Voyeurism

In cinema, the act of watching or spying at other peoples’ lives is referred to as voyeurism. Originally, the word voyeurism means “[gaining] sexual pleasure from watching others when they are naked or engaged in sexual activity” (Oxford Dictionary, Oxford University Press), but in cinema, voyeurism has been used as a plot tool for decades. Hitchcock films depict the roles a man and woman have in marriage through various tools, but in Rear Window, it is through voyeurism that the story is set in motion, and it is because of the main characters voyeuristic activity that we are able to see how he feels about getting married. This represents a central theme in the film as throughout the movie we see essentially every character be described in terms of their marital status and their relationship with the…

Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960) is a pseudo snuff film centred on the act of voyeurism. Although, Peeping Tom predates the horror subgenre, slashers, it still upholds the psychosexual elements that reside in such films (Clover). Released in the same year as Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), Peeping Tom can be cited as the aforementioned British equivalent, as the male central characters seem to share sadistic and psychopathic qualities. This film proves to be a self-reflexive metafilm as it…

Sexual predators have utilized the substantial improvement in quality in the camera phone by taking inappropriate pictures without the consent of those being photographed , these pictures are called “up-skirts”- “a picture that is taken pointed up someone’s skirt “ and “down-blouse” – “a picture of a woman’s breasts taken as she is bending over”. “The United States has taken action by enacting the Video Voyeurism Prevention Act, which prohibits the videotaping or photographing of anyone who is…

Voyeurism is, generally, a gender-specific crime, where men are usually the voyeurs and women are the unsuspecting victims. And now the new amendment had also made voyeurism gender-specific due to the perception of the society that sexual offences against men are not rampant in nature. This being only a small negative in the grand scheme of things. Hypothetical Situation 1: A woman has a long-standing crush on a man, who is also her next-door neighbour. She bugs his bedroom by placing…

Classical narratives have been found to stimulate the desire of looking thorough integrating structures of narcissism and voyeurism into the image and story. Narcissist visual pleasure is achieved from the self-identification with the image while voyeuristic visual pleasure is achieved from looking at another as our object. The traditional cinema’s narrative structure has been said to portray men as powerful and active characters while the female character is perceived as powerless and passive.…

Narrative Cinema”, has been influential in the discussion of voyeurism in film. Her essay discusses the role of women in narrative cinema and their sexual objectification due to the male gaze. This essay will only reference her claims about the woman as a “spectacle”. She asserts, “In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed…The presence of woman is an indispensable element of spectacle in normal narrative film…” (11). The owl is not alive, yet…

Michel Foucault, in The History of Sexuality, argues that the concepts of power and pleasure are intertwined. In the given excerpt from Herculine Barbin, both narrator Camille and her “sister”/lover, Sara, are teachers at a religious boarding school in nineteenth-century France, thus being forced to keep their relationship a secret. One religious figure of authority at the school, Abbé H., plays a significant role in the dynamic between the two women as confessor and religious guide. The…

Hitchcock utilised the theme of voyeurism in many of his works e.g. Rear Window, Psycho, Vertigo, and North by Northwest, in his endless pursuit to engage the audience. The use of the gaze invites the viewer into the character’s world and become a part of the scene via relatability. Whilst watching a Hitchcock movie, we almost feel responsible when we see an act of violence being imposed on a character in an act of passion boiling over, as if the blade were in our own hand. There is an element…

It is fascinating to find that things that apparently seem to be so different can be developed in such way that they sustain the same point of view. If we think about the career of a very tall, basketball player; people attraction to voyeurism; the career of a country music singer who beats records in discs’ selling, and the use of laugh tracks in comedy sitcom, it looks like there can not be a strong connection between them. Now if we consider that the public is looking for this basketball…

Voyeurism in The Mind of a Potential Serial Killer Ted Bundy, probably one of the most famous of serial killers, can be accredited with the reasoning for this research. Bundy is on record, saying, “…I’ve lived in prison for a long time now, and I’ve met a lot of men who were motivated to commit violence… without exception, every one of them was deeply involved with pornography; without question, without exception, deeply influenced and consumed by an addiction to pornography.” Voyeurism and…