Laura Mulvey and The Male Gaze ("Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema")

Classical Hollywood Narrative:

- Psychologically defined individuals

- struggle to solve a problem or achieve specific goals (often two intertwined: one romantic, one other)

- Enter into conflict with others or with external circumstances

- the character is the principal causal agency, and causality is the unifying principle

- Decisive victory or defeat: problem solved, goals attained, or not.

Psychoanalytic feminism: These universal, unconscious forces can be examined as explanations for all kinds of phenomena, including misogyny and its cultural exponents (ie Hollywood cinema)

Male Gaze, Part A: Looking at women as objects (Women as objects who's purpose is soley to be looked at, as voyeurism, as narrative suspended to enjoy women "performing") When women appear on screen as erotic objects, they often halt narrative progression, and we are encouraged to possess them with our gaze.

Male Gaze, Part B: Identifying with a male protagonist  (...or if female, Identification, rather than looking at women as objects)

The split between  spectacle and narrative supports the man's role as the active one affording the story making things happen. The man controls the film fantasy and also emerges as a representative of power in a further sense, as the bearer of the look of the spectator. This is made possible by structuring the film  around a main controlling figure, often a man, with whom the spectator can identify. (So it is crucial that we have a story that is organized around a male perspective otherwise you wouldn't  have the whole system of narration that Mulvey looks at.)

Identifies like in Lacan's Mirror Stage.. believes the image superior to its' own feeling.

Two ways that Man escapes the threat of castration signified by woman:

- Punishment of women (sadistic voyeurism)

- Over-valuation of woman (fetishistic scopophilia)

 

What is the Female Gaze?

1. Reversal hypothesis: Visual and narrative strategies for depicting men as sexual object for consumption by heterosexual female spectators (ie - Magic Mike)

2. Visual and narrative strategies that represent the visual dimensions of female desire.

3. Visual and narrative strategies that are unique to female filmmakers (directors, cinematographers, screenwriters)

4. Combos of 1-3.

Types of defined "Gazes":

Male (women)
Medical (patients)
Orientalist (Orientalized "others")
Colonial Gaze (the colonized)
Rich Gaze (poor/ working class)
Straight Gaze (LGBTQ+)
White Gaze (people of colour)

Each of these terms, each of these concepts, is trying to formulate a structure of power in which the adjective that comes before "Gaze" (Subject) names an oppressive or dominant aspect of a power structure that might be termed the subject; as opposed to the things (objects) that are oppressed or the people that are oppressed who we might call the object. Mulvey believes that the Academic Discourse of 'the Gaze' is generally about 'harmful structures of power' enacted throught the relation of looker (subject) and looked-at (object). In Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, the gaze is the anxious state of mind that comes with the self-awareness that one can be seen and looked at. The psychoanalytic effect upon the person subjected to the gaze is a loss of autonomy upon becoming aware that he or she is a visible object. theoretically, the gaze is linked to the mirror stage of psychological development, in which a child encountering a mirror learns that he or she has an external appearance.

"...we can not perceive the world and at the same time apprehend a look fastened upon us; it must be either one or the other. This is because to perceive is to look at, and to apprehend a look is not to apprehend a look-as-object in the world: it is the consciousness of being looked at."

- Jean Paul Sartre, "Being and Nothingness"

Semiotics and the Language of Film - Christian Metz

Cinematographic Signification is always more or less MOTIVATED, never arbitrary. 

 1. Narrative cinema only 

2. The shot is not analogous to a word - its' a phrase 

3. Cinema is a language (langage), not a language system (langue) 

4. In Film studies, we still study denotation, not connotation 

Denotation = "the second shot, by virtue of following the first shot, represents or denotes that this is the content of Jimmy Stuarts optical point of view. (Film Code - How does the cinema indicate successivity, precession, temporal breaks, causality, adversive relationships, consequence, spatial proximity or distance? These are questions of film denotation.) 

Connotation = A kind of signification which goes beyond what is immediately communicated as narrative information.

Film is like a language (langage) because editing forms signification along a "syntagmatic chain."

Syntagmatic = of or denoting the relationship between two or more linguistic units used sequentially to make well-formed structures.

....as opposed to its' opposite

Paradigmatic = of or denoting the relationship between a set of linguistic items that form mutually exclusive choices in particular syntactic roles.

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Syntagmatic relationships are the actual relations between words in a sentence and Paradigmatic relationships are the potential relations between the words that could be used.

Syntagmatic structures can create meaning.

What is a Woman?: On Reading the Binary Patriarchal Social System Code.

Laura Mulvey (excerpts):

The paradox of phallocentrism (penis=power or its' lack) in all its' manifestations is that it depends on the image of the castrated woman to give order and meaning to its' world. An idea of woman stands as linchpin to the system; it is her lack that produces the phallus as a symbolic presence; it is her desire to make good the lack that the phallus signifies. Recent writing in "Screen" about psychoanalysis brought out the importance of the representation of the female form in a symbolic order in which, in the last resort, it speaks castration and nothing else. To summarize briefly: the function of woman in forming the patriarchal unconscious is two-fold; the first symbolizes the castration threat by her real absence of a penis and second thereby raises her child into the symbolic [...] She turns her child (penis-baby) into the signifier of her own desire to possess a penis* (the condition, the imagines, of entry into the symbolic).

[*"In the girl's Oedipal scenarios, the father, unlike the castrated mother, stands for the virile capacity of desire itself, which she herself lacks but might reclaim through another man's provision of the opportunity to have a child." - Emily Zakin]

Once this has been achieved [i.e. having a child], her meaning in the process is at an end; it does not last into the world of law and language (symbolic order) except as a memory which oscillates between memory of maternal plenitude and memory of lack. Either [the woman] must gracefully give way to the word, the Name of the father and the Law [i.e. in the symbolic domain**], or else struggle to keep her child (penis-baby) down with her in the half-light of the imaginary.

[**Social structure defined through difference: Fear of castration (men); Search for plenitude (women)]

Woman's desire is subjugated to her image as bearer of the bleeding wound, she can only exist in relation to castration and cannot transcend it [...] Woman 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 through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning.

[***signifier: a sign's physical form (such as a sound, printed word, or image) as distinct from its' meaning. The single condition which characterizes something as a signifier, for Lacan, is that it is inscribed in a system in which it takes on value purely by virtue of its' difference from other elements in the system (This is the essence of structuralism and structural linguistics).]

The idea of woman takes on value in the system of binary gender relations purely by virtue of her anatomical difference from man [man= without lack; woman= with lack][a Binary system 1/0 where the idea of "evil" takes on value in the system of binary relations purely by virtue of its' difference from "good". Good=1=without lack AND Evil=0=lack] This is how psychanalytic structures work. [The idea of "dark" takes on value in the system of binary relations purely by virtue of its' difference from light. LIGHT=1=without lack; DARK=0=lack]