Mulvey, Laura. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Film Theory and criticism Introductory Readings. Eds. Leo braudy and marshall Cohen New york: Oxford UP 1999:833-44
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Film Theory and Criticism : Introductory Readings. Eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. New York: Oxford UP, 1999: 833-44
FlLM: PSYCHOLOGY, SOCIETY, AND IDEOLOGY it,"must aim radically towards a kind of distraction which exposes disintegration rather than masking it. "36 As Hansen has indicated, Benjamins analysis of she has a fundamental ambivalence, moulded certainly by the impoverishment of ex- perience in modern life, but afso capable of assuming"a strategic sigr LAURA MULVEY artificial means of propelling the human body into moments of recognition. "37 The panic before the image on the screen exceeds a VISUAL PLEASURE AND llar to those one experiences in a daily encounter with urban traffic or industrial production. In its double nature, its transformation of still image into moving illu- NARRATIVE CINEMA tiginous dance, and pleasure derives from the energy released by the play betweer the shock caused by this illusion of danger and delight in its pure illusion, The jolt experienced becomes a shock of recognition. Far from fulfilling a dream of total replication of reality-the apophantis of the myth of total cinema-the experie of the first projections exposes the hollow centre of the cinematic illusion The thrill of transformation into motion depended on its presentation as a contrived illusion nder the controi of the projectionist showman. The movement from still to mov accented the unbelievable and extraordinary nature of the apparatus it self. But in doing so, it also undid any naive belief in the reality of the image Cinema's first audiences can no longer serve as a founding myth for the theo. reticalisation of the enthralled spectator. History reveals fissures along wit different from the classical spectator's absorption into an empathetic narrative L INTRODUCTION Placed within a historical context and tradition, the first spectators'experience re- A. A Political Use of Psychoanalys eals not a childlike belief, but lusionistic capabilities. I have attempted to reverse the traditional understanding of This paper intends to use psychoanalysis to discover where and how the fasc this first onslaught of moving images. Like a demystifying showman, I have frozen nation of film is reinforced by pre-existing patterns of fascination already at work the image of crowds scattered before the projection of an on-rushing train and read within the individual subject and the social formations that have moulded him. It it allegorically rather than mythically. This arrest should astonish us with the real takes as starting point the way film reflects, reveals and even plays on the straight, isation that these screams of terror and delight were well prepared for by both shor socially established interpretation of sexual difference which controls images, erotic men and audience. The audience's reaction was the antipode to the primitive one: ways of looking and spectacle. It is helpful to understand what the cinema has been It was an encounter with modernity. From the start, the terror of that image unco has worked in the theory and a practice which ered a lack, and promised only a phantom embrace. The train collided with no one will challenge this cinema of the past. Psychoanalytic theory is thus appropriate here It was, as Gorky said, a train of shadows, and the threat that it bore eighted tical weapon, demonstrating the way the ety has structured film form. dox of phallocentrism in all its manifestations is that it depend 1989 rated woman to gi and meaning to its woman stands as lynch pin to the system: it is her lack that produces the phallus as a symbolic presence, it is her desire to make good the lack that the phallus signi fies. Recent writing in en about psychoanalysis and the cinema has not suffi- iently brought out the importance of the representation of the female form in a symbolic order in which, in the last resort, it speaks castration and nothing else. To mmarise briefly the function of woman in forming the patriarchal unconscious her real absence of a and second thereby raises her child into the symbolic. Once this has been achieved, racauer, Cult of insen, Benyamin her meaning in the process is at an end it does not last into the world of law and language except as a memory which oscillates between memory of matemal plen- 833
