Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema

In the introductory section of “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey notes that her essay centers on the style of filmmaking predominant in Hollywood during the first half of the 20th century. The studio system, as film historians call it, evolved in the 1920s and reached its zenith by the 1940s. It was, as Mulvey writes, a “monolithic system based on large capital investment” (15), in which studios controlled the production, distribution, and exhibition of their feature-length films. By the 1930s, the Hollywood industry was dominated by a handful of big companies, including MGM, Warner Brothers, and Paramount, and had established an international monopoly.

To ensure profits, studios cultivated a roster of actors with “star” appeal and cast them in formulaic reiterations of films that had proven “pleasurable” to audiences. Each studio had a distinctive style (Warner, for example, was known for crime dramas) and churned out generic vehicles for the stars they “owned” (by contract). Working at Paramount, director Joseph von Sternberg cast Marlene Dietrich in a series of star-genre formula features that, as Mulvey notes, are distinguished more by spectacle than story. This factory-style system was enormously successful with audiences, and it defined film style and standards for decades, including the visual style that Mulvey identifies as patriarchal. By the 1960s, changes in technology brought about challenges to the status quo. Low-budget cameras and film, Mulvey writes, “have changed the economics of cinema production, which can now be artisanal as well as capitalist” (15). Mulvey herself—along with her husband, Peter Wollen—wrote and produced several artisanal films in the 1970s.

Published in 1975 in the British film journal Screen, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” was a groundbreaking text in the field of feminist film theory. Mulvey writes from a feminist perspective, maintaining that “[t]here is an obvious interest in this [psycho]analysis for feminists” (15). Starting with the premise that film reproduces society’s devaluation of women, she recruits Freud’s theories to “advance our understanding […] of the patriarchal order” (15) and how its all-pervasive ideology encodes sexual difference into cinematic representations. Mulvey’s work quickly gained traction in the intellectual environment of the day, which was informed by second-wave feminism (the first “wave,” which ended in 1920, focused on obtaining voting rights for women). Inspired by Betty Friedan’s 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique, as well as the Civil Rights Movement, the second wave of feminism saw American women call for rights and recognition equal to that which (white) men enjoyed. Their cause was soon taken up by women in other countries, particularly in England and Europe.

Second-wave feminism was largely a movement of and for white women and their particular concerns, and this fact points to some limitations regarding Mulvey’s (and Freud’s) arguments. According to psychoanalysis and Lacanian theory, woman signifies “the other” in opposition to man, the “maker of meaning” (15). The meaning that “man”—or, more accurately, the patriarchy—assigns to woman “is sexual difference, the visually ascertainable absence of the penis” (22), and nothing more. Not only does this idea of woman reduce her to an ahistoric, never-changing foil for man, it also erases the differences between women as individuals. While it may well be self-evident that women are subordinate to men in patriarchal cultures, this subordination—including objectification—takes different forms depending on the race, sexuality, and class of each woman. To the extent that Mulvey singles out “the socially established interpretation of sexual difference” (emphasis added, 14) as the source of women’s oppression, her argument suffers from the same disregard for the experiences of non-white, non-heterosexual, non-middle-class women as Freud’s does. This criticism and numerous others (including the glaring omission of any attempt to theorize female spectatorship) have been levied against Mulvey’s provocative essay, making it the epicenter of lively debate and discussion, and demonstrating its pioneering contribution to the field of feminist film studies.

Finally, the formal structure and tone of Mulvey’s essay are noteworthy. Alluding to the central role of the penis in Freudian theory and its attendant privileging of masculinity, Mulvey identifies psychoanalysis as “phallocentric” (15). Jacques Lacan crossed structural linguistics with psychoanalysis to take male privilege a step further, into the realm of meaning-making and language itself. “The symbolic order” and “the Law of the Father” are Lacanian concepts that reflect linguistic structuralism’s preoccupation with order and hierarchical oppositions. Building on Freud’s conclusion that woman always signifies lack, or absence, Lacan proposed that, just as presence opposes and subordinates lack, so male always subordinates female. If language functions as system of opposing signs (as structuralists argue), then sexual difference is the original signifying opposition that subtends all others and always elevates the masculine side of binary. In essence, man is the “maker of meaning” (15).

Despite this brief detour into linguistics, it is not the details of structuralism that matter most here, but the recognition that Lacan’s symbolic order is, fundamentally, indebted to the notion of hierarchical structures. Jacques Derrida, the leading figure in deconstructionist philosophy, criticized structuralism as “phallogocentric” in its misguided emphasis on not just the masculine, but on the “logic” that clear, determinant meanings issue from hierarchical oppositions. Taking a cue from their compatriot Derrida, French feminist intellectuals like Hélene Cixous and Catherine Clément envisioned a female form of writing (écriture feminine) that deconstructs “determinateness” and eschews hierarchical signification.

Given the feminist agenda of Mulvey’s essay, it is ironic that its form is so emphatically hierarchical. She did not simply craft a well-organized essay; she numbered each main section (four in total), flagged sub-points with letters (A, B, and C), and marked sub-sub-points with Arabic numerals. In this respect, the essay brings to mind a formally outlined legal brief, which, in turn, elicits associations with “the symbolic order and the law” (23)—the very systems Hitchcock’s male protagonists exemplify, Mulvey argues, to cloak them with “ideological correctness” (24). Perhaps Mulvey, consciously or unconsciously, structured her essay as she did to invest it with the authority usually granted to the male point of view.

While the essay’s structure is formal, and the rhetoric of its expository sections is primarily analytical, Mulvey’s tone in the “Introduction” and “Summary” is polemical, even aggressive. Following two subsections with confrontational titles (“A Political Use of Psychoanalysis” (14) and “Destruction of Pleasure as a Radical Weapon” (15)), Mulvey ends her introduction by forcefully declaring, “It is said that analysing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the intention of this article” (16). With this bold, call-to-arms language, Mulvey’s essay begins (and ends) in the style of a manifesto, a type of resistance writing favored by early 20th century avant garde artists. The manifestoes these artists issued are typically short, but like Mulvey’s essay, feature numbered tenets that deploy theatrical rhetoric to challenge established norms and ideology.

As the counter-establishment spirit of the 1960s took hold, so did a renewed enthusiasm for the manifesto. In an article titled “Mulvey’s Manifesto,” Mandy Merck reveals that several years before publishing Mulvey’s essay, the journal Screen reprinted writings by modernist-era Russian artists, including Dziga Vertov’s 1923 manifesto, “Film Directors, a Revolution.” Noting its significance with respect to Mulvey’s essay, Merck cites Vertov’s pronouncement on the film-camera: “Up to today we have coerced the film-camera and made it copy the work of our own eyes. […] From today we are liberating the camera […] we affirm the cinema eye with its dimensions of time and space” (Merck, Camera Obscura, June 2007, Issue 66). These words seemingly prefigure Mulvey’s own as she concludes her essay: “The first blow against the monolithic accumulation of traditional film conventions […] is to free the look of the camera into its materiality in time and space […]” (27). With its provocative tone here, and in the “Introduction,” Mulvey’s essay recalls the tradition of the manifesto and its oppositional nature.