Deconstructing the male gaze with alfred hitchcock
Written for my senior seminar film class. We were to take a popular film theory and write a research paper comparing it to a series of films including one that we watched in class.
Alfred Hitchcock was a director with a powerful understanding of the cinematic point of view. He understood that the camera, the characters, and the director all played a part in creating a lens for audiences to see the filmic world through. The male gaze in particular was one that he was familiar with. Where typically women are often the objects of desire and cater towards providing men with visual pleasure. With this knowledge, Hitchcock sought to show the different ways that the male gaze in particular could be applied or not and how that affected characters who were meant to be objects of desire. In several of his films, he manages to disrupt or even deconstruct the male gaze. He also works to dismantle the stereotypical concept of who can be the object of desire. With a filmography spanning from the 1920s to the 1970s, well before homosexuality was widely accepted, he was able to explore the various lenses and gazes that come from men and women across the spectrum of sexuality. He often did so by flipping the goal of the male gaze and centering men as the objects of desire while keeping the beholder of the gaze intact. Often his work would contain a metaphor that was an in-universe representation of the gaze and that would work as a cover for the deeper underlying message that he was hinting audiences towards. There are four films from Alfred Hitchcock’s body of work that are most exemplary of how he managed to manipulate the male gaze and oftentimes deconstruct the concept in order to ask thought-provoking questions. Between Notorious (1946), Strangers on a Train (1951), Rope (1948), and Rebecca (1940) there is a flip on the typical male gaze and how it operates. Alfred Hitchcock was able to explore what effect the male gaze or lack thereof could have on presenting both men and women as the objects of desire.
In Notorious (1946) Hitchcock uses a restrained yet lethal instance of the male gaze where it is only enacted within the final act of the film and the object of desire becomes the woman who actually held the gaze for most of the film. At the start of Notorious Devlin is the beholder of the gaze and this is felt in Alicia’s introduction. The audience is meant to see her as nothing more than an object of desire at that point in time, her character is drunk and untrustworthy. Specifically, in the scene in the car at minute marker 00:06:54, Hitchcock provides a point-of-view shot of Devlin from the passenger seat. Then once it suits him, Devlin passes the gaze over to Alicia so that the narrative of the film can begin. At minute marker 00:10:42 Alicia is in bed and Devlin is waking her up. She looks from the glass on her bedside table to the man who is speaking to her and there is a point of view shot. Instead of doing a typical shot-reverse-shot Hitchcock places the audience within the literal gaze of Alicia. By doing so he manages to synonymize the narrative of the film with the deconstruction of the male gaze. This moment becomes a turning point for the film; it marks the start of Alicia’s gaze having the narrative power over the film. In the film world, Alicia is meant to seduce Alexander Sebastian, gain his trust, and relay any information she can find back to Devlin. This makes Alicia the clear and outright object of desire in the film world, but because she has a hold on the gaze for so long she is not subject to the objectification it often comes with.
This also marks the start of another key way Hitchcock deconstructs the male gaze. Typically, women are associated with sex or romance which is a distraction from the narrative or plot of the movie. “In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female” (Mulvey, 837). As Laura Mulvey points out the male gaze in full throttle works to have women be likened to spectacle. Shiny, flashy, and fun to play with but nothing more than carnival attractions that the man can discard once bored. Yet, here in Notorious her sexuality is tethered to the advancement of the plot. If Sebastian does not find her desirable then the movie ends. So, Hitchcock positions the audience behind the eyes of Alicia and gives her both the masculine urge to forward the plot and the feminine trait of being desirable. For the majority of the film, the male gaze is not prominent because the female protagonist is the driving force. This allows her to seemingly escape the male gaze and simply exist as her own person as opposed to being reduced to an object meant for consumption.
However, the film ends in a way that serves as a reminder to audiences that the patriarchal forces of society still exist. Rather than just be subject to being the object of desire, Alicia has her gaze ripped away from her. The power is given back to the men and she is left to their whims. “In spite of the subjective prominence of Alicia’s point of view throughout most of the film, at a deeper structural level and from the very outset, the power of the look is aligned with the Law; it is indeed a question of the Law (whether legitimate, as in the case of the US government, or illegitimate, as with the Nazi cartel) which begins and ends the film” (Flitterman Lewis, 1). In other words, it is by no mistake that Hitchcock introduces us to Alicia as a drunk and disorderly woman who hates the cops. These traits are parallel to that of her womanhood. She was never going to hold the power of the gaze indefinitely. This serves as a metaphor for the real world, where the patriarchy still rules supreme. Women and women’s rights can progress but that progress is never without backlash or the eventual backslide.
