Laura Mulvey wrote an article back in the 1970s when she was just a graduate student that went on to become what is arguably the single most influential article in modern cinema studies. It has been elaborately critiqued over the years, but the article describes a basic feature so common in mainstream films that it is hard to avoid referring to it. It will be extremely important in this class, and you will find that it often describes movies and television shows that you will see.

One of the main reasons we go to see movies is because we like to see things that are beautiful. The technical term Mulvey uses is scopophilia, which suggests that we get a kind of almost sexual pleasure from looking at beautiful things. Hollywood caters to this desire by giving us beautiful people to look at—particularly beautiful women. Mulvey believes that women on screen, however, also create a certain sense of anxiety in the viewer, because the viewer is also reminded that women are historically subordinate to men, cut off from power and socio-economic status. (Women are symbolically castrated, to use Mulvey’s psychoanalytic language). The viewer might worry, at least unconsciously, that the same thing could happen to him! Hollywood narrative movies usually relieve this anxiety by investigating the woman and punishing her over the course of the film (suggesting that women’s subordinate status is their fault, something that they did, and not a historical injustice).

There are two main characters in Singin’ in the Rain, Kathy Selden (the good-hearted newcomer with real talent) and Lina Lamont (the veteran actress who schemes to exploit Kathy to conceal her own lack of talent). Many students assume that Lina Lamont should be punished for her domineering and castrating ways (she manipulates and threatens the men around her, even forcing the head of the studio to do her bidding)—and she is! Her lack of talent is put on public display and her career is ruined at the end. But we should note that she is not investigated—only punished. Mulvey doesn’t say that women are castrating (although they sometimes are, like Lina)—she says that they are symbolically castrated, all of them, and this makes the male spectator worried that the same could happen to him (hence, it must turn out that women “deserved it”). And in fact, the woman who makes our male hero, Don Lockwood, nervous and unsure of himself is not the ridiculous Lina, but the beautiful and generous Kathy. Is Kathy investigated and punished in the film? She certainly is. When Kathy meets Don, she makes fun of him for being a silent film actor rather than a real stage actor; she doesn’t go to the movies (too lowbrow!), and she’s never even heard of the famous Don Lockwood! Over the course of the film, this will turn out to be a lie—she has seen all his films, and subscribes to his fan magazines. And the public humiliation of Lina Lamont is just as public and just as humiliating for Kathy, who rushes from the theater in tears (see image above).

1. •Mulvey is not talking about castrating women (such as the femme fatale), but about how Hollywood films constitute women in general as symbolically castrated.
   

2. •She does not suggest that women provoke anxiety in men because their beauty gives them power over men—this is a typical “post-feminist” argument from our own era, almost 30 years later. The fear is not of powerful women, but of women without power—and of men who might be like them.
   

3. •The need to investigate thus applies more to the good heroines than it does to female villains. In the typical Bond film, it is never the sexy and psychotic Russian assassin who must be investigated (we know she’s evil from the start), but the apparently normal love interest, whose terrible secret betrayal must be revealed, and punished—Vesper in Casino Royale is a perfect, and typical, example.
   

4. •Mulvey knows perfectly well that actual, real viewers are men and women, straight, gay and queer—but she is arguing that the Hollywood camera itself looks with a (straight) “male gaze.” Imagine the (in)famous sequence of Megan Fox in Transformers, tuning up the car in slow motion in her tank top and Daisy Dukes. Now replace her with Shia LeBoeuf in analogous clothes, doing the same thing in the same posture, and filmed the same way—and a perfectly typical film spectacle (the sexy female body on display for the (male) spectator’s pleasure) becomes a ridiculous scene of comic camp, a drag show, apparently homoerotic in character. Why? Because the camera is still looking with a male gaze.
   

5. •We in the audience don’t have to look with a male gaze; we can resist it. But the structures of the film are built for that gaze (they “suture” us into that viewing position), and we will derive the greatest pleasure from the film if we adopt such a gaze. If we do not, there will be continuous interference.
   

6. •These structures are embedded at an unconscious level, so we don’t choose to watch the film from a straight male perspective; the “male gaze” chooses us, is prepared for us in advance whether we want it or not.
   

7. •Mulvey believed that pleasure was the problem—if we could eliminate pleasure from cinema, the male gaze would have no psychic support for its position. This was, in some ways, typical of the sometimes anti-pleasure feminism of the 1970s and 1980s, and it clearly did not work. How else might one combat the male gaze, the constitution of women as lacking?
   

8. •As always, you shouldn’t simply accept that Mulvey was right—but you should assume that an article written by a grad student 40 years ago that dominated the field for three decades was probably really, really smart. The chances of any of us doing something that people will take seriously for forty years is almost vanishingly small. Take it seriously.