ABSTRACT
Ever since Laura Mulvey’s seminal essay, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, the notion of ‘the male gaze’ has galvanised critical attention to Hollywood films (Mulvey 1975). She argues that the feminine in conventional filmic narratives is construed as an object of erotic masculine attention in a perpetuation of patriarchy. Here the feminine is the passive recipient of scopophilia, and as such becomes the bearer of meaning, not the maker of meaning. Three inflections of masculine ‘looking’ are to be found in the narrative images of such films. First, the films are organised to emphasise the principal male character’s gaze at the female, so objectifying her. Second, the spectator is co-opted into this masculine sexual position through the persistence of the eroticised feminine on the screen. Third, the product of the two masculine gazes enables the spectator to take the male character’s position and ‘have’ the feminine character as a sexual object.
