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Question: How has feminist film history and theory developed in the decades since the
publication of Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”? Discuss the main
ideas, approaches, and arguments in Mulvey’s original essay, as well as responses or challenges
to her essay from within the field of film studies.
In 1975, Laura Mulvey published her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.”
Originally, her background was in the field of history, but she eventually transitioned into the
field of film theory and published essays such as “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” to
think of the connections between cinematic gender and spectatorship. In her essay, it is
summarized that Mulvey’s intentions are to destroy the patriarchal structure of the American
film industry. She concluded that the movie industry is male-driven and male-centric and there is
no room for female spectators. Mulvey touches on the implementation of psychoanalysis; the
fascination of the female form, scopophilia and the idea that the male figure creates meaning
while the female character bears the meaning of said meaning.
“Psychoanalytic theory is thus appropriate here as a political weapon, demonstrating the
way the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form” (Mulvey). At the time
Mulvey saw something that anyone could have easily overlooked regarding how women, or in
this case the female figure in film, are depicted. “To summarize briefly: the function of woman
in forming the patriarchal unconscious is two-fold, she first symbolizes the castration threat by
her real absence of a penis and second thereby raises her child into the symbolic. Once this has
been achieved, 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 maternal plentitude and
memory of lack” (Mulvey). From Mulvey’s perspective at this time, woman in film were
typically depicted as maternal figures subjected to childrearing and the children in question were

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expected to live up to a certain set of ideals; boys would tend to become active figures in society
while girls would follow in their mother’s footsteps and become the role of passive figures due to
the fact that by lacking the male form, they symbolically lacked a sense of power and authority.
“In the highly developed Hollywood cinema it was only through these codes that the
alienated subject, torn in his imaginary memory by a sense of loss, by the terror of potential lack
in fantasy, came near to finding a glimpse of satisfaction: through its formal beauty and its play
on his own formative obsessions. This article will discuss the interweaving of that erotic pleasure
in film, its meaning, and in particular the central place of the image of woman” (Mulvey). These
codes Mulvey is discussing involves the language of the male-oriented order of Hollywood. The
industry has twisted the concept of what is pleasurable to look at and marketed it to the male
audience at large at the expense of the female. Mulvey puts it bluntly simple: “It is said that
analyzing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the intention of this article” (Mulvey).
Mulvey recognizes scopophilia as one of the core pleasures of cinema. Scopophilia is
defined as taking sexual pleasure from looking at the nude human form through photographs but
Mulvey goes one step further, by applying the term to cinema. In fact, she includes Freud’s
theories in her article, particularly and specifically referring to Freud’s “Three Essays on
Sexuality.” Mulvey claimed that Freud “associated with scopophilia with taking other people as
objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze” (Mulvey). It is here that Mulvey
reaches a conclusion about the practices of mainstream filmmaking and the mainstream
filmmaking audience, both realms, which are said to be male-dominated according to the writer.
“The cinema satisfies a primordial wish for pleasurable looking but it also goes further,
developing scopophilia in its narcissistic aspect. The conventions of mainstream film focus
attention on the human form” (Mulvey).

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Mulvey has identified two aspects of the pleasurable edifices of looking in conventional
cinematic situations: looking/perceiving another person as an eroticized object and identification
with what is seen through vanity. “…in film terms, one implies a separation of the erotic identity
of the subject from the object on the screen (active scopophilia), the other demands that
identification of the ego with the object on the screen through the spectator’s fascination with
and recognition of his like. The first is a function of the sexual instincts, the second of ego libido”
(Mulvey). Mulvey is arguing that because the film industry is run, led and marketed by men,
something has to be cast as the eroticized object in their films in order to appease the male
spectator and that something has to be: women. “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 on to the female figure, which is styled accordingly. In their
traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their
appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-
looked-at-ness…The presence of woman is an indispensible element of spectacle in normal
narrative film, yet her visual presence tends to work against the development of a story line, to
freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation” (Mulvey).
Mulvey reached the conclusion that women in film at this time serve two purposes: to be
sexually objectified for the characters within the screen story and to be sexually objectified for
the spectators in the movie theaters as well. “A woman performs within the narrative, the gaze of
the spectator and that of the male characters in the film are neatly combined without breaking
narrative verisimilitude” (Mulvey). Mulvey also argues that the reverse gaze, the premise that the
spectator can sexually objectify the male figure in film, is impossible. “The man controls the film
fantasy and also emerges as the representative of power in a further sense: as the bearer of the

