Laura Mulvey: Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema

 

DJ (Duvvada Jagannadham) is a Telugu action-comedy film released in 2017 starring Allu Arjun as the male protagonist, and Pooja Hegde as his love interest. In this film, the male lead’s introduction to the audience is set as he steps onto the top of a temple, filled with golden light. The female lead’s introduction is a 25-second-long shot of her body panning from her exposed hips, breasts, eyes, and then to lips. This is where the film clearly establishes the difference in roles of each of these characters, the male lead is a man of high power and strength who stops at nothing for justice. But the female lead is a conventionally beautiful woman displayed as an erotic object only to be looked at and owned while contributing near nothing to the narrative of the film. She is used as a structure with her main purpose being to satisfy the audience's scopophilic fantasies. 

 

There is also a scene where she walks out of a swimming pool and this is when the film’s male gaze becomes evident. The camera moves along her body slowly, lingers at her breast, hips, and thighs for 10 whole seconds. The audience, unaware of the camera’s presence, gains satisfaction from the voyeuristic experience of attaching sexual meaning to the object. The other character in the scene is the male lead, who is a brahmin priest at this point, says it is immoral to expose skin, but continues to openly gawk at her, this is the image that the audience identifies with. In this film, there is a long series of scenes where the female lead walks up to the male lead and kisses him on the cheek as a prank. During the multiple that this happens in, everyone around them is staring at them and there is one other man who quite openly moans and squirms as he watches. While it is true that the woman does this of her own accord, it is completely irrelevant to the narrative of the film and once again, only there for the scopophilic pleasure of the audience. Every time, she appears throughout the film, the narrative pauses and holds breath for us to simply look at her, she is not allowed to contribute anything to the phallocentric narrative as anything but an object. At first, she is her father’s daughter to be exchanged for political power, then she is the villain's leverage, and finally, she is the male lead’s wife.  

As a bearer of meaning, in the first half of the film, she is given the typical characteristics of a Vamp. She wears what society considers “modern” clothes that are short and show skin, stands up for herself and her friends, has feministic opinions, and is independent. But soon, in the second half of the film after she realizes that she has been in love with him all along, she suddenly pictures herself in stereotypical brahmin clothes and jewelry. After this, in all interactions with the male lead, she dresses up in outfits that do not show a lot of skin and agrees with the male lead on every opinion possible. She becomes mild and even starts referring to the male lead with respect and obedience. Here, she is attached to the meaning of the mother. She is an extremely passive role that carried the labor of being looked at and objectified while the male lead carries the narrative.  

  

Aladdin is an animated film aimed at children, yet this one of the best examples of gender representation disparity and the male gaze. Even though most of the audience is young and cannot fully understand the concepts of objectification, they are still being shown films where they can identify with the men in the film and are being shown the stereotypical vulnerability of the female figure. Jasmine was invented to please the male eye with her large eyes, full lips, a tiny waist (almost the same size as her neck like most other Disney princesses), and big breasts featuring a small top with her shoulders and waist exposed. Then she was designed to satisfy the male ego in her helplessness, and deep lack of identity independent from the male characters in the film. First, she is trapped by her father like a precious artifact locked away in a safe, soon to be married to the villain (to whom Jasmine is only a commodity for power) and is rescued by Aladdin to whom Jasmine is a prize to be won. She only exists in relation to another man, never individually as a person of her own. She is simply a passive object that is looked at and passed around from one active man’s hands to another’s.  

Though the 2019 remake does give her a voice, with a song about breaking free and her greater ambitions, she is still highly sexualized and objectified. She is still a passive object of scopophilia to the phallocentric plot