Triangulation: Laura Mulvey's 'Women as image, man as bearer of the look': CoP2 Seminar (10/10/2016)

For our first CoP Seminar of the year we were tasked with triangulating between three texts revolving around Feminist film theorist/Avant-Garde Filmmaker Laura Mulvey's 1975 essay 'Visual and Other Pleasures' which discusses women's roles in what she perceives and argues to be a male-dominated narrative media. In the extract which we analysed as a part of the seminar, Mulvey puts forth the argument that women are placed in a passive, exhibitionist role to be looked at and displayed, while the male characters, in most cases, often take on a much more active driving role in the narrative. She reinforces this point by referencing Molly Haskell's argument that most traditional narrative structure is centred around a main controlling figure, a person who assumes control of the narrative and is the centre of the events that unfold, which she argues is reflective of the assumed male spectator.

The crux of Mulvey's argument is that men take the active role, often relegating the female characters to a more passive role in the narrative. In her argument Mulvey quotes film director Budd Boetticher in saying;

'What counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents. She is the one, or rather, the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act the way he does. In herself the women has not the slightest importance.'

Man is reluctant to gaze upon his 'exhibitionist like' as it were. The glamorous looks of the male movie stars who inhabit these narratives are not the erotic object of gaze, like the female characters often are, rather they are there to fulfil the 'ideal ego' and power fantasies of the presumably male spectator. John Storey echoes this sentiment to a degree in his 2008 essay 'Cultural Theory and Popular Culture' in which he echoes the arguments put forth by Mulvey, arguing that this 'Voyeuristic Fantasy' of the male gaze is encouraged by the darkness of the cinema and the bright lights of the projector screen. Storey compares the way audiences see themselves in narrative cinema  with 'The Mirror Phase' of child cognitive development, where the child's physical ambitions outstrip their motor capacity. To Storey, narrative cinema offers a means for audiences to fulfil their own fantasises and 'ideal egos' through what Mulvey describes as a 'screen surrogate', and that these fantasies whether consciously or not reinforce harmful patriarchal norms that place women in a passive role.

However, in his 1998 essay 'Stars', Film Academic Richard Dyer argues that research shows that a broader context of social relationships is equally, if not more influential in how people view media, though for the purposes of his argument, he means in terms of television.