Reaction To The Sissy Gaze in American Cinema

My freshman year in film school I remember such topics as the male gaze or female gaze in film. The male gaze being the way our eye portrays women in film. We see them as advertisements, and the females notice the way that us men stare at them and treat themselves as objects also to use their looks as seductive power over men. The male gaze is very eminent in Hitchcock films. Rear Window is told almost purely through the eyes of the male role Jimmy Stuart. Hitchcock gives a lot of point of view shots to the male in his films.

However, I have never heard of the sissy gaze. The power of the sissy gaze comes from the “problems of Hollywood” today. According to Ray Davis the author of, The Sissy Gaze in American Cinema, people are challenging cinema constantly these days saying it is not what it used to be. Ray Davis has the solution for what is different about films. It is not that Hollywood has lost their ability to create original storyline, or use the same formula to create every film. It is that Hollywood has stopped using sissies in their films. Males with a feminine touch are the aspect that film does not have anymore. When Davis first proposed this I thought it was ridiculous, but then I reflected over my favorite films from early cinema. Davis used stars from the early star-cast system like Charlie Chaplin and buster Keaton “snapping a limp wrist” (Davis) constantly at the camera. One film in particular I think of is Modern Times with Charlie Chaplin especially in the beginning. Charlie is working along side this enormous masculine man who keeps threatening Charlie with his dominance. Keaton and Chaplin are both men that are relatively small and skinny, not exactly the Christian Bale’s or the multiple actors that interpreted the role of James Bond that we see today.

Even old German films from the German Expressionism era contained sissy men. In the film, Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), directed by Robert Weine, the somnambulist Cesare is skinny, frail, and reminds most of us of a ballet dancer. Villains in more modern films contain masks of horror and body armor with chiseled abs. Or in the movie, Metropolis, by Fritz Lang, the main character seemed very ‘light’ for a man. The way he ran was quite off, and even the way he played games with the women around town was a little odd. However, later in film his feminine qualities were altered as he worked in the underground sweat shops.

I have always noticed that there was a certain politeness to films that has disappeared in the last few decades. I miss the strange courtesy in the relationship of Count Dracula and John Harker as Bela Lugosi welcomes his visitor to his home just before offering him a midnight snack. A strange atmosphere always surrounded the early actors of Hollywood, the way they dressed or moved. “Contemporary hard body stars are easy to picture in gay porn” (Davies) as they are continuously featured with their clothes off with bodies that are completely toned and perfect. The politeness that was once is no more in films with fighting machines like Will Smith in I Am Legend.

Finally, this is what I feel the Sissy Gaze is. In all films viewers must see the story through the eyes of one of the characters. The character is usually the one that embodies the viewer most accurately. We cannot relate to most Hollywood actors with superior genes and bodies that you only see in magazines. Most men in America are average; I guess that is why the term average is coined. We relate to the smaller gentlemen that are better at talking and being gentle, rather than the hyper-male that can do everything physically. Since less of us are relating to these hyper-masculine characters less of us are enjoying the Hollywood narrative.