Film and Television Analysis by Benshoff Harry;

Author:Benshoff, Harry; [Harry M. Benshoff]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781136473845
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

Laura Mulvey: Psychoanalysis, apparatus theory, and gender

One of the most important feminist interventions in film studies occurred in 1975, when Laura Mulvey published her landmark essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” within the pages of Screen magazine. While much feminist media scholarship up to that time (like Molly Haskell's) had been focused on the content of Hollywood films (and to a lesser extent the content of European art cinema), Mulvey's essay focused on the patriarchal nature of Hollywood form itself. Mulvey's essay shifted the scholarly discussion away from how Hollywood films represented gender, by arguing that Hollywood form itself can be thought of as gendered, and more precisely gendered male. Drawing on then-prevalent theories of the cinematic apparatus (see Chapter 7), including its use of psychoanalysis to theorize the pleasures of looking (scopophilia) and the construction of the cinematic spectator, Mulvey persuasively argued that Hollywood form was designed to speak to and/or appease the male unconscious. She examined the different pleasurable looks that Hollywood cinema affords its spectators, and concluded that they were all male. For example, Mulvey argued that the narcissistic gaze encourages the spectator to identify with the central male character on screen. The voyeuristic gaze, which looks at human bodies on screen in an erotic or libidinal way, is also male, since it is the female body that is usually objectified or put on sexualized display for the male (character, camera, and audience member). As Mulvey puts it,

As the spectator identifies with the main male protagonist, he projects his look on to 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 if omnipotence.

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