In this paper we are going to discuss the position of Laura Malvey in her work “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”. We will also discuss how Mulvey’s thesis may be convincing in one instance but tested to its limitations in another using two examples.
The psychoanalytic interpretation of the position of women viewers gets back to the famous essay by Laura Mulvey “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, the original thesis of which was that the film form is structured by the unconscious of the patriarchal society and that woman as a spectator is always imposed the rules of a “foreign” game – getting of the male type of pleasure – for example, inherently scopophilic pleasure from the examination of the female body.
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But the issue in this work is not only and not so much about the pleasure itself, but about more serious things – how the “vision” is the instance of identification formation of the subject through the visual practices and how the power is incorporated into the play – that is, the question is raised in the work about the ideological effects of the basic cinematic apparatus.
Mulvey argued that ideology is involved in forming the subjectivity of the individual at the level of the unconscious – and that is how a female spectator, through borrowing the male gaze, takes the ideology of a patriarchal society, which is imposed.
Laura Mulvey in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” explains how the traditional Hollywood film claims the scopophilic view: “In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female form which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness.” (Malvey, 1975). The woman, demonstrated as a sexual object, acts as a leitmotif of erotic spectacle.
The formulated problem in this context may be solved through a strong deconstruction of the vision machine, which constitutes a woman as an image, and a man as an owner of the sight. Mulvey proposes to destroy the voayeristic-scopophilic opinion, consistently destroying cinematic codes that postulate such view.
Will this be the solution of the problem? Mulvey’s emphasis on the analysis of the specific of the cinematographic system, with all its radical and provocative judgements, seems to be legitimate. The real is the question of the discursive mediation properties. However, in general, the psychoanalytic criticism of visual representations may also have a profound methodologic effect.
In our work we have to give two examples from visual culture and discuss how Mulvey’s thesis may be convincing in one instance but tested to its limitations in another.
For this discussion I propose to take two films: “Rare Window” by Alfred Hitchcock and “Kill Bill” by Quentin Jerome Tarantino.
The film “Rare Window” by Alfred Hitchcock is convicing the thesis of Laura Malvey that Man is the bearer of the look while Woman connotes to-be-looked-at-ness. The main character of this film is put in such conditions that he has to be scopophilic. A photographer Jeffries has broken his leg and now he has to watch everything going on outside through the window. The film reveals to us one of the main needs of men – peep through the keyhole, figuratively speaking. It is really impossible to keep away from such a forbidden fruit. And the blame of everything is curiosity, namely it moves the main mechanisms in a man, allowing to forget about other equally important needs (food, rest, sex) and exciting the imagination at a time. In this film everything is concentrated around the man, Jeffries, women are just a background here.
In this film we can see many scenes convincing Malvey’s thesis. Jeff Jeffries (Stewart), a photographer who works in magazine and has broken his leg, is forced to miss in the four walls and have fun just because of peeping into the daily life of the yard, and neighbors with binoculars. Having noticed the suspicious behavior of one of them, he comes to the firm belief that the latter has murdered his wife. Being motionless himself, Jeff enlists the aid of Lisa (Kelly), a quiet blonde working model in the fashion house – here she is particularly beautiful. The girl is desperately in love with him and therefore agrees to perform for him a dangerous “work down”. Of all the works by Hitchcock this is an exercise in scopophilia in which the viewer is nothing left to do but to take part in the process. It’s like to stay Hitchcock himself within 112 minutes. “Look out the window and see what you should not see” – says Jeff to the nurse (Ritter), and the viewer looks through the window and sees what the main character sees.
A men chained to the chair, staring out the window is one part of the film. The second part shows what he sees, and the third one – how he reacts to what he sees. This is the purest expression of the idea of narrative cinema.
Another confirmation of Malvey’s thesis is how Jeffries renews his erotic interest for girlfriend when she enters the other apartment and Jeffries sees her at distance. This is the power from a voyeurism point of view because Jeffries is controlling the visual the spatial and the temporal. In addition the camera movements are dictated by the male hero, Jeffries.
Now let us discuss another film, in which Malvey’s thesis that Man is the bearer of the look while Woman connotes to-be-looked-at-ness in classical Hollywood cinema is tested to its limitations. As an example I would like to take the film “Kill Bill” by Quentin Tarantino. In this film we see a strong girl who denies Malvey’s view of women in the Holywood cinema.
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Having been four years in coma the girl-victim wakes up in the hospital in shock and with the atrophy of muscles, but in a few minutes after waking up she commits a double murder and steals the car of one of her victims. Further, in the course of the movie she can not stop, especially since the recalls, who is responsible for the fact that she has lost her baby, her husband and all the guests at the wedding, where her beating took place.
The female character Uma Thurman (the bride) wears little makeup or did her hair in a manner to arouse the male audience through her physical looks. Additonally she hardly smiles on the camera drawing a distinction to the female characters in classical Hollywood cinema.
The episode when the bride in cold blood composes a list of five names of her future victims, the main and the latest of which is Bill also deserves a special attantion. Here we see not a classical woman who appears as an erotic object, but a strong, manlike heroine. Further, in the course of the first part the violence over the first two names in the list of death follows.
Even in the eyes of the main heroine, the bride, we see a burning, glowing white-hatred and this is the limitation of Malvey’s thesis that that Man is the bearer of the look while Woman connotes to-be-looked-at-ness in classical Hollywood cinema. The monologues of the character are also uncommon for a classical woman:
“Look lifeless, right? Well, I am not dead, the fortune smiled at me, that’s what I can tell you. It so happened that the last Bill’s bullet drove me into a coma. In coma I was destined to lie for five years. Then I woke up … And immediately I ran, as it is taught by one advertisement, “fret and fume.” I fumed and raged, and craved, and found blood. In total, until today, I killed 33 people. Only one remained.”
So, as we can see, the bride is a strong, manlike female character, unusual for the Hollywood cinema.
To make a conclusion it should be said that in our work we have discussed the position of Laura Malvey in her work “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”. We have also discussed how Mulvey’s thesis may be convincing in one instance but tested to its limitations in another using two examples. For discussion we took two films: “Rare Window” by Alfred Hitchcock and “Kill Bill” by Quentin Jerome Tarantino.
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