Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

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Chapter 5 Psychoanalysis
‘ego libido (forming identification processes)’ (17). But in a world structured by
‘sexual imbalance’, the pleasure of the gaze has been separated into two distinct positions:
men look and women exhibit ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ – both playing to, and signifying,
male desire (11). Women are therefore crucial to the pleasure of the (male) gaze.
Traditionally, the woman displayed has functioned on two levels: as erotic object
for the characters within the screen story, and as erotic object for the spectator
within the auditorium, with a shifting tension between the looks on either side of
the screen (11–12).
She gives the example of the showgirl who can be seen to dance for both looks.
When the heroine removes her clothes, it is for the sexual gaze of both the hero in the
narrative and the spectator in the auditorium. It is only when they subsequently make
love that a tension arises between the two looks.
Popular cinema is structured around two moments: moments of narrative and
moments of spectacle. The first is associated with the active male, the second with the
passive female. The male spectator fixes his gaze on the hero (‘the bearer of the look’)
to satisfy ego formation, and through the hero to the heroine (‘the erotic look’) to
satisfy libido. The first look recalls the moment of recognition/misrecognition in front
of the mirror. The second look confirms women as sexual objects. The second look is
made more complex by the claim that
[u]ltimately, the meaning of woman is sexual difference. . . . She connotes something
that the look continually circles around but disavows: her lack of a penis,
implying a threat of castration and hence unpleasure. . . . Thus the woman as icon,
displayed for the gaze and enjoyment of men, the active controllers of the look,
always threatens to evoke the anxiety it originally signified (13).
To salvage pleasure and escape an unpleasurable re-enactment of the original castration
complex, the male unconscious can take two routes to safety. The first means of
escape is through detailed investigation of the original moment of trauma, usually
leading to ‘the devaluation, punishment or saving of the guilty object’ (ibid.). She cites
the narratives of film noir as typical of this method of anxiety control. The second
means of escape is through ‘complete disavowal of castration by the substitution of a
fetish object or turning the represented figure itself into a fetish so that it becomes reassuring
rather than dangerous’ (13–14). She gives the example of ‘the cult of the female
star . . . [in which] fetishistic scopophilia builds up the physical beauty of the object,
transforming it into something satisfying in itself’ (14). This often leads to the erotic
look of the spectator no longer being borne by the look of the male protagonist, producing
moments of pure erotic spectacle as the camera holds the female body (often
focusing on particular parts of the body) for the unmediated erotic look of the spectator.
Mulvey concludes her argument by suggesting that the pleasure of popular cinema
must be destroyed in order to liberate women from the exploitation and oppression of
being the ‘(passive) raw material for the (active) male gaze’ (17). She proposes what