Laura Mulvey's Theory

Mulvey’s study on ‘Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema’ argues that the predominantly male audience is positioned to identify with the common male protagonist, the audience create a sense of idealization with the protagonist as the audience seeing a perfect visual portrayal of them enforcing the ideologies of a narcissistic audience and society, imposing the idea of scopophilia. In addition this exemplifies patriarchy as the male protagonist drives the narrative concluding the female character as passive.

Moreover, the use of phallic objects by the male characters e.g. guns and swords male dominance, additionally the penis let alone acts as a symbol of power and authority in society. Hence objectifying the passive female due to their sexual depiction as they have no phallic creating penis envy for the very little female audience; creating the audience to recognize them voyeuristically or fethishistically .This therefore makes the male audience unconsciously perceive the female character as castrated enforcing Freud’s theory; imposing the idea of anxiety towards the male audience. Thus, the need for the female characters for a substitute fethisized/phallic objects to reduce the anxiety of the male audience.

How the theory could be useful for my independent study:

The theory enforces the my studies hypothesis as the majority of the female characters in ‘The Sopranos’ is perceived as a fetishists, reflecting on the patriarchy and the narrative cinema to be driven by a male protagonist. In addition, even though, there are depictions of intelligent independent female characters they are nonetheless dependant on male protagonist’s safety and closure therefore subordinate to the male character.