> Skip to content
FEATURED:
  • The Evolution of Race in Admissions
Sign In
  • News
  • Advice
  • The Review
  • Data
  • Current Issue
  • Virtual Events
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Career Resources
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Career Resources
Sign In
  • News
  • Advice
  • The Review
  • Data
  • Current Issue
  • Virtual Events
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Career Resources
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Career Resources
  • News
  • Advice
  • The Review
  • Data
  • Current Issue
  • Virtual Events
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Career Resources
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Career Resources
Sign In
ADVERTISEMENT
The Review
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Show more sharing options
Share
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Facebook
  • Email
  • Copy Link URLCopied!
  • Print

A Spectator Who Left Identity Behind

By  Laura Mulvey
December 13, 2015
Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not. Laura Mulvey’s fundamental insight — that film cameras, characters, and spectators focus on women’s looks in a distorting way — speaks to many of us.
Warner Brothers, Photofest
Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not. Laura Mulvey’s fundamental insight — that film cameras, characters, and spectators focus on women’s looks in a distorting way — speaks to many of us.

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.

We’re sorry. Something went wrong.

We are unable to fully display the content of this page.

The most likely cause of this is a content blocker on your computer or network. Please make sure your computer, VPN, or network allows javascript and allows content to be delivered from c950.chronicle.com and chronicle.blueconic.net.

Once javascript and access to those URLs are allowed, please refresh this page. You may then be asked to log in, create an account if you don't already have one, or subscribe.

If you continue to experience issues, contact us at 202-466-1032 or help@chronicle.com

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.

The Male Gaze in Retrospect

6216-gaze-sidebar

In 1975, Laura Mulvey brought a new perspective to cinema studies. Susan Bordo, Jack Halberstam, Toby Miller, Sharon Marcus, and Mulvey herself consider its impact. Read their essays.

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.

ADVERTISEMENT

Laura Mulvey is a filmmaker and professor in the department of film, media, and cultural studies at Birkbeck College, University of London.

A version of this article appeared in the December 18, 2015, issue.
Read other items in this The Male Gaze in Retrospect package.
We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
  • Explore
    • Get Newsletters
    • Letters
    • Free Reports and Guides
    • Blogs
    • Virtual Events
    • Chronicle Store
    • Find a Job
    Explore
    • Get Newsletters
    • Letters
    • Free Reports and Guides
    • Blogs
    • Virtual Events
    • Chronicle Store
    • Find a Job
  • The Chronicle
    • About Us
    • DEI Commitment Statement
    • Write for Us
    • Talk to Us
    • Work at The Chronicle
    • User Agreement
    • Privacy Policy
    • California Privacy Policy
    • Site Map
    • Accessibility Statement
    The Chronicle
    • About Us
    • DEI Commitment Statement
    • Write for Us
    • Talk to Us
    • Work at The Chronicle
    • User Agreement
    • Privacy Policy
    • California Privacy Policy
    • Site Map
    • Accessibility Statement
  • Customer Assistance
    • Contact Us
    • Advertise With Us
    • Post a Job
    • Advertising Terms and Conditions
    • Reprints & Permissions
    • Do Not Sell My Personal Information
    Customer Assistance
    • Contact Us
    • Advertise With Us
    • Post a Job
    • Advertising Terms and Conditions
    • Reprints & Permissions
    • Do Not Sell My Personal Information
  • Subscribe
    • Individual Subscriptions
    • Institutional Subscriptions
    • Subscription & Account FAQ
    • Manage Newsletters
    • Manage Your Account
    Subscribe
    • Individual Subscriptions
    • Institutional Subscriptions
    • Subscription & Account FAQ
    • Manage Newsletters
    • Manage Your Account
1255 23rd Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037
© 2023 The Chronicle of Higher Education
  • twitter
  • instagram
  • youtube
  • facebook
  • linkedin