laura mulvey

Laura mulvey was the key theorist that suggested the argument of ‘the controlling male gaze’. She said that women are merely presented as objects of image and the man as the bearer of the look. Mulvey suggested that Hollywood movies were constructed to identify with men by using maole protagonists the vast majority of the time. She said that the male dominated movies were also for the ‘male spectator’. Men were considered the protagonist who acted as the catalyst for all events. Women were considered to be a device to amplify a male’s dominance through being feeble and weak sex symbols. Mulvey defined that the male spectatorship had two types of reading of women. She differentiated them by naming one as voyeuristic and the other as fetishistic. Voyeuristic or voyeurism involves a more sadistic edge according to mulvey. The male audience has a controlling gaze and the pleasure lies in ascertaining guilt - asserting control and subjecting the guilty person through punishment or forgiveness. Fetishistic on the other hand is defined more along the lines of: looking, in contrast, involves ‘the substitution of a fetish object or turning the represented figure it into a fetish so that it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous. This builds up the physical beauty of the object, transforming it into something satisfying in itself. The erotic instinct is focused on the look alone’. ‘the female image as a castration threat constantly endangers the unity of the diegesis and burst through the world of illusion as an intrusive, static, one-dimensional fetish. Thus the two looks materially present in time and space are obsessively subordinated to the neurotic needs of the male ego' (Mulvey, 1986). Mulvey’s work was considered an adaptation or expansion of the bass ideas of Sigmund Freud. A branch of mulvey’s theory was the idea of castration anxiety. This is the subconscious deep rooted fear that a women doesn’t have a penis as a punishment that a man fears of happening to himself.