Download Laura Mulvey against the grain: a critical assessment of the

Laura Mulvey against the grain: a critical assessment of the psychoanalytic feminist approach to
film
By Terje Steinulfsson Skjerdal, Centre for Cultural and Media Studies, University of Natal, 1997.
Abstract
Since the middle 1970s, Laura Mulvey has been regarded as one of the most prominent feminist
film critic. Her critique of mainstream cinema is built on Lacanian psychoanalysis, in which the
differences between male and female spectatorship becomes a key component. In this paper, I argue
that Mulvey's pscyhoanalytic approach to a very little extent is successful in dealing with the
feminist dilemma. With references to "Thelma and Louise" (1991), I attempt to show that the
psychoanalytic approach to film has three fatal weaknesses: (a) it is not easily applicable to film
reading, (b) it assumes an unproven dichotomy between the active male and the passive
female, and (c) it is simplistic in its condemnation of all Hollywood film.
Content
Mulvey's view of mainstream film: a typical feminist response
Approaching cinema through psychoanalysis
Critical assessment: how Mulvey's approach fall short
The problem of applying psychoanalysis to film
The problem of the active male vs. the passive female
The problem of reading all Hollywood film as antagonistic
The main contribution to film criticism by Laura Mulvey, whom I am about to assess in this paper,
can be summarized as a challenge to both the audience and the film-maker. The audience is
challenged in the way it assumingly reads film in a customary and uncritical manner; the filmmaker is challenged by the degree to which he or she surrenders to the established norms of
representing gender. A theorist and practitioner of feminist film criticism, Mulvey adopted and
customized two central tools to analyse gendered address in classical narrative film: psychoanalysis
and semiotic analysis. Following the publishing of her crucial essay «Visual Pleasure and
Narrative Cinema» (1988b [1975]), an influential branch of feminist film theory was built on
Mulvey’s theories as a vehicle to empower the broader feminist movement.
This paper will trace the key elements of Mulvey’s theories, most notably psychoanalysis and
feminist views on spectatorship. I will in this regard pay attention to the general theoretical
significance as well as to the particular relevance to film criticism, since Mulvey throughout her
writings seldom restricts herself to one theoretical aspect only. My specific aim in this section is to
make clear what Mulvey’s critical theories have contributed to film criticism the past 20 years. I
will then go on to critically assess Mulvey’s approach, with examples drawn from Thelma and
Louise (1991). I hope thereby to show how a critical approach can question traditional film-making,
but foremost I aim at proving that Mulvey’s psychoanalytic approach is insufficient to provide a
sound modern film critique. The conclusion is twofold: firstly, that Laura Mulvey has contributed
greatly to the criticism of gender representation in traditional Hollywood film [1]; secondly, that her
reliability on psychoanalytic methods nevertheless proves to be an unfruitful approach to read films,
both with regard to narrative content and with regard to her preoccupation with the relationship
between film-maker and spectator.
Mulvey’s approach to mainstream film: a typical feminist response
Mulvey’s critique of traditional Hollywood film falls into the broad claim of feminist film criticism,
as stated in «Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema»: «Film reflects, reveals and even plays on
the straight, socially established interpretation of sexual difference which controls images,
erotic ways of looking and spectacle» (p. 57). Film is thus seen as a reinforcement of traditional
gender representation rather than a corrective. Crucial in this argument is the claim that the
interpretation on behalf of the viewer takes place unconsciously, thus providing the basis for
ignorance to gender oppression and subordination. It appears somewhat unclear from Mulvey’s
writings whether she sees the portrayal of gender in mainstream film as a deliberate act performed
by the production companies. On the one hand, the logical conclusion from the Freudo-Lacanian
approach would be that also the film-maker’s thought is distorted through social learning. On the
other hand, Mulvey utilizes the expression «manipulation of visual pleasure» to explain the magic
of Hollywood style, as if the film-maker has a hidden male-biased agenda in mind. In either case, it
is exactly the understanding of visual pleasure that is Mulvey’s project; in the first place to explain
why the viewer is subject to a male reading of the film, and in the second place to propose solutions
for an alternative way of reading and producing films.
Mulvey claims that the main challenge for those who want to promote alternatives to the
establishment is to overcome a patriarchal industry that has «left women largely without a
voice» (1989, p. 39). The genres of melodrama and the western are used to prove this claim. With
regard to melodramas, Mulvey argues that the sense in which these supposedly are able to equip
women with a voice is contradictory. The female point of view will also here surrender to the
overall patriarchal structure of society, Mulvey argues (1989). (Jackie Byars (1991) opposes this
view, as I will note later on.)
Central to Mulvey’s critique of traditional film is that popular culture discourages the
audience from keeping a critical distance to the content (Seton, 1997). Most notably, however,
is Mulvey’s assertion that the point of view that a camera holds is essentially male. The female
viewer must therefore adapt to an identity other than her own, an argument that constitute
the foundation for the psychoanalytic approach to film criticism. In this regard, Mulvey
implicitly answers in the affirmative the question that has become central to feminist film criticism
debate: «Is the gaze male?» Herein also lies Mulvey’s key to reading films: by help from Lacanian
psychoanalysis.
Approaching cinema through psychoanalysis
One would not immediately think of psychoanalysis as a proper tool to read films, and perhaps it
was partly the unexpectedness that made this approach popular after Mulvey presented it in 1975 . I
will shortly summarize the main elements of this theory as it appeared in «Visual pleasure and
narrative cinema» (1988b) [2].
The primary proposition of the psychoanalytic method, developed by Freud and further
elaborated by Lacan, is that the woman is subject to personal and social depression through
her lack of a penis. Her existence is thus decided by her desire to escape castration, an escape
which turns out to be impossible. Psychoanalysis subsequently sees the male as physically and
symbolically dominant, a dominance that is only threatened by his adopted fear of castration.
Mulvey draws in this respect more on Freud than on Lacan, although she later goes on to use
Lacanian terms such as «imaginary» and «symbolic». In transferring this theory to film analysis,
particular attention is paid to the Freudian explanation of scopophilia – control through gaze.
Mulvey contends that the scopophilic nature is evident in the way films are watched. Through
narrative structure and conditions of screening, cinema provides a perfect climate for looking
at another person as an object of sexual stimulation. This is the scopophilic function of sexual
instincts. The ego function is also apparent, and develops as the viewer seeks to identify with
characters on the screen. A central component in Mulvey’s adoption of Freud’s psychoanalysis to
film spectatorship is therefore voyeurism, the pleasure in looking.
Further, Mulvey distinguishes between the active male and the passive female. She argues that
this dichotomy is further reinforced by mainstream film which combines spectacle and narrative in
a speculative manner. The woman is in this view crucial to the narrative (as an object); and at
the same time, she freezes the narrative in «moments of erotic contemplation» (p. 62). These
moments ‘apart from time’ are evident for instance when the camera shows a close-up of Julia
Roberts’ leg as she pulls on her stockings in the opening sequence of Pretty Woman (1990).
According to Mulvey, such filmatic techniques are a result of the male gaze, and only proves how
feminine qualities are married with the passive – both in the way the film is made and in the way
the spectator makes meaning of it. The masculine, on the other hand, is perceived as more complex,
more perfect. When reading films, the female spectator is left with two options: She can either
identify with the male camera and the male object within the film, or she can identify with the
female object within the film in a masochistic way (Man, 1993). Her destiny is that she cannot
escape the male gaze as she reads the film. From this, it is evident that Mulvey’s
psychoanalytic approach to film is a pessimistic one, and indeed deterministic.
Mulvey also makes it a point to rediscover the three looks that are associated with film: that
of the camera, that of the audience, and that of the characters. Her argument is that only the
third of these, the viewpoint of the characters, is present in mainstream film. The two others
are denied in order to strip the spectator of critical thinking and suppress information that
may question the ‘realism’ of the picture.
From the last argument in particular, it is no surprise that Mulvey’s answer to the feminist challenge
is to call for production methods that extensively discard traditional film-making and instead pave
the way for alternative cinema. In other words, she becomes a proponent for avant-garde film.
Alternative film that challenges the basic assumptions of mainstream film is possible in
Mulvey’s opinion, but «it can still only exist as a counterpoint» (1988b, p. 59). This adds to the
theoretical pessimism that I will argue is evident from Mulvey’s psychoanalytic approach. It leads
in a sense to a cul-de-sac where the male gaze penetrates not only cinema, but also the fundamental
way in which gender is represented in society. To overthrow this patriarchal structure in a simple
manner is in Mulvey’s opinion inconceivable – which follows logically from the psychoanalytic
approach. Avant-garde cinema turns out to be her only response to mainstream cinema which
supposedly is so structured by the male gaze that it is unable to accommodate images of women
without fetishism (Enciso, 1997). The only way to facilitate a powerful feminist cinema is to disrupt
traditional viewing pleasure, so to speak.
In «Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’» (1988a [1981]), Mulvey
reinforces her Freudian approach to film interpretation. In particular, the distinction between the
active male and the passive female is further argued and extended. The conclusion remains the
same, «Hollywood genre films structured around masculine pleasure, offering an
identification with the active point of view, allow a woman spectator to rediscover that lost
aspect of her sexual identity» (p. 71). The masculine identification is thus evident both from
the point of the female character and the female spectator.
