The Male Gaze (article for Gorilla Film Magazine)

The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly.

- Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, (1975)

There’s a great visual gag in the third Naked Gun movie. The camera pans slowly up Anna Nicole Smith’s legs – but exaggerates their length and gives her an extra pair of knees. Naked Gun isn’t exactly a feminist classic, but this playful spoofing of cinematic clichés highlights a key concept in feminist film theory. The joke draws attention to a moment when three ‘gazes’ are united: the gaze of the camera, filming the legs; the gaze of the other characters, looking at Smith; the gaze of the audience, placed in the same position as the characters in their presumed sexual desire for Smith. For all three, the woman is the object of the gaze.

The critic Laura Mulvey, in her beautiful, persuasive article ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, is credited with theorizing the gaze in film. She divided the gaze into the three ‘looks’ described above (the camera’s, the spectator’s, the character’s). The gaze that Hollywood cinema created by manipulating these looks, she discovered, was exclusively male. It turned women into objects, with no force or power of their own other than a superficial ability to excite male desire – a ‘to-be-looked-at-ness.’

Rather than simply relating the (countless) examples of this in film, Mulvey used elements of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis to show that Hollywood filmmaking reflected the desires of a ‘patriarchal unconscious.’ She took Freud’s notion of scopophilia – taking sexual pleasure from looking, an activity that turns others into objects of a ‘controlling and curious gaze’ – and applied it to the way in which films are viewed. The spectators, she suggested, are voyeurs, anonymous in the darkness of the cinema staring rapt at the ‘hermetically sealed world’ of the bright screen.

If this sounds like it’s taking all the pleasure out of cinema – that’s kind of the point. Sometimes you have to question where you’re getting your pleasure from. It might seem fun to enjoy the privileged position of the oppressor, but it’s not worth it. As film-lovers or filmmakers, we have a responsibility to face this kind of ugly truth.

This article was written for Gorilla Film Magazine. To find out where you can get your (free) copy, check their distribution map at http://gorillafilmmagazine.com/issue5distribution/

there go the warm jets

Hollywood studios refused to finance Soderbergh's - totally brilliant - Behind the Candelabra - a biopic of Liberaci, as seen through the eyes of his lover/employee/[almost]adoptive-son - because of its subject matter. In Britain, you can watch Matt Damon getting it on with Michael Douglas on the screens of mainstream cinemas, but American cinemas have decided they aren't ready.

According to Soderbergh, 'they said it was too gay.' Maybe they imagined walking through a foyer that advertises Man of Steel & Pacific Rim & decided they'd overdone it. Anyway, the result is that it's gone straight-to-TV in the USA, premiering on HBO. Some critics have said this 'may mark the moment when TV overtakes film in the cultural relevance stakes.' I guess it might; some people think that's already happened [well, in my mind, TV's kind of on the way out too, & I'm just hoping some really good books get written soon, & that everyone starts coming to see theatre productions & gigs a lot more].

Aside from my sadness at the conservativism, bigotry & pessimism that such a decision implies... I'm just sorry that many people will miss the glory of the sound design in this film. TVs & laptops aren't going to do it justice. The moment when applause begins just a few seconds before the scene in which the crowd is clapping - but starts on the left speaker, only to pan across gradually as the shot changes - alienating us as listeners, making us deal with the sound as this strange, rippling, disconcerting thing; the subtle shifts between sound quality in the schmaltz-virtuoso piano-playing; the moment when a long take - one of many beautiful long takes in this film - follows Liberaci out of the jacuzzi but then stays with his lover, Scott Thorson, as out-of-shot Liberaci switches off the water jets - so the gorgeous bubbling that had underscored their conversation abruptly vanishes into a kind of stunned silence...

I urge people to go hear this film in cinemas.

[NB - the Eno's only here because of the coincidental title - as far as I know, he had no involvement in this film - this is a beautiful song though]