I read these four essays with great interest, very much enjoying their perspectives and, as so often, looking for clues to the secret of the strange longevity of “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” What these essays share is a welcome understanding that, whether or not “Visual Pleasure” still has value, it has to be located in its historical context: It could not have been written either much earlier or much later. It should be read as a document of its time, not for abiding theoretical value.
As I wondered about the question of longevity, all the essays seemed to suggest that “Visual Pleasure” was particularly useful as a provocation; it raises questions that still have resonance even as the assumptions behind them are refuted. At some point in the 1980s, I realized that my essay had found its way onto university reading lists, and I remember that I fantasized about a ban that would stop anyone under a certain age from reading it. As it happens, these four responses all bear witness to the continuing life of “Visual Pleasure” in undergraduate cinema studies and also to its continuing ability, at the advanced age of 40, to annoy and confuse. It has preserved some of its capacity to provoke, and that must be valuable.
The four responses illustrate one particularly wide gap between the essay’s argument and the way it is understood today. In 1975, I had in mind a spectator who left identity behind as he or she entered the darkened theater, so that the experience of a Hollywood film (this is of the high-studio-system period) was specifically unlike real life. The opposition of “voyeurism” and “exhibitionism” was, to my mind, infinitely more schematic on the screen than it ever was in Freud and, equally, infinitely less complex than in life. And the use of the pronoun “he” for all spectators was intended to draw attention to a homogenizing, universalizing mode of address: As actual social identities and cultures were, for complex social and political reasons, by and large repressed by Hollywood, there was little point in lamenting their absence. For instance, to address the question of race and its repression in this nearly apartheid cinema would have demanded a different polemic, a different polemicist, and a much more historical, and thus a more serious, argument.
This was a cinema I could write about with confidence precisely because I knew it well and, indeed, loved it.
Toward the beginning of “Visual Pleasure,” I said that I was leaving aside Hollywood’s irony and self-consciousness, indicating that this was a cinema I could write about with confidence precisely because I knew it well and, indeed, loved it. Although I always argue that the essay spoke for and through its time, retrospectively I see that it was also rooted in my personal relationship to Hollywood. As I suggested, perhaps implicitly, in “Afterthoughts on Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1981), I enjoyed the “transvestite clothes” that Hollywood offered the female spectator, and I enjoyed the visual pleasure involved in the extraordinary ways in which the female star as spectacle fused with cinema as spectacle. But feminism detached me from that particular screen, and, whether I liked it or not, I became a thoughtful rather than an absorbed spectator.
Recently digital technology transformed my mode of spectatorship once again. I found myself going back to the Hollywood movies of “Visual Pleasure” and their contemporaries. With the ability to still the moving image and to repeat sequences (the “delayed cinema” in my book Death 24x a Second: Stillness in the Moving Image), I watched fascinated as I, rather than the male star, controlled the action, as I undermined the linearity of the narrative. I could, indeed, hold him in the stilled image for voyeuristic contemplation, just as the female star had so often been displayed as spectacle. From this kind of spectatorship, anyone can enjoy the erotics of the cinematic “gaze,” regardless of gender or even individual sexual proclivity. Of course, this kind of spectatorship leads to other, more abstract, ideas; but Hollywood cinema can now be materialized on the screen with more-nuanced images of gender and more-complex concepts of narrative than I had visualized in 1975.
Laura Mulvey is a filmmaker and professor in the department of film, media, and cultural studies at Birkbeck College, University of London.
