About Laura Mulvey

Mulvey is best known for her essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", written in 1973 and published in 1975 in the influential British film theory journal Screen. It later appeared in a collection of her essays entitled Visual and Other Pleasures, and numerous other anthologies. Her article was one of the first major essays that helped shift the orientation of film theory towards a psychoanalytic framework, influenced by the theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. Prior to Mulvey, film theorists such as Jean-Louis Baudry and Christian Metz had attempted to use psychoanalytic ideas in their theoretical accounts of the cinema, but Mulvey's contribution was to inaugurate the intersection of film theory, psychoanalysis, and radical feminism.

Mulvey's article engaged in no empirical research of film audiences. She instead stated that she intended to make a "political use" of Freud and Lacan, and then used some of their concepts to argue that the cinematic apparatus of classical Hollywood cinema inevitably put the spectator in a masculine subject position, with the figure of the woman on screen as the object of desire. In the era of classical Hollywood cinema, viewers were encouraged to identify with the protagonist of the film, who tended to be a man. Meanwhile, Hollywood female characters of the 1950s and 60s were, according to Mulvey, coded with "to-be-looked-at-ness." Mulvey suggests that there were two distinct modes of the male gaze of this era: "voyeuristic" (i.e. seeing women as 'Madonna’s') and "fetishistic" (i.e. seeing women as 'whores').

Mulvey argued that the only way to annihilate that "patriarchal" Hollywood system was to radically challenge and re-shape the filmic strategies of classical Hollywood with alternative feminist methods. She called for a new feminist avant-garde filmmaking that would rupture the magic and pleasure of classical Hollywood filmmaking. She wrote, "It is said that analysing pleasure or beauty annihilates it. That is the intention of this article".

Radical feminists made a major criticism of "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema". They claimed that, while Mulvey believed that classical Hollywood cinema reflected and shaped the "patriarchal order", the perspective of her writing actually remained within that very heterosexual order. The article was thus said to have contradicted its "radical" claims, by actually being a covert perpetuation of heterosexual patriarchal order. This was because, in her article, Mulvey presupposes the spectator to be a heterosexual man. She was thus felt to be denying the existence of lesbian women and even heterosexual women.

"Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" was the subject of much interdisciplinary discussion among film theorists that continued into the mid 1980s. Critics of the article objected to the fact that her argument implied the impossibility of genuine 'feminine' enjoyment of the classical Hollywood cinema, and to the fact that her argument did not seem to take into account spectatorships that were not organised along the normative lines of gender. For example, a metaphoric 'transvestism' might be possible when viewing a film -- a male viewer might enjoy a 'feminine' point-of-view provided by a film, or vice versa; gay, lesbian and bisexual spectatorships might also be different. Her article also did not take into account the findings of the later wave of media audience studies on the complex nature of fan cultures and their interaction with stars. Gay male film theorists such as Richard Dyer have used Mulvey's work as a starting point to explore the complex projections that many gay men onto certain female stars (e.g. Liza Minnelli, Greta Garbo, Judy Garland).

Mulvey later wrote that her article was meant to be a provocation or a manifesto, rather than a reasoned academic article that considered all objections. She addressed many of her critics, and changed some of her opinions, in a follow-up article, "Afterthoughts on 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema'”

Key Words

Freud – This particular theorist was the founder of psychoanalysis. He is best known for the unconscious mind especially sexual desire.

Voyeurism – A person who watches the behaviour of others without their knowledge from a detached, non-involved position and for reasons of self-gratification.

Sadism – This is the sexual pleasure that one gets from the infliction of pain and abuse, e.g. rape

Fetishization - The basic idea of sexual fetishism is sexual arousal and satisfaction through an inanimate object, the fetish.

Patriarchy - In gender studies, the word patriarchy often refers to a social organization marked by the supremacy of a male figure, group of male figures, or men in general.

Male Gaze - Male gaze in relation to feminist theory presents asymmetrical gaze as a means of exhibiting an unequal power relationship; that is, the male imposes an unwanted gaze upon the female.

Essay

Batman Begins 2005 is a mostly dominated by a male character, due to Batman being male. Within the film although there is a female character that is fetishized by the male audience. In some parts where she overcomes such theories as misogyny being a well-paid and well-known lawyer, she is looked upon by both genders, where they may envy her achievements. Laura Mulvey’s essay on “Visual Pleasure and Narratice Cinema”, suggests that it draws psychoanalysis in order to argue that looking is typically divided “between active male and passive female components”. In this particular instance this does not occur simply because she is looked upon as being an active female character.

In various scenes Batman him self is shown to be looking at the lawyer voyeuristically as she is dressed to-be-looked-at-ness. The relationship between these two characters are that they were brought up together, but later on noticing each other’s looks, where the male audience follows Laura Mulvey’s theory of the Male gaze. A scene where she is most fetishised is where Batman saves her and picks her body up, where she lays in his arms.