Freud, Hollywood and the male gaze

My name is Laura Mulvey.

I write about the cinema and over the course of  about 50 years, I’ve published a number of books,

many articles, essays etc. on very  varying aspects of film. But in 1975,

I wrote a short essay called ‘Visual Pleasure  and Narrative Cinema’. As time passed,

‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ came to  be very much my most well-known essay, provoking

discussion, debate, some disagreement. But also,

its influence persisted and spread beyond film  studies into other areas of the humanities.

Over the decades, the cinema changed, technologies  changed, new digital formats and viewing platforms

transformed the ways in which films were consumed.  Spectatorship was revolutionised. As I began to

write about these new developments, I  felt certain that my old 1975 essay,

written in the days of darkened film theatres and  the silver screen, would gradually be retired to

become an archaeological object of theoretical  and historical interest. But on the contrary,

over the last decade, the idea of ‘a male  gaze’ has more or less entered cultural

and even ordinary language. And, very  often, the term is related back to my

‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ essay.  I welcome the way that this phrase represents

a new generation’s critique of mainstream  film – its day-to-day sexism, the continued

difficulties faced by women directors,  the lack of good female parts and so on.

This critique is, to my mind, long overdue and  I’m gratified that the concept ‘male gaze’ has

proved to be useful to a new generation. But  it's also become rather a cliché – overused,

over-generalised, an identity rather than a  concept. So, I’d like to use this British Academy

10-Minute Talk to return to 1970s feminism, in  the hope of recovering some of the original ideas

that inspired my essay. I am going to use three  questions that have been put to me so often by

bewildered readers – some feminist, some film  theorists, and some others. First question:

why Freud? Second question: why Hollywood? Third  question: what about the ‘female spectator’?

First, a brief summary of my argument. ‘Visual  Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ analysed the

sexual politics of Hollywood film and argued,  unsurprisingly, that the imbalance of power

between men and women in society was reflected in  an imbalance of power between men and women on the

screen. But, as the cinema is a supremely visual  medium, these gender inequalities were necessarily

inscribed into the visual style of cinema itself,  and how its stories were structured. It was not

simply a matter of content, but of film form.  Female performers, that is the female stars, were

visualised with all the spectacular attributes  of the cinema itself, but also highly sexualised

and endowed with a quality that I called  ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’. The male performers,

the male stars, tended, on the other hand,  to control the story and, particularly,

responded to the ‘woman as spectacle’ with  a dynamic, active and erotic gaze. Finally,

I argued that this ‘division of labour’ on the  screen was transferred to a film’s spectators,

playing to an assumed male visual pleasure.  The film’s spectators, and this is important,

either male or female, couldn’t avoid a  way of seeing that was produced by the

language of film itself, its characters’  point of view, the framing of figures,

the female star’s privileged lighting, colour,  camera angle etc. And I then interpreted these

visual tropes though psychoanalytic theory –  by and large, Freudian – in order to decipher

and make visible the presence of the patriarchal  psyche in this particular popular culture.

First question: why Freud?

Certainly, and at least to my mind, the  term ‘male gaze’ seemed to have discarded

a psychoanalytic frame of reference –  the mainspring of my original argument.

This is in many ways understandable:  psychoanalysis is theoretically challenging,

socially disturbing – it disrupts  certainty and confuses identity.

In the 1970s, feminists turned to Freudian  theories that we found illuminated the patriarchal

psyche, theories that made its unconscious  symptoms visible, that deciphered the way,

and why, women, their bodies and their sexuality  were distorted and oppressed by male fantasy and

male psychic pain. Freud had little to say  about the female psyche, but his analyses

of the male psyche were a revelation for  me and for many feminists. For instance,

my ideas about the representation of women  were strongly influenced by Freud’s analyses

of the male castration complex, as he discovered  through his patients and through his cultural

observations that the female, penis-less  body could be fearful and repulsive to man.

As Freud put it: ‘To decapitate equals to  castrate. The terror of the Medusa is thus

the terror of castration that is linked to the  sight of something. The hair upon the Medusa’s

head is frequently represented in works of art  in the form of snakes, and those once again are

derived from the castration complex. It is  a remarkable fact that, however frightening

they may be in themselves, they nevertheless  serve actually as a mitigation of the horror,

for they replace the penis, the absence of which  is the cause of the horror. This is the technical

rule according to which a multiplication  of penis symbols signifies castration.’

