Laura Mulvey – The Male Gaze
The magic of the Hollywood style arose, not exclusively, but in one important aspect, from its skilled and satisfying manipulation of visual pleasure.
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.
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 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, portrays 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.
voyeuristic separation.
Just you and the film
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 their motor capacity, with the result that their recognition of oneself is joyous in that they imagine their mirror image to be more complete, more perfect than their own body.
Recognition is thus overlaid with mis-recognition
This mirror-moment predates language for the child.
Mulvey draws a link between the mirror and the cinema screen.
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).
So far 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.
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 fantasy 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 a common 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.
A tendency in narrative film has been to dispense with this problem altogether; hence the development of what Molly Haskell has called the ~buddy movie'
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.
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.
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 fantasy 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.
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.
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