'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' by Laura Mulvey
Paragraph Breakdown:
1. Her use of psychoanalysis as a feminist critical tool.
2. The opportunity in contemporary cinema for more radical forms that break away from patriarchal influence. ... Emerging from classic Hollywood cinema.
3. Explanation of scopophillia ... how it relates to cinema.
4. Explanation of narcissistic pleasure ... how it relates to cinema.
5. Summary of the two forms of visual pleasure, and a discussion of the castration threat.
6. The roles that men and women play in cinema and spectatorship - active/male, passive/female.
7. The constant threat of castration and how the male unconscious relinquishes it.
8. 2x case studies - Stenberg and Hitchcock.
9. Summary.
'Psychoanalytical theory is thus appropriated here as a political weapon, demonstrating the way the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form.'
- psychoanalysis is a reason why patriarchy exists.
'cinema has not sufficiently brought out the importance of the representation of the female form in a symbolic order in which, in the last resort, it speaks castration ad nothing else.'
- women have not been represented enough
'Woman's desire is subjugated to her image as bearer of the bleeding wound; she can exist only in relation to castration and cannot transcend it.'
' woman still tied to her place as bearer, not maker, of meaning.'
- women are all tied to their role, whilst men are free.
'The magic of Hollywood style at its best ... arose, not exclusively, but in one important aspect, from its skilled and satisfying manipulation of visual pleasure.'
'film coded the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order'
- original Hollywood
'analysing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it.'
'scopophillia (pleasure in looking)'
On Freud.
'he associated scopophillia with taking other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze'
- what film does to women
'voyeuristic activities of children, their desire to see and make sure of the private and forbidden'
'scopophillia is essentially active'
'relationship between the active instinct and its further development in narcissistic form'
'at the extreme, it can become fixated into a perversion, producing obsessive voyeurs and peeping toms'
- how the voyeuristic instinct can lead/grow into perversion
'the moment when a child recognises its own image in the mirror is crucial for the constitution of the ego' - ego is born at a young age
'recognition of themselves is joyous in that they imagine their mirror image to be more complete, more perfect than they experience in their own body'
'misrecognition: the image is conceived as the reflected body of the self, but its misrecognition as superior projects this body outside itself as an ideal ego, alienated subject which, re-interjected as an ego ideal'
- recognition is misrecognition.
'the cinema has structures of fascination strong enough to allow temporary loss of ego while simultaneously reinforcing it'
'likeness and difference (the glamorous impersonates the ordinary)'
- losing and reinforcing the ego
'The first, scopophilic, arises from pleasure in using another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight. The second, developed through narcissism and the constitution of ego, comes from identification with the image seen.'
'one implies a separation of the erotic identity of the subject from the object on the screen (active scopophillia), the other demands identification of the ego with the object, on the screen through the spectator's fascination with and recognition of his like.'
'The first is a function of the sexual instincts, the second of ego and libido'.
'Desire, born in language, allows the possibility of transcending the instinctual and the imaginary, but its point of reference continually returns to the traumatic moment of its birth; the castration complex. Hence the look, pleasurable in form, can be threatening in content, and it is women as representation/image that crystallises this paradox'.
- desire vs. unconscious castration fear
'pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly'
'mainstream film neatly combines spectacle and narrative'
- male for narrative, female for spectacle
' the presence of woman is an indispensable element of spectacle in normal narrative film, yet her visual presence tends to work against the development of a story-line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation'
On Budd Boetticher:
'What counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents. She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act the way he does. In herself the woman has not the slightest importance.'
- women are an accessory.
'the woman displayed has functioned on two levels: as erotic object for the characters within the screen story, and as erotic object for the spectator within the auditorium, with a shifting tension between the looks on either side of the screen'.
- women are there for the male character or for the male audience
'a woman performs within the narrative; the gaze of the spectator and that of the male characters in the film are neatly combined without breaking narrative verisimilitude'
- the women are there for both the male character and for the male audience
'the male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectificatio'
'Man is reluctant to gaze at his exhibitionist like'
- men do not wish to gaze upon themselves
'Stars and Audiences' by R. Dyer.
'[Mulvey] argues, using a psychoanalytic framework, that classic narrative cinema continually organises looks which centre on the woman as spectacle'
' the effect of this way of looking is that the moviegoer is positioned according to the pleasures of male heterosexual desire' -Mulvey said this cannot happen.
'Steve Neale argues that looks between male characters on film are made obviously threatening and aggressive in order to divert their erotic potential'
- keeping male characters as narrative, so they don't become 'spectacle'
'Holden/Hal is placed in a position conventionally coded as feminine.'
'However, Holden's image as 'a red-blooded American boy', his ambivalent attitude to acting and anecdotes about his reckless stunts when showing off to acquaintances are read by Cohan as constructing a star profile which attempts to counteract Holden's objectification and authenticate the 'reality' of his masculinity'.
- fighting against the 'feminine' as much as possible
Male Gaze Theory:
Male gaze theory is the idea that within cinema, the storyline and presentation of different genders is catered towards the male perspective. Laura Mulvey, in her essay 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Film' describes woman on screen to have two functions: an 'erotic object for the characters within the screen story, and as an erotic object for the spectator within the auditorium'. What this suggests, is that in mainstream film, women are placed within a storyline not for substance, but for decoration. They are their either as an accessory for the main character, or as a visually and erotically stimulating object for the audience. Mulvey also mentions how mainstream film 'neatly combines spectacle and narrative'. The spectacle is the women character used as decoration, and the narrative is the male character that leads the story. This idea is supported by Budd Boetticher, who states that 'what counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents... the love or fear she inspires in the hero ...makes him act the way he does'. What Boetticher is saying is that women by themselves hold no importance within the narrative, they are only significant as long as the male character is present. This reinforced the idea of women being seen simply as spectacle and decoration. The male gaze theory towards male characters in different. As the male characters hold the 'narrative', there is a fear in shifting objectification and the idea of becoming 'spectacle'. Steve Neale states how 'looks between male characters on film are made obviously threatening and aggressive in order to divert their erotic potential'. In other words, the interaction between male characters within film are strictly controlled to be only masculine, as there is the fear that feminine attributes would jeopardise the narrative. In the cases when the male character is given feminine attributes, those are almost instantaneously contrasted and defended by an array of 'masculine' attributes. Richard Dyer looks at this fact in his discussion of the film 'Picnic', where the main character 'Holden/Hal' is placed shirtless and in a feminine position. This scene is defended by Holden's 'image as 'a red-blooded American boy', his ambivalent attitude to acting and anecdotes about his reckless stunts'. This behaviour demonstrates the need to showcase 'masculinity' in an attempt to get rid of 'feminine' attributes he was displayed with. As Richard Dyer puts it, he 'attempts to counteract Holden's objectification and authenticate the 'reality' of his masculinity'. Overall, the male gaze theory is one that is present throughout cinema, in cases subtly and in some cases obviously. It can be viewed as sexist and de-humanizing, however, it is part of 'original Hollywood', which is outdated and unacceptable in this day and age. The male gaze and its theory will always exist, due to the primitive nature of the different genders and their interaction with one another, however, the way Hollywood and cinema portrays gender roles is ever changing and evolving, so hopefully the term 'male gaze' will soon become forgotten.
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