In films women and men are equal in abilities and skills, but men are usually the leaders and saviours of women. If a woman is a leader she is normally young and attractive. To be fair, men have also to be attractive, but they can be in their forties, fifties and sixties and there are numerous examples of this (Sean Connery, Bruce Willis, etc).
In advertisement it is widely proved that women usually are announcing domestical products or supporting men. They are usually portrayed as housewives not just in adverts, but also on slogans. An example is the Iceland Supermarket's: 'That is why mum goes to Iceland'. At some point advertisers stopped doing this to avoid offense to customers and keep them, but not because they have changed the way they see the world.
Nowadays the women expected to be seen on films and advertisement are busy, confident, in control of their lives and slave of no one. Men on the other hand are started to being used to support that idea with different roles: the woman that no man tells her what to do or the man that is used as a mock when he tries to do this.
The speech to make contemporary women to consume is based on two words: freedom and liberation. Selling beauty has a different approach from 1970 nowadays. TV shows or films cultivate insecurities in order to sell solutions, something that adverts do.
Laura Mulvey
Visual and other pleasures
Mulvey presents her theory based on two aspects of the human being: the scopophilia, which is the pleasure of looking, and the narcissism as cross roads of feelings that make us forget about the real reality.
Through scopophilia an spectator identifies an alike on the screen as a physical object, affecting that person's erotic identity. And here is where narcissism plays its role. From the childhood when a kid discovers his or her look on a mirror wonders how to improve it based on the standard figures on TV and films, creating both a fascination and stimulation of the ego libido on what he or she could be and a high demand of himself. This dichotomy was very important for Freud and it has no meaning by itself, only if attached to an idealisation. It is a virtually pleasant process because a person is in tension between following the instinctual drives through the scopophilia but also the self preservation given by the narcissism, but it makes that person ignore the reality and motivate false interpretations of it creating expectations with inevitable disappointments.
Women play an important role in forming the patriarchal unconscious, being what men do not wish to be because of an association to maternal roles and the natural lack of phallus, a part of the body directly related with power. For that, the women unconsciouslly symbolises the castration threat.
In films, ergo in reality by extension, women are just beautiful objects for men to enjoy. On one hand, the man normally controls the plot and the spectator looks through his eyes. On the other, the women are usually sexual reasons to distract the man from the main story-line. The woman is indispensable to ensure spectacle in normal narrative films, but her function slows down the action for erotic contemplation. A good example for this can be strippers, pin-ups, Ziegfield or Busby Berkeley, shows that satiate fantasies through scopophilia.
The men usually play active roles, while the women do the passive. Man's fantasies are projected on a woman, who is styled according to that projection. They have strong visual and erotic impact to be identified as the mentioned projection. It is what she provokes or represents what is imoprtant, either if it is love or fear, or even feelings of concern: this makes the male character to act the way he acts. But the woman has no importance by herself.
When analysing film and reality it is important to understand that in the 'film world' there is a control of time - through edition and narrative - and space - distances can be faked-. These are codes that given in a proper order can define desires. Desires that can be reflected from 3 different angles:
- The camera that films what is going on before it.
- The interpretation of the audience watching the final product. - How characters see each other in the illusion on the screen.
Through scopophilia an spectator identifies an alike on the screen as a physical object, affecting that person's erotic identity. And here is where narcissism plays its role. From the childhood when a kid discovers his or her look on a mirror wonders how to improve it based on the standard figures on TV and films, creating both a fascination and stimulation of the ego libido on what he or she could be and a high demand of himself. This dichotomy was very important for Freud and it has no meaning by itself, only if attached to an idealisation. It is a virtually pleasant process because a person is in tension between following the instinctual drives through the scopophilia but also the self preservation given by the narcissism, but it makes that person ignore the reality and motivate false interpretations of it creating expectations with inevitable disappointments.
- The camera that films what is going on before it.
- How characters see each other in the illusion on the screen.