In addition to bringing psychoanalysis into film criticism, Mulvey should be acknowledged for her
application of semiotics in reading gendered address. Her approach in this regard did not represent a
pioneer project in film criticism in general, yet it gave a new direction for feminist film criticism in
particular. As Seton (1997) points out, the tools offered by linguistics and semiotics provided
insights into the spoken (i.e. the conscious articulation of patriarchy), thereby filling in for the
shortcomings of psychoanalysis (which analyses the unspoken, i.e. the unconscious of
patriarchy). [3]
Overall, Mulvey’s contribution can be read as a shift in film analysis from ideology critique to
cultural forms critique manifested through the dominant male viewing pleasures into which
everything has to conform. We have seen that the central explanatory component in this theory is
Freud’s assumption that the female is rendered powerless through her awareness of a lack of
masculine genitals. The female, then, is in this view unable to find ways of emancipation
through a movie industry that only reinforces the male gaze. Thus, Mulvey denies that
traditional filmic solutions are capable of destroying the male-oriented female image, and she
consequently calls for an avant-garde technique that enables women to develop imageries that
explore their own fantasies and desires. Mulvey’s own films (notably Riddles of the Sphinx
(1976), which she co-produced with Peter Wollen), are often referred to as successful avant-garde
responses to the challenge that stems from the psychoanalytic film criticism. The clue in these films
is precisely that they supposedly turns the female passive spectatorial position to an active one.
Mulvey’s crucial importance to feminist film criticism is evident from several recent commentators,
for instance Elizabeth Wright (1992): «All subsequent feminist film theory working within a
psychoanalytic tradition has begun with Mulvey’s articulation of the patriarchal gaze of
narrative cinema» (p. 120).
A critical assessment: how Mulvey’s approach falls short
Having explained Mulvey’s main thoughts, we are now ready to turn to a critical discussion of her
approach. I will organize the criticism in three broad categories: the difficulty that lies within
psychoanalytic theory itself and its application to film criticism, the fatal tendency to
dichotomize male and female natures, and the simplistic view that all Hollywood film is
destructive. The bottom line is that Mulvey’s theories fall short of empowering the broad feminist
movement. I am not arguing against her aim, only her method and theory. In so doing, I will draw
on the reading of Thelma and Louise, a film that in my opinion in fact gives women a voice,
although the film is highly marked by the Hollywood stamp both in narrative structure,
cinematography and mise en scène.
The problem of applying psychoanalysis to film
As E. Deidre Pribram (1988) points out, Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic theories have been
central to film studies because they forge a link between cultural forms of representation (here:
film), and the aquisition of subject identity in social beings. However, my argument is that this link
has proved difficult to establish in practice. Mulvey’s project is to search for a theory that
sufficiently explains why Hollywood cinema is a threat to women. Her starting-point is thus
fixed: She sees traditional narrative film as being destructive in that it forces the female to
submit to established patriarchal norms. At this point, we already see a fallacy to which
psychoanalytic film criticism tends to submit. It starts with the assumption that gendered
address in traditional film is destructive, and goes on to explain this phenomenon without
investigating the truthfulness of the initial presupposition. Then in the second place, as we are
blinded by the seemingly obvious relevance of explaining a cultural representation through its
psychological significance, the psychoanalytical film critic will utilize semiotic terminology
partly derived from Lacan to explain the link between sexual identity and social
determination (through the moving picture). The explanation seems convincing, yet it does not
prove its claim – precisely because the order of assumptions and explanations/claims is reversed.
There are too many assumptions and too little proof, as it were.
The methodological approach of psychoanalysis is therefore a highly problematic (and subjective)
one. The problems of a psychoanalytic film theory is also apparent from its preoccupation
with only one aspect of the human nature, sexual desires. E. Deidre Pribram (1988) adds to
this critique and claims that psychoanalytic theories «fail to address the formation and
operation of other variables or differences amongst individuals, such as race and class» (p. 2).
This notion is a valid one, particularly when considering the fact that most feminists will claim to be
part of a broader movement that questions every part of patriarchal domination. Interestingly
enough, Pribram goes on to argue that psychoanalytic models are also weak in that they deny the
importance of the context; «no place is allowed for shifts in textual meaning related to shifts in
viewing situation», hence ignoring the differences in viewership that might come about when
people with different social and cultural backgrounds read the same movie. However, this position
of psychoanalysitic film theory corresponds with its major premise that the gaze is merely male.
This criticism will be further discussed under the next subheading.
Christine Gledhill (1988) contends that a weakness of the psychoanalytic film approach (which she
consistently calls «cine-psychoanalysis») is that it has derived its framework from the perspective
of masculinity. The theory thus characterizes the feminine as «lack», «absence» and «otherness».
However, Glenhill notes that there has been a development from early cine-psychoanalysis, i.e.
from the 1970s, and that more recent approaches to the theory may be able to acknowledge
feminine qualities as more complex than «male subordination». This is a valuable remark, and
should be kept in mind as we examine Mulvey’s theories; it should not be taken for granted that she
still supports all aspects of the approach as it appeared in the first publishing of «Visual Pleasure
and Narrative Cinema» in 1975. However, in the introduction to the 1989 reprinting of the essay,
Mulvey does reinforce the psychoanalytic approach, though she maintains that the practical side of
the theory faced a different social climate in the 1970s.
Teresa de Lauretis (1987) applauds much of Mulvey’s work, but is critical of the psychoanalytic
approach. Her concern is particularly to prove the limits of this approach for film theory, and she
argues that semiotic theories of iconicity and narrativity would be of more user to feminist film
critics. De Lauretis’s critique seems to be sound in the first place, but how does she go about
distinguishing semiotic theories from psychoanalysis, especially in the tradition of Lacan? Her
response to this question appears to be incomplete.
Zoe Sofia (1989), on the other hand, is easier to follow as she argues that a main difficulty with
psychoanalytic cultural criticism is the inflexibility that results when the findings are generalized.
The difficulty arises as the researcher tries to map out a larger theory from the analysis of the
psyche; the problem is just that the findings will inevitably gravitate towards sociological
conceptions already determined by the order of gender differences (which, again, stems from the
presuppositions of the psychoanalytic approach).
One of the more solid critiques of feminist psychoanalysis is provided by Jackie Byars (1991). Her
argument is well-founded in that it points both to inconsistencies within psychoanalysis itself as
well as to the problems of applying the theory to feminist film criticism. Byars notes how Freudian
and Lacanian psychoanalysis sees the masculine as normative and the feminine as deviant, and
further argues that this theory indeed «cannot account for resistance and ideological struggle; they
represent, instead, the psychic mechanisms for reinforcing dominant ideologies» (p. 137). If true,
this argument is all the more embarrassing to feminist psychoanalysists when facing the fact that
feminism’s major project is exactly to reveal and overthrow dominant structures at all levels. Byars
also contends that recent developments in psychology has discarded parts of Freud’s theories,
whereas in film theory orthodox Freudianism still prevails.
What, then, about the application of psychoanalysis to the actual interpretation of films? In my
view, the reading of films through Freudian glasses proves how difficult it is to utilize
psychoanalysis as a tool to understand patriarchal structures in society. A few examples from
Thelma and Louise will illustrate my point.
In a psychoanalytic reading, Thelma (Geena Davis) and Louise (Susan Sarandon) are seen as
objects of their traditional, domestic world. Their ascribed task in life is to do the dish-washing, to
nurture and to love their husbands. No other world is known to them. Thelma and Louise’s desire,
however, is to escape and get away. In particular, they seek independence, freedom and space –
qualities usually attributed to males. The psychoanalytic reading of this is obvious: The female’s
innate hatred of castration leads her to worship masculine qualities. As the storyline develops and
the two women run away to free themselves from their domestic environment, they indeed utilize
masculine commodities to make their escape possible: a car, a gun, harsh language. Yet the
psychoanalyst would not let the women get away with easy solutions. Eventually, they will have to
surrender to their female destiny. I can therefore only think about one psychoanalytic interpretation
of Thelma and Louise’s decision to speed their stolen car to the edge of the Grand Canyon in the
end: They were ultimately trapped by the powers of the male-dominated society; the only way out –
if not returning to their domestic world – was to give it all up. A positive interpretation of this last
sequence is inconceivable in psychoanalytic terms.
With regard to spectatorship, the psychoanalytic approach faces however difficulties. One of the
problematic question is this: How can the male – who assumingly watches movies mainly for
pleasure (voyuerism) – have pleasure in watching two women gaining power over other men? (Our
presupposition here is that males actually did enjoy Thelma and Louise, which is evident from the
popularity of the movie both among men and women.) The castration fear would certainly make
this a painful watching experience for men as well as women. To this I simply reply that the
psychoanalytic approach appears to be unable to deal with such problems.
The problem of the active male vs. the passive female
My second objection to Mulvey’s film theory arises from her rigid distinction between the active
male and the passive female. In her view, woman is the object and man is the bearer of the look (the
gaze is male). This dichotomy can to a certain extent be explained by the tendency for tying gender
to biological determinism rather than to social development. Yet the psychoanalytic theory fails to
account for differences within each gender, as I am about to argue now.
