Laura Mulvey against the grain: a critical assessment of the psychoanalytic feminist approach to film By Terje Steinulfsson Skjerdal,

Centre for Cultural and Media Studies, University of Natal, 1997. Abstract Since the middle 1970s, Laura Mulvey has been regarded as one of the most prominent feminist film critic. Her critique of mainstream cinema is built on Lacanian psychoanalysis, in which the differences between male and female spectatorship becomes a key component. In this paper, I argue that Mulvey's pscyhoanalytic approach to a very little extent is successful in dealing with the feminist dilemma. With references to "Thelma and Louise" (1991), I attempt to show that the psychoanalytic approach to film has three fatal weaknesses: (a) it is not easily applicable to film reading, (b) it assumes an unproven dichotomy between the active male and the passive female, and (c) it is simplistic in its condemnation of all Hollywood film.

Content Mulvey's view of mainstream film: a typical feminist response Approaching cinema through psychoanalysis Critical assessment: how Mulvey's approach fall short The problem of applying psychoanalysis to film The problem of the active male vs. the passive female The problem of reading all Hollywood film as antagonistic The main contribution to film criticism by Laura Mulvey, whom I am about to assess in this paper, can be summarized as a challenge to both the audience and the film-maker. The audience is challenged in the way it assumingly reads film in a customary and uncritical manner; the filmmaker is challenged by the degree to which he or she surrenders to the established norms of representing gender. A theorist and practitioner of feminist film criticism, Mulvey adopted and customized two central tools to analyse gendered address in classical narrative film: psychoanalysis and semiotic analysis. Following the publishing of her crucial essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1988b [1975]), an influential branch of feminist film theory was built on Mulveys theories as a vehicle to empower the broader feminist movement. This paper will trace the key elements of Mulveys theories, most notably psychoanalysis and feminist views on spectatorship. I will in this regard pay attention to the general theoretical significance as well as to the particular relevance to film criticism, since Mulvey throughout her writings seldom restricts herself to one theoretical aspect only. My specific aim in this section is to make clear what Mulveys critical theories have contributed to film criticism the past 20 years. I will then go on to critically assess Mulveys approach, with examples drawn from Thelma and Louise (1991). I hope thereby to show how a critical approach can question traditional film-making, but foremost I aim at proving that Mulveys psychoanalytic approach is insufficient to provide a sound modern film critique. The conclusion is twofold: firstly, that Laura Mulvey has contributed greatly to the criticism of gender representation in traditional Hollywood film [1]; secondly, that her reliability on psychoanalytic methods nevertheless proves to be an unfruitful approach to read films, both with regard to narrative content and with regard to her preoccupation with the relationship between film-maker and spectator.

Mulveys approach to mainstream film: a typical feminist response Mulveys critique of traditional Hollywood film falls into the broad claim of feminist film criticism, as stated in Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema: Film reflects, reveals and even plays on the straight, socially established interpretation of sexual difference which controls images, erotic ways of looking and spectacle (p. 57). Film is thus seen as a reinforcement of traditional gender representation rather than a corrective. Crucial in this argument is the claim that the interpretation on behalf of the viewer takes place unconsciously, thus providing the basis for ignorance to gender oppression and subordination. It appears somewhat unclear from Mulveys writings whether she sees the portrayal of gender in mainstream film as a deliberate act performed by the production companies. On the one hand, the logical conclusion from the Freudo-Lacanian approach would be that also the film-makers thought is distorted through social learning. On the other hand, Mulvey utilizes the expression manipulation of visual pleasure to explain the magic of Hollywood style, as if the film-maker has a hidden male-biased agenda in mind. In either case, it is exactly the understanding of visual pleasure that is Mulveys project; in the first place to explain why the viewer is subject to a male reading of the film, and in the second place to propose solutions for an alternative way of reading and producing films. Mulvey claims that the main challenge for those who want to promote alternatives to the establishment is to overcome a patriarchal industry that has left women largely without a voice (1989, p. 39). The genres of melodrama and the western are used to prove this claim. With regard to melodramas, Mulvey argues that the sense in which these supposedly are able to equip women with a voice is contradictory. The female point of view will also here surrender to the overall patriarchal structure of society, Mulvey argues (1989). (Jackie Byars (1991) opposes this view, as I will note later on.) Central to Mulveys critique of traditional film is that popular culture discourages the audience from keeping a critical distance to the content (Seton, 1997). Most notably, however, is Mulveys assertion that the point of view that a camera holds is essentially male. The female viewer must therefore adapt to an identity other than her own, an argument that constitute the foundation for the psychoanalytic approach to film criticism. In this regard, Mulvey implicitly answers in the affirmative the question that has become central to feminist film criticism debate: Is the gaze male? Herein also lies Mulveys key to reading films: by help from Lacanian psychoanalysis.

Approaching cinema through psychoanalysis One would not immediately think of psychoanalysis as a proper tool to read films, and perhaps it was partly the unexpectedness that made this approach popular after Mulvey presented it in 1975 . I will shortly summarize the main elements of this theory as it appeared in Visual pleasure and narrative cinema (1988b) [2]. The primary proposition of the psychoanalytic method, developed by Freud and further elaborated by Lacan, is that the woman is subject to personal and social depression through her lack of a penis. Her existence is thus decided by her desire to escape castration, an escape which turns out to be impossible. Psychoanalysis subsequently sees the male as physically and symbolically dominant, a dominance that is only threatened by his adopted fear of castration. Mulvey draws in this respect more on Freud than on Lacan, although she later goes on to use Lacanian terms such as imaginary and symbolic. In transferring this theory to film analysis, particular attention is paid to the Freudian explanation of scopophilia control through gaze. Mulvey contends that the scopophilic nature is evident in the way films are watched. Through

narrative structure and conditions of screening, cinema provides a perfect climate for looking at another person as an object of sexual stimulation. This is the scopophilic function of sexual instincts. The ego function is also apparent, and develops as the viewer seeks to identify with characters on the screen. A central component in Mulveys adoption of Freuds psychoanalysis to film spectatorship is therefore voyeurism, the pleasure in looking. Further, Mulvey distinguishes between the active male and the passive female. She argues that this dichotomy is further reinforced by mainstream film which combines spectacle and narrative in a speculative manner. The woman is in this view crucial to the narrative (as an object); and at the same time, she freezes the narrative in moments of erotic contemplation (p. 62). These moments apart from time are evident for instance when the camera shows a close-up of Julia Roberts leg as she pulls on her stockings in the opening sequence of Pretty Woman (1990). According to Mulvey, such filmatic techniques are a result of the male gaze, and only proves how feminine qualities are married with the passive both in the way the film is made and in the way the spectator makes meaning of it. The masculine, on the other hand, is perceived as more complex, more perfect. When reading films, the female spectator is left with two options: She can either identify with the male camera and the male object within the film, or she can identify with the female object within the film in a masochistic way (Man, 1993). Her destiny is that she cannot escape the male gaze as she reads the film. From this, it is evident that Mulveys psychoanalytic approach to film is a pessimistic one, and indeed deterministic. Mulvey also makes it a point to rediscover the three looks that are associated with film: that of the camera, that of the audience, and that of the characters. Her argument is that only the third of these, the viewpoint of the characters, is present in mainstream film. The two others are denied in order to strip the spectator of critical thinking and suppress information that may question the realism of the picture. From the last argument in particular, it is no surprise that Mulveys answer to the feminist challenge is to call for production methods that extensively discard traditional film-making and instead pave the way for alternative cinema. In other words, she becomes a proponent for avant-garde film. Alternative film that challenges the basic assumptions of mainstream film is possible in Mulveys opinion, but it can still only exist as a counterpoint (1988b, p. 59). This adds to the theoretical pessimism that I will argue is evident from Mulveys psychoanalytic approach. It leads in a sense to a cul-de-sac where the male gaze penetrates not only cinema, but also the fundamental way in which gender is represented in society. To overthrow this patriarchal structure in a simple manner is in Mulveys opinion inconceivable which follows logically from the psychoanalytic approach. Avant-garde cinema turns out to be her only response to mainstream cinema which supposedly is so structured by the male gaze that it is unable to accommodate images of women without fetishism (Enciso, 1997). The only way to facilitate a powerful feminist cinema is to disrupt traditional viewing pleasure, so to speak. In Afterthoughts on Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1988a [1981]), Mulvey reinforces her Freudian approach to film interpretation. In particular, the distinction between the active male and the passive female is further argued and extended. The conclusion remains the same, Hollywood genre films structured around masculine pleasure, offering an identification with the active point of view, allow a woman spectator to rediscover that lost aspect of her sexual identity (p. 71). The masculine identification is thus evident both from the point of the female character and the female spectator.

