Psychoanalytic film theorists, particularly feminists, were interested in the construction of the viewer in relation to questions of gender and sexual desire. Apparatus theory did not address gender at all. In assuming that the spectator was male, Metz examined desire in the context of the male Oedipal trajectory. In 1975 Laura Mulvey published a daring essay, 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema', which put female spectatorship on the agenda for all time. As Mulvey later admitted, the essay was deliberately and provocatively polemical. It established the psychoanalytic basis for a feminist theory of spectatorship which is still being debated. What Mulvey did was to redefine, in terms of gender, Metz's account of the cinema as an activity of disavowal and fetishization. Drawing on Freudian theories of scopophilia, castration, and fetishism, and Lacanian theories of the formation of subjectivity, Mulvey introduced gender into apparatus theory.
In her essay, Mulvey argued that in a world ordered by sexual imbalance the role of making things happen usually fell to the male protagonist, while the female star occupied a more passive position, functioning as an erotic object for the desiring look of the male. Woman signified image, a figure to be looked at, while man controlled the look. In other words, cinematic spectatorship is divided along gender lines. The cinema addressed itself to an ideal male spectator, and pleasure in looking was split
in terms of an active male gaze and a passive female image.
Mulvey argued that in a world ordered by sexual imbalance the role of making
things happen usually fell to the male protagonist, while the female star occupied
a more passive position, functioning as an erotic object for the desiring
look of the male. Woman signified image, a figure to be looked at, while man
controlled the look.
She argued that, although the form and figure of woman was displayed for the enjoyment of the male protagonist, and, by extension, the male spectator in the cinema, the female form was also threatening because it invoked man's unconscious anxieties about sexual difference and castration. Either the male protagonist could deal with this threat (as in the films of Hitchcock) by subjecting woman to his sadistic gaze and punishing her for being different or he could deny her difference (as in the films of Joseph von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich) and fetishize her body by overvaluing a part of her body such as her legs or breasts. The narrative endings of films, which almost always punished the threatening woman, reinforced Mulvey's argument about the voyeuristic gaze, while the deployment of the close-up shot, which almost always fragmented parts of the female form for erotic contemplation, reinforced Mulvey's argument about the fetishistic look.
Whereas Freudian and Lacanian theory argued that the castration complex was a universal formation that explained the origins and perpetuation of patriarchy, Mulvey demonstrated in specific terms how the unconscious of patriarchal society organized its own signifying practices, such as film, to reinforce myths about women and to offer the male viewer pleasure. Within this system there is no place for woman. Her difference represents - to use what was fast becoming a notorious term - 'lack'. However, Mulvey did not hold up this system as universal and unchangeable. If, in order to represent a new language of desire, the filmmaker found it necessary to destroy pleasure, then this was the price that must be paid.
What of the female spectator? In a second article, 'Afterthoughts on "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" Inspired by King Vidor's Duel in the Sun (1946)'(1981), Mulvey took up the issue of the female spectator. Since the classic Hollywood text is so dependent upon the male Oedipal trajectory and male fantasies about woman to generate pleasure, how does the female spectator experience visual pleasure? To answer this question, Mulvey drew on Freud's theory of the libido, in which he asserted that 'there is only one libido, which performs both the masculine and feminine functions' (1981: 13). Thus, when the heroine on the screen is strong, resourceful, and phallic, it is because she has reverted to the pre-Oedipal phase. According to Freud, in the lives of some women, 'there is a repeated alternation between periods in which femininity and masculinity gain the upper hand' (quoted in Mulvey 1971: 15). Mulvey concluded that the female spectator either identifies with woman as object of the narrative and (male) gaze or may adopt a 'masculine' position. But, the female spectator's 'phantasy of masculinisation is always to some extent at cross-purposes with itself, restless in its transvestite clothes' (in Mulvey 1981: 15).
It is this aspect of her work that became most controversial amongst critics, such as D. N. Rodowick (1982), who argued that her approach was too reductive and that her analysis of the female character on the screen and female spectator in the auditorium did not allow for the possibility of female desire outside a phallocentric context.
Pamela Church Gibson, Oxford University Press, 1998
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