Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema
Laura Mulvey
I Introduction
A. A Political Use of Psychoanalysis
This paper intends to use psychoanalysis to discover where and
how the fascination of film is reinforced by pre-existing patterns
of fascination already at work within the individual subject and the
social formations that have moulded him. It takes as starting point
the way film reflects, reveals and even plays on the straight, socially
established interpretation of sexual difference which controls
images, erotic ways of looking and spectacle. It is helpful to under-
stand what the cinema has been, how its magic has worked in the
past, while attempting a theory and a practice which will challenge
this cinema of the past. Psychoanalytic theory is thus appro-
priated here as a political weapon, demonstrating the way the un-
conscious of patriarchal society has structured film form.
The paradox of phallocentrism in all its manifestations is that it
depends on the image of the castrated woman to give order and
meaning to its world. An idea of woman stands as lynch pin to the
system: it is her lack that produces the phallus as a symbolic
presence, it is her desire to make good the lack that the phallus
signifies. Recent wrting in Screen about psychoanalysis and the
cinema has not sufficiently brought out the importance of the
representation of the female form in a symbolic order in which, in
the last resort, it speaks castration and nothing else. To summarise
briefly: the function of woman in forming the patriarchal uncon-
scious is two-fold, she first symbolises the castration threat by her
real absence of a penis and second thereby raises her child into the
symbolic. Once this has been achieved, her meaning in the process
is at an end, it does not last into the world of law and language
except as a memory which oscillates between memory of maternal
plenitude and memory of lack. Both are posited on nature (or on 7
anatomy in Freud's famoas phrase). Woman's desire is subjected
to her image as bearer of the bleeding wound, she can exist only !
in relation to castration and cannot transcend it. She turns her J
child into the signifier of her own desire to possess a penis (the
condition, she imagines, of entry into the symbolic). Either she
must gracefully give way to the word, the Name of the Father and
the Law, or else struggle to keep her child down with her in the
half-light of the imaginary. Woman then stands in patriarchal
culture as signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order
in which man can live out his phantasies and obsessions through
linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of
woman still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of
meaning.
There is an obvious interest in this analysis for feminists, a
beauty in its exact rendering of the frustration experienced under
the phallocentric order. It gets us nearer to the roots of our
oppression, it brings an articulation of the problem closer, it faces,
us with the ultimate challenge: how to fight the unconscious
structured like a language (formed critically at the moment of
arrival of language) while still caught within the language of the
patriarchy. There is no way in which we can produce an alternative
out of the blue, but we 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. We are still separated by a
great gap from important issues for the female unconscious which
are scarcely relevant to phallocentric theory: the sexing of the
female infant and her relationship to the symbolic the sexually
mature woman as non-mother, maternity outside the signification
of the phallus, the vagina. . . . But, at this point, psychoanalytic
theory as it now stands can at least advance our understanding of
the status quo, of the patriarchal order in which we are caught.
B. Destruction of Pleasure as a Radical Weapon
As an advanced representation system, the cinema poses questions
of the ways the unconscious (formed by the dominant order) struc-
tures ways of seeing and pleasure in looking. Cinema has changed
over the last few decades. It is no longer the monolithic system
based on large capital investment exemplified at its best by Holly-
wood in the 1930's, 1940's and 1950's. Technological advances
(16mm, etc) have changed the economic conditions of cinematic
production, which can now be artisanal as well as capitalist. Thus
it has been possible for an alternative cinema to develop. However
self-conscious and ironic Hollywood managed to be, it always
restricted itself to a formal mise-en-scene reflecting the dominant
ideological concept of the cinema. The alternative cinema provides
a space for a cinema to be born which is radical in both a poli
and an aesthetic sense and challenges ti e basic assumptions of the
mainstream film. This is not to reject the latter moralistically, but
to highlight the ways in which its formal preoccupations reflect
the psychical obsessions of the society which produced it, and,
further, to stress that the alternative cinema must start specifically
by reacting against these obsessions and assumptions. A politically
and aesthetically avant-garde cinema is now possible, but it can
still only exist as a counterpoint.
The magic of the Hollywood style at its best (and of all the
cinema which fell within its sphere of influence) arose, not ex-
clusively, but in one important aspect, from its skilled and satis-
fying manipulation of visual pleasure. Unchallenged, mainstream
film coded the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal
order. In the highly developed Hollywood cinema it was only
through these codes that the alienated subject, torn in his imagin-
ary memory by a sense of loss, by the terror of potential lack in
phantasy, came near to finding a glimpse of satisfaction: through
its formal beauty and its play on his own formative obsessions.
This article will discuss the interweaving of that erotic pleasure
in film, its meaning, and in particular the central place of the
image of woman. It is said that analysing pleasure, or beauty,
destroys it. That is the intention of this article. 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, which cannot exist in the abstract, nor of intel-
lectualised unpleasure, but to make way for a total negation of
the ease and plenitude of the narrative fiction film. The alternative
is the thrill that comes from leaving the past behind without
rejecting it, transcending outworn or oppressive forms, or daring
to break with normal pleasurable expectations in order to conceive
a new language of desire.