In addition to bringing psychoanalysis into film criticism, Mulvey should be acknowledged for her application of semiotics in reading gendered address. Her approach in this regard did not represent a pioneer project in film criticism in general, yet it gave a new direction for feminist film criticism in particular. As Seton (1997) points out, the tools offered by linguistics and semiotics provided insights into the spoken (i.e. the conscious articulation of patriarchy), thereby filling in for the shortcomings of psychoanalysis (which analyses the unspoken, i.e. the unconscious of patriarchy). [3] Overall, Mulveys contribution can be read as a shift in film analysis from ideology critique to cultural forms critique manifested through the dominant male viewing pleasures into which everything has to conform. We have seen that the central explanatory component in this theory is Freuds assumption that the female is rendered powerless through her awareness of a lack of masculine genitals. The female, then, is in this view unable to find ways of emancipation through a movie industry that only reinforces the male gaze. Thus, Mulvey denies that traditional filmic solutions are capable of destroying the male-oriented female image, and she consequently calls for an avant-garde technique that enables women to develop imageries that explore their own fantasies and desires. Mulveys own films (notably Riddles of the Sphinx (1976), which she co-produced with Peter Wollen), are often referred to as successful avant-garde responses to the challenge that stems from the psychoanalytic film criticism. The clue in these films is precisely that they supposedly turns the female passive spectatorial position to an active one. Mulveys crucial importance to feminist film criticism is evident from several recent commentators, for instance Elizabeth Wright (1992): All subsequent feminist film theory working within a psychoanalytic tradition has begun with Mulveys articulation of the patriarchal gaze of narrative cinema (p. 120).

A critical assessment: how Mulveys approach falls short Having explained Mulveys main thoughts, we are now ready to turn to a critical discussion of her approach. I will organize the criticism in three broad categories: the difficulty that lies within psychoanalytic theory itself and its application to film criticism, the fatal tendency to dichotomize male and female natures, and the simplistic view that all Hollywood film is destructive. The bottom line is that Mulveys theories fall short of empowering the broad feminist movement. I am not arguing against her aim, only her method and theory. In so doing, I will draw on the reading of Thelma and Louise, a film that in my opinion in fact gives women a voice, although the film is highly marked by the Hollywood stamp both in narrative structure, cinematography and mise en scne. The problem of applying psychoanalysis to film As E. Deidre Pribram (1988) points out, Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic theories have been central to film studies because they forge a link between cultural forms of representation (here: film), and the aquisition of subject identity in social beings. However, my argument is that this link has proved difficult to establish in practice. Mulveys project is to search for a theory that sufficiently explains why Hollywood cinema is a threat to women. Her starting-point is thus fixed: She sees traditional narrative film as being destructive in that it forces the female to submit to established patriarchal norms. At this point, we already see a fallacy to which psychoanalytic film criticism tends to submit. It starts with the assumption that gendered address in traditional film is destructive, and goes on to explain this phenomenon without investigating the truthfulness of the initial presupposition. Then in the second place, as we are

blinded by the seemingly obvious relevance of explaining a cultural representation through its psychological significance, the psychoanalytical film critic will utilize semiotic terminology partly derived from Lacan to explain the link between sexual identity and social determination (through the moving picture). The explanation seems convincing, yet it does not prove its claim precisely because the order of assumptions and explanations/claims is reversed. There are too many assumptions and too little proof, as it were. The methodological approach of psychoanalysis is therefore a highly problematic (and subjective) one. The problems of a psychoanalytic film theory is also apparent from its preoccupation with only one aspect of the human nature, sexual desires. E. Deidre Pribram (1988) adds to this critique and claims that psychoanalytic theories fail to address the formation and operation of other variables or differences amongst individuals, such as race and class (p. 2). This notion is a valid one, particularly when considering the fact that most feminists will claim to be part of a broader movement that questions every part of patriarchal domination. Interestingly enough, Pribram goes on to argue that psychoanalytic models are also weak in that they deny the importance of the context; no place is allowed for shifts in textual meaning related to shifts in viewing situation, hence ignoring the differences in viewership that might come about when people with different social and cultural backgrounds read the same movie. However, this position of psychoanalysitic film theory corresponds with its major premise that the gaze is merely male. This criticism will be further discussed under the next subheading. Christine Gledhill (1988) contends that a weakness of the psychoanalytic film approach (which she consistently calls cine-psychoanalysis) is that it has derived its framework from the perspective of masculinity. The theory thus characterizes the feminine as lack, absence and otherness. However, Glenhill notes that there has been a development from early cine-psychoanalysis, i.e. from the 1970s, and that more recent approaches to the theory may be able to acknowledge feminine qualities as more complex than male subordination. This is a valuable remark, and should be kept in mind as we examine Mulveys theories; it should not be taken for granted that she still supports all aspects of the approach as it appeared in the first publishing of Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema in 1975. However, in the introduction to the 1989 reprinting of the essay, Mulvey does reinforce the psychoanalytic approach, though she maintains that the practical side of the theory faced a different social climate in the 1970s. Teresa de Lauretis (1987) applauds much of Mulveys work, but is critical of the psychoanalytic approach. Her concern is particularly to prove the limits of this approach for film theory, and she argues that semiotic theories of iconicity and narrativity would be of more user to feminist film critics. De Lauretiss critique seems to be sound in the first place, but how does she go about distinguishing semiotic theories from psychoanalysis, especially in the tradition of Lacan? Her response to this question appears to be incomplete. Zoe Sofia (1989), on the other hand, is easier to follow as she argues that a main difficulty with psychoanalytic cultural criticism is the inflexibility that results when the findings are generalized. The difficulty arises as the researcher tries to map out a larger theory from the analysis of the psyche; the problem is just that the findings will inevitably gravitate towards sociological conceptions already determined by the order of gender differences (which, again, stems from the presuppositions of the psychoanalytic approach).

One of the more solid critiques of feminist psychoanalysis is provided by Jackie Byars (1991). Her argument is well-founded in that it points both to inconsistencies within psychoanalysis itself as well as to the problems of applying the theory to feminist film criticism. Byars notes how Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis sees the masculine as normative and the feminine as deviant, and further argues that this theory indeed cannot account for resistance and ideological struggle; they represent, instead, the psychic mechanisms for reinforcing dominant ideologies (p. 137). If true, this argument is all the more embarrassing to feminist psychoanalysists when facing the fact that feminisms major project is exactly to reveal and overthrow dominant structures at all levels. Byars also contends that recent developments in psychology has discarded parts of Freuds theories, whereas in film theory orthodox Freudianism still prevails. What, then, about the application of psychoanalysis to the actual interpretation of films? In my view, the reading of films through Freudian glasses proves how difficult it is to utilize psychoanalysis as a tool to understand patriarchal structures in society. A few examples from Thelma and Louise will illustrate my point. In a psychoanalytic reading, Thelma (Geena Davis) and Louise (Susan Sarandon) are seen as objects of their traditional, domestic world. Their ascribed task in life is to do the dish-washing, to nurture and to love their husbands. No other world is known to them. Thelma and Louises desire, however, is to escape and get away. In particular, they seek independence, freedom and space qualities usually attributed to males. The psychoanalytic reading of this is obvious: The females innate hatred of castration leads her to worship masculine qualities. As the storyline develops and the two women run away to free themselves from their domestic environment, they indeed utilize masculine commodities to make their escape possible: a car, a gun, harsh language. Yet the psychoanalyst would not let the women get away with easy solutions. Eventually, they will have to surrender to their female destiny. I can therefore only think about one psychoanalytic interpretation of Thelma and Louises decision to speed their stolen car to the edge of the Grand Canyon in the end: They were ultimately trapped by the powers of the male-dominated society; the only way out if not returning to their domestic world was to give it all up. A positive interpretation of this last sequence is inconceivable in psychoanalytic terms. With regard to spectatorship, the psychoanalytic approach faces however difficulties. One of the problematic question is this: How can the male who assumingly watches movies mainly for pleasure (voyuerism) have pleasure in watching two women gaining power over other men? (Our presupposition here is that males actually did enjoy Thelma and Louise, which is evident from the popularity of the movie both among men and women.) The castration fear would certainly make this a painful watching experience for men as well as women. To this I simply reply that the psychoanalytic approach appears to be unable to deal with such problems. The problem of the active male vs. the passive female My second objection to Mulveys film theory arises from her rigid distinction between the active male and the passive female. In her view, woman is the object and man is the bearer of the look (the gaze is male). This dichotomy can to a certain extent be explained by the tendency for tying gender to biological determinism rather than to social development. Yet the psychoanalytic theory fails to account for differences within each gender, as I am about to argue now. In her argument against this dualistic model of gender identity, Sofia (1989) points out that the woman remains almost without any sexual identity in psychoanalysis since she is entirely defined in