In her argument against this dualistic model of gender identity, Sofia (1989) points out that the
woman remains almost without any sexual identity in psychoanalysis since she is entirely defined in
relation to the man. Sofia espands her argument by denying that symbolic language (as defined by
Lacan) is adequate to masculine self-representation. Likewise, Sofia argues, textual excess or
indecidability should not always be regarded as a feminine quality. Indeed, she concludes her paper
with a crucial precaution that is highly relevant to a critical assessment of feminist film theories,
namely that a failure to distinguish between feminine and masculine femininities and maternal
figures can result in misreadings of masculine perversity as feminist progress. Such misreadings
would of course go against the aim of the entire Mulveyian project.
The fallacy of defining the genders as dichotomous categories becomes similarly clear from
Mulvey’s assumption that the male is the bearer of the look. She expands this assumption to an
application of the narrative film industry in order to show that both characters, film-makers and
audience take the male gaze for granted. But how then, we must ask, is it possible to account for the
differences that we apparently see in female characters within the same film? Mulvey’s answer is
that there only appears to be a difference, a lesser or larger degree of masculine/feminine acting, but
in reality all such individual characteristics are constructued to perfectly suit the overall notion of
the man as the bearer of the look. The female spectator, then, unconsciously has to shift between an
active masculine and a passive feminine identity.
Pamela Robertson (1996) agrees with the assertion that female spectatorship is characterized by an
oscillation between the active and the passive, but she also argues for a model that more accurately
can account for «the overlap between passitivity and activity in a viewer who sees through,
simultaneously perhaps, one mask of serious femininity and another mask of laughing femininity»
(p. 15). Robertson’s solution is the position of camp, which she argues for extensively throughout
her book, but it ultimately appears to be just another separatist ideology – which I doubt is a fruitful
answer to the feminist challenge.
Since Mulvey approaches the feminist gaze as utopic, how will she read Thelma and Louise? We
can only guess. Because the psychoanalytic starting-point is that the female spectator is forced to
read every action as either passive submission or active identification, it is likely that the critic will
ignore the complexity of Thelma and Louise’s characters. Such a view becomes problematic
because, as Glenn Man (1993) points out, Thelma and Louise generates a complex narrative process
that can create «new fantasies for spectator appropriation» (p. 37). Man goes on to state what is
exactly the core of my argument here: «What the narration of Thelma and Louise attempts to do
then is to inscribe both women as subjects and agents of the narrative, give authentic voice to their
desires, and mute the discourses of the male characters» (p. 39). If this is a sound observation, and I
believe it is, then Mulvey’s assumption of the silent woman in Hollywood film is false.
The problem of reading all Hollywood film as antagonistic
We have seen that Mulvey argues for a feminist film-making practice that goes against traditional
narrative film as much as possible. The assumption behind this argument is that the audience is so
surrounded by traditional patriarchal norms that it is not able to critically read films unless an
entirely different approach is provided. Mulvey’s response is to call for the avant-garde cinema,
which she sees as a possible alternative to Hollywood, but «it can still only exist as a counterpoint»
(1988b, p. 59). There is truly a sense of pessimism in that statement, a sort of Mulveyian «realistic
dissidence» (cf. Theodor Adorno).
Byars (1991) strongly objects to this claim that narrative film is all bad. Quite contrary to Mulvey,
Byars sees the American melodramas of the 1950s as a creative tool rather than a destructive force.
She shows that the Hollywood dramas not only encouraged the audience (both males and females)
to interpret the filmic material, but also extended debates around issues of sexual divisions of
labour, gender roles, and family structure.
The kind of view that Byars advocates has gained more recognition in feminist circles in recent
years. Film-maker Michelle Citron (1988), for instance, openly argues for a feminist use of
Hollywood. In her opinion, the entry into mainstream narrative film-making will «broaden the work
we [feminist film-makers] do and expand our understanding of visual culture and of ourselves» (p.
62). She even contends that traditional narrative film has more potential than alternative film in
some areas because it opens up for contradictions, paradoxes and uncertainties. Another major point
she raises against avant-garde advocates such as Mulvey, is that alternative cinema is inaccessible
to many viewers. It contains an unfamiliar style and communicative form, and thus creates a gap
that many viewers cannot overcome. Nuria Enciso (1997) adds to this critique, and maintains that
radical films like Mulvey’s «have remained on the fringe and therefore have not contributed as
greatly as they could have to altering the position of women within society».
A main concern of Mulvey’s is the question of whether it is possible to obtain a true feminist gaze.
By means of traditional narrative film, her answer is negative. On the contrary, Mulvey argues that
only an alternative film method in the hands of feminists can possibly turn the gaze around.
However, reality seems to be more complex than what Mulvey seems to suggest. That the filmmaker is female does not of course ensure that the gaze will be feminine. And what is a feminine
gaze? Film critics disagree on this point; many will say that there is no essential difference between
a male and a female gaze. Furthermore, as Enciso (1997) points out, there are within each gender
vast differences between individuals (there are blacks, older, younger, working-class, etc.). Such
differences will often override gender differences as well, and makes the whole notion of gender
separations highly questionable. It follows from this that Mulvey’s theories hardly can be said to
have universal validity.
Lastly, I will pay attention to the fact that contemporary mainstream cinema utilizes filmatic
techniques and strategies of narration that would have been considered alternative only one decade
ago. It is enough here to refer to Romeo and Juliet (1996) and Natural Born Killers (1994), which
both have attracted large audiences although they in some ways break significantly with established
narrative film. In the same manner, Thelma and Louise has been able to put on the agenda a
traditionally marginalized issue, the issue of women emancipatoin. The last statement should be
qualified to a certain extent; some commentators, such as Elayne Rapping, «certainly don’t think
it’s a feminist movie» (1992, p. 30). However, I am not so concerned here with classifying what is a
feminist movie and not. My argument is that the main concern for feminist film should not
necessarily be to oppose mainstream film in all aspects. Rather, the focus should be on the issue
itself, namely the struggle for women’s liberation. In this struggle, I contend that mainstream film
may very well be a helpful tool, because, as Enciso (1997) points out, «the situation for women
intellectuals and artists is already difficult enough without women discouraging their own
participation in popular culture».
In conclusion, I ought to give credit to Laura Mulvey for her important role in paving the way for a
modern feminist film criticism whose main concern has been to give voice to marginalized subgroups in society. I think here not only of the feminist movement itself. Nevertheless, I wish to
maintain that Mulvey’s psychoanalytic approach has not been fruitful to an understanding of
gendered address in traditional cinema.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------Notes
1. By «traditional Hollywood film» I mean mainstream movies which to a very little extent seek to
challenge established norms and underlying societal ideologies. «Hollywood film» is always
produced to reach a large audience, but needs not necessarily be made in Hollywood. The central
claim in feminist film criticism is that Hollywood film fails to question dominant patriarchal
structures in society.
2. Two other scholars who contributed to the development of psychoanalytic film theory in the midseventies were Christian Metz and Juliet Mitchell. More names could have been mentioned.
However, this paper concentrates merely on Mulvey’s work since she appears to have been the most
influential in developing a feminist film criticism based on psychoanalysis.
3. We may also speak of semiotics within psychoanalysis. Indeed, it is difficult to explain Lacanian
psychoanalysis without using semiotic terminology. Lacan sees the phallus as the «signifier of
signifers», the representative of signification and language. Moreover, the phallus signifies
distribution of power and possession; a notion which in turn becomes a crucial element in Mulvey’s
use of psychoanalysis. Lacan’s significance for feminist theory is extensively traced by Elizabeth
Grosz (1990).
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------References
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De Lauretis, T. (1984). Alice doesn’t: feminism, semiotics, cinema. London: Macmillan.
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Seton, J. (1997). Feminist film theory. World Wide Web:
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Reading Guide to Mulvey on Cinema and Pschoanalysis
(NB see the linked critical discussion in the file relating to the Screen 'special' on difference -- here)
Three pieces are summarised here, ranging over a decade, and featuring some important changes in
persepctive...
Mulvey L 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema', Screen, 16, 3, Autumn 1975
NB this piece is collected in several readers as well, including Screen (1992), and Bennett et al
(1981) Popular Film and Television, London: BFI Publishing ( in an abridged version). Page
numbers for quotes below refer to the version in Thornham, S (ed) Feminist Film Theory: a Reader,
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press
The particular fascinations of film may be 'reinforced by pre-existing patterns of fascination already
at work within the individual subject and the social formations that have moulded him' [sic] (page
58), especially by considering sexual difference. 'psychoanalytic theory... [becomes]... a political
weapon, demonstrating the way the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form'
(58).
Phallocentrism relies upon the image of 'the castrated women [sic]' (58). Woman as lack produces
the phallus as symbolic presence. Recent material in Screen has shown how the female form
'speaks castration' (58). Women symbolise the castration threat through the lack of a penis, and raise
children so they can enter the symbolic order. Women do not enter the symbolic themselves, (and
can have no desires of their own) 'except as a memory ... memory of maternal plenitude and
memory of lack' (59). Both of these options are found in nature, or anatomy, as in Freud [a hint of
the old biologism here? -- see the file on Screen theory]. Women bear 'the bleeding wound', existing
only in relation to castration. When women bear children, these are desires to possess a penis -- the
child has submitted to the law of the symbolic order, or '[kept] down with her in the half light of the
imaginary' (59). Women thus stand as an Other to males: men live out fantasies and obsessions
'through linguistic command by imposing them' on women (59).
