This week's blog task was to look at Laura Mulvey's essay 
Laura Mulvey discusses the topic of the male gaze in her essay, it's about the fact a majority of cinema is seen through heterosexual male eyes and society itself at the time was run through the man's penis more than the brain. The male gaze itself refers to the fact in film whenever a woman would come on screen there would be an emphasis on her body and curves and everything would be set in slow motion so that men could 'appreciate' what they were seeing. Of course this essay was written in an earlier more patriachal society, but in film I would say that this kind of behaviour hasn't changed in the slightest. There was even a recent film that came out on Netflix, it was beyond even the male gaze but one of paedophilic nature. The movie is called Cuties and it is set around a dance group of 12 year old girls and even though the director was a woman for the film, the message it put out was the opposite of what she wanted, in fact it was almost heinous how much they sexualised these young girls. The truth is the male gaze still occurs today in society. 

The subculture I wanted to focus on was Steampunk, some people have dedicated their whole lifestyle to being Steampunk and it's an interesting subculture to look at. It's like these people live in an alternate universe where humanity never progressed past the steam age but rather progressed with the steam age. All the mechanical creatures are far beyond are understanding but they all work through steam, there are usually robotic arms that people wear and clothing reminiscent of the 1800s mixed with some 1920s flare. 

the comic i decided to look at was Beastars, a Japanese manga which is about the complexities of society if everyone was animals. In the page I took a look at it goes from moment to moment to subject change. There is only a slight difference in expressions between the first two panels which I really enjoy. 

I have also gone ahead and analysed an advertisement I found online, because I haven't been able to go anywhere to buy a magazine, sadly.

literally: the advertisement displays a drastically oversized onion in the background with a triangular chunk cut out, a febreeze bottle in the foreground, text, brand logo and title and a plain orange tinted background with no indication to where it is. 
image message: to me the image message is more outstanding then the linguistic message behind the ad. The onion in the background is dramatically oversized, impossibly big, a metaphor perhaps to how much onion packs a punch with its smell, overwhelming any other smells in a home especially when cooking. A smell we can all distinctly imagine, although it's not necessarily unpleasant, just overwhelming and huge which is why I believe they used it. The onion too has a huge triangular chunk cut out of it, which fits perfectly into the spray range of the Febreze. implying that the Febreze has cut a chunk out of the smell, the shape alone of the spray is almost iconic for Febreze. The bottle itself is placed on the foreground, right in the centre of the ad, drawing your eyes in, and in the golden zone as I've heard it be called which is about a quarter up the page from the bottom and often to the side, is the logo with another logo placed in a slightly bigger size in the corner. 
Linguistic image: the text is both the Febreze logos, the word air which is one of their flavours I believe and the fun fact on the side. The logos themselves are strategically placed both in the centre of the ad and towards the side so your eye can go from one end to the other, it is the second thing you look at, as your eyes initially train on the image to the side before searching elsewhere for anything else and they are naturally drawn to the logo text in the corner, emphasising the brand importance. The other text is a small fact of sorts with the phrase "60% of the people exposed to bad odour has bad mood." the text is surprisingly small compared to the rest of the ad and is almost easily missable, however to combat that the advertisement has the Febreze bottle pointing towards the text with the onion pointing the same direction so your eyes are naturally lead towards the text to read them. I'm not sure about the meaning of the text itself, other than it has a factual scientific feel to it, as if to give it an official professional vibe somewhat. The flavour(?) of the Febreze being called air which the type itself is spaced out, giving it an airy and light feeling to it, somehow as well it being called air further emphasises the idea of a wind like quality cutting through the onion.

I created an example above to show how the different definitions can be interpreted, from the word to the parallel, each one creates a different kind of vibe from the straight forward to the somewhat confusing but almost comedic. The example used in the lecture was the painting by René Magritte of the pipe, or at least not the pipe. We discussed both the denotations and connotations which took me back to English lit and lang in A Levels hahaha. Both the denotation and connotation of a painting and how it should be taken both literally and metaphorically, I'm the type of person who takes things too literally sometimes, I feel, so having more insight into how to convey other meanings through the combination of text and image is interesting to me.