relation to the man. Sofia espands her argument by denying that symbolic language (as defined by Lacan) is adequate to masculine self-representation. Likewise, Sofia argues, textual excess or indecidability should not always be regarded as a feminine quality. Indeed, she concludes her paper with a crucial precaution that is highly relevant to a critical assessment of feminist film theories, namely that a failure to distinguish between feminine and masculine femininities and maternal figures can result in misreadings of masculine perversity as feminist progress. Such misreadings would of course go against the aim of the entire Mulveyian project. The fallacy of defining the genders as dichotomous categories becomes similarly clear from Mulveys assumption that the male is the bearer of the look. She expands this assumption to an application of the narrative film industry in order to show that both characters, film-makers and audience take the male gaze for granted. But how then, we must ask, is it possible to account for the differences that we apparently see in female characters within the same film? Mulveys answer is that there only appears to be a difference, a lesser or larger degree of masculine/feminine acting, but in reality all such individual characteristics are constructued to perfectly suit the overall notion of the man as the bearer of the look. The female spectator, then, unconsciously has to shift between an active masculine and a passive feminine identity. Pamela Robertson (1996) agrees with the assertion that female spectatorship is characterized by an oscillation between the active and the passive, but she also argues for a model that more accurately can account for the overlap between passitivity and activity in a viewer who sees through, simultaneously perhaps, one mask of serious femininity and another mask of laughing femininity (p. 15). Robertsons solution is the position of camp, which she argues for extensively throughout her book, but it ultimately appears to be just another separatist ideology which I doubt is a fruitful answer to the feminist challenge. Since Mulvey approaches the feminist gaze as utopic, how will she read Thelma and Louise? We can only guess. Because the psychoanalytic starting-point is that the female spectator is forced to read every action as either passive submission or active identification, it is likely that the critic will ignore the complexity of Thelma and Louises characters. Such a view becomes problematic because, as Glenn Man (1993) points out, Thelma and Louise generates a complex narrative process that can create new fantasies for spectator appropriation (p. 37). Man goes on to state what is exactly the core of my argument here: What the narration of Thelma and Louise attempts to do then is to inscribe both women as subjects and agents of the narrative, give authentic voice to their desires, and mute the discourses of the male characters (p. 39). If this is a sound observation, and I believe it is, then Mulveys assumption of the silent woman in Hollywood film is false. The problem of reading all Hollywood film as antagonistic We have seen that Mulvey argues for a feminist film-making practice that goes against traditional narrative film as much as possible. The assumption behind this argument is that the audience is so surrounded by traditional patriarchal norms that it is not able to critically read films unless an entirely different approach is provided. Mulveys response is to call for the avant-garde cinema, which she sees as a possible alternative to Hollywood, but it can still only exist as a counterpoint (1988b, p. 59). There is truly a sense of pessimism in that statement, a sort of Mulveyian realistic dissidence (cf. Theodor Adorno). Byars (1991) strongly objects to this claim that narrative film is all bad. Quite contrary to Mulvey, Byars sees the American melodramas of the 1950s as a creative tool rather than a destructive force.

She shows that the Hollywood dramas not only encouraged the audience (both males and females) to interpret the filmic material, but also extended debates around issues of sexual divisions of labour, gender roles, and family structure. The kind of view that Byars advocates has gained more recognition in feminist circles in recent years. Film-maker Michelle Citron (1988), for instance, openly argues for a feminist use of Hollywood. In her opinion, the entry into mainstream narrative film-making will broaden the work we [feminist film-makers] do and expand our understanding of visual culture and of ourselves (p. 62). She even contends that traditional narrative film has more potential than alternative film in some areas because it opens up for contradictions, paradoxes and uncertainties. Another major point she raises against avant-garde advocates such as Mulvey, is that alternative cinema is inaccessible to many viewers. It contains an unfamiliar style and communicative form, and thus creates a gap that many viewers cannot overcome. Nuria Enciso (1997) adds to this critique, and maintains that radical films like Mulveys have remained on the fringe and therefore have not contributed as greatly as they could have to altering the position of women within society. A main concern of Mulveys is the question of whether it is possible to obtain a true feminist gaze. By means of traditional narrative film, her answer is negative. On the contrary, Mulvey argues that only an alternative film method in the hands of feminists can possibly turn the gaze around. However, reality seems to be more complex than what Mulvey seems to suggest. That the filmmaker is female does not of course ensure that the gaze will be feminine. And what is a feminine gaze? Film critics disagree on this point; many will say that there is no essential difference between a male and a female gaze. Furthermore, as Enciso (1997) points out, there are within each gender vast differences between individuals (there are blacks, older, younger, working-class, etc.). Such differences will often override gender differences as well, and makes the whole notion of gender separations highly questionable. It follows from this that Mulveys theories hardly can be said to have universal validity. Lastly, I will pay attention to the fact that contemporary mainstream cinema utilizes filmatic techniques and strategies of narration that would have been considered alternative only one decade ago. It is enough here to refer to Romeo and Juliet (1996) and Natural Born Killers (1994), which both have attracted large audiences although they in some ways break significantly with established narrative film. In the same manner, Thelma and Louise has been able to put on the agenda a traditionally marginalized issue, the issue of women emancipatoin. The last statement should be qualified to a certain extent; some commentators, such as Elayne Rapping, certainly dont think its a feminist movie (1992, p. 30). However, I am not so concerned here with classifying what is a feminist movie and not. My argument is that the main concern for feminist film should not necessarily be to oppose mainstream film in all aspects. Rather, the focus should be on the issue itself, namely the struggle for womens liberation. In this struggle, I contend that mainstream film may very well be a helpful tool, because, as Enciso (1997) points out, the situation for women intellectuals and artists is already difficult enough without women discouraging their own participation in popular culture. In conclusion, I ought to give credit to Laura Mulvey for her important role in paving the way for a modern feminist film criticism whose main concern has been to give voice to marginalized subgroups in society. I think here not only of the feminist movement itself. Nevertheless, I wish to maintain that Mulveys psychoanalytic approach has not been fruitful to an understanding of gendered address in traditional cinema.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------Notes 1. By traditional Hollywood film I mean mainstream movies which to a very little extent seek to challenge established norms and underlying societal ideologies. Hollywood film is always produced to reach a large audience, but needs not necessarily be made in Hollywood. The central claim in feminist film criticism is that Hollywood film fails to question dominant patriarchal structures in society. 2. Two other scholars who contributed to the development of psychoanalytic film theory in the midseventies were Christian Metz and Juliet Mitchell. More names could have been mentioned. However, this paper concentrates merely on Mulveys work since she appears to have been the most influential in developing a feminist film criticism based on psychoanalysis. 3. We may also speak of semiotics within psychoanalysis. Indeed, it is difficult to explain Lacanian psychoanalysis without using semiotic terminology. Lacan sees the phallus as the signifier of signifers, the representative of signification and language. Moreover, the phallus signifies distribution of power and possession; a notion which in turn becomes a crucial element in Mulveys use of psychoanalysis. Lacans significance for feminist theory is extensively traced by Elizabeth Grosz (1990).

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------References Byars, J. (1991). All that Hollywood allows. London: The University of North Carolina Press. De Lauretis, T. (1984). Alice doesnt: feminism, semiotics, cinema. London: Macmillan. Citron, M. (1988). Womens film production: going mainstream. In E. D. Pribram (Ed.), Female spectators: looking at film and television (pp. 4563). London: Verso. Enciso, N. (1997). Turning the gaze around and Orlando. World Wide Web: http://domingo.concordia.ca/~mtribe/mtribe95/orlando.html. Gledhill, C. (1988). Pleasurable negotiations. In E. D. Pribram (Ed.), Female spectators: looking at film and television (pp. 6489). London: Verso. Grosz, E. (1990). Jacques Lacan: a feminist introduction. London: Routledge. Man, G. (1993). Gender, genre, and myth in Thelma and Louise. Film Criticism, xviii(1), 3653. Mulvey, L. (1988a). Afterthoughts on Visual pleasure and narrative cinema. In C. Penley (Ed.), Feminism and film theory. New York: Routledge. Mulvey, L. (1988b). Visual pleasure and narrative cinema. In C. Penley (Ed.), Feminism and film theory. New York: Routledge. Mulvey, L. (1989). Visual and other pleasures. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Pribram, E. D. (1988). Introduction. In E. D. Pribram (Ed.), Female spectators: looking at film and television. London: Verso. Rapping, E. (1992). Feminism gets the Hollywood treatment. Cineaste, xviii(4), 3032.

Robertson, P. (1996). Guilty pleasure. Feminist camp from Mae West to Madonna. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Seton, J. (1997). Feminist film theory. World Wide Web: http://www.massey.ac.nz/~NZSRDA/nzssreps/journals/sites/seton13.htm. Sofia, Z. (1989). Masculine excess and the metaphorics of vision: some problems of feminist film theory. Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media & Culture, 2(2). Wright, E. (1992). Feminism and psychoanalysis. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.

