Laura Mulvey's Visual Pleasure And Narrative Cinema

In the article Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, published in 1975, Laura Mulvey, a British film critic, has set out the concept of visual pleasure named scopophilia (Mulvey 485) and explained its presence in Hollywood cinema. She points out that this scopophilia is taken from “the pleasure in using another person as an object of sexual stimulation” (Mulvey 487), explains that when men looked at women, men as the subject can get scopophilia by looking at women in the object position. In contrast, women accept their role of being looked at and creating visual pleasures for men as well as outside the film (Mulvey 485). This difference in the role of looking position might be directed from the presence of the signifier - the penis. In The significance of the Phallus, Jacques Lacan tried to point out the difference between “to have” and “to be” the penis.
He stated that the function of the phallus differentiates sexes (Lacan 1309), which indicates that the difference between sexes is related to the presence or the lack of a penis. The castration theory of Sigmund Freud (psychoanalysis expert) also described the castration phobia of women where they fear of the lack of penis on their body. It is to say all human beings are considered as “men”, where women are “men” who have been castrated the penis. Men are set in “men” category when he is seen of having a penis. Women, meanwhile, do not possess penis, should they be viewed as “to be” penis, so they are considered to be possessed by the one who do have the penis.
As the spectator, we put ourselves in position of the on-screen characters, thus we may possess the power of this on-screen character.
So when we are watching films, we seem to be indirectly owning everything on the screen, including the power of the male character. The act of looking at women is described in the sequences of pair looks where men are active as subject while women are passive as objects/images on film. The male spectators can look through the camera to the male characters, and then from the eyes of the male characters look on female characters. The purpose is through the sight of male characters, the viewers can find the pleasure. For instance, in the scene where the male character will be cut and changed into a part of female character’s body, the viewer whether they wanted or not, have to direct their looks to the direction of male characters’ looking. Also the majority filmmakers are male so the films are made on the perspective of men’s eyes. Therefore gender are the chief determinant in the process of looking and being looked at in films, where men will have the dominant perspective for
women.