Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema

Born in 1856 in what is now known as the Czech Republic, Sigmund Freud is considered the founder of psychoanalysis. Freud was a practicing psychotherapist and published numerous books detailing his research and theories, which exerted an enormous impact on 20th century Western thinking and arts. Indeed, his innovative proposal that the mind harbors an “unconscious” realm teeming with repressed desires countered longstanding assumptions that human beings are fully in command of their thoughts, decision-making, and behavior.

Mulvey’s essay directly references only Freud’s 1905 publication, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, but he developed the basic tenets of psychoanalysis over the course of several publications between 1900 and 1905. These tenets include the recognition of repressed memories and drives that unconsciously shape human behavior, the analysis of dreams as a means of accessing the unconscious mind, and the clinical therapy Freud termed “transference.” With respect to Mulvey’s essay, the most relevant principle of psychoanalysis pertains to early infantile psychosexual development.

Freud theorizes that the infant progresses through three stages of erogenous zone organizations, culminating, at age three, in the phallic stage. This is the stage that Mulvey’s argument hinges on, as it involves the infant’s discovery of sexual difference, specifically the mother’s lack of a penis and the resulting castration complex. Having heretofore desired the mother sexually and considered the father a rival, the child, fearing the punishment of castration, represses his incestuous desire and proceeds to identify, not compete with, the father (male children better model Freud’s theories). As Mulvey notes, Freud also links infantile sexuality with scopophilia, but identifies it “as one of the component instincts of sexuality which exist […] independently from the erotogenic zones” (17). Looking as erotic pleasure continues throughout the individual’s life, and the cinema, Mulvey argues, provides the ideal conditions for fulfilling the pleasure-instinct of the gaze.

The extension of psychoanalysis into the discourse of literary and visual arts criticism may seem surprising, but Freud was the first to do it. He wrote many essays examining how works of art and literature express the dynamic forces of the unconscious. Indeed, in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Freud upholds Sophocles’ play Oedipus Rex (in which Oedipus inadvertently marries his mother and kills his father) as exemplifying the phallic stage, leading to his term, the “Oedipus Complex.” Psychoanalytic criticism became a widespread and pervasive practice in literary and cultural arts studies, particularly during the second half of the 20th century.

Jacques Lacan was born in France in 1901. After training in forensic psychiatry, he became a practicing psychoanalyst and delivered weekly lectures at the University of Paris. Ecrits, published between 1966 and 1971, is a two-volume collection of his lectures that contains his most significant ideas, including those Mulvey draws upon in her essay. Although Lacan’s discussion of his theories is often nonlinear and difficult to follow, his expansion of Freud’s biologically-based mechanisms into language-based structures has proven productive for many intellectuals and critics, including feminists.

Mulvey refers to several Lacanian terms, including the “mirror-moment” (18), the “the Name of the Father” (15), and the “symbolic order” (14), and these offer useful entry points into his theories. Whereas Freud locates the initiation of ego formation in the child’s traumatic discovery of sexual difference, Lacan links it with the moment the child, by about 18 months age, recognizes his reflection in the mirror. To the extent that he sees this image as complete and autonomous, the child also misrecognizes it as more perfect and powerful than he—helpless and dependent—knows himself to be. Thus, the mirror-moment introduces a psychic split that is twofold: the child perceives himself both as himself (the subject) and as other than himself (the object); and he identifies with the reflected image as both himself and his ideal self. Henceforth, he will experience himself as separate from the Other, but as also always desiring to unite with the Other, in whom he identifies his ideal self. This desire can never be truly satisfied, so the individual is afflicted with a fundamental sense of lack.

Coinciding with the mirror stage of the child’s ego development is his acquisition of language. As Freud attributes the child’s ultimate separation from the mother to the father’s threat of castration, so Lacan figures the socializing process of language development as the child’s submission to “the Name of the Father.” In Lacan’s model of the mind, the unconscious is a consequence of language learning and not, as Freud would have it, the repression of taboo desires. Having discovered the ideal Other in the mirror, the child redirects his desire from the mother to the Other, but this Other is not real, only a signifier of desire that haunts the unconscious. Lacan’s concept of the Other as a sign of something, but never the thing itself, is indebted to structural linguistics, which emphasizes that words (signifiers) are simply arbitrary symbols for referents to which they have no natural connection. Because words do not make meaning through connections to referents, but by means of oppositions to other words, language is a closed, self-referential system. With his entrance into language, then, the child has no access to any reality outside language’s constructions. Language becomes the means by which he tries to invoke and secure the Other, but his efforts never succeed.

Lacan argues that language is the gateway into the symbolic order, or the social arena where the individual is subject to the laws, prohibitions, and values of the ruling order. As Mulvey establishes through her analysis of Lacan’s theories, this ruling order is patriarchal (and most social organizations are patriarchal, according to anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, whose work influenced Lacan). Man controls the meaning of language, which structures the social order of the symbolic, as well as the unconscious of the individual. Woman, meanwhile, “stands in patriarchal culture as the signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his fantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of woman […]” (15).

Alfred Hitchcock was born in England in 1899. His name has achieved nearly mythic status for his work as a film director, which began in the 1920s and continued into the 1970s. He wrote and directed comedies, romantic adventures, and historical dramas, but his signature films are espionage and psychological thrillers. After working in the British film industry for two decades, Hitchcock moved to America in 1939 and immediately gained recognition when his Hollywood debut, Rebecca (1940), received the Academy Award for Best Picture. He resented the control Hollywood producers exercised over his projects, but his career flourished in the studio system.

