Tried SO hard to understand what this was about, but I'm afraid no amount of Yahoo answers or Wiki terms can help me. But, I will give it the benefit of the doubt and try to explain it.
Right. So Laura Mulvey is a distinguished professor of Film and Media Studies at Wellesley College, and wrote a rather noteworthy essay in 1973 called 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema'. (So far so good.)
Her first theme in this essay was "The Gaze and the Female Specter". She wrote that it is the woman's look which spurs on the actions of the hero of the film. She argues that the passive role of women in cinema provides visual pleasure through voyeurism, and identification with the male actor. She suggests that women are to be looked at in a film, displayed and her appearance is 'coded' for an erotic impact. (This is kind of true, think about the 70's, anybody watched The Spy Who Loved Me?)
She wrote that women are objectified in films, and that there are three 'looks' to a women in the film. The first look is that from the male heroin's perspective. The second is the spectators view, and the third perspective (GET THIS) allows the male audience to take the female character as his own personal sex object because he can relate himself, through looking, to the male character in the film. (WHAT IS THAT ABOUT?)
There is a lot more about her essay, which I had a go at reading, but I found it a little far fetched and to be quite honest, boring and rambling. But I have learnt something from this. I am never watching a film with a lad again if he thinks the heroine is his personal sex slave.
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