Week 6, Visual Pleasure

“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” by Laura Mulvey is an analysis on focused on many theories about the representation and importance of women in cinema. Laura explains how women are in a way used a visual pleasure only, while men are sure to be the dominant role. She also began with Freuds ideas on scopophilia, or the pleasure in looking. In this reading, Laura focuses her attention on the theories from Sigmund Freud. While reading this article I found it hard to keep reading. The representation on how women were viewed and that this was probably a reality in how women were viewed is both fascinating, and disgusting. According to Freud, scopophilia is the manifest in, “the voyeuristic activities of children’, who have a desire to see private areas on the human body. There are many moments within this article where Freud refers to castration, or how women are a castration threat. “her lack of a penis, implying a threat of castration and hence unpleasure. Ultimately, the meaning of woman is sexual difference, the visually ascertainable absence of the penis, the material evidence on which is based the castration complex.” Freud explains how males are threatened and filled with anxiety, how women are then seen as a fetish object? At this moment of the article, I was not interested in anything Freud had to say about women at all. This to me, makes me think that this man was traumatized himself. From what I believe that Freud is trying to get across in that because women have an absence of a penis that it signifies as the lack of nothingness? Thus, these men feel empowered by having what women biologically do not have. So, the relation to castration so many times through the article is his fear of losing that theoretical power they are born with? In the next part of the article, Laura points out that the first aspect of scopophilia involves the objectification of the other for erotic pleasure, while the second identifying and securing their ideal of ego.

I am using images from the movie Vertigo by Alfred Hitchcock because it serves as a film that features a male hero that is mainly about voyeurism. In the article Laura states, “the look is central to the plot, oscillating between voyeurism and fetishistic fascination.” In a film like this the male or the protagonist is given this false sense of authority just because of his occupation and wealth. In the movie, the protagonist is hired to spy on a woman which then eventually becomes obsessed with her. Toward the end of the movie, he finally interrogates her and compels her to change her appearance and then finally instigates a punishment, being death. This illusion that was made during this time about power, weakness, identity, ego and even voyeurism is something that I believe we are changing now. This made me start to pay attention a little more to what it is I am watching, see it in a lens that I normally wouldn’t. This theory of pleasure in viewing has different meanings, and to explore each one may be something to explore ourselves.