Reading Guide to Mulvey on Cinema and Pschoanalysis (NB see the linked critical discussion in the file relating to the Screen 'special' on difference -- here) Three pieces are summarised here, ranging over a decade, and featuring some important changes in persepctive... Mulvey L 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema', Screen, 16, 3, Autumn 1975 NB this piece is collected in several readers as well, including Screen (1992), and Bennett et al (1981) Popular Film and Television, London: BFI Publishing ( in an abridged version). Page numbers for quotes below refer to the version in Thornham, S (ed) Feminist Film Theory: a Reader, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press The particular fascinations of film may be 'reinforced by pre-existing patterns of fascination already at work within the individual subject and the social formations that have moulded him' [sic] (page 58), especially by considering sexual difference. 'psychoanalytic theory... [becomes]... a political weapon, demonstrating the way the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form' (58). Phallocentrism relies upon the image of 'the castrated women [sic]' (58). Woman as lack produces the phallus as symbolic presence. Recent material in Screen has shown how the female form 'speaks castration' (58). Women symbolise the castration threat through the lack of a penis, and raise children so they can enter the symbolic order. Women do not enter the symbolic themselves, (and can have no desires of their own) 'except as a memory ... memory of maternal plenitude and memory of lack' (59). Both of these options are found in nature, or anatomy, as in Freud [a hint of the old biologism here? -- see the file on Screen theory]. Women bear 'the bleeding wound', existing only in relation to castration. When women bear children, these are desires to possess a penis -- the child has submitted to the law of the symbolic order, or '[kept] down with her in the half light of the imaginary' (59). Women thus stand as an Other to males: men live out fantasies and obsessions 'through linguistic command by imposing them' on women (59). This expresses very well the frustrations for women in phallocentric societies. It helps women articulate the problem, and presents them with a major challenge -- how to fight while still caught within the language of patriarchy. Alternatives are unlikely, but patriarchy can be analysed, especially via psychoanalysis. However, even psychoanalysis has not developed very far and actually exploring female sexuality and its relation to the symbolical order.

Despite the emergence of alternative cinemas and new developments in technology, Hollywood still dominates, mainly because of its skill in manipulating verbal pleasure -- 'mainstream film coded the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order' (60). Thus erotic pleasure and the central place of the image of women needs to be analysed. Such analysis deliberately sets out to destroy naive pleasure in watching the narrative fiction film. The past is to be left behind, or transcended, 'in order to conceive a new language of desire'. A major source of pleasure for the viewer is scopophilia -- the pleasure in looking and in being looked at. Freud suggested scopophilia was an important component of sexuality, although he restricted this to childish activities in seeing, especially other people's genitals. Scopophilia can develop into a perversion, obsessive voyeurism, which involves gaining satisfaction from 'watching, in an active controlling sense, an objectified other' (61). Scopophilic pleasure is available in the cinema, since the viewers watch in an enclosed world, where images appear apparently regardless of who is watching. Thus the spectators seem to be looking in on a private world, and can project their desires on to the actors. Conventions of mainstream film also focus on the human body, and 'Scale, space, stories are all anthropomorphic' (61) . This provides the pleasures of recognition. Lacan described the mirror phase as a crucial stage in the development of the ego. The child sees an image in the mirror as a more perfect and idealised version of himself ( as in narcissism) -- hence recognition is combined with a misrecognition, and a mirror image gets taken as an ideal ego, and the basis of models of others. This is an alienating moment, but it also marks an entry into the social symbolic order. It is no coincidence that an image provokes this phase, not the perception of the real object, such as the mother's face. The tension between image and self-image is established too, and this leads directly to film and the processes of recognition in the cinema audience. The film is fascinating enough to 'allow temporary loss of ego while simultaneously reinforcing the ego' (62). The images presented by the film enable a temporary sense of forgetting and also the observation of 'ego ideals as expressed in particular in the star system'. The whole process is 'nostalgically reminiscent of that pre-subjective moment of image recognition' [in Lacan]. Thus we have a contradiction between two kinds of pleasure -- scopophilic and narcissistic. Scopophilic pleasure involves seeing others as objects of sexual stimulation. The second kind of pleasure comes from recognising or identifying with the image, a narcissistic pleasure, to do with the constitution or maintenance of the ego. The subject himself is split in pursuing these two kinds of pleasures -- there is an erotic identity, arising from sexual instincts, and (ego) identification, more to do with ego and their energies. This contradiction is a major aspect of the perception of the subject -- 'the imaginised, eroticised concept of the world' [the Lacanian Imaginary]: this subjective perception 'makes a mockery of empirical objectivity' (62). Cinema offers a particular version of reality which enables these contradictory pleasures to co-exist. However, pleasure is accompanied by threats to the ego -- images of women crystallise this tension. Pleasures in looking have been split between active/male and passive/female. The male gaze is 'determining', and female figures appear in accordance with male fantasies -- they 'connote to-belooked-at-ness'(63) , as in conventional erotic spectacles like strip-tease. In mainstream film, there is both spectacle and narrative, and here, the presence of women can threaten the flow of narrative, by freezing the action in 'moments of erotic contemplation'. This means that women have to be reintegrated into the narrative -- indeed, their role in narrative is almost entirely to make the hero act

in the way he does. An exception here involves the development of the 'buddy movie'-- Mulvey cites Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid -- where the 'active homosexual eroticism of the central male figures can carry the story without distraction' (63) [and without any threat to the conventional sexuality of the male audience?]. Traditionally, though women are erotic objects for the characters and for the spectators, leading to a combination of looks -- sometimes, when women are performing as showgirls, the two looks can be unified, and this is also commonly achieved in conventional narratives. Women performers can add extra pleasure of a sexual nature. However, occasionally, the 'sexual impact of the performing woman [can take] the film into a no-man's-land outside its own time and space', and can destroy perspective, appearing as a 'cut-out or icon' (62). [Examples here are 'Marilyn Monroe's fist appearance in The River of No Return and Lauren Bacall's songs in To Have and Have Not' ( 63)] The split between active and passive stances also dominate conventional narrative. '... the principles of the ruling ideology and the psychical structures that back it up... [mean]... the male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification. Man is reluctant to gaze at his exhibitionist like[ness]' (62). As a result there has to be a split between spectacle and narrative, and men have to be given the active role of forwarding the story [as a kind of excuse, or pretext, or because of the extra demands of patriarchal ideology?]. Men control the 'film fantasy', and also gain power by representing the look of the spectator. This follows because the spectator 'identifies with the main male protagonist' [in an aside, Mulvey acknowledges that there are female main protagonists in films too, pleads lack of space to discuss these, and suggests that these main protagonists are not as strong as they appear -- but see below]. This identification enables the spectator to enjoy the controlling power of the male performer -- the latter becomes the more powerful ideal ego as in the mirror phase. Camera technology, including deep focus, unobtrusive movements and editing [i.e. realist technique] lend support to this idea of male control of a 3-D environment, and the action. Thus one look involves the spectator 'in direct scopophilic contact with the female form', while another enables identification with male performers who are in control of the action and the woman. However, women also signify lack, and thus pose a threat of castration. [ The lack of a penis is again seen as 'visually ascertainable...evidence on which is based the castration complex' (65) -biologism, again]. Thus women as icon also threaten and cause anxiety. Men respond by reenacting the trauma ( via investigation and demystification of women); [les healthy?] by punishing 'or saving' the guilty object ('the concerns of the film noir' ( 65)); by substituting the threat into a fetish, 'so that it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous' (65) ('overvaluation, the cult of the female star'). The first two reactions lead to voyeurism, and asadism, aasserting control and subjugating the guilty person. 'This sadistic side fits in well with narrative. Sadism demands a story...' ( 65), and linear time. Fetishism can go on outside of time, ' focused on the look alone' (65). Only Angels Have Wings, and To Have and Have Not are cited of examples of how narrative delivers the main female character into the hands of the main male protagonist, and thus delivers pleasure to the identifying spectator] Hitchcock and Sternberg also offer examples of variation. Sternberg, in creating images of Dietrich, 'produces the ultimate fetish' (65), almost dispensing with the identification mechanism in order to provide direct scopophilia pleasure for the viewer. There is almost no controlling male gaze, but concentration upon Dietrich directly as an erotic image. There is 'cyclical rather than linear time' (66), as plots revolve around misunderstandings: Dietrich offers maximum erotic meaning 'in the absence of the man she loves in the fiction' (66): the man 'misunderstands and above all does not see' (66).

