Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema

by Laura Mulvey

Genres: Nonfiction, Feminism, Film, Essays, Theory, Art, Philosophy

15 pages, Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 1975

About the author

Laura Mulvey is an English feminist film theorist. She was educated at St Hilda's College, Oxford. She is currently professor of film and media studies at Birkbeck, University of London. She worked at the British Film Institute for many years before taking up her current position.

Mulvey is best known for her essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", written in 1973 and published in 1975 in the influential British film theory journal Screen. It later appeared in a collection of her essays entitled Visual and Other Pleasures, as well as in numerous other anthologies. Her article, which was influenced by the theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, is one of the first major essays that helped shift the orientation of film theory towards a psychoanalytic framework. Prior to Mulvey, film theorists such as Jean-Louis Baudry and Christian Metz used psychoanalytic ideas in their theoretical accounts of the cinema. Mulvey's contribution, however, inaugurated the intersection of film theory, psychoanalysis and feminism.

(via wiki)

Reviews

[anistyn]

unrelated, but i will never take another film class again

[No' · Rating 5 out of 5]

This article exposes the construction of a male gaze that hypersexualises the women in movies. It takes its roots in Freud's theory and works with three main ideas : phallocentrism and the fear of castration, scopophilia and women as an erotic object to be looked at.
It's written in 1975, so it takes "old movies" as examples (e.g Hitchcock) but I think it's interesting to find our own examples in today's cinema, and think of the rise of transformative works and the construction of a female/feminine gaze that offer an alternative to the misogynistic way women are represented in movies.

[Wera · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 stars

Incredible essay and very easy to understand thanks to the structure! I'm sure I am not quite grasping some concepts (had to look up some vocab as it was being used in the context of the article) and I wasn't familiar with the examples Mulvey used, but I am encouraged to watch the films she mentioned and come back to this essay.

[Fullmetalfisting · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wrote a dissertation on "gazes," so thanks, Mulvey, for coining the term. This is the foundation upon which Western, feminist film theory is built. If you take a feminist film class in college, they'll make you read this for sure. Within this school of thought, female characters are highly sexualized and male characters are vehicles for which the spectator can live out their fantasies. That's the long and short of it. bell hooks discusses this theory much better in her book, Black Looks: Race and Representation, specifically the chapter entitled Oppositional Gaze.

[Lucija0_ · Rating 4 out of 5]

this is one of the articles that the male/female gaze trend is based upon but the article is so much more nuanced and interesting than the modern usage, and I enjoyed reading it
I'll admit the writing can be difficult to understand at times, but I would still recommend it for anyone interested in movies :)

[cait · Rating 3 out of 5]

i don't understand the concept of femaleness as a threat to maleness and the potentiality of castration....idk maybe i am just forgetting some or just wholly lacking some gender/feminist theory. but other than that, a classic!

[romi ☆]

laura mulvey is my Idol at this point

[eve · Rating 4 out of 5]

juste trop intéressant

[Daniela · Rating 4 out of 5]

an angel loses its wings every time the terms "male gaze" and female gaze" are misused online btw

[sophie esther · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this for a class and again for an essay, and was prompted to rate it not only for its importance in theory & criticism but also because of other more contemporary criticisms of it for being "reductive" (as Viv Burr and Tim Edwards suggest) and "iconophobic" (as Rey Chow called Mulvey).

I resonate with Burr & Edwards concerns about Mulvey's downplaying the female gaze as autonomously female by suggesting that female viewership of a film is masculine because the gaze is written by patriarchy (and therefore, the pleasure that a woman viewer gets from films would be through female objectification and male heroism) or that a vulnerable male character in a film is victimised to prove his heroism, or else to feminise, and therefore degrade him. I also appreciate Chow's efforts to look at sentimental (characteristically conservative/traditionalist and therefore patriarchal, I suppose) cinema and try and find ways of representation that are more penetrable and effective than the more sensationalized (as she charactersises it) forms of representation produced from political discourse like Mulvey's feminist approach.

HOWEVER I also believe that it is unfair to (ironically) reduce this short essay to the questions it poses readers, questions that end up in trains of thought that may be suspicious of Mulvey's perhaps overly binary analysis of gender roles in film. Her comments on viewership, on "looking", on subject/object, and as the coiner of the term GAZE in cultural/social discourse in relation to gender, is precisely what provide these other thinkers with the tools to pose these questions, and to form these criticisms, which they express in their own essays and books. For these reasons, I think Mulvey deserves more credit than this recent trend of reducing her transformative ideas to being "reductive"...

[L000.000.000aura · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Suele decirse que al analizar el placer o la belleza se les destruye. Esta es la intención de este ensayo” 😧😧😧😧🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️

[ally douglas? · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have always had an issue with the depiction of women in film but have never had the words to express why. These are those words.

