The Male Gaze Laura Mullvey

In 1975, Laura Mulvey, a British feminist film theorist, introduced the idea of the male gaze in her paper on visual pleasure and narrative cinema. She pinpoints the man as the active pro-tagonist in mainstream Hollywood movies (838). Mulvey believes that the audience, regard-less of sex or gender, identifies with the “active male figure” (838) due to the means of cine-matography and the rooted patriarchy in Western cultures. Thus, women in film become sub-ject to the gaze of the active – the male. However, I believe that Mulvey’s notion of the male gaze is not limited to narrative cinema as “an advanced representation system” (834). Televi-sion advertisement and its portrayal of the female body reaches even more people on a regular basis.
Therefore, I argue that Laura Mulvey’s theory of the male gaze in narrative cinema also applies to television advertisement. In doing so, I will focus on the Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s 2012 Super Bowl commercial, starring the American model Kate Upton. However, I will first touch upon Laura Mulvey’s theory of the male gaze in order to evaluate the portrayal of Kate Upton in the Super Bowl commercial. Laura Mulvey identifies Freud’s theory of scopophilia “as the erotic basis for pleasure in looking at another person as object” (835) which sets the foundation for the male gaze.
Scopophilia can be understood as “one of the component instincts of sexuality” (835) which leads to “taking other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze” (835). Mulvey’s psychoanalytic approach suggests that “sexual anxiety drives the gaze” (Schultz 368). Regarding Mulvey, the biological difference of a woman causes anxiety in men. On the one hand, men seek to compensate this anxiety through voyeurism in order to demystify the female body. On the other hand, men can turn the “disturbing ‘other’” (Schultz 369) into an icon of
pleasure. Undoubtedly, the Carl’s Jr.
commercial regards Kate Upton as such an icon of pleas-ure. At the beginning of the commercial, a shot of a neon sign of a drive-in theater establishes the setting of the television advertisement. The second shot shows the actual theater in a total view followed by a medium shot which puts on display the American model Kate Upton who is adjusting her drive-in theater speakers. Kate Upton wears garter straps, a 50s-esque head-band, a polka dot dress, and a pink cardigan. Together with the rockabilly music in the back-ground, Kate Upton appears to impersonate an idealized version of a 50’s pin-up girl. Thus, the American model is being iconized as an object of pleasure, desire, and sexuality. Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s objectify the American model in order to promote the “South West Patty Melt”, a new burger which is supposedly so spicy that it causes Kate Upton to perform a striptease in the following shots. In accordance to Kate Upton’s performance, the sociologists Gwen Sharp and Lisa Wade argue that “sex is used to sell food [by] sexualizing and gendering the food product” (48). The Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s Super Bowl commercial demonstrates in a picturesque way how “food is marketed alongside women’s bodies” (Sharp and Wade 48) by using the male
gaze. In addition to that, the commercial introduces a male customer of the drive-in theater as the bearer of the view while we see more close-ups of the undressing Kate Upton who is heavily transpiring as she seemingly cannot handle the spiciness of the burger. Thus, the commercial also includes Laura Mulvey’s voyeuristic approach to the male gaze. The Carl’s Jr, and Hardee’s television advertisement produces “obsessive voyeurs and Peeping Toms, whose only sexual satisfaction can come from watching . . . an objectified other” (Mulvey 835).