“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” – by Laura Mulvey

“Introduction,” The Beauty Myth – by Naomi Wolf

• one is psychoanalytic, one sociological
• both take up the issue of the portrayal of women and the representation of the feminine

Mulvey –

• unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form
• relies on the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud and of Jacques Lacan
• everyone is caught in culture which is phallocentric; power is represented symbolically by the phallus
• women want a penis or the phallus of power and privilege
• men perceive women as castrated men, as “bearer of the bleeding wound”
• woman has no meaning except to remind men of their fear of being castrated, of losing their power and to bring a child (male = phallus= power) into the world
• woman can never be more than the wound, the absence, the ‘other’
• woman carries meaning for culture as castrated, but woman can’t make or transform culture
• since language is formed by phallocentric culture, it is problematic for women since it cannot represent their experience
• male is active and looks
• woman is passive and is seen
• film is a system of representation and reveals the ways in which the cultural unconscious structures the way we see
• culture is “scopophilic” – take pleasure in looking
• erotic is coded into language to reflect the phallocentric dominant culture
• in film, female subject represents the sense of loss, the terror or the lack
• film is split into story and image
• story provides an ideal image with which the male spectator can identify and reassure himself that he is whole
• image is of the passive female, the object of the gaze of the male spectator; it evokes both pleasure and anxiety (lack)
• male unconscious copes with the anxiety by either demystifying woman and then devaluing her by punishing or saving her or
• denying the anxiety and make her into a fetish object: scopophilia

Wolf

• second wave feminism of the 1970s provided women with unparalleled freedom and opportunity
• rejected ideologies that had previously held women in place, such as necessity of chastity, cult of domesticity, necessity of motherhood and passivity (‘angel in the house’)
• Wolf observes that as power grew, so did female dissatisfaction with the female body
• observes that the successful woman is now represented as a “gaunt, youthful model” despite fact that average American women wear size 14 - 16
• women show fear of aging, fear of loss of control, self-hatred
• theorizes that these feelings are a result of a backlash against feminism
• images of beauty are used to undermine female power
• beauty myth is that beauty is both objective and universal; women want to embody it and men want to posses it; also that beauty is unchanging, inert, generic
• Instead, Wolf argues that beauty is determined by politics, rather than aesthetics; reflects male institutional power
• ideas of beauty prescribe behaviour, rather than appearance
• women have traded unending housework for unending beauty work
• as women’s roles have changed, women have developed anxiety and guilt about their liberation
• response to change is to posit something unchanging: timeless beauty
• repackage fear into something acceptable
• instead of owning female power and accomplishment, women are trained to be obsessed with what they lack
• women’s new feelings of worth are counteracted by an ideology that trains women to feel worthless to undermine their power and accomplishment
• “unconscious hallucination” is reinforced by conscious market manipulation:

$33 x 10⁶ diet industry

$20 x 10⁶ cosmetic industry

$300 x 10⁶ cosmetic surgery

$7 x 10⁶ pornography

• female consumer is vital to the society, so behaviour is reinforced
• “This does not require a conspiracy; merely an atmosphere”