Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema

Mulvey contends that “alternative cinema must start specifically by reacting against [… the] obsessions and assumptions” (16) of traditional cinema. While one of the foremost obsessions intrinsic to this type of cinema is clearly the spectacle of woman’s image, what are the assumptions Mulvey refers to here? How do these assumptions relate to patriarchal ideology? In what ways could alternative cinema oppose these assumptions?

American second-wave feminists largely denounced Freudian psychoanalysis because it overlooks female psychological development and, even worse, is based on the principle that female anatomy is naturally inferior to male anatomy. Mulvey nevertheless enlists psychoanalytic theory to argue that the pleasure of narrative cinema is a function of various conventions that mitigate the castration anxiety associated with woman, thereby making woman fully available as an object of desire. How might a feminist defend Mulvey’s reliance on psychoanalytic theories?

Mulvey’s theory of visual pleasure and film spectatorship center on male subjectivity and psychology. She does not address how (or if) the sexual difference between viewers informs their experience of pleasure. Why not? Explain why Mulvey might assume that all viewers, regardless of sexuality, would take pleasure in films that are designed to satisfy “the neurotic needs of the male ego” (26).