”A Female Gaze?”

The purpose of this essay is to focus on the following question: In the light of Laura Mulvey's ideas, and the subsequent theory and practice, is it still fair to characterise women as objects of a male gaze? Movies in general have often been seen as portraying certain roles for men and women and establishing the existence of a male gaze. However, the issue here is whether we could see a reversed definition of the male gaze in contemporary movies-i.e. is there a female gaze? The following essay has chosen to focus on one movie in particular, " Fatal Attraction " , due to its construction of initially challenging the more traditional role of a male gaze. This movie tries to present an altered picture which substitutes the traditional male gaze for a female one, however, it will be shown that this is not really the case. The brief analysis of the movie " Fatal Attraction " will indicate to us the need for understanding the social construction and the definitions of the male and female gaze in order to understand the production of contemporary movies. 6 CID-51 • " A Female Gaze? " CID-51 • " A Female Gaze? " 7 " Fatal Attraction is fundamentally a horror film set in yuppie-melodrama-land: its whole structure becomes blindingly clear once you realise that the part usually played by the Thing/ the Blob/ the Bug (the virus) is played by the Single Working Woman, Alex." H ollywood can be seen as a dream factory-a cultural industry, a dynamic of desires (using Donald's terminology, 3). Films can be said to mass-produce daydreams, a form of escapism, but for who? Laura Mulvey sees Hollywood as a monolithic construct, reaffirming the positions and structures of the male psyche. It is the unconscious desires and fears of the patriarchy which determines the narrative. The Women are objectified in the Hollywood movies through unconscious desires, founded in the patriarchal ideology, giving a "male gaze". Mulvey's argument in "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" hinges on the idea that the woman is presented as the object of the male gaze and is thereby rendered passive in the frames of the narrative. In the film-text itself the male look is the gaze on women in a position from the camera, the spectator comes to identify with this male gaze and objectifies the women on the screen. According to Mulvey, …