Traces of the "male gaze" on the image of women in Hollywood superhero movies
In Hollywood superhero movies, many female images carry traces of the "male gaze". When the audience enters the theater and casts their eyes on the movie screen, it naturally forms a relationship with the characters in it, the relationship between seeing and being seen.
Laura Morvey analyzes the pleasure of watching, and the first pattern is "voyeurism". The cinema creates a dark and narrow space, and the screen becomes the largest light source in it, which creates a "keyhole" for people. The second is "narcissism," which is based on Lacan's mirror theory.
Lacan argues that people first know themselves by looking in the mirror in early childhood, that is, by acquiring the image of their own subject in the mirror. But young children will initially regard the image in the mirror as someone else's, and as they grow up, they will understand that they are themselves in the mirror, and in this process of understanding, there is confusion between illusion and reality. In the mirror is the ideal self, and the identification with the ideal image makes people "narcissistic".
The movie screen has become the equivalent of the mirror, and the perfect actor in the play gives the audience a sense of identity with the ideal self, and the male audience further forms a viewing pleasure through this identity.
What male audiences want to see is not the original appearance of real women, but the ideal image of women created according to male aesthetic experience that is more in line with the projection of male desires. This female figure has the femininity created by the discourse of male power.
"Women are no longer complete individuals, as individual human beings, women have disappeared, just cut 'parts', living in aesthetic activities dominated by male culture. The so-called "parts" of the net are women as aesthetic objects, various parts of the body are disassembled for "gaze", different body parts have the aesthetic standards defined by men, such as the dimension of the body to present a beautiful proportion, for the chest, waist, limbs and facial features and other body parts have a set of male aesthetic preference requirements.
In Hollywood superhero movies, female images are also created according to the aesthetic needs of men. From the casting point of view alone, Scarlett Johansson, Jennifer Lawrence, etc. are themselves actresses with very outstanding conditions.
The costumes of the female characters they play are usually tights that highlight the curves of the body, or clothing that exposes more body parts, such as miniskirts and so on. There are not a few female characters who appear in such a look, and Catwoman, who appeared in the third part of the Batman series directed by Nolan, is dressed in a black bodysuit and wears a black eye patch and a cat-ear-shaped headdress.
Catwoman's costume styling has a sense of sexual sadomasochism (SM) in comics and various versions of the movie, satisfying the special proclivities of male audiences.
The witch in the X-Men series is a more extreme example, she wears extremely close-fitting clothing decorated with scales, and her image is almost completely naked when she is substituted for the role, and her presentation as an object of lust is so explicit.
These women's characters, they present more of a "gendered body", is the writing of the female body by male discourse in the context of androcentrism. The female role is cut off in the narrative and exists only as a landscape, which shows that women are devalued and women's values cannot be reflected.
