The Male Gaze in Iron Man 2

Valerie Gritsch March 29, 2017 MEDST 320W: Gender, Sexuality, & Media Professor Herzog Close Analysis of the Male Gaze in Iron Man 2 Tony Stark is sparring with a friend Happy Hogan in this short scene where his character unknowingly meets his future crime-fighting partner in the 2010 film Iron Man 2, directed by Jon Favreau. Natasha Romanoff, going by the name Natalie Rushman - aka Black Widow - enters the scene with paperwork, as she’s currently undercover as a legal secretary at Stark Industries. Watching this, I was thrilled that the only female Avenger had turned up at last in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), only to be swiftly disappointed at the way she was introduced. Upon meeting her, Tony Stark is, well, Tony Stark. That is to say, he thinks he is charming as he “oogles” Natasha, forcing her to go into a boxing ring with Happy, as he sits back to watch. While babbling on about how he needs Natasha as his assistant to Pepper Potts - Tony’s former assistant, and newly appointed CEO of Stark Industries - when Natasha flips Happy down, startling and impressing the room. As Natasha exits, Tony remarks to Pepper “I want one.” “I want one” - not even using the word “her”, but rather “one”. To Tony, Natasha is an object. We have just watched a scene through the “male gaze”. This term was coined by Laura Mulvey, and is explored in her 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” The male gaze is the way that the male point of view is written into film, which often lowers a woman's status to an object of “visual pleasure”. This fetishizes a woman. By objectifying a woman you are reducing them, containing them, and removing their agency. They can not fight or talk back. They exist to be looked at. As we break this scene down further to see how Tony makes Natasha into an object specifically, we can also see the brief moment when Natasha breaks her objectification. The clip of this film I used for this analysis I found uploaded to YouTube. 0:12 to 0:16 - LS: Natasha enters the brightly lit room where Tony and Happy are boxing, she walks around a corner and is walking towards the camera. She’s in a white button down shirt, with a few top buttons open, and black slacks. MS: Shot over Tony’s shoulder, Happy faces the camera and watches Natasha enter. He stops, nods toward her off screen, and Tony turns around to stare, confused. MS: Natasha, who paused for a moment, looks at Happy and Tony, before looking down and walking over to Pepper with the paperwork. There is no dialogue throughout this. 0:30 to 0:34 - MS: Tony, with his back to us, hits Happy, turns toward the camera and asks “What’s your name, lady?” to Natasha. CU: Natasha answers, centered in the frame. MS: Tony, demands she “get into the church” (the boxing ring) while turning away dismissively from her, and the camera, as Pepper protests off screen. 0:42 to 0:46 - MS: Tony lifts the ropes with a water bottle hanging out of his mouth. CU: Of the ropes on the right side of the screen. We see Natasha’s leg enter, then her bend down low to duck her head and rest of her body into the ring. She’s staring up at Tony (the camera) as she does this, silently. It feels uncomfortably long. She stands staring at him with her mouth slightly open. 0:47 to 1:00 - CU: Tony, staring at her, licks his lips and drinks from the bottle. CU: Natasha is silently staring at him, smiling slightly. CU: Tony is still drinking from the bottle, watching her. He stops, and goes “what?” leaning towards her. CU: Natasha blinks and leans back a bit. CU: Tony smirks. MS: Framed as Tony, Happy, and Natasha from outside the ring, Tony tells Happy to “give her a lesson”, as he exits. 1:05 to 1:13 - MS: On the right hand side of the screen Pepper and Tony discuss “who is she”, and Pepper says she’s a potential sexual harassment case. On the left side of the frame, behind them, we can see Happy and Natasha walking around the ring, talking, but we can’t make out much of what they’re saying. Tony crosses and uncrosses his legs, his arms are folded, he seems impatient as he watches Natasha. 1:23 to 1:27 - CU: We’re back in the ring, over Happy’s shoulder, facing her, as he asks Natasha if she’s ever boxed before. She smiles and says yes. CU: Over Natasha’s as Happy looks down on her, smirking, listing off options of more “girlier” forms of boxing, including “booty boot camp”. CU: Back over Happy’s shoulder, we see Natasha look down like she’s slightly defeated, annoyed, and uncomfortable, as she clears her throat. 1:34 to 1:50 - CU: Over Tony’s shoulder as he does a Google search of Natasha’s fake identity (Natalie). MS: Pepper looking annoyed while Tony reads out his findings, like that she’s fluent in numerous languages. CU: Back over the shoulder, the screen is a collection of photos of Natasha in glamour shots, most with big hair, pouting, and she’s in underwear. He picks one and zooms in on it on his screen. MS: Tony makes a comment about her modelling, while staring at her photos, and Pepper rolls her eyes. “I need her” (to be his assistant) he says. 1:53 to 1:58 - MS: Happy and Natasha in the ring, Natasha has her back towards us (and Tony) but she’s turned to look at him talking about her, she’s almost frowning. In front of her Happy looks smug as he says “Rule #1 never take your eyes off your opponent” and he goes to swing. CU: Over Happy’s shoulder, Natasha grabs his fist, twists it and does some impressive leg on the neck pull down move to pin Happy to the floor. MS: Pepper and Tony react, startled, screaming. 