II Pleasure in Looking/Fascination with the Human Form
A. The cinema offers a number of possible pleasures. One is
scopophilia. There are circumstances in which looking itself is a
source of pleasure, just as, in the reverse formation, there is
pleasure in being looked at. Originally, in his Three Essays on
Sexuality, Freud isolated scopophilia as one of the component
instincts of sexuality which exist as drives quite independently of
the erotogenic zones. At this point he associated scopophilia with
taking other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling
and curious gaze. His particular examples centie around the
voyeuristic activities of children, their desire to see and make sure
of the private and the forbidden (curiosity about other people's
genital and bodily functions, about the presence or absence of the
penis and, retrospectively, about the primal scene). In this analysis
scopophilia is essentially active. (Later, in Instincts and their
Vicissitudes, Freud developed his theory of scopophilia further,
attaching it initially to pre-genital auto-eroticism, after which the
pleasure of the look is transferred to others by analogy. There is
a close working here of the relationship between the active instinct
and its further development in a narcissistic form.) Although the
instinct is modified by other factors, in particular the constitution
of the ego, it continues to exist as the erotic basis for pleasure
in looking at another person as object. At the extreme, it can
become fixated into a perversion, producing obsessive voyeurs and
Peeping Toms, whose only sexual satisfaction can come from
watching, in an active controlling sense, an objectified other.
At first glance, the cinema would seem to be remote from the
undercover world of the surreptitious observation of an unknowing
and unwilling victim. What is seen of the screen is so manifestly
shown. But the mass of mainstream film, and the conventions
within which it has consciously evolved, portray a hermetically
sealed world which unwinds magically, indifferent to the presence
of the audience, producing for them a sense of separation and
playing on their voyeuristic phantasy. Moreover, the extreme con-
trast between the darkness in the auditorium (which also isolates
the spectators from one another) and the brilliance of the shifting
patterns of light and shade on the screen helps to promote the
illusion of voyeuristic separation. Although the film is really being
shown, is there to be seen, conditions of screening and narrative
conventions give the spectator an illusion of looking in on a private
world. Among other things, the position of the spectators in the
rinema is blatantly one of repression of their exhibitionism and
projection of the repressed desire on to the performer.
B. The rinema satisfies a primordial wish for pleasurable looking,
but it also goes further, developing scopophilia in its narcissistic
aspect. The conventions of mainstream film focus attention on the
human form. Scale, space, stories are all anthropomorphic. Here,
curiosity and the wish to look intermingle with a fascination with
likeness and recognition: the human face, the human body, the
relationship between the human form and its surroundings, the
visible presence of the person in the world. Jacques Lacan has
described how the moment when a child lecognises its own image
in the mirror is crucial for the constitution of the ego. Several
aspects of this analysis are relevant here. The mirror phase occurs
at a time when the child's physical ambitions outstrip his motor
capacity, with the result that his recognition of himself is joyous
in that he imagines his mirror image to be more complete, more
perfect than he experiences his own body. Recognition is thus
overlaid with mis-recognition: the image recognised is conceived
io as the reflected body of the self, but its misrecognition as superior
projects this body outside itself as an ideal ego, the alienated
subject, which, re-introjected as an ego ideal, gives rise to the
future generation of identification with others. This mirror-moment
predates language for the child.
Important for this article is the fact that it is an image that
constitutes the matrix of the imaginary, of recognition/mis-
recognition and identification, and hence of the first articulation
of the ' I *, of subjectivity. This is a moment when an older
fascination with looking (at the mother's face, for an obvious
example) collides with the initial inklings of self-awareness. Hence
it is the birth of the long love affair/despair between image and
self-image which has found such intensity of expression in film
and such joyous recognition in the cinema audience. Quite apart
from the extraneous similarities between screen and mirror (the
framing of the human form in its surroundings, for instance), the
cinema has structures of fascination strong enough to allow tem-
porary loss of ego while simultaneously reinforcing the ego. The
sense of forgetting the world as the ego has subsequently come to
perceive it (I forgot who I am and where I was) is nostalgically
reminiscent of that pre-subjective moment of image recognition.
At the same time the cinema has distinguished itself in the pro-
duction of ego ideals as expressed in particular in the star system,
the stars centring both screen presence and screen story as they
act out a complex process of likeness and difference (the glamorous
impersonates the ordinary).
C. Sections II. A and B have set out two contradictory aspects of
the pleasurable structures of looking in the conventional cinematic
situation. The first, scopophilic, arises from pleasure in using
another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight.
The second, developed through narcissism and the constitution of
the ego, comes from identification with the image seen. Thus, in
film terms, one implies a separation of the erotic identity of the
subject from the object on the screen (active scopophilia), the
other demands identification of the ego with the object on the
screen through the spectator's fascination with and recognition of
his like. The first is a function of the sexual instincts, the second
of ego libido. This dichotomy was crucial for Freud. Although he
saw the two as interacting and overlaying each other, the tension
between instinctual drives and self-preservation continues to be
a dramatic polarisation in terms of pleasure. Both are formative
structures, mechanisms not meaning. In themselves they have no
signification, they have to be attached to an idealisation. Both
pursue aims in indifference to perceptual reality, creating the
imagised, eroticised concept of the world that forms the perception
of the subject and makes a mockery of empirical objectivity.
