Images, Power and Politics

Looking is what gives humans the ability to interpret the world. The world is so strongly organized around visual and spatial cues and meanwhile the culture we live in is increasingly permeated by visual images with a variety of purposes and intended effects. Sturken & Cartwright in the book chapter “Images Power and Politics” that images can be used very effectively to portray devastating aspects of violence through a sense of voyeurism and fascination with the violence. In a sophomore year film class I learned about Laura Mulvey’s theories surrounding the male gaze and voyeurism within film and we are revisiting with idea in this semesters Media Criticism film class. Mulvey uses the already established studies of Freud and Lacan concepts of the “political weapon.” She argues that the typical narrative used in Hollywood films, namely classical Hollywood cinema, inevitable positions the audience or the spectator in a masculine point of view, with the women on the screen as the subject of desire and the “male gaze.” The women were cast in films to be the object of the male gaze referred to as to-be-looked-at-ness.

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