Pleasures of Cinema

In the Laura Mulvey text, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", the nature and roll of women in cinematic history is examined. Mulvey notes how women in cinema appear almost exclusively as sexual objects, and although there have been a great variety of roles women play in cinema, a great portion all still use women in this nature.
What I found particularly interesting is how she draws much of her inspiration for this analysis on the theories of Freud. There are several aspects of his theory in particular that she draws on, such as scopophilia, which Freud himself stated is "taking people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze" (Mulvey, pg. 3). This, as Freud describes, is essentially the basic essence of all cinema. Everyone and everything on the screen, or any medium for that matter, is subjected to this scopophilia, especially in the modern first world where the amount of visual media we consume is tremendous. I also liked how Mulvey later went on to describe how modern cinema, particularly in the case of women, "continues to exist as the erotic basis for pleasure in looking at another person as object" Mulvey, pg 3).

So clearly, she believes that modern cinema still sports this standard, and that modern film and television still primarily use women as sexual objects, which I personally agree with. I am struggling to think of examples (although I don't watch as many movies as I used to) where a women in the film were used as crucial, plot driving characters in the last year or so. At the moment, only Sandra Bullock in Gravity comes to mind. After checking IMDB, I failed to find a single film on the top 10 highest grossing films from this last weekend that featured a women in a dynamic, plot driving role. I'm sure I'm missing a great many films, but the fact that I struggled to think of one at least means that these kinds of films are too few and far between. With this, I completely agree with the main stance Laura Mulvey makes in her text.