As the power shifts away from Alicia in the poisoning scene (01:24:29) we see how Hitchcock frames her and creates a struggle between who has the gaze. For the majority of this scene, the camera does not follow Alicia’s eyeline. Instead the characters around her move the coffee cup around the room in a well-orchestrated dance that Alicia is not following. It is only when there is an outburst surrounding someone almost mistakenly drinking from her cup that she briefly regains control of the gaze. The camera follows her eye movements from Sebastian to the cup, but it is too late the poison goes into effect shortly after. Rather than making a movie that has the male gaze all over it, Hitchcock bookends Notorious with it and in doing so manages to deconstruct the concept only to build it right back up by the film’s ending.
On that same note, in Strangers on a Train (1951) Hitchcock leaves the male gaze intact, however, there is a man as the object of desire. Having a man as the object of desire was not typical for movies from this era and it is not in line with the concept of the male gaze, where the object of desire is meant to be a woman. Mulvey states that, “according to the principles of the ruling ideology and the physical structures that back it up, the male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification. Man is reluctant to gaze at his exhibitionist like,” yet in Strangers on a Train there is no reluctance on Bruno’s part. He goes to great lengths to stalk, harass, and remind Guy of his voyeuristic ways. The reluctance is actually flipped and Guy is the one who is reluctant to be gazed at. He finds Bruno and Bruno’s obsession off-putting and scary. Hitchcock cleverly rotates the male gaze and allows men to not only understand but to be put in the shoes of women who are often objectified in this same way unwillingly.
Additionally, Hitchcock plays coy with this message. The protagonist’s name is Guy, so every time Bruno tries to call out to him the audience is served with a direct reminder that this interaction is between two men. On top of that the metaphor Hitchcock uses in the murder plot to advance this attraction/repulsion between the two characters. This gay coding can be seen in the very first scene where these characters meet at minute marker 00:02:14. In this scene the characters meet and Bruno worms his way into conversation with Guy, then he begins to unveil his murder plot to the tennis player, and Guy goes along with Bruno for just long enough to give Bruno false hope. This moment could read as nothing more than what it is on the surface but given the rest of the movie and an understanding of the male gaze, it is clear that this interaction is a narrative-based cover for cruising, in other words, a gay pick-up.
That is not the only spot in the film where Hitchcock uses gay coding. Later in the film, we see Bruno receiving a manicure from his mother, “Just after Guy has shouted over the telephone that he could strangle Miriam, we see a close-up of Bruno’s hands apparently about to do the strangling, but at this point merely getting a manicure from his doting, dotty mother…The film thus links its male couple with the couple standing behind them in the classic scenography of fifties pop Freudianism: the momma’s boy and his momma” (Edelman, Litvak, 304). The feminine way in Bruno not only receives his manicure but inspects it, serves as another nudge to the audience that societal norms and conventions are not being followed here. Hitchcock tethers these men together through repression and obsession; having Guy deny that he had any part in what led to his wife’s death while Bruno is going to great lengths to ‘impress’ Guy.
This particular coding is key in breaking down the male gaze because the object of desire, Guy, has no real idea what is going on. Meanwhile, the beholder of the gaze, Bruno, is not the typical male protagonist that is easy for heterosexual men to identify with, “As the spectator identifies with the main male* protagonist, he projects his look on to that of his like, his screen surrogate, so that the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look, both giving a satisfying sense of omnipotence” (Mulvey, 838). Hitchcock forces the audience out of the typical male gaze and instead curates a world in which those who seek pleasure from the male gaze are forced to be uncomfortable in one way or another.
That being said, Hitchcock ends Strangers on a Train by reinstating the status quo within the film world but not to the audience’s perception. “Not even Bruno in his moment of death is the telos of the camera’s gaze” (Edelman, Litvak, 307). After a romp to the death with Bruno, we see Guy make his way over to his lighter to retrieve it. By centering the camera’s action on him rather than Bruno’s dying body it is clear to the audience that Guy is still the object of desire. The character who held the gaze may be gone but the message prevails. Hitchcock used this film to explore the dangers of the male gaze and what effect it would have if a man were the object of desire.
