Visual Pleasure And Narrative Cinema Analysis

Cinema has always been an art form that revolves around the concept of looking, viewing, and spectating. Over time, film critics and scholars alike have explored this concept and what drives it. What exactly defines the fascination with looking? What motivates the spectator? What does the object being looked at signify? These are all questions that have been examined and discussed since the beginning of film; however, one question that is still being answered is how gender affects the look. Most psychological theories that have been applied to cinema are centered on the desires stemming from the male gaze towards the woman. But, where does that leave female spectatorship? This is a topic that is thoroughly examined in two articles, one by Laura Mulvey and the other by Constance Penley, located in “The Nature of the Gaze” section of Robert Stam and Toby Miller’s, Film and Theory: An Anthology. Here, both authors tackle the issue of sexual difference by challenging theories that have already been established by Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Christian Metz, and Jean-Louis Baudry.

In her article, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975), Laura Mulvey approaches the fascination with looking through a psychoanalytic lens. She begins by commenting on the concept of phallocentrism, which “depends on the image of the castrated woman to give order and meaning to its world.” Mulvey further explains that, “the function of woman in forming the patriarchal unconscious is twofold: she first symbolizes the castration threat by her real absence of a penis and second thereby raises her child into the symbolic.” Through this view, the woman cannot exist without castration. Therefore, Mulvey’s belief is that woman “stands in patriarchal culture ...

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...usion, Mulvey reminds us that, “it is the place of the look that defines cinema, the possibility of varying it and exposing it.” She continues by summarizing all of her other points as she states: “Nevertheless, as this essay has argued, the structure of looking in narrative fiction film contains a contradiction in its own premises: the female image as a castration threat constantly endangers the unity of the diegesis and bursts through the world of illusion as an intrusive, static, one-dimensional fetish. Thus the two looks materially present in time and space are obsessively subordinated to the neurotic needs of the male ego.” She ends her argument by declaring that, “women, whose image has continually been stolen and used for this end, cannot view the decline of the traditional film form with anything much more than sentimental regret” (Stam and Miller, 492-494).