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look of the spectator, transferring it behind the screen to neutralize the extra-diegetic tendencies
represented by woman as spectacle…As the spectator identifies with the main male protagonist,
he projects his look on to that of his like, his ‘screen surrogate’, so that the power of 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 glamorous characteristics are thus not
those of the erotic object of the gaze, but those of the more perfect, complete, powerful ideal ego
conceived in the original moment of recognition in front of the mirror” (Mulvey). The male
figure in film can be glamorous physically yet he himself cannot be objectified for it and the
reason lies with the fact that his character has a sense of power over the world in which the
spectator is watching, is what Mulvey is trying to convey.
What sets men and women apart according to Mulvey, is the basic reason why men are
different from women: the lack of a penis, thus Mulvey gets to the core of her essay:
penis=power. “Ultimately, the meaning of woman is sexual difference, the absence of the penis
as visually ascertainable, the material evidence on which is based on the castration complex
essential for the organization of entrance to the symbolic order and the law of the father. Thus
the woman as icon, displayed for the gaze and enjoyment of men, the active controllers of the
look, always threaten to evoke the anxiety it originally signified” (Mulvey). It is suggested that
the male unconscious has two escape plans from this idea of emasculation; voyeurism or
fetishistic scopophila.
Mulvey wrote this article for one core purpose: to analyze how pleasure and beauty are
perceived in film and break down the barriers of how pleasure and beauty, specifically the
female figure, is perceived in film. “To begin with, the voyeuristic-scopophilic look that is a
crucial part of traditional filmic pleasure can itself be broken down. There are three different

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looks associated with cinema: that of the camera as it records the profilmic event, that of the
audience as it watches the final product, and that of the characters at each other within the screen
illusion. The conventions of narrative film deny the first two and subordinate them to the third,
the conscious aim being always to eliminate intrusive camera presence and prevent a distancing
awareness in the audiences…Nevertheless, as this article has argued, the structure of looking in
narrative fiction film contains a contradiction in its own premises: the female image as a
castration threat constantly endangers the unity of the diegesis and bursts through the world of
illusion as an intrusive, static, one dimensional fetish. Thus the two looks materially present in
time and space are obsessively subordinated to the neurotic needs of the male ego” (Mulvey).
“In order to understand the fiction film, I must both ‘take myself’ for the character so that
he benefits, by analogical projection, from all the schemata of intelligibility that I have within me,
and not take myself for him so that the fiction can be established as such: this is seeming-real.
Similarly, in order to understand the film (at all), I must perceive the photographed object as
absent, its photograph as present, and the presence of this absence as signifying” (Metz). This is
an excerpt form Christian Metz’s “From the Imaginary Signifier.” This could be identified as a
response to Mulvey’s claim about the female figure in film and how the male gaze can perceive
her at the time. What Metz is trying to say is that the male spectator can keep in mind that what
he is seeing on the screen isn’t happening in the reality that spectator is apart of in the moment of
seeing it, thus if a female body is present, the body itself is not before the eyes of the spectator,
but the image of a female body is before the eyes of the male spectator. “the cinema is a body (a
corpus for the semiologist), a fetish that can be loved” (Metz).
“The voyeur is very careful to maintain a gulf, an empty space, between the object and
the eye, the object and his own body: his look fastens the object at the right distance, as with

