Laura Mulvey - Theorist

Laura Mulvey is a feminist film theorist who wrote a seminal article called 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema', which was published in 1975.

Mulvey notes that Freud (theorist on dreams and the subconscious mind) had referred to (infantile) scopophilia, which is the pleasure involved in looking at other people's bodies as (particularly erotic) objects. She also states how in the darkness of a cinema auditorium, it's notable that one may look without being seen, either by the people on screen or by other members of the audience.

Mulvey argues that various features of the viewing conditions in a cinema facilitate for the viewer the voyeuristic process of objectification of female characters as well as the narcissistic process of identification with an 'ideal ego' seen on the screen.

She also states that in the society that we live in today, which is fluid (always changing), 'pleasure in looking has been split between the active male and the passive female.' Also, 'as the spectator identifies with the main male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look, both giving a satisfying sense of omnipotence.'
Due to 88% of American directors being male, therefore they subconsciously make men control the narrative.

Traditionally, films present men as active and controlling subjects and they treat women as passive objects of desire for both men in the story and men in the audience, and they do no allow women to be desiring sexual subjects in their own right. Basically, men do the looking, while women are there to be looked at.

Many critical responses have been that Mulvey's argument in her paper 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' seemed to be essentialist. It tended to treat spectatorship and maleness as homogeneous essences - as if there's only one type of spectator - male - and only one type of masculinity - heterosexual, the reason for this being that most Hollywood films are heterosexual. However, women objectify men just as much as men objectify women, it's just very rare to see in music video and films. Also, their is a niche market of homosexual films, and there is becoming a rise in the sexualisation of the male body in both films and advertising.