Mulvey's visual pleasure and narrative cinema

Laura Mulvey is a feminist film theorist best known for this paper on visual pleasure and narrative cinema which has an emphasis on psychoanalysis. Frankly I don't believe a word of it, but that's psychoanalysis for you. So according to Mulvey a patriarchal society has structured the form of film. In narrative cinema, the women portrayed represent a castration threat with their lack of a penis. Furthermore, it is because they cannot escape this position of causing men to have a fear of this castration that they develop a desire to have a penis- 'penis envy' Freud calls it. Mulvey goes on to say that the erotic aspect of cinema is found through scopophilia, which is when the audience experiences the pleasure of looking, rather than being the object looked at. This is where people begin to be treated as objects as has a tendency to lead to perversion as some may gain sexual gratification from watching a person and treating them as an object.

The separation of the film and the audience plays for the audience a voyeuristic fantasy and the position of the audience watching the film allows exhibitionism where the film being watched is 'repressed' by the viewing audience. Mulvey argues that cinema is essentially a primordial wish for pleasurable looking and that film shows a love affair/ despair relationship between image and self-image (in other words, what we are versus what we see in the mirror). There is an identification with the on-screen image, though there is also the experience whereby the erotic identity of the image becomes separated from the image itself. 

Mulvey mentions that women in film basically have an exhibitionist role and that men have an active role while women remain passive. The 'show-girl' imagery signifies male desire, which is found in many films where the hero/heroine develop a romantic relationship; Mulvey points out that in certain 'buddy movies' there is a case for homosexual eroticism between the lead male roles so no such distraction interferes with the story. Nevertheless, women are seen as the erotic object for both the characters and the audience as the (male) audience are able to link themselves with the power of the male protagonist since his power is similar to the active power of the erotic look. As a result, the audience are able to indirectly possess the heroine, as the hero does when they develop a romantic relationship. There is a view that, as the female figure represents the castration complex the male unconscious wants to escape this fear through sadism, by investigating the woman (if you know what I mean) or by developing a fetish by giving the female star cult status. There is an example of this in the films of the German actress Marlene Dietrich, where the erotic imagery occurs whilst the love interest is off-screen.

Examples of scopophilic eroticism can be seen in some of Hitchcock's films, where the erotic drives of the male characters put them in compromised situations. The power of the male characters is evoked by the guilt of the woman because of the castration complex and the legal right- men are (mostly) seen to be on the right side of the war (eg. a policeman in Vertigo) whilst the women are on the wrong side.

Overall, women are passive raw material for the active gaze of men. As a representation they signify castration which can be circumvented by voyeurism or developing this scopophilic view. As cinema has the effects of the camera and distance between the audience and what it sees, the erotic look towards a scene can be varied or exposed, which makes it different from the more direct viewing of theatre, strip-tease and shows. Cinema meets the neurotic needs of the male ego, though the verisimilitude presented by the camera deny the erotic look of the audience the intrinsic power. Additionally the camera's ability to be able to conceal the castration fear and display a direct erotic image freezes the look of the spectator and prevents him from distancing himself from the image he sees.