834 FILM: PSYCHOLOGY, SOCIETY, AND IDEOLOGY VISUAL PLEASURE AND NARRATIVE CINEMA itude k. Both is subjected to her within its the bleeding and, she can exist only in relation to castration and cannot transcend it. She tums om its skilled and satisfying manipulation of visual plea her child into the signifier of her own desire to a penis(the condition. she stream film coded the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order. In imagines, of entry into the symbolic). Either she must gracefully give way to the the highly developed Hollywood cinema it was only through these codes that the word, the Name of the Father and the Law, or else struggle to keep her child down Rienated subject, tom in his imaginary memory by a sense of loss, by the terror of with her in the half-light of the imaginary. Woman then stands in patriarchal cul tential lack in phantasy, came near to finding a glimpse of satisfaction: through ture as signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can its formal beauty and its play on his own formative obsessions. This article wil dis- live out his phantasies ch linguistic command by imposing them cuss the interweaving of that erotic pieasure in film, its meaning, and in particular on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker the central place of the image of woman. It is said that analysing pleasure, or bear destroys it. That is the intention of this article. The satisfaction and reinforcement of the ego that represent the high point of film history hitherto must be attacked nearer to the roots nor of intellectualised unpleasure, but to make way for a total negation of the ease it faces us with the ultimate challenge: how to fight the unconscious structured like and plenitude of the narrative fiction film. The alternative is the thrill that comes a language(formed critically at the moment of arrival of language)while still caught from leaving the past behind without rejecting it, transcending outworn or oppres within the language of the patriarchy. There is no way in which we an produce ar sive forms, or daring to break with normal pleasurable expectations in order to co alternative out of the blue, but we can begin to make a break by examining patri- ceive a new language of desire ides, of which psychoanalysis is not the only but an portant one. We are still separated by a great gap from important issues for the fe- II. PLEASURE IN LOOKING/FASCINATION WITH THE male ious which are scarcely relevant to phallocentric HUMAN FORM orv: the the female infant and her relationship to the symbolic, the sexually mature woman as non-mother, matemity outside the signification of the phallus, the vagina .. But, A. The cinema offers a number of possible pleasures. One is scopophilia. There a psychoanalytic theory as it now stands can at least advance our un of the status quo, of the patriarchal order in which we are caught verse formation there is pleasure in being looked at. Originally. in his Three E Freud isolated scotophil the component instincts of B. Destruction of plec sexuality which exist as drives quite independently of the erotogenic zones. At this point he associated scopophilia with taking other people as objects, subjecting them As an advanced representation system, the cinema poses questions of the ways o a controlling and curious gaze. His particular examples centre around the voyeurs- the unconscious( formed by the dominant order) structure ways of seeing and plea- tic activities of children, their desire to see and make sure of the private and the for- sure in looking. Cinema has changed over the last few decades. It is no longer the bidden(curiosity about other people's genital and bodily functions, about the pres- monolithic system based on large capital investment exemplified at its best by Hol- ence or absence of the penis and, retrospectively, about the primal scene ). In thi lywood in the 19305, 1940 s and 1950,s. Technological advances(16mm, etc. )hat analysis scopophilia is essentially active (Later, in Instincts and their Vicissitudes, hanged the economic conditions of cinematic production, which can now be arti Freud developed his theory of scopophilia further, attaching it initially to pre- sanal as well as capitalist. Thus it has been possible for an alternative cinema to genital auto-eroticism, after which the pleasure of the look is transferred to others velop. However self-conscious and ironic Hollywood managed to be, it always re- by analogy. There is a close working here of the relationship between the active in- stricted itself to a formal mise-en-scene reflecting the dominant ideological concept stinct and its further development in a narcissistic form. )Although the instinct is of the cinema. The alternative cinema provides a space for a cinema to be born modified by other factors, in particular the constitution of the ego, it continues which is radical in both a political and an aesthetic sense and challenges the basic exist as the erotic basis for pleasure in looking at another person as object. At the umptions of the mainstream film. This is not to reject the latter moral treme, it can become fixated int n producing obsessive voyeurs and ghlight the ways in which its formal preoccupations reflect the psychical Peeping Toms, whose only sexual satisfaction can come from watching, in an ac sessions of the society which produced it. and, further, to stress that the alterna- tive controlling sense, an objectified other ive cinema must start specifically by reacting against these obsessions and as- At first glance, the cinema would seem to be remote from the undercover world sumptions, A politically and aesthetically avant-garde cinema is now possible, but of the surreptitious observation of an unknowing and unwilling victim. What is seen can still only exist as a counterpoint of the screen is so manifestly shown, But the mass of mainstream film, and the cor The magic of the Hollywood style at its best (and of all the cinema which fel ventions within which it has consciously evolved, portray a hermetically sealed world which unwinds magically, indifferent to the presence of the audience, pre
