Gone With The Wind Film Analysis

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The male gaze has been a prominent theme in movies, music and other areas of culture for a considerable amount of time. This is something that is primarily categorized by someone who is doing the looking. More specifically it is how the audience is viewing the people or person that is being represented. The male gaze is essentially something that in advertizing, and in movies enables women to become a commodity which enables products to sell, because we all know in society that sex sells, and especially in modern marketing. Something to take into consideration is the fact that woman have not had a considerable amount of involvement in film making over the past 100 years, and even today, this is still a fact. Although women tend to be involved …show more content…

Scarlet O’Hara, who is the protagonist in the film, really shakes up the idea of the male gaze for the spectator. Scarlet exposes in the film a different side of gender myths which embody male values that are transformed at the time of a drastic economic change due to the invasion of the Yankees. Scarlet really has an ambiguous gender identity in certain aspects of her life, with relation to economic ideals, her own gender roles and with relation to the current war that took place. In the beginning of the film, we see Scarlett saying to her Mammy “Why does a girl have to be so silly to catch a husband?” We can identify the significance of this quote here as something very ambiguous. Scarlett wants to find a husband, yet she is not necessarily overjoyed at the things she has to do in order to get one. Unlike many films in which the male gaze is something that dominates the spectator eye. What is fascinating about “Gone With the Wind” is that the protagonist that the spectator identifies with is female. What is most important to note is the paradox of personality that she displays throughout the film with regards to Scarlett encompassing throughout the film masculine ideals enclosed in a female form. Laura Mulvey talks about women with conflicting desires. She mentions “the conflicting desires, first of all, correspond closely with Freud’s argument about female sexuality quoted above, that is: an oscillation between passive femininity and regressive masculinity” (Mulvey, 1990 p.

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