The Whole Plate - Episode 6: The Male Gaze vs. The Men

flashthought... Turturro in Transformers is what happened to his character Al Fountain from Box of Moonlight. When you showed the clip of him reflecting on his own story I half expected him to write it down as a quote, noted with date and time.

Don Bright

Basically, the Bay hates everyone. Except the military. Which is odd since he can't really portray them with any decency (#stillbitteroverpearlharbor)

Up until this point, I had never got the impression that Bay disliked the males in films. I just assumed that this was his preferred sense of humor.

Will Park

Yes, Dan helped formate the whole brain child that was this series, but his biggest contribution were to the gender episodes.

Lindsay Ellis

WITWICKIAD!!! stealing

Lindsay Ellis

Lol.....Michael Bay?

I've really been enjoying your series on Transformers, but I felt that perhaps I was missing out on some vital context by not having seen the films. So, of course, I did the only logical thing one can do, and watched the Witwickiad in a single day. I now have absolutely no more context, and a significant quantity of regrets, so I think I'll skip the Yeagerbombs, but still, your series analyzing these films is wonderful. Now, can someone please explain to me why the Green Day song "21 Guns" comes up four different times in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen?

Harold Kingsberg

I really enjoyed this video, but if I could make a slight comment: there seems to some kind of explosion sound effect at 11:49 that doesn't seem to match up to the clip being shown and momentarily drowns out what you're saying.

Thank you for the expanded view on the term "Male Gaze". I have previously felt somewhat offended by the concept, in-so-much-as I only ever understood it to be the extremely condensed "Looking =Objectifying" But I understand the term and concept much better now. I always learn something new watching your videos.

Benjamin Preston

I think he worked on this with her more directly too, since they're friends in real life, but his video has other good stuff that isn't covered here and it's worth watching both.

I assume that's why he has a co-writing credit on this.

Joe G

If anyone's interested Dan Olson of Folding Ideas made a really good video about Sam Witwicky that went into a lot of the same ideas.

For a couple of years I kept a log of the books I'd read from start to finish. It started as a step towards managing my reading list (at that time I was making a lot of tables and lists; I was unemployed). I put no pressure on myself to alter reading habits for the first year or thereabouts. I just monitored my reading habits. I read some non-fiction by women (popular science, books on logic), but my consumption of fiction was pretty much zero. It's not that I'd not read women authors at all, I just was sort of coasting along, resting on my laurels, not really noticing that I'd censored an entire bloc of authors from my universe, for no real reason really. There were a few fits and starts, where I'd run through (and then invalidate) as to why there was resistance (I owned too many books -- purchasing more wasn't part of the plan!) but ultimately every argument against a shift in habits came down to apathy. I set myself a quota, a target, to get to roughly parity (even by gender from the date of starting the log). It took time and eventually I did it. And then it was like the valve had loosened, and I started to hunt down and devour works by female authors, reading something like 15 in a row. If my study topic wasn't dominated by male authors (mermaids) I'd probably have kept going. I also sought out films written and directed by women, and found that there was such a greater level of comfort, naturalness, and yes sexiness in those films in regards to the female characters, that I was aching for more. And how I never had to notice the domination of film, art, media, literature and so on by male voices; that was something I could coast by without noticing if I wanted to. And the thing about it is is that I wasn't someone who would particularly have thought of himself as in a drought of female influence/stimulation/exposure/whatever, I'd read Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath (I said this to myself over and over in my defence -- and that book by Maggie Gee!) but there's something persistently fucked up in our culture where...I don't know, you just sometimes don't know what you're missing. And if those are the options in easy reach, that's what they dole out to you. And sigh. One last thing: men have been subconsciously more tender to me since I started wearing a bra. I get compliments on my weight loss, my increase in height, my face. Nobody has complimented my shapely tits but I dunno maybe they don't know why they're acting like this to me.

What a fascinating expectation reversal! I'm still dying for us to get to Mikaela, but this was so interesting I don't mind waiting until we get there!

Luninareph

I'm not saying that I *like* your poor planning skills, but I sure enjoy getting two videos in two days. Great work, as always!

Jens Nielsen