Safe Sexy Dance: The Male Gaze, Bayonetta and the Dissonant Resonance of a Humanized, Sexualized Female Character

So, the male gaze in film. In her seminal essay ‘Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema’, Laura Mulvey points out that in classical Hollywood film, women fill the role of passively accepting male views and desires. This leaves them as simple supports or rewards for men, as they are 'controlled and fetishized' over the course of the story. Since I seem to have subconsciously made the choice that this blog is going to be mostly about video games now, let’s think about the male gaze in a medium where control over any playable character is a defining feature. In one of her outstanding series of videos 'Tropes vs Women in Video Games', Anita Sarkesian points out that, from the introduction of the first up-right arcade console in the 80s, the fetishization of women has been a recurrent theme of advertising games to a straight male audience. Models in these adverts are mostly shown pushing themselves up against the peripherals in whatever skimpy gear was most thematically suitable (leopard skin bikinis for jungle adventures etc.). Sarkesian says that, just like the games, the women are presented in a way that suggests they are there for men to play with. Without more complex representation within the game or wider culture generally, women, regardless of race or sexuality, are made to identify with this dehumanizing perspective before interacting with the machine itself, however temporarily. Even when women are the game’s protagonist, their first order of business is to sexually appeal to male players, whether in leather cat suits, breast plates that are more breast than plate or whatever personal peccadillo the game developers want to take for a spin.

Few examples of the hyper-sexualisation of female characters in video games are as fitting as Bayonetta. While she is ludicrously objectified from the very start of the game, a bizarrely significant effort is made to humanise Bayonetta herself. The balanced competition between performing for and being empowered under the male gaze by the game’s end results in a unique resonance between two characterisations that conventional wisdom would suggest are at fundamental cross purposes. Taking my lead from the acrobatic star of the show, I’ll try and manoeuvre out of the blind alley reasoning of whether or not Bayonetta’s sexuality ‘belongs’ to her that dominates discussion of this game and pick out what made this cheese-y, convoluted and poorly scripted action game have such an unexpected effect on me. From there, I’ll make the point that Bayonetta’s primary provocation is directed towards making space for characters that are sexy, human and, an added twist, female.

 *Spoilers to follow*

As much as I love Bayonetta, I still have to bend over backwards to set up a coherent plot synopsis for it (the game itself cuts through any primers as quickly as possible to get to the boobies it takes such pleasure in). Bayonetta is the last survivor of the two hundred year-long Witch Hunts throughout Europe. The hunts came about from a schism within the controlling forces of the world, the Umbran Witches and the Lumen Sages. The pact of non-interaction between women whose power comes from the demons of Inferno and men whose divine energy comes from the angels of Paradiso was broken when a witch and a sage had a child together. The ensuing battle for total control of both omnipotent gems known as the Eyes of the World, one trusted to each clan, resulted in the witches’ near extinction. 20 years later, Bayonetta survives on a new pact with Inferno. In exchange for information of her forgotten past, she guards freshly buried corpses and kills the angelic host that come to claim them for Paradiso, leaving them up for grabs by the hordes of the underworld. When she finds out that both Eyes of the World are under the Lumen Sages control, she must fight through redoubled onslaughts of angels to prevent the puritanical priests from recreating the world in their image. 

Writing out the plot, accurately or otherwise, makes Bayonetta sound much more complex than either the box art or gameplay suggests. From the start, the experience of this game can be described as, in Sarkeesian’s glorious estimation, a choose your own porno adventure. All the potential for Bayonetta as a character is boxed in by hypersexuality. The Umbran Witch power of acrobatic untouchability is expressed by her doing stripper moves, leaning back and wrapping her legs around switches as she pulls them. Being kick-ass and physically domineering mean she is a dominatrix, complete with full-body leather cat suit and overuse of the word ‘naughty’. Her knowledge of Umbran lore means she’s a sexy librarian, complete with British accent and constant salutations to glasses fetishists. What results is an odd combination of the epic, gripping presence of Storm from X-Men and the maniacal and innuendo obsessed bartender Mad Moxxi from Borderlands. 

Even so, three fetishes just weren’t enough for PlatinumGames. To regain health and attack or defence power, Bayonetta sucks seductively on lollipops. More egregiously, completing attack combos successfully forms ‘Wicked Weaves’; anthropomorphic limbs made up of Bayonetta’s hair that erupt from demonic portals to knock murderous angelic choirs for a loop. Since Bayonetta’s outfit is also made up of her hair (seriously), the summoning of these limbs cause most of her clothes to temporarily come off (SERIOUSLY). Sarkesian points out that the player, testing the boundaries of freedom offered by the game, is indirectly encouraged to literally strip her. Still not satisfied, any of Bayonetta’s other special moves end with her in a sexualized pose followed by the snap of a camera lens. Without contest, the gameplay of Bayonetta is the domain of the male gaze.

