In traditional Hollywood cinema, the narrative film structures its gaze as masculine; films use women in order to provide a pleasing viewing experience for men, while symbolizing women as a man's desire. (483-94). The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), however, substitutes women for male desire with gold to fill the narrative void. In “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey presents a number of very interesting facts about the way sex is experienced. images of men and women respectively are used in the world of cinema. One of these facts is that of the man as spectator and the woman as the watched. She maintains that the woman is always the object of the reifying gaze, and not the bearer of the gaze. And “[t]he determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is stylized accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role, women are simultaneously looked at and exposed, their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact, so that they can be said to have a connotation of being looked at” (487). Mulvey asserts that women are presented and prepared to play this role of “being-watched”. They are put into films for this purpose and very few other purposes. However, this argument cannot be incorporated into the Treasure of the Sierra Madre; the existence of women in the film is extremely insignificant to the point that one could consider it absent. “In a world governed by sexual imbalance”, men constitute the dominant figures with whom the spectator can identify, women only appear in the film for a very short moment. For example, the women's appearance is only shown when Howard saves the sick child in the village and his return to the village for a hospitality reception...... middle of paper...... ulvey says that the role that the woman plays in front of the male characters and the audience itself, not only does the woman present an erotic image to the characters in the film, but her other function is to do the same to the audience. The concept is the same when the woman is replaced by gold. Gold not only serves as the trio's desire, but also becomes the audience's desire. If mainstream Hollywood cinema films use women as lust for male characters and use women as visual pleasure for the audience, as Mulvey argues,; The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is therefore considered a non-traditional and disruptive type of narrative. The film lacks the male gaze between men and women, this male gaze focuses instead on the desire for gold of the male characters. Gold replaces men's desire for women in the film.