Final Project - Mulvey

For some reason, I had difficulties uploading my video. I'll try again later, but my computer is almost dead at the moment, so here is my response to my project at least:

My final video is based on the theories of Laura Mulvey. The two aspects of her theory that stood out to me were the objectification of women, and the active male. Mulvey claims that the mindset of the audience is essentially male which is why most movies objectify women. In this way, the “male” audience does not have to identify with the women, and they can get an erotic pleasure out of watching movies as well. Then, the male characters in films are usually the active characters. This way, the “male” audience can identify with the active male who gets the girl in the end. Mulvey says, "the male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification. Man is reluctant to gaze at his exhibitionist like. Hence the split between spectacle and narrative supports the man's role as the active one of forwarding the story, making things happen."

So, for my project, I wanted to discover if what she was saying was true or not. I took a movie that I knew objectified women a decent amount, and I edited it so that this aspect was intensified. I wanted to see if the audience would become uncomfortable by the extreme objectification of women, or if Mulvey is correct, and we have become used to it, and it does not surprise us anymore. In this version, I also made sure the male was the active character that saves the day and gets the girl while the female is the passive character. In this way, I followed Mulvey’s theory of what films have become, and merely intensified it a little.

Yet, my second version of this film is rather different. I wanted to flip everything that Mulvey said, and see if this made the audience even more uncomfortable. I objectified the male (somewhat), and created a passive male character and active female character that saves the day and gets the guy. If this story makes the audience uncomfortable, it is obvious that it is uncommon to see this type of film even now. Yet, I do not believe that film should have one dominant type, so shouldn’t we do something about it?

I know for myself, I did not feel too uncomfortable during my first version. There was one or two short seconds where I thought something was unnecessary and overdoing it a little, but otherwise I did not see much of a problem. However, the second version did shock me when I saw it all come together, and it seems as if the male is getting raped. Then I tried to think of a movie that included a male getting beaten up and raped, and I could not think of one. There may be one out there, but my guess is that it was not a big Hollywood hit if I couldn’t think of it. So, Mulvey was more correct than I originally thought. These are two extremes, and I believe that she may be extreme herself, but she clearly has a point. I think there is definitely some truth to this.

Another reason I believe Mulvey’s theory has some truth to it is because of my experience when making the two versions. I had no trouble finding the parts that I needed for the first version. I did not even use every clip I found that objectifies women. Also, this film happens to have an “almost rape” scene that I just had to re-edit a little bit. It was not difficult to manipulate the story line a little bit and find the images I wanted. However, I thought the second version would be nearly impossible. After a long time of trying to find the clips that I needed, I thought about switching movies for the second version because I could not find anything. I had issues finding any objectification of males, so I ended up using the only good images I could for this aspect. I had a lot of issues trying to make the female active and the male passive. I had to manipulate some clips to show what I need, and I still am uncertain about the rape scene in this version, but it was the closest I could get. I even had trouble simply finding an image of the main female character with her hands on the main male character’s face as if she was trying to calm him down (used after the “rape” scene). There was a great deal of that situation reversed for the first version, but hardly anything for this version. I was scrounging for anything I could get, which shows to me that there is not much out there of the male being passive or the female being active. It may just be the movie I picked, but one of the reasons I picked this film was because I thought that this film went back and forth between who was active and who was passive. It does have some moments where the roles change, but for the most part, I was wrong about that. So, after this project, I believe more in Mulvey’s theories than I did before.