First, I want to say that I did not enjoy this movie nearly as much as I did Limitless yet, it was not as bad as The Battle of Algiers. Now, I will begin my blog post. This movie was confusing at times and definitely complex. I struggled to make the connection between Mulvey and the movie but eventually I made a few connections.
While watching the movie in correlation with the essay, I simply focused on the pleasures of watching a film and not so much on the erotic and sexual aspect of the reading. I liked the very first sentence of the essay in which the author explains the purpose of the paper. I think it is a good question to explore although I never quite found the answer. But what answer I did come up with is that fascinations with film are unique to the individual. There are qualities within each person that drives him/her to want to see something or someone and what causes them to enjoy it. However I just want to briefly mention the sexual aspect of the movie and relate it to the essay. There weren’t many sexual scenes in the movie but for the few that were, I don’t think they were necessarily for the audience. Kim, having sex with the guy in rehab with her was the only sexual content throughout the movie and the scenes were very brief; my interpretation of this is that Kim satisfied the man whom she was sleeping with’s arousal and and those members of the audience who can not understand a film unless she is objectified and has some sort of sexual relationship with a man as if the woman’s relationship with the man validates her as a character.
In addition, what stood out to me the most is “…analyzing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it.” This is profound to me and I’ve never read or heard anyone put it this way but it is true. Oftentimes, we as humans are pleased by someone or something for its visual purposes only, such as reality television or infamous celebrities but once we begin to ask ourselves why we truly are attracted to the person or thing, it begins to lose its value to us…we no longer find it to be beautiful or pleasing to us especially if it’s something that has no substantial meaning only superficial value like Basketball Wives or Rhianna, and that is the sole purpose of visual pleasure: seeing or watching something that is pleasing to us. But when we begin to explore why something is pleasing to us it sometimes loses its value.
