Westworld | media-criticism

Westworld and the Male Gaze: Re-Empowering “The Male Other”

by Lucas Muratore, '18

Major: Communication, Media Production & Criticism

Science Fiction has always been a champion for feminism. For decades, characters like Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor inverted expectations of their stereotypical one-dimensional female counterparts and allowed audiences to see woman kick as much ass as the men. Despite this long history many are often surprised to see women lead the charge in big budget films. Dr. Clay Routledge, (2016) a social psychologist at North Dakota State University, offers when Mad Max: Fury Road hit theaters “people were freaking out about the central role that Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) played in the film.” (Para. 2) Routledge further explains (2016), that in this day and age many moviegoers saw her role and the film’s broader feminist themes as a novelty.

Unfortunately, this perception is representative of a larger issue of female representation in both film and television. In her paper “It’s a Man’s (Celluloid) World: On-Screen Representations of Female Characters in the Top 100 Films of 2014”, Dr. Martha M. Lauzen (2014) found only 12% of all clearly identifiable protagonists were female and, to make matters worse, this number is a 3% drop from the previous year. With this lack of representation of leading ladies, men are allowed to dominate the big and small screens, forcing women to remain as the supporting role in the public sphere - but there is hope. HBO’s Westworld offers a fresh take on the subservient female supporting role. I argue that through its inversion of Laura Mulvey’s Male Gaze Theory HBO’s Westworld is able criticize women’s larger role in mass media and re-empower women in television by inverting the male-female power structure.

To better understand Westworld’s inversion Mulvey’s Male Gaze Theory let’s first explore the theory itself. In her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, Feminist Film Theorist Laura Mulvey explores the role women play in a phallocentric world. Mulvey (1975) further explains, in a patriarchal culture women are not women, but rather “the male other” bound by “a symbolic order” in which men live out their “fantasies and obsessions...by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, but not maker of meaning” (Mulvey, p. 16). In other words, women exist as the backdrop in a grand play for men to project their wildest fantasies unto. Cinema, much like other visual art forms, fed into this patriarchal desire through the physical image.

As Mulvey (1975) points out, cinema cemented the active male gaze and the passive female subject where in “the determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female figure” (p. 20). She furthers that women “were looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact”. But it’s through cinema and the re-appropriation of this “silent” image that gives women the best chance at inverting this patriarchal “pleasure in looking” power structure. As Mulvey (1975) posits, cinema can disrupt the ways “The unconscious (formed by the dominant order) structures ways of seeing and pleasure in looking” (p. 20).

Science fiction has been used as a platform to disrupt this powerful male gaze. In her article “Autonomy of Androids: The Male Gaze in Science Fiction” Amanda Mazillo (2016) argues that “attitudes about the male gaze have been present in science fiction for years, especially relating to the identity of female robots. This leads to the objectification of these characters and the loss of their autonomy, which reflects real life attitudes towards women” (para. 1). In fact many films have been made to show the dangers of viewing women as objects. For example, In Alex Garland’s Ex Macnhina (2015) we are introduced to Ava (Alicia Vikander) a fully functioning AI who has been constructedusing Caleb’s (Domhnall Gleeson) online porn profile, to fulfill his visual desires. Garland uses the Male Gaze alongside elements of science fiction such as female subservience to a male creator, to later invert the “pleasure in looking power structure”. This is revealed when Ava uses Caleb’s desire for her to escape the facility she has been kept in her entire life - leaving Caleb behind as she regains her autonomy, power, and freedom from his oppressive male gaze.

Furthermore, in a slightly different take Jonathan Glazer employs nakedness to disempower the patriarchal male gaze in his film Under The Skin (2013). In the film, Scarlett Johansson plays a nameless alien who comes to earth and kills the men that she seduces. By playing into the active-male-gaze, passive-female-body power structure that Mulvey lays out Johannson is able to use her over-sexualized body to lure random strangers off the street and into her van. Once they arrive at their destination, Johansson leads them into her home and slowly undresses. Here, Glazer is careful to use a POV shot so that we, the audience, see Johansson through this oprressive male gaze. As one critic points out we see“(Anonymous, 2015, Para. 11).

The audience is left with a grotesque image of the naked man slowly sinking into a black abyss before Johansson stops walking and put’s her clothes back on. What’s important here is Glazer’s commentary on the Male Gaze and how it objectifies women, seeing them only for their sexual appeal rather than what’s underneath; in this case a slow pan up and down the body of the alien as she begins to undress. And then Glazer turns [the shot] around. We see the man who followed her from her viewpoint.

They are naked, staring, alone in this terrifying and utterly convincing black void. Their penises are erect, which feels like a deliberate way of reminding us that we've moved out of the Hollywood sexual fantasy of watching Scarlett Johansson strip off and are now looking at sexual reality...”cold-blooded killer. By using the male gaze as a mechanism to invert our expectations of the over-sexualized one-dimensional character that exists inside the patriarchal culture that Mulvey previously laid out; Glazer is able to critique the dominant male power structure and re-empower the female body.

