The Male Gaze

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Recommended: Representations of sexuality in films

Fifty Shades of the Male Gaze The cinema has deviously played on the voyeuristic characteristics of humans, something unknown to the average “innocent” minded audience. The dark, separated setting of the theatre provides the perfect breeding ground for these hidden urges within us all (Mulvey 60). Film has long manipulated these voyeuristic ideals in humans incorporating them into the diegesis of the work; painting perfect scenes that make the audience feel as if they are secretly viewing these real-life, private, and intimate moments between two celebrities on screen. While incorporating also the theory of the “male gaze,” audience members are hypnotized under the director’s and male lead’s spell, continually bringing them crawling back for more.
This approach is adamant in the use of an all white cast (aside from one Hispanic friend), and in the way the author/director uses the male gaze of a “dominant”, attractive, wealthy, white man to lure women into this BDSM lifestyle. The main male character, Christian Grey, displays this instinct of scopophilia in the opening scene of the movie (3:07-9:00). Freud described this instinct as, “taking other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze,” (Mulvey 59) in this scene the audience gets it first look into the deep scopophilic gaze of Christian

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