This expresses very well the frustrations for women in phallocentric societies. It helps women
articulate the problem, and presents them with a major challenge -- how to fight while still caught
within the language of patriarchy. Alternatives are unlikely, but patriarchy can be analysed,
especially via psychoanalysis. However, even psychoanalysis has not developed very far and
actually exploring female sexuality and its relation to the symbolical order.
Despite the emergence of alternative cinemas and new developments in technology, Hollywood still
dominates, mainly because of its skill in manipulating verbal pleasure -- 'mainstream film coded the
erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order' (60). Thus erotic pleasure and the central
place of the image of women needs to be analysed. Such analysis deliberately sets out to destroy
naive pleasure in watching the narrative fiction film. The past is to be left behind, or transcended,
'in order to conceive a new language of desire'.
A major source of pleasure for the viewer is scopophilia -- the pleasure in looking and in being
looked at. Freud suggested scopophilia was an important component of sexuality, although he
restricted this to childish activities in seeing, especially other people's genitals. Scopophilia can
develop into a perversion, obsessive voyeurism, which involves gaining satisfaction from 'watching,
in an active controlling sense, an objectified other' (61).
Scopophilic pleasure is available in the cinema, since the viewers watch in an enclosed world,
where images appear apparently regardless of who is watching. Thus the spectators seem to be
looking in on a private world, and can project their desires on to the actors. Conventions of
mainstream film also focus on the human body, and 'Scale, space, stories are all anthropomorphic'
(61) . This provides the pleasures of recognition.
Lacan described the mirror phase as a crucial stage in the development of the ego. The child sees an
image in the mirror as a more perfect and idealised version of himself ( as in narcissism) -- hence
recognition is combined with a misrecognition, and a mirror image gets taken as an ideal ego, and
the basis of models of others. This is an alienating moment, but it also marks an entry into the social
symbolic order. It is no coincidence that an image provokes this phase, not the perception of the real
object, such as the mother's face. The tension between image and self-image is established too, and
this leads directly to film and the processes of recognition in the cinema audience. The film is
fascinating enough to 'allow temporary loss of ego while simultaneously reinforcing the ego' (62).
The images presented by the film enable a temporary sense of forgetting and also the observation of
'ego ideals as expressed in particular in the star system'. The whole process is 'nostalgically
reminiscent of that pre-subjective moment of image recognition' [in Lacan].
Thus we have a contradiction between two kinds of pleasure -- scopophilic and narcissistic.
Scopophilic pleasure involves seeing others as objects of sexual stimulation. The second kind of
pleasure comes from recognising or identifying with the image, a narcissistic pleasure, to do with
the constitution or maintenance of the ego. The subject himself is split in pursuing these two kinds
of pleasures -- there is an erotic identity, arising from sexual instincts, and (ego) identification, more
to do with ego and their energies. This contradiction is a major aspect of the perception of the
subject -- 'the imaginised, eroticised concept of the world' [the Lacanian Imaginary]: this subjective
perception 'makes a mockery of empirical objectivity' (62). Cinema offers a particular version of
reality which enables these contradictory pleasures to co-exist. However, pleasure is accompanied
by threats to the ego -- images of women crystallise this tension.
Pleasures in looking have been split between active/male and passive/female. The male gaze is
'determining', and female figures appear in accordance with male fantasies -- they 'connote to-belooked-at-ness'(63) , as in conventional erotic spectacles like strip-tease. In mainstream film, there
is both spectacle and narrative, and here, the presence of women can threaten the flow of narrative,
by freezing the action in 'moments of erotic contemplation'. This means that women have to be
reintegrated into the narrative -- indeed, their role in narrative is almost entirely to make the hero act
in the way he does. An exception here involves the development of the 'buddy movie'-- Mulvey
cites Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid -- where the 'active homosexual eroticism of the central
male figures can carry the story without distraction' (63) [and without any threat to the conventional
sexuality of the male audience?].
Traditionally, though women are erotic objects for the characters and for the spectators, leading to a
combination of looks -- sometimes, when women are performing as showgirls, the two looks can be
unified, and this is also commonly achieved in conventional narratives. Women performers can add
extra pleasure of a sexual nature. However, occasionally, the 'sexual impact of the performing
woman [can take] the film into a no-man's-land outside its own time and space', and can destroy
perspective, appearing as a 'cut-out or icon' (62). [Examples here are 'Marilyn Monroe's fist
appearance in The River of No Return and Lauren Bacall's songs in To Have and Have Not' ( 63)]
The split between active and passive stances also dominate conventional narrative. '... the principles
of the ruling ideology and the psychical structures that back it up... [mean]... the male figure cannot
bear the burden of sexual objectification. Man is reluctant to gaze at his exhibitionist like[ness]'
(62). As a result there has to be a split between spectacle and narrative, and men have to be given
the active role of forwarding the story [as a kind of excuse, or pretext, or because of the extra
demands of patriarchal ideology?]. Men control the 'film fantasy', and also gain power by
representing the look of the spectator. This follows because the spectator 'identifies with the main
male protagonist' [in an aside, Mulvey acknowledges that there are female main protagonists in
films too, pleads lack of space to discuss these, and suggests that these main protagonists are not as
strong as they appear -- but see below]. This identification enables the spectator to enjoy the
controlling power of the male performer -- the latter becomes the more powerful ideal ego as in the
mirror phase. Camera technology, including deep focus, unobtrusive movements and editing [i.e.
realist technique] lend support to this idea of male control of a 3-D environment, and the action.
Thus one look involves the spectator 'in direct scopophilic contact with the female form', while
another enables identification with male performers who are in control of the action and the woman.
However, women also signify lack, and thus pose a threat of castration. [ The lack of a penis is
again seen as 'visually ascertainable...evidence on which is based the castration complex' (65) -biologism, again]. Thus women as icon also threaten and cause anxiety. Men respond by reenacting the trauma ( via investigation and demystification of women); [les healthy?] by punishing
'or saving' the guilty object ('the concerns of the film noir' ( 65)); by substituting the threat into a
fetish, 'so that it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous' (65) ('overvaluation, the cult of the
female star'). The first two reactions lead to voyeurism, and asadism, aasserting control and
subjugating the guilty person. 'This sadistic side fits in well with narrative. Sadism demands a
story...' ( 65), and linear time. Fetishism can go on outside of time, ' focused on the look alone' (65).
Only Angels Have Wings, and To Have and Have Not are cited of examples of how narrative
delivers the main female character into the hands of the main male protagonist, and thus delivers
pleasure to the identifying spectator] Hitchcock and Sternberg also offer examples of variation.
Sternberg, in creating images of Dietrich, 'produces the ultimate fetish' (65), almost dispensing with
the identification mechanism in order to provide direct scopophilia pleasure for the viewer. There is
almost no controlling male gaze, but concentration upon Dietrich directly as an erotic image. There
is 'cyclical rather than linear time' (66), as plots revolve around misunderstandings: Dietrich offers
maximum erotic meaning 'in the absence of the man she loves in the fiction' (66): the man
'misunderstands and above all does not see' (66).
In Hitchcock, by contrast, the male hero always sees what the audience sees. There are scopophilia
moments, 'oscillating between voyeurism and fetishistic fascination', and the male heroes usually
lose their respectability ('His heroes are exemplary of the symbolic order and the law'(66)) by
succumbing to erotic drives. Sadistic subjection, and voyeuristic gaze are both directed at women,
thinly justified by acting in the name of legalised power, or because the woman is classically 'guilty'
-- 'evoking castration, psychoanalytically speaking' (66). Viewers are encouraged to identify,
through devices like 'liberal use of subjective camera from the point of view of the male protagonist'
(66). [A more detailed discussion of Vertigo ensues -- it demonstrates an interesting opinion that the
viewer in Hitchcock films can feel uneasy, complicit, 'caught in the moral ambiguity of looking'
(67), almost as if the sexual pleasures are too blatant, and too thinly disguised by the apparent
morality of the film, its 'shallow mask of ideological correctness'].
Thus psychoanalysis is relevant to understanding pleasure and unpleasure in traditional narrative
films. The mechanism of looking supplemented by more active forms of male control 'adding a
further layer demanded by the ideology of the patriarchal order as it is worked out in its favourite
cinematic form -- illusionist narrative film' (68). Psychoanlaytic analysis argue that women can only
signify castration, and this threat is countered by 'voyeuristic or fetishistic mechanisms' (68). None
of this is intrinsic to film, but film happens to be able to illustrate them perfectly by manipulating
the look. Cinema can add the pleasures of looking to narratives about control and these become part
of the spectacle too 'producing an illusion cut to the measure of [male] desire' (68). The relation
between cinematic codes and 'formative external structures' needs to be understood before this
dubious pleasure can be challenged. [It has been assumed so far].
