The concept of “the male gaze” describes the visual presentation of women for the pleasure of the male heterosexual viewer. Under the male gaze, women are positioned as passive objects, subject to the controlling view of a man. Examples can be found in paintings, statues and movies. Mulvey takes the movies of Golden Age Hollywood (1927-1960) and examines how the male gaze makes films pleasurable for male viewers. She enriches the theory of looking by making use of psychoanalytic theory, specifically Freud’s ideas around scopophilia and castration, and Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage.

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Scopophilia and the Mirror Stage

Scopophilia, as described by Freud, is the act of deriving sexual pleasure through sight. As Mulvey explains, Freud “associated scopophilia with taking other people as objects [and] subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze.” We can see, therefore, that scopophilia involves exerting power over the sexual object. In its extreme form, it is associated with voyeurism or “peeping Toms.”

 

Mulvey observes that the cinema is a technology of scopophilia. It allows passive observers to sit in the relative privacy of a darkened room while offering them full visual access to the world of the film. Since movie actors never acknowledge the audience, the spectator is provided “the illusion of looking in on a private world” which is precisely the situation of the voyeur. Thus, movies are established as inherently voyeuristic and satisfy “a primordial wish for pleasurable looking.”

 

On the other hand, Mulvey also likens cinema to the mirror stage in child development. This stage, when children first recognize themselves in the mirror, is revisited in the cinema when the audience is permitted a “temporary loss of ego” as they identify instead with characters on the screen.

 

Interestingly, these two forms of pleasure are contradictory. Scopophilia gives pleasure by taking another person as an object whereas the pleasure of the mirror stage is in identification with the person on the screen. This is the contradiction between the libido, or sexual drive, which is generally directed at others, and the ego, which is concerned with the self.

 

Women and men on screen

Mulvey describes the differing roles of men and women in movies. Females are there to be looked at. There is a double looking in that a woman is an “erotic object for the characters within the screen story, and [an] erotic object for the spectator within the auditorium.” In this sense, women provide the scopophilic pleasures. In addition, Mulvey notes the passivity of women as sexual objects. Since their function is just to be looked at, women tend not to be involved in plots and their appearances often mark a pause in the narrative of the film. For example, when Marilyn Monroe first appears in River of No Return (1954), the film’s action stops as everyone watches her sing.

 

On the other hand, men are active. The narrative of films tends to be driven by male characters. These men supply the other half of the pleasure afforded by cinema. The audience is invited to identify with the male protagonist, who becomes what Mulvey terms a “screen surrogate.” The power of the male protagonist is therefore also enjoyed by the male audience members who identify with him. Just like the image in the mirror for the child, the image of the protagonist on screen is “more perfect, more complete, more powerful” than the audience member. Identifying with him therefore provides “a satisfying sense of omnipotence.”

 

Women and Castration

Following Freud, Mulvey claims that women on screen are also a source of anxiety for the male viewer. This relates to the castration complex which is said to lurk in the male unconscious. Freud claims that women’s lack of a penis causes young boys to fear that they too may, one day, be castrated. In this sense, there is a kind of built in fear and displeasure which is attached to women.

 

So if movies are to use women in order to generate visual pleasure for the male viewer, the threat of castration will need to be neutralized. Mulvey suggests that movies can do this in two ways. One is to sadistically demystify a female character, to uncover her secrets and therefore to remove any power that she might have over the viewer. The woman will lose a battle of wills and be forced to change. This is typically what happens to the femme fatale in film noir. The other method is to turn the woman into a fetish object. This is to elevate the physical beauty of the woman to the point of overwhelming satisfaction for the viewer.

 

Mulvey then details how the films of Josef von Sternberg tend to treat women as fetish objects, while Alfred Hitchcock movies also demystify female characters. 

 

Mulvey concludes that the pleasures afforded to the heterosexual male viewer are achieved by promoting one form of looking and suppressing two other possible forms. Narrative film affirms the look between characters on the screen. But it tends to obscure the look of the camera as it records as well as the look of the audience as it views the film. 

 

What she means is that visual pleasure is provided to the viewer when he is able to identify with a male protagonist who looks at the female love interest. The viewer can forget that he is in the cinema or even that he is watching a film as he receives the dual pleasures of enhancing his ego and controlling a woman. On the other hand, if films used techniques to put distance between the viewer and the film; to remind them that they are in a cinema or to show that they are seeing an artificial construct through the lens of a camera, then these pleasures would be diminished and the film would no longer be in the service of subconscious male heterosexual desires.