Laura Mulvey’s ‘male gaze’ theory in her 1975 essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema has been rightfully regarded as a landmark moment in film theory, injecting it with a much-needed feminist angle.
Her argument never strove to critique all films made by men just because it was men making them. She did, however, draw important attention to a cinematic trend: that women in film have historically been portrayed for the benefit of a distinctly-male, heterosexual spectator.
These films of the ‘male gaze’ — for example, Mulvey discusses Vertigo and Rear Window in her essay — respond to a woman as a visual spectacle, with close-up shots of her curves, lips, or legs reducing women to mere objects of desire and passivity. In contrast to their male counterparts — who behaved, often, with a unique and gendered agency — women were made to be looked at by the audience for their physical appeal rather than their depth.
In summary, audiences, generally, weren’t seeing real women on screen. Rather, they saw what ‘woman’ had come to represent under this patriarchal system — a canvas upon which to hang ideals of sexual fantasy.
The ‘male gaze’ theory stands up remarkably well, even today. Classic Hollywood stars like Marilyn Monroe are well-known for their erotic cinematic presence, but we see contemporary characters like Naomi Lapaglia (Margot Robbie) in Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, or Mikaela Barnes (Megan Fox) in Transformers still being presented in this manner.
Mulvey’s argument gives us a new way of seeing. We notice this gendered imbalance between the representation of men and women on screen much more acutely now. But further widening this gulf between the sexes is the relationship between spectatorship, and other elements of the film.
Women aren’t just robbed of power in a purely visual sense when they are looked at through this voyeuristic lens during classic ‘male gaze’ movies. Women are often denied the opportunity to operate the camera and change on-screen representation of female characters, because ‘male gaze’ films have a distinctly male visual language that women are excluded from. Women are systematically barred from writing female agency into these films, because eroticised women on film is too-often seen as ‘the norm’. And finally, films like these are marketed in such a way to discourage women from seeing them in the first place,with advertising campaigns hinting at the sexualised role that female actors will play on screen — the human ‘prize’ gifted to us for watching. Even if they have artistic merit that can be enjoyed by women and men alike, such presentations of women in film are made for and by men disproportionately, with their advertisement primarily targeted at men too.
The ‘male gaze’ trend of cinema, in summary, is a clear and obvious challenge to address in our increasingly egalitarian society. Yet, despite the conspicuous nature of this problem, attempts to counter the male gaze with a female one have also, often, been too limited in scope, and fail to address the issue.
Many people, for example, have been too content with seeing the ‘female gaze’ as a direct opposite to the ‘male gaze’: replacing the sexualisation of women in ‘male gaze’ films with the agency-robbing sexualisation of men. It’s a trend that has its origins in the 1980s, shortly after Mulvey’s theory was published. Now, this sexualised depiction of men is more common than ever.
Films like Magic Mike (to use, perhaps, an overexaggerated example) have been somehow heralded as readdressing the male gaze’s systemic exclusion of female agency on screen. Other films, like Crazy Stupid Love, or even the Marvel franchise have been criticised for favouring sexualisation over writing characters with genuine agency.
This solution of the ‘female gaze’, quite frankly, just seems ridiculous. It’s as if people advocating for this solution expect feminists to see characters like ‘Big Dick Richie’, and then cry out: “Finally: our fight is over — men can be sexualised too!”
Placing male actors into these overly-sexualised roles with little substance, firstly, replicates the oppressive expectations that women have had to contend with for generations. Male actors have spoken out about this amplified pressure to look a certain way on screen — even if it can’t be achieved naturally. In the same ways that women have learnt to internalise their own insecurity in comparison to an ‘ideal femininity’ on screen, men now do the same — imposing this expectation upon themselves and others.
This expectation is obviously harmful for men, but it also does nothing to help women. Replacing who is being oppressed under this ‘female gaze’ is a diversionary tactic to distract from the fact that oppression still exists. In fact, these purportedly ‘female gaze’ movies go further, and justify the new phenomena of oppressing men on the same terms that women, too, have always been restricted by.
Furthermore, these films do very little to address the wider issues of women’s underrepresentation within the film industry. ‘Male gaze’ films and these new ‘female gaze’ films exclude women equally from participating in filmmaking. Magic Mike is written, directed, and produced by men exclusively. Its production design, costume, art direction is all done by men. The film is even edited by a man using a female pseudonym!
Men should be part of a film’s artistic process. But so should women. And ‘female gaze’ movies that lazily replace the sexualisation of women with this sexualisation of men not only start to replicate women’s oppression onto men as well — advancing an unhealthy expectation of an ‘ideal masculinity’ that men place upon each other — but also, they disguise the wider issues of women entering the male-dominated film industry. It’s polarizing and offensive to brand this trend under a feminist banner.
If the ‘female gaze’ isn’t the direct opposite of the ‘male gaze’, though, then how do we define this elusive phrase?
And, more importantly, if we can’t even define it, then why does it matter?
The answer to both questions lies in an emerging trend of cinema that is slowly finding its way into the mainstream. These are movies that are often (but not always!) directed by women, with a new, female visual imagination behind them — ones where women and men are both given agency, activity, and significance beyond their sexuality within a story.
Céline Schiamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire has become the most iconic poster child of this new ‘female gaze’ movement, and is a good example to illustrate what the ‘female gaze’ should mean if we want systemic change for female representation.
It’s a visually-striking film where every frame feels like a painting. In and of itself, this should be considered an achievement. It’s also significant that men and women are represented far more equally in the film’s crew. But, what is most important is the remarkable agency and vitality that the two central female characters have within their on-screen affair. Female desire is one component of their character, but the two women, Marianne and Héloïse, are simultaneously powerful, stoic, sensitive, imaginative, rebellious.
They are written to be real women, beyond the parameters of erotic objectification that the ‘male gaze’ has often demanded of female characters.
Portrait of a Lady on Fire isn’t the only film like this, but it represents the growing acceptance of broadening women’s roles on screen. By expanding these on-screen roles, too, the film industry gives greater opportunity for female creatives to have poetic and cinematic expression. This is a wonderful thing which has too-long been denied.
Why does this representation matter, though? Well, why is it that we go to the cinema in the first place? Why do we sit in a dark room watching pictures on a screen? What does it give us? What do we pay for?
In part, it is to disconnect and unwind. It is to feel terror and excitement. But we also go to the cinema to get a sense of another life beyond our own. And, in that sense, the ‘female gaze’ — in terms of its true meaning — allows women to experience this magic that has hitherto been remote and distant for the female spectator.