Get Carter

Anna

During the scene with Anna in the bed whilst on the phone to Jack, she follows his orders without hesitation – showing that she is passive character. We, as the audience, are positioned between her legs looking up at her body in a very intimate and invasive, voyeuristic manner. As Jack cannot see Anna because he is in Newcastle, he gains no pleasure directly from the situation, only a perverse pleasure from doing so in front of Edna. This follows Laura Mulvey’s ‘visual pleasure and the narrative cinema’ theory that states that women occupy two roles in a narrative: an erotic object for the characters or an erotic character for the audience. Anna is reduced to an object for audience sexual pleasure; it is only the fact that it is Brit Ekland (viewed as one of the sexiest women in the 1970s) that she is used in such a way to bring male audience members to see the film.

Carter is in control of her sexual pleasure (‘wait til Sunday’) and Fletcher has no notion that Anna could be pleasuring herself whilst on the phone shows men’s attitudes to female sexual pleasure. Sexual liberation, which was marketed as coming to prominence in the ‘swinging sixties’, has failed and is not wide spread.