I chose to have the concept of the gaze as the subject matter of my
project because I am very interested in the relationship between image and pleasure, how images express, sell and exploit pleasure. In her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, Laura Mulvey writes about how classical Hollywood has a patriarchal point of view, which represents and depicts women as objects of desire of the male gaze. Since paintings were the main source of image-making, this gaze has been traditionally associated with reducing (only) women to sexual depictions, but I find it interesting how lately, as our textbook mentions, men have started to become the subject of the gaze. Even though the male body is now being more objectified in the media, it is interesting how the result of it is different than when women are objectified. Objectified, the male body is not reduced; it is gazed upon in a powerful way. This happens not only because we are already familiar with the conventions of images with the pleasurable gaze, but also because the strong, fit, “hyper-muscled”, male body gives power to the subject (Sturken, Cartwright 88). This is only the beginning of it, though; men have definitely not been objectified as much as women.
The gaze urges viewers to consume more of the same objectified image as it touches on the spectator’s pleasures and desires. Thus, in our capitalist society, the gaze encourages the objectified to allow herself/himself to rely on its profitable marketability. In this way, female stars have been exploited, consumed, and lead to tragic endings as a result of playing by the rules of the gaze. Seeing how the gaze is now starting to embrace the male figure more prominently, will it ever have such drastic effects upon men?
For my
foundational ‘past’ image, I chose to make a collage around a photograph of Marilyn Monroe, naked in bed, with its photographer. It is historically significant because it belongs to a series, “The Last Sitting” by male photographer Bert Stern, which, according to CBS News, was Marilyn’s last photoshoot, just a few weeks before her death. In this collage, I incorporated another photo of Marilyn in bed from this series, a photo of a newspaper’s front page announcing her death, a photo of Marilyn in her casket, and a flower right next to it. Monroe was – and still is – a symbol for how the media objectifies women until it is not possible anymore. The fact that her body is emphasized in both photos from “The Last Sitting”, as she is photographed naked by a man, shows how she was objectified even until she died. The fact that she is naked under the headline “MARILYN DEAD” is also meant to tie to how, according to the Los Angeles Times, Marilyn was found dead naked in bed. In the foundational photo, we can even see the photographer in the mirror, showing the male gaze. This collage works together with the phrase “your gaze consumed me” to show how the gaze that constructed Marilyn’s iconic image lead her to suicide – no one really knows why she killed herself, but the reasons proposed for it are often linked to how the media possibly made her go crazy. The words in this collage are scattered to represent how the gaze tore her apart, and the phrase, starting at the top and ending at the bottom of the image – right next to Marilyn’s dead body – symbolize how she was consumed as a sexual object since the height of her career, until she hit rock bottom, until her death.
For the
second image, I chose a photo of contemporary actor Jamie Dornan to represent how men are under the gaze in the present. In this photo, Dornan, who has been very much sexualized as Fifty Shades of Grey’s Christian Grey, is seen modeling in his underwear for Calvin Klein. I wanted to show how even though he is being gazed upon and sexualized, he is not reduced; how men, when sexualized under the conventions of the gaze constructed by them, are made powerful and confident. The red border with the words “my gaze” written repeatedly all around his photo symbolizes how the image of the objectified man is still constructed by his gaze, and the words “made powerful” were positioned close to Dornan’s bicep, which works to define a man’s strength, masculinity, and power. The word powerful is emphasized to represent how the size of a man’s muscles.
My vision for the
future is represented by a collage created over a photo of Justin Bieber aggressively reacting to paparazzi. I chose Bieber for the “future” because he has increasingly objectified his persona and become the subject of the gaze lately. In addition, he is the closest that we have in the present to a young male star who is being objectified, and who has gone off the tracks a few times. I wanted this third image to represent the question that I am asking with this project: will the gaze ever have the drastic, tragedy-leading, effects (that it had over stars like Marilyn Monroe and Judy Garland) upon men/male stars? Behind the bodyguard, I positioned many paparazzi pointing their cameras at Justin to represent the overwhelming high amount of objectification from the gaze required to destroy one. The skull showing on half of his face is an allusion to a star being objectified, consumed, to death. If Justin here represents his future self going crazy, acting out, as a consequence of being consumed by the gaze, on the right side of the image, relatively behind him, is a subtle reflection of his younger self being objectified. Like the first collage, this image has a duality of past and future, life and death, high and low. With past representing height of career and peak of objectification and sexualization, and future representing (something close to) a tragic ending, a train wreck caused by the conventions present in his sexualized reflection. It all ties together to the question written over the collage: “how far will your gaze go?”
Will the gaze evolve to the point where men are affected by it in the same way that it has affected women? Will it go beyond that? If it does, are we to blame the media, or ourselves for gazing for too long?
