Response to Wynn Hunter's film blog

For some reason, I am unable to comment below Wynn Hunter's blog post titled "007 and the Pleasure of the Male Gaze. I recommend reading it because it is very well written. Here is my response to it:

Your example clip for how the female body is fragmented in fetishized in parts is also a great example of voyeurism. The male in this scene is acting as a voyeur; Ursula does not know he is watching and is intensely startled when she realizes he is. Right up until this point in the scene, the audience has undoubtedly been identify with the male gaze (as you suggest they do) and was, in fact, using her as a fetish. But when the man surprisingly makes himself known, the audience is jolted right along with Ursula. Christian Metz expresses why the audience is jolted in his book, The Imaginary Signifier : In the theatre, as in domestic voyeurism, the passive actor (the one seen), simply because he is bodily present, because he does not go away, is presumed to consent, to cooperate deliberately." But since Ursula is not actually present (only her picture is on the screen), we do not have her consent to be watching. Therefore, because we are sewn into the film, we are jolted when she notices us gazing. According to Metz, "in order to understand the film (at all), I must perceive the photographed object as absent, its photograph as present, and the presence of the absence as signifying. It does not matter that the actual women (and not just her picture) has caught us gazing, being voyeurs. The signifying photo of her presence is all the film needs to operate as a "pseudo-real" life occurrence.