2:26 to 2:34 - MS: Natasha is standing on the right, asking Tony (who is with Pepper on the left side) if that’ll be all after he signs her papers. He says “No” while Pepper says “Yes” and thanks her. Natasha goes to exit the room walking behind them. CU: Pepper and Tony watch her go, he turns to Pepper to say “I want one” and Pepper says “No”, in a tone and manner of a mother scolding a whiney child who wants a toy, not a human being as an assistant. There is a ton of creepy, predatory behavior in this short scene. Tony is Natasha’s boss, so he thinks, and he is exploiting the power he has over her as such. Natasha is not in a position to say no to anything that is happening throughout the scene. She can not say no to getting in the ring, she can not say no to being Googled, and “oogled”. She has no control, and comes off meek, and beautiful, and mysterious. Both men leer at her repeatedly, as she stands in front of them, and on a screen after Tony searches for her online. As if he is not satisfied, and it is not enough to see her as she currently is. Tony feels entitled to dig into her past and see what is not on the surface - literally and figuratively. By discussing his internet search findings out loud, he makes his perverse and invasive actions known to the room, embarrassing Natasha and mildly annoying Pepper. This scene is meant to be funny, even though Tony is belittling and sexualizing an employee, in all ways reducing Natasha to an object of pleasure. The last sentence of the scene says it all: “I want one.” It is frustrating that we are meant to side with Tony’s point of view, and see nothing - or at least very little - wrong with how he is behaving. It is even more frustrating to see the only other woman in the scene, Pepper, not actually do a damn thing to help Natasha out of this situation. Pepper is Tony’s actual long term love-interest in the MCU, and she spends the majority of the scene looking annoyed, rolling her eyes, acting as if she is dealing with a child. She jokingly calls Natasha a “potentially very expensive sexual harassment lawsuit” Said at 1:12 in the clip on YouTube once Tony starts getting fixated on her. She does nothing to stop this sexualization from happening, and would rather ignore it - and Tony - completely it appears. She could have stood by Natasha, she could have defended her and helped her hold onto her agency. Pepper is the boss, after all, so she should be able to squash anything before it gets to that level of uncomfortable. But she does nothing. Happy acts condescendingly to Natasha the entire time. He’s taller than she is, and he is literally looking down on her in the boxing ring. To add to this, the entire time he is smirking in a very cocky, full of himself, manner. Since Tony began objectifying her, Happy piggy backs off it. The difference here is that while interacting with Tony, Natasha smiles, she seems almost coy at times, and she is silently obedient. With Happy, she begins to look annoyed, she scoffs at one point, and then literally breaks out of the box of seen and not heard objectification by proving in one move that she was a better fighter than him. In the greater context of the film this makes sense, because Natasha is undercover and trying to get herself hired as Tony’s assistant to stay close to him. This is why she lets herself be treated this way, when it is clear she is more than capable of handling herself. It is not revealed till later in the film that Natalie Rushman is really Natasha Romanoff, a S.H.I.E.L.D S.H.I.E.L.D. stands for Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division. agent and key player in the Avengers as Black Widow. Without knowing this, Mulvey’s model of scopophilia - the pleasure of looking - absolutely fits this scene from Iron Man 2. Mulvey wrote, “The power to subject another person to the will sadistically or to the gaze voyeuristically is turned on to the woman as the object of both. Power is backed by certainty of legal right and the established guilt of the woman (evoking castration, psychoanalytically speaking).” (Mulvey, 1975, p 841) The only way to not be totally creeped out by this scene as an audience member is to identify with Tony. His gaze is reinforced during the most erotic moment - Natasha entering the boxing ring - with the shot from Tony’s point of view. Natasha is a spy, she’s a fighter, she’s all kinds of badass. But here she is reduced to just limbs and big eyes looking up silently at a man who has all the power in the room. When the shots are not from Tony’s point of view, the audience is forced to watch him watch Natasha, and to become voyeurs as well. Together - the audience and Tony - we silently soak Natasha in, and are as silent as Pepper as he jokes while looking at her in her underwear on a computer screen, while she’s just a few feet away. However, if you watch this scene knowing who Natasha is, and pay attention to how she acts towards Happy, everything gets a bit more complicated. Natasha is playing into the male gaze to achieve her own end goal. She knowingly commits to it and allows herself to be objectified. She hams it up, crawling into the ring slowly. Her fake identity is just that - fake - meaning she and S.H.I.E.L.D. could have let anything pop up for when Tony searched for her on the computer. The photos of her barely dressed were planted to draw Tony in deeper, to intrigue him more. When she deals with Happy, she has no one to impress or win over. She does not need to smile, or stroke his ego. She can pin him down to the ground in a second, and it will only make Tony want her more, not less, which is exactly what she wanted to happen. It would have been interesting to read from Mulvey about a woman’s role in a scene with the male gaze. Pepper is complicit to the objectification and sexualization of Natasha, and this is an endless source of irritation. Additionally, I would have liked to read more about using the male gaze against the male, using femininity and sexuality to get what one wants, as Natasha does to manipulate the situation without anyone realizing. This scene is complicated to deconstruct because it is so layered, and it requires the foreknowledge of Natasha being a spy to fully appreciate just how clever it is. Like all women under the male gaze, there is far more here than meets the eye.  Works Cited “Iron Man 2 - I Want One.” YouTube, uploaded by Katka Hammerich, 5 May 2013 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iojX7zMhQA “Iron Man 2 (2010).” IMDb, 30 March 2017 Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Film Theory and Criticism : Introductory Readings. Eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. New York: Oxford UP, 199: 833-44 “S.H.I.E.L.D.” Wikipedia, 31 March 2017 Gritsch