Laura Mulvey ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ 1975
An interest in the history of the celluloid Mulvey looks at the “established interpretation of sexual difference which controls image” (1) on how the unconscious patriarchal society has influenced cinema formalities. Phallocentrism has led women to rest in this ugly/other state, only due their difference to men. Much like Mark Cousin’s essay on ‘The Ugly’ which categorises the outsiders as something with a mistake. Women are without a penis. Thus, women only exist as a carrier of male fantasies. We are the “bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning”.
With this, the cinema is dominated through ways of looking at women and the spectacle of women, through patriotic eyes.
With shifts in the glorification of cinema as a Hollywood spectacle, and it’s translation into artisanal construction, the pleasure of looking was destructed. Cinema was no longer this monolithic spectacle based on capital game. It became an art form.
Mulvey’s article sets out to analyse beauty through cinema in a way which detracts in from its detonated meaning and pulls it down into the world of the ugly.
Cinema provides a means of accessible scopophilia. There is pleasure in looking, and pleasure in being looked at. The ease cinema provides gives permission for this invasive, sick act to be activated. This has taken people and put them into an objectified position under a “controlling and curious gaze”. The position of the viewer is of repression, where their thoughts (constructed by a society) are projected onto the performer, thus allowing a voyeristic moment through the cinema based on the illusion of looking into a private world. And much like viewing yourself in the mirror, we attach ourselves to the personas in the monitor as a means of understanding this anthropomorphic story. Again, like looking in the mirror, what we see is a is recognition as it is overlaid with a more perfected view, or under perfected view, rather than a realistic recognition. But is this truly possible?
This connects directly to Warhol’s discussion around photography being a framing of the most perfected image of ourselves, or this moment of ourselves much like Sherman’s various characters, rather than us in an actualised time and space relating to people around us.
This becomes the genesis of self-awareness. Cinema has provided an escapism into deconstructing the representation of the human, simultaneously breaking down the ego and building it up again. Mulvey is explaining that the personas in film let us be them and forget who we are, while in reverse they inject into our subconscious what we discovered through these characters. We are all made up of fragments of other characters.
So, cinema has provided this scopohillic narcissistic matrix where we experience an unavoidable sense of pleasure and self identification.
“pleasure in form, can be threatening by content” (4) because we take this larger than us idea and insist it play a role in this reality, but these two dimensions of time and space do not merge. Like oil in water. And much like the ugly, we feel as if we’re mistakes, or incomplete, because we’re not living up to this bigger idea.
