Laura Mulvey - Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema

Described by the Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism (1995) as providing a key statement on feminist film theory with a view on the psychoanalytical theories of Lacan, Mulvey’s Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975) essay offers a critical opinion on the effect of cinema on its viewing audience considered from an emergent feminist perspective gaining popularity in this post modern period. She is attributed with the phrase ‘Male Gaze.’

Originally published in 1975 in the film theory journal Screen Mulvey later updated her article with Afterthoughts (1981) following criticism of aspects of the piece on spectatorship of women by women, which she extended and re-evaluated.  For the purposes of this posting I will only be considering the original Visual Pleasure essay.

In VPNC Mulvey identifies two modes of film audience spectatorship.  These are Voyeuristic and Fetishistic for which she bases her concept upon Freud and Lacan’s theories.  She declares her findings as her ‘political weapons’ as if conducting warfare on the classical narrative film industry of Hollywood in the 1940’s and 50’s.  She describes her view of Hollywood as they ‘demonstrate the way the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form’, which she considered represented the male ideology/desire of the time.  When viewing a film she considers the audience are given a masculine spectator position whereby the usually male protagonist is with whom the audience identify.  The secondary female characters are positioned to be objects of desire on which audiences view, through the male almost ‘Peeping Tom’ like camera lens.  This lens having been strategically positioned to ensure the audience become the ‘bearer of the look’ subjecting the characters who have been positioned with ‘to be looked at ness’.  Mulvey comments about the auditorium itself taking on the ideal surroundings for this ‘viewing’, with the darkness isolating the spectator, allowing them to look without being seen and the screen acting as lens into the world of another.

She then delineates this into two distinct modes of scopophilia.  The Voyeuristic mode is  where the characters are ‘to be looked at’ which uses Freud’s scopophilic childhood pleasure of looking at/objectifying bodies, and Lacan narcissistic mirror stage whereby the audience are to identify with the screen as if it were the mirror and thus identifying with the self like image. She explains that in society ‘pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female’ which is merely reflected into film, thus giving her well documented ‘Male Gaze’ label to audiences of film.

The other viewing form Mulvey describes is that of Fetishistic, which she attributes to the cult status female movie stars as they are substituted figures of beauty which to the bearer/spectator of the gaze become ‘reassuring rather than dangerous’.  She does not give male movie stars the same status as she states that the male figure in society, and thus in film ‘cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification. Man is reluctant to gaze at his exhibitionist like’. He is therefore given the more powerful ideal of being the ‘ego conceived in the original moment of recognition in front of the mirror’.

My major criticism of this piece is that Mulvey appears to ascribe all spectators a male persona which does make the article feel almost contradictory as she appears to have fallen foul of her own theory, that of excluding the female and almost making them appear as ‘other’.  This theory will be used later in my close analysis of Kiss of the Spider Woman.  Written after Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972) I do see similarities and possible influences in Murvey’s theories.

Mulvey Bibliography

Childs, J. (1995) Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism.

[accessed via LRC]

<ahref="http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lfh&AN=22450189&site=lrc-live">VISUAL PLEASURE.</a> [accessed 12.12.12]

Braudy, L. and Cohen, M. (Eds) (1999) Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. Mulvey, L. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.(p 833-844)  New York. Oxford University Press.

Chandler, D. (2012) Notes on the Male Gaze. Aberystwyth University [online] available from http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/gaze/gaze09.html - [accessed 29 December 2012]