Lecture 3 - "The Gaze"

Call of Duty allows you to choose 1st person or 3rd person perspective. Why?
1st - more life like, more intense - makes you feel you're actually in the game.
3rd - more cinematic, interactive movie. Harder to control other people in 3rd.

Why do we hunt?
What motivates us to watch hurt?

We control how much we engage with death and violence - we can make them less detailed - more abstract.

Psychoanalysis - analysis of the options and controls we choose in life.
Be the hunter or the hunted.

Key authors / theorists - Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Laura Murphy, Kaja Silverman.

Common misconceptions

• It's a mish mash of psychology (behaviour) and psychitary (mental illness).
• Although it is linked to the two - it's also a way of thinking that can be applied to all aspects of society, including art and design.
• It's all about sex.
• About how we treat and examine objects.

Laura Mulvey - Hollywood film is sexist in that it represents 'the gaze' as powerful and driven by males. 
Heroes typically are male and drive the plot.
Women in film exist as 'sexual' objects to be looked at.

Freud Theories of Pyschoanalysis 1
SCOPOPHILIA - the pleasure of looking at others bodies as objects. Emerges in childhood.

Freud Theories of Pyschoanalysis 2
NARCISSISTIC Identification - spectators identify with the male hero in narrative films.

Theories of Pyschoanalysis 3
Jacques Lacan - the mirror stage.
Projected notion of 'ideal ego' in image reflected.
Child's body less perfect than reflection.
Film - similarity with the mirror - produces fascination in the image that can itself, include a loss of ego. In our increasing indentification with a projected 'ego', our own sense of ego becomes lost.

Comic Book Guy (Simpsons) - narcissistic identification with comic book heroes highlights his loss of self ego. Film and art prey on our ability to identify with a projected 'ego'.

Contradiction in the two pleasurable structures of looking -
1. SCOPOPHILIA - sexual stimulation by sight - objectifying the actors.
2. NARCISSISTIC identification with the image seen.
Fantasy world - product of patriarchal realities.

Mulvey's theory
SUTURE

•Spectators look through eyes of the actors in the film

•We are able to follow ‘their’ gaze without feeling guilty

•Suture can be broken e.g., when an actor speaks out to us

•When broken, the audience are aware of their own gaze –

•Possibility then, to make the spectator feel guilty

SUTURE - point of View Gaze

•This form of ‘gaze’ invites us to be a part of the scene. We view through the eyes of a character.

•When ‘suture’ is broken, the viewer is aware of the power of their own gaze.

FORMS of GAZE

1.the spectator’s gaze – gaze of a viewer at an image

Most common form of gaze.

You looking at me.

Can also see you looking at others… 

2. intra-diegetic gaze – a gaze of one depicted person at another within the image

When I look around me now I don’t just see you looking at me. I also see you looking at others.

 

Degas: Le Viol (The Rape) 

This gaze is ‘intra-diegetic’. Character in the image that gazes at the subject (the young girl).

 May feel disgusted and upset about the image - don’t really feel any guilt; we are not the perpetrators of the assault/rape.

 

3. extra-diegetic gaze – this is the direct address to the viewer – the gaze of a person in an image looking out at us e.g. newsreaders.

Intra-diegetic gazes defer our guilt – someone else is hurting that person - enhances our guilt - we are complict.

Conclusions to take away:

•Different forms of ‘gaze’ evoke different structures of power;

•We can objectify (scopophilia) AND identify (narcissistic identification);

•Cinema, advertising, computer games thrive upon ‘contradiction’ [but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing!];

•Visual culture employs different forms of the gaze to evoke structures of patriarchy;

•Psychoanalysis seeks to evaluate and identify the architecture and symptoms of the gaze.