In the essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Laura Mulvey discusses the theory of "the male gaze," better known as "the look." She states that classical Hollywood cinema is gendered toward a male audience. Whether the audience is male or female, classical Hollywood overlooks the fact that there are females in the audience and assumes that the audience is entirely male and biased with male attitudes. Mulvey also discusses the active male and the passive female. The male gendered audience is doing the looking/investigating while the female actor is performing strictly for the investigation of the camera and audience—mainly a display of the erotic on the woman by the camera—which lingers and dotes upon her presence. This would draw the attention of any male gendered audience. This idea connotes a to-be-looked-at-ness for the woman. "The presence of woman is an indispensable element of spectacle in normal narrative film, yet her visual presence tends to work against the development of a story line, to freeze the flow of action in moments or erotic contemplation" (Mulvey 408). This theory can be applied to many movies in classical Hollywood cinema, including the film You Only Live Once (1937, Fritz Lang).

The theory of the male gaze is present all the way through You Only Live Once, mainly with the character of Joan Taylor (Sylvia Sydney). Almost from the very beginning she is the main object of the male gaze. The very first scene where this becomes apparent is where Joan, the secretary for the public defender, is called into his office. In this scene she is the center of attention between the two male occupants of the office: the public defender and the district attorney. The camera reveals all three characters in their own personal shots but lingers on Joan, who stands out from the men in the room. The men are very formal and dressed in dark suit while Joan is in lighter colored clothes. The lighting in the shot makes her stand out even more because it makes her face glow, giving it an angelic, innocent quality that neither of the males in the scene possess. This glow makes her flesh stand out especially around the neckline, which gives Joan an erotic quality that draws the male gaze. After she leaves the room, a question is asked among the men concerning Joan's personal relationship with another character. This scene is clearly the male gaze in its entirety. There is the object in which the camera and audience dotes upon, and an erotic quality which permeates from the character.

Another scene in which the male gaze is evident is the scene in which Joan is framed in the window. In this scene Joan comes to visit Eddie Taylor (Henry Fonda) while he is wrongfully in prison. They are each sitting on opposite sides of a glass window. For a moment the camera lingers on her face through the glass while she is crying. Eddie has asked her to do something in which she knows is wrong but, because she loves him, she has trouble denying him his request. The lighting and the positioning of this shot make frame of the window and her face the center of the piece. This shot is a frame within a frame, almost painting a target in which Joan's face is the bull’s-eye. The position of this shot draws the audience to the center of the target and it lingers there. The audience sees her tears and feels sympathy for the character—wishing to be the hero and save the damsel in distress, as most males are likely to do.

Both of these scenes from You Only Live Once are clearly defined in Laura Melvey's theory of the male gaze, and while each scene portrays the male gaze/look differently, they still are biased as if the audience is entirely male and do not even take into consideration the female audience. Each shot focuses entirely on a young beautiful female over which a male would obsess.

In her essay analyzing the nature of what she describes as the “male gaze,” Laura Mulvey writes, “In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness” (487). This assertion seems to hold true mainly in the realm of classical Hollywood cinema, and Fritz Lang’s You Only Live Once serves as evidence, giving Mulvey’s thesis merit through the character of Joan Taylor (Sylvia Sydney). In the opening scene, Joan works at the front desk of the public defender’s office. She deftly calms a frustrated client while also managing to pack up her items as she prepares to meet her estranged lover who is leaving prison. As she moves from room to room in the office, we see she is the only woman in the scene, and her appearance contrasts greatly with the men surrounding her. While the men are all dressed in dull suits or overalls that cover and hide their physical features, she wears a flirty dress that accentuates her features and draws attention to her figure. Because of her wardrobe and central placement on screen, the audience cannot help but stare at her; the characters on screen transfix their eyes on her as well. Joan plays a crucial character in the film, but in this scene, she simply serves as female eye candy—a sexual object placed on screen solely for the pleasure of the male looker. In this scene, the character of Joan supports Mulvey’s argument that female characters in cinema are the sole bearers of sexual objectification.

