Laura Maulvey's essay on " Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" can be considered as the feminist work of criticism on the process of self-identification. The essay explains the interconnection of the spectator's subjectivity with the cinematic text established by Freudian psychoanalytic theories.
Mulvey's intention to unfold and reveal the phallocentrism structured in the unconscious of patriarchal society manifests itself primarily and demonstrates the castration anxiety of male spectator to the lack of phallic power of female character in the visual text. Her interpretation of the castration threat raises the problematic identity of women's objectified body through its fragmentation in the voyeuristic reflection of male spectator sexual desire. In other words, woman body stands in the image as the bearer of the meaning and poses question of the unconscious structure of male fantasies and desires.
Malvey develops her discussion on seeing and pleasure throughout the concept of alternative cinema as she states in her writing: 'The alternative cinema provides a space for a cinema to be born which is radical in both a political and an aesthetic and challenges the basic assumptions of the mainstream film" (Screen, 200). Obviously, the erotic representation of the images in the dominant patriarchal order to satisfy visual pleasure is attacked and criticized by Mullvey in order to establish a new language of expectations as she continues to observe:
"The satisfaction and reinforcement of the ego that represent the high spirit of film history hitherto must be attacked. Not in favor of a reconstructed new pleasure, but to make way for a total negation of the ease and plentitude fiction film. the alternative is the thrill that comes from leaving the past behind without rejecting it, transcending outworn or oppressive forms, or daring to break with normal pleasurable expectations in order to conceive a new language of desire as Mulvey states in her writing: (Screen, 200).
Freudian scopophilia which is associated with voyeurism and curious gaze to see the forbidden places and things as Peeping Toms continues to exist In Mulvey's discussion on the spectator voyeuristic fantasy to offer the same narcissistic aspect of the male gaze. Simultaneously, the Lacanian emphasis of mirror image for child to recognize his ego gives rise to Mulvey's future remarks on her article: " Important for this article is the fact that it is an image that constitutes the matrix of the imaginary, of recognition/misrecognition and identification, and hence for the first articulation of the 'I' of subjectivity" (Screen, 201).
Reinforcing of ego while at the same time the forgetting the world of ego is perceived and experienced by the spectator creates a complex process of self-identification through which the objectifying the sight to satisfy the sexual stimulation and develop the narcissistic ego function as the crucial dichotomy for the spectator's fascination with his like and sexual fantasies. The tension and contradiction between eroticized form of the world imposed by mechanism of libido or instinctual drive and self-preservation of ego allows the possibility of interweaving between the instinctual and perceptual reality with the realm of imaginary. Therefore, the point of reference returns to woman as represented image: " In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure which is styled accordingly" (Screen, 203). According to Mulvey, the combination of the narrative and the spectacle creates an erotic display window of the screen to please the male gaze and signifies the woman body as the sexual object which is similarly eroticized through the gaze of the male characters and the protagonists within the screen:
"Traditionally, the woman displayed had functioned on two levels as erotic object for the characters within the screen story, and as the erotic object for the spectator within the auditorium with a shifting tension between the looks on either side of the screen" (Screen,203).
This presence of the woman figure on the screen which is passive not active heterosexual is manipulated and controlled by the ideological domination of Hollywood classic films and studio system on controlling the narrative and aesthetic structure of the cinematic text.
The coincidence between the gaze of the male protagonist who controls the narrative and the erotic look of woman figure within the screen to satisfy him and the gaze of the male spectator characterizes the omnipotent characteristic ideal ego of the active male figure. Therefore, the male protagonist in the story can control the narrative better than spectator as Mulvey states in her writing:
"The character in the story can make 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 identification process) demands a three-dimensional space corresponding to that of the mirror recognition in which the alienated subject internalized his own representation of imaginary existence...The male protagonist is free to command the stage, a stage of spatial illusion in which he articulates the look and creates the action" (Screen, 204).
Mulvey suggests that the mechanism of possession of woman figure within the diegesis for the male star alone as the narrative progresses emphasizes on the spectator desire to possess her too as she tells us in her writing: " By means of identification with him[male protagonist], through the participation in his power, the spectator can indirectly possess her too" (Screen, 204).
The castration threat and anxiety which is originally signified with the woman sexual difference and her lack of phallic power evokes the male spectator to dymystify her mystery and disavows that threat by substituting her as a fetish object which transforms her into physical beauty. The final result is voyeuristic which has associations with sadistic pleasure through the process of punishment and forgiveness. At the end of her essay, Mulvey's exemplary discussion refers to Hitchcock's and Von Sternberg's cinematic representation of the images which goes into the investigative side of their psychoanalytic formalistic school for the narratives and the aesthetic styles. She insists on the absence of the gaze of the male character in the most of Sternberg's narratives as she indicates in her article:
"The most important absence is that of the controlling male gaze within the screen scene. The high point of emotional drama in the most typical Dietrich film, her supreme moments of erotic meaning, take place in the absence of the man she love sin the fiction...The male hero misunderstands and, above all, does not see" (Screen, 206).
In Hitchcock's narrative and aesthetic style, the presence of the male gaze controls the temporal and spatial elements of the story: "In Hitchcock, by contrast, the male hero does see precisely what the audience sees...Moreover, in these cases the hero portrays the contradictions and tensions experienced by the spectator...the look is central to the plot, oscillating between voyeurism and fetishistic fascination" (Screen, 206). In fact, Mulvey never clearly explains about the alternative forms of spectatorship such as the theorizing the female gaze among the female spectators and the validity of her discourse through the intellectual history raises many questions such as 'How the female gaze can be represented and interpreted throughout the cinematic text while the theoretical sexua; specification can be inherited from the feminist stand point?'
Mulvey, Laura. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema Screen Journal. Vol.16, No:3, Autumn 1975.
By: Morad Sadeghi
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