The objectification of women has prompted extensive debate in modern media and film theory. While the representation of women in film and television is a prominent topic of discussion in contemporary times, the issue was pioneered by feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey in her 1975 analysis of the male gaze, where she argues that viewers watch a film from a male perspective and female characters are treated as objects rather than subjects. The idea of the male gaze has been explored by critics in regard to a wide variety of films, both within the Classical Hollywood era and beyond. It has become particularly synonymous with the work of Alfred Hitchcock, most notably his 1958 film Vertigo.

Mulvey introduced the concept of the male gaze to the second-wave feminist era of the 1970s through her essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. In the essay, she applies the psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan to narrative cinema — one of the first film theorists to do so. As a feminist film theorist, Mulvey is critical of the patriarchal structure of Hollywood cinema and states she plans to use psychoanalytic theory as a ‘political weapon’ (Mulvey 1975, pg. 6). Mulvey makes this intention clear, stating “it is said that analysing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the intention of this article” (Mulvey 1975, pg. 7). It is important to note the socio-political context of the time in which Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema was written. The essay was first published in 1975, when the women’s liberation movement was in full swing, and many of the issues raised by women during this time acted as inspiration for Mulvey’s work, including the objectification of women. In an interview with Roberta Sassatelli, Mulvey outlines the feminist influence of her work, stating “the women’s movement made a political point that women were exploited through the body and through images of the female body. Thus, if the female body was a site of oppression, questions of representation could not be ignored, so it was impossible to conceive of liberating the female body without analysing [its] oppressive representations” (Sassatelli 2011, pg. 131). In addition to her work as a film theorist, Mulvey was also avant-garde filmmaker. Her films were designed to challenge the perceived patriarchal dominance and male viewpoint of Classical Hollywood through the representation of strong, independent female figures such as Frida Kahlo and Amy Johnson (Sassatelli 2011).

While applicable to a wide range of cinema genres and eras, the male gaze can be easily identified in many films of the Classical Hollywood era. One film where the male gaze plays a particularly prominent role is Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Vertigo centres on Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart), a police detective who is forced to retire when he discovers he has acrophobia. Scottie is then hired by an old college friend, Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore), to follow his wife Madeleine (Kim Novak), who he believes is possessed by Carlotta Valdes — her great grandmother. As he watches Madeleine, Scottie becomes infatuated with her, and upon her suicide, becomes near catatonic. Some time later, Scottie notices a woman, Judy, who looks strikingly similar to Madeleine. The two develop a relationship and Scottie becomes obsessed with transforming her into Madeleine. It is revealed that Judy and Madeleine are in fact the same person, with Judy hired by Gavin to play his wife as part of a murder plot.

In many Hitchcock films, including Vertigo, the male gaze is not just evident — it also forms part of the film’s story. Scottie is hired to literally watch Madeleine and through this voyeuristic process, becomes obsessed with her based on her looks alone. It is not until the 45-minute mark of the film that we actually hear Madeleine speak, although we are first introduced to her in the 17th minute. As the film progresses, Scottie’s obsession with Madeleine deepens. After Madeleine’s supposed suicide, when he meets Judy, it becomes clear that Scottie’s love for Madeleine was more an obsession or fetish. He starts to develop the same fixation with Judy when he spots her in the street and is reminded of Madeleine, but then begins to transform Judy into an exact visual replica of Madeleine in a quest to create the ideal woman.

In Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Mulvey outlines two modes of the male gaze — voyeuristic and fetishistic — both of which can be seen in Vertigo. She defines voyeurism as the pleasure that comes from watching others and in turn transforming them into objects of sexual stimulation or desire (Mulvey 1975). She states that fetishistic viewing, on the other hand, involves “the substitution of a fetish object or turning the represented figure itself into a fetish so that it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous. This builds up the physical beauty of the object, transforming it into something satisfying in itself” (Mulvey 1975, pg. 12). While Scottie’s gaze over Madeleine is initially voyeuristic, in that he enjoys watching her from a distance, his gaze over Judy is more of a fetishistic gaze. Scottie finds satisfaction and pleasure in making Judy look like Madeleine, and it helps ease his guilt over his inability to prevent her suicide. The way Madeleine looks and is looked at are key focus points throughout the entire film. At first, she is compared to Carlotta through her identical hairstyle and supposed relation. Following this, when Judy is styled to look like Madeleine, every part of Madeleine and Judy’s appearance is placed under scrutiny to ensure the ideal woman is perfect down to every detail, from the identical grey suit to the hair colour and Carlotta hairstyle. Even the way she is ‘modelled’ must be perfect, with Scottie telling Judy to sit by the fire or the pair heading back to Ernie’s so Scottie can recreate his exact visual memory of Madeleine. Judy’s appearance in the story marks the point where the film shifts from a voyeuristic gaze to a fetishistic one.

