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.
Unchallenged, mainstream film coded the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order.
Mulvey discusses the interweaving of that erotic pleasure in film, essentially the place of women in film.
It is said that analysing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the intention of Mulvey’s work..
PLEASURE IN LOOKING/FASCINATION WITH THE HUMAN FORM
The cinema offers a number of possible pleasures.
One is scopophilia. There are circumstances in which looking itself is a source of pleasure, just as, in the reverse formation, there is pleasure in being looked at. This links to fly-on-the-wall.
Originally, in his Three Essays on Sexuality, Freud isolated scopophilia as one of the component instincts of sexuality.
According to Frued then looking or being seen is human sexual instinct.
At this point he associated scopophilia with taking other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze.
His particular examples centre around the voyeuristic activities of children, their desire to see and make sure of the private and the forbidden (curiosity about other people's genital and bodily functions, about the presence or absence of the penis)
In this analysis scopophilia exists as the erotic basis for pleasure in looking at another person as object.
At the extreme, it can become fixated into a perversion, producing obsessive voyeurs and Peeping Toms, whose only sexual satisfaction can come from watching, in an active controlling sense, an objectified other.
At first glance, the cinema would seem to be remote from the undercover world of the surreptitious observation of an unknowing and unwilling victim.
What is seen on the screen is so manifestly shown.
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.
Moreover, the extreme contrast between the darkness in the auditorium (which also isolates the spectators from one another) and the brilliance of the shifting patterns of light and shade on the screen helps to promote the illusion of voyeuristic separation.
Just you and the film
This should link to meaning and the conditions of reception.
Although the film is really being shown, conditions of screening and narrative conventions give the spectator an illusion of looking in on a private world.
Among other things, the position of the spectators in the cinema is blatantly one of repression of their exhibitionism and projection of the repressed desire on to the performer.
The cinema satisfies a primordial wish for pleasurable looking, but it also goes further, developing scopophilia in its narcissistic aspect. Narcissistic means to be in love with one’s own image.
The conventions of mainstream film focus attention on the human form.
Scale, space, stories are all anthropomorphic.
Here, curiosity and the wish to look intermingle with a fascination with likeness and recognition:
the human face, the human body, the relationship between the human form and its surroundings, the visible presence of the person in the world.
[The French psychoanalyst ] Jacques Lacan has described how the moment when a child recognises its own image in the mirror is crucial for the constitution of the ego.
Several aspects of this analysis are relevant here.
The mirror phase occurs at a time when the child's physical ambitions outstrip his motor capacity, with the result that his recognition of himself is joyous in that he imagines his mirror image to be more complete, more perfect than he experiences his own body. Re-read this paragraph and make sure you understand it.
Recognition is thus overlaid with mis-recognition: the image recognised is conceived as the reflected body of the self, but its misrecognition as superior projects this body outside itself as an ideal ego, the alienated subject, which, re-introjected as an ego ideal, gives rise to the future generation of identification with others [the entry into the social symbolic order ]. Wow! Don’t worry it’s not as complicated as it sounds.
This mirror-moment predates language for the child.
Important for this article is the fact that it is an image that constitutes the matrix of the imaginary, of recognition/mis-recognition and identification, and hence of the first articulation of the 'I, of subjectivity.
This is a moment when an older fascination with looking (at the mother's face, for an obvious example) collides with the initial inklings of self-awareness.
Hence it is the birth of the long love affair/despair between image and self-image which has found such intensity of expression in film and such joyous recognition in the cinema audience.
Quite apart from the extraneous similarities between screen and mirror (the framing of the human form in its surroundings, for instance),
The sense of forgetting the world as the ego has subsequently come to perceive it (I forgot who I am and where I was) is nostalgically reminiscent of that pre-subjective moment of image recognition.
At the same time the cinema has distinguished itself in the production of ego ideals as expressed in particular in the star system, the stars centring both screen presence and screen story as they act out a complex process of likeness and difference (the glamorous impersonates the ordinary).
[Above we] have set out two contradictory aspects of the pleasurable structures of looking in the conventional cinematic situation.
The first scopophilic, arises from pleasure in using another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight.
The second, developed through narcissism and the constitution of the ego, comes from identification with the image seen.
Thus, in film terms, one implies a separation of the erotic identity of the subject from the object on the screen (active scopophilia), the other demands identification of the ego with the object on the screen through the spectator's fascination with and recognition of his like.
The first is a function of the sexual instincts, the second of ego libido.
The look, pleasurable in form, can be threatening in content, and it is woman as representation/image that crystallises this paradox.
WOMAN AS IMAGE, MAN AS BEARER OF THE LOOK
In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female.
The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female figure which is styled accordingly.
In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be looked-at-ness.
Woman displayed as sexual object is the leit-motif of erotic spectacle: from pin-ups to strip-tease, she holds the look, plays to and signifies male desire. Mainstream film neatly combined spectacle and narrative.
The presence of woman is an indispensable element of spectacle in normal narrative film, yet her visual presence tends to work against the development of a story line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation.
This alien presence then has to be integrated into cohesion with the narrative. As Budd Boetticher has put it:
What counts is what the heroine provokes or rather what she represents. She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act the way he does. In herself the woman has not the slightest importance.
(A recent tendency in narrative film has been to dispense with this problem altogether; hence the development of what Molly Haskell has called the ~buddy movie' [for example Butch Casidy and the Sundance Kid], in which the active homosexual eroticism of the central male figures can carry the story without distraction).
Any other examples.
Traditionally, the woman displayed has functioned on two levels: as erotic object for the characters within the screen story, and as erotic object for the spectator within the auditorium, with a shifting tension between the looks on either side of the screen.
For instance, the device of the show-girl allows the two looks to be unified technically without any apparent break in the story.*
A woman performs within the narrative, the gaze of the spectator and that of the male characters in the film are neatly combined without breaking narrative verisimilitude.
For a moment the sexual impact of the performing woman takes the film into a no-man s-land outside its own time and space. ... . ]
An active/passive heterosexual division of labour has similarly controlled narrative structure.
According to the principles of the ruling ideology and the psychical structures that back it up, the male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification.
Man is reluctant to gaze at his exhibitionist like.
Hence the split between spectacle and narrative supports the man's role as the active one of forwarding the story, making things happen. The man controls the film phantasy and also emerges as the representative of power in a further sense: as the bearer of the look of the spectator.
This is made possible through the processes set in motion by structuring the film around a main controlling figure with whom the spectator can identify.
As the spectator identifies with the main male protagonist, he projects his look on to that of his like, his screen surrogate, so that the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look.
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.
The character in the story can make things happen and control events better than the subject/spectator, just as the image in the mirror was more in control of motor co-ordination.
[Above we have set out a tension between a mode of representation of woman in film and conventions surrounding the narrative. Each is associated with a look: that of the spectator in direct scopophilic contact with the female form displayed for his enjoyment (connoting male phantasy)
and that of the spectator fascinated with the image of his like set in an illusion of natural space, and through him gaining control and possession of the woman within the narrative.
(This tension and the shift from one pole to the other can structure a single text. Thus both in Only Angels Have Wings and in To Have and Have Not, the film opens with the woman as object of the combined gaze of spectator and all the male protagonists in the film. She is isolated, glamorous, on display, sexualised. But as the narrative progresses she falls in love with the main male protagonist and becomes his property, losing her outward glamorous characteristics, her generalised sexuality, her show-girl connotations; her eroticism is subjected to the male star alone. By means of identification with him, through participation in his power, the spectator can indirectly possess her too.)
No comments:
Post a Comment