RESEARCH: MEDIA THEORY - LAURA MULVEY

Today in media we began by looking at some examples of theory that we would come across in our exam. We looked primarily at how the placement of people (particularly according to gender) would affect how they might appear in media. E.g. are women primarily viewed as simply sexual objects or have the progressed?

We examined theorists Laura Mulvey and her Gaze Theory which states that film has been called an instrument of the male gaze as it produces representations of women, the good life, and sexual fantasy from a male point of view. 
This concept comes from the article Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema by Laura Mulvey, a feminist film theorist. Mulvey's theory was published in 1975 and is one of the most widely cited and notable articles in the whole of contemporary film theory. She declared her intention to make political use of Freudian psychoanalytic theory in a study of cinematic spectatorship. Mulvey argues that there are various features of the cinema viewing conditions that facilitate for the viewer, like the voyeuristic process of objectification of female characters and also the narcissistic process of identification with the ideal image and ego seen on the screen. She also states that in a patriarchal society the pleasure in looking has been split between both active male and passive female. 

This is reflected in the dominant forms of cinema. For example, narrative films in Hollywood not only typically focusses on a male protagonist but also assume a male spectator. In traditional, hollywood, cinematic films, men are presented as active, controlling subjects that treat women as passive objects. Women are treated as passive objects of desire for men. These types of films place women in relation to "the controlling male gaze" presenting them as objects of desire and as 'spectacle'for men to look at. Men do the looking, and women are there to be looked at. 

After this lesson in theory we began to plan for our music videos. While we are still trying to think of a suitable video to make we came up with a number of songs that could be viable candidates.

• Red Hot Chili Peppers - Californication
• Misfits - Scream
• Aerosmith - Walk this way
• My Chemical Romance - Black parade