Sin City: Theory in action
In Media the world is represented in a way that the director wants you to view it. The world would be a shadow of the real world and this helps us to compare what we know about ‘our world’ to the world that is in the film. The world can be represented in a bias way for example the news can show people to be right when they are doing something that is wrong but it is shown in a way that you view it and don’t realise its been made a one sided story. Another way Media can represent something is in a stereotypical way a strong stereotypical targets that are easy for the media to manipulate are black men, women and Muslims this can be because of the press showing news about them or movies portraying them in a certain way. Some theorists believe that bias and stereotype terms are just reflections of the real world. Not all stereotypes are bad but can still be damaging to a reputation.
Mulvey’s theory on ‘the Gaze’ is that classic Hollywood films are positioned to target the male audience and so woman are represented as objects, and are there to be looked at as sex objects for the pleasures of men, this is showing Hollywood’s representation of women in the 1970’s. He thought that making the main protagonist male the male audience would have more of an active role in viewing the female characters and gaining pleasures. The look from a male audience to an actress is called ‘the gaze’; this has been developed into ‘the male gaze’ and can be viewed in a ‘Voyeristic’ view where the women as seen as beautiful or a ‘Festishistic’ view where women are seen as sex objects. When women even have important roles in a film they are still viewed as frightened, in need of protection, direction, support from the male characters, not independent generally weaker and still objectified as sexually.
Since the beginning of the theory in 1973 it has been developed since to show different types of views, women can also get something out of the male gaze and can view women that men would be looking at in a objectified way and turn that in to admiration or even objectify. The views that have been developed are ‘the spectator’s gaze where the audience is looking together at the objects on screen and nobody is been objectified, ‘The male gaze’ which is the development of Mulvey’s theory of viewing women on screen, ‘The female gaze’ this been the same as the male gaze but with women viewing a subject on screen, this accepts that women can view a subject on screen and can view it in a ‘Voyeristic’ or ‘Festishistic’ fashion. ‘The intra-diegetic gaze’ is when a character in the film is viewing another character; this can also lead to a spectators gaze. And last ‘the extra-diegetic gaze’ when the characters in the film look at the camera as if they are aware of the audience viewing them, this is essentially breaking the fourth wall.
The gaze is giving the spectator who is looking the power over the person who is been viewed, this is because the subject that is been viewed doesn’t know they are been looked at the this gives them less knowledge of the situation and giving them less power over the viewer. Mulvey thinks that it’s the males who have the power in most cases and this is because it’s the male filmmaker that is giving it to him. The person who is subject to the gaze can challenge the viewer by staring back at them; this can be a female character trying to gain power. Mulvey drew her ideas about the gaze from two theories called ‘Scopophilia and The mirror stage’.
Sigmund Freud has a theory called Scopophilia and this is the pleasure of watching. Freud thought that this caused in the stages of child development and it’s about the obsession of oral and anal fixation before reaching the genital stage in adult maturity. The oral stage is when a child is fixated with activities to do with the mouth and the anal stage is about toilet training and learning how to itself clean. These childhood obsessions can pass on to adulthood and cause personality complexes. An example of this that is used in film is in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) when Normandy bates is obsessed with chewing; this is to show his oral fixation. And when a shot of a toilet seat was show, this challenged the anal fixation of the American audience. This can relate to Mulvey’s gaze theory because the audience will be looking at the scene in a Festishistic view to see something that a mature adult desires to see.
Another theory by Jaques Lacan called ‘The mirror stage’. This starts from the moment that a child becomes independent; this is usually between the ages of 6-18 month old, when the child looks into the mirror and recognises its send this gives it a boost of its ego and narcissistic pleasure, narcissistic pleasure is when you become excessive or erotically interested in yourself. This can change a typical male audience’s viewing of a film form identifying with the films main male protagonist. This can be a form of uses and gratification theory because the viewer is actively looking for something in the film.
Feminist film theory was is the way film makes meaning to how women are shown in a movie in response to a patriarchal ideology. Although women are starting to be shown in a more equal way to men in films they are still objectified by the way they look and the cloths that they wear. Mulvey assumed that the film audience was a heterosexual male but this denies the possibility that woman can enjoy films, this was the case in classic Hollywood cinema where it was dominated by males and women didn’t have equal rights and shown in a certain stereotype, this is still been shown in today’s films.