In Hitchcock, by contrast, the male hero always sees what the audience sees. There are scopophilia moments, 'oscillating between voyeurism and fetishistic fascination', and the male heroes usually lose their respectability ('His heroes are exemplary of the symbolic order and the law'(66)) by succumbing to erotic drives. Sadistic subjection, and voyeuristic gaze are both directed at women, thinly justified by acting in the name of legalised power, or because the woman is classically 'guilty' -- 'evoking castration, psychoanalytically speaking' (66). Viewers are encouraged to identify, through devices like 'liberal use of subjective camera from the point of view of the male protagonist' (66). [A more detailed discussion of Vertigo ensues -- it demonstrates an interesting opinion that the viewer in Hitchcock films can feel uneasy, complicit, 'caught in the moral ambiguity of looking' (67), almost as if the sexual pleasures are too blatant, and too thinly disguised by the apparent morality of the film, its 'shallow mask of ideological correctness']. Thus psychoanalysis is relevant to understanding pleasure and unpleasure in traditional narrative films. The mechanism of looking supplemented by more active forms of male control 'adding a further layer demanded by the ideology of the patriarchal order as it is worked out in its favourite cinematic form -- illusionist narrative film' (68). Psychoanlaytic analysis argue that women can only signify castration, and this threat is countered by 'voyeuristic or fetishistic mechanisms' (68). None of this is intrinsic to film, but film happens to be able to illustrate them perfectly by manipulating the look. Cinema can add the pleasures of looking to narratives about control and these become part of the spectacle too 'producing an illusion cut to the measure of [male] desire' (68). The relation between cinematic codes and 'formative external structures' needs to be understood before this dubious pleasure can be challenged. [It has been assumed so far]. A beginning might involve breaking down the look into three stages -- the camera, the audience, and the characters. Films conceal the effects of the first two, in the interests of achieving 'reality, obviousness and truth' (68). However, the threat of castration connoted by the female image requires constant work if it is not to 'burst through the world of illusion' (68) [and there is the danger of freezing the narrative into fetishism]. In such circumstances, some direct identification by the spectator takes the place of the more narrative based forms of involvement. [I don't think Mulvey is recommending this as a way to break the hold of the narrative, of course, since women would still be fetishised I do think some female stars to have this power to stop narratives -- Marilyn Monroe springs to mind -- but I am not all sure this needs to be fetishistic. When she sings in close-up in Some Like It Hot, we become interested in her not only for her body, but because we see the actress as well as the performer? In other words, this is more like an identification with women performers as well as with men? See Stacey on homosexual identifications as well -- in this file] It becomes important to oppose these conventions, as radical film-makers do -- to make us aware of the look and how it is produced by the camera, and break the detachment of the audience [ see MacCabe on this too]. This may end the conventional pleasures of film, but women in particular should not regard these changes 'with anything much more than sentimental regret'. [NB bell hooks in her account of black women reading film says this sentimental regret is typical of white feminists -- black women never identified so strongly with film narratives, always felt uneasy and unable to locate them selves in them, and soon developed a critical ability to resist the pleasures of the film -see her piece in Thornham).

Mulvey, L 'Afterthoughts on "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" Inspired by King Vidor's Duel in the Sun (1946)' in Thornham, S (1999) (Ed) Feminist Film Theory A Reader, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. NB This essay is published in a number of other places as well. Its original location was the journal Framework, 15-16-17, summer 1981, pp 12 -- 15. Page numbers for quotes refer to this version in Thornham The original essay (see above) focused on the 'masculinisation' of spectators (who might be men or women). It is a matter of identifying points of view, and spectator positions. This essay follows up an interest in melodrama and in the woman spectator in particular: is the female spectator dominated by the text, and how does having a female character central to the narrative affect the analysis? Female spectators may simply dissociate from the masculine pleasures of film. However, they may also identify with the hero and enjoy a certain freedom as a result, and this is the option that will be explored here. Films to be discussed are chosen which show 'a woman central protagonist is shown to be unable to achieve a stable sexual identity, torn between the deep blue sea of passive femininity and the devil of regressive masculinity' (page 122). These dilemmas relate to the dilemmas of the female spectator -- both display and 'oscillation...a sense of the difficulty of sexual difference' (123). Freudian theory will help clarify this again. Freud suggests that femininity is complicated, since both sexes share a masculine phase. There may be a simple process of repression of the masculine tendencies in female sexuality, accompanied by the occasional regression or alternation between masculine and feminine tendencies. Finally, Freud suggests that the libido, the 'motive force of sexual life' serves both masculine and feminine functions and has no sex of its own -- but it happens to be more constrained 'when it is pressed into the service of the feminine function' (Mulvey quoting Freud, her page 124). These conceptions still have problems, such as seeing femininity in terms of masculinity, even as opposition or similarity, but it. describes the shifting process which confronts women as they try to be either active or passive, although the active is increasingly repressed for 'correct' femininity. When female spectators identify with male-oriented films, they 'rediscover that lost aspect of...[their]... sexual identity... [but it is in the form of a]... never fully repressed bedrock of feminine neurosis' (124). Cinema has inherited these traditions from earlier forms of folk and mass culture, which did not rely particularly on cinematic looks [so this is now a much more deep-seated and widespread phenomenon affecting a lot of women's experience, and it helps draw in some other resources for analysis, as we shall soon see]. Freud's work expands this cultural dimension himself, with references to daydreams and stories which 'describe the male fantasy of ambition, reflecting something of an experience and expectation of dominance (the active)' (125). Conventionally, the erotic place of women is to be passive, to wait, to close the narrative. However, Freud's work can be read as supporting habitual 'trans-sex identification' for women, based on their residual masculinity, the ease of logical identification with narratives stressing activity, and their ability to fantasise in an active manner. However, this is still not an easy form of identification for women. We can now begin to analyse films such as the Western. [Having made the connection with wider cultural contexts, Mulvey can begin her analysis by drawing upon some classic 'structuralist ' analysis. She intends to define the Western for her purposes as films which convey best the 'primitive narrative structures analysed by Vladimir Propp in folk tales' (126)]. Westerns offer male fantasies of invulnerability, and women occupy a classically passive function. As with folk tales,

marriage helps close the narrative in the Western, but this time as an option -- the hero can remain alone, in a 'nostalgic celebration of phallic, narcissistic omnipotence' (126). Strictly speaking, this does not fit a classic Oedipal trajectory. The hero is often split between narcissism and social integration. Women are invariably associated with the latter, [adding a gender dimension to the classic dramatic conflicts between good and evil in a folk tale?]. The spectator is also able to fantasise in both directions, rebelling and conforming. An analysis of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance confirms these double pleasures and tensions. There seem to be two heroic protagonists out to defeat the villain, one a symbolic representative of the law, and the other a wilder but more personal representative of 'the good or the right'. The former receives official, symbolic power at the expense of personal submission, while the one possessing 'phallic attributes... has to bow himself of the way of history' (127 ).The straight gets to marry the girl too, it seems, in a classic 'closing social ritual'. Since this ritual is sex-specific, a narrative function is offered for women, in addition to offering visual pleasure when they are looked at. Marriage is an acceptable, symbolic way to signify the erotic. Introducing a woman in a narrative can also shift meanings, as Duel in the Sun indicates. This is also a Western, but it focuses on a woman caught between two conflicting desires, corresponding closely to the oscillation described above between passive femininity and regressive masculinity. This enables a whole new narrative to be opened up -- there is no need to symbolise woman as erotic, 'the female presence at the centre allows the story to be actually, overtly, about sexuality: it becomes a melodrama' (127). Here, the heroine has to decide whether to legitimate the symbolic by marrying the straight. The two main male characters offer the same options as in Liberty Valance, but here they signify different aspects of the heroine ('Pearl'). Pearl can only oscillate between them, however, unable to find passion with the straight or acceptance in the 'world of misogynist machismo'-- she is 'unable to settle or find a "femininity" in which she and the male world can meet' (128). She is still dominated by the male world: it all ends unhappily in mutual death with macho man. The straight guy eventually marries a 'perfect lady... [who]... represents the correct road' (128), so patriarchy and the symbolic triumph in the end. [For my simple 'reading' click here] A very similar plot is found in another Vidor film Stella Dallas. These narratives show shifts in 'Oedipal nostalgia', since none of the personifications can really be seen as parental figures. Instead, 'they represent an internal oscillation of desire, which lies dormant, waiting to be "pleasured" in stories of this kind' (129). Female spectators [might? must? should?] experience a reawakening of a fantasy of activity, normally repressed by correct femininity, but this is only possible through a 'metaphor of masculinity' (129). As such, there is no real way out for femininity -- there is the romance of the rebellious last stand against patriarchy, or a periodic masculinity followed by repression. Pearl also demonstrates the 'sadness' of masculine identification, which is never fully acceptable even by macho men. 'So, too, is the female spectator's fantasy of masculinisation at cross-purposes with itself, restless in its transvestite clothes' (129). Mulvey, L (1985) 'Changes', Discourse, Fall, 1985: pp 11 -- 30. Page numbers here refer to the original.

