Mulvey Pleasure and Narrative cinema

Mulvey Pleasure and Narrative cinema.

Mulvey states that film fascinates us and uses psychoanalysis to 'discover where and how the fascination of film is reinforced by pre-existing patterns of fascination already at work within the individual subject'. Film allows us to engage our emotions through the images that are being portrayed on the screen which can alter and or manipulate what the audience gains visual pleasure from by encoding different themes and visual cues into the text. Mulvey suggests that visual pleasure is gained by the audience by allowing them to indulge in scopophilia where the most pleasure is by looking at the human form in most instances that of being a woman which leads onto the male gaze theory. Laura Mulvey states that ‘the cinema offers a number of possible pleasures’. The idea of scopophilia allows an individual to indulge in a childlike way of looking without being judged or told of for staring at another individual. 

    

In Hollywood and mainstream narrative, it often encodes the dominant patriarchal order where men are in charge and woman are objects of visual pleasure therefore cinema uses scopophilia of the human form to allow the active male audience to engage in a childlike looking of a passive female, as Laura Mulvey states that’s ‘pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female’, without being bound by social constructs.  The male gaze makes the audience identify with the male protagonist so that both male and female audiences view the female on the screen as an object of visual pleasure rather than a character that is going to help the narrative develop and move on. Mulvey describes ‘woman as image, man as bearer of the look’ along with the fact that women in film are supposed to ‘connote to-be-looked-at-ness’. This means that filmmakers encode females into scenes to offer sexual gratification to the male spectator which helps the audience gain visual pleasure from seeing the female as a sexual object and nothing more. 

However, using the male gaze to allow the audience to indulge in scopophilia may also lead to fetishist scopophilia where the image of the woman on the screen also connotes a threat to the male spectator that needs to be relieved in order to enjoy the narrative and gain visual pleasure. From this there are only two ways in which the male spectator can escape the fear of femininity, the first being to investigate the woman, which can mean ‘transforming it into satisfying in itself’. This means to take away her mystery which can be done by fragmentation of her where the audience sees different parts of her body in an extremely sexualised way, which can lead to the audience no longer seeing her as a treat but more as an object of pleasure as they no longer see her as a whole but rather different body parts. Suddenly the woman is no longer a whole but rather sections of a body, little objects for enjoyment. 

The other way that the male spectator can escape the fear of femininity is by being denied castration which therefore portrays the female as a reassuring fetish rather than a dangerous character. This means that when a female character is portraying a potentially dangerous or threatening character such as a female superhero or supervillain, the filmmakers will then turn ‘the represented figure itself into a fetish so that it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous’. This can be done by placing them in outfit’s that leave little to the imagination such as characters like Wonder Woman or Harley Quinn. By doing this the male spectator no longer has to be fearful of castration but rather indulge in sexual gratification as the female character is turned back into a sexualised object.

The male gaze is used to ‘describe the cinematic angle of a heterosexual male on a female character’ and can be split into 3 parts, the first being the camera gaze, which means that the camera may linger on a females body either in a long shot, or multiple close ups allowing the audience to indulge longer in looking. The second is the character gaze which is where the audience sees the characters within the scene indulging in scopophilia themselves therefore making it okay for the audience to also do this. Finally, there is the audience gaze that with a combination of the camera and character gaze they feel it’s okay to sexualise the female on the screen and also indulge in a childlike way of looking the female. 

References 

•    Original essay, Laura Mulvey (1999) Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Film Theory and Criticism, New York, Oxford UP
• Psychology Today (6^thNovember 2017) (online) available from https://www.psychologytoday.com(Accessed 7^thDecember 2018)