It also intensifies the fear portrayed in this scene.
Louise arrives on the scene just as Thelma's attacker is about to penetrate Thelma. The attacker ignores Louises voice over until the gun comes into the scene and is held at his jaw. Louise looks strong and unwavering when she is threatening the attacker. The attacker looses his phallic power over Thelma when Louise takes it with another phallic symbol, the gun. She forces the attackers face out of frame with the gun to his jaw, which indicates the power she has gained. Louise stops the rape before penetration but then penetrates the attacker when she shoots him with the gun.
After the gun shot, Louise remains calm after the realisation of what she had done. She calmly tells Thelma to get the car and walks away from the scene slowly, evidently shocked by what she has done.
ARGUMENT.
The gaze theory was written by Laura Mulvey, a feminist film theorist, in an essay called "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema". The gaze takes a psychoanalytical look at the moving picture and many of its ideas are based on Freudian theory. In simple terms, Mulvey believed that films where made with an intentional male audience and females on screen are there to be looked act, not to act. This is supported by John Berger "men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at". Mulvey also focused her theory around the idea of scopophilia, which is a form of control by looking.
Mulvey argues that men gain pleasure in two ways by looking at women in cinema. The voyeuristic gaze and the fetishistic gaze. With the voyeuristic gaze, the viewer wishes to control the object on the screen. With the fetishistic gaze, men compensate for their fear of having their power overturned by a powerful women (the Freudian theory of the fear of castration) by making the female form into fetish object. According to Mulvey, "fetishism leads to the female image becoming overvalued for example the cult of the female movie star" .
