Laura Mulvey and the Contradictory Structure of Looking in Narrative Fiction

By Gabrielle Guz

(Written in November 2020 for my Film and Media Theory class at Columbia University.)

Something that is anxiety-inducing for the vast majority of the world’s population, if not its entirety, is that the notion of “being yourself” is unrealistic. Those who believe that “being yourself” is wholly fruitful are blameless, for they are the byproducts of generations of media that promulgate a kind of “kudos” to those who take advantage of their supposed “self-absorption” to an extreme point where they become ego-centrists, who grow anxious only about losing their dominance in the social sphere. Laura Mulvey, in her seminal and highly anthologized essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” goes along a similar logic, except that she more specifically repudiates male spectators and their pro-filmic surrogates. She argues that, in some paradoxical way, the “male gaze” not only maintains the patriarchal structure in Hollywood-cinema, which makes women the signifiers of male’s “phantasies” but also, in a contradictory fashion, helps men to escape their fear of emasculation (719). Women’s “castration anxiety-inducing” image undermines men’s “indomitable masculinity.” Thus, Mulvey’s claim implies that by focusing on the pleasure of fetishistic scopophilia (libido) and voyeuristic identification (ego-oriented), men repress the danger that the female image poses to men’s supposed “dominance.”

Mulvey’s reference to “castration anxiety” cannot go without further specification of its grounding in a psychological premise. Not only is phallocentrism, paired with castration anxiety, paradoxical, but so is the fact that a male neurologist, the infamous “father of psychoanalysis” Sigmund Freud, attested to those concepts in his Three Essays on Sexuality and Instincts and their Vicissitudes. According to Freud’s former work, boys, during their phallic stage of psychosexual development, realize the anatomical differences between females and males and soon grow fearful that because they desire, through the Oedipal complex, their mothers’ attention, their genitalia will be removed. That traumatic childhood confusion as to how and why the female “looks” castrated apparently stays with males for a lifetime. The fear, however, does not remain solely physical and psychological, but also deeply metaphorical in the sense that men become prideful and triggered even by trivial signs of something offending their “dominance.” In his latter work, Freud confirms that boys’ primal instinct to be voyeurs of the “castrated” female is modified by narcissistic ego. That, in turn, derives from another psychoanalyst’s, Jacques Lacan’s, theory, in the “Mirror Stage,” that when a male infans first sees his specular image, he assumes “power in the mirage” because he mis-recognizes himself as more potently constituted than he really is (Lacan, 76). Insofar as to escape the sense of dooming loss of their “phantasy,” men in the patriarchy of the classic Hollywood era, who were in charge of the capitalist ways of the industry in the 1930’s, 40’s, and 50’s, managed to construct methods of “seeing” female representations onscreen. Just as Lacan points out that one’s imago isn’t equivalent to one’s less constituted reality, the transference of the “male gaze” in cinema onto the female’s “to-be-looked-at-ness” is also a kind of mirage that feeds men’s confirmation biases of their “dominant” gender.

Considering that Mulvey wrote her essay in 1975, she concedes that the technologies of her times allowed for a more artisanal approach to forming representations onscreen. Avant-garde feminist filmmakers, contemporaneous to her, could have utilized camera functions, spearheaded narrative subversions through experimental, non-linear structures, to their own favor. But, it is still traditional-Hollywood cinema that remains commercial and far-reaching. Its patriarchal history, regardless of progress, cannot be cast aside without examination. As innocuous as Mulvey’s argument might seem, so is the deceiving idea that cinema is “remote from the undercover world of the surreptitious observation” (717). The original act of movie-screening is, in fact, manipulative. Instead of honing a sense of distanciation and objectivity onto spectators’ consciousnesses, the screen becomes a “window” or “mirror” of sorts. Isolated in the darkness of the auditorium, the viewers are almost hypnotized by their obsession with the anthropomorphic nature of the space, scale, and characters on-screen. Camera technology maintains that hypnosis through deep focus, seamless transitions without stylized montage, and point-of-view shots.

