CCS 101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Laura Mulvey, Primal Scene, Sexual Objectification
20 Jun 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Visual Pleasure & Narrative Cinema
Laura Mulvey
the paradox of phallocentrism is that it depends on the image of the castrated woman
to give order and meaning to its world
the function of a woman in forming the patriarchal unconscious is: she symbolizes the
castration threat by her real absence of a penis and thereby raises her child into the
symbolic; once this has been achieved, her meaning in the process is at an end
woman's desire is subjected to her image as bearer of the bleeding wound, she can exist
only in castration and cannot transcend it
she turns her child into the signifier of her own desire to possess a penis
scopophilia - looking itself is a source of pleasure
Freud isolated scopophilia as one of the component instincts of sexuality which exist as
drives quite independently of the erotogenic zones; he associated scopophilia with taking
other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze
his examples center around the voyeuristic activities of children, their desire to see and
make sure of the private and the forbidden (curiosity about other people's genital and
bodily functions, about the presence/absence of the penis, and about the primal scene)
can become fixated into a perversion, producing obsessive voyeurs and Peeping Toms,
whose only sexual satisfaction can come from watching, in an active controlling sense, an
objectified other
the mass of mainstream film portray a hermetically sealed world which unwinds
magically, indifferent to the presence of the audience, producing for them a sense of
separation and playing on their voyeuristic phantasy
the extreme contrast between the darkness in the auditorium (which also isolates the
spectators from each other) and the brilliance of the shifting patterns of light and shade
on the screen helps to promote the illusion of voyeuristic separation
conditions of screening and narrative conventions give the spectator an illusion of
looking in on a private world, although the film is there to be seen
the position of the spectators in the cinema is blatantly one of repression of their
exhibitionism and projection of the repressed desire on to the performer
the cinema satisfies a primordial wish for pleasurable looking, but it also goes further,
developing scopophilia in its narcissistic aspect
the conventions of mainstream film focus attention on the human form
2 contradictory aspects of the pleasurable structures of looking in the conventional
cinematic situation
oscopophilic - arises from pleasure in using another person as an object of sexual
stimulation through sight; function of the sexual instincts
odeveloped through narcissism and the constitution of the ego, comes from
identification of the image seen; function of the ego libido
pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female
the determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female figure which is styled
accordingly
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
