Reading and Understanding a Text

In the last lesson we were assigned to start our research reading the texts on eStudio and extracting five different arguments with their respective quotes.

David Gauntlett is very analytic and objective in his book Media, gender and identity using several examples to back his arguments up. His conclusions can be cataloged as feminist, but they are just a result of an impartial breakdown of different facts and studies. The following text is a conclusion he made after the analysis of the roles of males and females in contemporary films, stating that although both men and women have to meet canons of beauty in order to be in a film, but older men are more likely to be considered for leading characters:

"Women and men tend to have similar skills and abilities in films today, but if you look at any bunch of films on release and identify the one leading character in each, there's likely to be more men than women. Male characters alre also more likely to find themselves able to save a woman in a heroic moment. Leading women have to be attractive, within our recognised conventions of what makes women attractive; but, to be fair, we should note that leading men also have to be attractive, within the recognised conventions for males. Men can get away with being older, however, and there are far more leading men in their forties, fifties and sixties than there are leading women in this group".

In relation with David Glauntlett conclusion shown above, from a psychological point of view with a more technical but deeper articulation of arguments Laura Mulvey analyses in her book Visual and other pleasures the scopophilic instincts of the human being, feeling pleasure when “using another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight”. But also the narcissism cultivated from a very young age when a person sees him or herself in the mirror for the first time and how the brain use that image to project a “better” one based on the canons of beauty the cinema industry sell. In the next paragraph she thoroughly explains how this two mental processes have no meaning by themselves, but they are attached to an idealasation that creates unrealistic expectations in real life.

"Thus, in film terms, one implies a separation of the erotic identity of the subject from the object on the screen (active scopophilia), the other demands identification of the ego with the object on the screen through the spectator’s fascination with and recognition of his like. The first is a function of the sexual instincts, the second of ego libido. This dichotomy was crucial for Freud. Although he saw the two as interacting and overlaying each other, the tension between instinctual drives and self-preservation polarises in terms of pleasure. But both are formative structures, mechanisms without intrinsic meaning. In themselves they have no signification, unless attached to an idealisation. Both pursue aims in indifference to perceptual reality, and motivate eroticised phantasmagoria that affect the subject’s perception of the world to make a mockery of empirical objectivity”.

Mulvey also rationalises in a political use of psychoanalysis what is the role of a woman in forming the patriarchal unconscious, being someone that a men would not like to be because of an association of maternal roles and the lack of phallus, which is directly related with power.

"The function of woman in forming the patriarchal unconscious is twofold: she firstly symbolises the castration threat by her real lack of a penis and secondly thereby raises her child into the symbolic. Once this has been achieved, her meaning in the process is at an end. It does not last into the world of law and language except as a memory, which oscillates between memory of maternal plenitude and memory of lack."

Getting into a more tangible field, Mulvey focuses as well on how the woman's role is actually a mere image while the man is the one who looks. The man is the one who usually controls the plot making the spectator see through his eyes. This can be appreciated in the role females characters have in films and other kinds of spectacles where they are there in order to affect the main plot. For instance, in how women in films usually slow men down in their missions due to sexual reasons. Another example is the role of a woman in a strip club, where some men go to satiate their fantasies (notice the act of scopophilia previously mentioned):

"In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness. Woman displayed as sexual object is the leitmotif of erotic spectacle: from pin-ups to strip-tease, from Ziegfeld to Busby Berkely, she holds the look, and plays to and signifies the male desire"... "The presence of woman is an indispensable element of spectacle in normal narrative film, yet her visual presence tends to work against the development of a story-line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation. This alien presence then has to be integrated into cohesion with the narrative. As Budd Boetticher has put it:

“What counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents. She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act the way he does. In herself the woman has no the slightest importance"".

Although this narcissism and scopophilia defines the roles of females in media and in real world, it is important to notice that there are certain differences between the representation of a woman on a film, where the perspective of the audience can be shifted while in the real world the sense of spectacle do not have the same impact.

"The place of the look defines cinema, the possibility of varying it and exposing it. This is what makes cinema quite different in its voyeuristic potential from, say, strip-tease, theatre, shows and so on"... "

Playing on the tenstion between film as controlling the dimension of time (editing, narrative) and film as controlling the dimension of space (changes in distance, editing), cinematic codes create a gaze, a world and an object, thereby producing an illusion cut to the measure of desire"...

..."There are three different looks associated with cinema: that of the camera as it records the pro-filmic event, that of the audience as it watches the final product, and that of the characters at each other within the screen illusion".