prep blog #2

Welcome back to my second blog post! During this holiday season, I remained at home and was able to expand my "watched film list" with the addition of films like American Psycho. From this, I was able to notice some of the elements of the Male Gaze but the lack of coherence of what Female Gaze was as I watched the film recreationally.

Image of Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman for American Psycho.

After the break, although I had discussed the plans for my methodology, I still had not found enough information from scholarly sources. That said, I found the following studies to aid in the reform of my research process:

First I studied the analysis of activism in coming-of-age films by Anne Salden, which similarly studied coming-of-age films. First, they analyzed the agency of the main hero archetypes in films. At first, I genuinely had no what agency was or meant so after some research I found that the term agency refers to the actions and dialogue that a character has that push for a certain narrative or drive the character to make a certain choice.

With this information, I decided to create a criteria that would include aspects of character agency and a thorough list of what makes a scene fall under the Male Gaze.

Next, I looked into a piece by Abigail J. Zwier, of Colorado State University, which analyzed the portrayals of teenage romantic relationships across a decade of top-grossing teen films. Ziewer described selecting her movies using the Internet Movie DataBase (IMDb.com) while utilizing keywords to find the genre/type of film she was interested in and sorted them using the “US Box Office” tool that is offered on the site.

From this, my study entailed that I search the IMDb website using the following keywords “Top 25 Coming-of-Age Films of the ____” inserting each decade studied: 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s.

Image and reference citations:

Zwier, Abigail J. “Thesis Just Another Teen Movie ... - Mountainscholar.org.” Mountain Scholar, 2012. https://mountainscholar.org/bitstream/handle/10217/67909/Zwier_colostate_0053N_11150.pdf?sequence=1.

Salden, Anne. “Coming-of-Age Film in the Age of Activism: Agency and Intersectionality in Moonlight, Lady Bird, and Call Me By Your Name.” Master Media Studies (Film Studies), 2018.

Pittway, Holly. “Conflicting Identities in American Psycho: Redbrick Film.” Redbrick, June 19, 2020. https://www.redbrick.me/conflicting-identities-in-american-psycho/.