Following these homoerotic undertones comes the film Rope (1948), wherein Hitchcock breaks from convention and makes the object of desire a man but removes the male gaze. Based on a play and a real event, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope works as an insight into a compelling and complex gay relationship. This then works to deconstruct the male gaze because while centering a man as the object of desire, he never has his personhood removed due to an omnipotent character using him as a plaything. White explains the dynamic between the two men as “doe-eyed [Farley] Granger made sensitive Philip (a submissive) the perfect partner to strong-jawed [John] Dall, whose Brandon (a dom) keeps his cohort's nervousness under control. Even their names define their relationship by connoting feeling and ownership”. While not a relationship of equals the audience is meant to watch the pair and get the sense that there is mutual respect and shared love between the two.
This is especially true in the very opening sequence of the film (00:02:31); wherein Brandon and Philip have just committed the violent act of murder. They collapse together with their chests heaving; exhilarated by the thrill of the kill but exhausted by actually committing the murder. Brandon is the first to recover and lights a cigarette. While this could be seen as nothing more than a character tick, given all that is to come in this film, it is a nod from Hitchcock to the audience that this is a post-coitus cigarette. Brandon is from then on the leader among the two men, often telling Philip what to do and making attempts to calm his nerves.
The audience is meant to watch these two men interact from an outsider’s perspective rather than assume the identity of either man. As Mulvey puts it, “Hitchcock has never concealed his interest in voyeurism, cinematic and noncinematic” (841). At minute marker 00:15:00 we see Brandon and Philip begin to set up their dinner party only Brandon still holds the murder weapon, the titular rope, in his hands. As he makes his way through the dining room and into the kitchen to put it away in a drawer with a flourish, the audience is only capable of watching with bated breath. This dismantles another key piece of the male gaze, as there is no presence or force in the film that is entirely active so the audience cannot be anything more than passive and the male gaze itself cannot be activated.
The lack of a male gaze also allows for the audience to be more keenly perceptive of the dynamics between characters. “Brandon and Philip's special bond is apparent only to those mature enough to spot their intimacy. It's in the way Dall and Granger look at each other” (White). Making clear that because the pervasive male gaze is not present in this film audiences are more adept and can tune into the deeper implications of the work. The characters do not objectify each other so much as they share a tenderness and a deeper connection. Similar to how Act Two of Notorious Alicia was able to evade the male gaze by having the protagonist be the object of desire Rope does the same. Philip and Brandon desire one another but they also respect each other. The audience is thus able to watch them work without relegating either man to being a sexual distraction. This works in the same vein of Strangers on a Train where because the disruption of the male gaze happens with homoerotic undertones the men are able to keep the narrative moving and can advance the plot without any fuss. That being said, Hitchcock ends Rope with the same warning as the two aforementioned films. The men are caught and punished for opting to break from societal conventions.
Finally, in Rebecca (1940) Hitchcock completely subverts the male gaze and its goal by having the object of desire and titular character, a woman named Rebecca, be absent from the film itself. Hitchcock unravels the male gaze because there is no phallocentrism. “Woman's desire is subjected to her image as bearer of the bleeding wound, she can exist only in relation to castration and cannot transcend it” (Mulvey, 834). Mulvey illustrates that the purpose of women in patriarchal filmmaking is to not be a man. Women are meant to serve as an opposite. In this style of filmmaking women are forever tethered to men, but only to be a direct counterpoint. She is meant to scare him as much as she excites him. Ultimately, it uses women as a reminder to men how pitiful it is to be penis-less.
Additionally, her lack of a phallus is meant to drive the male characters and viewers to be proactive. Hitchcock refuses to do this, however, instead allowing for the women and their desires to drive the narrative of this film. Perhaps that is part of what causes this film to have a runtime much longer than any of the aforementioned films, coming in at 130 minutes. “Women in Rebecca do not necessarily lack narrative agency and independence…Rebecca adopts a female point of view, by turning the feminine power of storytelling into a crucial plot organizing device” (Osoliová). In other words, the story follows the perspective of the female characters more than their male counterparts so there is a distinct breakdown of the male gaze because it is never activated by the film. This female point of view that Hitchcock adopts was uncommon for the time and is still not all that prevalent today. This film inherently rejects the male gaze and is wholly uninterested in allowing any man to use women as tools meant only for his benefit.
