In Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Mulvey creates a divide between the roles of male and female characters in narrative cinema. From the scopohiliac perspective, humans are naturally fascinated with getting pleasure from erotic forms, Mulvey considers cinema is representative of “women as image, man as bearer of the look” (1). The male gaze theory is used to describe the hypothesis that the audience of a film is made of primarily men and this leads to the objectification and sexualizing image of the female role on screen for men to enjoy, “with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact” (Mulvey 62). The male gaze in Transformers and Jennifer’s Body of Megan Fox, caters to these illusions in mainstream cinema where the women are treated as nothing more than eye candy for male character and viewers.
While both Transformers and Jennifer’s Body furnish the male gaze by over-sexualizing Megan Fox, Jennifer’s Body
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The viewer is carried into a military base, moments after the title sequence, where more than a dozen male soldiers are escaping their bombed campsite. The camera focuses on the strength and masculinity which emphasizes the aggressiveness of the male characters. Not until five minutes into the movie is a women introduced. Even though the women are only seen on the soldier’s computer screen, it actively puts the audience into the male’s perspective, minimizing the women’s role. With that, the woman is depicted as beautiful, with sunlight beating down on her face, creating a shine in her hair. Although this woman is a minor character, she is over-feminized and treated like nothing but a beautiful face contrasting the harshness of the male’s position in the military. This occurs even before the main female character is presented and already there is an obvious desire of objectification towards the male