MOVIES AND FEMINISM

(audience: undergraduate students)

Movies are the most influential pop culture item as they are viewed by millions of people across the globe in theaters, on television, electronic media, etc. Movies  these days are meant only for entertainment purposes more than anything and most of them fail to deliver a social message. The sad part however, is the way women are being depicted in films- given less and unimportant screen space, wear skimpy clothes, sexually objectified and scrutinized through the 'male gaze'. 

'Male gaze' is the most predominant thing depicted in movies. Budd Boetticher summarises the view thus: "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."  Laura Mulvey's germinal essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (written in 1973 and published in 1975) expands on this conception of the passive role of women in cinema to argue that film provides visual pleasure through scopophilia, and identification with the on-screen male actor. She asserts: "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," and as a result contends that in film a woman is the "bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning." 

An example of this phenomena is very prominent in almost all of the 'Bond' films. When 'Sir Sean Connery' or 'Daniel Craig' look at the female leads in these films and the camera turns to focus just on the women we too unknowingly 'gaze' through their eyes and construe the image of a perfect women. These women are shown to be the ideal ones with straight hair, lots of make - up and a perfect body. When a woman watches these films her view too is restricted by the 'male gaze', which denies any sexuality of the women other than the male construction. 

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