With close to 9,000 citations in Google Scholar, Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” stands as one of the 20th century’s most generative essays.
Notice that I said generative, not seminal. Mulvey’s essay belongs to a political moment that taught us to beware of the phallocentrism that equates power and influence with sperm.
Indeed, the standard story of human biological reproduction, as the anthropologist Emily Martin has shown, runs something like the Hollywood films that Mulvey analyzes: a heroic, active, desiring male sperm makes its way toward the passive, static female egg, which has no choice but to be penetrated.
Put a wig, some lipstick, and a feather boa on that egg, give her a glamorous close-up, and you have classic Hollywood cinema, without the dance numbers.
Like many foundational essays, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” has often been simplified to the point of distortion. Many readers forget Mulvey’s careful distinctions between imaginary and symbolic, ideal ego and ego-ideal, fetishistic scopophilia and sadism. They find it hard to hold on to her dialectical approach, her insistence that film, like the psyche, permits opposites to coexist, so that watching a film, for example, can simultaneously undermine and reinforce our sense of self.
The phrase “male gaze” appears in the essay only twice but has come to encapsulate its argument. Men look, women “connote to-be-looked-at-ness.” Men are active bearers of a “controlling” gaze; women are passive spectacles “displayed for the gaze and enjoyment of men.” Men’s bodies become invisible, because “man is reluctant to gaze on his exhibitionist like.” Women “bear the burden of sexual objectification,” although — the dialectic again — the feminine icon “threatens” male mastery as much as she reinforces it.
At what point does a theory topple under the weight of its counterexamples? When I first read “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” in college, around 1984, I immediately recognized the landscape it described. In movies and advertisements, on city streets and at fraternity parties, I saw men looking at women and women arranging themselves to be looked at.
Yet, as a female bearer of a gaze taking all this in, I also failed to recognize myself in Mulvey’s essay. That was perhaps to be expected, since Mulvey was describing, and ultimately challenging, women’s alienation from culture and from power. But she seemed to have either overstated the case, suggesting that women did not exist as spectators, or to have implied that, at least as far as cinema went, women could only inhabit the male gaze.
I found the absence of the female spectator from Mulvey’s schema especially confusing because in 1975, when her essay was published, I was a 9-year-old girl who wanted to be a ballerina and was obsessed with female movie stars. I collected images of Elizabeth Taylor, Vivien Leigh, and Greta Garbo and spent hours gazing at them. I knew there was something excessive about my interest, so I kept it somewhat secret, but that only made it more intense. I knew that I wasn’t just seeking out models whose eyeliner techniques I could emulate; I was aroused by these images of female beauty.
Mulvey’s essay, with its firm distinction between identification and desire, made no room for a 9-year-old lesbian who desperately wanted to be a feminine icon and also wanted to have one. As the decades passed and scholars continued to respond to the essay, more counterexamples accumulated. What about gay visual culture, which had no problem with male exhibitionism? What about women who looked at men, a phenomenon that existed long before Magic Mike? What about female action heroes who took control of their narratives, albeit while wearing tight-fitting leotards with plunging necklines? What about the limits placed on men of color as bearers of the look, especially when directed at white women? What about women of color denied the limited privilege of becoming erotic spectacles? What about heterosexuals who took pleasure in looking at people of the same sex?
And yet, 40 years later, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” still resonates with students, and still resonates with me. Men and women remain unequal in their relationship to vision, visibility, and action. Reductive models of sexual difference continue to relegate the amazing variety of what people actually do, think, and feel to the shadowy realm of the exception.
“Visual Pleasure” sometimes seems to reproduce the normalization it describes because it focuses on a very conventional form. The essay’s limitations are real, but they also reflect real limitations; four decades later, we cannot celebrate the essay’s anniversary by declaring it an artifact of a distant, bygone era. But we can celebrate by returning to the essay itself. I think you will find, as I did, that just as lived experiences of masculinity and femininity are much weirder than the Hollywood versions, so too is this subtle essay richer and stranger than the image we have made of it.
Sharon Marcus is dean of the humanities at Columbia University and author of Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton, 2007).
