Probably the film clip that relates best to Mulvey’s theory is the very first one we were provided with: the opening scene of “Rear Window.” Through the eyes of the main character, Jeff, the audience watches his perspective shift through subjects as he watches the goings-on of his neighbors from the window. While this may not be inherently “masculine” the direction of the camera(his gaze) reveals his nature and his perspective unfolds before the audience. Take, for instance, the time in which he watches a young woman dance around her kitchen in what appears to be underwear from the time. He watches her openly, and his expressions and the way he gets “lost in thought” at times makes it clear that he isn’t watching her for her dancing skills. He does not respect this woman, most likely because he does not know her and is in fact in the clear when any personal justification is needed.
The scenes from Psycho are harder to really discern. In the first clip, the “gaze” of the camera is less focused on the character’s perspective and more on the characters themselves. However, the second clip is more interesting. The shower scene is iconic, not just because it’s been shown in other movies or just in clips of horror movie moments, but also because the scene is shot to both censor and capture as much of the brutal stabbing as possible. As is a problem in many horror movies, there can be a glorification or a focus on the violence done to the female characters. Now, I have never seen Psycho, nor am I enough of an expert to definitively say that this is an instance of violence against a woman just for that purpose, but the killing happening in the shower, for no real reason besides the character being at her most vulnerable, seems to lead to a similar conclusion.
“… the series of politics, representation, image, academic, exists as a kind of chain so that the essay emerges from the women’s liberation movement’s insistence that there was a politics of the body–the female body…” (9:55).
Mulvey’s interview of sorts makes sense in a historical context. When she wrote the essay and realized all this stuff about feminism, she was also in one of the most controversial and radical eras of recent United States history. Of course her worldview was being shifted and she was in a time where her work of challenging something that had been established for a long time was more accepted in a wider mainstream audience. However, I cannot seem to find a good place to connect it with my earlier analysis. Maybe I’m not understanding the video well enough. Although, I will say that there are many instances of history that are thought of as unique and “only people who lived through it could understand the nuances and impacts.” So I think Mulvey is definitely correct in saying that this specific set of circumstances led her to the conclusions in the essay and in her other work, but that is not to say that it cannot be deeply and truly understood by future generations. I hope that’s what she’s saying, otherwise I’ll sound like I’m coming out of left field with this one.
