Gender Representation

Vertigo
-The male character loses his strength and power as he becomes more obsessed with the female.

Scotty loses his strength and power as he falls in love with Madeleine/Judy, he loses control of his relationship with her, throughout the film he develops from strength to strength with love for her and he loses his sight of everything else. He is sent to investigate Madeleine but it os found he actually is falling in love with her as the film progresses.

-The representations of gender reflect the pre-feminist gender politics of the late 1950s.

In this period women were seen as objects, woman were doing menial jobs such as clothes jobs or in a flower shop, whereas men work as high ranking police officers and business owners, Scotty chooses how he want Judy to look, down to the detail of her hair colour, what she wears and even hair style. This is a perfect example of how pre-feminist gender politics is reflected in the late 1950s.

-The placing of most of the camerawork from the male's point of view serves to make the audience identify with the male and therefore sympathise with his sexist view point.

Throughout the film most of the camera work is in the view of Scotty in this film, this engages the spectator to see things from his perspective, and we start to sympathise for him even though he is being very sexist towards Judy, its hard not to sympathise when you can see his feelings for her. We can see the sexism as he is trying to objectify Judy as he make her look exactly how she want and she just listens to him and does it.

One flew over the cuckoo's nest
-Female characters represent both repression and sexual liberation.

The two prostitutes Candy and Rose are the characters which represent sexual liberation as they are sex objects to men, significantly to Billy as he loses is virginity to Candy, And the nurse
Miss Ratched has the sexual identity that represents for sexual repression as she isn't married, she hasn't got a partner, she is "married to her job", she is sexless and completely opposite to Candy and Rose, a very significant act of sexual repression is when Billy loses his virginity to Candy, Miss Ratched does the worst thing to Billy and says "i will tell your mother", Billy whom is already scared to tell his mother about his sexual deems and she knows this will crush him even though he has not done anything wrong at all.

-The film is ahead of its time in terms of the way it represented femininity.

Even in 1975 woman were second class descendants to men, this era was when equal right to woman were being introduced, this film is ahead of its time as we have a female character who is the main dominant character who is very masculine, and in order for her to be masculine and to be bold she has been stripped of any of her femininity for example she doesn't wear any make up, she essentially becomes a robot in the way she shows no femininity. Which was very unusual for female to act this way in the mid 1970s

The emasculation of males in this film is represent the way Nurse Ratched metaphorically castrates McMurphy in particular, in the way she stops the men on the ward from being free to be whatever they want.