Echendu Sonia 23BE032990 Assignment 16/6/25

 Laura Mulvey’s “Male Gaze” Theory

Feliz Navidad Nigeria! Closeup Ad: A Dual Feminist Critique

Introduction

The “Feliz Navidad Nigeria” Closeup ad aims to celebrate love and holiday cheer, combining global and local elements to advertise toothpaste as a hold between love and attraction. While ad sparkles with festive music and cheerful differences, a much deeper analysis shows how pictorial language, symbol, and power versatile are fixed.  To understand this, we move to two important female critics Laura Mulvey and bell hooks and each offering different frame to unveil the most-hidden messages inside media texts.

This essay shows us two detailed critiques of the ad: first is the Laura Mulvey’s lens, which emphasize the male gaze and gendered pictorial pleasure and second through bell hooks’ lens, interrogating how race, class, and capitalism globally construct representations of love and identity in Nigeria.

 Analysis Using Laura Mulvey’s Theory of the Male Gaze

Detail on Mulvey’s Lens

Laura Mulvey, landmark 1975 essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," shows that mainstream media specially film allows its images to show as a heterosexual male gaze. According to her, women are portrayed as passive objects of desire and pleasure, to be looked at and consumed visually, while men are active force which drives the narrative.

Applying this theory to advertising helps unveil how brands not only sell products but also put in messages about feminine beauty and power.

1.      Aesthetic Frame and Female seen as an Object:

The Closeup ad, during the Christmas season in a vibrant Nigerian setting, focus on young people preparing for holiday celebrations. While both men and women are shown engaging in joyful activities such as singing and dancing, and exchanging gifts, the camera often capture on women in a way that shows physical beauty and sensuality.

Multiple scenes are edited to pinpoint women lips, hair, and eyes, often in slow motion. For example, the frame of a woman smiling just before being kissed is done through tight shots, soft lighting, and romanticized angles which encouraging people that view to take visual pleasure in her appearance. These shots do not just advertise toothpaste, but they show feminine gender itself. The woman becomes a visual spectacle, not just as a subject.

Mulvey’s critique is perfectly here. The women do not drive the action rather they respond to male cues. In a festive scene, a man leans in toward a woman and she bashfully accepts his approach. The emotion centre is the man’s boldness, while the woman’s role is reduced to passive and visual acceptance. In essence, she is to-be-looked-at fulfilling Mulvey’s idea of the woman as a object.

Two Gender Roles and Passive Female:

Even though the ad supposedly celebrates love and togetherness, it emphasizes conventional gender roles. The male characters are portrayed as initiators who offers gifts, reaching out for kisses, leading dances. The female characters, on the other hand, are shown reacting to blushing, and gently accepting advances. This emphasizes Mulvey’s analysis that female identity is often shaped through its linear role to the men.

The most exposing aspect to this is that the ad never fully allows women to show desire. Instead, desire is performed on their bodies through editing, gaze, and music. The men are given narrative direction; they prepare and deliver surprises and win the women. This two gender reveals shows how that Mulvey argues cinema and advertising continuously replicate.

Sexualization is seen as Romance

What makes the ad particularly complex is how it pretends sensuality under the veil of festive joy and romantic love. There are numerous instances where physical closeness is seen as the beginning of the story. For example, in moment where couples move in for a kiss, the lighting becomes warmer, the music softens, and the camera zooms into their lips. These are story visual cues from romantic cinema, but in advertising, they are used to show that using Closeup toothpaste leads to intimacy.

In Mulvey’s terms, this is the main portrayal of the female body, and it is not only seen as object but also used to sell a product. A fresh smile becomes the tool for male gaze. Women’s sensuality is not on their own part, but rather a promise sold to male consumers that is “use this product, and you will gain access to women like this."

Festivity as Distraction:

Mulvey also point out how the musical, multicultural setting of the ad serves to cover its traditional gender. The Christmas theme, the lively dance scenes, and the cultural references create a smokescreen of inclusivity and celebration. Yet underneath it, the gender power structures remain untouched.