What's interesting about Bayonetta comes later, when the focus is on what isn’t seen. Bayonetta’s witch powers make her invisible to humans. Also, avoiding being hit or touched by angelic enemies over the course of combat fill her magic gauge to power Wicked Weaves and special moves. While the player is again privileged by always having Bayonetta in sight and grasping the controller is closer than most the angels will get to touching her, the first subversive edge to the game is revealed once Bayonetta takes too many hits and ‘dies’. Choosing to quit the game causes Bayonetta to regain consciousness and scream in terror just as she is dragged to Inferno by thousands of grasping demonic hands. Contrasting this with her swaggering confidence during gameplay shows her as a fetishized object that welcomes and enjoys the male gaze but who does not want to be touched. 

Bayonetta’s invisibility can then be seen to place her outside the patriarchal double bind of female sexuality. This contradictory social structure says that ‘pure’ women must not draw heterosexual male attention and must dress modestly and reject any sexual contact. However, if women reject men’s advances, they are equally disgusting as ‘impure’ women who welcome the male gaze and have many sexual partners; those that touch them in a way that the rejected man feels entitled to do. In the context of this game, women operating under either of these categorizations render them visible to humans by this virgin/whore dichotomy. Outside the social structure of the human world entirely, Bayonetta cannot be seen or touched by anything other than angels and demons. The power of the Umbra Witch is to resist simple, sexist categorization by men outside of her realm of influence.

From here, the potential for Bayonetta to actually be an positive representation of womanhood starts to slowly rise, subverting her objectification and showing her dominance. This growth is shaky at first, overbalancing from the lack of world building. Vigrid is a much less stable location for the off-hand references to fairy tales as well as Dante’s Inferno inspired theology. As a result, it’s never clear whether Cheshire, the male secondary protagonist of the story, is a regular human or the human form of The Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland. His insistence on being called ‘Luka’ suggests the former. Since there’s little evidence for the latter, I’ll assume he’s just a regular womanising photojournalist with a cool scarf from here on. Pursuing Bayonetta for killing his father (his mother is never seen or mentioned) after he freed her from her amnesia inducing nap at the bottom of a lake, Cheshire seeks to capture her on film to show Vigrid the witch hunts aren’t over. He continualy fails to manage this, since Bayonetta’s ‘true form’ doesn’t show up on his camera and she is invisible to him unless she wants to be seen. This failure of men to capture Bayonetta under the gaze that cameras represent then subverts the special move snapshot animation that objectifies her. Whatever sexual pose she strikes is neither recorded nor all of what she is. Her performance for the male gaze in this instance is fleeting, as her resistance to sight and touch returns when she throws herself back into combat.

You can't see me

While this choice could just priviledge the player's constant sight of Bayonetta through the fluid camera work of gameplay, their discovering of her 'true form' is also fragmented by the style of the game's cutscenes. Taking place over comic book like frames of 35mm film with constantly moving surroundings but stationary characters, a narrative space almost devoid of the male gaze performance of gameplay is opened up. These scenes construct Bayonetta's past, with each scene giving more of her backstory as rewards for clearing gameplay sections. The essential seperation of story and play in games are used together to show Bayonetta's 'true form'.

The resonant balance between male gaze and female empowerment that makes Bayonetta so fascinating takes full shape with the inclusion of Cereza, who contributes even more to the convoluted story, its exaggerated structure and the thematic undercurrent of agency that the game unexpectedly makes its focus. After her introduction as an translucent, human-realm dwelling shadow in the game's early chapters, Cereza, a five year old girl who can see and be seen by the human, hellish and heavenly worlds is saved from angelic execution by Bayonetta. She instantly assumes this makes Bayonetta her ‘mummy’. At first unloading the child on Cheshire to maintain her adventurous manoeuvrability, Bayonetta is convinced of Cereza’s worth after she applauds and cheers mummy’s ability to kick divine ass. Cereza’s identification with and appropriation of the male gaze centred combat brings her more into Bayonetta’s world, resulting in two escort missions where Cereza’s continued safety leads the player through check points. The most interesting of these missions comes as you escape a sinking plane after a battle with Jeanne, another hypersexual Umbra Witch who works for Paradiso and the Lumen Sages. Assaulted by angels on all sides, Bayonetta casts a spell that places Cereza into an opaque shield that the angels cannot break. Here, Bayonetta protects Cereza from the angel’s onslaught and from the dehumanizing male gaze of gameplay sections while still allowing her to watch her own performance for it. In doing this, Bayonetta admits the appeal of identification of the male gaze to a female observer and creates a safe space for their pleasurable watching as well, complicating the simple titillation that pervades the gameplay.

