Analysis Of Laura Mulvey's Afterthoughts On Visual Pleasure And Narrative Cinema

Looking at classic Hollywood films, Laura Mulvey has deduced in her work in 1975, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” that the industry’s films are made for the male gaze. She emphasises that these movies are dominated by the heterosexual male’s pleasure in looking at the female. Later in another one of her works in 1981, “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’”, she goes on to say that no matter what the gender of the audience is, when it comes to them watching what is on a screen as a spectacle, the spectator will always have a male gaze. When looking at the male gaze (from Mulvey’s point of view) as the projection of one’s fantasies onto the female body while watching it on the screen, regardless of one’s gender, one

He mentions that they are not allowed to touch the strippers, but implies that even if they do, they would not be punished. This places the women in the position of power from the start as they are allowed to look at the men in the club as objects to satisfy their sexual fantasies without having to face any consequences. Furthermore, the solely female audience of the strip club already shows the dynamics of the female spectator and male spectacle. According to Mulvey, even if the audience is female, when it comes to film, they take on the “male gaze” due to the fact that in the film itself, the men are viewing the female body. This makes the spectator identify with the active, scopophilic male. The female spectator on the other hand is gazing at the female spectacle as a narcissistic, passive act although it is still labelled by Mulvey as a “male gaze”. In Magic Mike, from the very beginning, there is a reversal of this argument. Due to fact that the spectators are placed amongst the female audience represented in the film from the very beginning, it gives the sense that the spectators are viewing the film from the female point of view. This thus creates this heterosexual female gaze, making the women the scopophilic female spectators and the male the narcissistic spectators. Even throughout the movie there is a constant reminder that the

When the audience takes on a “female gaze”, how then is there a threat to the phallus? In Magic Mike, I would argue that with the presence of the female gaze, there is a higher threat of male castration. The men have not become the object of the gaze, thus reducing their power and control over the female. This in turn increases the male’s anxiety of castration. In the film, when Mike first asks Brooke out to grab some food, she sees this as something sexual and declines the offer saying “I don’t sport-fuck my brother’s stripper friends”. This objectifies Mike as mere sexual figure. Later on in the movie after Mike decided to leave his career as a stripper behind, Brooke suggest that they go out for food, and implies that it is a date and does not place any sexual objectification of Mike. These parallel situations show that Brooke, the female character, was the one in power of the direction in which their relationship would progress. When she rejects Mike earlier, she prevents their relationship from developing into something more and when she later makes the offer to Mike, she paves the way for new developments in their relationship. In both situations Mike passively receives her responses. Also the fact that Mike has to leave his job before Brooke wanted to have any relationship with him reemphasises on her control over the development of the relationship. This allows the female