A Critical Analysis of Scopophilia in Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”
Elizabeth Weber
2
In “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey discusses the psychoanalytic concept of scopophilia as applied to twentieth century Hollywood films. Influenced by the ideas of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, she views scopophilia through a phallocentric, heteronormative lens. Rather than conceiving of scopophilia as merely something that “arises from pleasure in using another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight,”1 or the state that occurs when “looking itself is a source of pleasure,”2 she expands upon Freud’s theory, and thereby limits it. According to Mulvey, Freud “associated scopophilia with taking other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze.”3 To Mulvey, however, something more is at work: oppressive gendering and patriarchal control. She characterizes scopophilia as “essentially active,” a state in which the controlling male gaze objectifies and limits the passive woman on the screen, who “then stands in patriarchal culture as signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his phantasies and obsessions,” restricted to her role as the “bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning.”4 Through scopophilia, therefore, “mainstream film coded the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order.”5 This type of pleasure, as Mulvey understands it, is a tool heterosexual men use to control and harm heterosexual women. In answer to this troubling tendency of cinema, Mulvey proposes as a solution the end of the traditional narrative film. The viability of this solution depends upon three things. First, it depends upon Mulvey comprehensively reading traditional narrative film. Second, it depends upon Mulvey correctly assessing the capabilities of non-narrative film. Finally, Mulvey must thoroughly account for the forms of control scopophilia imposes and upon whom they are imposed. The restrictive conception of scopophilia that leads Mulvey to suggest non-narrative
3
film as the end to the problem of a controlling gaze is the very reason for her proposed solution’s inadequacy. Immediately, Mulvey establishes that her starting point is the “straight, socially established interpretation of sexual difference.”6 Here exists a problem. Consumers of mass culture include many people who do not fit into this category. The narrative Hollywood film is not viewed only by white, conformist heterosexuals. What is socially established as the norm excludes a portion of the audience who may also be marginalized, in addition to the heterosexual (white) women Mulvey lists as examples, such as Kim Novak and Marlene Dietrich. These people may be considered to belong to a subculture, a counterculture, or mainstream culture, if not some combination thereof. In Fashion as Communication, Malcolm Barnard posits that “Freud’s claims are intended to apply to all cultures, whereas Mulvey is not concerned with other cultures.”7 Yet, people outside of mainstream culture are also consumers of these films. How do they figure into this equation of control and domination, either as part of the audience or when they occasionally appear on the screen? Does this represent a misuse of Freudian theory by Mulvey? In his book, Roll Over, Adorno, Robert Miklitsch identifies what he calls a “blind spot” when Mulvey fails to account for the “racial gaze.”8 The role of the African American in most narrative Hollywood films had been, for most of the twentieth century, either nonexistent or a crude stereotype. Persons of Asian heritage, indigenous populations, and many other ethnic groups have suffered under a controlling gaze as well. Surely these people have been rendered passive on the screen for sexual or other gratification by both men and women, but there is not a word about this from Mulvey. Having limited her idea of scopophilia to something almost solely defined by its genderedness, she cannot apply her non-narrative solution to the problems of these similarly-oppressed groups.
4
Furthermore, says Miklitsch, because “scopophilia for Mulvey is a very particular kind of perversion, a gendered perversion,” Mulvey is “invoking the populist, lowest-commondenominator reaction.”9 This limits her understanding of narrative film, so that she may not read them accurately or comprehensively. Assuming that the directors whose work she cites, such as Alfred Hitchcock, fall into this “lowest common denominator” predisposes her to a reading of these films that confirms her theory regardless of what is on the screen. For example, in her essay “A Closer Look at Scopophilia,” which appears in the Marshall Deutelbaum and Leland Poague volume A Hitchcock Reader, Marian E. Keane states that in Mulvey’s reading of Vertigo, “the film’s specific framings, lines of dialog, and authorship are neglected and lost.”10 Much of the support Mulvey provides for her ideas appear to confirm Keane’s assessment. High on the list of misread aspects of Hitchcock’s Vertigo stand the issues of punishment, action, and suffering. “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 phantasy on to the female form which is styled accordingly,” Mulvey says.11 She continues, “The male protagonist is free to command the stage, a stage of spatial illusion in which he articulates the look and creates the action,” a freedom he uses for “punishment or saving of the guilty object”— the woman.12 In other words, it is the woman who suffers, who is punished, and not the man. In Vertigo, however, Keane identifies something Mulvey misses. “Chief among the features of Stewart’s photogenesis,” she says, “is his capacity for suffering.”13 Because Mulvey’s fetishistic, narrowly-proscribed version of scopophilia is “too extended or metaphorical to bear the weight she puts upon it,” Mulvey can only see “the Stewart character as possessing, brandishing, and relishing a position of active power in relation to the woman” despite the fact that “he suffers throughout Vertigo.”14 It is therefore clear that Mulvey’s failure to read the film correctly is a
5
