Summary of the arguments that Laura Mulvey puts forward in her Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975)

Mulvey’s arguments are influenced by the theories of Sigmund Freud and focuses on the representation of women in Hollywood films. Conventional Hollywood films have a male protagonist who is active. The audience is assumed to be male. Actresses on the other hand, are seen to be glamorous and attractive and therefore appease to the male gaze. Therefore, the male is active and female passive.

Mulvey argues that through the Male gaze, in which the spectator is put in a masculine subject position, the audience look at films voyeuristically and fetishistically. The audience are voyeurs because they are watching the film (usually in a darkened cinema) and don’t acknowledge the rest of the audience, just the characters on the screen and see the woman as a “modonna”. She argues that this voyeurism involves turning the female character into a fetish, seeing the woman as a “whore”, so they are objectified by the audience because of their looks. This goes onto her idea of women simply having the quality of “to-be-looked-at-ness”.

There are two effects of voyeurism: objectification and narcissist identification. Objectification involves the audience to look at the female character as an object rather than a real person and narcissism means the audience imagine that they are the person they see on the screen, creating them to love themselves. Another possibility of pleasure in the cinema is taken from Freud’s idea of “scopophilia”- where the male audience take pleasure in looking at the female as an object.

Mulvey also talks about the threat of male castration through the substitution of a phallic fetish object, such as a cigarette or a pen.

Metaphorically, Mulvey’s work refers to a way of thinking about and acting within society.