On Spectators' Responses To The R-rated Film Fifty Shades Of Grey

Feminist film theory originates from the 1970s; it is the product of the Second Feminist Movement. As feminist film theorists begin to realize the important role of ideology in political fight, they gradually shift their study to cultural products. Film,one of the most important cultural products, becomes the target of feminists naturally.Feminist film theorists conduct research on the image of women in film, revealing that patriarchal ideology prevails in mainstream films and women are oppressed in the patriarchal society.For decades, feminist film theory has been well developed in western nations,but in China the study is at the primary stage. Besides, domestic studies on this theory are confined to the generalization of existing results abroad, and the application of feminist film theory is relatively rare. This thesis initially applies Male Gaze theory, a branch of feminist film theory, to analyzing the erotic R-rated film Fifty Shades of Grey.Fifty Shades of Grey tells a story of an innocent college student Anastasia and a mysterious CEO Christian who fall in love with each other after an interview for the school newspaper, performing a hardcore sexual love story. Mulvey's Male Gaze theory proposes that gaze in mainstream films is male. And the image of women in film is the object of males' desire and the source of males' visual pleasures. This thesis, applies Male Gaze theory to investigating how the mainstream film positions women as a “spectacle” to meet males' visual pleasure, and how narrative serves men and makes the gaze male pejoratively.This thesis consists of four chapters. The first chapter is a brief introduction, in which a basic introduction of Fifty Shades of Grey, related study on this film, the research background of this thesis, related foreign and domestic studies on feminist film theory are presented. The second chapter traces back the history of feminist film theory and Laura Mulvey's Male Gaze theory. The third chapter applies Male Gaze theory in the analysis of Fifty Shades Grey, studying how women are shaped to meet males' visual pleasure, so to reveal the oppression of women in the patriarchal society. In this part, this thesis combines cinematic techniques and textual analysis to examine how Fifty Shades of Grey meets spectators' voyeuristic and narcissistic pleasures. In the meantime, it investigates how the film resolves the castration anxiety,which is caused by the presence of female images, and by the way of reenacting original trauma and fetishism to ensure spectators' visual pleasures. The fourth chapter deals with real spectators' responses to this film, which include spectators' cinematic responses and their extra-cinematic responses. The last chapter concludes what has been mentioned in the former three chapters, moreover, and points out innovations and limitations of this thesis. One of the innovations of this thesis is that it adopts Male Gaze theory to investigate mainstream films, which enriches the application of feminist film theory.