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The Male Gaze in Cinema

Article · April 2016
DOI: 10.1002/9781118663219.wbegss157

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Anneke Smelik
Radboud University
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forced, to adopt a male position. “The

Gaze male gaze” is a cinematic structure
ANNEKE SMELIK
Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands
combining a threefold look: camera, male
character, and viewer. To enhance the
visual pleasure, the woman’s body is “cut
The notion of the gaze can be related back up” into close-ups through framing and
to Simone de Beauvoir’s feminist editing. The male gaze works in cinema as
understanding of women’s oppression a form of voyeurism objectifying the
within the dialectics of gender relations woman’s body and turning it into a passive
(Beauvoir 2009). Women, the oppressed spectacle; in Mulvey’s famous words, into
(“second”) sex, internalize the objectifying “to-be-looked-at-ness.”
gaze of men upon them and do not have Narcissism, the desiring look at oneself, is related to
the power to own or return the gaze. In the Lacan’s theory of the mirror phase. The film functions as a
division of the sexes the man is the mirror in which the viewer recognizes his or her ideal “I”
Subject while the woman remains the through a secondary identification with the hero, in addition
Other. to the primary identification with the cinematic apparatus
Today, the notion of the gaze is widely of camera and projection. The mirror phase is a
used in visual culture. Berger (1972) psychoanalytic concept that explains how a child builds his
proposed that in Western culture, from or her first sense of a conscious self, at a young age before
painting to advertising, men look and the entry into language. Lacan proposes that the parent
women are looked at. The theoretical holds the child up before a mirror, teaching the child to
explanation of the male gaze as involving recognize itself by distinguishing its self from the (m)other.
complex mechanisms of voyeurism and The mirror image is an imaginary idealization, because
narcissism was specifically developed in the child projects an ideal image of itself onto the mirror.
film studies. This ideal self-image leads the child to a first awareness of
Voyeurism, the desiring look at the ego. The recognition of the self in the mirror image is
someone else, is explained by the Freudian simultaneously a “mis”-recognition (méconnaissance),
concept of scopophilia: the desire to look because the child identifies with the image of itself as an
as the foundation of human sexuality. Film other, that is to say, as a better self than he or she will hope
theorists argue that the medium of film is to be in the future.
based on In cinema, the identification with the larger-than-life
scopophilia:inthedarknessofthecinema,the figures on the white screen revitalizes the early mirror
viewer is a voyeur who can look at the phase for the spectator. The powerful and attractive heroes
screen without limits or fear of being in the film function as ideal mirror images for the viewer,
The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies, First Edition. Edited by Nancy A. who can narcissistically
Naples. identify with them. For
© 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2016 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. feminist film theorists
DOI: 10.1002/9781118663219.wbegss157 cinema
punished for his or her desire. 2 GAZE
Mulvey (1989/1974) advanced the idea
that active and passive aspects of the poses the problem that the active male
desiring look are distributed among the hero offers ideal images for identification,
sexes in cinema. The male character is whereas the image of the passive woman
powerful as he actively commands the offers no such visual pleasure for the
narrative and the visual point of view. In female spectator.
classical Hollywood films the male As the structures of voyeurism (the
character looks at a woman while the desire to have the other) and narcissism
camera films what he sees. Because the (the desire to be the other) are both geared
camera films along with the male toward the pleasures of a male audience,
character, the viewer is invited, or rather the female viewer has no other option but
 to identify with a male gaze or adopt a REFERENCES
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Mulvey, Laura. 1989. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In
gaze were soon included in this quest. The Visual and Other Pleasures, 14–26. London: Macmillan. First
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relations between the “races” was further
developed in black studies (Hall 1997). FURTHERREADING
Moving away from cinema, the gaze Baudry, Jean-Louis. 1992. “Ideological Effects of the Basic
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panoptic gaze is a form of disciplinary Introductory Readings, edited by Gerald Mast, Marshall
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Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey,
their subjects. Contemporary forms of
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surveillance, such as the routine use of Lacan, Jacques. 1977. “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the
CCTV cameras, but also the ubiquity of Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience.”
media in the public realm, produce an In Écrits: A Selection, 1–7. New York: Norton.
anonymous and authoritative panoptic Metz, Christian. 1977. The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis
gaze. Feminists have argued that the and Cinema. London: Macmillan.
disciplining effect of the panoptic gaze is Smelik, Anneke. 2007. “Feminist Film Theory.” In The Cinema
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their own body. 491–504. London: British Film Institute.

SEE ALSO: Feminism and Psychoanalysis;

Feminist Film Theory; Popular Culture and

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Gender; Visual Culture; Visual Culture and

Gender