While the former features give spectators the illusion that they, not the filmmakers, are the interpreters of the spatio-temporal cinematic space, the latter feature places them in the shoes of the male hero who “commands the stage” (720). Mulvey points out that Josef Von Sternberg and his approach to actress Marlene Dietrich throughout their five-year collaboration is an example of his control over spectators to escape his own “castration anxiety.” The method that he utilizes is fetishistic scopophilia, which has an instinctual drive towards sexual desire for the object on-screen, and it focuses on one-dimensional close-ups of the female image so as to misremember the formal, three-dimensional “lack” for which she stands. For instance, in Dietrich’s first Paramount movie, “Morocco” (1930), Sternberg creates for her a persona by underscoring her best physical aspects. Through high lighting, her cheeks become lower. Her famous sultry expressions and thin brows also became objects of “male gazes.” There is a 1992 documentary, “Visions of Light,” that expounds further about the Dietrich phenomenon and passes on the notion that, essentially, she became the “story” of many Sternberg films. The close-ups of Dietrich’s body parts — her legs, her face — recurs so often in his films that she is also sexualized when she doesn’t mean to elicit eroticism in a strictly hetereosexual audience. In one “Morocco” scene, Dietrich supposedly exposes her bisexuality when, wearing a tailcoat and singing, she kisses a woman. It’s ironic how no matter her actual evocations of androgyny and her self-aware willingness for independence from sexualized “feminine mystique,” she is best associated with those aforementioned sensual characteristics that Von Sternberg assigned to her. Curiously, too, Sternberg’s films hardly ever contained a “mediation through the eyes of the main male protagonist” (Mulvey, 722). It’s almost as though the male protagonist would be vulnerable to anxiety about his erroneous “perfect” imago if he were more diegetically active in the presence of someone like Dietrich, who was eager to possess a sense of “control” over her own image and sexuality no matter how passively she was represented. In other words, Sternberg’s focus on misunderstanding rather than conflict between the males and females in his films was meant as a protective shield over men’s anxieties in the presence of strong women, like Dietrich.

Alfred Hitchcock’s films, according to Mulvey, are not only focused on male heroes as erotic contemplators but also as voyeurs who, in order to soothe their “castration anxieties,” subject their female “objects” to either sadistic punishment or forgiveness. In other words, whether or not the male hero decides to punish or forgive, the spectators are meant to identify with him from the onset through point-of-view shots and the “spying” nature of the camera. The most solid example of that is in Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1953), in which a photographer named Jefferies is confined to his wheelchair after breaking his leg and out of boredom, stares into his neighbors’ apartments across the street. Most of those neighbors are women — one who is struggling with loneliness, another who is sick, another who is newlywed, and yet another who is a dancer, and so on. However, as Mulvey mentions, the main object of Jeffries’s gaze is his wife Lisa, for whom he does not have as much sexual appeal as before until she becomes a “guilty intruder,” who stands between him and his window (723). Perhaps in order to repress his anxiety about her evoking omnipotence and unintentionally undermining him, his voyeurism becomes scopophilic. He desires her sexually so as not to feel further degraded; instead of feeling intimidated, he can take pride in his sexual arousement. Considering that movie-viewing is a phenomenon that oscillates between spectators’ ego-libidos, they unconsciously fall back into their mirror phase, where the projected image of the main protagonist onscreen is their ego ideal. Almost on auto-pilot, they accept it, trust it, and follow it. Jefferies, for the spectators, becomes their ego ideal; no matter how flawed he is, they trust his “gaze” and judgement to lead the narrative in Rear Window primarily because the camera work endorses his perspective as “dominant” and his desires, his framework, his image as more constituted. Coincidentally, too, the fact that Jefferies finds himself stuck in his wheelchair, it’s easier for the spectators to identify with him as a voyeur. His situation, his dependence on outside goings-on as entertainment (like spectators’ dependence on screens) and his eventual increase in sexuality towards his wife (his seemingly “harmless” desires) make him relatable. The spectators are not necessarily aware that Hitchcock is manipulating them because they are so immersed in their ego-ideal, but their lack of self-awareness is partly what makes his method work and, also, what has made it so easy since cinema’s birth to forgive the demeaning “male gaze.”

Mulvey’s renowned claims on the contradiction of the male’s “look” upon the female involves a phenomenological experience that transcends the screen. What encapsulates her argument is the following: the contradiction of the “look” really “prevents him from achieving any distance from the image in front of him” (Mulvey, 724). Whether a male filmmaker takes on the fetishistic scopophilia or the voyeuristic-identification strategy, the ability to trick the spectators into siding with the patriarchal perspective is a means to evade the real psychology behind men’s supposed “dominance.” There’s no “dominance” precisely, but a fear of the loss of false “dominance” that’s triggered by the “castrated” female image. The desire to be fully masculine and domineering is non-existent; instead, it’s actually escapist. It’s an imagined ideal.

Works Cited Page

1. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen, Volume 16, Issue 3, Autumn 1975. https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/16.3.6 Published: 01 October 1975

2. LACAN, JACQUES. 1949. Pp. 1-3 and 172-175 in Ecrits: A Selection. New York: Taylor and Francis, 1977.