Summary of Laura Mulvey: Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975)


Laura Mulvey says that the propose of film is to engage the audience by using images and spectacle. She says that in order for this to work the psychoanalyses theory is used for this. This means that we as an audience view what we subconsciously desire. What we keep within our unconscious mind (and what appears in our dreams) is what we may begin to loom for in our viewing material.

She also talks about Scopophilia (the pleasure of watching) being used to appeal an audience. As Freud suggested, that an individual passes through various stages such as going from the oral and anal fixation to the genital stage where they reach adult maturity. Basically, childhood obsessions can cause personality complexes during adulthood.Scopophilia also links to the desire of an adult to view things that seen as taboo or culturally forbidden.

Jaques Lacan states that a child mirror stage where they see themselves through the eyes of their mother. Then as they grow up they adopt a personal identity and gain an Independence and believe that what they view in the mirror is perfection. This perception then goes onto what they view as adults and what they want to see. Mulvey says that the typical audience member feels a narcissistic pleasure from identifying themselves with the protagonist of the movie.

Women however, are seen usually as sex objects that are there to give sexual pleasure to the audience member (to-be-looked-at-ness'. Men identify with the male character (the hero usually) and therefore see the female character as sexual aid for pleasure (Freud). Mulvey calls this the 'the look' or 'the gaze'. She says that this is either voyeuristic (women are seen as beautiful and virtuous) or fetishistic (women are seen as sexual beings). There is however, more female fetishistic viewing than male fetishistic viewing and this links to our society being patriarchal.

Spectator Gaze: Audience views subject on screen.

Male Gaze: Male viewing the female voyeuristic or fetishist

Female Gaze: Women gaining pleasure from male viewing.

Intra-diegetic Gaze: When the character from the text looks upon the audience.


How this links with my text (Green Street) :-
I found that the theory of Laura Mulvey links into my study in the way that it talks about film texts being predominately patriarchal. The text 'Green Street' has more men than women as football is a male dominated sport and this shows the way in which it's target audience will mainly be male as they will go for a sense of identification with the characters in the movie. They will also gain pleasure from viewing this text because it may be an image of what they view in their unconscious mind (in their dreams) where they imagine violence etc as men usually do.Women in my text are not shown as the typically sexual women that are usually represented in male dominated movies. They have a more motherly image than a sexual image, this therefore contradicts Laura Mulvey's theory as for my text, male viewers (target audience) don't go for 'the male gaze'.
I could however, use Mulvey's theory in my text for the representation of men. Mulvey says that a text incorporates what we as viewers may contain in our subconscious mind (violence, death, danger, rebellion) and i will link this to how men could gain pleasure from viewing the characters in my text being represented as violent and rebellious.