How Are Women Represented in the Films You Have Studied for This Topic?

Women in get Get Carter are represented as having a lower status than men. The rarely serve a function to the narrative and if they do, almost immediately after they have fulfilled their role, they are disposed of and never seen again.

A prime example of this is the character of Glenda. She is first introduced as a tool of Kinnear, he tells her to get Carter a drink and she immediately follows his instruction.  This shows her lower status and how she has to be obedient to the men surrounding her.
There are many men surrounding her who have more power than she does and they ignore her presence unless it’s to give her instruction, this isolates her and makes her seem vulnerable and it is clear that she’s only there as Kinnear’s tool and to seduce Carter. This also reflects the role of women in society at the time as men in power surround them too.

Glenda’s role in the narrative is mainly passive and her only active part is when she sleeps with Carter, which leads to him finding out important information. So even in her active role she is still submissive to a man. Laura Mulvy published a study on the way women are viewed in film and their impact on the narrative. Her belief is that women in film are dominated by the male point of view and their role in the narrative is passive rather than active like the male role. She believes that audiences of film are forces to view the film from a male point of view or “The Male Gaze”.
The Male Gaze suggests that women in film serve two purposes: one, to be the erotic object of a character or two, to be the erotic object of the audience. The audience is forced to adopt this view when watching Get Carter because the scenes are shot from angles that imply women have a lower status or angles such as the voyeuristic one’s used to show Anna, which fetishize women. We get the entire story from Carter’s point of view, Carter is a womanizer and his character sees women as lower than him.

Anna is a character that is the erotic object of both character and audience. Her role in the movie is very short and irrelevant to the plot. All it shows is that Carter is masculine. Her whole part in the movie is a phone-sex scene where she is shot in a voyeuristic way. From the moment she is introduced in this scene she is stripping and this was put in to appeal to the male audience. Both the audience and Carter objectify her and Carter is shown to have the power because he can give this woman pleasure with his voice alone.
At the end of the scene when another man enters, Anna is forced to lie and say she’s speaking to a friend. She cannot be truthful about what she is doing and has to hide her activities from a man.

This shows that she does not really have any of the freedom we would expect a woman in her time to have. The film is set in the 70’s and the 60’s were famous for the liberation of women because they were offered contraception and feminism became popular. The representation of women in this film shows that women were not really as liberated as we were led to believe. None of the women in this movie can voice an opinion; they are always talked down to or instructed by men. For example, Edna who is told what to do in her own home and is simply there to feed, shelter and please Carter even though he treats her with no respect.

The invention of the pill may have given women more freedom over their sex lives but it also gave men the same freedom to exploit women. They could sleep with women without the risk of getting them pregnant and so they could sleep with more people. Carter has sexual experiences with three of the women in this film and all three characters disappear or are killed shortly after.
Also because these things are shown in the movie, it implies that the audience enjoyed seeing these things so it would be logical to believe that the view of women being controlled, objectified and of a lower status was one still held by many men in society in the 1970’s