In the same breath as Strangers on a Train and Rope, Rebecca relies on homoerotic undertones in order to frame the object of desire. In this film, the housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers is a lesbian who was in love with the passed Rebecca. She now finds herself in a precarious position with the new Mrs. de Winter and this dynamic is challenging for both of them. “Interestingly, in Rebecca, it is not the husband who abuses the heroine but the housekeeper, who often acts aggressively toward the narrator and abuses her verbally. A master of psychological control, Mrs. Danvers slowly and subtly sows seeds of doubt in the narrator, who begins to feel like a second-rate person and questions her own perception, and judgments” (Osoliová). The audience is meant to pick up on how the new Mrs. de Winter is unsettled by Mrs Danvers and wants little to do with her while Mrs. Danvers herself shifts from being wary of the newcomer to outright hostile towards her. By having Mrs. Danvers become verbally abusive towards the woman, the audience is meant to understand that the actual head of household is this woman and whoever joins Mr. de Winter’s side is actually engaging in a lesbian relationship with her.
The most interesting part of how Rebecca works to unravel the male gaze is how the object of desire is a woman. Rebecca is missed dearly by her lesbian housekeeper and the mystery surrounding her death also entices her replacement. Both of these women desire Rebecca in one way or another and because there is no male gaze they are free to express that desire any way they so choose. Due to the fact that Rebecca is dead, she is never shown on screen. This is a clever way for Hitchcock to subvert the male gaze because there is no way to objectify the object of desire if she is never seen. The new Mrs. de Winter makes it her mission to solve the death of Rebecca, almost vindicating her. When she does solve this mystery, we as the audience are clued into why Mr. de Winter had such a reduced impact on the narrative. By being the only one who knows how his first wife died, the man relinquishes his right to the gaze because he does not find any visual pleasure in Rebecca so it would not make sense for him to objectify her post-mortem. The end of Rebecca is like the three films discussed earlier, with a reconstruction of the male gaze (02:07:39). Mrs. Danvers dies and Mr. & Mrs. de Winter embrace in a heterosexual hug, Hitchcock reminds the audience of the prevailing themes in society after showing them a world where those norms can be challenged.
In conclusion, Alfred Hitchcock across his body of work was able to wield an understanding of the cinematic point of view and demonstrate various ways in which the male gaze could be deconstructed or utilized in order to present both men and women as objects of desire. Whether this be through having homoerotic undertones or female-driven narratives, Hitchcock was tapping into a reality that has yet to occur. An interesting juxtaposition and optimistic perspective from the usually grim subjects of his work, which typically revolve around murder or espionage. He would then remind the audience that the male gaze was the prevailing force in cinema and the hegemonic norm in society by reconstructing the male gaze by the very end of the film. In today’s film landscape the heterosexual male gaze is still the dominant force and women in film are often reduced to sex objects for the visual pleasure of male viewers. Examples of this can be seen in Oppenheimer (2023), Joker (2019), and The Avengers (2012). However, today’s film landscape is much more diverse so there are also plenty of films like Challengers (2024), Past Lives (2023), and Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) being released that subvert or negate the traditional male gaze.
Works Cited
Edelman, Lee, and Joseph Litvak. “Two Much: Excess, Enjoyment, and Estrangement in Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian & Gay Studies, vol. 25, no. 2, Apr. 2019, pp. 297–314. EBSCOhost, https://doi-org.proxy.libraries.rutgers.edu/10.1215/10642684-7367764.
Flitterman-Lewis, Sandy. To See and Not To Be: Female Subjectivity and the Law in Hitchcock’s Notorious. 1990.
Mulvey, Laura. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. 1975.
Osoliová, V. “Framing the Absence and Presence of Rebecca: Female Subjectivity and Voyeurism On and Off-Screen in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca.” Americana: E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary, vol. 17, no. 1, 2021, N.PAG.
White, Armond. “Hitchcock’s Gay Ballet: How the Classic Mystery Rope Cleverly Depicted Queer Life.” Out, vol. 26, no. 1, Aug. 2017, p. 43. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspxdirect=true&db=qth&AN=124261691&site=ehost-live.
Rebecca. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, Selznick International Pictures, 1940.
Notorious. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, RKO Pictures, 1946.
Rope. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, Warner Bros., 1948.
Strangers on a Train. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, Warner Bros., 1951.