Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema

“It gets us nearer to the roots of our oppression, it brings closer an articulation of the problem, it faces us with the ultimate challenge: how to fight the unconscious structured like a language (formed critically at the moment of arrival of language) while still caught within the language of the patriarchy?” 

Unlike the middle sections of the essay, in which an inconspicuous, “disembodied” narrative voice presents exposition and analysis, Mulvey inserts herself into this part of the “Introduction” by using the pronoun “us.” She identifies herself with those who are oppressed and prepared to fight against their oppressors. Moreover, she “embodies” her voice as female, which, given her analysis of how patriarchal structures silence women, marks her essay as subversive and transgressive for the simple fact that it is female-authored.

“We are still separated by a great gap from important issues for the female unconscious which are scarcely relevant to phallocentric theory: the sexing of the female infant and her relationship to the symbolic, the sexually mature woman as non-mother, maternity outside the signification of the phallus, the vagina.” 

While Mulvey recruits psychoanalysis “as a political weapon” and uses it, seemingly credulously, to support her argument that the patriarchal unconscious structures narrative film, this sentence stands out as one of the few in which she acknowledges gaps in Freud’s (and Lacan’s) theories. Moreover, by depending on psychoanalysis to make her case, Mulvey leaves it vulnerable to the charge that, like Freudian theory, hers fails to take into account that race, class, and sexual differences significantly complicate the concept of woman. Here, she acknowledges, if only cursorily, that woman cannot be reduced to one model (for example, there exists “the sexually mature woman as non-mother”).

“Technological advances (16mm and so on) have changed the economic conditions of cinematic production, which can now be artisanal as well as capitalist.” 

While the bulk of Mulvey’s essay examines how the visual pleasure of Hollywood cinema conceals structures amenable to the patriarchy, here she suggests they are also amenable to capitalism. Mulvey doesn’t pursue the connection between the patriarchal order and capitalism, and she eschews any real discussion of “the economic conditions of cinematic production” in Hollywood’s studio system. It is an important connection for her to note, however, because it allows for a “counterpoint” (16) to traditional cinema—artisanal production.

“The magic of the Hollywood style at its best (and of all the cinema which fell within its sphere of influence) arose, not exclusively, but in one important aspect, from its skilled and satisfying manipulation of visual pleasure.”

Mulvey explicitly associates Hollywood cinema with “magic” several times in her essay. This is not an unusual association, as one can well imagine the publicity machines of Hollywood studios touting the “magic” of one film after another. Whereas Hollywood films are conventionally (and commercially) celebrated as magical largely because of their visual pleasure, Mulvey asserts that this pleasure is better understood as “manipulation.” She thus underscores the deceptive, untrustworthy aspects of their “magic.”

“It is said that analyzing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the intention of this article.” 

These are fighting words. They leave no doubt that Mulvey’s agenda is to challenge not only established norms, but the court of public opinion, as well. In this respect, Mulvey’s essay recalls the manifestoes of the early 20th century avant-garde aesthetic movements. Artists involved in these movements produced new forms of art in an effort to effect social and political change, and by evoking the spirit of their manifestoes, Mulvey aligns herself with their revolutionary goals.

“But the mass of mainstream film, and the conventions within which it has consciously evolved, portray a hermetically sealed world which unwinds magically, indifferent to the presence of the audience, producing for them a sense of separation and playing on their voyeuristic fantasy.” 

This observation on the typical cinematic experience immediately follows Mulvey’s discussion of scopophilia, voyeurism, and “perverted” voyeurism (practiced by “Peeping Toms” (17)), as theorized by Freud. The proximity of her reference to Peeping Toms to this description of film spectators reveling in “voyeuristic fantasy” brings the two categories uncomfortably close, subtly implicating cinema audiences in perverse voyeurism. Mulvey thus provokes her readers to question the pleasure they may feel while watching “mainstream film” and thereby begins to distance them from that pleasure, with the stated goal of destroying it.

“Scale, space, stories are all anthropomorphic.” (Page 17)

As part of her argument against the “visual pleasure” of mainstream film, Mulvey explains that such pleasure derives from the cinema’s unique capacity to satisfy viewers’ narcissistic voyeurism—or desire to identify with an ideal ego. To facilitate and entice this identification, mainstream films visually center on alluring human forms. Mulvey’s stated objective is to analyze and destroy the allure and pleasure of narrative cinema. Here, she starts to pull the curtain back, as it were, and reveal some of the compositional attributes of films (“Scale, space, stories”) that, coded anthropomorphically, invite and reward viewers’ narcissistic voyeurism.

“Important for this article is the fact that it is an image that constitutes the matrix of the imaginary, of recognition/misrecognition and identification, and hence of the first articulation of the ‘I,’ of subjectivity.”