A beginning might involve breaking down the look into three stages -- the camera, the audience,
and the characters. Films conceal the effects of the first two, in the interests of achieving 'reality,
obviousness and truth' (68). However, the threat of castration connoted by the female image
requires constant work if it is not to 'burst through the world of illusion' (68) [and there is the danger
of freezing the narrative into fetishism]. In such circumstances, some direct identification by the
spectator takes the place of the more narrative based forms of involvement. [I don't think Mulvey is
recommending this as a way to break the hold of the narrative, of course, since women would still
be fetishised I do think some female stars to have this power to stop narratives -- Marilyn Monroe
springs to mind -- but I am not all sure this needs to be fetishistic. When she sings in close-up in
Some Like It Hot, we become interested in her not only for her body, but because we see the actress
as well as the performer? In other words, this is more like an identification with women performers
as well as with men? See Stacey on homosexual identifications as well -- in this file]
It becomes important to oppose these conventions, as radical film-makers do -- to make us aware of
the look and how it is produced by the camera, and break the detachment of the audience [ see
MacCabe on this too]. This may end the conventional pleasures of film, but women in particular
should not regard these changes 'with anything much more than sentimental regret'. [NB bell hooks
in her account of black women reading film says this sentimental regret is typical of white feminists
-- black women never identified so strongly with film narratives, always felt uneasy and unable to
locate them selves in them, and soon developed a critical ability to resist the pleasures of the film -see her piece in Thornham).
Mulvey, L 'Afterthoughts on "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" Inspired by King Vidor's
Duel in the Sun (1946)' in Thornham, S (1999) (Ed) Feminist Film Theory A Reader, Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.
NB This essay is published in a number of other places as well. Its original location was the journal
Framework, 15-16-17, summer 1981, pp 12 -- 15. Page numbers for quotes refer to this version in
Thornham
The original essay (see above) focused on the 'masculinisation' of spectators (who might be men or
women). It is a matter of identifying points of view, and spectator positions. This essay follows up
an interest in melodrama and in the woman spectator in particular: is the female spectator
dominated by the text, and how does having a female character central to the narrative affect the
analysis? Female spectators may simply dissociate from the masculine pleasures of film. However,
they may also identify with the hero and enjoy a certain freedom as a result, and this is the option
that will be explored here. Films to be discussed are chosen which show 'a woman central
protagonist is shown to be unable to achieve a stable sexual identity, torn between the deep blue sea
of passive femininity and the devil of regressive masculinity' (page 122). These dilemmas relate to
the dilemmas of the female spectator -- both display and 'oscillation...a sense of the difficulty of
sexual difference' (123). Freudian theory will help clarify this again.
Freud suggests that femininity is complicated, since both sexes share a masculine phase. There may
be a simple process of repression of the masculine tendencies in female sexuality, accompanied by
the occasional regression or alternation between masculine and feminine tendencies. Finally, Freud
suggests that the libido, the 'motive force of sexual life' serves both masculine and feminine
functions and has no sex of its own -- but it happens to be more constrained 'when it is pressed into
the service of the feminine function' (Mulvey quoting Freud, her page 124). These conceptions still
have problems, such as seeing femininity in terms of masculinity, even as opposition or similarity,
but it. describes the shifting process which confronts women as they try to be either active or
passive, although the active is increasingly repressed for 'correct' femininity. When female
spectators identify with male-oriented films, they 'rediscover that lost aspect of...[their]... sexual
identity... [but it is in the form of a]... never fully repressed bedrock of feminine neurosis' (124).
Cinema has inherited these traditions from earlier forms of folk and mass culture, which did not rely
particularly on cinematic looks [so this is now a much more deep-seated and widespread
phenomenon affecting a lot of women's experience, and it helps draw in some other resources for
analysis, as we shall soon see]. Freud's work expands this cultural dimension himself, with
references to daydreams and stories which 'describe the male fantasy of ambition, reflecting
something of an experience and expectation of dominance (the active)' (125). Conventionally, the
erotic place of women is to be passive, to wait, to close the narrative. However, Freud's work can be
read as supporting habitual 'trans-sex identification' for women, based on their residual masculinity,
the ease of logical identification with narratives stressing activity, and their ability to fantasise in an
active manner. However, this is still not an easy form of identification for women.
We can now begin to analyse films such as the Western. [Having made the connection with wider
cultural contexts, Mulvey can begin her analysis by drawing upon some classic 'structuralist '
analysis. She intends to define the Western for her purposes as films which convey best the
'primitive narrative structures analysed by Vladimir Propp in folk tales' (126)]. Westerns offer male
fantasies of invulnerability, and women occupy a classically passive function. As with folk tales,
marriage helps close the narrative in the Western, but this time as an option -- the hero can remain
alone, in a 'nostalgic celebration of phallic, narcissistic omnipotence' (126). Strictly speaking, this
does not fit a classic Oedipal trajectory.
The hero is often split between narcissism and social integration. Women are invariably associated
with the latter, [adding a gender dimension to the classic dramatic conflicts between good and evil
in a folk tale?]. The spectator is also able to fantasise in both directions, rebelling and conforming.
An analysis of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance confirms these double pleasures and tensions.
There seem to be two heroic protagonists out to defeat the villain, one a symbolic representative of
the law, and the other a wilder but more personal representative of 'the good or the right'. The
former receives official, symbolic power at the expense of personal submission, while the one
possessing 'phallic attributes... has to bow himself of the way of history' (127 ).The straight gets to
marry the girl too, it seems, in a classic 'closing social ritual'. Since this ritual is sex-specific, a
narrative function is offered for women, in addition to offering visual pleasure when they are looked
at. Marriage is an acceptable, symbolic way to signify the erotic.
Introducing a woman in a narrative can also shift meanings, as Duel in the Sun indicates. This is
also a Western, but it focuses on a woman caught between two conflicting desires, corresponding
closely to the oscillation described above between passive femininity and regressive masculinity.
This enables a whole new narrative to be opened up -- there is no need to symbolise woman as
erotic, 'the female presence at the centre allows the story to be actually, overtly, about sexuality: it
becomes a melodrama' (127). Here, the heroine has to decide whether to legitimate the symbolic by
marrying the straight. The two main male characters offer the same options as in Liberty Valance,
but here they signify different aspects of the heroine ('Pearl'). Pearl can only oscillate between them,
however, unable to find passion with the straight or acceptance in the 'world of misogynist
machismo'-- she is 'unable to settle or find a "femininity" in which she and the male world can meet'
(128). She is still dominated by the male world: it all ends unhappily in mutual death with macho
man. The straight guy eventually marries a 'perfect lady... [who]... represents the correct road' (128),
so patriarchy and the symbolic triumph in the end. [For my simple 'reading' click here]
A very similar plot is found in another Vidor film Stella Dallas. These narratives show shifts in
'Oedipal nostalgia', since none of the personifications can really be seen as parental figures. Instead,
'they represent an internal oscillation of desire, which lies dormant, waiting to be "pleasured" in
stories of this kind' (129).
Female spectators [might? must? should?] experience a reawakening of a fantasy of activity,
normally repressed by correct femininity, but this is only possible through a 'metaphor of
masculinity' (129). As such, there is no real way out for femininity -- there is the romance of the
rebellious last stand against patriarchy, or a periodic masculinity followed by repression. Pearl also
demonstrates the 'sadness' of masculine identification, which is never fully acceptable even by
macho men. 'So, too, is the female spectator's fantasy of masculinisation at cross-purposes with
itself, restless in its transvestite clothes' (129).
Mulvey, L (1985) 'Changes', Discourse, Fall, 1985: pp 11 -- 30.
Page numbers here refer to the original.
Gender politics have moved on and something new is required [and something new in academic
terms?]. Conservatism in Britain has taken hold, with a new narrative of its own, announcing a new
beginning and thus being able to 'catch public popular imagination by clothing complex political
and economic factors in binary pairings around an old/new opposition' (11). It seems necessary to
revive feminist avant garde struggles, and also approach the wider context, especially 'the
interaction between narrative and history, contradiction and myth...' (12). Thatcherite closures of
narrative must be resisted, and new thinking undertaken by radicals, rather than just nostalgia.
Mulvey examines her own principles first.
The original article [above] is 10 years old, and some of its formal aspects might be related to the
specifics of the women's movement at that time. Oppositional culture has changed, and the
symbolic order might have changed -- psychoanalysis may be less relevant [and Cultural Studies on
the ascendant?].
There is an awareness that the notion of difference can be domesticated by representing it as a
system of binaries or polar oppositions. In Freud, metaphor plays an important role, and the early
ambivalence of psychic drives is disciplined by the Oedipus complex, which organises them around
appropriate notions of gender. But the drives themselves were only 'back - named' in gendered
terms by Freud, recognising the endpoint, the 'grammar of sex roles in myth, folk tales, cinema, in
fact in popular cultural representation in general' (13). In those forms, they get filled out with other
binaries --'public/private, nomadic/stable, sun/moon, mind/body, the law/sexuality, creator of
culture/close to nature, etc' (13). But there is still a gap between these mythical representations, and
lived experience, between domesticated and stable distinctions and 'uncertainty, difficulty and
confusion' (13). [Getting to sound pretty gramscian here?]
Myths tend to reduce complexity to binaries, as in Levi-Strauss. They can be between or outside
these binaries -- they can only be inverted. The early work, using active/passive and
masculine/feminine binaries [politically] requires another stage, alternatives which break out of the
'double bind of binarism' (14).
