Let's Roar!: Cinema's Effect on the Spectator

The cinema is an important aspect of nearly everyone’s life whether it provides an escape or is just merely a good way to waste time on a Saturday. There's no denying that cinema plays a major role in modern culture. But what effects does it have on the people watching it? What's the relationship between the screen and its audience? There have been many theories and discussions analyzing this relationship and there are a few commonalities as well as stark differences. Bell Hooks, Laura Mulvey, and Christian Metz all have their own views on the subject and share similarities and differences with each other. 

Bell Hooks wrote an essay called, “The Oppositional Gaze:  Black Female Spectators.” According to Hooks, the cinema gets a response from the viewer, in this case being black people and more specifically black women, by allowing them to unleash their repressed gaze. By this she means that throughout their history black men were prohibited from looking at white women and the cinema allowed them to do this without fear of punishment. Hooks also notes that the film experience is not the same for both genders. Often women were more isolated watching a film because of the overwhelming presence of white characters; there was no one for them to identify with. The reactions got from the black audience viewing film are definitely active according to Hooks. It's an event that leads to what she defined as an oppositional black gaze and critical spectatorship which were the audience resisting and criticizing the white supremacist films to the point that they wanted to do something about it. These led to the mocking of television shows that were aimed at portraying black people in a negative manner and the development of independent black cinema. It was through what Hooks called the oppositional gaze that black women were able to choose whether or not they would identify the white female in films. Bell Hooks mentions that most black women who went to watch films did so “on guard” because of the lack of representation or derogatory representation of them on film. Hooks uses an example of a woman named Pauline who must literally imagine herself as transformed into a white woman in order to watch the film without feeling too offended.

Hattie McDaniel (Gone with the Wind)

This lack of identification made the experience of watching film drastically different for black men and women. Where black men were finally able to look all they wanted at those who told them that they were not allowed to, black woman had nothing. There was a character on a show called Amos n’ Andy named sapphire who was a representative of black women. The character was annoying and mean; someone that both white people and black men could laugh at. The other option for black female representation was found in the “mammy” characters that would wait hand and foot on their white masters. This kind of imagery and treatment of black people in screen (especially women) had a major impact on that audience. It reinforced the idea that women should be critical with their gaze and analyze films, eventually leading to making them themselves as part of independent black cinema. 

Laura Mulvey's essay entitled “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” focuses on a different aspect of the gaze and that is the pleasure that derives from scopophilia. Scopophilia is the pleasure that comes from watching people usually without their knowledge. The people become objects and are subjected to the viewer’s “controlling and curious gaze” (Mulvey, 713). This kind of relationship with the screen and the objects displayed on it make the viewing, as Hooks saw it, an active engagement. At least for the men. As with Hooks’ essay on the effects of cinema on viewers, it's different based on gender. And with this, the way it engages both genders differs. According to Mulvey, in terms of pleasure, cinema engages men actively and women passively. The woman is displayed on screen as a sexual object that's mainly used for spectacle while the presence of a male central character is used as a means to drive to story forward. Mulvey cites large production numbers such as those from musicals featuring a large number of women that if anything merely distract from the plot of the film. The man in the film is what moves the story and with him as the main character, the audience relates and identifies with him. The woman is the character that needs to be saved and made to be less sexual by becoming a possession of the leading male. Through this achievement and by the audience’s association with the male figure, the audience gains possession over her as well, fulfilling the desire brought from scopophilia. There are social implications from viewing cinema this way. Unlike Hook’s essay in which they are mainly racial, Mulvey sees them as part of a sexual experience as well as a form of advanced identification. Like an infant seeing its reflection in a mirror, the viewer watching the screen develops a recognition of the objects displayed an which Mulvey describes as “the birth of the long love affair/despair between image and self-image which has found such intensity of expression in film and such joyous recognition in the cinema audience” (Mulvey, 714).

James Stewart & Kim Novak (Vertigo)

Christian Metz’s essay also seems to describe cinema as actively engaging the audience. Metz describes the viewing process as requiring a considerable amount of subconscious knowledge of perception and truth. The audience is aware of what they perceive to be imaginary which is why they are not seriously disturbed by even the most extreme absurdities. In this sense, Metx claims that the audience identifies with himself. He's aware of himself watching something that's not real. Metz describes cinema as the most perceptual art form in relation to artwork, photography, etc., but it's also the most false. All the images that are being watched on a screen are not real, nor are they there. They are the shadows of the real images that made the film. Interestingly, like Mulvey, he compares cinema to a mirror. The cinema is a mirror that includes everything but the spectator so then he poses the question: what does the spectator identify with? The effect that the cinema has on the viewer according to Metz is one that puts the viewer in a position of supreme power. The viewer becomes “all-perceiving” (Metz, 697), as in the spectator is in no way displayed on the screen, but nothing that's displayed on the screen can exist without the presence of a spectator. It's with this in mind that Metz makes the statement, “it is I who make the film” (Metz, 697). Another aspect of cinema that the audience unconsciously identifies with is the camera. With all the movement that the camera makes (pans, close-ups, etc.) the audience never accepts that this is truly the viewpoint of another person. This is a camera and it's the eye that they can see through, or in the case of a conversation and a character’s viewpoint becomes the perspective given to the audience, then that audience automatically accepts that this viewpoint is the way that they can acknowledge that he's still present despite not being visible on screen. Also enforcing the idea that engaging with cinema is an active process, Metz, like Mulvey, brings up the passion that coincides with viewing cinema. The desire to see, and Metz references scopophilia, and the desire to hear are important aspects of engaging with film. 

Unlike Mulvey and Hooks, Metz doesn’t seem to distinguish between genders in terms of how cinema engages the audience. Metz is much more general with his viewpoints on the effects of cinema on its’ viewers. While all three would agree that cinema engages the viewer in a more active than passive way, they all see how this happens differently. Hooks explains its effects on a black audience and distinguishes the differences between the black male and female spectator, Mulvey also delves into the different experiences of men and women watching films. The two of them both acknowledge that women are often represented a certain way in films typically as objects meant to serve the male and male spectator sexually or in the case of black women not at all. The sexual aspect is seen again in Metz essay, but there's no mention of any discernable experiences between men and women engaging in viewing cinema.