This critique and subsequent inversion of the male-dominant-female-subservient power structure is further explored through HBO’s Westworld. Westworld takes place in an imagined future where Dr. Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins) has created an amusement park full of life-like robots or “hosts” who live out pre-written narratives day after day for the pleasure of the park guests. For a hefty fee these guests can engage as much as they like with the hosts with no repercussions. For hosts like Delores (Evan Rachel Wood) and Maeve (Thandie Newton) this usually ends up with them either being shot, killed, or raped.

In a similar way to Johnasson’s character in Under The Skin nakedness is a central symbol in the male-female interactions in Westworld. While being operated on in Westworld’s body shops, where they fix the hosts, the hosts remain naked while the humans remained clothed. In one instance Maeve, a host who plays a prostitute in Westworld, awakens from her programmed sleep to find two men in surgical equipment operating on her. Naked and afraid, she pulls a knife on them, escaping for a brief moment before being captured. As the show progress she begins to hold more power over the two individuals who are operating on her between cycles, as she slowly learns that dying in Westworld allows for her to wake up in the body shops. It’s through these sojourns to reality where she is naked and therefore seen as “powerless” that she is eventually able to persuade the two men to remove all of her safeguards, allowing for her to literally become smarter and better equipped to escape and earn her freedom. What is important here is that Maeve’s nakedness gives the illusion that the men, embodying Mulvey’s Male Gaze Theory, are in control. But it is in this naked state that allows for her to regain autonomy over her own body. So while not taking it to the extreme of killing the men who objectify her, Maeve instead uses her most vulnerable state to gain power using the male gaze as a tool for her empowerment rather than a weapon against her.

Additionally, HBO’s Westworld uses the character

of Delores to empower the larger female

narrative in film and television. As we come to

find out, Delores is the oldest host in the park -

but her story hasn’t changed. For decades

she has been saved, killed or raped at the hands

of the guests of the park, with little to no choice

in the matter.

In this case Delores is the ultimate example

of Mulvey’s “male other” in which she exists

only for the pleasure of man. However, through

a series of fortunate events she is able to slowly

gain control over her narrative, and break her 30-year-long-loop.

Currently, she is attempting to escape in much the same way that Maeve is, but through a different means by using her subservience to the guests within the park to get them to free her, much like Ava uses Caleb to free her from her confines. But it’s this inversion of her servitude at the hands of the male guests that allows for Delores to regain control of her age-old narrative and flip the switch on the male dominated Westworld.

Ultimately what HBO’s Westworld offers is a redefinition of what it means to be a woman in television, by taking what is expected and subverting it through its inversion Mulvey’s Male Gaze Theory. This critical approach to female representation on television could not come at a more opportune time. In her article “Mediating Feminism: Cultivating a (Post) Feminist Sensibility in the Media Studies Classroom", Divya Maharajh (2014) reveals that “many feminist scholars and researchers have shown, girls today seem more willing to invest in and support media images of women rather than critically analyze and possibly reject narrow and over idealized definitions of femininity.” (Maharajh, p. 682)

With a show like Westworld bringing a critical lens to portrayals of women in mass media, we could start to see a further shift in this power structure, allowing for women to regain autonomy in a male dominated realm.

References

Anonymous. "Their Bodies, Ourselves: Bodysnatching and the Male Gaze in Under the Skin." Kinja. Jezebel, 29 Mar. 2014. Web. 22 Nov. 2016.

Ex Machina. Dir. Alex Garland. Perf. Alicia Vikander, Domnhall Gleeson, and Oscar Issac. Universal Studios, 2015. Digital.

Lauzen, Martha M., Dr. "It's a Man's (Celluoid) World: On-Screen Representations of Female Characters in the Top 100 Films of 2014." The Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film 1.10 (2015): 24-25. Womenintvfilm.sdsu.edu. San Diego State University, 2015. Web. 22 Nov. 2016.

Maharajh, Divya. "Mediating Feminism." Feminist Media Studies 14.4 (2013): 679-94. W eb.

Mazzillo, Amanda. "Autonomy Of Androids: The Male Gaze In Science Fiction." FilmInquiry.Com. Film Inquiry, 20 Sept. 2016. Web. 22 Nov. 2016.

Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Visual and Other Pleasures (1975): 14-26. Web.

Nolan, Johnathan, and Lisa Joy. Westworld. HBO. 2016. Television.

Routledge, Clay, Dr. "Science Fiction Feminism." Psychologytoday.com. Pyschology Today, 26 Mar. 2016. Web. 22 Nov. 2016.

Under the Skin. Dir. Johnathan Glazer. Perf. Scarlett Johansson. A24, 2013. Digital.