Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema
Visual Pleasure & Narrative Cinema - Laura Melvey (1975)
http://www.composingdigitalmedia.org/f15_mca/mca_reads/mulvey.pdf
Begins with assertion that woman’s lack of a penis is what makes male possession of one important - definition through differentiation/meaning made by comparison. Because men dominate industries of representation (visual/performing/media arts), women are then used as a vehicle for men to make meaning, rather than as agents for women’s own meanings (Mulvey: “bearer or meaning, not maker of meaning.”).
Looking is pleasurable. Freud called it scopophilia and identified it as an instinct related to sexuality. Inverse is also true - being looked at can be pleasurable.
While watching cinema, viewer is both a watcher and the watched in that they identify with the characters and engage vicariously, like a daydream or fantasy.
Looking is split: active (male) and passive (female). Looker and Looked-at. Female-characters rarely have agency enough to be the lookers.
The use of women as erotic looking objects is justified in film via the male hero: they move through the world of the film so that we can see the world (and women) of the film. The male acts as a “screen surrogate” for the male viewer -> the fantasy/daydream of power and control over the female objects in the film.
The women in the film still represent a threat. Their lack of penises remind the viewer that it’s possible not to have one (castration), and so the women must be neutralized somehow. Two ways:
1) Fetishize and thereby remove threat (Mulvey: hence the “cult of the female star”) or...
2) ascertain guilt, assert control over the guilty, and pass judgment (punish or forgive).
WORSHIP or PUNISH. Brings to mind Elliot Roger’s 2014 shooting spree which was kicked off with a video diatribe about women refusing to have sex with him and a written “manifesto” that included a planned “Day of Retribution” and “War on Women.”
Cinema is itself the gaze: “It is the place of the look that defines cinema, the possibility of varying it and exposing it.” This is what makes cinema unique from drama, stage shows, strip tease, etc. It directs/controls/comprises the gaze.
Generally useful conception of cinema: three different “looks:” 1) camera, 2) audience, and 3) the characters. Conventional cinema tries to deny the first two and create the illusion of objectivity.
Inverted order of THIRDNESS: the event, the recording, and the reception. Mulvey: “without these two absences (the material existence of the recording process, the critical reading of the spectator), fictional drama cannot achieve reality, obviousness, and truth.”
“The camera’s look is disavowed in order to create a convincing world in which the spectator’s surrogate can perform with verisimilitude.” Classical cinema denies that an image is manufactured and that an audience has an active participation.