During its history, the cinema seems to have evolved a par- 11
ticular illusion of reality in which this contradiction between libido
and ego has found a beautifully complementary phantasy world.
In reality the phantasy world of the screen is subject to the law
which produces it.. Sexual instincts and identification processes
have a meaning within the symbolic order which articulates desire.
Desire, born with language, allows the possibility of transcending
the instinctual and the imaginary, but its point of reference con-
tinually returns to the traumatic moment of its birth: the castra-
tion complex. Hence the look, pleasurable in form, can be threaten-
ing in content, and it is woman as representation/image that
crystallises this paradox.
Ill Woman as Image, Man as Bearer of the Look
A. In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking
has been split between active/male and passive/female. The deter-
mining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female figure
which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role
women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their
appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they
can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness. Woman displayed as
sexual object is the leit-motif of erotic spectacle: from pin-ups to
strip-tease, from Ziegfeld to Busby Berkeley, she holds the look,
plays to and signifies male desire. Mainstream film neatly combined
spectacle and narrative. (Note, however, how in the musical song-
and-dance numbers break the flow of the diegesis.) The presence of
woman is an indispensable element of spectacle in normal narra-
tive film, yet her visual presence tends to work against the develop-
ment of a story line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of
erotic contemplation. This alien presence then has to be integrated
into cohesion with the narrative. As Budd Boetticher has put it:
' What counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she
represents. She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires
in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him
act the way he does. In herself the woman has not the slightest
importance.'
(A recent tendency in narrative film has been to dispense with this
problem altogether; hence the development of what Molly Haskell
has called the 'buddy movie', in which the active homosexual
eroticism of the central male figures can carry the story without
distraction.) Traditionally, the woman displayed has functioned on
two levels: as erotic object for the characters within the screen
story, and as erotic object for the spectator within the auditorium,
with a shifting tension between the looks on either side of the
12 screen. For instance, the device of the show-girl allows the two
looks to be unified technically without any apparent break in the
diegesis. A woman performs within the narrative, the gaze of the
spectator and that of the male characters in the film are neatly
combined without breaking narrative verisimilitude. For a moment
the sexual impact of the performing woman takes the film into a
no-man's-land outside its own time and space. Thus Marilyn
Monroe's first appearance in The River of No Return and Lauren
Bacall's songs in To Have or Have Not. Similarly, conventional
close-ups of legs (Dietrich, for instance) or a face (Garbo) integrate
into the narrative a different mode of eroticism. One part of a
fragmented body destroys the Renaissance space, the illusion of
depth demanded by the narrative, it gives flatness, the quality of
a cut-out or icon rather than verisimilitude to the screen.
B. An active/passive heterosexual division of labour has similarly
controlled narrative structure. According to the principles of the
ruling ideology and the psychical structures that back it up, the
male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification. Man
is reluctant to gaze at his exhibitionist like. Hence the split
between spectacle and narrative supports the man's role as the
active one of forwarding the story, making things happen. The
man controls the film phantasy and also emerges as the representa-
tive of power in a further sense: as the bearer of the look of the
spectator, transferring it behind the screen to neutralise the extra-
diegetic tendencies represented by woman as spectacle. This is
made possible through the processes set in motion by structuring
the film around a main controlling figure with whom the spectator
can identify. As the spectator identifies with the main male1 pro-
tagonist, he projects his look on to that of his like, his screen
surrogate, so that the power of the male protagonist as he controls
events coincides with the active power of the erotic look, both
giving a satisfying sense of omnipotence. A male movie star's
glamorous characteristics are thus not those of the erotic object
of the gaze, but those of the more perfect, more complete, more
powerful ideal ego conceived in the original moment of recognition
in front of the mirror. The character in the story can make things
happen and control events better than the subject/spectator, just
as the image in the mirror was more in control of motor co-
ordination. In contrast to woman as icon, the active male figure
(the ego ideal of the identification process) demands a three-
1. There are films with a woman as main protagonist, of course. To
analyse this phenomenon seriously here would take me too far afield.
Pam Cook and Claire Johnston's study of The Revolt of Mamie
Stover in Phil Hardy, ed: Raoul Walsh, Edinburgh 1974, shows in a
striking case how the strength of this female protagonist is more
apparent than real.
dimensional space corresponding to that of the mirror-recognition
in which the alienated subject internalised his own representation
of this imaginary existence. He is a figure in a landscape. Here the
function of film is to reproduce as accurately as possible the so-
called natural conditions of human perception. Camera technology
(as exemplified by deep focus in particular) and camera move-
ments (determined by the action of the protagonist), combined with
invisible editing (demanded by realism) all tend to blur the limits
of screen space. The male protagonist is free to command the stage,
a stage of spatial illusion in which he articulates the look and
creates the action.
C.i Sections III. A and B have set out a tension bet