RESEARCH: LAURA MULVEY: VISUAL PLEASURE AND NARRATIVE

Today we revised theoretical frameworks that you may draw on as you research music videos and write about your own. In the A2 exam, you will need to do this for both sections of the exam paper. For example, you will need to analyse your own production work with critical distance.

Daniel Chandler writes about film spectatorship and Laura Mulvey's gaze theory:

'Film has been called an instrument of the male gaze, producing representations of women, the good life, and sexual fantasy from a male point of view' (Schroeder 1998, 208). The concept derives from a seminal article called Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema by Laura Mulvey, a feminist film theorist. It was published in 1975.

Mulvey notes that Freud had referred to (infantile) scopophilia - the pleasure involved in looking at other people’s bodies as (particularly, erotic) objects.

Rita Hayworth

In the darkness of the cinema it is notable that one may look at someone without being seen either by those on screen or other members of the audience. Mulvey argues that various features of cinema viewing conditions help for the viewer both the voyeuristic process of objectification of female characters and also the self-centred process of identification with an ‘ideal ego’ seen on the screen. She declares that in patriarchal society ‘pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female’ (Mulvey 1992, 27).  

Traditional films present men as active, controlling subjects and treat women as passive objects of desire for men in both the story and in the audience, and do not allow women to be desiring sexual subjects in their own right. Such films objectify women in relation to ‘the controlling male gaze’, presenting ‘woman as image’ (or ‘spectacle’) and man as ‘bearer of the look’. Men do the looking; women are there to be looked at. The cinematic codes of popular films ‘are obsessively subordinated to the neurotic needs of the male ego’. It was Mulvey who coined the term 'the male gaze'. 

Both Steve Neale and Richard Dyer (1982)  challenge the idea that the male is never sexually objectified in mainstream cinema and argued that the male is not always the looker in control of the gaze. Since the 1980s there has been an increasing display and sexualisation of the male body in mainstream cinema, television and advertising (Dolce and Gabbana)

Michel Foucault, who linked knowledge with power, related the 'inspecting gaze' to power rather than to gender in his discussion of surveillance.

We also looked at Miley Cyrus Wrecking Ball (2013)  as a very recent example.