So just about exactly 30 years ago now, a film scholar named Laura Mulvey wrote an article called "Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema," which defines "the erotic pleasure in film" in terms of voyeurism, sadism, and "the fetishistic representation of the female image." The male viewer, according to her thesis, identifies with the "omnipotence" of the male protagonist and the "active power of the erotic look." In a later essay, "Afterthoughts on 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,'" she addresses the female spectator, arguing that she oscillates between a "transvestite" masculinization (in identifying with the male hero) and "passive femininity." She condemns scopophilia--which she defines as arising "from pleasure in using another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight"--and her split between the "active/male" subject who gazes and "passive/female" object of the gaze. Well, there's certainly enough truth to her argument if you're looking at classic cinema, but at the same time, I found her approach binary and reductionist. I don't think she ever deals adequately with "the female gaze," and it never occurs to her to wonder about a "lesbian gaze." What happens when the hero is female? Where do the viewers' identifications lie? Her worst crime, in my humble opinion, was introducing the phrase "the male gaze" to the language, where it became ubiquitous and omnipresent in film criticism, literary criticism, art criticism, and probably architectural criticism for the next couple of decades.

What does this have to do with Hercules the Legendary Journeys, I hear you ask. One thing I've always liked about XWP and HTLJ was that the heroes of both series were equally heroic and equally babe-a-licious, although Hercules was a good deal more nurturing than Xena. What HTLJ did particularly well on occasion was not only present its hero as a sex object, but also include a kind of meta self-consciousness about doing so, including characters in the episode who are in awe of Herc's hunkiness, thereby standing in for the viewing audience. This type of play with the "gaze" tended to occur in episodes directed by Michael Hurst, who also played Hercules' sidekick Iolaus and the ambiguously gendered Widow Twanky (is MH playing a woman, is he playing a man in drag, or a transgendered woman?), an occasonal character who obviously lusts after her "hunky Herc." In a fifth season episode, "Greece is Burning," Twanky describes Hercules as "a sight for sore thighs" and strokes his biceps, exclaiming "I haven't felt anything that hard in a long time!" The episode title, of course, refers to Paris is Burning, the 1980 documentary about New York drag queens, further evoking a queer resonance. In Twanky's initial appearance in the episode titled, " . . . And Fancy Free," Twanky teaches Hercules to "dance" by evoking his ability to fight together with a partner, using the same moves that Hercules and Iolaus use in a typical fight.

So what does this have to do with icons, I hear you cry. In "Greece is Burning," there's a wonderful scene in which Hercules is pouring a bucket of water over himself, and the camera lingers lovingly on the drops of water making their way down his chest. Hurst, the director of the episode, certainly seems to be playing with the idea of the "gaze." The camera switches between Hercules and three viewers: a young man, a young woman, and the Widow Twanky, and there is, in fact, a lingering shot of the Widow Twanky's eye. So much for the male gaze and the passive female object. I've always loved that scene and have been wanting to make an icon representing it for some time now. So, I'll now shut up, to your sighs of relief, and let the picture do the talking. :-)



Resources are in my Resource Post, and each icon has individual credits here.

Take, use, enjoy, but please credit (and comments are cool too). :-)