Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema

American second-wave feminists largely denounced Freudian psychoanalysis because it overlooks female psychological development and, even worse, is based on the principle that female anatomy is naturally inferior to male anatomy. Mulvey nevertheless enlists psychoanalytic theory to argue that the pleasure of narrative cinema is a function of various conventions that mitigate the castration anxiety associated with woman, thereby making woman fully available as an object of desire. How might a feminist defend Mulvey’s reliance on psychoanalytic theories?

Mulvey’s theory of visual pleasure and film spectatorship center on male subjectivity and psychology. She does not address how (or if) the sexual difference between viewers informs their experience of pleasure. Why not? Explain why Mulvey might assume that all viewers, regardless of sexuality, would take pleasure in films that are designed to satisfy “the neurotic needs of the male ego” (26). Do you agree? Why or why not?

Consider the role of the spectator in Mulvey’s explanation of how narrative cinema “structures ways of seeing” (15). She contends that, by means of traditional cinematic conventions, “the look of the audience is denied” (26), indicating that viewers are unable to resist the spell of the cinema’s illusions. According to Mulvey, why do viewers passively submit to cinema’s “manipulation of visual pleasure” (16) without questioning or critiquing it? Do you agree that viewers are so completely controlled by the images that realistic cinema constructs? Why or why not?

Mulvey’s argument rests largely on a particular practice of film reception, namely that of a passive viewer seated before a large screen in a darkened auditorium. Technologies developed after the 1975 publication of Mulvey’s article (DVD players, home movie streaming) allow viewers to take a more active role in film reception. How does this complicate the theoretical foundations of Mulvey’s argument? Given these changes in film spectatorship, is Mulvey’s essay still relevant?

Mulvey suggests that one way to manage castration anxiety is to investigate woman (“demystifying her mystery” (22)), an option, she argues, that “has associations with sadism” (22). Why does she refer to sadism here? In what way does her brief discussion of sadism advance her larger argument, if at all? Looking closely at her analysis of Hitchcock’s film Vertigo, how does the association of sadism with the narrative actually problematize Mulvey’s basic claims? How or can her association of sadism with voyeurism be reconciled with the narcissistic needs of the viewer?