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those cinema spectators who take care to avoid being too close or too far from the screen. The
voyeur represents in space the fracture which forever separates him from the object; he
represents his very dissatisfaction, and thus also his ‘satisfaction’ insofar as it is of a specifically
voyeuristic type” (Metz). Mulvey believed that breaking down what is coded to be pleasurable
on an analytic level would destroy the conventions of what it means to be pleasurable, but
Metz’s approach to what the voyeur is observing takes things to another level entirely. Perhaps
he is arguing that what the voyeur is observing is not real, therefore the pleasure in looking is
shallow and fleeting. The fact that the male gaze is observing something fictional and there is a
sense of distance involved and maintained throughout the spectacle seems harmless, but Mulvey
could counter argue that the act of taking pleasure from looking, a sense of playing “peeping
Tom” is still being committed particularly regarding the male gaze and the female form.
The gaze doesn’t have to be entirely male though. Just because men are filmmakers and
they convey their perceptions and perspectives through the films they make, and cast women in
the roles they serve in a male-dominated realm, doesn’t mean that women only have one place.
The observations and studies of Mary Ann Doane in her essay “Film and Masquerade:
Theorizing the Female Specator” argues over what the female spectator sees when she looks at
what is being seen on screen. “Theories of female spectatorship are thus rare, and when they are
produced, seem inevitably to confront certain blockages in conceptualization…After all, even if
it is admitted that the woman is frequently the object of voyeuristic or fetishistic gaze in the
cinema, what is there to prevent her from reversing the relation and appropriating gaze for her
own pleasure?” (Doane). Doane makes references to both Mulvey and Metz in her essay. “It is
precisely this opposition between proximity and distance, control of the image and it’s loss,
which locates the possibilities of spectatorship within the problematic sexual difference. For the

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female spectator there is a certain over-presence of the image-she is the image. Given the
closeness of this relationship, the female spectator’s desire can be described only in terms of a
kind of narcissism-the female look demands a becoming. It thus appears to negate the very
distance or gap specific by Metz and Burch as the essential precondition for voyeurism” (Doane).
Doane claims that women may have a more difficult time to distance themselves from what is
being looked at on screen because they can easily identify with the female characters on screen;
they perhaps share this sense of powerlessness in a male-dominated society.
Doane also claims that women can wear masks in a proverbial manner of speaking. “The
masquerade’s resistance to patriarchal positioning would therefore lie in its denial of the
production of femininity as closeness as presence-to-itself, as, precisely, imaginistic…on the
other hand, involves a realignment of femininity, the recovery, or more accurately, simulation, of
the missing gap or distance. To masquerade is to manufacture a lack in the form of a certain
distance between oneself and one’s image” (Doane). Woman can use this mask of womanhood
to attain something they never had before; creating a new image distant of their current persona
to attain a higher power. Doane uses Betty Davis’ character from Now Voyager as an example of
this masquerade; she relinquishes her glasses, a symbol of intelligence and potential authority
and she instantly becomes a spectacle/beauty. “Glasses worn by a woman in the cinema do not
generally signify a deficiency in seeing but an active looking, or even simply the fact of seeing as
opposed to being seen” (Doane).
At this juncture, it is established that the male gaze is a controlling gaze. The female gaze
however can be described as repressed, censored and perhaps overpowered to be apt. “It is quite
tempting to foreclose entirely the possibility of female spectatorship, to repeat at the level of
theory the gesture of the photograph [Doane is referring to the still photograph of Robert

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Doisneau’s 1948 Un Regard oblique], given the history of a cinema which relies so heavily on
voyeurism, fetishism, and identification with an ego ideal conceivable only in masculine
terms…Femininity is produced very precisely as a position within a network of power relations.
And the growing insistence upon the elaboration of a theory of female spectatorship is indicative
of the crucial necessity of understanding that position in order to dislocate it” (Doane).
If men have power in cinema, shifting that power toward the female perspective could
create a new paradigm. In fact, Claire Johnston’s essay “Women’s Cinema as Counter Cinema”
explores why the skeletal structure of the female character hasn’t changed under the Hollywood
model, while the male character has always adapted to the times. “Much writing on the
stereotyping of women in the cinema takes as its starting-point a monolithic view of the media as
a repressive and manipulative: in this way, Hollywood has been viewed as a dream factory
producing an oppressive cultural productive. This over-politicized view bears little relation to the
ideas on art expressed either by Marx or Lenin, who both pointed to there being no direct
connection between the development of art and the material basis of society. The idea of the
intentionality of art which this view implies is extremely misleading and retrograde, and short-
circuits the possibility of a critique which could prove useful for developing a strategy for
women’s cinema” (Johnston).
Johnston zeroes in on what she believes is the reason why women have been stereotyped
within mainstream cinema. “Iconography as a specific kind of sign or cluster of signs based on
certain conventions within the Hollywood genres has been partly responsible for the stereotyping
of women within the commercial cinema in general, but the fact that there is a far greater
differentiation of men’s roles than of women’s role in the history of cinema relates to sexist
ideology itself, and the basic opposition which places man inside history, and woman as ahistoric

