Abstract

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Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” proposed the now highly influential notion of the male gaze, an idea profoundly central to much of contemporary feminist thought. Any foundational text informing and undergirding a field of study in this way must necessarily demand that much be demanded of the textual source as well.  However, the original technical analyses within the thesis leave much to be desired. There is then a responsibility to buttress these analyses – albeit retroactively – such that this seminal work for feminism may stand up to scholarly scrutiny.

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Analysis

This analysis seeks to problematise the technical analyses by which Laura Mulvey advances the thesis of her landmark essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”[1] (Mulvey 1998, 422-431), on the notion of the male gaze. The end of this essay is to find ways to buttress the technical strength of her analyses, that these may match the veritable conceptual strength of the notion of the male gaze, which she proposes, for this idea has become a key cornerstone of contemporary feminist thought. Any foundational text informing and undergirding a field of study in this way must necessarily demand that much be demanded of the textual source as well, and it is in the original technical analyses of “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” that one chances upon certain lapses, which one may then retroactively take the chance to remedy.

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In section III, subsection C2, Mulvey (1975) provides close readings of films by Josef von Sternberg – Morocco (1930) and Dishonoured (1931) – and Alfred Hitchcock – Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958) and Marnie (1964). These technical analyses lead Mulvey to conclude that the woman’s function in film is to serve the male gaze. This androcentric gaze subjects the woman, as a visual spectacle, to the voyeurism of both a diegetic (within the reality of the world presented in a film) and non-diegetic (outside the reality of the film’s world: voice-overs, the cinema or theatre space, etc.) audience. The woman is either seen with “little or no mediation of the look through the eyes of the main male protagonist” (428) such that the “look of the male protagonist … is broken in favour of the [woman’s] image [being] in direct erotic rapport with the spectator”; or “the male hero … see[s] precisely what the audience sees” through “liberal use of the subjective camera from the point of view of the male protagonist [to] draw the spectators deeply into his position, making them share his uneasy gaze” (429).

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In analysing Sternberg’s films, Mulvey exposes how these films “demand that the figure of the woman … should be identifiable” (428) as “a perfect product, whose body, stylised and fragmented by close-ups, is the content of the film and the direct recipient of the spectator’s look”. The female protagonist of Morocco[2], Amy Jolly, is subject to such framing in the scene where she performs in a nightclub before her diegetic audience. This close-up shot breaks from the first-person gaze of the male protagonist, Tom Brown, to zoom in on Amy’s face despite Tom sitting some distance away from the stage she is on; his own perspective could not project this view of her for the non-diegetic 

cinematic audience. Compensating for this, Tom’s gaze is “broken in favour of [Amy’s] image in direct erotic rapport with the spectator”. In particularising this part of Amy’s body for scrutiny and spectacle, and framing her face with wisps of smoke, her face is made to be beheld in all its sensual beauty by both the diegetic (the nightclub patrons nearer the stage) and non-diegetic (the cinematic audience) spectator.

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However, Mulvey neglects to point out how Amy herself appears to appropriate the power of the male gaze by dressing in conventional male attire and smoking, thereby partaking in conventionally-male recreation. The fact that the wisps of smoke are now attributable to her self-agency , as demonstrated by her act of smoking, undercuts an image of an entirely passive sexual object. Amy exploits the affordances of the theatrical space to put up a transgressive performance of femininity and sexuality, making eyes at and even kissing another woman before the male-majority audience. This could be read as a symbolic attempt to resist her own sexual objectification for “the male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification. Man is reluctant to gaze at his exhibitionist like” (426). What is telling, though, of the primacy of the androcentric gaze is that for a woman to resist this gaze, she must appropriate it and therefore subject another fellow woman of hers to such a gaze.

