Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema

While the overarching theme of “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” is the oppression of women; the essay’s particular interest is how the conventions of classic narrative film reinforce woman’s objectification by exploiting psychical structures socially conditioned to privilege masculinity. When published in 1975, Mulvey’s essay was groundbreaking, launching a new line of thinking in feminist film theory about the “male gaze” as a medium of fantasized pleasure for film spectators. Notably, when Mulvey was formulating her ideas in the early 1970s, film studies was not a well-developed academic discipline in England, where she lived. To pursue her interest in the subject, she read film journals like Screen and discussed ideas with other cinema enthusiasts.

Mulvey was also active in the feminist movement of the 1960s and 70s. Second wave feminism first surfaced in America and gained momentum following the 1963 publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. While first wave feminism was primarily centered on the struggle to achieve women’s suffrage (the right to vote), the ambitions of second wave feminism were more wide-ranging, but generally expressed women’s frustrations with gender stereotypes that consigned them to the domestic sphere. Women across the world were soon calling for greater gender equality. Mulvey’s commitment to women’s issues informed her engagement with new theories emerging in British and European film studies, particularly those linked to Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis.

In America, where the second wave started, a number of feminist thinkers began to publish critiques of the stereotypical representations of women circulating throughout visual culture. The “Images of Women” critics, as they are called, argued that the cinema presents predominantly stock female characters (the wife, the mother, the whore, the temptress) and so perpetuates the social construction of “woman” as limited by her sex. In response to the “Images” school of criticism, Mulvey (along with other British feminists, particularly Claire Johnston) determined that the cinema’s capacity to reproduce society’s gender inequality goes beyond merely reflecting female stereotypes. Because of its unique power to control not just what is seen but how it is seen, cinema, in its classic form, has achieved a structure that both articulates the male look and rewards it with pleasurable spectacle. The source of this pleasure, Mulvey contends, can be mined with the tools of psychoanalysis, which uncover connections between spectatorship and the primal moment of ego formation, when the child recognizes sexual difference and—significantly—male superiority (due to his genital “presence” as opposed to lack).

In the opening section of her essay, Mulvey writes, “Woman […] stands in patriarchal culture as signifier for the male other, […] tied to her place as bearer, not maker, of meaning” (15). This observation refers to how patriarchal ideology constructs “woman” (which is not a construction Mulvey endorses) and follows from Jacques Lacan’s integration of Freud’s theories with structuralist linguistics. If language makes meaning through the opposition of binary terms (male vs female, presence vs absence, subject vs object), and if woman, fundamentally, signifies absence (or lack), then man signifies everything that opposes absence and lack: presence, subject, action, authority (authorship). Woman, the subordinate “other” that opposes man’s subjectivity, then bears the meaning of every other subordinate term in the linguistic system of binary oppositions. Sexual difference is thus coded into language itself (as well as the entire symbolic order, which includes language) in ways that essentialize (or fix) the meanings of man and woman, and in ways that always privilege the masculine over the feminine.

To signify or communicate without using the linguistic structures that fix the meaning of “woman” and of “man” (and of everything else) is all but impossible to imagine. It would mean the end of language as we know it. As Mulvey notes, the challenge is to fight the patriarchal order “while still caught within the language of the patriarchy” (15). Resistance to the dominant order begins by recognizing the structures that uphold it, particularly the hierarchical structures that associate man with superiority and woman with subordination. Mulvey argues that, like language, narrative cinema encodes sexual difference and male privilege into its signifying conventions. It does so by seamlessly recasting the look of the camera and the look of the spectator as the look (or gaze) of the active male protagonist. The spectator identifies with the male hero and immerses himself in a fantasy world of visual pleasure and power, which includes possessing woman as spectacle. Narrative cinema thus oppresses women not simply by reflecting reductive social stereotypes, but by organizing a relay of “looks” that put woman in her place—a place that is constructed by “the unconscious of patriarchal society” (14) and is always subordinate to male subjectivity, activity, presence, and power.

That British and American feminists took different approaches to film criticism in the 1970s can be explained, in part, by the latter’s distaste for Freudian psychoanalysis and its identification of woman with “lack.” The British political activist and writer Juliet Mitchell, by contrast, began recuperating Freud’s theories for feminist purposes during the 1960s, and, in 1974, published Psychoanalysis and Feminism. As Shohini Chaudhuri notes in Feminist Film Theorists, Mitchell’s stated position is that “psychoanalysis is ‘not a recommendation for a patriarchal society but an analysis of one.’” (Chaudhuri, Shohini. Feminist Film Theorists. Routledge, 2006). This is Mulvey’s position toward psychoanalysis, as well. Her appropriation of psychoanalytic theory as a “political weapon” (14) should not be construed as her approval of its basic principles. Yet, there are moments in her essay when Mulvey seems to rehearse these principles too uncritically. For example, by claiming that cinema relies on fetishistic scopophilia and investigative voyeurism to mitigate the viewer’s castration anxiety, Mulvey infers the reality of the castration complex. This complex, as Freud theorizes it, results from not just the first recognition of sexual difference, but also—and necessarily—the attendant reaction of horror to female genitalia. Mulvey almost certainly does not intend to confirm that female anatomy strikes horror in young children, but that is one implication of her argument.