Get Carter - Glenda

The character of Glenda in Get Carter serves the purpose to provide sexual pleasure for men in the film and the heterosexual males in the audience. The women in the film are only seen in relation to men from their point of view. For example, in the scene in Kinnear's room she serves as a distraction for Jack by wearing revealing clothes and emphasising her seductive nature. She waits on the men by serving them drinks when instructed to by Kinnear. This shows how men hold power over her and how she complies to their commands. When she is talking to Jack her voice is drowned out by the voices of the other men in the scene, despite the fact that what she was saying was relevant information about Sid Fletcher. The men's diegetic voice is louder than Glenda's indicating how a mans voice is more important than a woman's. This reflects the ideologies of the 70s as being a patriarchal society and a time where women were treated as having less importance than men and a lower status.  

Laura Mulvey proposed the theory of 'Visual Pleasure and the Narrative cinema' which suggests that the audience must view the film from the perspective of a heterosexual male - or from the 'male gaze'. The theory suggests that role of a female character serves two purposes: as an erotic object for the characters in the film and as an erotic object for the spectator in the audience. This can be applied to Glenda's character as in one scene we can see close-ups of Glenda's body parts such as her chest, legs, face, hands and backside all from Jack's POV. This sexualises parts of her body and aims to serve pleasure for Jack and the audience viewing it. Women are denied sexual pleasure and a POV throughout the film and Glenda's only function is to provide sexual pleasure for men. The montage shots that juxtapose the car and the women connotes how they both serve specific functions in that a woman's job is to please a man. Glenda is not represented as a realistic representation of a woman. Instead she is being fetishised and depicted as a sexual object whose sole purpose is the gratification of men, both in the film and in the audience, we gaze at her body just like Carter does. This highlights Mulvey's theory and reinforces the view of woman in the 70s as simply being a means of sexual pleasure for men.