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Mulvey’s claim that the “high point of emotional drama … the supreme moment of erotic meaning” is “at the end of Morocco, [when] Tom … has already disappeared into the desert when Amy Jolly kicks off her gold sandals and walks after him” (428) is also suspect. While the suggestion that the woman’s feet are particularised in this scene, and so fetishised, may be entertained, this is no scene of Amy’s feet on a sandy, tropical beach but of her bare soles being scorched by hot desert sand. This complex image, coupled with Amy symbolically leaving her gold sandals behind, speaks more to the 

self-destruction of the female and her body in her attempt to exercise any form of agency to pursue her own destiny and to leave the patriarchal system that rewards females for acquiescence, not agency, than to female sexualisation. Her apparent agency is also undercut by the fact that she but follows her male lover into the desert: the female remains but a passive follower in the steps of the male’s active quest. Many points may be made of this scene – that man is the active, the pioneer; woman is the passive, the follower – but female sexualisation by the male gaze does not immediately emerge as amongst the more productive ones to make. 

In analysing Hitchcock’s films, Mulvey claims that “heroes [in these Vertigo and Marnie] are exemplary of the symbolic order and the law … but their erotic drives lead them into compromised situations” (428). In pushing to advance her position, Mulvey glosses over the fact that in Vertigo [3], the male protagonist, John “Scottie” Ferguson, is not simply a “policeman” as she states, but a former policeman. While this does not preclude him from representing order and the law, the reason for his resignation from service was precisely his inability to uphold order and the law: his vertigo, and fear of heights, had led to the death of a fellow policeman. Further problematising Mulvey’s argument is the fact that Scottie is not driven by erotic desire to stalk Madeleine Elster; he was asked to by her husband, Gavin Elster, who claimed that she was in danger – and Scottie only agreed begrudgingly. However, the implications Vertigo holds for Mulvey’s theorising about the male gaze are still profound: a male, though unwilling, is still vested by a figure of patriarchal authority (the husband) with the power of the male gaze to visually scrutinise and police a female. Males thus cannot excuse themselves from complicity in any system of patriarchal power for however unwilling they may be to exercise patriarchal control over females, the fact remains that they are interpellated positively, on the side of power, such that the power of the gaze is accorded to them.

 

In analysing Rear Window[4], Mulvey neglects to acknowledge that the primary subject that provides the visual spectacle for the gaze of the male protagonist, L. B. “Jeff” Jefferies’, is his male neighbour, Lars Thorwald, and not his girlfriend, Lisa Fremont. Jeff, possessed by the belief that Lars murdered his own wife, constantly monitors Lars from his apartment in the block opposite. However, being wheelchair-bound, Jeff has to ask Lisa to investigate instead; Lisa is charged with the duty of investigation, but Lars is the subject of scrutiny and investigation. Claiming that Jeff’s “enforced inactivity” binds “him to his seat as a spectator, put[ting] him squarely in the fantasy position of the cinema audience” (429) is inaccurate; his wheelchair seat more closely symbolises a director’s chair as he orchestrates this espionage against his neighbour. Furthermore, as Lisa “crosses the barrier between [Jeff’s] room and the block opposite”, Jeff watches with concern, not arousal; his focus is not on her body as a sensual spectacle, but her physicality: in an impressive show of physical ability, she climbs up the fire escape and sneaks into Lars’ apartment through an open window. However, Mulvey’s framing of this as how “their relationship is reborn erotically” suggests much more sensuality than was actually presented.

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Overall, while the conceptual strength of Mulvey’s thesis is veritable, the technical strength of her analyses is artificially inflated by strategic, insistent use of sensual, sexual language on her part to frame her argument. Yet, as this analysis has found, the lapses in the original technical analyses can be pushed productively to yield a much more compelling argument whose merit matches that of Mulvey’s influential idea: that, indeed, the male gaze is a powerful apparatus of control that works to structure power in society by sex.

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Endnotes

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[1]Mulvey, Laura. 1998. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In Contemporary Literary Criticism: Literary and Cultural Studies, edited by Robert Con David, Ronald Schleifer, 422-431. New York: Longman.

[2]Morocco. Directed by Josef von by Sternberg. Los Angeles: Paramount Pictures, 1930.

[3]Vertigo. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Los Angeles: Paramount Pictures, 1958.

[4]Rear Window. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Los Angeles: Paramount Pictures, 1954.