cléo and mirrors - the male gaze visualized

Cléo ends up going into a hat shop, relaxed by her reflection in the many mirrors throughout the store as she tries on the various hats...The hats Cléo tries on are ridiculous and do not fit her head right for they are so small, and she can barely see her reflection in the tiny mirrors. Yet, she still finds comfort in her reflection, finding these hats stylish because purchasing and wearing them will further turn her into an object desired by the male gaze.

Just as Madeleine is wrapped up in her own vanity, as expressed by her admiring her reflection in a compact mirror, Cléo is drawn to the mirror outside the tarot reader’s office and stops to admire herself. She then utters a line that encapsulates her mindset and shallowness perfectly: “Wait, pretty butterfly. Ugliness is a kind of death. As long as I’m beautiful, I’m even more alive than the rest.”

However, Cléo undergoes a shift halfway through the film. Fed up by the way her lover, music producer, and songwriter (all of whom are men) treat her, she snaps at her producer and songwriter and goes out into Paris on her own. This pivotal moment in the narrative demonstrates where Varda and Godard diverge – with this scene, Varda allows her female character to undergo a change and become a subject, which is an arc Godard does not allow Madeleine to experience.

With this, she switches from playing into these men’s demands to resisting them, yelling, “You make me this way, treating me like an idiot or a china doll! A revolution with macabre words! You tire me! You exploit me! Go away!” At this moment, Cléo realizes these men are exploiting her, and she does not want to comply any longer. Up to this point she enjoyed her pop star status and found joy in people recognizing her (take the woman in the hat store asking for a photo and the taxi driver playing her song, for example). The fusion of her economic and sexual success did not bother her, and she did not care that she was being exploited for she was ultimately benefiting from the system through her fame. However, finally acknowledging the exploitation she experiences by the men in charge of her career, she refuses to comply any longer. This strays from Madeleine’s attitude toward her own career in Godard’s film, for she always remains content with her exploitation, fusing her sexual and economic power to continue to succeed.

Before, she was merely an object of other people’s gaze, prohibiting her from being able to see the world around her because she was preoccupied with the idea of being seen. With her newfound subjecthood, she possesses her own gaze. Her Parisian neighborhood has been transformed in her eyes; “the city street thus becomes a new structuring presence that enables her and those around her to participate in an alternative model of spectatorship not defined by a strict subject/object dichotomy” (Mouton 9).