result of what Keane calls a “prejudicial understanding” of the characters.15 This denies Stewart’s suffering and passivity as well as Novak’s active aspect. It is Stewart’s character who is always denied his desire; it is Novak’s character who takes control and leaps to her death rather than maintain the passive role of scopophilic object. In this light, Mulvey’s scopophilia limits both the male and the female figures upon the screen, forcing them into gendered roles Hitchcock never gave them. Continuing with this example, Vertigo also proves false Mulvey’s claim that in narrative cinema the camera itself is the male gaze, promoting the interests and possessive desires of the male protagonist at the expense of the female’s interests and desires. To Mulvey, this function of the camera allows “identification with him,” and “through participation in his power, the spectator can indirectly possess her too.”16 Keane, on the other hand, sees Hitchcock’s camera in this film as mostly “unacknowledged and sexless.”17 It performs both active, dynamic maneuvers and passive, lingering ones, so that if “sexless” does not quite describe the movements, “hermaphroditic” or “androgynous” might. Whatever word one applies, the truth remains that “the camera possesses both active and passive possibilities.”18 Additionally, through the camera’s eye we can see that Hitchcock is “allying himself with and privileging the woman’s story in Vertigo.”19 The viewer pities her for what the male protagonist is doing to her through what Hitchcock reveals to be none other than the very fetishistic, voyeuristic scopophilia Mulvey despises. Keane even goes so far as to say that the male character’s objectification of the female character is “condemned” by Hitchcock’s camera.20 Mulvey never sees any of this, however, because of her theoretical blinders. Because Mulvey’s views are rooted in “an understanding of human sexuality that competes with Freud’s on a number of levels,” she misapplies his, and Hitchcock’s, ideas.21 She
6
does not see that “what is shown to be brutal in Vertigo is the nature of human desire and need, not some function of a particular phase of male development whose correction it is fairly simple to imagine.”22 If Mulvey has misread this film, which essentially agrees with her assessment of scopophilia, as emblematic of the degrading scopophilia she discusses, what else in narrative film has she misread? If Mulvey cannot properly assess narrative cinema, can she posit that nonnarrative cinema will free the screen of scopophilic sins? One way to examine the potential veracity of such a claim is scrutiny of existing nonnarrative films. Upon such examination, Mulvey’s view of non-narrative cinema as a way to free the viewer and the camera of degradation and oppression does not hold. One notoriously scopophilic non-narrative, non-Hollywood film is Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising. In it, Anger presents a series of vignettes featuring members of a motorcycle club. One is shown obsessively stroking his cat as he watches James Dean on television, while another polishes his motorcycle with masturbatory gestures. Anger’s camera shows us bare buttocks, genitals packed into tight denim, and men who are so alike that they can be said to have no individual identity, only group identity. Robbed of individual desire as they are, rendered into sexual objects as they are, and surrounded by fetishism, these men and their motorcycles simply replace the woman in Mulvey’s scopophilia equation. Here, it is simply not true that “the male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification.” In “Pop, Queer, or Fascist,” Juan Suarez’s essay in Wheeler Winston Dixon and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster’s Experimental Cinema, The Film Reader, Suarez reveals that in fact, the bikers are “placed in what Laura Mulvey’s characterization of visual pleasure has defined as a feminine position.”23 With the “emphasis on masquerade and appearances,” they become “more presentational than representational.”24 The direct parallel between Anger’s bikers and
7
Mulvey’s passive women grows obvious when “several sequences in Scorpio Rising show characters constructing their appearance before the camera, turning themselves into spectacles that tend to freeze the narrative flow.”25 Mulvey states that “the presence of woman is an indispensable 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,” and refers to a woman’s “to-be-looked-at-ness.”26 Viewers of Anger’s film may swap “woman” for “biker” and end up with a statement just as accurate. Yet, Scorpio Rising does women no favors either, for it essentially omits them from its world for the sake of “misogyny and emphasis on male fellowship.”27 Anger did not need to include women, for these men are, as David E. James states in his book The Most Typical AvantGarde, both “erotic and thanatotic.”28 They are each other’s audience, as well as each other’s spectacle. Here, “pleasure and pain, beauty and ugliness are complementary psychic states.”29 Anger did not need a woman to become “the other,” for in his camera’s eye, any person is subject to a scopophilic synthesis that renders them simultaneously the watcher and the watched, objectifier and objectified. Conclusively, Mulvey’s proposed answer to the problem of the dark side of scopophilia is insufficient. Her ideas do not meet the three criteria outlined as necessary supports for her thesis. She does not correctly read the narrative Hollywood films she discusses. She does not clearly grasp the depth and breadth of non-narrative cinema’s potential. Also, she does not account for the multiple ways scopophilia and the oppressive gaze can marginalize various groups. This lack stems from her specific interpretation and application of Freudian/Lacanian scopophilia. Because she views scopophilia exclusively through the lens of heterosexist, gendered power, Mulvey misses the larger picture and suggests a solution to only a part of the problem. While useful, her
8
perspective in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema� should be only one of many considered when moving beyond theory and formulating praxis.
1
Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 4. http://imlportfolio.usc.edu/ctcs505/mulveyVisualPleasureNarrativeCinema.pdf. AccessedMay 2010. Ibid, 2. Ibid, 3. 4 Ibid, 1. 5 Ibid, 2. 6 Ibid, 1. 7 Malcolm Barnard, Fashion as Communication (New York: Routledge Press, 2002), 121. 8 Robert Miklitsch, Roll Over, Adorno: Critical Theory, Pop Culture, Audiovisual Media (Syracuse: SyracuseUniversity New York Press,2006), 96. 9 Ibid, 94. 10 Marian E. Keane, “A Closer Look at Scopophilia,” A Hitchcock Reader, ed. Marshall Deutelbaum and Leland Poague (Ames: Wiley-Blackwell, 1986), 239. 11 Mulvey, 4. 12 Ibid, 6. 13 Keane, 233. 14 Ibid, 236. 15 Ibid, 236. 16 Mulvey, 6. 17 Keane, 245. 18 Ibid, 239. 19 Ibid, 242. 20 Ibid, 246. 21 Ibid, 239. 22 Ibid, 236. 23 Juan A. Suarez, “Pop, Queer, or Fascist,” Experimental Cinema: The Film Reader, ed. Wheeler Winston Dixon and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster (New York:Routledge Press, 2002), 122. 24 Ibid, 118. 25 Ibid, 118. 26 Mulvey, 5. 27 Suarez, 125. 28 David E. James,The Most Typical Avant-Garde (Berkely: University of California Press,2005), 197. 29 Ibid, 373. 2 3