[Alejandra · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mulvey is rooted in psychoanalysis to explain the phallocentrism construction and structure in mainstream cinema. She talks about “woman”, in a homogenized way, and does not take into account the socio-cultural context of the word. There are so many gaps in this essay… and her position is to pessimistic, she even says that the only solution to phallocentrism cinema is avant-garde film.
However, the essay is interesting and she knows how to link psychoanalysis to explain the male gaze as an active and opposite to passive female gaze. It is also a very influential essay and piece to feminism cinema, so we should also consider that.

[Marie · Rating 4 out of 5]

She gets it.

[Minnie · Rating 3 out of 5]

3*

A timeless classic, but you definitely need a solid grounding in Freudian and especially Lacanian psychoanalytical cultural analysis to understand what Mulvey's talking about.

[R. M. · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting summary of the male gaze in films with some classic examples, but the fascination with women 'representing the threat of castration' is a strange one that isn't explained or backed up.

[Emma Vissers]

girlie girl ik heb nu wat kritieken op jou gelezen en je bent wel een beetje een essentialist nietwaar?
(ik vind psychoanalyse ook gewoon echt niet leuk)

[Şenay · Rating 4 out of 5]

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

[Ana Parejo · Rating 3 out of 5]

extracto de reflexiones varias que he sacado del artículo para un trabajo de Estudios de Género sobre el desnudo en la pintura:

"[...]pone énfasis en cómo este tipo de representaciones refuerzan constantemente los modelos patriarcales a nivel social e individual, creándose un bucle de referencias que nunca sale del estatus quo. En el caso del cine, se producen unos protagonistas masculinos que satisfacen el ego ideal en el que el espectador busca sentirse reflejado, al mismo tiempo que crea un ideal que el espectador espera ver en sí mismo cuando se mira en un espejo. Estos protagonista ideales toman acción y suelen estar orbitados por mujeres pasivas que son exhibidas, como un objeto, por el impacto erótico-visual. A su vez, estas mujeres representan para el hombre (protagonista-espectador), un premio. Por lo tanto, la mujer no tiene importancia más allá de su rol supeditado al del protagonista masculino. "

[gaba · Rating 5 out of 5]

Filled with relief and hope, I can confidently recommend this very short read. You won’t finish it with a sense of dissatisfaction, unless you’ve chosen a method of tenacity. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” is an essay on scopophila, male gaze, voyeurism and psychoanalysis (for those little boys idolising Hitchcock, Sternberg, Tarantino etc.). Interesting dive into the presence of a woman on the screen as the embodiment of both the most shallow desires and the deepest shadows of male characters. Theories about sadism being a form of ascertaining guilt associated with castration (thus with women - as women are males suffering from a lack of penis). Very much enjoyed the analysis of the separation from the objectified character on the screen - in order to achieve sexual stimulation - but also identification of the ego with the object - to complete the fantasy through images.

[Sofia Singer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Så så så interessant

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Now when we talk about blueprints…

[Jamie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Would have enjoyed this a lot more and given it much more credit if the author didn’t use Freud’s cocaine-fueled fever dreams as major theoretical background every other paragraph ESPECIALLY the ones pertaining to castration threat. The voyeurism part was interesting.

[mafi]

enjoyed this essay a lot, very accessible in terms of reading. im never escaping freud's clutches so at this point im just conforming to it honestly

[Frankie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read this for my article for Spina mag. Interesting stuff. Now I get it. Cool

[Kelly Rosalyn Moore · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolute staple for feminist film theory

[T]

Basically, the pleasures of movies instantiate general pleasures of the phallocentric order they are produced from, namely “the scopophilic instinct (pleasure in looking at another person as an erotic object) and, in contradistinction, ego libido (forming identification processes).” These two forms of pleasures are contradictory, but directors have managed their copresence by narrative deftness, such as in Howard Hawks’ Only Angels Have Wings and To Have and Have Not. Moreover, they are only pleasurable as forms, and women as their content creates a paradox. The potential destabilization to the order offered by the woman (her supposed castration both founds and threatens phallocentrism) can again be managed by the narrative form of films. The way these destabilizations are managed is elision of the material views of the camera and viewers in favor of narrative viewing by characters. For instance Boetticher’s statement on emptying female characters so they can become a mere screen for the active, male protagonist can be seen especially clearly in the plotting of some of his Ranown movies, wherein the protagonist's action is motivated by a dead woman, who is also therefore absent and cannot inspire castration anxiety (I may defend Boetticher on this matter as presenting this elision so extremely that it actually calls attention to it. Decision at Sundown has a good deal to say about what men make women into in their thoughts!). The anxiety is also managed in club-scenes collapsing viewers’ gaze into that of the character’s. Therefore, what is necessary (and already occurring when Mulvey wrote this) is a radical filmmaking which foregrounds the material gazes at the expense of those techniques which manage the destabilizing anxiety. This will be unpleasurable (because it rejects the pleasure forms) but will also destroy those conventions which protect the phallocentric order. Moreover, Mulvey’s article participates in this project because it is doing something similar: presenting readers with the manipulative techniques which suppress the destabilizing anxiety of castration. That all sounds pretty right to me!

