Laura Mulvey

Visuals and the Violated: Women in Julie Taymor’s Titus Up until the past few decades, Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus was never taken seriously by critics or audiences. As a revenge tragedy set in ancient Rome, the story is one of never-ending, over the top violence, which viewers may find hard to sit through without rolling their eyes, or at least becoming entirely desensitized. When Julie Taymor created the film version of this text, Titus, in 1999, she attempted to utilize visual…

In today’s media, specifically music videos, there are quite often distinct gender representations. This is shown in the music video “Girls on Film” by Duran Duran. This music video was published in 1981, expected to be played at night clubs and the “Play Boy” channel (Girls on Film, n.d., para. 4). The raunchy video created an uproar, and it was consequently banned by the BBC and heavily edited for MTV (Girls on Film, n.d., para. 4). This caused the band to gain more spot light and furthermore,…

According to a case study ‘Gender Inequality in 500 Popular Films’ (Stacy, 2013) by University of Southern California, it examines the gender roles of speaking characters in top-grossing films, through the data to show the gender representation in the mainstream films. In the films that released in 2012, there are out of 4,475 speaking characters on screen, but only 28.4% are female which shows females are grossly underrepresented on screen, this result reflects Mulvey’s view “the character…

often end up to be evil and manipulator. In The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory (1977) Tania Modleski interprets Notorious according to the female point of view, as the film theorist Laura Mulvey had already done in her essay, Visual pleasure and narrative cinema (1975). Mulvey argued that in classical Hollywood cinema the spectator is inevitably in a masculine subject position while the woman on screen is seen as the object of desire, constantly under "the male gaze".…

Nonetheless, ownership of property does not only apply to things, but also to people such as Maria. She is an asset to the studio that employs her as an actress until she is not. Maria is also a property of Carter as her husband, at least that comes from an actor in the elevator she meets. (Didion, 23). Helen May reaffirms this sentiment of property, like any other women in entertainment business, a statement mentions “That women are nothing more but a prop” (May, 9) taken from the word “use” in…

We, the viewers gain pleasure through identification and watching something on the screen. Mulvey argues that the perspectives of Hollywood narrative cinema are those of a heterosexual male. We the viewers gain pleasure in watching someone without their knowledge (the character acts as if there is no audience). In Hollywood narrative cinema, where…

Time Stamp: Ex Machina 1:32:54-1:38:44 TITLE Composer of the male gaze, Laura Mulvey, explains how a heterosexual male views different aspects occurring in a film. The male gaze captures how male viewers depict females within the film. In Alex Garland’s movie, Ex Machina, there is an abundant usage of the male gaze occurring through Nathan and Caleb’s perspective. The male gaze is important in this film because it reveals to the audience who truly holds the power. Throughout the film…

“The Gaze,” also known as “The Male Gaze,” is a concept that has been prevalent in the arts for hundreds of years. Throughout history, male viewers have perceived women as taboo, pleasurable, beautiful, offensive, and sometimes all of these at once. These unfair judgments were dismissed far too often. Sometimes, the use of an “imagined spectator,” where the viewer of a piece becomes an essential part of it, draws awareness and strong responses to these issues. In Ways of Seeing, John Berger…

Part A (1) What is the purity myth and how is it related to the Madonna/Whore binary? Why is this myth impossible to realize for women? The Purity Myth is described by Jennifer Valenti throughout her novel as the socially created construct that surrounds women based on the premise that in the 21st century a women’s worth is determined by whether or not she is sexually active. A women who is sexually active may feel a loss of worth a this Purity Myth, given that they are consistently bombarded…

This can be seen in the scene where the viewers learn of an instance in which Sergio records his wife Laura, talking without her knowledge or consent to do so. The viewer sees Sergio press play on a recording device and what is played back are a series of questions that he asks her, to her increasing irritation. As the recording plays the viewers watch Sergio…