The original article was a polemic and challenge. This excitement compensated for the loss of
pleasure in viewing conventional films. It might also explain the excesses of the Mulvey films made
with Peter Wollen --'a scorched earth policy or return to zero' (14). Wollen drew on Godard [see
file] in his attempts to invert the values of conventional cinema, and Mulvey and Wollen did the
same [in their film Penthesilia]. [I have not seen this one, but I have seen their Amy, and it looks
similar in form -- disruptive camera work, not allowing any female characters to be the subject of a
prolonged gaze, breaking the barriers between film and audience, telling the story as episodes
rather than as one continuous conventional narrative]. However, such inversions rely on the
audience knowing the conventions and dominant codes already, and thus risk being domesticated
into a binary again.
Their film Riddles of the Sphinx tries to develop a more positive questioning at the symbolic order,
by looking at motherhood as it appears in patriarchy [and not as attempting to '[replace] the phallus
as signifier with the body of the mother' (14), as some critics have alleged]. The idea was to
recapture the excesses of motherhood, beyond that which is described in patriarchy.
Patriarchy never completely dominates language. Psychoanalysis can change what can be spoken,
and so can feminist and black power resistance movements, as in consciousness raising, bringing
new areas of experience into language. Speaking [out] itself might therefore challenge the symbolic
order, even if restricted to a 'discourse of negation' as a starting point (15).
Lacanian work has ended in impasse. There is an unfortunate 'retreat into the intricacies of theory',
which devalues the activist wing of feminism, but also his concepts have reached a logical limit, as
exposed by Stephen Heath [see file for a brief resume of Heath's critique via Merck]. Basically, we
need to move from formal binary oppositions between men and their Other, to more concrete and
historical specific relationships between men and women. Men have not always had total 'access to
symbolisation', for example (16).
The attempt to confine femininity to mere Otherness may represent an impossibility in practice, and
only raises the question of female desire: however, Lacan's work makes it impossible to enquire any
further. Hence there is a 'blocked relation between woman and the symbolic' (16), which Lacan
cannot unblock. However, this excess of femininity, stretching beyond the symbolic attempt to
confine it, can become 'the site for struggle, confrontation and changing history' (17). Such struggle
would refuse to be confined within a binary, and this refusal would clearly weaken the conventional
notion of 'masculinity' too.
Those who do not have access to symbolisation are seen as 'non-creative'. Feminists can struggle by
negating this negation itself, as in avant-garde practice, especially with feminist challenges to male
artists' monopoly. However, politics also involves other oppositions, including ones based on racial
terms or class terms [well nearly -- Mulvey uses the strange opposition 'peasant/noble in feudal
society' -- page 17]. Here too, Others embody in appropriate qualities are, which also 'link the
oppressed to nature, and the dominant to culture' (17). After feudalism declines, women come to be
the main representatives of nature. Binary oppositions like this appear immediately sensible, acting
'to mean something by themselves' (Mulvey, quoting Barthes' Mythologies, her page 18).
For Lacan, there can be no alternative language, but Kristeva argues that there are aspects that
cannot be contained by the symbolic -- the semiotic -- that arise in the pre-Oedipal stage, and act as
a source of a whole poetics and a 'discourse of otherness' [that is, about the experience of
otherness]. Kristeva on the primary bond with the mother helps valorise motherhood too. There
may also be a link with colonial revolts drawing upon the old mother goddesses. The Mexican
example of such a revolt drew upon a religious tradition that was not incorporated into a binary by
the symbolic order, but offered 'fantastic hybrid culture'. Kristeva was impressed by the social
upheavals in medieval carnivals (via Bakhtin, apparently). Carnivals inverted the usual binaries, but
also celebrated excess, and the comic. Bakhtin's examples are not identical with, but 'reminiscent of
women's cultural sphere' (19): feminine cultures can become transgressive, asking their own
questions about tradition and history.
However, Mitchell suggests that these apparent exceptions to psychological and social order may
exist within a tolerance established by the law anyway: somehow, transgression has to try to
establish a whole new law of the symbolic. The need is to go beyond metaphor and gesture into
language. However, even inversions could have a destabilising effect. What is required to
investigate this is a 'tripartite structure... [focusing on]... process rather than mythic image...
metonymy rather than metaphor... linked chains of events rather than polar opposition' (21).
Propp emphasises the narratives of myth rather than static binaries. The classic narrative has three
stages [usually rendered as equilibrium (quiet western town ) - disruption (bandits ride in ) - new
equilibrium (townsfolk quell the disorder and learn about themselves)]. Mulvey has a more formal
definition [not sure I know what it adds] , noting that only the first and second stages are static, and
adding that 'the second... [stage]... causes the third' (21). The middle section adds drama and
pleasure in disrupting the laws of normality, and celebrates transgressive desire. This structure can
even be found in the Oedipus story. The social context of the Oedipus story was also a period of
social instability and class struggle, which the story also represents symbolically.
Social rituals can also be analysed in this way, as participants escape at stage two and are
reintegrated at stage three. Rights of passage illustrate this structure, with the initiate occupying a
separate 'liminal' state, often embodied by a physical journey across boundaries. Indeed, journeys
are often metaphors for social transitions, beginning and ending with a state of being at home.
Sexual maturation also follows the structure. Hitchcock films often do as well, as an ordinary hero
encounters 'a world turned upside-down' (24).
The political point is to ask whether the second, liminal state can resist subsequent reintegration.
Analysts of carnivals differ here. In analysing Roman carnivals, Ladurie argued (apparently) that
the periods of disorder could be learning experiences, spaces for thinking out progressive political
forms. Carnival can also provide a language of resistance (25) [and there is even a link with the
work on subcultures as resistance through rituals -- see file on the famous gramscian stuff]. Here
too, 'symbols... [can act]... as a primitive language for the oppressed' (27) [the actual example is
provided by Cosgrove in a piece in History Workshop Journal -- Mulvey's page 25, and see note 23,
page 30 --'for many participants... [spectacular street styles]... were an entry into the language of
politics, and inarticulate rejection of the "straight" world and its organisation']. Thus liminal
moments can at least supply symbols, and even 'a language that speaks for the oppressed' (26)
[albeit a limited and localised one].
Thus symmetry and dualistic opposition, as in the first Mulvey piece, have little political potential,
and also block theoretical advance. Binaries were already breaking down, in fact, by reference to
the notion of sexual difference and castration -- strictly, castration anxiety provides different
experiences of disruption and prohibition for males and females. Now, this non equivalence is seen
as 'a mechanism for distributing power' (26): boys merely have to undergo transitions, while girls
have to switch genders, or move into 'masquerade and inversion, into politics and desire', which
options are never closed or integrated.
There is a shared dimension to the unconscious, and this affects both culture and politics. Feminism
has politicised psychoanalysis, and this has led to cultural criticism, especially film theory, 'But
there is still a missing link or term... [to]... describe the contribution the unconscious makes to the
political and social structures we live within' (27). If we see the Oedipal myth as an example of the
classic model of the narrative, the middle phase might be a special source of excess and the
carnivalesque [Mulvey says this could even help to explain Freud's findings that the Oedipal
experience often ends in failure, especially for women].
We're still not in a position to offer a whole alternative symbolic, but there is more space 'on the
threshold, the liminal area between silence and speech, the terrain in which desire merely finds
expression' (28). There are different possibilities of carnival as a model here as we have seen.
However, it is admitted that 'the liminal phase is closely linked with closure' (28), and this produces
symptoms [of repression?] which appear 'most clearly in popular culture, whether folk tale, carnival
or the movies' (28).
Finally, cinema is primarily a narrative form. The challenge is to try to develop an ending that is not
a closure, to express the state of liminality as an instrument for 'maintaining heterogeneity within
the symbolic, and subjecting myths and symbols to perpetual re-evaluation' (28). It can at least
provide images 'which simultaneously express collective desires and impose coherence on the
infinitely numerous and infinitely varied data of experiences' (Mulvey quoting Nash Smith, her
page 28).
Feminists especially 'should insist on the need to prolong the middle phase, that so easily becomes
masked or telescoped behind binary opposition, the point of disruption and contradiction, the point
at which politics can be inserted into both cultural and psycho-analytic terrains' (28).
[I think Mulvey heard the siren call of British activism and its critiques of Screen theory -- see file - in writing this piece as well as the specific demands of feminist activists and those tired of the
theoreticism of Lacan. The piece also marks the emergence of a new successful academic division
of labour -- 'Cultural Studies' -- to replace or contain Film Studies per se? That would have been
very helpful for those seeking to widen out from film into other more popular aspects of culture,
essential to close the gap between Hollywood and patriarchy in general, as is foreshadowed in the
second piece above?]
Notes on 'The Gaze'
Daniel Chandler
Laura Mulvey on film spectatorship
Whilst these notes are concerned more generally with ‘the gaze’ in the mass media, the term
originates in film theory and a brief discussion of its use in film theory is appropriate here.
As Jonathan Schroeder notes, 'Film has been called an instrument of the male gaze, producing
representations of women, the good life, and sexual fantasy from a male point of view' (Schroeder
1998, 208). The concept derives from a seminal article called ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative
Cinema’ by Laura Mulvey, a feminist film theorist. It was published in 1975 and is one of the most
widely cited and anthologized (though certainly not one of the most accessible) articles in the whole
of contemporary film theory.
