36 pages • 1 hour read
Laura MulveyVisual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema
Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 1975A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Analogy
An analogy is the comparison of two things that are not obviously similar. Mulvey’s argument hinges on the analogy she draws between the screen on which spectators view films and the mirror that, according to Lacan, precipitates subject-formation. After briefly summarizing Lacan’s notion that the young child’s first glimpse of himself in the mirror is a formative moment “of recognition/ misrecognition and identification, and hence the first articulation of the ‘I’ […]” (18), Mulvey compares this primary experience to film spectatorship: “Quite apart from the extraneous similarities between screen and mirror […], the cinema has structures of fascination strong enough to allow temporary loss of ego while simultaneously reinforcing the ego” (18). Because films, like mirrors, are largely visual texts, they can convincingly reproduce the subject-forming mirror-moment and thereby reinforce the spectator’s ego even as the spectator identifies with the on-screen male hero.
Parrhesia
Parrhesia is expressing one’s thoughts boldly and frankly in order to effect a change that one believes will benefit society. It is similar to constructive criticism, but the critic, in this case, is speaking out (or writing) from a disempowered position. While the term originated with the ancient Greeks (and can be translated as “saying it all”), Michel Foucault delivered a series of lectures centered on the concept as recently as 1983. To qualify as parrhesia, according to Foucault, a declaration must meet several conditions: it must be truthful, beneficial, and, require a degree of courage (as it entails speaking an unpopular truth to power).
Mulvey exercises parrhesia in both the opening and closing sections of her essay. At the end of the “Introduction,” she boldly declares, “The satisfaction and reinforcement of the ego that represent the high point of film history hitherto must be attacked. Not in favour of a reconstructed new pleasure, […] but to make way for a total negation of the ease and plentitude of the narrative fiction film” (16). Not only does Mulvey implicitly acknowledge that her argument goes against popular opinion (which favors narrative film as a source of “satisfaction” and ego-reinforcement), she also recognizes that she is challenging the powerful, established Hollywood industry that produced “the high point of film history.” After presenting evidence to support her claim that narrative film thwarts feminist objectives, Mulvey concludes her essay by reiterating her brazen call for the downfall of narrative cinema. She surmises, however, that “[w]omen, whose image has continually been stolen […], cannot view the decline of the traditional film form with anything much more than sentimental regret” (27).
Point of View
Mulvey states that “the intention of this article” (16) is to destroy “pleasure, or beauty” (16), but her wider agenda is to persuade readers that the pleasure of narrative cinema is actually a function of psycho-social structures that marginalize women. Her audience includes at least two different groups (which may, of course, overlap): feminists and intellectuals. To successfully—and persuasively—convey her argument to her diverse readers, Mulvey shifts the narrative point of view, or “look,” over the course of her essay.
A confrontational tone dominates the “Introduction,” where Mulvey calls “for a total negation of the ease and plentitude of the narrative fiction film” (16). Because it is clear from the opening paragraph that the essay targets the patriarchy, it would seem that Mulvey could easily win over feminist readers. Yet many feminists of the time were uncomfortable with Freudian psychoanalysis. To allay their misgivings, Mulvey devotes the third paragraph of her essay to the utility of psychoanalysis for feminism, and it is in this paragraph, too, that she identifies her point of view with other feminists by using the pronoun “we:” “[… W]e can begin to make a break by examining patriarchy with the tools it provides, of which psychoanalysis is not the only but an important one” (15).
After the “Introduction,” Mulvey abandons the first-person point of view and erases her situated self from the remainder of the essay to take up the rhetorical “tools” that, historically, intellectuals (and the patriarchy) favor. These appeal to logic more than emotion, and include a detached, objective tone as well as the methodical exposition of ideas. Much like the disavowed look of the camera in traditional film, Mulvey proceeds to disavow her personal “look,” or perspective, by adopting a third-person, omniscient point of view. Thus, she uses the structure of the passive voice to avoid using “I” in the following sentence from her final section: “The psychoanalytic background that has been discussed in this article is relevant to the pleasure and unpleasure offered by traditional narrative film” (25). This “view-from-nowhere” point of view pretends to absolute objectivity, which reinforces the logic and persuasiveness of Mulvey’s essay, but is actually just a rhetorical strategy.
