Mulvey's theory -male gaze +apply

 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 phantasy on to the female form 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 leit-motif of erotic spectacle: from pin-ups to striptease, from Ziegfeld to Busby Berkeley, she holds the look, plays to and signifies male desire. Mainstream film neatly combined spectacie and narrative. (Note, however, how the musical song-and-dance numbers break the flow of the diegesis.) 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 not the slightest importance.

An active/passive heterosexual division of labor has similarly controlled narrative structure. According to the principles of the ruling ideology and the psychical structures that back it up, the male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification. Man is reluctant to gaze at his exhibitionist like. Hence the split between spectacle and narrative supports the man's role as the active one of forwarding the story, making things happen. The man controls the film phantasy and also emerges as the representative of power in a further sense: as the bearer of the look of the spectator, transferring it behind the screen to neutralise the extradiegetic tendencies represented by woman as spectacle. This is made possible through the processes set in motion by structuring the film around a main controlling figure with whom the spectator can identify. As the spectator identifies with the main male protagonist, he projects his look on to that of his like, his screen surrogate, so that the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look, both giving a satisfying sense of omnipotence. A male movie star's glamorous characteristics are thus not those of the erotic object of the gaze, but those of the more perfect, more complete, more powerful ideal ego conceived in the original moment of recognition in front of the mirror."1 

Mulvey argued that most popular movies are filmed in ways that satisfy masculine scopophilia. Although sometimes described as the “male gaze”, Mulvey's concept is more accurately described as a heterosexual, masculine gaze. Visual media that respond to masculine voyeurism tends to sexualise women for a male viewer.  2

• Women are displayed as a spectacle to be looked at 
• womens bodies are exhibited as objects of desire 
• women are constructed as a spectacle for voyeuristic pleasure 

for female audience is easy to identify with the females when they are being objectified- the female scpectators are no longer looking through their own eyes but instead the male gaze has manipulated their perseption of the character

• camera movement- slowly scaning the female body 
• slow motion 
• exadareted camera angles 

FEMINIST FILM STUDIES, WRITING THE WOMAN INTO CINEMA JANET McCABE   A Wallflower Paperback First published in Great Britain in 2004 by Wallflower Press 

Mulvey turns to psychoanalytic studies on the scopophilic subject - most notably Freud's child who desires to control the object through the gaze and Lacan's jubilant infant caught in the image - as 'a political weapon* to psychoanalyse 'the way the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form' (1975: 6). She begins with the contention that dominant cinema, as exemplified by Hollywood, appeals to a preconscious desire for pleasurable looking. Deconstructing how the subject gains pleasure in looking would, she argues, reveal the manner in which the patriarchal unconscious genderises those pleasures: 'Unchallenged, mainstream film coded the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order' (1975: 8). Patriarchy encodes a gender imbalance within ways of seeing, in which 'the pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female' (1975:11). Chief among the pleasures offered is that of voyeuristic-scopophilic gazing, where the spectator gains gratification from indulgingin unlicensed looking at an image, typically of a woman. The active and curious (male) gaze translates the (female) image into an object of sexual fantasy, so granting the voyeur a position defined by control and mastery with its implied separation from the source of erotic stimulation. Narcissistic (mis)recognition of self in an idealised figure on screen, typically the male hero, is the other visual pleasure; a structure of seeing that allows for a 'temporary loss of ego while simultaneously reinforcing if (1975:10). Replicating the child's discovery of its own image during the Lacanian mirror scenario, the spectator 'projects his look onto that of his like, his screen surrogate, so that the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look, both giving a satisfying sense of omnipotence' (1975: 12). Structured in the language of the patriarchal unconscious (instinctual libidinal drives and processes of ego formation), visual pleasures in dominant cinema constitute the spectator as male while the woman 'holds the look, and plays to and signifies male desire' (1975: 11). In turn, this gendered active/passive divide structures film narrative with the male hero advancing the story and the woman-as-image disrupting narrative movement, 'to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation' (ibid.). 

