Friday 18 October 2013

Mulveys theory Notion of looking


The notion of looking is used a lot in music videos, in candy shop by 50 cent the women are shown as sexual objects this video uses male gaze, the camera gaze and the audience gaze to objectify women as sexual objects. The women have a slight degree of control but not as much as in Primal Screams Country Girl music video where she takes control of how they look at her in the second half of the video, the first half of country girl does objectify her through the cameras gaze

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWjm_W-4Ml8- Primal Scream
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRcnnId15BA- 50 Cent

The gaze of the camera: the camera that looks at the female body

The gaze of the male actor: shots of males looking at women and then the shot of the female body being looked at

The gaze of the audience: what the audience look at (even female audience members were positioned within a male gaze)

One video we have looked at that contradicts Goodwin and Mulvey's theories is Lady Gaga's video for Alejandro. In this video we have found that Gaga uses power in her video, switching backwards and forwards using the male gaze, however in this video, instead of objectifying women, she is instead objectifying men.

Lady Gaga has a high level of self awareness in her video and makes it clear that she wants the men to be seen more than her, and encourages the audience to do this by using props and clothing to make the men stand out more than her, for example at one part in her video, she is wearing the same colour as the backdrops, where as the men are wearing an opposite colour, causing the audience attention to be on them instead. 

One word we could use for this is the queer gaze, which is where Gaga is trying to attract gay men to look at the video, by sexualizing the men. However Lady Gaga is sexualized slightly during the video however I would say that this is used more as a political act, as an attempt to change the world and what they think.

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