Voyeurism and the Male Gaze in Narrative Cinema

Voyeurism and the Cinematic Gaze

According to the feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey, the pleasures of voyeurism, once considered a perversion or fetish, are normalized rather than rendered problematic by the nature of the cinematic gaze and the visual nature of the film medium. In both voyeurism in life and voyeuristic gazing while watching a film, the voyeur need not be part of the world around him. The voyeur need only stare at the image that entices him and achieve a passive kind of gratification. Because the voyeur acts illicitly, without the object of his desire being aware of his presence, there is both a sadistic and a masochistic aspect to this passive, exclusively visual form of sexual behavior and enjoyment. Through the voyeuristic gaze, the woman is rendered into an object, against her will and knowledge. In the absence of her own mutual gratification from the voyeur, she does not experience pleasure. She experiences a violation and an unwilling and unwitting penetration by the male eye. Yet the male gazing voyeur also suffers because he can receive nothing in return from his object of desire.

Film as an Inherently Voyeuristic Medium

Film is an inherently voyeuristic medium because it is visual in a passive and recorded fashion. The viewer gazes at images and at actors. But unlike a theatrical performance, where performers are aware of audience members' expressed approval or disapproval and can tailor their performances accordingly, the actors in film have acted without awareness of exactly who will watch them, when, and how. The actors cannot respond to the reactions of individual audience members. Yet the director directs the way that the viewer's eye will pass over the observed subject. Thus, there is a doubly sadistic aspect to the voyeuristic element of film. While one chooses to gaze, one cannot choose where to gaze—at a woman's stockings or through a porthole at two women in a ship's cabin. The viewer is thus subject to the vision of the director, just as the actors are subject to the viewer's gaze and the director's desired direction of that gaze.

Directorial Control and the Male Perspective

Notice that in the first section of this essay, the voyeur was referred to as "he." For a director—and most directors, just like most voyeurs clinically speaking, are male—can render even a heterosexual woman's gaze into a desiring male gaze, simply by focusing on sensual aspects of feminine behavior. Consider Marilyn Monroe's bejeweled cleavage in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. The female viewer might prefer to gaze at the male faces of the suited individuals who surround the lovely Ms. Monroe and her evident charms. But by virtue of Howard Hawks's direction, the men in this song and dance routine who wave black ropes of diamonds at the conventionally attractive and voluptuously presented actress are virtually faceless. There is no camera focus on any individual male, so the men appear as a sea of white faces in black suits against a sea of pink.

Gender and the Construction of Desire in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

The pink costume of the actress draws all eyes to her, as well as the fact that she is the singer. Even in the scene where Monroe and her compatriot, the generously endowed Jane Russell, sing at a café on a French street, the broadness of the camera angle is undercut by the muted clothing of the other passersby and waiters in the scene, and the lack of lighting and sharply focused makeup on their features. All eyes are on the actresses and their most feminine assets: legs, breasts, and highly rouged lips and cheeks. "Don't you know that a man being rich is like a woman being pretty?" asks Monroe's character Lorelei Lee of her desired marriage prospect. However, unlike wealth, which can be concealed, beauty is in evidence in the camera's visually present lens. Money is concealed visually. In the film, we know a man is rich because we are told by the women that he is wealthy, but we know as voyeurs that the women are sexually desirable because the camera tells us, by virtue of its focus, even if "we" as viewers are heterosexual females who would not see them as such in ordinary life.