The sight of woman stimulates pleasure, her 'appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact ... [connotes a] to-be-looked-at-ness' (ibid.). Yet, and at the same time, her image provokes anxiety for the spectator. Because she constitutes the castrated male Other, a signifier of sexual difference, the woman as object is concomitant with the threat of castration that needs to be somehow disavowed. To allay castration fears the film narrative renders the woman-as-image non-threatening through two basic strategies. The first associates voyeurism with sadism: 'pleasure lies in ascertaining guilt (immediately associated with castration), assert-ing control and subjugating the guilty person' (1975: 14). The narrative here is concerned with investigating the 'woman' in order to demystify and control her, resulting finally in her punishment, devaluation or moral rescue. She is subjected to and subordinated by the male gaze as he tries to gain control and discipline her for arousing forbidden desire in him. An undercover investigation in Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) gives Scottie Fergusson (James Stewart) license to scrutinise the spectacle of Madeleine (Kim Novak), 'a perfect image of female beauty and mystery' (1975: 16). Soon sexual attraction turns into an obsession with mastering her image, as he sadistically forces Judy to become 'Madeleine'. The film concludes with Scottie exposing Judy's guilt and her death: 'True perversion is barely concealed under a shallow mask of ideological correctness-the man is on the right side of the law, the woman on the wrong' (1975:15). 

The second strategy is fetishism. Drawing on its original significance within Freudian accounts of sexual difference (Freud 1977a), Mulvey demonstrates how turning the woman-as-image (as opposed to the cinematic apparatus identified by Metz) into fetish conceals castration anxiety. Rather than lacking, the woman-as-image is idealised as being complete. The flawless female body, or parts of it at least, are given an importance to compensate for the lack that she originally signified, hence the exces-sive over-valuation of the female star-image - Greta Garbo's face, Marilyn Monroe's mouth, Marlene Dietrich's legs. Translating the woman into fetish diverts attention away from the female lack' - her lack of penis, her bleeding wound - so that she no longer represents a menacing figure but an idealised spectacle of beauty and perfection. 'She is no longer the bearer of guilt but a perfect product, whose body, stylised and fragmented by close-ups, is the content of the film and the direct recipient of the spectator's look' (1975:14).  3

The representationof ‘Woman’ as a spectacle to be looked at pervades visual culture. In such representations, ‘Woman’ is defined solely in terms of sexuality,as an object of desire, in relation to, or as a foil for, ‘Man’. Mulvey’s1975 essay explored the inscription of this tendency in mainstreamnarrative cinema, where it arguably has the most far-reaching effects.She argued that mainstream cinema is constructed for a male gaze,catering to male fantasies and pleasures. Uncovering the voyeuristicand fetishistic responses of male spectators to images of women, theessay was the first attempt to consider the interplay between the spec-tator and the screen in feminist terms.

As Mulvey says, ‘women’s struggle to gain rights over their bodies could not be divorced from questions of [the] image’ (Mulvey1989a: vii).4 

Mulvey's theory can still be seen and applied to many mainstream films and her theory on how women are portrayed in film and the media is just as prevalent today as it was in 1975 when her text was first published.
In Michael Bay‘s Transformers, we clearly see that through firstly the difference in male/female character ratio, making it unrepresentative and also by the fact that all women in the franchise are highly sexualised in some way, having no relavance to the story line- 'the pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female'

 All the females in the franchise are also deemed stereotypically attractive, as their careers in acting are secondary to their modelling careers.
Another example is the model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley plays the role of Sam’s girlfriend in Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011)

Bibliography

1 Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Film Theory and Criticism : Introductory Readings(1975) 

 2 https://www.filminquiry.com/film-theory-basics-laura-mulvey-male-gaze-theory/

 3 FEMINIST FILM STUDIES, WRITING THE WOMAN INTO CINEMA JANET McCABE A Wallflower Paperback First published in Great Britain in 2004 by Wallflower Press

4 Feminist film theorists  Chaudhuri, Shohini.  2009. London: Routledge.