Introduction to Laura Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"

The first in a series of videos on Laura Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" and her theory of the "male gaze," with an emphasis on key principles in psychoanalysis and examples from Rear Window and Vertigo.

Part 1:    • Introduction to Laura Mulvey's "Visua...  

Part 2:    • Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrati...  

Part 3:    • Laura Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and N...  

Part 4:    • Laura Mulvey and the Female Gaze  \

Part 5:    • Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrati...  

*Corrections:

1. The video suggests that for Mulvey the erotic display of women in Hollywood film necessarily halts the flow of narrative. But upon closer inspection to the text, it's more likely the case that in principle erotic display for Mulvey halts narrative flow because it is spectacular in nature, but mainstream Hollywood cinema successfully integrates it into the narrative flow by having female characters display themselves in the context of a romantic subplot or, more broadly, as the object of interest by a male protagonist. In other words, while Mulvey writes "[the woman's] visual presence tends to work against the development of a story line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation," she also says "Mainstream film neatly combined spectacle and narrative." Because of this, the examples from Vertigo that dramatically elongate Scottie's moments of looking might be seen by Mulvey as reflecting upon the conditions of erotic display--i.e. how it inherently works counter to narrative--that more mainstream film conventionally hides. This reinforces a point made in Part 3 of the series, which is that Vertigo is less a straightforward example of the cinematic structures that Mulvey argues exist than it is a reflection or meditation on them.

2. The video suggests (around the 10 minute mark) that the convention of men visually objectifying women in Hollywood film is a means of alleviating the castration anxiety that the image of woman triggers for male viewers. This is inaccurate, as the text doesn't suggest this. What the text does suggest about castration anxiety is more accurately reflected in Part 2 of the video series, which is that the objectifying look at displayed woman itself triggers castration anxiety, which films alleviate through two means: voyeuristic sadism and fetishistic scopophilia.