Despite Hollywood’s factory-like production methods, Hitchcock’s films retain the elements of his unique style, which include a strategic use of light and shadow, suspenseful cross-cutting, and innovative camera movements. Hitchcock was also masterful in his use of the camera to manipulate audience identification, particularly in later films like Vertigo (1958). As Mulvey writes, “[i]n Vertigo, subjective camera predominates. […T]he narrative is woven around what Scottie sees or fails to see. The audience follows the growth of his erotic obsession and subsequent despair precisely from his point of view” (24). Because the form and content of Hitchcock’s films combine to create complex, and at times competing, perspectives, critics have considered his works rich territory for psychoanalytic mining.

Josef von Sternberg was born in Vienna in 1894 and emigrated to the United States with his family when he was a young boy. He eventually made his way to Hollywood, where he struggled to establish himself as a director, despite Charlie Chaplin’s praise for him as a “genius.” He went to Germany in 1930 to direct a joint Paramount-Ufa production, The Blue Angel, and his decision to cast Marlene Dietrich as Lola Lola proved momentous. Her arresting performance as the femme fatale thrilled audiences and set the stage for further collaborations between her and Sternberg. They returned to Hollywood and made six more films together at Paramount studios, including those that Mulvey’s essay references, Morocco (1930) and Dishonored (1931). There is little to distinguish these films from one another, as they retread the same themes, but their sumptuous visual quality made for high box-office returns. By 1935, the year Sternberg and Dietrich’s final film was released, audiences had wearied of the director’s pictorial excesses, and his Hollywood career was essentially finished.

In 1920s post-war Berlin, Marlene Dietrich, in her 20s herself, took to the cabaret stages and fascinated crowds with her sultry, ambiguous sexuality. From the stage, she pivoted to the German film industry, where Josef von Sternberg found her and cast her as the femme fatale in the 1930 film The Blue Angel. Under Sternberg’s direction, the Dietrich mystique was born. His methods were uniquely suited to exploiting her erotic aura, and they made five more films together at Paramount studios in Hollywood. Featuring Dietrich in variations on the role of seductress, the films captivated audiences with their screen-saturating sensuality. By 1935, however, the thrill was gone, and Paramount let Sternberg go. Dietrich’s film career continued, with a string of performances in the 1940s playing cabaret-singers, and, in 1958, the role of a hardened prostitute in Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil.

Scottie Ferguson is the fictional male protagonist in Vertigo, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 psychological thriller. A former San Francisco private investigator, Scottie retired from the profession after a rooftop tragedy left him with a fear of heights. When a college friend shares concerns about his emotionally unstable wife, Madeleine, and asks Scottie to follow her during her daily activities, Scottie agrees. As Scottie shadows the beautiful woman, he falls in love with her. He rescues her from a suicide attempt, and a clandestine romance begins but is cut short when Madeleine plunges to her death from the bell tower of a church. Unable to shake his obsession with Madeleine, Scottie haunts the places where he once followed her. This is how he meets Judy Barton, a woman who looks remarkably like Madeleine. After spending time together and establishing their mutual attraction, Scottie, who is still fixated on Madeleine, compels Judy to change herself so as to appear identical to Madeleine. Judy reluctantly complies, because she loves Scottie, but he soon learns the truth: Judy is Madeleine, and he has been an unwitting pawn in a scheme to conceal the murder of his friend’s wife. Scottie embodies the male gaze in film. 

Judy Barton is the fictional female protagonist in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. She is paid by Gavin Elster to impersonate his wife, Madeleine, because they share a similar appearance. Elster, who has hatched a plan to get away with murder, also enlists the help of an unwitting acquaintance and former detective, Scottie Ferguson. After Elster tells Scottie he’s concerned about his wife’s behavior, Scottie agrees to follow the woman, who is actually Judy. During the course of the intrigue—which involves planting the body of Elster’s murdered wife below the bell tower from which Madeleine appears to fall—Judy falls in love with Scottie. When Judy resumes her relationship with Scottie after “Madeleine’s” death, she is troubled by her deception and nearly tells him the truth. Scottie eventually realizes the truth himself, and, during his confrontation with Judy, she falls to her death. She embodies the women trapped in the male gaze, never growing or changing from that which he sees her.

Jefferies is the fictional male hero in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 mystery-thriller, Rear Window. Jefferies is a professional photographer, but due to a broken leg, is confined to a wheelchair in his New York apartment. His back window provides a view of the complex’s courtyard, and, to pass the time, he trains his telephoto lens on his neighbors’ windows and watches them. When he observes strange goings-on in the Thorwald apartment, he grows suspicious that Mr. Thorwald has murdered his wife. Jefferies eventually persuades his beautiful, fashion-minded girlfriend, Lisa, that foul play is afoot, and she sneaks into Thorwald’s apartment to investigate. As Jefferies watches helplessly from his window, Thorwald returns and calls the police to arrest Lisa, but not before Lisa signals to Jefferies that she has found incriminating evidence. A harrowing confrontation between Thorwald and Jefferies follows, but the police arrive in time to rescue Jefferies, and Thorwald confesses to murder. Jefferies also embodies the male gaze amputated from action by his hurt leg, and he thus thrusts the female into harm's way from which she must be saved by male authority figures.