Male gaze in David Lynch cinema: Representation of woman in Lynch films

Cinema has been mirroring to almost everything that is pertaining to social structure from past to present. Therefore, cinema culture has been reflecting a lot of socio-cultural changes, experienced chronologically, into the film screen with its own possibilities. However, when it comes to gender, women have been depicted in the frame for more than a hundred years in line with the teachings of a male-centric attitude, and the radical identity and role changes in terms of women are very limited in films. As a matter of fact, cinema has glorified masculinity with its own possibilities, and the woman has been added to the film culture with a masculine point of view. Even though the experimental efforts created by feminist film culture turned this situation into somewhat in favor of women, the fact that avant-garde art also kept up with the patriarchal structure gave rise to to fail to achieve the desired purpose related to the woman struggle. In this regard, the main concern of this study is to reveal the outline of the concept of male gaze in sliding into the women's identity to the marginalized position and reinforcing this role, especially in David Lynch cinema. In this study, semiotics and psychoanalysis, accepted as the main methods of feminist film theory, have been used, and film analysis has been practised according to this direction. As a result of the analysis, it has been noticed that well-known director David Lynch either interpreted the female identity through the femme fatale identity which he depicted and associated with sexuality, or it has been observed that the female subject has been positioned as a passive character by de-identifying the female subject. Despite the fact that David Lynch is a distinct director feeding on art cinema, when it comes to women, it can be recognised that the director also approaches women in a patriarchal mentality with cliché images and in a misogynistic way.