Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema

Laura Mulvey’s essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” originally appeared in the autumn 1975 issue of the British film journal, Screen. This study guide refers to the reprint of the essay included in Mulvey’s book Visual and Other Pleasures (Palgrave Macmillan, 2nd edition 2009).

Part 1: “Introduction”

In the “Introduction” to her 1975 essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey announces her agenda: to appropriate psychoanalytic theory “as a political weapon” to expose how “the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form” (14). She acknowledges that other film theorists have written about psychoanalysis and film but argues they have failed to address “the importance of the representation of the female form” (14) in narrative cinema. To explore how this representation provides “visual pleasure” while also fortifying male dominance, Mulvey enlists the theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan.

Identifying Freud’s model of psychoanalysis (along with the system of patriarchal values it reflects) with phallocentrism, Mulvey explains that fundamentally “it depends on the image of the castrated woman to give order and meaning to its world” (14). Psychoanalysis maintains that, due to woman’s “real absence of a penis” (14), she signifies lack and nothingness, thereby conferring on man, her sexual opposite, the opposing attributes of presence and subjectivity. While man gains authority by virtue of woman’s lack, he also acquires an abiding fear of castration. Mapping concepts from structural linguistics onto these psychoanalytic theories, Jacques Lacan introduced terms such as “the symbolic order” (14) and “the Name of the Father and the Law” (15) to indicate the ideological systems that constitute society and its subjects. Because woman only signifies lack, man is the “maker of meaning” (15), or of the symbolic order itself (which includes language). Woman’s essential function is to symbolize “the castration threat” (14), which in turn compels children to submit to “the Name of the Father and the Law.”

According to Lacan, language, which is encoded with patriarchal values, creates the unconscious. Noting the difficulty of challenging the structures that diminish women when those structures are inscribed in language and the unconscious, Mulvey argues that psychoanalysis can be used to “advance our understanding of the status quo” (15). She acknowledges alternative forms of cinema, but declares that the “status quo” of cinema, Hollywood cinema, visually responds to and satisfies unconscious (patriarchal) desires and “formative obsessions” (16) that center on woman. Mulvey’s stated intention is to analyze and destroy the pleasure produced by the visual and narrative structures of classic cinema.

Part 2: “Pleasure in Looking/Fascination with the Human Form”

Mulvey begins the second part of her essay with a discussion of Freud’s ideas on scopophilia, or the pleasure associated with looking. According to Freud, scopophilia is manifest in “the voyeuristic activities of children” (17), who have a desire to see forbidden bodily areas and acts. This active way of looking transforms others into objects of pleasure, and Freud considers it “one of the component instincts of sexuality” (17). By developing conventions that create the “illusion of looking in on a private word” (17) separate from the darkened viewing gallery, mainstream cinema positions audiences to engage in scopophilia and experience its erotic pleasure.

Freud also identifies a narcissistic aspect of scopophilia, which Mulvey links to Lacan’s “mirror phase” (18) and to the ego-reinforcing operations of classic narrative films. Lacan theorizes that before a child can talk or even walk, “he” develops “inklings of self-awareness” (18) by glimpsing himself in a mirror. He recognizes himself, but also misperceives this reflected self as having more autonomy and agency than he, who still lacks motor skills, possesses. In this moment, the child experiences the notion of an ideal ego, the reflection of which he can receive from others (in this case, the other in the mirror). Mulvey notes that “the conventions of mainstream film focus attention on the human form” (18) in its most glamorous incarnations, thereby appealing to the spectator’s narcissistic desire to gaze at others who reflect his ideal ego. Because it reproduces Lacan’s proposed formative moment of recognition/misrecognition in the mirror image, Hollywood “cinema has structures of fascination strong enough to allow temporary loss of ego while simultaneously reinforcing it” (18).

In the final section of Part 2, Mulvey points out that the first aspect of scopophilia involves objectifying the other for erotic pleasure, while the second entails identifying with the other to secure one’s ideal ego. These two aspects register a tension between objectivity and subjectivity. As Mulvey explains, “in film terms, one implies a separation of the erotic identity of the subject from the object on the screen […], the other demands identification of the ego with the object on the screen through the spectator’s fascination with and recognition of his like” (18-19). In Freud’s terms, one is a function of sexual drives and the other of ego drives, and both are coded in the symbolic order as the purview of male desire. Although cinematic images of the female form offer “a beautifully complementary fantasy world” (19) for man’s erotic and narcissistic scopophilia, the image of woman also represents castration. Thus, the object of “the look” (19) is both pleasurable and threatening to man.

