Study Task 3 | Triangulation Exercise pt. 1

'Stars' Richard Dyer (1979)  |  Themes: Film theory, gender, film, marketing

Primary text - 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' - Laura Mulvey

• What is being discussed/argued? - The power of Hollywood

- Media and how it relates to social/cultural expectations

- Stars using their status to sell products in order for audiences to imitate them

- Richard Dyer's 'Star Theory' - the idea that icons and celebrities are manufactured by institutions for financial gain. Stars are constructed to represent 'real people' experiencing real emotions

- Narrative cinema/television are models for how we should act and be: 'Jenkins argues that fans 'construct their cultural and social identity through borrowing and inflecting mass-culture images'

- The male gaze in cinema, how the media (in this example, movies) are marketed to a male, heterosexual audience: 'the moviegoer is positioned according to the pleasures of male heterosexual desire'        'Laura Mulvey's use of Freudian/Lacanian thinking leads her to conclude that the male gaze produces a sadistically voyeuristic pleasure'

- Father relates to male stereotype: 'In her study of a London family viewing a video of Rocky III in the home, Valerie Walkerdine linked the father's identification with Sylvester Stallone to his role as a union representative at work, and how he sees himself 'fighting' for his family'


• Criticisms? - Dated, consumers/audiences have became a little more self-aware

- Greater variation in role models - different types of femininity/masculinity, different types of relationships (platonic, same-sex)

- Unfocused argument, sweeps across many different points

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'Cultural Theory and Popular Culture' John Storey

• What is being discussed/argued? 

- References Mulvey's essay

- Popular cinema is structured around two moments: 'moments of narrative and moments of spectacle. The first is associated with the active male, the second with the passive female...' 

'The male spectator fixes his gaze on the hero ('the bearer of the look') to satisfy ego formation, and through the hero to the heroine ('the erotic look'), to satisfy libido'

• Criticisms? - Not sure what Storey discusses himself, as the extract mainly references Mulvey's essay.

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'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' (1975) Laura Mulvey

• What is being discussed/argued? 

- Audience relate to male character, male has power. 'pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female'

- Looking 'the cinema satisfies a primordial wish for pleasurable looking'

- Women are objects of male desire, and signifiers of the threat of castration

- Male viewer projects himself on to that male character, fulfilling his own internal hero-narrative

- Women/female characters portrayed as sexualised, objects of desire: 'traditionally, the woman displayed has functioned on two levels: as erotic object for the characters within the screen story...and for the spectator within the auditorium'

- Uses psychoanalysis/Freudian theory to '(demonstrate) the way the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form'