FILM: PSYCHOLOGY, SOCIETY, AND IDEOLOGY Ⅴ ISUAL PLEASURE AND RATIVE CINEMA ducing for them a sense of separation and playing on their voyeuristic phantasy through sight. The second, developed through narcissism and the constitution of the Moreover, the extreme contrast between the darkness in the auditorium(which also go, comes from identification with the image seen. Thus, in film terms, one ir plates the spectators from one another) and the brilliance of the shifting pattems plies a separation of the erotic identity of the subject from the object on the screen of light and shade on the screen helps to promote the illusion of voyeuristic sepa ctive scopophilia), the other demands identification of the ego with the object on lion. Although the film is really being shown, is there to be seen, conditions of the screen through the spectator's fascination with and recognition of his like. The screening and narrative conventions give the spectator an illusion of looking first is a function of the sexual instincts, the second of ego libido. This dichotom a private world. Among other things, the position of the spectators in the cinema is was crucial for Freud. Although he saw the two as interacting and overlaying each blatantly one of repression of their exhibitionism and projection of the repressed de other, the tension between instinctual drives and self-preservation continues to be a nisms not meaning. In themselves they have no signification, they have to be at- B. The cinema satisfies a primordial wish for pleasurable looking, but it also goes tached to an idealisation. Both pursue aims in indifference to perceptual reality,cre- stream film foch ng scopophilia in its narcissistic aspect. The conventions of main- ing the imagined, eroticised concept of the world that forms the perception of the attention on the human form. Scale, space, stories are all anthro- During its history, the evolved a particular ikeness and recognition: the human face, the human body, the relationship between the human form and its surroundings, the visible presence of the person in the world ality in which this contradiction between libido and ego has found a beautifully cor Jacques Lacan has described how the moment when a child recognises its own im- ntary phantasy world. In reality the phantasy world of the screen is subject to the law which produces it. Sexual instincts and identification processes have a mea age in the mirror is crucial for the ing within the symbolic order which articulates desire. Desire, born wit sis are relevant here. The mirror phase occurs at a time when the child's physical allows the possibility of transcending the instinctual and the imaginary, but pacity,with the result that his recognition of himself is of reference continually returns to the traumatic moment of its birth: the joyous in that he imagines his mirror image to be more complete, more perfect than complex. Hence the look, pleasurable in form, can be threatening in content, and it he experiences his own body. Recognition is thus overlaid with mis-recognition: the is woman as representation/image that crystallises this paradox image recognised is conceived as the reflected body of the self, but its mi he alienate which, re-introjected as an ego ideal, gives rise to the future generation of i Il. WOMAN AS IMAGE. MAN AS BEARER OF THE LOOK tion with others. This mirmor-moment predates language for the child. Important for this article is the fact that it is an image that constitutes the matrix A In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split be- cognition and identification, and hence of the tween active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phan- first articulation of the"I, "of subjectivity, This is a moment when an older fasci- asy on to the female figure which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibi nation with looking(at the mother's face, for an obvious example)collides with the tionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance initial inklings of self-awareness. Hence it is the birth of the long love affair/despair coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be between image and self-image which has found such intensity of expression in film looked-at-ness. Women displayed as sexual object is the leit-motiff of erotic and such joyous recognition in the cinema audience. Quite apart from the extra tacle: from pin-ups to strip-tease, from Ziegfeld to Busby Berkeley, she holds the ous similarities between screen and mirror(the framing of the human form in its ook, plays to and signifies male desire. Mainstream film neatly combined specta surroundings, for instance), the cinema has structures of fascination strong enough le and narrative. ( Note, however, how in