[Sydney · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great read - truthful then and truthful now. Only reason it didn't receive 5/5 is the writing comes off a bit elitest at times

[LightIssues]

Foundational work in feminist film theory and film theory more broadly, and therefore incredibly worthwhile. Certainly provides much to think about, but I do think Mulvey fits herself a little too snugly within this overarching view of mainstream narrative cinema (which she talks about in terms of classical Hollywood, even though much of what she talks about could arguably be extended to international cinema as well) that sort-of deadens the idea that the world might be more complex; especially in how Mulvey seems to think the issue of the "male gaze" (not that this is a termin she ever actually uses in-text lol, crazy how her actual arguments are so much more interesting than the watered-down popular variant!) hasn't really been surpassed by anybody at the time of writing even. All the argumentation about the scopophilic effect of cinema as it relates to patriarchal ideals and the ideal male spectator makes sense since she's talking abt a general ideological-systemic reality dominated by men that operates on and sees female bodies in very specific ways, but that she dismisses the issue of female protagonists with a casual reference to another piece of writing as opposed to actually interrogating it in-text certainly hints at a dangerous disinterest in anything beyond one's stated beliefs (btw, the Cook/Johnston essay on women in Walsh movies is essential reading for anyone who found this intriguing, clarifies that problem a lot and provides more food for thought, probably more so than Mulvey's own follow-up which is still interesting anyhow); difficult as a statement because despite some quibbles I do find this to be ultimately quite fascinating, even if, due to my lack of knowledge of the Lacanian, slightly out of my grasp. Maybe it's very straight cis male-ish of me too, but I do wonder if the idea of transforming the medium into a different sort of voyeurism that relies precisely on destroying the chance of pleasure at all doesn't perhaps distract from the possible pleasures and complications of a different type of scopophilic attachment, not necessarily "female gaze", but something more interested in specifically moving beyond patriarichal/heteronormative/etc norms...Plagued by concerns about this being a "make sex work legal/make progressive porn" type of total idiocy, but I'm also plagued by uncertainty abt the total denunciation of the pleasurable in the cinema so I'll just have to keep struggling with this I suppose.

What does impress me especially is that despite being very short it actually is very complex and requires to be thought through, but is also conducive to that virtue of being so sparing; enjoying that book, but the comparisons btw Anti-Oedipus and this do make me recall all the old memes about 20th-century continental philosophers' impenetrability and oververbosity. Although admittedly this is more a sketch on these issues for others to follow from vs D&G's more thorough attempts at encapsulating their ideas, so there's that. Very interested in checking out possible theory on the relation of the female spectator to all these patriarchal images and male-centered voyeurism. A lot of this probably reads as more critical than my actual thoughts are--critical theory and philosophy are these sorts of weird complex things anyhow based on my limited experience, plenty eye-opening and exciting stuff, but also plenty of personal disagreements and uncertainties to struggle through and engage with. Ultimately, as long as an article like this is intriguing and exciting to think about it's basically a success.

[Kate Arnold · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good stuff. Jumping right in we discuss the phallus and how women in media are centered around worshiping it in films. We are like castrated children because we don’t have a phallus basically. Freud would love it. Maybe I don’t understand it completely though…? There aren’t really any examples for this either so I guess it’s up to interpretation. It is recognized that women cannot do anything about this system but push against it and we will eventually get somewhere.

I learned a new word- scopophilia! This was used a lot in the article- the art of looking and finding sexual satisfaction through it. Mulvaney proposes that this is what big movies are based on. You’re sitting in a dark room, paying to watch a story that’s not your own, it’s rude if you talk out loud and ruin the moment for everyone. Maybe that is a little creepy if you think about it. But there is something so beautiful about people sitting next to you, escaping from the same mundane life as you through the same form of media. But is everyone in the room a creeper too?

I think this essay hits the nail on the head with her ideas of male gaze. I just watched Pretty Woman tonight and then went to write this because that weird 90s/00s romcom girlboss genre is just like the 30s/40s/50s film noir craze, which is mainly what the essay concerns itself with. Both eras of movies are completely about the man (maybe every big film era is…). The woman might be the main character, but what we are really watching is the feelings that the woman evokes within the man. In Pretty Woman, we know next to nothing about Vivian. But we know all about Edward’s family life, his job, the effect that Vivian has on his job. Mulvaney discusses that the difference between male and female gaze is that men are not comfortable with themselves having feelings of their own so they have women provoke them. Edward was not confident enough to fire his assistant or stand up to the boss of the company he was trying to negotiate with, so of course he goes and tells everyone that it’s the dirty hooker that’s changing him. He literally paid somebody to have opinions for him. Another characteristic of a scopophiliac, men also enjoy associating themself with the main character who bags the woman on the screen. Edward is a lame guy who doesn’t really have any discernible personality traits, so any man can see himself in him and then think they can go out and find a woman as hot as freaking Julia Roberts.

Overall very interesting points. Just don’t understand the phallus one.