Sexual Difference and Looking Through the Eyes of Mulvey, Penley, and Hitchcock

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Recommended: examples of feminism in the film industry

Even though Mulvey presents some intriguing points on how psychoanalysis affects the way gender is viewed in regards to the look, her writing is restricted and one-dimensional in comparison to Constance Penley’s article, “Feminism, Film Theory, and the Bachelor Machines” (1985). Penley begins by focusing on the idea of the “bachelor machine:” a practice used from approximately 1850-1925 where “numerous artists, writers, and scientists imaginatively or in reality constructed anthropomorphized machines to represent the relation of the body to the social, the relation of sexes to each other, the structure of the psyche, or the workings of history.” It is a perpetually moving, self-sufficient system that, as Michael de Certeau states, has a chief distinction of “being male.” It also includes common themes of, “an ideal time and the magical possibility of its reversal (the time machine is an exemplary bachelor machine) electrification, voyeurism, and masturbatory eroticism, the dream of the mechanical reproduction of art, and artificial birth or reanimation” (Stam and Miller, 456-457). This leads Penley to discuss a similar theory, that of the cinema as an apparatus itself, which focuses on the same characteristics of the bachelor machine. This theory is discussed through the writings of Jean-Louis Baudry and Christian Metz, but Penley points out that their works close off essential questions about sexual difference.
Firstly, Penley informs her readers that, “in Baudry’s Freudian terms, the apparatus induces (as a result of the immobility of the spectator, the darkness of the theater, and the projection of the images from a place behind the spectator’s head) a total regression to an earlier developmental stage in which the subject hal...

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...” (Stam and Miller, 470). Penley’s writing opens up some of the opinions Mulvey presents by examining the complexities of the cinematic apparatus and why that theory restricts female spectatorship as well. These writings are but only a dent in the complicated question on how gender affects spectatorship. As film critics and scholars have constantly been trying to answer this question, so they will continue to do so as long as women feel any kind of threat of male dominance.

Works Cited

Stam, Robert, and Toby Miller. "Chapter 25: Feminism, Film Theory and the Bachelor Machines (Constance Penley); Chapter 26: Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (Laura Mulvey)." Film and Theory: An Anthology. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000. Print.
Rear Window. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Perf. James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Wendell Corey. 1954. Paramount Pictures, Patron Inc., 1955. DVD.

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