the musical song-and- dance numbers break to allow temporary loss of ego while simultaneously reinforcing the ego. The sense the flow of the diegesis. ) The presence of woman is an indispensible element of forgetting the world as the ego has subsequently come to perceive it(I forgot tacle in normal narrative film, yet her visual presence tends to work against the ho I am and where I was)is nostalgically reminiscent of that pre-subjective mo- the flow of action in moments of erotic con- ment of image recognition. At the same time the cinema has dist shed itself in emplation. This alien presence then has to be integrated into cohesion with the nar- the production of ego ideals as expressed in particular in the star system, the stars ering both screen presence and screen story as they act out a complex proccess ermine provokes, or rather what she represents. She is the one, of likeness and difference(the glamorous impersonates the ordinary the love or fear she es in the hero, or else the concen he feels for her akes him act the way he does, In herself the woman has not the slightest im C. Sections IL. A and b have set out two contradictory aspects of the ple g nal cinematic situation. The first, scopophilic arises from pleasure in using another person as an object of sexual stimulation (A recent tendency in narrative film has been to dispense with this problem alto-
FILM: PSYCHOLOGY SOCIETY AND IDEOLOGY VISUAL PLEASURE AND NARRATIVE CINEMA in which the active homosexual eroticism of the central male figures can carry the ogy(as exemplified by deep focus in par thout distraction. Traditionally, the woman by the action of the protagonist), comb invisible editing (demanded by re- levels: as erotic object for the characters within the screen story, and as erotic alism)all tend to blur the limits of scr ace. The male protagonist is bject for the spectator within the auditorium with a shifting tension between the command the stage a stage of spatial n which he articulates looks on either side of the screen. For instance, the device of the show-girl allows creates the action the two looks to be unified technically without any apparent break in the diegesis A woman performs within the narrative, the gaze of the spectator and that of the C 1 Sections lil. A and B have set out a tension between a mode of representa male characters in the film are neatly combined without breaking narrative verisimil- tion of woman in film and conventions surrounding the diegesis. Each is associated itude. For a moment the sexual impact of the performin ith a iook: that of the spectator in direct scopophilic contact with the female form displayed for his enjoyment(connoting male phantasy) and that of the spectator fas- cinated with the image of his like set in an illusion of natural space, and through Not. Similarly, conventional close-ups of legs (Dietrich, for instance)or a face him gaining control and possession of the woman within the diegesis. (This tension (Garbo)integrate into the narrative a different mode of eroticism. One part of a frag mented body destroys the Renaissance space, the ilusion of depth demanded by the narrative, it gives flatness, the quality of a cut-out or icon rather than verisimilitue B. An active/passive heterosexual division of labour has similarly controlled nar- rative structure. According to the principles of the ruling ideology and the psych cal structures that back it up, the male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual jectification. Man is reluctant to gaze at his exhibitionist like. Hence the split between supports the man story,making things happen. The man controls the film phantasy as the representative of power in a further sense: as the bearer of the look of the spectator, transferring it behind the screen to neutralise the extra-diegetic tenden- cies represented by woman as spectacle. This is made possible through the processes set in motion by structuring the film around a main controlling figure with whom the spectator can identify. As the spectator identifies with the main male* protago- jects his look on to that of his like, his screen surrogate, so that the power f the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look, both giving a satisfying sense of omnipotence. A male movie star's glamourous characteristics are thus not those of the erotic object of the gaze, but those of the more perfect, more complete, more powerful ideal ego conceived in the original moment of recognition in front of the mirror. The character in the story can ake things happen and control events better than the subject/spectator, just as the image in the mirror was more in control of motor coordination. In contrast to woman as icon, the active male figure( the ego ideal of the identification process)demands a three-dimensional space corresonding to that of the mirror-recognition the alienated subject internalised his own representation of this imaginary He is a figure in a landscape. Here the function of film is to reproduce as Mitchum in a publicity sh of the erotic look, both giving a satisfying sense of omnipo. male protagonist is more apparent than real tence”(MUL