Study Task 3 - Triangulation

In Laura Mulvey's 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' (1975), Mulvey argues cinema highly depends on the ideology of scopophilia, a Freudian theory in which people gain pleasure through the objectification of another person, Mulvey rationalises this claim by stating that women in cinema are 'looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact' (Mulvey 1975). In comparison, John Storey in his text 'Cultural Theory and Popular Culture' states that the audience views 'women as a sexual object', further backing up Mulvey's claim of women in cinema being viewed and treated as objects and as something to be looked at and displayed as a pose to an actual person.

Although sometimes critical of Mulveys text, Dyers 'Stars andAudiences' also backs up the claim that women are objectified through cinema by exploring how the male is represented within the narrative. He explores the idea that male-pinups are used in an image in a way that suggests they are not an erotic object and that 'this can involve looking off as if disinterested in the viewer, glancing upwards to appear lost in a higher spiritual form of thinking, or staring to confront the fact of being looked at'.