Occasionally in academia, an astute and brilliant thinker puts a finger on the pulse of an idea that is radiating across an entire field and succinctly and definitively puts that idea into a form that is readable, appealing, economical, and somehow “right.” Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” fell into this category. For other such essays think of Gayle Rubin’s “Thinking Sex,” or Hortense Spillers’s “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” or Eve K. Sedgwick’s introduction to Epistemology of the Closet. We might call these career-making, timely essays neoteric in the sense that they continue to feel new and fresh long after their appropriate shelf lives.
Mulvey’s neoteric essay was originally published in the Autumn 1975 issue of the journal Screen. Structuralist film theory was in its heyday. It was not uncommon to read entire essays on films like Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho or The Birds that broke them down through shot-by-shot analysis without ever touching on the fact that they produced suspense, pleasure, immersion, and fascination by presenting the viewer with the fragmented and brutal image of a woman being watched, pursued, and slaughtered. Even Hollywood films outside of the horror genre depended upon the subjugation of women to generate pleasure, and so Mulvey could take just about any traditional narrative film and use it to show how cinema upheld a phallic order.
Alongside other feminist psychoanalytic theorists, such as Teresa de Lauretis, Mulvey tried to show how cinema produced power and pleasure in the same site. In doing so, she argued, popular films naturalized heterosexuality, male domination, and the family, as they implicitly confirmed and enhanced racial hierarchies and class systems. For Mulvey, psychoanalytic theory offered a way of decoding cinema by providing a language for the motivations that determine and define human activity without ever surfacing into the visual. By presuming the subterranean activity of the unconscious, psychoanalytic theory could be used as a “political weapon,” she wrote, to defuse the “magic” of cinema. Mulvey proposed to demonstrate “the way the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form.”
Conveying the ways in which the pleasures of looking and of being looked at are neatly divided into male and female roles, Mulvey diagnosed the problem of dominant cinema in terms of a male gaze and a female figure. Given that cinematic pleasure is gendered in this way, she came to the conclusion that it was pleasure itself that must go: “It is said,” she wrote in one of those economical formulations that abound in the essay, “that analysing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the intention of this article.”
The Mulveyan scheme is beautiful in its simplicity — the gaze is male; the image is female. Narrative cinema offers visual pleasure in a few different ways — it provides a voyeuristic platform from which to look without being seen; it offers vectors for identification with the one who looks and the bearer of the look; furthermore, the film confirms the power of the male gaze by giving the male viewer opportunities to feel as if he controls the film/woman through the gaze. Thus, at the level of genre, classical narrative cinema offers us male heroes who fend off castration themselves either by projecting castration (lack, loss, inadequacy, humanness) onto the female body and punishing it; or by endowing the female body with magical powers, fetishizing it, and then punishing it. Either route — voyeurism or fetishism — must lead to the destruction of the woman because, as Mulvey reminds us: “Sadism demands a story.”
Sadism still demands a story, and that story still plays out in cinemas using the same camera and editing techniques to produce, as Mulvey wrote 40 years ago, “an illusion cut to the measure of desire.” And so, in films like The Kids Are All Right, Stonewall, Milk, or Transamerica, the players may have changed — we no longer limit our understandings of either gender or desire to heterosexual normativity — but the system remains the same. “Sadism demands a story,” Mulvey told us. It “depends on making something happen, forcing a change in another person, a battle of will and strength, victory/defeat, all occurring in a linear time with a beginning and an end.”
Tell me that this is not still the overriding logic of narrative film: Boy meets girl; sparks fly; girl announces her fierce independence; boy, despite having no job and questionable morals (or a bad job, or a talking bear friend, or buddies who take him to Las Vegas and lose him there, or a disinclination to bathe) wears her down with flowers, romance, sex, or simply by threatening to abandon her; girl gives in and marries Mr. Wrong, who through marriage becomes Mr. Right. Or how about this: Girl meets girl; conflict ensues; society objects; man interrupts; children object; but over time, family accepts; girl and girl do not form a feminist commune, they settle down to have the marriage and kids that their queerness had offered to rescue them from. Finally, girl and girl are unhappy, this confirms their assimilation into the culture of marriage and misery, they no longer pose a threat. Castration accomplished. Or how about: boy meets boy, offers to have open relationship, everyone has lots of sex, boy sees that there is something special about one of the clones with whom he has sex, sees the error of his ways and settles down with the clone of the day. The threat posed by promiscuity recedes, the men assume and sometimes exchange the positions of voyeur and object of the gaze, the threat of the double phallus is subsumed.
Even transgender narratives depend upon these markers of progress, change, acceptance, and victory and defeat. And so, as Hollywood film becomes more and more predictable, reaching a kind of steady state of exhausted fantasy, the viewer turns to new landscapes for the excitement once found in narrative cinema: the TV series that offers a stretched-out temporal frame for visual and narrative pleasure; reality TV that promises to deliver the impossible — unedited streams of human unpredictability; and, my favorite, animated universes where nonhuman subjects, embedded through the mysteries of stop-motion animation into an intricate world of gestures and almost imperceptible shifts of expression, articulate absurd desires and utopian dreams.
Queer and feminist theorists are still trying to destroy visual pleasure cut to the measure of sadistic desire, and while I think we do not believe, as Mulvey did, that avant-garde cinema might be the only way out, I think we must continue to look, in high and low places, for mesmerizing alternatives to “the magic of Hollywood.”
Jack Halberstam is a professor of American studies and ethnicity, comparative literature, and gender studies, at the University of Southern California. He is the author, most recently, of Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal (Beacon, 2012).
