Coming to terms with Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"
"Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" by Laura Mulvey is, undoubtedly, a bit of a head screw. It's taken me three sittings to get through the whole thing (even though it's just 12 pages) and it was, certainly, the satisfaction of starting to understand it that has compelled me to even try maintain an Art History blog in the first place. A big portion of this difficult-ness can be attributed to Mulvey’s constant referral to psychoanalytic theory, which her analysis is hinged on. As someone not massively familiar with many ideas in psychology and philosophy, this has been really difficult (and enjoyable!) to try and get my head around. Coming to terms with such complex ideas is rewarding! It’s also a bit like 1970s, and I don’t wholly see where she’s coming from with some of the psychoanalysis. But this me trying to make sense of it rather than agree. I think her insights into the technicalities of filmmaking and the results of this are very exciting though and bear a lot of parallels with art.
The aim of the text is to pin-point how it is that cinema is able to generate visual pleasure to the (presumed) male spectator. This hinges on the erotic, and sexual form of visual pleasure - generated by the subordinate woman. Whilst it is a distinct, unfaltering cultural “truth” that the woman is subordinate, Mulvey links this subordinacy directly to psychoanalytic theory. That is, she theorizes how a woman may represent the subconscious threat of castration to the male - and how he reacts. I think this might, more normally, mean a more archaic fear of emasculation the woman characterises in her other-ness. Thus, the so called “male-gaze”, where a woman is “styled accordingly” to the will of the male spectator/viewer, is characterised by this desire to manage the castration threat a woman poses.
However, before we get bogged down in this, it is important to root Mulvey’s analysis of how the male gaze eventually works in first considering the primordial fascination of looking. Mulvey considers the pleasure of viewing to be twofold: the desire to look at sexual objects (scopophilia) and the desire to identify oneself with an over-representation of said self. The first is present in every human and is particularly active during childhood where there is a particular fascination with what happens in private, forbidden spaces. Mulvey notes how, at the extreme, this voyeurism simply descends into perversion.
The desire to identify oneself with more than what they actually are, is particularly critical and often structures a film’s narrative and characters so as to relate directly to the spectator/viewer. In perhaps one of the most symbolic, and primary instances of this desire, Mulvey refers to Lacan’s “mirror moment”. She states that “the mirror phase occurs at a time when the child’s physical ambitions outrstrip his motor capacity, with the result that his recognition of himself is more complete, more perfect than he experiences his own body”. Hence, “recognition is thus overlaid with mis-recognition”. The extension of this into cinema is particularly complex - in order to generate “visual pleasure”, the male spectator viewer must grow to over-value himself in a way that means he identifies with the male protagonist on screen. That is, that he does not envy him, but directly relates to him. This also demands, from the outset, that the film create an imaginary space as vivid and dimensional as the one the man originally chose to overvalue himself in, in that critical mirror moment. The coinciding of major narrative events with this shared “look” between spectator and character, only furthers the impression of omnipotence.
Now that the spectator and the male protagonist of the film are one, seeing with the same “look”, the woman and her threat of castration is styled in response. That is because this threat still exists, and underpins the dilemma between the twofold desire of wanting to look and wanting to belong. Mulvey comments directly upon this contradiction and how it is what makes up the larger structure of desire. That is, desire, in its most simple origin and form, to misrepresent/ overidentify oneself: to be more than a woman, a constant reminder of the threat of castration; but also to look at her as a sexual object. Thus, Mulvey notes how “the look, pleasurable in form, can be threatening in content and it is women as a representation/image that crystallizes this paradox”.
Mulvey identifies two main ways of viewing a woman that contain her threat of castration. Both of these are structured by the one-ness between the male viewer and the male protagonist, and the conditions of cinema that enable this one-ness to be maintained. On a technical level, a camera obscures its own means, meaning that the audience is always seeing a version of reality that blurs directly into their own. The absorptive proximity of cinema, and the flicking looks of female characters between audience and fellow character often consolidate this. Hence, the subconscious projection of the spectator onto the protagonist is only reinforced by the technicalities of cinema. The two aforementioned means of containing this threat directly correspond: fetishizing a woman until her presence becomes reassuring rather than scary - often by focusing on specific parts of her body (Dietrich’s legs, for instance); or by reenacting the threat of trauma a woman poses, seeking to demystify it, only with the qualification that she is inevitably saved, or punished (Hitchcock films such as Vertigo). The threat posed by the woman only strengthens the male ego’s assault against it. Thus, this projection of “male phantasy” is utterly sustained, even in any attempt to identify the subconscious trauma that succeeds it.
