The Default Viewer

For many, fiction is a way for us to escape our everyday lives and see ourselves reflected in worlds different from the one we live in. Recently, there have been more pieces of media coming out that focus on the representation of different gender identities, cultures, sexualities, and ways of life. This is a great thing, everyone deserves to feel seen and represented in the movies that they watch. Unfortunately, no matter how much progress has been made in terms of representation in film, there remains an unspoken elephant in the room, the male gaze.
The term “male gaze” has had a boom in popularity online but many are still unsure of what exactly it means. The term was originally coined by filmmaker Laura Mulvey, and to put it simply the term is used to show how the world is structured by heterosexual men for the benefit of other heterosexual men. In film, men are “active” characters, the do-ers, while women take on “passive” roles, the supporters.
According to Mulvey, is this due to the vast majority of writers and filmmakers being heterosexual men, as this leads to them being the target audience and default viewers.
Female characters in movies are often there to fulfill two roles, erotic objects for the characters or erotic objects for the (assumed heterosexual male) viewer. The perfect example of this is Scarlet Johanson’s character Black Widow in the Avengers. While the male characters are wearing high-tech suits or another form of body armor, Natasha is the least covered out of them all. Most notably, her chest is left almost bare. In a fight scene in which there are arrows, guns, and lasers being shot at her, the filmmakers decided to have the only main female character be the only one with no protective real armor, for the sake of showing as much skin as possible.
No plot device highlights the disposability of female characters in media better than “fridging”. The term is short for “putting the woman in the refrigerator” and is a reference to a storyline in a Green Lantern comic in which the villain leaves the corpse of Kyle Rayner’s girlfriend in the fridge. The official definition is “a character who is assaulted, maimed or otherwise traumatized to motivate another character and move the plot along”. This device may not be exclusive to female characters, but it cannot be denied that more often than not, female characters close to the main (male) lead are usually killed off or assaulted to give the story more “angst”.
We have come a long way when it comes to the representation of women in film, but we still have a long way to go. This is an issue that can only be solved with more women taking control behind the scenes. As long as mainstream media is created with a male default viewer in mind, we will never make the advancements needed.