Later in the film, director Lang includes a scene that overtly acts out and proves Mulvey’s point. After Joan leaves her newborn baby with her sister, she stops to buy a pack of cigarettes from a vending machine. As she puts her coins in the slot, she unknowingly awakens a man who sleeps in a room adjacent to the vending machine. As he begins to look at her, the camera shows Joan from his point of view, and her figure fills up the screen. He rolls over to sleep, but then quickly realizes that the police are searching for her. He puts on his glasses, and Joan appears blurry at first, then clear. The man rubs his eyes, and takes one final glance at Joan before she leaves with Eddie (Henry Fonda). While this scene establishes a crucial point in the plot, more than anything it allows the audience to openly and guiltlessly stare at the beautiful female character. In this scene, audience members fantasize taking the place of the old sleeping man and voyeuristically stare at the young woman. Whether consciously or unconsciously, cinema elicits a sort of voyeurism on the part of the male, and this scene strongly supports Laura Mulvey’s theory of the female’s character’s inherent “to-be-looked-at-ness” in classical Hollywood cinema..

Joan Graham Taylor (Sylvia Sidney) embodies “to-be-looked-at-ness” in Fritz Lang’s film You Only Live Once (1937). One look says it all as she gazes adoringly at Eddie (Henry Fonda). . .no criminal act will keep her from loving him. The attempt to “neutralize” her in feminized secretarial attire fails because of her pure beauty. The extreme close-up shots capitalize on her demure sweetness, luminous eyes, and pixyish-shaped head.

The two other women characters starkly contrast Joan. Gruff, chain-smoking, and unfeminine, Joan’s sister Bonnie (Jean Dixon) may wear a floral robe and iron, but she speaks as if she belts down shots at the local bar. Hester (Margaret Hamilton), forever the Wicked Witch of the West, retains her moniker by refusing to allow Joan and Eddie their honeymoon. Her husband willingly has taken on the castrated role—unable to confront Joan, he pushes Hester to the fore where she, the designated castrator, handles the problem.

If the camera loves Joan, it loathes Bonnie and Hester. In their scenes, the film editor eliminates the slow lingering shots employed with Joan; to play up their lack of femininity, the editing pace quickens. Bonnie only becomes an “embodied” character when Joan gives her the newborn baby. Key lighting highlights her face and the shot lasts for several moments. The soft focus matches her new role: Mother. Previous to this, she functions as a disconnected voice or a two-dimensional body— often only viewed from her back. Were it not for Margaret Hamilton’s notoriety (and that nose), she would be as unmemorable as Bonnie.

And the castration theme continues: arguably the most attractive and masculine man in the film is Father Dolan (William Gargan); yet as a priest, he personifies “neuterness.”

Paradoxically, he performs the part of hero—acting as “Man” when Eddie won’t assume the role.

Snickers in the viewing audience affirm the male gaze operating at its finest. Buggys’s (Warren Hymer) adoration of Eddie raises suspicion: Buggsy takes on the “wife” role and is punished for it by our laughter. Surely he must be queer. He washes Eddie’s socks, wishes him farewell (remaining like a faithful partner, in the “home”), and manages to get Eddie a gun when Joan cannot.

In You Only Live Once (Fritz Lang, 1937), the male gaze is made apparent in every scene with Joan (Sylvia Sydney). In one instance Joan and Eddie (Henry Fonda) approach a frog laden pond in the middle of the night. The camera positions Eddie standing slightly above Joan, but the majority of his body is obscured by brush. Joan, on the other hand, is fully visible with a loving moon-lit glow. This representation of Joan signifies her “to-be-looked-at-ness” quality brought about by the male gaze. Joan takes full spectral control of the frame and invites the viewer to look at her with great ease and love. It is in this sense that the male gaze operates to male-ify the audience. Looking lovingly on Joan, in this romantic scene, can only provide a heterosexual male gendered reading of the gaze.

