Michelle HatchFilm Theory10/2/2013MulveyLaura Mulvey, a film history expert, studies films and makes connections betweenspectatorship and gender roles. She analyzes Hollywood cinema and points out the ways thatfilm has been structured by the unconsciousness of our patriarchal society and howinterpretations of sexual difference controls the erotic images we see on screen. Mulveythoroughly discusses the function of women in Hollywood cinema by outlining gender splitconcepts such as voyeurism, fetishism, and the masculine gaze where men play the dominate,order role and where “women are the bearers of meaning, not makers of meaning”in her essay,Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Though her theories can’t be made an example of in allmovies, they are still demonstrated in a lot of Hollywood cinema, and especially of what Inoticed in Film Noir. Robert Siodmak’sThe Killers, a film Noir from 1946 is a good example ofhow patriarchal culture unconsciously outlines our cinema.Mulvey first explains how phallocentrism has shaped film form and how erotic image hasbecome the language for male dominance. She states “the function of woman in formingthepatriarchal unconscious is two-fold,” meaning women’s roles in film is doubled. “She firstsymbolizes the castration threat by her real absence of a penis and second thereby raises her childinto the symbolic. Once this has been achieved her meaning in the process is at an end…” Here, I