Mulvey speaks of an active male role and a passive female role, where male characters, including the usually male protagonist, drive the story forward and have an active influence on the outcome of the story (Mulvey 1975). Female characters support male characters and may cause them to act in a certain way, be it out of love, fear, concern, anger or other. According to director Budd Boetticher, “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 not the slightest importance” (Mulvey 1975, pg.11). Scottie is the protagonist of Vertigo and rarely do we gain insight to other characters from a perspective other than his own — we are even shown his nightmares. The two main exceptions to this are when we see Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes) furious at herself for painting the portrait of herself as Carlotta and when Judy reveals the murder plot through a letter she writes for Scottie. These scenes still revolve around Scottie however and the women’s motives are about wanting Scottie’s love, yet throughout the film they do nothing to act on these feelings — they are passive. This highlights another level at which the male gaze is at play — women also see themselves through the eyes of men. Both women try to style themselves in such a way to appeal to Scottie. As Scottie does not see Midge in a romantic sense, she goes largely ignored throughout the film. “One of the more benign of Hitchcock’s many bespectacled female characters, Midge is a ‘motherly’ type, as the film continually emphasises, too prosaic for Scottie’s romantic imagination” (Modleski 1988, pg.88). Judy, on the other, allows Scottie to mould her into Madeleine in the hope that it will make him love her.

Mulvey argues that the camera represents a masculine point of view, and it is through this point of view that the viewer, be they female or male, experiences the film. She notes three levels of spectatorship associated with cinema — that of the camera, the characters on screen and the cinema audience (Mulvey 1975). The camera, while not intrusive, is set to represent a male perspective due to the way women are depicted on screen and the male point of view it often represents. Shots may linger on a woman’s form, pan across her body or show close-ups of certain features to portray women in an erotic way. For example, when Scottie watches Madeleine in the flower store, there is a shot, seen from Scottie’s point of view, where she walks towards the camera, slowly turns and walks back in the opposite direction — similar to a runway model on a catwalk. We see Madeleine from the front, side and back, and a long shot allows the viewer to take in Madeleine’s entire figure, from her high heels to her tight-fitting grey suit and neat blonde hair. The characters in the film can also push a male perspective, as most protagonists in the Classical Hollywood era are male, and stories are told from their point of view. The audience watching the film, therefore, watch it from a male perspective. Mulvey also sees watching as an active male role, and being looked at as a passive female role, so when viewers watch characters on screen, they take on the active male role.

In addition to Mulvey’s three levels of spectatorship, it can be argued that with films such as Vertigo, a fourth level of the male gaze exists — that of the director. In many of Alfred Hitchcock’s films, the main female character tends to fit a certain model of appearance — she is generally attractive with blonde hair. Kim Novak, who plays both Madeleine and Judy, is one example. Hitchcock’s preoccupation with blonde beauties has been noted by many critics, including Susan Jhirad, who states “the most casual glance at Hitchcock’s films, especially the later ones, suggests a man preoccupied with women, especially coolly beautiful blondes like Madeline Carroll, Grace Kelly and Kim Novak… the unreal, obsessive quality of Hitchcock’s blonde heroines does not show women as they are, but woman as Hitchcock wished them to be” (Jhirad 1984, pg. 31).

While Mulvey has garnered the praise of many film critics, others are more critical of her idea of the male gaze and offer alternative interpretations. Most notably, they seek to question or redefine Mulvey’s stance on gender positions in the gaze, the heterosexuality of the gaze and the idea that the gaze represents an exclusively male voyeuristic pleasure (Manlove 2007). Theorists have also sought to further analyse the role of the gaze within Hitchcock films such as Vertigo, offering a range of alternative readings. Modleski argues that Hitchcock both constructs and deconstructs the male spectator through a captivation with femininity that questions male identity and allows for a female spectator of the film. She states “we have seen how one of the major attractions of Scottie to Madeline is his identification with her, an identification that the film works to elicit in the audience as well: we are identifying with Scottie identifying with Madeleine. Woman thus becomes the ultimate point of identification for all of the film’s spectators” (Modleski 1988, pg. 99). Manlove also revaluates the role of the male gaze in Vertigo, claiming “rather than being about active male heroes using their gazes to control passive, “to-be-looked-at” women, Vertigo, Rear Window, and Marnie show ambivalent, less-than-powerful heroes struggling to resist patriarchy, struggling to wrest control of the gaze from the world around them” (Manlove 2007, pg. 84).

Mulvey’s analysis of the male gaze in Classical Hollywood cinema is both insightful and divisive. As one of the first prominent feminist film theorists, she has generated widespread discussion of the gaze and the representation of women within cinema, as well as the application of psychoanalytic theory. As Vertigo undergoes a critical revival of sorts, coming in at number one in Sight and Sound’s most recent Greatest Films poll, both the film and Mulvey’s essay will continue to be evaluated and scrutinised for years to come.

References

Jhirad, S 1984, ‘Hitchcock’s Women’, Cineaste, vol. 13, no. 4, pp. 30–33.

Manlove, C 2007, ‘Visual “Drive” and Cinematic Narrative: Reading Gaze Theory in Lacan, Hitchcock and Mulvey’, Cinema Journal, vol. 46, no. 3, pp. 83–108).

Modleski, T 1988, The Women Who Knew Too Much, Methuen, New York.

Mulvey, L 1975, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,’ Screen, vol. 16, no. 3, pp. 6–18.

Sassatelli, R 2011, ‘Interview With Laura Mulvey: Gender, Gaze and Technology in Film Culture’, Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 28, no. 5, pp. 123–143.