Laura Mulvey - Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema - notes and questions

1. Notes on 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' by Laura Mulvey
This is one of the more complicated ideas we will think about. The original
article (subtitled 'A Political Use of Psychoanalysis') is much more advanced
and complicated than we need to worry about, but there are ideas within it
that are very useful. It is particularly relevant to work about messages and
values - representations - especially in relation to gender issues.
Mulvey is writing about films, but what she says is relevant to all visual media.
She is talking about the power and pleasure of looking (which has a name in
psychoanalytical theory - scopophilia). She says...
1. There is pleasure to be had in seeing things and, in seeing them, also
understanding and to an extent controlling them (or at least deciding
what they mean).
2. This comes from deeply embedded psychological processes, especially
what one writer (called Jacques Lacan) called 'The Mirror Phase' of a
young child's development. This happens when a very young child
recognises his/her reflection in a mirror as both him/herself and
something that isn't actually him/herself but only an image of
him/herself. It's the beginning of 'symbolic understanding' - seeing that
things can represent other things without actually being them. (And it's
about more than just mirrors - it also means that the very young child
sees the world and understand that it is full of things that might
represent and mean other things - again developing the idea of
symbolic understanding. It's about understanding connotation as well
as denotation.)
3. Cinema, by its very nature, highlights the pleasures in looking and
making meaning. It is all about the imaginary relationships that exist
between the characters in the films we watch, but also between film-
makers and their cast and the films they are making, between the
characters and the actors, between the audience and the characters and
perhaps between the audience and the actors/director. It's about the
idea of the film as being 'real-and-not-real' - being what it is and what it
means.
4. This idea links up closely with ideas about gender. Cinema is usually a
very stereotypically gendered thing - men are brave and muscular and
do things and women are visually attractive and submissive and have
things done to them. Men stereotypically have narrative agency - they
are the characters within the narrative who make things happen.

2. Women stereotypically don't have narrative agency - there are there to
be admired/desired/rescued, they are there as the reward, they are there
to be looked at and men are there to look at them.
5. And there are interesting 'levels' of this look that take us back to the
mirror phase - because women are being looked at for pleasure by a) the
male characters and b) the camera and c) the audience, and even if
some of the audience are women (or gay men) the look is itself gendered
masculine, because it's about more than looking, it's about asserting
power and controlling meaning and these things are stereotypically
masculine. It gets described, in film theory, as 'the male gaze'.
6. And just to push you one stage further, the psychoanalytical basis for all
of this, both from Lacan and from Freud, is that women's role is to
'carry' meaning (just as their role is to carry a child) whereas men's role
is to make meaning (just as it is their role to provide the child) … and
even further... psychoanalysts being what they are, this in turn looks
back to the idea of male power and female weakness coming from the
presence or absence of the phallus. There are other critics - especially
feminist critics - who think Freud and his followers were talking
nonsense.
This is relevant and useful to us because it's all part of reinforcing how much
mainstream media relies on gender stereotypes and about how it's not just the
gendered characters but the underlying process of audiences looking at media
that forces different characters into these stereotypical roles.
Questions
1. What do you understand by 'The mirror phase'?
2. How is this relevant to looking at the media?
3. Explain the point about gender roles in films and narrative agency.
4. What is the male gaze? Why is it male?
5. What different levels of the male gaze exist in cinema?
6. How might all of this stuff help you write interesting things about how
media texts communicate messages and values and make meaning for
audiences?