Gender politics have moved on and something new is required [and something new in academic terms?]. Conservatism in Britain has taken hold, with a new narrative of its own, announcing a new beginning and thus being able to 'catch public popular imagination by clothing complex political and economic factors in binary pairings around an old/new opposition' (11). It seems necessary to revive feminist avant garde struggles, and also approach the wider context, especially 'the interaction between narrative and history, contradiction and myth...' (12). Thatcherite closures of narrative must be resisted, and new thinking undertaken by radicals, rather than just nostalgia. Mulvey examines her own principles first. The original article [above] is 10 years old, and some of its formal aspects might be related to the specifics of the women's movement at that time. Oppositional culture has changed, and the symbolic order might have changed -- psychoanalysis may be less relevant [and Cultural Studies on the ascendant?]. There is an awareness that the notion of difference can be domesticated by representing it as a system of binaries or polar oppositions. In Freud, metaphor plays an important role, and the early ambivalence of psychic drives is disciplined by the Oedipus complex, which organises them around appropriate notions of gender. But the drives themselves were only 'back - named' in gendered terms by Freud, recognising the endpoint, the 'grammar of sex roles in myth, folk tales, cinema, in fact in popular cultural representation in general' (13). In those forms, they get filled out with other binaries --'public/private, nomadic/stable, sun/moon, mind/body, the law/sexuality, creator of culture/close to nature, etc' (13). But there is still a gap between these mythical representations, and lived experience, between domesticated and stable distinctions and 'uncertainty, difficulty and confusion' (13). [Getting to sound pretty gramscian here?] Myths tend to reduce complexity to binaries, as in Levi-Strauss. They can be between or outside these binaries -- they can only be inverted. The early work, using active/passive and masculine/feminine binaries [politically] requires another stage, alternatives which break out of the 'double bind of binarism' (14). The original article was a polemic and challenge. This excitement compensated for the loss of pleasure in viewing conventional films. It might also explain the excesses of the Mulvey films made with Peter Wollen --'a scorched earth policy or return to zero' (14). Wollen drew on Godard [see file] in his attempts to invert the values of conventional cinema, and Mulvey and Wollen did the same [in their film Penthesilia]. [I have not seen this one, but I have seen their Amy, and it looks similar in form -- disruptive camera work, not allowing any female characters to be the subject of a prolonged gaze, breaking the barriers between film and audience, telling the story as episodes rather than as one continuous conventional narrative]. However, such inversions rely on the audience knowing the conventions and dominant codes already, and thus risk being domesticated into a binary again. Their film Riddles of the Sphinx tries to develop a more positive questioning at the symbolic order, by looking at motherhood as it appears in patriarchy [and not as attempting to '[replace] the phallus as signifier with the body of the mother' (14), as some critics have alleged]. The idea was to recapture the excesses of motherhood, beyond that which is described in patriarchy. Patriarchy never completely dominates language. Psychoanalysis can change what can be spoken, and so can feminist and black power resistance movements, as in consciousness raising, bringing

new areas of experience into language. Speaking [out] itself might therefore challenge the symbolic order, even if restricted to a 'discourse of negation' as a starting point (15). Lacanian work has ended in impasse. There is an unfortunate 'retreat into the intricacies of theory', which devalues the activist wing of feminism, but also his concepts have reached a logical limit, as exposed by Stephen Heath [see file for a brief resume of Heath's critique via Merck]. Basically, we need to move from formal binary oppositions between men and their Other, to more concrete and historical specific relationships between men and women. Men have not always had total 'access to symbolisation', for example (16). The attempt to confine femininity to mere Otherness may represent an impossibility in practice, and only raises the question of female desire: however, Lacan's work makes it impossible to enquire any further. Hence there is a 'blocked relation between woman and the symbolic' (16), which Lacan cannot unblock. However, this excess of femininity, stretching beyond the symbolic attempt to confine it, can become 'the site for struggle, confrontation and changing history' (17). Such struggle would refuse to be confined within a binary, and this refusal would clearly weaken the conventional notion of 'masculinity' too. Those who do not have access to symbolisation are seen as 'non-creative'. Feminists can struggle by negating this negation itself, as in avant-garde practice, especially with feminist challenges to male artists' monopoly. However, politics also involves other oppositions, including ones based on racial terms or class terms [well nearly -- Mulvey uses the strange opposition 'peasant/noble in feudal society' -- page 17]. Here too, Others embody in appropriate qualities are, which also 'link the oppressed to nature, and the dominant to culture' (17). After feudalism declines, women come to be the main representatives of nature. Binary oppositions like this appear immediately sensible, acting 'to mean something by themselves' (Mulvey, quoting Barthes' Mythologies, her page 18). For Lacan, there can be no alternative language, but Kristeva argues that there are aspects that cannot be contained by the symbolic -- the semiotic -- that arise in the pre-Oedipal stage, and act as a source of a whole poetics and a 'discourse of otherness' [that is, about the experience of otherness]. Kristeva on the primary bond with the mother helps valorise motherhood too. There may also be a link with colonial revolts drawing upon the old mother goddesses. The Mexican example of such a revolt drew upon a religious tradition that was not incorporated into a binary by the symbolic order, but offered 'fantastic hybrid culture'. Kristeva was impressed by the social upheavals in medieval carnivals (via Bakhtin, apparently). Carnivals inverted the usual binaries, but also celebrated excess, and the comic. Bakhtin's examples are not identical with, but 'reminiscent of women's cultural sphere' (19): feminine cultures can become transgressive, asking their own questions about tradition and history. However, Mitchell suggests that these apparent exceptions to psychological and social order may exist within a tolerance established by the law anyway: somehow, transgression has to try to establish a whole new law of the symbolic. The need is to go beyond metaphor and gesture into language. However, even inversions could have a destabilising effect. What is required to investigate this is a 'tripartite structure... [focusing on]... process rather than mythic image... metonymy rather than metaphor... linked chains of events rather than polar opposition' (21). Propp emphasises the narratives of myth rather than static binaries. The classic narrative has three stages [usually rendered as equilibrium (quiet western town ) - disruption (bandits ride in ) - new

equilibrium (townsfolk quell the disorder and learn about themselves)]. Mulvey has a more formal definition [not sure I know what it adds] , noting that only the first and second stages are static, and adding that 'the second... [stage]... causes the third' (21). The middle section adds drama and pleasure in disrupting the laws of normality, and celebrates transgressive desire. This structure can even be found in the Oedipus story. The social context of the Oedipus story was also a period of social instability and class struggle, which the story also represents symbolically. Social rituals can also be analysed in this way, as participants escape at stage two and are reintegrated at stage three. Rights of passage illustrate this structure, with the initiate occupying a separate 'liminal' state, often embodied by a physical journey across boundaries. Indeed, journeys are often metaphors for social transitions, beginning and ending with a state of being at home. Sexual maturation also follows the structure. Hitchcock films often do as well, as an ordinary hero encounters 'a world turned upside-down' (24). The political point is to ask whether the second, liminal state can resist subsequent reintegration. Analysts of carnivals differ here. In analysing Roman carnivals, Ladurie argued (apparently) that the periods of disorder could be learning experiences, spaces for thinking out progressive political forms. Carnival can also provide a language of resistance (25) [and there is even a link with the work on subcultures as resistance through rituals -- see file on the famous gramscian stuff]. Here too, 'symbols... [can act]... as a primitive language for the oppressed' (27) [the actual example is provided by Cosgrove in a piece in History Workshop Journal -- Mulvey's page 25, and see note 23, page 30 --'for many participants... [spectacular street styles]... were an entry into the language of politics, and inarticulate rejection of the "straight" world and its organisation']. Thus liminal moments can at least supply symbols, and even 'a language that speaks for the oppressed' (26) [albeit a limited and localised one]. Thus symmetry and dualistic opposition, as in the first Mulvey piece, have little political potential, and also block theoretical advance. Binaries were already breaking down, in fact, by reference to the notion of sexual difference and castration -- strictly, castration anxiety provides different experiences of disruption and prohibition for males and females. Now, this non equivalence is seen as 'a mechanism for distributing power' (26): boys merely have to undergo transitions, while girls have to switch genders, or move into 'masquerade and inversion, into politics and desire', which options are never closed or integrated. There is a shared dimension to the unconscious, and this affects both culture and politics. Feminism has politicised psychoanalysis, and this has led to cultural criticism, especially film theory, 'But there is still a missing link or term... [to]... describe the contribution the unconscious makes to the political and social structures we live within' (27). If we see the Oedipal myth as an example of the classic model of the narrative, the middle phase might be a special source of excess and the carnivalesque [Mulvey says this could even help to explain Freud's findings that the Oedipal experience often ends in failure, especially for women]. We're still not in a position to offer a whole alternative symbolic, but there is more space 'on the threshold, the liminal area between silence and speech, the terrain in which desire merely finds expression' (28). There are different possibilities of carnival as a model here as we have seen. However, it is admitted that 'the liminal phase is closely linked with closure' (28), and this produces symptoms [of repression?] which appear 'most clearly in popular culture, whether folk tale, carnival or the movies' (28).

Finally, cinema is primarily a narrative form. The challenge is to try to develop an ending that is not a closure, to express the state of liminality as an instrument for 'maintaining heterogeneity within the symbolic, and subjecting myths and symbols to perpetual re-evaluation' (28). It can at least provide images 'which simultaneously express collective desires and impose coherence on the infinitely numerous and infinitely varied data of experiences' (Mulvey quoting Nash Smith, her page 28). Feminists especially 'should insist on the need to prolong the middle phase, that so easily becomes masked or telescoped behind binary opposition, the point of disruption and contradiction, the point at which politics can be inserted into both cultural and psycho-analytic terrains' (28). [I think Mulvey heard the siren call of British activism and its critiques of Screen theory -- see file - in writing this piece as well as the specific demands of feminist activists and those tired of the theoreticism of Lacan. The piece also marks the emergence of a new successful academic division of labour -- 'Cultural Studies' -- to replace or contain Film Studies per se? That would have been very helpful for those seeking to widen out from film into other more popular aspects of culture, essential to close the gap between Hollywood and patriarchy in general, as is foreshadowed in the second piece above?]

