Laura Mulvey theory: Representation (RESEARCH)

Like in TV drama, music videos tend to represent the artist or the people involved in the video in a particular way. According to Laura Mulvey, it consists on these aspects- gender, age, ethnicity, place etc. Laura also goes on to say that artists choose how they would want to represent a particular group or themselves. For instance most R'n'B artists tend to portray the women in their videos as sex objects and possessions, rather than display them as respected figures. Here is an example of R'n'B rapper, Lil Wayne with his explicit song called Love me.

 

In this video, we can see that the women are objectified by the men. Laura Mulvey uses a key word for this called 'The male gaze'. This is when the camera adopts the perspective of a man and objectify the women in a sexually way. The way camera does this is by using slow motion on the girls when they are dancing and using low and high angle shots to directly get a shot of their seductive body and revealing outfits. Also, the women in this video tend to have less amount of camera time as the men. This means that they are not seen as significant as the artist and only seen as an item that is owned by the men. The aspects I mentioned are very common among R'n'B videos because it is one of the conventions that tends to be popular- to have a large amount of background dancers, dancing seductively in revealing costumes.

 

However in the video with Beyonce Listen, we see a strong contrast between the two videos

 

In this video, we can argue that the artist, Beyoncé, is portrayed as the dominant figure. She stands strong and firm throughout the video and is represented as a powerful figure that has respect for herself. The costume she wears is very basic and not revealing as the first video we looked at. The simple clothing may suggest that Beyoncé is comfortable with the way she is and does not need live for the interest of men. The close ups and mid shots of her throughout the video shows the passion she feels within the lyrics- it captures every bit of emotion she feels. Beyoncé represents herself in this video as a dominant woman that has self respect for herself and a strong place within society. In this case, we can argue that this video is intended for a female audience. The setting of her being on stage by herself shows that she is confident and willing to express herself to society, the variety of shots on her shows that she is the main focus and that she doesn't need to live in the shadow of a man and like said before, the costume shows that she is comfortable with her physical appearance. This will portray Beyoncé as a positive role model to young girls and encouraging them in being confident and comfortable with their physical appearance.