Part 3: “Woman as Image, Man as Bearer of the Look”

Part 3 of the essay applies the foregoing theories to the essential role woman plays in creating the visual pleasure of narrative cinema. Because the symbolic order rests on an ideology of sexual difference that attributes presence and power to man, “pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female” (19). Woman is the object of the look. Ever on display, she receives the look and holds it, but lacks authority to give or direct it. Woman is the fundamental erotic object of the gaze, and, as such, she “is an indispensable element of spectacle in normal narrative film, yet her visual presence tends to […] freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation” (19). By holding the look, she jeopardizes the development of the film’s narrative.

Hollywood cinema relies on the subjectivity of the male hero to overcome the disruptive effects of woman’s image. While film spectators look at the woman on the screen as an erotic object, she is also objectified by the gaze of other screen characters, particularly that of the leading man. Contrasting woman’s passive role as erotic spectacle, the male hero is the active subject of the narrative. He is positioned to control events not only by “the ruling ideology and the psychical structures that back it up” (20), but also by the framing and editing conventions of classic cinema. Camera technology that delivers a deep-focus perspective combines with film editing and other techniques to establish the illusion of an on-screen space that faithfully reflects the real world. Indeed, the screen assumes the aspect of a mirror, at the center of which is the male hero, who “articulates the look and creates the action” (21). Due to his command of the space, he reproduces the ideal ego conceived in the mirror phase of childhood development. The film spectator thus identifies with the male hero, assumes his perspective (or “look”), and, in this way, “the extra-diegetic tendencies represented by woman as spectacle” (20) are neutralized.

Woman’s image, however, remains destabilizing inasmuch as she “connotes something the look continually circles around but disavows: her lack of a penis, implying a threat of castration and hence unpleasure” (22). Mulvey maintains that traditional cinema works to mitigate this problem in one of two ways. The first relies on a story propelled largely by voyeurism and a narrative arc (typified in film noir) that begins with investigation of woman’s guilt or “mystery” (22) and ends by punishing or saving her. The second exploits fetishistic scopophilia, which is the “complete disavowal of castration by the substitution of a fetish object or turning the represented figure itself into a fetish so that it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous (hence […] the cult of the female star)” (22). This strategy dispenses with efforts to maintain the narrative development, inviting the film spectator to suspend himself in the pleasure of looking at woman as highly stylized spectacle.

Mulvey briefly engages her theories with the work of two directors, Joseph von Sternberg and Alfred Hitchcock. Numerous Sternberg films revel in the image of his preferred female star, Marlene Dietrich, and exemplify the cinematic rendering of fetishistic scopophilia. In films like Morocco and Dishonored, Dietrich’s perfected beauty suffuses the screen, relegating the story to the sidelines in favor of enticing and holding the spectator’s look. Mulvey notes that “[t]he most important absence is that of the controlling male gaze within the screen scene” (23), which allows the audience to indulge in unmediated fetishistic scopophilia.

While “the look” largely constitutes the content in Sternberg’s films, it serves as the subject of several Hitchcock films featuring male heroes embroiled in investigative voyeurism. Because Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Rear Window, and Marnie also contain examples of fetishistic scopophilia, Mulvey states that in these works, “the look is central to the plot, oscillating between voyeurism and fetishistic fascination” (23). In each of these films, the male protagonist is invested with authority by means of his occupation or wealth. Scottie (Vertigo) and Jefferies (Rear Window)—policeman and photographer, respectively—exemplify power and authority in the symbolic order. Film audiences identify with them as ego ideals, see through their viewpoint, and are “absorbed into a voyeuristic situation within the screen scene and diegesis” (24).

Mulvey argues that voyeurism involves a sadistic impulse, and she explores this association as it plays out in Vertigo. When Scottie, the protagonist, is hired to spy on a beautiful woman, he becomes obsessed with her. He ultimately confronts her, subjects her to interrogation, compels her to change her appearance, and, finally, instigates her punishment (death). Meanwhile, Hitchcock’s use of subjective camera intensifies the spectator’s identification with Scottie. As Scottie’s controlling perspective turns sadistic, however, the spectator “finds himself exposed as complicit, caught in the moral ambiguity of looking” (25).

Part 4: “Summary”

In the concluding section of her essay, Mulvey notes that while other visual mediums (such as photography or even strip-tease) exploit the psychic structures that subtend “woman’s to-be-looked-at-ness, cinema builds the way she is to be looked at into the spectacle itself” (26). Traditional cinema accomplishes this by means of conventions that suppress the constructed-ness of the screen’s content, thereby absorbing the viewer (via the male hero’s perspective or fetishistic scopophilia) into the seemingly real world of the narrative film. One way to expose these conventions and disrupt their affirmation of the male gaze is to allow the camera to make its presence known in the film. While an intrusive camera will destroy the pleasure produced by the illusion of realism, Mulvey concludes that women “cannot view the decline of the traditional film form with anything much more than sentimental regret” (27).