Following an exposition of Lacan’s mirror-moment and its critical role in the child’s exit from the imaginary and entrance into subjectivity, Mulvey emphasizes that images are the fundamental signifiers in both the mirror encounter and the cinema. This point of intersection between the two experiences is key to Mulvey’s argument; it subtends the analogy she draws between the screen and the mirror. By establishing a correspondence between the visual operations of Hollywood cinema and the subject-forming mirror-moment, Mulvey warrants her claim that traditional cinematic codes exploit and satisfy viewers’ desire, born in the mirror-moment, to identify and be one with an idealized, all-powerful ego.

“Sections A and B have set out two contradictory aspects of the pleasurable structures of looking in the conventional cinematic situation.”

With this sentence, Mulvey anticipates readers’ objections that the argument she is carefully constructing appears to contradict itself. As a rhetorical strategy, this line signals to her readers that she has full command of her material and is prepared to resolve inconsistencies, which she proceeds to do. (Mulvey uses this strategy again in Part III C: “Sections III A and B have set out a tension between a mode of representation of woman in film and conventions surrounding the diegesis” (21).) Lines and passages like this one exemplify Mulvey’s recourse (particularly in the body of the essay) to conspicuously formal structures of reasoning, perhaps in an effort to make her case “exemplary of the symbolic order and the law” (23), and thus, irreproachable.

“Both pursue aims in indifference to perceptual reality, and motivate eroticised phantasmagoria that affect the subject’s perception of the world to make a mockery of empirical reality.” 

Mulvey explains that, according to Freud, two formative mechanisms shape psychological development: the sexual instincts and the ego libido. These are fundamental mechanisms which, “[i]n themselves […] have no signification, unless attached to an idealisation” (19). In other words, society’s ruling ideology determines the aims these mechanisms pursue. Mulvey’s observation that “both pursue aims in indifference to perceptual reality” is noteworthy, because it evokes the Marxist notion of the “false consciousness” that subjects of a capitalist state acquire. Just as the ego’s formative psychic structures pursue desires authorized by the social order, heedless of “empirical reality,” so the consumer in a capitalist economy purchases goods deemed desirable by society’s collective false consciousness, regardless of the “real” value of the goods. Mulvey thus implicitly connects the interests of society’s ruling, patriarchal ideology with capitalism (as she does more explicitly in the “Introduction”).

“In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female.” 

By using the term “sexual imbalance” and referring to a hierarchy of binary terms (“active” and “male” are privileged over their binary opposites, “passive” and “female”), Mulvey reveals her indebtedness to the theories of structural linguistics. Structuralism posits that the meanings of words derive from their relationship to other words, not from any natural relationship to a real referent outside language. Because language is then detached from any final, fixed meanings, it is available as a symbolic instrument of power for the ruling order. Thus, in a patriarchy, woman is “bearer, not maker, of meaning” (15). Moreover, “in a world ordered by sexual imbalance” so as to privilege male subjectivity, every term that opposes subjectivity (lack, passivity, silence) is coded as female (the binary opposite of male).

“A male movie star’s glamorous characteristics are thus not those of the erotic object of the gaze, but those of the more perfect, more complete, more powerful ideal ego conceived in the original moment of recognition in front of the mirror.” 

This statement may give readers pause to wonder why a male movie star would not naturally function as “the erotic object” of the female gaze, but as Mulvey has noted, the language of the patriarchal symbolic order codes “female” as “passive object,” and “male” as “active subject.” While readers can consciously reject this “active/passive heterosexual division of labor” (20), the division is embedded in language, which, according to Lacan, creates and structures the individual’s unconscious. The result is that what may seem like erotic desire on the part of the female spectator is, in fact, “her own [unconscious] desire to possess a penis (the condition, she imagines, of entry into the symbolic)” (15). The female spectator, then, no less than her male counterpart, longs to be the “more perfect” male ego on the screen.

“The male unconscious has two avenues of escape from this castration anxiety: preoccupation with the reenactment of the original trauma (investigating the woman, demystifying her mystery), counterbalanced by the devaluation, punishment or saving of the guilty object (an avenue typified by the concerns of the film noir); or else complete disavowal of castration by the substitution of a fetish object or turning the represented figure itself into a fetish so that it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous (hence over-valuation, the cult of the female star).”

Woman as spectacle is central to the visual pleasure of mainstream cinema, but paradoxically, her image also triggers the latent fear of castration that compels individuals, in the original subject-forming process, to accept the “Law of the Father.” Mulvey here suggests “two avenues of escape” from this enduring castration anxiety. The second—“turning the represented figure itself into a fetish”—explicitly invokes Freud’s concept of the fetish, but also implicitly engages with Karl Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism. Marx maintains that in capitalist societies, commodities seemingly possess an intrinsic value, separate from (and usually greater than) the value of the labor invested in their production. While Mulvey’s use of the term “over-valuation” in connection with “the female star” implies commodity fetishism, her reference, later in the essay, to woman’s fetishized image as “a perfect product” (23) acknowledges that Hollywood cinema not only objectifies woman, it commodifies her.