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Feminist Perspective In Hitchcock's Vertigo

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I had watched Alfred Hitchcock’s, Vertigo a few times many years ago as I was a huge fan of his work. However, this time, I watched with a different perspective after the readings and videos this week. Laura Mulvey’s theory that we are in a sense forced to watch movies through a male perspective as objects for their pleasure, was written at the height of the feminist movement, noted as the “Male Gaze,” ran prevalent throughout this movie. It is unfortunate that Mulvey, while taken seriously, as her writing still resonates today, was unable to change the ways in which the film industry still views women.The entertainment industry and advertising have only become worse. Mulvey, in a sense, called it when she foresaw that over time these things would become natural and normal, as we have become immune to this notion of objectification, many times laughing it off. The first notation of the “Male Gaze” between Scotty and Madeline came as he was observing her in the …show more content…

At first glance, through his eyes, he is obviously seeing a beautiful and intriguing women for which shortly after he seems to feel almost guilty for the way he was just looking at her when they walk towards him and pass by. Further into the movie, while he is tracking her, we see through the camera shots his perspective of every angle of her body with a long puled back camera view of her from the back where we see her full body and sense that he is crossing the line from his viewpoint. It is interesting to view movies and have some background into the meanings of the small things we get caught up in and don't even notice truly what is occurring. The “Male Gaze” is something I had not noticed in a Hitchcock Film in the way it was presented until now, which

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In Laura Mulvey’s article, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” she writes about the relationship between voyeurism, cinema, and gender. She begins by describing the concept of scopophilia, which means to gain pleasure from looking. She writes that scopophilia is inherently active/masculine, and that pleasure is derived from looking at other people as mere objects. On the other hand, the passive/feminine is derived from the experience of being looked at (pg.188). Mulvey sees this binary relationship between viewer and object being viewed as a part of our culture, and the greatest example of this is found in cinema.

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