In 1975, feminist film critic Laura Mulvey published her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” in which she established the term “male gaze.” Anyone who consumes film reviews is probably familiar with the idea: the slow pan up a woman’s body; the dewy, angled-down close-ups on the female love interest. The male gaze refers not only to how women are depicted on film in ways designed for male viewers’ sexual pleasure, but also how male characters in a film are often given control of the camera. For example, if a man looks at a woman, only the woman tends to be in frame in the following shot, but if a woman looks at a man, the tendency is to shoot over the woman’s shoulder. The perspective and visual pleasure of men is generally privileged.
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is a 1953 musical romantic comedy directed by Howard Hawks and starring Jane Russell as Dorothy Shaw and Marilyn Monroe as Lorelei Lee. The two are best friends and co-performers who board a cruise ship bound for France where diamond-obsessed Lorelei intends to marry her wealthy-but-unattractive fiancé, Gus. But, despite starring Marilyn Monroe, arguably one of the most objectified women in Hollywood history, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes bucked the trend of the male gaze 20 years before the concept was brought into academia.
Others have identified the musical number “Ain’t There Anyone Here For Love?,” in which Dorothy sings about looking for “love” to dozens of nameless, half-naked Olympic athletes, as a scene that subverts the male gaze. However, the male gaze is subverted throughout the entire movie, and in some places replaced with the female gaze. At one point, Lorelei’s female gaze is privileged over realism — when she finds out that Piggy, a geriatric flirt, owns a diamond mine, his head turns into a diamond because that’s what she sees when she looks at him. The male characters — Gus, Piggy, and Malone, Dorothy’s love interest — rarely direct the camera to look at the women, even in romantic scenes.
In the film’s most famous musical number, “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” the stage is set for Lorelei to perform with a chandelier made of women in bondage. Yes, real women. And the gaze for the entire scene is controlled by Lorelei’s fiancé, Gus. This could read as the same kind of objectification present in other movies, but it works to confront the viewer with what Lorelei is singing about. It’s more than just materialism; in the song, Lorelei turns away men who confess their love for her, and sings lines like “He’s your guy / When stocks are high / But beware when they start to descend / It’s then that those louses / Go back to their spouses / Diamonds are a girl’s best friend.” The message is not “Get diamonds because they’re pretty” but “Get diamonds so that you have something to your name if a guy leaves you in the dust.”
Early in the film, Lorelei compares marrying a man because he’s rich to marrying a girl because she’s pretty. She’s repeatedly shown to be much more clever and manipulative than the men in the movie (except Malone) give her credit for — but she plays the dumb blonde because it feels safer to her than being loudmouthed and independent like Dorothy. She is trapped in the role of a decoration just as much as the women in the chandeliers are.
It’s telling that the most — and arguably only — provocative outfit is worn by Dorothy when she pretends to be Lorelei in court, reprising “Diamonds” in a rhinestone bathing suit and stockings; in other words, when Jane Russell is parodying Marilyn Monroe. It’s easy to look to movies where men are objectified as examples of the female gaze: Magic Mike, for example. But Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is deeply aware of how women — especially beautiful, blonde women like Marilyn Monroe — are seen by men. Giving them the power of the gaze confronts the audience with their complexity and strength, and it’s something that cinema still doesn’t always do.
