Applying Voyarism

I have chosen to us the example of Katy Perry’s ‘California Gurls’ music video to express the term of voyeurism. This is a term which shows male or female performers/artist that give some sort of pleasure to the audience from the screen. In this case I have chosen a female performer which mainly gives the voyeuristic characters to mostly males, through her costume, actions and Mise-en-Sene.

The song begins with a shot of a female figure being put onto some sort of playing board, immediately the audience can see that this female performer, Katy Perry is seen and being used as an object. The fact that she is seen as small from the proportion of her being place by a males, Snoop Dogs, hand.  The narrative of the music video is that the female, Katy Perry is being placed in a candy filled board game which the male, Snoop Dog is playing in his own candyland castle. The narrative progresses as there is a battle between the two and Katy triumphs. At the beginning Katy is seen as the object but throughout the video the narrative is subverted and the ending is  Snoop Dog  being surrounded by girls  and buried to the head in sand.  

The costume plays a vital part within this video as Katy is dressed in short, extremely tight dresses with thigh high suspender, which are all related to the candy dream that she is in. 

The most obvious shot of the video, which is what I personally feel make the video categorise as voyeuristic is the shot that has the least amount of costume on Katy in the nude on a candyfloss cloud, which covers her private areas, eating candyfloss. This was such a strong image that this shot was the cover of her album, evidently as her entre album was this theme.

In these shots the camera was scaling Katy's body slowly up and down. 

Katy is always making eye contact with the audience which enhances and engages the intimacy between the audience and the artist. 

Katy also has a choreographed dance scene within the video, in this herself and her backing dancers where dressed in revealing clothing; a cupcake bikini and hot pants. In this scene there were medium close ups of the girls stomachs and crotch areas.  

In the performance that Katy Perry was giving her actions was emphasising the voyeurism within the video as all the seductive actions were either in slow-mo or shot as a close up. This was mainly used on the with the whip-cream, as seen in the images below. 

She was also performing different facial expression and seductively eating different sweet things throughout the video. 

The entre video was set in a candy land so the Mise-en-Sene was an entre fantasy of a male’s mind of a girl. This is what I feel captures and relates to the audience, males.