This unexpected self-awareness charges Bayonetta’s narrative with a pro-feminist energy that fully allows an overlooking of its confusing story. In a rush of clunky exposition, it’s revealed to Bayonetta that not only has she been carrying one of the Eyes of the World all along (safely secured in her boob window) but that Cereza is her past self : the child whose birth broke the truce between the witches and sages. Returning Cereza to the past (somehow, magic I guess), a refrain of ‘Fly Me to the Moon’, used in gameplay to highlight Bayonetta’s untouchability and freedom takes on a sad, vulnerable tone as she sings Cereza to sleep. Here is where Bayonetta gains most all its feminist credentials. Cereza, witnessing the sexist human world of the virgin/whore dichotomy and Bayonetta’s joy outside of it but not the fact Bayonetta is her future self chooses to follow in her mummy’s pistol stiletto footsteps. Bayonetta realizes that the choice she made to be an Umbra Witch to avoid the in-game marginalisation of mothers means she is forever at a distance from being able to care for and nurture another as a mother would. The player watches this dominatrix/stripper/sexy librarian connect with a deeper, non-sexual part of herself and so, in turn, do we. Even under the male gaze, Bayonetta not only makes its central character’s agency part of its overall make-up but also presents admiration by a  female observer as more genuine and humanising than that of the male gaze in revealing Bayonetta's 'true form'.

The structure of the game then takes this affecting message and exaggerates it in a way that counter-balances the objectification of its start. The end of the final ‘chapter’ of Bayonetta trails off into a down note where our sexy human hero is captured by final boss Balder (also her father…I don’t care, I’m invested) who will use the newly active Eyes of the World to rebuild the universe according to his perspective. In the ‘Epilogue’, the player takes control of Jeanne, betraying Paradiso to save Bayonetta and stop her being forced to create life she has no say in. Swapping the tying up of loose plot threads with the final climax of the game, the exaggerated structure of Bayonetta builds to a critical mass of positive representation. In response, Bayonetta herself swaps the passionate but marginalising vulnerability of motherhood that is cut off from her with the equal, mutually protecting companionship of her ‘Umbran Sister’ Jeanne. Within themselves and between each other, agency and sexualisation go hand in hand. The landing has finally been stuck on a perfectly balanced glut of dehumanizing male gaze at the start of the game and humanizing female agency at the end, leaving Bayonetta left with nothing but the curtain call.

No butts before besties: Jeanne's agency and sexualisation balancing out Bayonetta's own

This grand finale reveals the tension at the very centre of Bayonetta’s resonant (or is it dissonant?) heart. Not only are we treated to Bayonetta pole dancing over the credits, she also performs a post-credits burlesque show. This post credit sequence, headlined by Bayonetta and Jeanne’s vanishing clothes, leaves us wondering whether the amount of character development they went through can justify this either freshly dehumanizing or emphatically empowering end.

This final split comes down to the dissonance of the male gaze and the extent to which audiences, of any gender, identify with it. Given it’s underscoring of Bayonetta’s choice to express her sexuality so overtly and making the power she gains from it an explicit part of gameplay, I felt more than happy to indulge in this performance. Thinking more about it though, there’s no way my reaction is universal. Those who suffer objectification in the wider world and are alienated by it's constant presence in games have been made to wade through this same objectification before Bayonetta is humanized. It would have been simple, if less structurally interesting, if her agency were highlighted from the game’s beginning.This latter perspective tips the balance I thought the game had settled on into a less than complete victory for women in gaming.

Still, I don’t feel Bayonetta has completely failed in its goal because of this imbalance. Instead, its two pronged provocation of the male gaze makes a challenge to the cultural problem of objectification and sexualisation in general. This game, with a contorted, hypersexualised woman on its front cover, still found space to humanise her.  The suggestion that sexualisation and empowerment work independently as well as in tandem would be well learned by wider media. If there were more representation of women humanized by their choices, their consensual sexualisation or both at once, the unsteady friction of this final performance would be of little concern. Further, Bayonetta's seperation of narrative and gameplay shows that humanization can be shown independently of sexualization as well as resonate together as Bayonetta and Jeanne's sisterhood shows. In a culture and industry that struggles to represent or imagine women outside of their appeal to men, Bayonetta makes room for both appealing to the dehumanizing male gaze while also counteracting it. All that follows is for more games to follow suit.

Hey, developers? She’s looking at you.

Some references and further research:

‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ by Laura Mulvey: should be widely available to most and I imagine will make an appearance in most feminist film criticism 101 books

Feminist Frequency on the male gaze in video games: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZPSrwedvsg&index=6&list=PLn4ob_5_ttEaA_vc8F3fjzE62esf9yP61

...and on Bayonetta and it's utterly despicable advertising strategy in Japan:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbihPTgAql4

The influence of burlesque on Bayonetta:

http://midnightresistance.co.uk/articles/bayonetta-and-burlesque

http://www.giantbomb.com/forums/bayonetta-1415/bayonettas-high-flying-pistol-stiletto-burlesque-1491414/ - some particularly fantastic analysis of Bayonetta’s gameplay

To see the male gaze in action, watch Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece Rear Window. Notice how all the unsuspecting women under Jeffries’ camera are defined by their body parts?