"Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"

"Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1975)
By Laura Mulvey

Synopsis: Utilizing Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to analyze the role of desire in the act of looking at/consuming film, Mulvey seeks to deconstruct the ease of narrative film and and visual pleasure, to "break with normal pleasurable expectations in order to conceive a new language of desire" (30). Describes scopophilia (the love of looking at objects/people) as one of the biggest pleasures of cinema. In traditional cinema, this "gaze" has usually been focused on a woman, and thus the woman becomes objectified and fetishized while the male onscreen (and supposedly as embodied by the viewer too) becomes the one in control. The female becomes both an object of desire, and a representative of castration (hence, a threat). Because film is a medium which controls so much of the visual experience, "cinematic codes create a gaze, a world, and an object, thereby producing an illusion cut to the measure of desire" (39). We must break down these codes if we are to challenge the pleasures it provides. Bottom line: women are fetishized in film, while also embodying castration fears; the male gaze is the gaze of power.

Interesting Specifics:

"It is said that analyzing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the intention of this essay" (30).

"Going far beyond highlighting a woman's to-be-looked-at-ness, cinema builds the way she is to be looked at into the spectacle itself. Playing on the tension between film as controlling the dimension of time (editing, narrative) and film as controlling the dimension of space (changes in distance, editing) cinematic codes create a gaze, a world, and an object, thereby producing an illusion cut to the measure of desire" (39).

Interacts With:

This is seen as one of the most famous film criticism essays ever written. She did introduce the idea of "the gaze," and the gaze as a symptom of power asymmetry.

Again, this annoys. Why does the gaze have to be male? Is this an inherently "male" way of looking, or is it just a "person in power" way of looking? This is problematic, and essentializes gender.