Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema

Despite its erotic connotations, the term “desire” in Mulvey’s essay is not exclusively, or even primarily a reference to sexual desire. In Lacanian theory, desire is born when the child acquires language, and it remains a feature of his subjectivity that can never be dispelled. During the prelingual stage (which Lacan calls “the imaginary”), the child exists in imaginary unity with the mother. The mirror stage, with its revelation of the Other, introduces the first fissure in this imagined unity. Language—the “Name of the Father”—comes next and removes the child from the “natural” order with the mother to the symbolic order with the Other. The loss of this “maternal plentitude” (15) creates desire for its recovery; the child—now a subject of language—seeks to unite with the Other through language, but can never do so. Desire is the irremediable consequence of subjectivity.

In terms of the cinema, diegesis refers to the spatial-temporal world a film presents. Those elements outside of the diegesis, such as music that does not have a source in the film world, are referred to as “extra-diegetic.”