The ad may look progressive because it’s fun, engaging and seemingly modern, but it still revolves around old male ideas of attraction. The woman's smile made “kiss-ready” by Closeup is her main contribution to the love story. Her internal desires, and complexities are irrelevant to the narrative.

Summary of Mulvey’s Critique

Through Laura Mulvey’s theory, the “Feliz Navidad Nigeria!” Closeup ad can be understood as a well-refined example of how advertising hold the male gaze. It sees women as object of visual pleasure, gives narrative power to men, and uses romantic tension to reinforce male ideas for purpose of festive joy and Nigerian pride.

1.      Analysis Using bell hooks’ Black Females and Cultural Critic

Understanding hooks Frame: bell hooks, unlike Mulvey, centres race, class and the politics of representation. Her work critiques not only how women are portrayed, but also how capitalism and white dominant structure are portrayed. In her writings like "Black Looks and Race and "Am not I am Woman?", hooks challenge the Blackness, the exclusion of oppressed identities found in commercial media.

Her lens is important when analysing a Nigerian-themed ad made by a global brand. What does it mean for a Western corporation to frame African identity and love in this specific way?

1.      Modern Multiculture and the Sanitization of Culture

At first view, the ad seems culturally rich which includes Christmas trees, rhythms, and the cityscapes. However, bell hooks would warn us not to mistake aesthetic alone for genuine cultural engagement. What we see in the Closeup ad is a market-friendly version of Nigerian youth culture, no social struggle, diverse of class.

All characters are light skinned which aligning with global beauty standards. There is no representation of rural life. Everyone is dressed fashionably and behaves in ways that echo Western ideals. hooks would say “where cultural elements are removed and repackaged in ways that feel satisfying but remain digestible for global consumption.

This is where Nigeria is used as a colourful background rather than an authentic identity. The message becomes; Nigeria is fun, sexy and global just like our toothpaste.

2.      Love and Whiteness: Desirability

bell hooks would also interrogate how beauty and desirability are framed. All the female leads in the ad conform to Western beauty ideas such as straight hair, narrow noses, flawless skin. This raises serious questions about how love and attraction are portrayed in African settings. If even Nigerian characters must look as a western to be considered attractive, what does that say about internal colonialism?

Love, in this ad, is direct to appearance. Closeup becomes not just toothpaste but a gatekeeper to desirability. hooks argues that this is rooted in white supremacy beauty culture, which filters even Black identity through white standards. Thus, even in African celebration, we see the absence of darker skin tones, natural hair, and diverse body types.

3.      Resistance Through Representation:

Hooks shows the importance of oppositional gaze, the ability for viewers, especially oppressed ones to critique and resist dominant images. Unfortunately, the Closeup ad does little/no to encourage such critical reflection.

There are no moments of alternative storytelling, no challenge to beauty norms. While the ad includes Black characters, they are placed in roles that replicate the dominant Western advertising formula: attractive heterosexual couples who find joy through consumption. hooks would argue that true representation goes beyond casting Black bodies and it must also reflect Black subjectivity, history, and diversity.

Summary of hooks’ Critique

bell hooks would see the Feliz Navidad Nigeria! ad as a surface-level performance of diversity. It centres consumerism over culture, sells love through whitened images of beauty, and fails to engage with the deeper realities of Nigerian life. It is not a celebration of African identity, but a capitalist remix of it and built to sell products, not promote self-empowerment.

 Conclusion: The Power and Problem of Beautiful Advertising

The Closeup “Feliz Navidad Nigeria!” ad is vibrant, well-produced, and resonant emotionally. But as both Laura Mulvey and bell hooks reveal, beauty in advertising often hides deeper meaning. Whether through the male gaze the ad emphasizes mainstream ideas of love, gender, and desire while appearing fresh and inclusive on the surface.

Through Mulvey’s lens, we see how women are seen as object for visual pleasure. Through hooks’ critique, we unveil how race, culture, and capitalism combine to flatten African identity in a sellable package. The two lenses remind us that media is never neutral as it reflects, reinforces.

As viewers, we must learn to look beyond the lights, music, and romance, and ask: Whose story is being told? Who gets to be beautiful? And at what cost is this closeness being sold?