So, now that we have (partially) identified the complex and psychoanalytic structures that systematically sustain the “male gaze”, the question remains in how this actually applies to art. Mulvey, in her summary, focuses on the unique capacity of film to pose these psychoanalytic and structural contradictions - building the woman into the “spectacle herself”. She notes how it is the ability of film to command both dimensions of time and space that means it is able to directly frame a spectator’s viewpoint into such a strictly conditioned space - and all the male gaze-ness that brings. Moreover, she identifies three different planes on which this gaze operates: the camera, the audience, and the characters. The capacity of film to deny and ignore the first two is what enables it to to command space and time in a way that generates such a realistic environment: “the camera’s look is disavowed in order to create a convincing world in which the speaker’s surrogate can perform with verisimilitude.” Even a static image - fetishization, for instance - dispels the reality of film and its capacity to command time and space. Therefore, it must be able to manipulate dimensions, else it collapses as a medium: so Mulvey notes that “the complex interaction of looks is specific to film”.
I draw some disagreement here. I do not think cinema is unique in its capacity to present time and space. Certainly, it may produce a reality more tangible than any other medium due to its visual immediacy. However, I think art draws a surprising relevance - particularly in the functioning of the male gaze. The way in which the camera is able to blur the line between audience/ character and camera by obscuring the means of its production is directly relevant to the artist. The role of the artist obscures its means of production: there is an immediate relation between the viewer and artist because you fill the physical space left by them. And so the audience and painter become blurred: where the painter was a voyeur, so becomes you.
Although art does not command time and space in the same way to generate this sense of realism, the fact that there is no linear time or structure to art operates in an entirely different way to a similar means. Art is seen all at once. It is not a moving narrative bound to a linear time structure in order to truly get across its meaning: it is an instance, where the entire narrative and reality is held at one (and thus always moving) point. The audience is held in an entire reality and entire story simultaneously, framed into the visual immediacy of one moment. This is to the same means as the viewer in the cinema: sharing the “look” of the painter, and, where there is, even a male subject he over-extends his likeness to. It is then ripe to prey on the male/ female, active/passive dichotomy.
As a side note: We may even draw, in some cases (particularly nudes), the fetishistic nature of Sternberg’s films as similar: he uses the fetishization method of containing the castration threat; capitalising off close-up, disjointed body parts which disrupt the narrative and exist in a more cyclical time structure.
Although art does not command time and space in the same way to generate this sense of realism, the fact that there is no linear time or structure to art operates in an entirely different way to a similar means. Art is seen all at once. It is not a moving narrative bound to a linear time structure in order to truly get across its meaning: it is an instance, where the entire narrative and reality is held at one (and thus always moving) point. The audience is held in an entire reality and entire story simultaneously, framed into the visual immediacy of one moment. This is to the same means as the viewer in the cinema: sharing the “look” of the painter, and, where there is, even a male subject he over-extends his likeness to. It is then ripe to prey on the male/ female, active/passive dichotomy.
As a side note: We may even draw, in some cases (particularly nudes), the fetishistic nature of Sternberg’s films as similar: he uses the fetishization method of containing the castration threat; capitalising off close-up, disjointed body parts which disrupt the narrative and exist in a more cyclical time structure.
Thus, in artworks initially conditioned by the “male gaze”, even a contemporary audience is forced into adopting it. This is despite any newer wisdom they have. The focal perspective of a work, as well as what the painter painted and how, specifically, and how, directly condition you into their intention. We are forcibly framed into seeing, in the most immediate, pre-linguistic sense of seeing, how the painter wanted it to be seen - regardless of any overlaying theory or analysis we may later consider.
“La Toilette” by Henri de Toulouse Lautrec draws this in to particular focus. Rather than continuing to write (because this has got very long and wordy and my hand is tired), I invite you to look at this work, and think about how you look at this woman (down onto). Maybe there is an acknowledgement in that, of all the ways she could have been portrayed, Lautrec has chosen this way. That is, a confirmation of that male ego that satiates itself by drawing in the spectator (nee buyer) into the place the artist stood and giving them no other comprehensible reality. The way in which it is painted and framed and structured adheres to the strict laws of the male gaze that neither painter nor viewer has been traditionally willing to escape.
Sorry - this was rough and might not even make sense at this point. But I got something down and had some ideas, however incoherent they may be. The art stuff is all me. I’m sorry again.
Mia.
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