This standard example of the male gaze does little more than enforce the standard conception of the male gaze: visual representation of the female form from an audience gendered as male by cinema’s inherent patriarchal structure. Another example of the male gaze can be found in a scene that does not actually bring the gaze itself to the forefront. Eddie’s fellow inmate tells him to “send your picture to that movie star; you know, the one who puts lumps in my mashed potatoes.” Here (almost self-reflexively) the male gaze is being discussed by two men doing the gazing. In this sense, the gaze is operative because the audience is naturally identifying with the protagonist and his potential relationship to a Hollywood starlet. The audience is rendered into the male gendered position by way of the imagery created by Eddie’s cellmate’s colorful language, rather than a literal image constructed by the camera. It is in this way that the male gaze can be found operative even when no striking example of preferential camera work (to the beautiful woman subject) can be found.

1. Composition: The male gaze goes beyond just making the female characters a pleasure to look at. The male gaze also concerns how the film should look. Essentially, because man developed the most numerous and influential theories on composition in art, then it is understandable that all directors who grasped the meaning of shot composition would never stray from these male theories—unconsciously designed to please a male viewer. Fritz Lang's style of composition, blocking, and mise-en-scène is pleasing to the male gaze because he follows these concepts of composition in art.

This is quite obvious when looking at any of the shots in the film. Two particular shots portray this idea of male-pleasing composition. The first example occurs in the beginning of the film as the lawyer for the main character, and his secretary Joan, are set up in the opening shot of the scene in balanced composition. Joan is set in the center of the frame, while her boss sits above her desk with some small apples right by him. The back of the room is close to the characters and objects so as to relieve the camera from being in a deep focus shot. Breaking down this shot, we notice that everything surrounding Joan is set in straight lines (the boss’s suit is pressed, the flat desk); whenever a curve appears another curve is set directly opposite (diagonal to the curve-shaped apple is a clock to counterbalance it). The artistic composition of the frame forces the eye of the viewer to focus on Joan—the center of the frame—rather than on the frame in its entirety. The composition of the shot follows the Italian Renaissance theory of composition: the center of a painting should be the focus, and everything around the center should be used to accent the center of the painting. Lang applies the exact same theory to his opening shot. This opening shot is proof of the male gaze at work since the shot brings a scopophilic pleasure to the viewer, following a male-oriented theory of composition.

2. Female Character Development: The second proof that You Only Live Once comes from the male gaze has to do with the way Joan as a female character is developed and presented on the film.

Visually, her development is done quite easily by having her well lit in every scene she is in. However, the way she is developed as a character is backwards from the way the mainstream male character of a film is typically developed. Joan is initially a complex character that has a career working as a secretary, as well as opinions about what a crime is and a sense of a past (as seen with her relationship with her mother, her boss, and other characters in the film). As the film progresses, though, Joan becomes less active as a character and eventually only becomes the “passive raw material” object for the male characters on the screen and the viewers of the film. This is seen when the guards believe the priest rather than continue to question her when she lies about the metal detector. The scene here shows she is only a woman that could never do anything wrong because she could not fathom the idea of doing something wrong. Finally, by the end of the film, her whole compassion for wanting to take care of a child and make a better life for herself falls by the wayside—she just wants to accompany the main character across the border. She is no longer an important figure, but rather similar to the Maltese Falcon statue. She is something that the male character desired to have, and what all other males want to keep safe from danger. This follows Mulvey’s idea that women are objects of pleasure in classic Hollywood cinema.

>  >  >  >   m  a  n  o  n  '  s     c  o  u  r  s  e     p  a  g  e  s 


Page layout and design ©2004 by Hugh S. Manon for the Oklahoma State University Film Program. Some images on this page are the property of a third party and are used with permission. The marks of Oklahoma State University are controlled under a licensing program administered by The Collegiate Licensing Company.

Last update: 2/22/2005