Mulvey, Laura. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Film Theory and criticism Introductory Readings. Eds. Leo braudy and marshall Cohen New york: Oxford UP 1999:833-44
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Film Theory and Criticism : Introductory Readings. Eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. New York: Oxford UP, 1999: 833-44
FlLM: PSYCHOLOGY, SOCIETY, AND IDEOLOGY it,"must aim radically towards a kind of distraction which exposes disintegration rather than masking it. "36 As Hansen has indicated, Benjamins analysis of she has a fundamental ambivalence, moulded certainly by the impoverishment of ex- perience in modern life, but afso capable of assuming"a strategic sigr LAURA MULVEY artificial means of propelling the human body into moments of recognition. "37 The panic before the image on the screen exceeds a VISUAL PLEASURE AND llar to those one experiences in a daily encounter with urban traffic or industrial production. In its double nature, its transformation of still image into moving illu- NARRATIVE CINEMA tiginous dance, and pleasure derives from the energy released by the play betweer the shock caused by this illusion of danger and delight in its pure illusion, The jolt experienced becomes a shock of recognition. Far from fulfilling a dream of total replication of reality-the apophantis of the myth of total cinema-the experie of the first projections exposes the hollow centre of the cinematic illusion The thrill of transformation into motion depended on its presentation as a contrived illusion nder the controi of the projectionist showman. The movement from still to mov accented the unbelievable and extraordinary nature of the apparatus it self. But in doing so, it also undid any naive belief in the reality of the image Cinema's first audiences can no longer serve as a founding myth for the theo. reticalisation of the enthralled spectator. History reveals fissures along wit different from the classical spectator's absorption into an empathetic narrative L INTRODUCTION Placed within a historical context and tradition, the first spectators'experience re- A. A Political Use of Psychoanalys eals not a childlike belief, but lusionistic capabilities. I have attempted to reverse the traditional understanding of This paper intends to use psychoanalysis to discover where and how the fasc this first onslaught of moving images. Like a demystifying showman, I have frozen nation of film is reinforced by pre-existing patterns of fascination already at work the image of crowds scattered before the projection of an on-rushing train and read within the individual subject and the social formations that have moulded him. It it allegorically rather than mythically. This arrest should astonish us with the real takes as starting point the way film reflects, reveals and even plays on the straight, isation that these screams of terror and delight were well prepared for by both shor socially established interpretation of sexual difference which controls images, erotic men and audience. The audience's reaction was the antipode to the primitive one: ways of looking and spectacle. It is helpful to understand what the cinema has been It was an encounter with modernity. From the start, the terror of that image unco has worked in the theory and a practice which ered a lack, and promised only a phantom embrace. The train collided with no one will challenge this cinema of the past. Psychoanalytic theory is thus appropriate here It was, as Gorky said, a train of shadows, and the threat that it bore eighted tical weapon, demonstrating the way the ety has structured film form. dox of phallocentrism in all its manifestations is that it depend 1989 rated woman to gi and meaning to its woman stands as lynch pin to the system: it is her lack that produces the phallus as a symbolic presence, it is her desire to make good the lack that the phallus signi fies. Recent writing in en about psychoanalysis and the cinema has not suffi- iently brought out the importance of the representation of the female form in a symbolic order in which, in the last resort, it speaks castration and nothing else. To mmarise briefly the function of woman in forming the patriarchal unconscious her real absence of a and second thereby raises her child into the symbolic. Once this has been achieved, racauer, Cult of insen, Benyamin her meaning in the process is at an end it does not last into the world of law and language except as a memory which oscillates between memory of matemal plen- 833
834 FILM: PSYCHOLOGY, SOCIETY, AND IDEOLOGY VISUAL PLEASURE AND NARRATIVE CINEMA itude k. Both is subjected to her within its the bleeding and, she can exist only in relation to castration and cannot transcend it. She tums om its skilled and satisfying manipulation of visual plea her child into the signifier of her own desire to a penis(the condition. she stream film coded the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order. In imagines, of entry into the symbolic). Either she must gracefully give way to the the highly developed Hollywood cinema it was only through these codes that the word, the Name of the Father and the Law, or else struggle to keep her child down Rienated subject, tom in his imaginary memory by a sense of loss, by the terror of with her in the half-light of the imaginary. Woman then stands in patriarchal cul tential lack in phantasy, came near to finding a glimpse of satisfaction: