When it is revealed that he is a federal agent, Devlin in return reveals that there is more to Alicia's character than her outward amorality: he plays a recording of her patriotic disgust at her father's involvement with the Nazis. Significantly, her hidden character can only be revealed through sound, not sight. Devlin asks her to spy (to acquire through looking): because she is the daughter of a convicted Nazi operative, the agency believes that Alicia can gain "access" to Nazi activities in Rio de Janeiro. Confronted with her own self-disgust and her desire to be punished, Alicia agrees.

A turning point for Alicia occurs in the next scene, in flight to Rio. When Alicia learns of her father's death, Alicia stops "performing" and reveals her true self and the motivations that have guided her past "party girl" behavior:

"When he told me a few years ago what he was, everything went to pot. I didn't care what happened to me. Now I remember how nice he once was, how nice we both were. It's a very curious feeling, a feeling as if something had happened to me, not to him. You see I don't have to hate him anymore--or myself."

In this scene, she is drawn to Devlin, who has become a glittering, beautiful statue, revealing no emotions, who resists seeing Alicia's transformation. Throughout the rest of the film, he resists looking at her. When he must look at her directly, it is with cold, unseeing eyes--he always perceives her as the woman he met in Miami, though the camera's view of her has become more sympathetic and dimensional. The point-of-view of the camera was originally aligned with Devlin as he watched Alicia; however, beginning with the in-flight scene, a feminine point-of-view is present, desirously watching Devlin, even when Alicia is looking away. Instead of a primary male spectator sympathizing with Devlin, the film privileges an all-seeing, all-understanding female spectator, who is aligned with Alicia.

But Alicia is not allowed to stop "performing." For her assignment, Alicia must seduce a former flame, Alex Sebastian (Claude Rains). Devlin feebly protests to his superiors, but because he cannot be sure of her reformation, of her love for him, Devlin agrees to ask her. Soon afterwards, Devlin abandons a bottle of champagne (obviously a phallic image) that he had purchased for a romantic dinner with Alicia. Back at her apartment, he expects her to "perform" for him, to refuse the assignment with no words of faith from him. Because she doubts her ability to make him see the true Alicia, the Alicia that loves him, she submits to his image of her as a tramp, masochistically paying penance for her past.

Devlin sadistically asks more and more from Alicia's dangerous performance. When she comes to the embassy to ask if she should accept Sebastian's marriage proposal, the intelligence chief is surprised: "Would you really do that much for us?" He defers to Devlin, who remains distant and above Alicia. Devlin asks her pointed questions, decides her fate, and then leaves the room without addressing her. He bullies her into stealing a key from her husband. When she manages to get the key, he asks her insinuatingly, "Did you get it off his chain?" Devlin continually pushes Alicia to perform degradingly, and then he punishes her for her successes. (It is her taking of the key that blows her cover and endangers her life.)

Alex Sebastian reinforces the masculine and the feminine gaze of the camera. As Alicia's targeted audience, she is at her most alluring for him. He is immediately captivated, seeing the image she projects, unsuspecting of her duplicity. But his gaze is less objectifying than Devlin's: Alex originally fell in love with Alicia years before, when she was still "nice," before Miami. Though deceived by Alicia, he may ironically see Alicia's worth clearer than Devlin.

Throughout the rest of the film, it is the cool, distant figure of Devlin that spurs Alicia forward. She continually sacrifices herself to the statue-like Devlin in the hope that he will forgive her past. Devlin is deliberately unknowing, never revealing. "If you had only once said that you loved me," Alicia mourns. When Alicia tells him that he could have stopped her from accepting the Sebastian assignment, he coolly replies, "A man doesn't tell a women what to do. She tells herself." But Alicia wants a man who will tell her what to do, who will possess her; she wants a man who will act like a man. Though it would have been less suspicious for Alicia to go to the wine cellar alone, she prefers to have Devlin accompany her, claiming incompetence: "I wouldn't know what to look for." But it is his clumsiness that causes a wine bottle to fall from a shelf and leads to Alex discovering them together. When Alicia learns that Devlin is leaving Rio, removing himself from her sight, she loses her will to live, allowing him to think that she has a hangover instead of telling him that she is ill. She gives up trying to make him see her.

In Notorious, there is also an emergent female gaze that has more in common with the male gaze directed at Hollywood vamps such as Marlene Dietrich. The subject of the gaze (Alicia) is masochistically willing to suffer for the object (Devlin). Any relationship with the object is better than no relationship, and there is always the hope that if the subject suffers enough, s/he will be rewarded. But Alicia is different than the male masochists who worshipped Marlene Dietrich in Blonde Venus and Morocco. She understands Devlin's disdain for the new Alicia:

"You're sore because you've fallen for a little drunk you tamed in Miami and you don't like it. It makes you sick all over, doesn't it? People will laugh at you, the invincible Devlin, in love with someone who isn't worth even wasting the words on."