Laura Mulvey did not undertake empirical studies of actual filmgoers, but declared her intention to
make ‘political use’ of Freudian psychoanalytic theory (in a version influenced by Jacques Lacan)
in a study of cinematic spectatorship. Such psychoanalytically-inspired studies of 'spectatorship'
focus on how 'subject positions' are constructed by media texts rather than investigating the viewing
practices of individuals in specific social contexts. Mulvey notes that Freud had referred to
(infantile) scopophilia - the pleasure involved in looking at other people’s bodies as (particularly,
erotic) objects. In the darkness of the cinema auditorium it is notable that one may look without
being seen either by those on screen by other members of the audience. Mulvey argues that various
features of cinema viewing conditions facilitate for the viewer both the voyeuristic process of
objectification of female characters and also the narcissistic process of identification with an ‘ideal
ego’ seen on the screen. She declares that in patriarchal society ‘pleasure in looking has been split
between active/male and passive/female’ (Mulvey 1992, 27). This is reflected in the dominant
forms of cinema. Conventional narrative films in the ‘classical’ Hollywood tradition not only
typically focus on a male protagonist in the narrative but also assume a male spectator. ‘As the
spectator identifies with the main male protagonist, he projects his look onto that of his like, his
screen surrogate, so that the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the
active power of the erotic look, both giving a satisfying sense of omnipotence’ (ibid., 28).
Traditional films present men as active, controlling subjects and treat women as passive objects of
desire for men in both the story and in the audience, and do not allow women to be desiring sexual
subjects in their own right. Such films objectify women in relation to ‘the controlling male gaze’
(ibid., 33), presenting ‘woman as image’ (or ‘spectacle’) and man as ‘bearer of the look’ (ibid., 27).
Men do the looking; women are there to be looked at. The cinematic codes of popular films ‘are
obsessively subordinated to the neurotic needs of the male ego’ (ibid., 33). It was Mulvey who
coined the term 'the male gaze'.
Mulvey distinguishes between two modes of looking for the film spectator: voyeuristic and
fetishistic, which she presents in Freudian terms as responses to male ‘castration anxiety’.
Voyeuristic looking involves a controlling gaze and Mulvey argues that this has has associations
with sadism: ‘pleasure lies in ascertaining guilt - asserting control and subjecting the guilty person
through punishment or forgiveness’ (Mulvey 1992, 29). Fetishistic looking, in contrast, involves
‘the substitution of a fetish object or turning the represented figure itself into a fetish so that it
becomes reassuring rather than dangerous. This builds up the physical beauty of the object,
transforming it into something satisfying in itself. The erotic instinct is focused on the look alone’.
Fetishistic looking, she suggests, leads to overvaluation of the female image and to the cult of the
female movie star. Mulvey argues that the film spectator oscillates between these two forms of
looking (ibid.; see also Neale 1992, 283ff; Ellis 1982, 45ff; Macdonald 1995, 26ff; Lapsley &
Westlake 1988, 77-9).
This article generated considerable controversy amongst film theorists. Many objected to the fixity
of the alignment of passivity with femininity and activity with masculinity and to a failure to
account for the female spectator. A key objection underlying many critical responses has been that
Mulvey's argument in this paper was (or seemed to be) essentialist: that is, it tended to treat both
spectatorship and maleness as homogeneous essences - as if there were only one kind of spectator
(male) and one kind of masculinity (heterosexual). E Ann Kaplan (1983) asked ‘Is the gaze male?’.
Both Kaplan and Kaja Silverman (1980) argued that the gaze could be adopted by both male and
female subjects: the male is not always the controlling subject nor is the female always the passive
object. We can ‘read against the grain’. Teresa de Lauretis (1984) argued that the female spectator
does not simply adopt a masculine reading position but is always involved in a ‘doubleidentification’ with both the passive and active subject positions. Jackie Stacey asks: ‘Do women
necessarily take up a feminine and men a masculine spectator position?’ (Stacey 1992, 245).
Indeed, are there only unitary ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ reading positions? What of gay spectators?
Steve Neale (1983) identifies the gaze of mainstream cinema in the Hollywood tradition as not only
male but also heterosexual. He observes a voyeuristic and fetishistic gaze directed by some male
characters at other male characters within the text (Stacey notes the erotic exchange of looks
between women within certain texts). A useful account of 'queer viewing' is given by Caroline
Evans and Lorraine Gamman (1995). Neale argues that ‘in a heterosexual and patriarchal society
the male body cannot be marked explictly as the erotic object of another male look: that look must
be motivated, its erotic component repressed’ (Neale 1992, 281). Both Neale and Richard Dyer
(1982) also challenged the idea that the male is never sexually objectified in mainstream cinema
and argued that the male is not always the looker in control of the gaze. It is widely noted that since
the 1980s there has been an increasing display and sexualisation of the male body in mainstream
cinema and television and in advertising (Moore 1987, Evans & Gamman 1995, Mort 1996,
Edwards 1997).
Gender is not the only important factor in determining what Jane Gaines calls 'looking relations' race and class are also key factors (Lutz & Collins 1994, 365; Gaines 1988; de Lauretis 1987; Tagg
1988; Traube 1992). Ethnicity was found to be a key factor in differentiating amongst different
groups of women viewers in a study of Women Viewing Violence (Schlesinger et al. 1992). Michel
Foucault, who linked knowledge with power, related the 'inspecting gaze' to power rather than to
gender in his discussion of surveillance (Foucault 1977).
The Eyes of Laura Mulvey:
Subjects, Objects and Cinematic Pleasures
Matthew Henry
The universalization of subjectivity as maleness is without a doubt, and justifiably, the primary
target of feminist theory and criticism.
--D.N. Rodowick, 1991
The question of how film plays both to and upon socially established systems of desire, fantasy, and
fear received one of its most significant treatments in Laura Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and
Narrative Cinema." Originally published in 1975, this essay has become one of the most important
and influential in contemporary film studies and feminist theory. Mulvey's objective in the essay is
clear: she wishes to place questions of sexual difference at the center of the debate surrounding the
application of psychoanalysis to film studies. Mulvey is concerned with exploring, through
psychoanalysis, the representation of woman as image in film and the concomitant
"masculinization" of the spectator position. Her objective here is also quite polemical, as noted by
Mulvey herself in the introduction: "Psychoanalytic theory is ... appropriated here as a political
weapon, demonstrating the way in which the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film
form" (14).
Mulvey begins from the premise that mainstream Hollywood cinema both reflects and reveals the
psychological obsessions of the society that produces it. In arguing this, she draws heavily upon
both Freudian and Lacanian forms of psychoanalysis. According to Mulvey, mainstream
Hollywood film "coded the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order" (16). Mulvey
implies that this coding is, in essence, the establishment of the "male gaze." Narrowly construed,
the male gaze refers to the act of looking upon women as objects, of adopting the role of spectator;
but metaphorically, it refers to a way of thinking about and acting within society (Devereaux 337).
"Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," and much of Mulvey's early work, organizes around
questions of spectatorial identification and its relationship to the male gaze. In exploring these
questions, she targets and examines the codes and mechanisms through which classic Hollywood
cinema has traditionally exhibited sexual difference as a function of its narrative and
representational forms. Mulvey also seeks to explore what effects these codes and mechanisms
might have on spectators as sexed individuals and what their role might be within the general
ideological structure of patriarchal culture. However, her project is not one of simply identifying
and condemning "sexist" representations of women on the screen: she is less concerned with textual
analyses than with "the definition of structures of identification and the mechanisms of pleasure and
unpleasure that accompany them" (Rodowick 5).
In a section of "Visual Pleasure" entitled "Woman as Image, Man as Bearer of the Look," Mulvey
succinctly states her organizing principle: "In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in
looking has been split between active/male and passive/female" (19). Drawing upon terms found in
Freud's "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes," Mulvey establishes a binary relationship between subject
(spectator/protagonist) and object (narrative film/image) in which the subject is associated with the
active/male position and the object with the passive/female position. Such an analysis of sexual
difference is revealing and quite in keeping with Mulvey's feminist critique of patriarchal structures:
since sexual differences in film function to produce pleasure, and this pleasure is produced for
someone, whom Mulvey identifies as the male, then this production sustains a situation in which
relations of social imbalance are maintained, both in the filmic representation and in the "real"
world outside the film (Rodowick 6).
Mulvey argues that the subject and object positions cited above are the product of point-of-view
mechanisms in Hollywood cinema. Point-of-view mechanisms--such as the shot/counter-shot and
the lingering close-up--function to reconfirm and reproduce set positions, both within and without
the film, by avoiding avenues of unpleasure and seeking avenues of pleasure. For Mulvey, there are
a number of possibilities for pleasure in the cinema, but she focuses primarily on only two, which
divide for her quite neatly along gender lines. The first is what Freud called "scopophilia," or the
pleasure of looking at another person as an object. Mulvey argues that this is an active practice, and
she describes it in largely Freudian terms: "the position of the spectator in the cinema is blatantly
one of repression of their exhibitionism and projection of the repressed desire onto the [female]
performer" (17). The second pleasure Mulvey defines is that of narcissism, which for her is
essentially passive and developed through identification with the object/image on the screen. Thus it
is that scopophilia is inscribed as male (active) and narcissism as female (passive). The spectator's
gaze is then male in two senses: from without, in its direction at women as objects of erotic desire,
and from within, in its identification with the male protagonist. For Mulvey, ultimately, "the
meaning of woman in the cinema is sexual difference" (21), and her lack of a penis invariably
connotes the threat of male castration. According to Mulvey, there are two avenues of escape for the
spectatorial male unconscious: the demystification of the woman through devaluation or
punishment, or the complete disavowal of castration through the substitution of a phallic fetish
object (21).