I am now going to apply these theories to the film Sin City (2005), I am going to analyze two scenes that have good representation of women been shown in a weak or an objectifying way. The first scene is the intro to the movie where there is a woman standing on a balcony on her own looking over the city, she is the only female character in the scene. The First shot was showing the woman from behind wearing a red dress and looking small compared to the size of the city, the way her back was showing to the audience give the audience a look at her body, this shot was suppose to give the audience a voyeristic view of her.
There is a man narrating her actions describing her as ‘shivering in the wind like the last leaf on a dying tree’. When audio gives meaning to what is showing on screen this is called Anchorage. The second shot shows the man who is narrating walking toward the woman who has her back turned to him and he said ‘I let her hear my footsteps’, he is looking at the woman, this is intra-diegetic gaze because it’s a character who has identified another character and is looking at them, this shot also leads to a spectators gaze, in this shot the man who is walking up has the power because he can see more of the situation and is in control. When they start talking he is telling her that he has ‘Watched you for days, your everything a man could want, it’s not just your face its your figure’ the things he is saying to her shows that he is in control and he is objectifying her sexually. It makes the audience think he has no control. She looks frightened and in need of protection and generally weaker standing next to man. There is a shot of her smoking and the camera us focusing on her face and it shows her putting the cigarette in her mouth in a sexy way, this shows evidence from Freud’s Scopophilia theory.
The second scene I am going to analyze is the bar scene where Bruce Willis who plays ‘Hartigan’ is looking for Nancy Gallahan. In this scene there ate two female characters that are interacting with the characters on screen, the first one is a waitress who is dressed in revealing cloths carrying around a tray with drinks on it, the characters is there to serve men in the bar and also for them to look at in an Festishistic way. The second woman is Nancy who is on the stage dancing for the men who are sat around her; she is also dressed in revealing cloths for the men’s entertainment in the bar. This shows that men are in power and relaxing but women are there it serve and wait on the men. This is a patriarchy world.
When Gallahan is walking through the bar the camera angle charges to part of the crowd and gives the audience a look at the dancer on the stage as if you where there. This is making the audience look at the dancer this would be the spectators/male gaze and giving the audience the power over the dancer. In more modern theories this could be just a spectators gaze because women can also look at women in a voyeristic or Festishistic way. Gallahan is also objectifying Nancy when he says ‘She filled out’ and then there is a shot of his face looking at her, his face is full of scars and looks ruff whilst Nancy looks clean and has smooth skin this is because of the shot the camera is giving it’s her a soft look, This is for voyeristic viewing.
The women in this scene are shown as objects for the male gaze because the film is staying true to the comic and in comics women are shown as Generally weaker where as men are always the hero. Comics are mainly aimed at men because it’s thought that men are more likely to buy them. Because he film is staying true to the comic they still need to show women as subservient to men. According to Patricia White ‘in film criticism and theory, making gender the axis of analysis has entailed a thoroughgoing reconsideration of films for, by and about women, and a consequent transformation of the canons of film studies’ (White, 1998: 117). Because this is more modern and women are becoming more powerful and equal to men the way women are been represented in films are changing.
In Sin city there are lots of women but are all shown in different ways but all in the way that they are less strong then men, the character Gail is a good example of a strong woman in this film and can be compared to Ripley from Alien (1976) Because they are both strong character but lack the ‘sexiness’ that the weaker characters posses, Even though she is a powerful character that is capable she still needed saving by Dwight a male character and this takes away from her power also if the character was shown in a more sexy way this can also take away form her power because hey audience would be looking at her in an Festishistic way and this will give the audience power over her. The Nancy characters can be compared to the Mikaela Character that Megan Fox plays in Transformers (2007); this is because she is objectified by men in the film but is also pure and looking for the right guy to save her from other men. The other women in the film are no matter what good things they have about them they are still going to be taken down by another bad thing such been a prostitute or a servant to a man.
The film is sending the message that women are weaker than men and that they need saving because they are in need of protection and direction. The film is doing this because it is staying true to the comic where women are stereotyped as weaker. I think that the women are been shown in this way because it makes the men look more powerful and with the target audience been men. The film needs the male audience to be able identify that they are more dominant and relate to the characters in the film this again applies to the Lacan theory of the mirror stage.
I think that women in films are slowly getting their power back from men. They are shown in objectifying way because it’s their only way to gain power over men. In films form the 70’s it was rare to fine women in power and this was shown in films. But more modern films are changing where women are getting the main role in a film and are shown as beautiful but also capable of protecting them self. An actor this is portrayed in films as sexy and capable is Angelina Jolie, films she was shown in are Tomb Raider (2001), Mr & Mrs Smith (2005) and Salt (2010).