Anyway, castration anxiety protects  itself with fetish objects. Just as

beautiful objects could distract the anxious  eye from the truth of sexual difference,

so the female body could be adorned to create  a mask of surface, an exquisite exterior,

a defence against a disturbing and  uncertain interior. I came to realise

that these fetishistic images of women were  not relegated to a perverse underworld,

but were pervasive in mass media, circulating  images that were not of ‘women’, but of what

‘woman’ had come to represent for collective  male fantasy: fear and desire intertwined.

Furthermore, I applied Freud’s analysis of  the sexual drives and their binary structure

to the rigid, binary structure  of gender in Hollywood film:

the terms ‘voyeurism’ vs ‘exhibitionism’, ‘sadism’  vs ‘masochism’. ‘Voyeurism’, for instance, would,

psychoanalytically speaking, be a component  of the sexual drive in both men and women

but in cultural representations,  most visible in Hollywood cinema,

it is bound necessarily to being an  attribute of the masculine.

Second question: why Hollywood?

The American film industry, the most powerful  in the world, was not only highly regulated

economically but highly regulated ideologically.  In its studio system days, strict rules governed

production chains and hierarchies like a factory  system, while culturally, movie production

followed rules of repetition and formula – genres  repeated formulaic narrative structures, stars

returned time and again to the screen more as  ‘themselves’ than any fictional character. In many

ways, repetition and formula, as in folk tales,  were a source of fascination and pleasure. To me,

this was a cinema that invested its aesthetic  energies in the beauty of the cinema itself, with

the greatest technicians, the most sophisticated  technologies and some outstanding directors.

Under the influence of the women’s movement  and feminism, my way of seeing these films

changed and I began to reflect on Hollywood as a  machine that revolved around the image of woman

as spectacle – an exploitation and an oppression.  But then, I came to see Hollywood as a rich source

material for critique of the patriarchal psyche.  The Hays Code imposed censorship on the studios,

all scripts had to be approved before filming  – eliminating any sexually explicit innuendo;

but the movies themselves were fuelled by  sex, embodied in the star system. Again,

as in folk tales, these formulaic Hollywood  movies revolved around gender roles, very often

‘about’ gender roles, realised through a visual  language of sexuality and eroticism. As I saw it,

the psychoanalytic concepts of voyeurism  and fetishism structured this language,

affecting not only the image of female but of the  male star. Due to a taboo on homosexual desire,

the spectacle of male and female sexuality had to  find an inverse balance – the male star, protected

from spectacular exhibition, he drove the action  and he controlled the flow of narrative, while the

female star attracted the desiring gaze, her own  spectacular image emblematic of the erotic.

The third question: a female gaze?

As the idea of a male gaze has gained currency,  so has the idea of an alternative. I’m quite often

asked whether I think the idea of a ‘female gaze’  works theoretically or in practice. To my mind,

simple role reversals are usually problematic,  to exchange one kind of power or domination for

its opposite perpetuates a system that  revolves around power and domination.

So, I have turned towards another idea.  Turning toward myths and folk tales and

even lady detectives to associate a woman’s way  of looking with curiosity – the desire to know,

to see with the mind’s eye. On the one hand, this  might be a desexualisation, a repression of the

element of desire in the look, on the other hand,  curiosity allows a moment to stop and think about

these questions, to reflect, to decipher, to see  unfamiliar things through defamiliarised eyes.

For its whole history, cinema by and large has  been produced by men. That is, the ideas and

imagination of 50 per cent of the population. Now,  more and more women are beginning to make films

and beginning to tell stories that would not be  available to, relevant to, or even of interest to

a patriarchal culture. Perhaps times are changing.  Perhaps patriarchy is on the retreat when women

can find the means for poetic and creative  expression. From my long engagement with cinema,

and in spite of the many films made by men  that I love and treasure, I feel an immense

curiosity about women’s visual imagination and  what it might open up for us. I imagine this

imagination as driven by curiosity about what has  hitherto been mute and ineffable in women’s lives.

I would like to end with a couple of examples. Two  recent films by women have explored, to my mind,

with extraordinary imaginative curiosity,  relations between mothers and daughters:

Joanna Hogg’s ‘The Eternal Daughter’  and Céline Sciamma’s ‘Petite Maman’.

But it’s also worth remembering that curiosity

played a key part in Barbie’s  desire to see the ‘real’ world.