through ture as signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can its formal beauty and its play on his own formative obsessions. This article wil dis- live out his phantasies ch linguistic command by imposing them cuss the interweaving of that erotic pieasure in film, its meaning, and in particular on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker the central place of the image of woman. It is said that analysing pleasure, or bear destroys it. That is the intention of this article. The satisfaction and reinforcement of the ego that represent the high point of film history hitherto must be attacked nearer to the roots nor of intellectualised unpleasure, but to make way for a total negation of the ease it faces us with the ultimate challenge: how to fight the unconscious structured like and plenitude of the narrative fiction film. The alternative is the thrill that comes a language(formed critically at the moment of arrival of language)while still caught from leaving the past behind without rejecting it, transcending outworn or oppres within the language of the patriarchy. There is no way in which we an produce ar sive forms, or daring to break with normal pleasurable expectations in order to co alternative out of the blue, but we can begin to make a break by examining patri- ceive a new language of desire ides, of which psychoanalysis is not the only but an portant one. We are still separated by a great gap from important issues for the fe- II. PLEASURE IN LOOKING/FASCINATION WITH THE male ious which are scarcely relevant to phallocentric HUMAN FORM orv: the the female infant and her relationship to the symbolic, the sexually mature woman as non-mother, matemity outside the signification of the phallus, the vagina .. But, A. The cinema offers a number of possible pleasures. One is scopophilia. There a psychoanalytic theory as it now stands can at least advance our un of the status quo, of the patriarchal order in which we are caught verse formation there is pleasure in being looked at. Originally. in his Three E Freud isolated scotophil the component instincts of B. Destruction of plec sexuality which exist as drives quite independently of the erotogenic zones. At this point he associated scopophilia with taking other people as objects, subjecting them As an advanced representation system, the cinema poses questions of the ways o a controlling and curious gaze. His particular examples centre around the voyeurs- the unconscious( formed by the dominant order) structure ways of seeing and plea- tic activities of children, their desire to see and make sure of the private and the for- sure in looking. Cinema has changed over the last few decades. It is no longer the bidden(curiosity about other people's genital and bodily functions, about the pres- monolithic system based on large capital investment exemplified at its best by Hol- ence or absence of the penis and, retrospectively, about the primal scene ). In thi lywood in the 19305, 1940 s and 1950,s. Technological advances(16mm, etc. )hat analysis scopophilia is essentially active (Later, in Instincts and their Vicissitudes, hanged the economic conditions of cinematic production, which can now be arti Freud developed his theory of scopophilia further, attaching it initially to pre- sanal as well as capitalist. Thus it has been possible for an alternative cinema to genital auto-eroticism, after which the pleasure of the look is transferred to others velop. However self-conscious and ironic Hollywood managed to be, it always re- by analogy. There is a close working here of the relationship between the active in- stricted itself to a formal mise-en-scene reflecting the dominant ideological concept stinct and its further development in a narcissistic form. )Although the instinct is of the cinema. The alternative cinema provides a space for a cinema to be born modified by other factors, in particular the constitution of the ego, it continues which is radical in both a political and an aesthetic sense and challenges the basic exist as the erotic basis for pleasure in looking at another person as object. At the umptions of the mainstream film. This is not to reject the latter moral treme, it can become fixated int n producing obsessive voyeurs and ghlight the ways in which its formal preoccupations reflect the psychical Peeping Toms, whose only sexual satisfaction can come from watching, in an ac sessions of the society which produced it. and, further, to stress that the alterna- tive controlling sense, an objectified other ive cinema must start specifically by reacting against these obsessions and as- At first glance, the cinema would seem to be remote from the undercover world sumptions, A politically and aesthetically avant-garde cinema is now possible, but of the surreptitious observation of an unknowing and unwilling victim. What is seen can still only exist as a counterpoint of the screen is so manifestly shown, But the mass of mainstream film, and the cor The magic of the Hollywood style at its best (and of all the cinema which fel ventions within which it has consciously evolved, portray a hermetically sealed world which unwinds magically, indifferent to the presence of the audience, pre
