I write about cinema, and over the course of about 50 years I’ve published a number of books, many articles, and essays on very varying aspects of film. In 1975, I wrote a short essay called 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema', and as time passed, this came to be my most well-known essay, provoking discussion, debate, and some disagreement. Its influence persisted and spread beyond film studies into other areas of the humanities.
Over the decades, cinema changed, technologies changed – new digital formats and viewing platforms transformed the ways in which films were consumed. Spectatorship was revolutionised. As I began to write about these new developments, I felt certain that my old 1975 essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, written in the days of darkened film theatres and the silver screen, would gradually be retired to become an archaeological object of theoretical and historical interest. On the contrary, over the last decade, the idea of ‘a male gaze’ has more or less entered cultural and even ordinary language. Very often, the term is related back to my ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ essay. I welcome the way the phrase represents a new generation’s critique of mainstream film – its day-to-day sexism, the continued difficulties faced by women directors, the lack of good female parts and so on.
This critique is, to my mind, long overdue and I’m gratified that the concept ‘male gaze’ has proved to be useful to a new generation. However, it's also become rather a cliché – overused, over-generalised, an identity rather than a concept. So, I would like to use this 10-minute Talk to return to 1970s feminism, in the hope of recovering some of the original ideas that inspired my essay. I am going to use three questions that have been so often put to me by bewildered readers – some feminist, some film theorists, and some others. First question: why Freud? Second question: why Hollywood? Third question: what about the ‘female spectator’?
First, a brief summary of my argument. ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ analysed the sexual politics of Hollywood film and argued, unsurprisingly, that the imbalance of power between men and women in society was reflected in an imbalance of power between men and women on the screen. But, as the cinema is a supremely visual medium, these gender inequalities were inscribed into the visual style of cinema itself, and how its stories were structured. It was not simply a matter of content, but of film form. Female performers, that is the female stars, were visualised with all the spectacular attributes of the cinema itself, but also highly sexualised and endowed with a quality that I called ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’. The male performers, the male stars, on the other hand, tended to control the story and responded to the ‘woman as spectacle’ with a dynamic, active and erotic gaze. Finally, I argued that this ‘division of labour’ on the screen was transferred to a film’s spectators, playing to an assumed male visual pleasure. The film’s spectators, either male or female, couldn’t avoid a way of seeing that was produced by the language of film itself, its characters’ point of view, the framing of figures, the female star’s privileged lighting, colour, camera angle, etc. I then interpreted these visual tropes though psychoanalytic theory – by and large Freudian – in order to decipher and make visible the presence of the patriarchal psyche in this particular popular culture.
Why Freud?
Certainly, and at least to my mind, the term ‘male gaze’ seemed to have discarded a psychoanalytic frame of reference – the mainspring of my original argument. This is in many ways understandable: psychoanalysis is theoretically challenging, socially disturbing, it disrupts certainty and confuses identity.
In the 1970s, feminists turned to Freudian theories that we found illuminated the patriarchal psyche, theories that made its unconscious symptoms visible, that deciphered the way, and why, women, their bodies and their sexuality were distorted and oppressed by male fantasy and male psychic pain. Freud had little to say about the female psyche, but his analyses of the male psyche were a revelation for me and for many feminists. For instance, my ideas about the representation of women were strongly influenced by Freud’s analyses of the male castration complex, as he discovered through his patients and through cultural observations that the female, penis-less body could be fearful and repulsive to man.
As Freud put it:
"To decapitate equals to castrate. The terror of the Medusa is thus the terror of castration that is linked to the sight of something. The hair upon the Medusa’s head is frequently represented in works of art in the form of snakes, and these once again are derived from the castration complex. It is a remarkable fact that, however frightening they may be in themselves, they nevertheless serve actually as a mitigation of the horror, for they replace the penis, the absence of which is the cause of the horror. This is the technical rule according to which a multiplication of penis symbols signifies castration."
