A Perpetual Subject of Male Gaze : an Analysis of Amal Neerad's Malayalam Movie Varathan
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A Perpetual Subject of Male Gaze : An Analysis of Amal Neerad’s Malayalam Movie Varathan Project submitted to the Mahatma Gandhi University Kottayam in partial recognition of the requirements for the award of the Degree of Bachelor of Arts in English Language and Literature (Model II – Teaching) Sharon Perera Register Number: 170021017787 Sixth Semester Department of English St. Paul’s College Kalamassery 2017-2020 Declaration I do hereby declare that the project a study on “A Perpetual Subject of Male Gaze: An Analysis of Amal Neerad’s Malayalam Movie Varathan” is the record of genuine research work done by me under the guidance of Professor Lima Sunny, Department of English, St. Paul’s College, Kalamassery. Sharon Perera Certificate This is to certify that the project work A study on “ A Perpetual Subject of Male Gaze : An Analysis of Amal Neerad’s Malayalam Movie Varathan” is a record of the original work carried out by Sharon Perera under the supervision and guidance of Professor Lima Sunny, Department of English, St. Paul’s College, Kalamassery. Dr. Salia Rex Ms. Lima Sunny Head of the Department Project Guide Department of English Department of English St. Paul’s College St. Paul’s College Kalamassery Kalamassery Acknowledgement I would like to thank Ms. Lima Sunny for her assistance and suggestions during the writing of this project. This work would not have taken its present shape without her painstaking scrutiny and timely interventions. I thank Dr. Salia Rex, Head of Department of English for her suggestions and corrections. I would also thank my friends, teachers and the librarian for their assistance and support. Sharon Perera Contents Page No: Introduction 1-7 Chapter I 7-12 Chapter II 13-15 Chapter III 16-20 Conclusion 20-26 Works Cited 26-27 Introduction “what counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents. She is the one or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act the way he does. In herself the women has not the slightest importance”. This is quoted by Laura Mulvey on her famous Male gaze theory. The film critic Laura Mulvey coined the term male gaze, which is conceptually contrasted with and opposed by the female gaze. " The “gaze” is a term that describes how viewers engage with visual media. Originating in film theory and criticism in the 1970s, the gaze refers to how we look at visual representations. These include advertisements, television programs and cinema.In feminist theory, the male gaze is the act of depicting women and the world, in the visual arts and in literature, from a masculine, heterosexual perspective that presents and represents women as sexual objects for the pleasure of the male viewer. Laura Mulvey is a feminist film theorist from Britain, best known for her essay on Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Her theories are influenced by the likes of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, is one of the first major essays that helped shift the orientation of film theory towards a psychoanalytic framework. Prior to Mulvey, film theorists such as Jean-Louis Baudry and Christian Metz used psychoanalytic ideas in their theoretical accounts of the cinema. Mulvey's contribution, however, inaugurated the intersection of film theory, psychoanalysis and feminism. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" brought the term "male gaze" into the academic lexicon and eventually into common parlance.Mulvey states that she intends to use Freud and Lacan's concepts as a "political weapon". She employs some of their concepts to argue that the cinematic 2 apparatus of classical Hollywood cinema inevitably put the spectator in a masculine subject position, with the figure of the woman on screen as the object of desire and "the male gaze". In the era of classical Hollywood cinema, viewers were encouraged to identify with the protagonists, who were and still are overwhelmingly male. Meanwhile, Hollywood women characters of the 1950s and '60s were, according to Mulvey, coded with "to-be-looked-at-ness" while the camera positioning and the male viewer constituted the "bearer of the look". Mulvey suggests two distinct modes of the male gaze of this era: "voyeuristic" (i.e., seeing woman as image "to be looked at") and "fetishistic" (i.e., seeing woman as a substitute for "the lack", the underlying psychoanalytic fear of castration). She argues that the only way to annihilate the patriarchal Hollywood system is to radically challenge and re-shape the filmic strategies of classical Hollywood with alternative feminist methods. She calls for a new feminist avant-garde filmmaking that would rupture the narrative pleasure of classical Hollywood filmmaking. Being one of the most notable film theorists in the world, her ideas and clear proof of misogyny in film opened up the eyes of many, and in 1975, something that people simply accepted was finally questioned. Although Mulvey‘s theory has helped identify issues with gender in film, why do we still have the same issues decades later? Why do we still see the same roles for women in film and television regurgitated over and over again? Mulvey states that “the gender power asymmetry is a controlling force in cinema and constructed for the pleasure of the male viewer, which is deeply rooted in patriarchal ideologies and discourses.” This means that the male viewer is the target audience, therefore their needs are met first and that this problem stems from an old fashioned, 3 male-driven society. Her theory on how women are portrayed in film and the media is just as prevalent today as it was in 1975 when her text was first published.She believes that women are in fact “the bearer of meaning and not the maker of meaning,” which suggests that women are not placed in a role where they can take control of a scene, instead they are simply put there to be observed from an objectified point of view. In addition, she believes that this way of watching film is never alternated so that the men are in fact the ones who are being viewed in this manner. This inequality enforces the ancient and outdated idea of men do the looking, and women are to be looked at.”From the feminist perspective, this theory can be viewed in three ways: How men look at women, how women look at themselves and finally, how women look at other women. Typical examples of the male gaze include medium close-up shots of women from over a man’s shoulder, shots that pan and fixate on a woman’s body, and scenes that frequently occur which show a man actively observing a passive woman. The Male Gaze suggests that the female viewer must experience the narrative secondarily, by identification with the male. In 1929 Salvador Dali released a film called Un Chein Andalou, which is an abstract short film that portrays a perfect example of this. One scene in the film, a man is found dissecting the iris of a young woman’s eye, which infers this idea of female sight not being central, and that men are not only the audience, but also in control of the action, the camera, the direction, the writing, et cetera, therefore completely running the show, dominating the entirety of the narrative and how it is depicted.Not only is the Male Gaze theory relevant to cinema, but it also correlates with every-day life. Some theorists have noted that in advertising, objectification and sexualised portrayals of the female body can be found even in situations where sex or 4 representations of sex have nothing to do with the product being advertised.Although as of recently, movies like Frozen (2013) and Suffragette (2015) do Mulvey justice in highlighting women’s independence and empowerment, breaking away from the Male Gaze, decades later we still see the same broken record playing, with films like The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) and Star Trek Into Darkness (2013) revealing women in extremely sexual and somewhat unnecessary manners. One reason for this is simply that the movie companies producing these films are male-dominated, as cinema is predominantly a male-run industry, and just like when Mulvey originally wrote this critical analysis of film, producers are still churning out the same work that has proved to be successful in the past with audiences as they invest to make profit. They believe that they are giving the public what they want, when that isn’t necessarily true. They are giving audiences what a proportion of males want, and what the rest of society has been brainwashed to accept. One film which stands out when considering this theory is Michael Bay‘s Transformers franchise. Firstly, these movies have a huge difference in the male/female character ratio, instantly making it an unrepresentative movie as it doesn’t depict 50% of its audience. All the women Bay casts in this franchise are sexualised in some way, and it has no relevance to the story line, or as Mulvey would put it: it is just to please the heterosexual male, rendering it a movie with touches of irrelevant objectification and misogyny. Another movies in Hollywood which male gaze can be applied are Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011), Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014), Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella et cetera etc. 5 Mulvey has shown a light on the old-fashioned and repetitive style of cinema we see every day, and her ideologies have helped create a more modern and truthful version of cinema as we now have more realistic portrayals of women than ever before.