Notes on 'The Gaze' Daniel Chandler Laura Mulvey on film spectatorship Whilst these notes are concerned more generally with the gaze in the mass media, the term originates in film theory and a brief discussion of its use in film theory is appropriate here. As Jonathan Schroeder notes, 'Film has been called an instrument of the male gaze, producing representations of women, the good life, and sexual fantasy from a male point of view' (Schroeder 1998, 208). The concept derives from a seminal article called Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema by Laura Mulvey, a feminist film theorist. It was published in 1975 and is one of the most widely cited and anthologized (though certainly not one of the most accessible) articles in the whole of contemporary film theory. Laura Mulvey did not undertake empirical studies of actual filmgoers, but declared her intention to make political use of Freudian psychoanalytic theory (in a version influenced by Jacques Lacan) in a study of cinematic spectatorship. Such psychoanalytically-inspired studies of 'spectatorship' focus on how 'subject positions' are constructed by media texts rather than investigating the viewing practices of individuals in specific social contexts. Mulvey notes that Freud had referred to (infantile) scopophilia - the pleasure involved in looking at other peoples bodies as (particularly, erotic) objects. In the darkness of the cinema auditorium it is notable that one may look without being seen either by those on screen by other members of the audience. Mulvey argues that various features of cinema viewing conditions facilitate for the viewer both the voyeuristic process of objectification of female characters and also the narcissistic process of identification with an ideal ego seen on the screen. She declares that in patriarchal society pleasure in looking has been split

between active/male and passive/female (Mulvey 1992, 27). This is reflected in the dominant forms of cinema. Conventional narrative films in the classical Hollywood tradition not only typically focus on a male protagonist in the narrative but also assume a male spectator. As the spectator identifies with the main male protagonist, he projects his look onto 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, both giving a satisfying sense of omnipotence (ibid., 28). Traditional films present men as active, controlling subjects and treat women as passive objects of desire for men in both the story and in the audience, and do not allow women to be desiring sexual subjects in their own right. Such films objectify women in relation to the controlling male gaze (ibid., 33), presenting woman as image (or spectacle) and man as bearer of the look (ibid., 27). Men do the looking; women are there to be looked at. The cinematic codes of popular films are obsessively subordinated to the neurotic needs of the male ego (ibid., 33). It was Mulvey who coined the term 'the male gaze'. Mulvey distinguishes between two modes of looking for the film spectator: voyeuristic and fetishistic, which she presents in Freudian terms as responses to male castration anxiety. Voyeuristic looking involves a controlling gaze and Mulvey argues that this has has associations with sadism: pleasure lies in ascertaining guilt - asserting control and subjecting the guilty person through punishment or forgiveness (Mulvey 1992, 29). Fetishistic looking, in contrast, involves the substitution of a fetish object or turning the represented figure itself into a fetish so that it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous. This builds up the physical beauty of the object, transforming it into something satisfying in itself. The erotic instinct is focused on the look alone. Fetishistic looking, she suggests, leads to overvaluation of the female image and to the cult of the female movie star. Mulvey argues that the film spectator oscillates between these two forms of looking (ibid.; see also Neale 1992, 283ff; Ellis 1982, 45ff; Macdonald 1995, 26ff; Lapsley & Westlake 1988, 77-9). This article generated considerable controversy amongst film theorists. Many objected to the fixity of the alignment of passivity with femininity and activity with masculinity and to a failure to account for the female spectator. A key objection underlying many critical responses has been that Mulvey's argument in this paper was (or seemed to be) essentialist: that is, it tended to treat both spectatorship and maleness as homogeneous essences - as if there were only one kind of spectator (male) and one kind of masculinity (heterosexual). E Ann Kaplan (1983) asked Is the gaze male?. Both Kaplan and Kaja Silverman (1980) argued that the gaze could be adopted by both male and female subjects: the male is not always the controlling subject nor is the female always the passive object. We can read against the grain. Teresa de Lauretis (1984) argued that the female spectator does not simply adopt a masculine reading position but is always involved in a doubleidentification with both the passive and active subject positions. Jackie Stacey asks: Do women necessarily take up a feminine and men a masculine spectator position? (Stacey 1992, 245). Indeed, are there only unitary masculine or feminine reading positions? What of gay spectators? Steve Neale (1983) identifies the gaze of mainstream cinema in the Hollywood tradition as not only male but also heterosexual. He observes a voyeuristic and fetishistic gaze directed by some male characters at other male characters within the text (Stacey notes the erotic exchange of looks between women within certain texts). A useful account of 'queer viewing' is given by Caroline Evans and Lorraine Gamman (1995). Neale argues that in a heterosexual and patriarchal society the male body cannot be marked explictly as the erotic object of another male look: that look must be motivated, its erotic component repressed (Neale 1992, 281). Both Neale and Richard Dyer (1982) also challenged the idea that the male is never sexually objectified in mainstream cinema

and argued that the male is not always the looker in control of the gaze. It is widely noted that since the 1980s there has been an increasing display and sexualisation of the male body in mainstream cinema and television and in advertising (Moore 1987, Evans & Gamman 1995, Mort 1996, Edwards 1997). Gender is not the only important factor in determining what Jane Gaines calls 'looking relations' race and class are also key factors (Lutz & Collins 1994, 365; Gaines 1988; de Lauretis 1987; Tagg 1988; Traube 1992). Ethnicity was found to be a key factor in differentiating amongst different groups of women viewers in a study of Women Viewing Violence (Schlesinger et al. 1992). Michel Foucault, who linked knowledge with power, related the 'inspecting gaze' to power rather than to gender in his discussion of surveillance (Foucault 1977).

The Eyes of Laura Mulvey: Subjects, Objects and Cinematic Pleasures Matthew Henry The universalization of subjectivity as maleness is without a doubt, and justifiably, the primary target of feminist theory and criticism. --D.N. Rodowick, 1991 The question of how film plays both to and upon socially established systems of desire, fantasy, and fear received one of its most significant treatments in Laura Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Originally published in 1975, this essay has become one of the most important and influential in contemporary film studies and feminist theory. Mulvey's objective in the essay is clear: she wishes to place questions of sexual difference at the center of the debate surrounding the application of psychoanalysis to film studies. Mulvey is concerned with exploring, through psychoanalysis, the representation of woman as image in film and the concomitant "masculinization" of the spectator position. Her objective here is also quite polemical, as noted by Mulvey herself in the introduction: "Psychoanalytic theory is ... appropriated here as a political weapon, demonstrating the way in which the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form" (14). Mulvey begins from the premise that mainstream Hollywood cinema both reflects and reveals the psychological obsessions of the society that produces it. In arguing this, she draws heavily upon both Freudian and Lacanian forms of psychoanalysis. According to Mulvey, mainstream Hollywood film "coded the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order" (16). Mulvey implies that this coding is, in essence, the establishment of the "male gaze." Narrowly construed, the male gaze refers to the act of looking upon women as objects, of adopting the role of spectator; but metaphorically, it refers to a way of thinking about and acting within society (Devereaux 337). "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," and much of Mulvey's early work, organizes around questions of spectatorial identification and its relationship to the male gaze. In exploring these questions, she targets and examines the codes and mechanisms through which classic Hollywood cinema has traditionally exhibited sexual difference as a function of its narrative and representational forms. Mulvey also seeks to explore what effects these codes and mechanisms might have on spectators as sexed individuals and what their role might be within the general ideological structure of patriarchal culture. However, her project is not one of simply identifying and condemning "sexist" representations of women on the screen: she is less concerned with textual

analyses than with "the definition of structures of identification and the mechanisms of pleasure and unpleasure that accompany them" (Rodowick 5). In a section of "Visual Pleasure" entitled "Woman as Image, Man as Bearer of the Look," Mulvey succinctly states her organizing principle: "In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female" (19). Drawing upon terms found in Freud's "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes," Mulvey establishes a binary relationship between subject (spectator/protagonist) and object (narrative film/image) in which the subject is associated with the active/male position and the object with the passive/female position. Such an analysis of sexual difference is revealing and quite in keeping with Mulvey's feminist critique of patriarchal structures: since sexual differences in film function to produce pleasure, and this pleasure is produced for someone, whom Mulvey identifies as the male, then this production sustains a situation in which relations of social imbalance are maintained, both in the filmic representation and in the "real" world outside the film (Rodowick 6). Mulvey argues that the subject and object positions cited above are the product of point-of-view mechanisms in Hollywood cinema. Point-of-view mechanisms--such as the shot/counter-shot and the lingering close-up--function to reconfirm and reproduce set positions, both within and without the film, by avoiding avenues of unpleasure and seeking avenues of pleasure. For Mulvey, there are a number of possibilities for pleasure in the cinema, but she focuses primarily on only two, which divide for her quite neatly along gender lines. The first is what Freud called "scopophilia," or the pleasure of looking at another person as an object. Mulvey argues that this is an active practice, and she describes it in largely Freudian terms: "the position of the spectator in the cinema is blatantly one of repression of their exhibitionism and projection of the repressed desire onto the [female] performer" (17). The second pleasure Mulvey defines is that of narcissism, which for her is essentially passive and developed through identification with the object/image on the screen. Thus it is that scopophilia is inscribed as male (active) and narcissism as female (passive). The spectator's gaze is then male in two senses: from without, in its direction at women as objects of erotic desire, and from within, in its identification with the male protagonist. For Mulvey, ultimately, "the meaning of woman in the cinema is sexual difference" (21), and her lack of a penis invariably connotes the threat of male castration. According to Mulvey, there are two avenues of escape for the spectatorial male unconscious: the demystification of the woman through devaluation or punishment, or the complete disavowal of castration through the substitution of a phallic fetish object (21). The only escape allowed for the female in Mulvey's schema is through an avant-garde form of film that breaks completely with the Hollywood traditions. In the introduction to Visual and Other Pleasures, Mulvey speaks to this in reminiscing upon her active involvement with the Women's Movement during the 1970s and the origins of "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema": she argues here for the need of film makers who could and would "forge an alliance between the radical tradition of the avant-garde and the feminist politicisation of images and representation" (ix). This alternative was realized, and thus provided space for the female as subject, by Mulvey herself: she has, over the intervening years, co-directed a number of independently produced "feminist" films. The major critique lodged against Mulvey since the publication of "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" is that she focuses only on the experience of a male spectator. While discussing at length the forms of male desire and identification, built on voyeuristic fantasies of the female body, Mulvey largely ignores speculating on the possibility of female desire, identification and

