Avengers Fandom

Avengers fans, often known as Loki's Army, are always seen as dressing up as the characters and getting very involved in the films. Universal Studio's, Florida, encourage this fandom by having a Marvel Superhero Island in which the rides are based around the Marvel films and there are people walking around dressed as the characters to encourage fans to have photos taken. This park can be seen below. 

 

 










The fans of Avengers Assemble are very varied; the director choose to use specific stars for this reason as Samuel Jackson brings in an african american audience and Robert Downey Jr brings in audiences of over 40 years old. However, the main audience of the film would probably be males aged 16-30. This can be noted through the merchandise that was produced from the aftermath of the film, male clothing in sizes for teenagers and above. There was also a lot of merchandise produced for young boys too, creating the idea for fathers to purchase for their son. The film did also attract a lot of female attention and there appears to be quite a few females who are also joining in on this fandom. The demographic breakdowns showed that everyone could enjoy The Avengers; families watched the film during the daytime, young adults and teens watched the film later and couples dominated the evening business of the film. 

The fans intense dressing up (as seen in the images below) show how the films got increasingly more popular and noticed. Disney helped market the film and with their promotions aimed at women, this increased the market of women going to see the film, statistics show that women made up 40% of the audience. 

 

 

Something else that is picked up with the Avengers film is the fan art (examples of this can be seen in the images below). Fan art is where audiences and fans have created their own images of the characters in the film and sometimes their own scenes from the films. This is breaking down the barriers between the director and spectator, creating the spectator to have more involvement within the film, and becoming a consumer. This helps director's as they can then see how their audience's interact with the films and how to make the next film better by incorporating the audience's ideas. 

Fandom is significant to our studies on spectatorship as by the fans getting involved within the film and dressing up and creating their own image based on the characters from the film, they are increasing the alignment with the characters, making them have a deeper understanding and possibly a different understanding and creation of meaning from the films. Fandom helps involve the fans more into the film, breaking down these barriers between film and real life, it may help the film become more "real" to them, interacting with the way that they see the film. 

From looking at Fandom within the Avengers Assemble film, it shows me that both male and female's are getting involved with the film this way and seem to both think the same way about the film and it's ideas as long as they are both involved and interested in the same film. Their gender doesn't appear to affect their spectatorship with a film that they are largely interested in. However with regards to this film, many female audiences feel that the marketing can be slightly sexist in the amounts of male merchandise produced and less for females, showing how the directors possibly didn't expect the film to be popular with female audiences? 

How significant is gender to a spectators experience and what evidence do you have for your argument?

How significant is gender to a spectators experience and what evidence do you have for your argument?

Gender appears to be important with a spectator’s experience, as with the spectator’s gender they are able to align with the characters easier and specialized to themselves. Your gender affects the ways in which you see things and understand things, as your gender affects different experiences.

Freud’s psychoanalysis theory is argued to affect the way our gender affects our spectatorship as different genders have different conscious thoughts that they want to repress so would see things differently, depending on their own conscious and unconscious thoughts. Freud argued that women were envious of men’s penis’, with this view it may affect a female’s experience of a film as if they were envious they may dislike the male characters, causing them to not align with that character and this may create them to have a different view and understanding of that film entirely.

The male gaze theory affects the ways spectators view something, as all spectators are seeing the same event through the perspective of a male and the sexualized female on screen. We are seeing things through a voyeuristic view where the spectator cannot help but look.  This can be applied to the film ‘Black Swan’ as by having the male gaze in this film, male spectators may be awarded with some sort of sexual gratification with the images and voyeuristic camera shots we have of the main female character. The scene in which her dance instructor touches up Natalie Portman’s character whilst he is supposedly helping her is an example of this as there are extreme close up’s of parts of her body. Heterosexual females may not see this voyeuristic look on the female character so may interpret this in different ways to which male characters did.

The ways in which the spectators connect with the film affects their viewing experience and this can be argued to be affected by their gender. Males and females align with different characters as they have different feelings towards characters which is affected by their own gender, often due to feeling sympathetic towards certain characters, finding aspects of yourself within the characters and aligning with them this way. Emotional response is also affected in the same way as your gender may affect the ways you see certain things happening with the film and your gender can affect the ways you respond to this and your understanding of messages from this.

There are also oppositional reading’s that we can see, for example for the female gaze theory. This can be seen in the film ‘Magic Mike’ in which there is sexual gratification but for females as we are seen looking voyeuristic at the male characters. However, it is noticed that the female gaze is not as direct as the male gaze is in Black Swan as perhaps this is not seen as acceptable so it is more rare and causes much more of a fuss over it. This female gaze would affect the spectator’s viewing as female’s may have some sexual gratification by watching male’s stripping.

The Female Gaze in Magic Mike

Magic Mike is a film about male strippers in which female audiences are encouraged to look at the male characters with pleasure, and is argued to focus almost entirely on the straight female gaze. 

 

The film sexualises the male characters as they are seen as objects, like women are in the male gaze, we are encouraged to look at and watch these characters with pleasure. The male character's job is to be a stripper and sexually please the audience with their appearance.

As the director expected, he made a huge profit with female audiences watching the film at cinemas the first weekend in which it was released, the marketing had clearly hit it’s target. However, many viewers of the film stated that the scenes in which the actors were not stripping bored them, making them restless, and that they wanted to see more of the stripping scenes. Although other women viewers argued that this was not what women want to see within a film and expressed their disappointment with the thoughts of what women want to view, this is quite different though to the amount of women who viewed the film for their own purpose.

It is noticed by many how little male nudity (partically full-frontal male nudity) we see in this film and many other films too, contrasted with the high amounts of female nudity that is shown in mainstream movies. Some audiences question whether this is because women are so used to seeing the female body sexualized on screen, that they are unsure how to react to the sexualized male body.

Other viewers compare the ways in which the male strippers in this film are portrayed and the ways female strippers are portrayed in Hollywood movies. The camera never lingers, pauses or isolates the male body as it does in films that star women. The director did not use extreme close up’s of individual body parts and uses long shots to capture Channing Tatum’s talent and gift when he dances. Peter Bradshaw, the Guardian's film critic, notices that "they are taken seriously even when they get into trouble... it's a movie which takes itself quite seriously and I think that's part of it's success as a massive box office hit", this is showing how the male characters are not only seen as sexualised males but professional men who have jobs. 

Amanda Klimczuk (a researcher at the Institute for Mind and Biology) stated that seeing male strippers is “seen as something ‘naughty’ – like eating ice cream right out of the carton – so doing it with friends may be pleasurable, but may also instill giddiness because they’re all doing something ‘taboo’ together.” 

However, women seemed to enjoy looking at males in a pleasurable and sexualized way, as seen by the reviews of the film and the ticket office sales, so perhaps if it wasn’t so uncommon and rare it would be seen more acceptable.