In her famous 1975 essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Laura Mulvey argued that Hollywood cinema was structured by male gaze and male identification. The male spectator watches some male hero like, say, Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca or Daniel Craig in a Bond film, as he shoots the bad guys, resists the Nazis, saves England, sweeps women off their feet, and looks cool while making things happen. The watcher gets to feel “the power of the male protagonist as he controls events.” The fun of Hollywood film, in Mulvey’s view, is that it gives (mostly) men the chance to pretend to be more powerful men.
That’s why Spencer, at the beginning of The Next Level, finds the idea of returning to Jumanji appealing. His freshman year at college is not going so well; he’s lonely, plagued by self doubt, and his long-distance relationship with Meg is on the rocks. He wants to be cool and strong and empowered again. So he decides to play the game that made him feel that way. He reassembles the circuitry of the video game he and his friends smashed at the end of the last film and returns to that trusty Mulvey narrative, designed to give men the pleasure of being men.
Yes, identifying with the tough guy can be awesome. But it’s also a charge to identify with someone of various genders who is funny or old or familiar or different. Why would you be a boring dude saving the day when instead you can be Awkwafina channeling Danny DeVito sharing a tender moment with a horse? Mulvey pointed out how rote, predictable, and, of course, sexist Hollywood movies can be. Jumanji: The Next Level cosigns that criticism by providing an alternative. It’s a giddily preposterous celebration of the power of art to put you in someone else’s story—or several someone else’s—all at once. v