Castration anxiety protects itself with fetish objects. Just as beautiful objects could distract the anxious eye from the truth of sexual difference, so the female body could be adorned to create a mask of surface, an exquisite exterior, a defence against a disturbing and uncertain interior. I came to realise that fetishistic images of women were not relegated to a perverse underworld, but were pervasive in mass media, circulating images that were not of ‘women’, but of what ‘woman’ had come to represent for collective male fantasy: fear and desire intertwined.
Furthermore, I applied Freud’s analysis of the sexual drives and their binary structure to the rigid, binary structure of gender in Hollywood film: the terms ‘voyeurism’ vs ‘exhibitionism’, ‘sadism’ vs ‘masochism’. ‘Voyeurism’, for instance, would, psychoanalytically speaking, be a component of the sexual drive in both men and women but in cultural representations, most visible in Hollywood cinema, it is bound necessarily to being an attribute of the masculine.
Why Hollywood?
The American film industry, the most powerful in the world, was not only highly regulated economically but highly regulated ideologically. In its studio system days, strict rules governed production chains and hierarchies like a factory system. Culturally, movie production followed rules of repetition and formula: genres repeated formulaic narrative structures, stars returned time and again to the screen more as ‘themselves’ than any fictional character. In many ways, repetition and formula, as in folk tales, were a source of fascination and pleasure. To me, this was a cinema that invested its aesthetic energies in the beauty of the cinema itself, with the greatest technicians, the most sophisticated technologies and some outstanding directors.
Under the influence of the women’s movement and feminism, my way of seeing these films changed and I began to reflect on Hollywood as a machine that revolved around the image of woman as spectacle – an exploitation and an oppression. I then came to see Hollywood as a rich source material for critique of the patriarchal psyche. The Hays Code imposed censorship on the studios and all scripts had to be approved before filming, eliminating any sexually explicit innuendo. However, the movies themselves were fuelled by sex, embodied in the star system. Again, as in folk tales, these formulaic Hollywood movies revolved around gender roles, very often ‘about’ gender roles, realised through a visual language of sexuality and eroticism. As I saw it, the psychoanalytic concepts of voyeurism and fetishism structured this language, affecting not only the image of the female but of the male star. Due to a taboo on homosexual desire, the spectacle of male and female sexuality had to find an inverse balance: the male star, protected from spectacular exhibition, who drove the action and controlled the flow of narrative, while the female star attracted the desiring gaze, her own spectacular image emblematic of the erotic.
A female gaze?
As the idea of a male gaze has gained currency, so has the idea of an alternative. I’m quite often asked whether I think the idea of a ‘female gaze’ works theoretically or in practice. To my mind, simple role reversals are usually problematic – to exchange one kind of power or domination for its opposite perpetuates a system that revolves around power and domination.
I have turned towards another idea, toward myths and folk tales and even lady detectives to associate a woman’s way of looking with curiosity – the desire to know, to see with the mind’s eye. On the one hand, this might be a desexualisation, a repression of the element of desire in the look. On the other hand, curiosity allows a moment to stop and think about these questions – to reflect, to decipher, to see unfamiliar things through defamiliarised eyes.
For its whole history, cinema by and large has been produced by men. That is, the ideas and imagination of 50 per cent of the population. Now, more and more women are beginning to make films and tell stories that would not be available to, relevant to, or even of interest to a patriarchal culture. Perhaps times are changing. Perhaps patriarchy is on the retreat when women can find the means for poetic and creative expression. From my long engagement with cinema, and in spite of the many films made by men that I love and treasure, I feel an immense curiosity about women’s visual imagination and what it might open up for us. I imagine this imagination as driven by curiosity about what has hitherto been mute and ineffable in women’s lives.
I would like to end with a couple of examples. Two recent films by women have explored, to my mind, with extraordinary imaginative curiosity, relations between mothers and daughters: Joanna Hogg’s The Eternal Daughter (2022) and Céline Sciamma’s Petite Maman (2021).
But it’s also worth remembering that curiosity played a key part in Barbie’s desire to see the ‘real’ world.
Laura Mulvey FBA is Professor of Film Theory at Birkbeck, University of London.