spectatorship. According to the analysis provided in "Visual Pleasure," the filmic gaze, in terms of both gender representation and gender address, belongs exclusively to the male, to the patriarchy; this leaves the female spectator with little agency: she must either identify with the male as subject or with the female as object/image. If she does the former, the female spectator aligns herself with what Mulvey explicitly defines as voyeurism; if the latter, she aligns herself with narcissism and, implicitly, masochism. Mulvey's rigidly gendered approach to cinematic pleasure has also been criticized for being taken as axiomatic by feminists and film theorists. Kaja Silverman, writing in 1984, emphasizes just how firmly the suppositions of a monolithic construction of sexual difference had taken hold less than a decade after the appearance of Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure": It is by now axiomatic that the female subject is the object rather than the subject of the gaze in mainstream narrative cinema ... It is equally axiomatic that the female subject as she has been constructed by the Hollywood cinema is denied any active role in the discourse (131-32). Since examples of such objectification were abundant, many feminists took Mulvey's observations as truisms regarding not only patriarchal Hollywood cinema but patriarchal American society itself. Thus the ingrained belief that spectatorial relationships were strictly binary oppositions. Mulvey attempts to redress the perceived errors of "Visual Pleasure" in the essay "Afterthoughts on 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' Inspired by King Vidor's Duel in the Sun" (1981). In this essay, Mulvey acknowledges the binary nature of her work in "Visual Pleasure" and concedes that her exclusive focus on male spectatorship closed off avenues of inquiry pertaining to questions about "the women in the audience" (29). Nevertheless, Mulvey's tack here is not to refute her earlier proposition--she says more than once that she "stands by" what she has already said--but to refine it in light of her viewing of Duel in the Sun, a film that purports to have a "female hero." In reading this film, Mulvey asserts ... the emotions of those women accepting "masculinization" while watching action movies with a male hero are illuminated by the emotions of a heroine of a melodrama whose resistance to a "correct" feminine position is the critical issue at stake (30). While conceding that this dual context offers a "sense of the difficulty of sexual difference in cinema that is missing in the undifferentiated spectator of 'Visual Pleasure,'" Mulvey maintains that the heroine of traditional cinema is unable to achieve a stable sexual identity and that her oscillation between masculine and feminine positions is "echoed by the woman spectator's masculine point of view" (30). In short, the female spectator still has to adopt the male perspective, though this now derives from the "grammar" of the film narrative and traditions which make trans-sex identification habitual and "second nature" (32-33). This sentiment is also echoed in the more recent work of scholars sympathetic to Mulvey's early claims. Mary Devereaux, for example, distinguishes between sex, which she says is physical, and gender, which she sees as social, and concludes that "the male gaze is not always male, but it is always male dominated" (339). This may be the case, but it then begs the question: is there a female gaze? And if so, what mechanisms structure it? Though theories of the female gaze were offered shortly after the publication of Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure"--Mary Ann Doane's influential essay on this topic appeared in 1982--they remain rare and

run into difficulties of conceptualization. One of the key problems is the basis of theories of desire and spectatorship in Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Recently, numerous critics have spoken to this problem. D.N. Rodowick, for example, calls the work of Freud into question by asking whether it can conceive of a position for femaleness outside the paradigm that universalizes subjectivity as male (19). Similarly, Jackie Byars critiques the work of Lacan for positing sexual identity as produced by language and, thereby, constructing woman as not man, as the Other (112). Byars also argues that feminist theorists mistakenly focused, al Mulvey, on an avant-garde film making for evidence of female power instead of on Hollywood film and network television, which had been dismissed as patriarchal (111). Byars asserts that female power exists within these forms, and to demonstrate this, she focuses on moments of the mutual gaze in two specific examples: the film Coma and the television show Cagney and Lacey. I think Byars makes a cogent argument for a reassessment of traditional film and television, but her thesis still contains a significant problem, one inherent in Mulvey's work and one that has only recently been given serious attention: the assumption of a singular male and/or female spectatorial experience. This issue is clearly addressed by Deidre Pribram in the introduction to her book Female Spectators: Looking at Film and Television. Pribram states that while both Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic practices have succeeded in recognizing gender as a primary factor in subject formation and social division, they have failed to address the formation and operation of other variables, such as age, class, and race (2). D.N. Rodowick echoes Pribram's ideas: he declares that the phallocentric and patriarchal model of the ideological function of classic cinema is totalizing, hegemonic, and allows no room for "historical variability." The variabilities he notes are the same as those identified by Pribram with the addition of one other: sexual orientation. Rodowick thus critiques Mulvey's original binary schema as follows: "neither a historical experience of race, class, nationality, nor deviant sexuality ... will alter an experience of texts that only the sexed body can identify" (44). Though Mulvey does address the concept of the female spectator in "Afterthoughts," her argument remains flawed by its acceptance of the female experience, of the singular shared response. Implicit in her essay is the idea that the experience of a white, middleclass, heterosexual, American woman represents the experience of all women. In similar fashion, Rodowick also criticizes early notions of the female spectator, such as those developed by Mary Ann Doane: What one gains by positing the singular specificity of "feminine" experience is achieved only at the cost of glossing over the variegate possibilities of hetero- and homosexual identities and pleasures, not to mention the multiple dimensions of subjectivity defined by class, race, and nationality (45). Obviously there is much concern in recent film theory with defining and redefining the female spectator in terms of variables such as age, race, and class. Mulvey is, as we have seen, guilty of the "glossing over" that Rodowick speaks of, and she has thus been roundly criticized for it. But it seems to me that this last issue raised by Rodowick--the issue of sexual orientation or preference--is of great significance to the concept of spectatorship in general and in need of further exploration. This exploration would begin with a redefinition of the role of the male spectator. In "Visual Pleasure," Mulvey hints at the issue of male homoerotic pleasure but dismisses it, arguing that "man is reluctant to gaze at his exhibitionist like" (20). This, of course, stands as a corollary to Mulvey's comments on female spectators: it too assumes that one man views for all men, and it blatantly disregards the issues of sexual preference raised by Rodowick. Moreover, Mulvey's insistence upon the heterosexual male gaze denies the possible functioning of man as erotic object. This, like Mulvey's insistence that the female spectator is forced to accept some uniform "male" position, is unnecessarily limiting. It seems to me, then, that what is needed is a theory of spectatorship that will

simultaneously examine both the male and the female experience, not one in the absence of the other; a theory that will add to its assessment of viewing pleasure and unpleasure, in terms both male and female, the influence of variables such as age, race, class, and--perhaps most importantly, since it has been so greatly lacking--sexual orientation. Works Consulted Byars, Jackie. "Gazes/Voices/Power: Expanding Psychoanalysis for Feminist Film and Television Theory." In Pribram 110-29. Devereaux, Mary. "Oppressive Texts, Resisting Readers and the Gendered Spectator: The New Aesthetics." Journal of Art and Art Criticism 48.4 (1990): 337-47. Doane, Mary Ann. "Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator." Screen 23.3/4 (1982): 74-85. Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Screen 16.3 (1975): 6-18. Rpt. in Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989. 14-27. ---. "Afterthoughts on 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' Inspired by King Vidor's Duel in the Sun." Framework 15/16/17 (1981). Rpt. in Visual and Other Pleasures. 29-38. Pribram, E. Deidre. Female Spectators: Looking at Film and Television. London: Verso, 1988. Putnam, Ann. "The Bearer of the Gaze in Ridley Scott's Thelma and Louise" Western American Literature 27.4 (1993): 291-302. Rodowick, D.N. The Difficulty of Difference: Psychoanalysis, Sexual Difference & Film Theory. New York: Routledge, 1991. Silverman, Kaja. "Dis-embodying the Female Voice." Re-vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism. Eds. Mary Ann Doane, et. al. Frederick, Maryland: University Publications of America, 1984. 13149.