In the video women are used primarily to add visual appeal to the title sequence for men. The general concept plays off of old spy TV shows and movies, and women are used in a similar manner to affect the “Bond Gaze”. The silhouettes of the women dancing spliced into the intro are there solely for their looks. The hosts of Top Gear even say to the audience before they air the clip that they specifically needed to have cars, guns, karate, and women. At one point, Jeremy Clarkson is shown in a car with three women and looks at the camera with a “look at me now” glance through which he indirectly says that he only cares about the women because they make him look good. Near the end of the video, Richard Hammond drives up to the Playboy Club of London in an attempt to make himself look “cooler”. Again it is the objectification of women that makes men look better.
http://www.topgear.com/uk/jeremy-clarkson/clarkson-women-2009-10
In this article Clarkson talks about women as television presenters and racing drivers posing questions as to why they aren't abundant in either field.
Does it seem the hosts of Top Gear are over playing the female aspect of the show intentionally? What does that say about women in this genre of film/television?
ReplyDeleteI believe that the Top Gear hosts are indeed over playing the female aspect, because it will attract more male viewers, whom are the largest majority of their viewer community. It shows that women in this genre definitely fall under the male gaze, and are really only there for looks rather than plot.
ReplyDeleteThe specific pop culture item talked about in this blog is Top Gear: The Interceptors. The main idea in this post is that Top Gear is using women in a male gaze in order to attract more viewers to their show. They believe that women are a way to make the men look better by dressing scantily to make the men look like 'players'.
I think you did a good job of supporting your main idea. I like how you actually picked out parts of the video and talked about them, rather than just typing a generic blog about what the video was about (as in, just talking about the objectification of women).
The video was very effective, and placed before the rest of the blog. This is great since the actual blog talks about the video, so it prioritizes the video to give the readers background information.
I think this clip does an interesting job playing on the images from the Bond clip we watched in class. However you need to develop those ideas more. What is the Bond Gaze (or male gaze) more generally? How does a parody undermine or reinforce it? Top Gear spoofs a lot of different cultural tropes, and we need to keep that context in mind as well.
ReplyDeleteWhat does the second image have to do with this?
The link at the bottom seems out of place, you should probably choose one or the other to analyze but not both.