Deftones- Sextape
Sextape, a music video for the band Deftones directed by Zak Forrest and Chad Liebengnth, shows an objectified view of women with the simple fact that only females are featured within the video. The video focuses on two women floating in water and kissing, touching and flirting. This supports Erving Goffman, Sut Jhally and Jean Killbourne’s ideologies on the feminine touch. In the music video the camera lingers and focuses on shots of the two girls touching each other, showing the female body as something to be desired and as precious. This sense of preciousness is also reinforced by the colourful lighting refracted through the water, which gives it a psychedelic feel and as if there is something “magical”, which can be interpreted as a connotation of pleasure. A ritual of subordination is also conveyed as through their playful nature and the lighting the two women are almost represented in a childlike manner.
Another factor that needs to be established is the fact that Sextape is founded on a scopophillic approach as the preferred reading of the content is for the male audience to enjoy, as an expression of sexuality. Consequently Laura Mulvey’s view on the male gaze in the mid 1970’s is very applicable. The use of dismembering camera shots means as an audience we see these women objectively through the archetypal “fantasy” of heterosexual men. However because the video contains interactions between two women, instead of a man and a woman, it could be argued that we are not necessarily seeing the camera through the agenda and eyes of a heterosexual male and ‘Sextape’ could actually cater for the female spectator through transsexual identification with men, as discussed in criticisms to Mulvey’s work.
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