Laura Mulvey is an established feminist film theorist who conceived the theory of the 'male gaze.' This theory deals with how an audience views the people presented in the film. It can be narrowed down to three simple strategies:
- How men look at women
- How women look at themselves
- How women look at other women
Mulvey states that film audiences have (forced) to view characters from the perspective of a heterosexual male, and that, to some extent, that the camera represents the man. The camera lingers on the curves of the female body, and events which occur to women are presented largely in the context of a man's reaction to these events. It diminishes women to the status of objects, and thus a female viewer must experience the narrative secondarily, by identification with the male.
Below is a clip from Zack Snyder's 2011 film Sucker Punch, that I think particularly exploits the image of women. Granted, it is set in a brothel, but the rest of the film is not. See the trailer below.
'Love Is The Drug'- Credits Scene
'Sucker Punch' Trailer
Set in the 1960's, women are presented in a variety of ways. The first time we see Babydoll (protagonist) she is vulnerable- her mother dies, her stepfather attempts to rape her, she accidentally shoots her sister and is sent to a mental asylum. Her father pays to have her lobotomized and to escape this she imagines herself in different realities- in one she is just as powerless but has others to help her, and in the other she is in complete control herself. In all of these realities, her clothing is highly sexualized, playing on the innocent school-girl image.
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