The only escape allowed for the female in Mulvey's schema is through an avant-garde form of film
that breaks completely with the Hollywood traditions. In the introduction to Visual and Other
Pleasures, Mulvey speaks to this in reminiscing upon her active involvement with the Women's
Movement during the 1970s and the origins of "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema": she argues
here for the need of film makers who could and would "forge an alliance between the radical
tradition of the avant-garde and the feminist politicisation of images and representation" (ix). This
alternative was realized, and thus provided space for the female as subject, by Mulvey herself: she
has, over the intervening years, co-directed a number of independently produced "feminist" films.
The major critique lodged against Mulvey since the publication of "Visual Pleasure and Narrative
Cinema" is that she focuses only on the experience of a male spectator. While discussing at length
the forms of male desire and identification, built on voyeuristic fantasies of the female body,
Mulvey largely ignores speculating on the possibility of female desire, identification and
spectatorship. According to the analysis provided in "Visual Pleasure," the filmic gaze, in terms of
both gender representation and gender address, belongs exclusively to the male, to the patriarchy;
this leaves the female spectator with little agency: she must either identify with the male as subject
or with the female as object/image. If she does the former, the female spectator aligns herself with
what Mulvey explicitly defines as voyeurism; if the latter, she aligns herself with narcissism and,
implicitly, masochism.
Mulvey's rigidly gendered approach to cinematic pleasure has also been criticized for being taken as
axiomatic by feminists and film theorists. Kaja Silverman, writing in 1984, emphasizes just how
firmly the suppositions of a monolithic construction of sexual difference had taken hold less than a
decade after the appearance of Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure":
It is by now axiomatic that the female subject is the object rather than the subject of the gaze in
mainstream narrative cinema ... It is equally axiomatic that the female subject as she has been
constructed by the Hollywood cinema is denied any active role in the discourse (131-32).
Since examples of such objectification were abundant, many feminists took Mulvey's observations
as truisms regarding not only patriarchal Hollywood cinema but patriarchal American society itself.
Thus the ingrained belief that spectatorial relationships were strictly binary oppositions.
Mulvey attempts to redress the perceived errors of "Visual Pleasure" in the essay "Afterthoughts on
'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' Inspired by King Vidor's Duel in the Sun" (1981).
In this essay, Mulvey acknowledges the binary nature of her work in "Visual Pleasure" and
concedes that her exclusive focus on male spectatorship closed off avenues of inquiry pertaining to
questions about "the women in the audience" (29). Nevertheless, Mulvey's tack here is not to refute
her earlier proposition--she says more than once that she "stands by" what she has already said--but
to refine it in light of her viewing of Duel in the Sun, a film that purports to have a "female hero." In
reading this film, Mulvey asserts
... the emotions of those women accepting "masculinization" while watching action movies with a
male hero are illuminated by the emotions of a heroine of a melodrama whose resistance to a
"correct" feminine position is the critical issue at stake (30).
While conceding that this dual context offers a "sense of the difficulty of sexual difference in
cinema that is missing in the undifferentiated spectator of 'Visual Pleasure,'" Mulvey maintains that
the heroine of traditional cinema is unable to achieve a stable sexual identity and that her oscillation
between masculine and feminine positions is "echoed by the woman spectator's masculine point of
view" (30). In short, the female spectator still has to adopt the male perspective, though this now
derives from the "grammar" of the film narrative and traditions which make trans-sex identification
habitual and "second nature" (32-33). This sentiment is also echoed in the more recent work of
scholars sympathetic to Mulvey's early claims. Mary Devereaux, for example, distinguishes
between sex, which she says is physical, and gender, which she sees as social, and concludes that
"the male gaze is not always male, but it is always male dominated" (339). This may be the case,
but it then begs the question: is there a female gaze? And if so, what mechanisms structure it?
Though theories of the female gaze were offered shortly after the publication of Mulvey's "Visual
Pleasure"--Mary Ann Doane's influential essay on this topic appeared in 1982--they remain rare and
run into difficulties of conceptualization. One of the key problems is the basis of theories of desire
and spectatorship in Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Recently, numerous critics have spoken
to this problem. D.N. Rodowick, for example, calls the work of Freud into question by asking
whether it can conceive of a position for femaleness outside the paradigm that universalizes
subjectivity as male (19). Similarly, Jackie Byars critiques the work of Lacan for positing sexual
identity as produced by language and, thereby, constructing woman as not man, as the Other (112).
Byars also argues that feminist theorists mistakenly focused, alá Mulvey, on an avant-garde film
making for evidence of female power instead of on Hollywood film and network television, which
had been dismissed as patriarchal (111). Byars asserts that female power exists within these forms,
and to demonstrate this, she focuses on moments of the mutual gaze in two specific examples: the
film Coma and the television show Cagney and Lacey.
I think Byars makes a cogent argument for a reassessment of traditional film and television, but her
thesis still contains a significant problem, one inherent in Mulvey's work and one that has only
recently been given serious attention: the assumption of a singular male and/or female spectatorial
experience. This issue is clearly addressed by Deidre Pribram in the introduction to her book
Female Spectators: Looking at Film and Television. Pribram states that while both Freudian and
Lacanian psychoanalytic practices have succeeded in recognizing gender as a primary factor in
subject formation and social division, they have failed to address the formation and operation of
other variables, such as age, class, and race (2). D.N. Rodowick echoes Pribram's ideas: he declares
that the phallocentric and patriarchal model of the ideological function of classic cinema is
totalizing, hegemonic, and allows no room for "historical variability." The variabilities he notes are
the same as those identified by Pribram with the addition of one other: sexual orientation. Rodowick
thus critiques Mulvey's original binary schema as follows: "neither a historical experience of race,
class, nationality, nor deviant sexuality ... will alter an experience of texts that only the sexed body
can identify" (44). Though Mulvey does address the concept of the female spectator in
"Afterthoughts," her argument remains flawed by its acceptance of the female experience, of the
singular shared response. Implicit in her essay is the idea that the experience of a white, middleclass, heterosexual, American woman represents the experience of all women. In similar fashion,
Rodowick also criticizes early notions of the female spectator, such as those developed by Mary
Ann Doane: What one gains by positing the singular specificity of "feminine" experience is
achieved only at the cost of glossing over the variegate possibilities of hetero- and homosexual
identities and pleasures, not to mention the multiple dimensions of subjectivity defined by class,
race, and nationality (45).
Obviously there is much concern in recent film theory with defining and redefining the female
spectator in terms of variables such as age, race, and class. Mulvey is, as we have seen, guilty of the
"glossing over" that Rodowick speaks of, and she has thus been roundly criticized for it. But it
seems to me that this last issue raised by Rodowick--the issue of sexual orientation or preference--is
of great significance to the concept of spectatorship in general and in need of further exploration.
This exploration would begin with a redefinition of the role of the male spectator. In "Visual
Pleasure," Mulvey hints at the issue of male homoerotic pleasure but dismisses it, arguing that "man
is reluctant to gaze at his exhibitionist like" (20). This, of course, stands as a corollary to Mulvey's
comments on female spectators: it too assumes that one man views for all men, and it blatantly
disregards the issues of sexual preference raised by Rodowick. Moreover, Mulvey's insistence upon
the heterosexual male gaze denies the possible functioning of man as erotic object. This, like
Mulvey's insistence that the female spectator is forced to accept some uniform "male" position, is
unnecessarily limiting. It seems to me, then, that what is needed is a theory of spectatorship that will
simultaneously examine both the male and the female experience, not one in the absence of the
other; a theory that will add to its assessment of viewing pleasure and unpleasure, in terms both
male and female, the influence of variables such as age, race, class, and--perhaps most importantly,
since it has been so greatly lacking--sexual orientation.
Works Consulted
Byars, Jackie. "Gazes/Voices/Power: Expanding Psychoanalysis for Feminist Film and Television
Theory." In Pribram 110-29.
Devereaux, Mary. "Oppressive Texts, Resisting Readers and the Gendered Spectator: The New
Aesthetics." Journal of Art and Art Criticism 48.4 (1990): 337-47.
Doane, Mary Ann. "Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator." Screen 23.3/4
(1982): 74-85.
Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Screen 16.3 (1975): 6-18. Rpt. in Visual
and Other Pleasures. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989. 14-27.
---. "Afterthoughts on 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' Inspired by King Vidor's Duel in the
Sun." Framework 15/16/17 (1981). Rpt. in Visual and Other Pleasures. 29-38.
Pribram, E. Deidre. Female Spectators: Looking at Film and Television. London: Verso, 1988.
Putnam, Ann. "The Bearer of the Gaze in Ridley Scott's Thelma and Louise" Western American
Literature 27.4 (1993): 291-302.
Rodowick, D.N. The Difficulty of Difference: Psychoanalysis, Sexual Difference & Film Theory.
New York: Routledge, 1991.
Silverman, Kaja. "Dis-embodying the Female Voice." Re-vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism.
Eds. Mary Ann Doane, et. al. Frederick, Maryland: University Publications of America, 1984. 13149.