Male Gaze

 

 This week in film theory class, we spoke about that male gaze and how that has impacted the film industry. Gender roles in films have been a major discussion topic recently, mostly because it is very controversial. There are so many horrible ways that films portray women, although I have not noticed it until reading about it in the textbook. After watching the gaze, I noticed that even camera angles will show women from a male perspective. The cameras will show women looking incredibly attractive to gain the attention of a male audience. For example, a lot of the camera angles during the movie Wonder Woman Look up her skirt while it is blowing in the wind. They also used posters to draw in an audience of males by making her look attractive, although Wonder woman should be targeted at a young women audience.  

     Unfortunately, I know a lot of people that go to see movies because of a female's attractiveness. Bigger corporations can pay these extremely attractive women to model and act for them to get so much attention and sell more tickets. When trying to sell tickets, producers will change how they promote the movie based on the female characters that are in it. I have not noticed that until very recently, although most of the trailers involve beautiful women. I think more people should be aware of this because it is a real problem in our world today. It can be very awkward at times when a gaze scene comes on when you are with a partner, mostly because I never know if I should look or not.  

     While learning about this topic, I was trying to think of an example when they made a man look good for a female gaze. As hard as I tried to find an example, I simply could not find one anywhere in my movie list. I have a couple guesses as to why this would be the case, although I think the most obvious one would be having so many male directors. With that unfortunately being a male dominated career choice, it would make sense that you get their perspective on most movies. For example, in class we spoke about a movie called Blonde about Marilyn Monroe. While she had miscarriages in the movie, the male director had a challenging time describing that feeling because he can only use his imagination to express what that feels like. If there was a woman directing the move, she could have a better idea and be able to empathize with Marilyn Monroe more. She would be able to express the more appropriate emotions that come with that traumatic experience which make the movie more authentic and relatable.