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and eternal” (Johnston). Hence the fact that men held places of prominence in history while the
women were relegated to sub-roles in society could have factored into why women in cinema
remained constant due to the constraints set upon them related to genre. Johnston believes that
cinema’s operations, particularly in the commercial sense moreso than the artistic sense, has a
hand in manipulating how a woman’s image is depicted in the media and goes a step further in
calling female filmmakers and prominent female figures such as Dorothy Arzner and Ida Lupino
“token women and nothing more” because they had little access to expression. “In rejecting a
sociological analysis of woman in the cinema we reject any view in terms of realism, for this
would involve an acceptance of the apparent denotation of the sign and would involve a denial of
the reality of myth in operation. Within a sexist ideology and male-dominated cinema, woman is
presented as what she represents for man” (Johnston).
In her essay, Johnston denounces the star-system claiming that it depends on the
fetishizing of women, she references the first editorial of Women and Film, which attacked the
notion of the auteur theory claiming that it was celebrating a “one man show,” how Howard
Hawks and John Ford have depicted women in their respective films, but she view’s the idea of a
potential woman’s cinema as a counter-cinema, design to upend the conventions and constraints
established by the Hollywood model. “All films or works of art are products: products of an
existing system of economic relations, in the final analysis. This applies equally to experimental
films, political films, and commercial entertainment cinema. Film is also an ideological product-
the product of bourgeois ideology. The idea that art is universal and thus potentially androgynous
is basically an idealist notion: art can only be defined as a discourse within a particular
conjuncture-for the purpose of women’s cinema, the bourgeois, sexist ideology of male
dominated capitalism” (Johnston). Johnston identifies the aesthetic roots of emerging women’s

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cinema from television and the techniques implemented through cinema verite; women are
actually talking to the camera/breaking down the fourth wall to discuss their experiences freely,
but she doesn’t feel that is enough for women’s cinema to take that necessary step forward. “In
this respect, it is instructive to look at films made by women within the Hollywood system (for
instance Dorothy Arzner and Ida Lupino), which attempted by formal means to bring about a
dislocation between sexist ideology and the text of the film; such insights could provide useful
guidelines for the emerging women’s cinema to draw on” (Johnston).
Johnston’s essay is constructed on the findings Mulvey has gathered and attempts to offer
an alternative to what Mulvey is looking for. “Ideas derived from the entertainment film, then,
should inform the political film, and political ideas should inform the entertainment cinema: a
two-way process. Finally, a repressive, moralistic assertion that women’s cinema is collective
filmmaking is misleading and unnecessary: we should seek to operate at all levels: within the
male-dominated cinema and outside it. This essay has attempted to demonstrate the interest of
women’s films made within the system…What collective methods do provide is the real
possibility of examining how cinema works and how we can best interrogate and demystify the
workings of ideology: it will be from these insights that a genuinely revolutionary conception of
counter-cinema for the women’s struggle will come” (Johnston). Giving women not only an out
from the male-system but elevating them in a manner of speaking.

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Works Cited
 Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Film Theory and Criticism:
Introductory Readings. By Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. New York, N.Y. ; Oxford:
Oxford UP, 1999. N. pag. Print.
 Metz, Christian. "From "The Imaginary Signifier"" Film Theory and Criticism:
Introductory Readings. By Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. New York, N.Y. ; Oxford:
Oxford UP, 1999. N. pag. Print.
 Doane, Mary Ann. "Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator." Film
and Theory: An Anthology. By Robert Stam and Toby Miller. Malden, MA: Blackwell,
2000. N. pag. Print.
 Johnston, Claire. "Women's Cinema as Counter Cinema." Feminism and Cultural Studies.
By Morag Shiach. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. N. pag. Print.