Sarah Rybak

Bioshock Infinite: Elizabeth and the Male Gaze

 

When studying media, the first things that come to mind are the study of advertising, television, or big budget movies and how those things affect the people that view them. A medium that is often forgotten except in discussions of violence and its effects is the medium of video gaming. Games often go through just as much, if not more, production and development work than do television shows and movies. Games have characters, audiences, and their own purposes – and they are very focused on the importance of looking. The point of view of the playable characters in the game (first person, third person) can change the effects of looking drastically. As opposed to a movie where you have the point of view of the camera in most cases, in a first person video game the majority of the time you are seeing through the eyes of the main character. You are often in control of the character’s gaze, but the game itself dictates through cut-scenes and character placement where your gaze should be, and how the looking practices of other characters contributes to the relationships in the game.

 

One such example of a game that relies on the idea of the gaze in order to convey relationships is Bioshock Infinite, the third game in the Bioshock series. Players act as the main character, Booker DeWitt, and have a close relationship with a woman named Elizabeth, creating an interesting dynamic. While the game begins in a way that seems to conform to Mulvey’s theory of the male gaze, it is soon very clear that the practices of looking within the game challenge her ideas on spectatorship by placing Elizabeth in positions of power throughout many scenes.

 

When the player first meets Elizabeth, she is only viewed through two-way mirrors that are hidden around the tower in which she is imprisoned. This sort of spectatorship relates very heavily to Mulvey’s theories about the male gaze – the player is made to follow Elizabeth from viewing station to viewing station around the tower, each time looking through to view her without being seen. This kind of voyeuristic spectatorship lends itself to the idea of the male gaze, and puts Booker in a position of power over her. Because the gaze of the character becomes the gaze of the player, this feeling of power transfers over to the player in control of Booker – however, Booker himself speaks negatively about those who spent time watching Elizabeth, giving the player a feeling of guilt for doing the same.

 

This sense of guilt is also present in the way the game forces you forward through the tower as Elizabeth moves from room to room, prohibiting the player from spending a prolonged amount of time at the viewing stations. So in a way, this first meeting of Elizabeth in her tower simultaneously confirms and denies the male gaze by displaying her voyeuristically but at the same time forcing the player to feel guilt for their actions through the act of voyeurism and the addition of Booker’s dialogue.

Fast forward a little through the game: Booker has been separated from Elizabeth and is trying to find her. He ends up finding Elizabeth dancing with a group of people, clearly catching their attention. The way that the other characters view her does not seem to correspond with any theory of the male gaze, but instead the characters seem to see Elizabeth just for what she is – a girl ecstatic to be out of the tower in which she had lived her entire life.

 

 She becomes the center of Booker’s attention for much of the rest of the game, as Elizabeth’s character is usually out in front of him leading the way to their next destination. This choice by developers to have Elizabeth lead rather than follow puts her in a position to be looked at, but also in a position of power as the leader. While Elizabeth is always ahead of Booker, she is not just passively there as an object to be stared at, she is a spectator as well as Booker, reacting to her surroundings and to the player. At one point, when the player lags behind, Elizabeth stands waiting ahead of him looking out onto the beach, and then looks at him and smiles as he draws closer. In this way she is again imbued with some power, the power to look back at Booker in the way the player looks at her. This distinctly goes against Mulvey’s idea that female characters tend to freeze the flow of action in scenes – Elizabeth is used to advance scenes and storylines rather than to work against the storyline.

 

In the same way, Elizabeth often directs the player’s/Booker’s attention to certain objects or events within the game – she is a vehicle for the player’s gaze. She has the power to shift the player’s ways of looking rather than to solely be the object of their gaze. The game encourages the player to gaze more at their surroundings than at any particular player, though while Elizabeth accompanies you she is usually in view. While Mulvey might use this as a support for a theory of male gaze on Booker’s part, there is no explicit or implicit objectification of Elizabeth by Booker or any other character except at the very beginning of the game when she is trapped in her tower.

 

Overall, the presence of looking throughout Bioshock Infinite counters Mulvey’s theory about the pervasive male gaze and flips it in a way that instead gives the female looker her own agency as a character that leads Booker/the player by the hand through the story. Elizabeth guides Booker’s looking, she is not the object of it – voyeuristic looking is discouraged for Booker and active looking is encouraged for Elizabeth.