mulvey calls this the ‘male-gaze’. In a film with almost exclusively female characters, it seems the male-gaze should be abolished with female subjectivity…

Women have been at the gaze of men for the duration of time for as long as we can remember. Laura Mulvey places this fact very strongly in her writing Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, and asserts that this has made a victim of the female gender. However, she seems to consider not how scopophilia can be a sensation felt by a woman, nor how she can also be the barer of the same gaze that a man may give. It is also discussed that, perhaps, men are unable to even receive the gaze, suggesting…

Laura Mulvey is the author of “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”. Where she uses psychoanalytic theories of Freud and Lacan, to critique Hollywood films. A very big argument that she pursues is Freud’s concept of “Scopophilia”. Which is defined as obtaining a sense of pleasure from observing someone else. Freud compares this to a form of sexual domination. Observing someone without their knowledge, is like possessing a kind of mastery over them. Mulvey takes this concept and compares is to…

not to fall prey to them. On the other hand, Grantley Dixon in Star of the Sea does the exact opposite and lets the horrendous morals of society overtake him. Dixon begins the novel as a struggling writer who is fascinated with the struggle between Mulvey and Marridith, and sees their story as an opening to make a name for himself. Dixon even murders Marridith in order to give his story the extra level. Instead of feeling guilty for this appalling act, as Guy would, he merely justifies his…

idealizes the way we view women in film. We have come to expect is that women are passive, sexual objects whose role in film revolves around a male gaze. “Babylon” by Mad Men reinforces this portrayal of women through the ‘Male Gaze’ as argued by Laura Mulvey and hyper-sexualization, argued by Phillips & Strobol. sThere are two examples in “Babylon” that I am going to discuss that support Mulvey’s idea of the male gaze and its implications on female roles. The female body in “Babylon” is…

and Johnny and the promiscuous Gilda begin a relationship and husband Ballin finds out and fakes his death. The story then follows Johnny and Gilda in the wake of his death and the actions that follow. The male gaze, a theory discussed heavily in Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” is very influential in this story because the plot and construction of Gilda advocates for the exposure and condemnation…

Typically deemed as the heroic and masculine character, males are typically the protagonist in both films and narratives. More recently, and “building upon the success of the few ‘80s action films female protagonists . . . the genre produced a number of narratives revolving around action heroines” (Brown 20). Katniss Everdeen’s depiction in The Hunger Games exemplifies her representation as a modern dystopian heroine. According to Gilpatric, women are frequently depicted as sexual or victimized…

The Apartment Film has a specific structure that creates meaning out of a series of photographs. This structure uses a specific language to create a narrative that the spectator should be able to understand. Christian Metz believes that through denotation a stronger meaning can be derived from the connotation. The study of connotation is that it is always symbolic in its nature, while denotation is the literal sense of the film. Connotative meaning should extend over the denotative meaning…

experience. This street harassment, however unfortunately, is not the only harassment a woman faces in her daily life. A woman is constantly objectified, as is evident in the article “Visual Pleasure”, where Laura Mulvey discusses the existence of women in film as sexual objects. Even when a woman is…

Laura Mulvey explains her theory in Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. An example of the Male Gaze occurs when the camera lingers over a woman’s body displaying her as an erotic object for the viewers to feel pleasure in (Mulvey). It allows men to appear dominant and woman to appear passive. The Male Gaze strip women of their human identity, redefining their status…