A Glo Network Commercial “Feliz Navidad Nigeria” Through Laura Mulvey’s Lens (The Male Gaze Theory)

 “Feliz Navidad Nigeria” was a Christmas Commercial done by Globacom Limited as a way of wishing their Nigerian audience Happy Holidays and New Year Celebration. This video focused on tap-dancing, music, singing, dancing and celebration generally of a large group of people harmlessly rejoicing over the season’s atmosphere. But beyond this, through Laura Mulvey’s lens, we can see how women and their bodies were being somewhat objectified for visual pleasure. Therefore in this review, we’ll be talking about the gaze of the camera; this is how the camera frames and moves in a way that objectifies the women in this video. We would also be looking at the gaze of the characters within the film; Typically, the male character and how the move their gaze towards the female characters also signifying who the subject is and also who the object is. Consequently, we’d be diving into the gaze of the audience and how they are encouraged to look at the female characters in the commercial as passive objects of male desire.

Firstly, we’d be observing the camera techniques and the visual framing to see what shots and frame were used to portray this message in “Male Gaze”. At the start of the commercial, we could see when the woman and three other men (bodyguards) were walking into the event center, the camera viewed them from behind making the figure of the woman more pronounced. There were other parts in this commercial where some parts of the women’s bodies were focused on by the camera. For example, the woman who was playing the saxophone, we could see at some intervals in the commercial how the camera was focused on her laps and legs. I’d also say the same for the women who were tap-dancing, a much part of the commercial was focused on their laps and legs to a large extent. In all of this, we see the camera majorly lingering on female bodies. All this might seem harmless to us because we see it as ‘vibes’ in this part of the country. But through Laura Mulvey’s Lens, this camera focuses that we’ve highlighted in the commercial and how they focus on the women’s bodies, they simply imply the female character as being sexualized for the viewer’s pleasure. Often times, videos done get large attention retention if there’s nothing that’s drawing the eyes of the viewers. In this case, it’s the beautifully shaped figure of the woman’s body. She is represented as a visual object rather than a subject with agency or any sense of power at all.

Secondly, we’ll be observing Who Looks At Whom i.e how the male characters in the commercial are watching the female characters. At 0:31 seconds in the video we could see how the male character there stares at the woman portraying it to be as though he’s getting pleasure from the sight. Although, we do not see a lot of this in the video and we might count it at nothing but through this lens, every little sign is BIG. In the few places where the men looked at the women, the gaze was not returned by the woman and there was little to no reaction from the women to being observed. This just implies that power lies with the looker who is usually male while the one being looked at, which is the female, is passive. This reinforces gender hierarchy which is a social construct where certain genders are positioned as superior or more dominant than others, resulting in systemic inequality. In this case, the video portrays men as dominant and the women as submissive. This gaze from men when they get that visual pleasure from women’s bodies is known as Scopophilia.

Also, for viewer identification, we could see that the camera aligned the viewer with a male character’s perspective. I’d say this because at a lot of points in the video, we see a lot of women and how the camera focuses on them and some parts of their body. As a viewer of that commercial, I would say that while watching the video it led me on a path where I could not but notice the female characters in the commercial because of how the narrative, camera composition and structuring was focusing mostly on the women’s bodies and faces themselves. This indicates that the audience has been positioned to identify with male desire and power. This commercial also aligns pleasure with the male perspective, it’s trying to portray that the visual pleasure and satisfaction comes from the male’s perspective, sidelining female experience/perspective of the video. We could also see largely that the women in the video are dressed and filmed to highlight physical beauty and sexuality.

At the end of the day, the commercial was a harmless one but of course we’re looking beyond the innocence, we’re looking deeper and trying to find hidden motifs from this commercial, a few of which we’ve done above already. Through Laura Mulvey’s lens, they used elements like Camera, Framing and composition, makeup, dressing and styling and so on. At some point, we could also see that lighting was used to emphasize some features of the women’s bodies. When the camera, character, and viewer are all aligned with a heterosexual male perspective, the woman becomes a spectacle, not a person. Recognizing these cues helps uncover hidden power structures in media.