FILM: PSYCHOLOGY, SOCIETY, AND IDEOLOGY Ⅴ ISUAL PLEASURE AND RATIVE CINEMA ducing for them a sense of separation and playing on their voyeuristic phantasy through sight. The second, developed through narcissism and the constitution of the Moreover, the extreme contrast between the darkness in the auditorium(which also go, comes from identification with the image seen. Thus, in film terms, one ir plates the spectators from one another) and the brilliance of the shifting pattems plies a separation of the erotic identity of the subject from the object on the screen of light and shade on the screen helps to promote the illusion of voyeuristic sepa ctive scopophilia), the other demands identification of the ego with the object on lion. Although the film is really being shown, is there to be seen, conditions of the screen through the spectator's fascination with and recognition of his like. The screening and narrative conventions give the spectator an illusion of looking first is a function of the sexual instincts, the second of ego libido. This dichotom a private world. Among other things, the position of the spectators in the cinema is was crucial for Freud. Although he saw the two as interacting and overlaying each blatantly one of repression of their exhibitionism and projection of the repressed de other, the tension between instinctual drives and self-preservation continues to be a nisms not meaning. In themselves they have no signification, they have to be at- B. The cinema satisfies a primordial wish for pleasurable looking, but it also goes tached to an idealisation. Both pursue aims in indifference to perceptual reality,cre- stream film foch ng scopophilia in its narcissistic aspect. The conventions of main- ing the imagined, eroticised concept of the world that forms the perception of the attention on the human form. Scale, space, stories are all anthro- During its history, the evolved a particular ikeness and recognition: the human face, the human body, the relationship between the human form and its surroundings, the visible presence of the person in the world ality in which this contradiction between libido and ego has found a beautifully cor Jacques Lacan has described how the moment when a child recognises its own im- ntary phantasy world. In reality the phantasy world of the screen is subject to the law which produces it. Sexual instincts and identification processes have a mea age in the mirror is crucial for the ing within the symbolic order which articulates desire. Desire, born wit sis are relevant here. The mirror phase occurs at a time when the child's physical allows the possibility of transcending the instinctual and the imaginary, but pacity,with the result that his recognition of himself is of reference continually returns to the traumatic moment of its birth: the joyous in that he imagines his mirror image to be more complete, more perfect than complex. Hence the look, pleasurable in form, can be threatening in content, and it he experiences his own body. Recognition is thus overlaid with mis-recognition: the is woman as representation/image that crystallises this paradox image recognised is conceived as the reflected body of the self, but its mi he alienate which, re-introjected as an ego ideal, gives rise to the future generation of i Il. WOMAN AS IMAGE. MAN AS BEARER OF THE LOOK tion with others. This mirmor-moment predates language for the child. Important for this article is the fact that it is an image that constitutes the matrix A In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split be- cognition and identification, and hence of the tween active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phan- first articulation of the"I, "of subjectivity, This is a moment when an older fasci- asy on to the female figure which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibi nation with looking(at the mother's face, for an obvious example)collides with the tionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance initial inklings of self-awareness. Hence it is the birth of the long love affair/despair coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be between image and self-image which has found such intensity of expression in film looked-at-ness. Women displayed as sexual object is the leit-motiff of erotic and such joyous recognition in the cinema audience. Quite apart from the extra tacle: from pin-ups to strip-tease, from Ziegfeld to Busby Berkeley, she holds the ous similarities between screen and mirror(the framing of the human form in its ook, plays to and signifies male desire. Mainstream film neatly combined specta surroundings, for instance), the cinema has structures of fascination strong enough le and narrative. ( Note, however, how in the musical song-and- dance numbers break to allow temporary loss of ego while simultaneously reinforcing the ego. The sense the flow of the diegesis. ) The presence of woman is an indispensible element of forgetting the world as the ego has subsequently come to perceive it(I forgot tacle in normal narrative film, yet her visual presence tends to work against the ho I am and where I was)is nostalgically reminiscent of that pre-subjective mo- the flow of action in moments of erotic con- ment of image recognition. At the same time the cinema has dist shed itself in emplation. This alien presence then has to be integrated into cohesion with the nar- the production of ego ideals as expressed in particular in the star system, the stars ering both screen presence and screen story as they act out a complex proccess ermine provokes, or rather what she represents. She is the one, of likeness and difference(the glamorous impersonates the ordinary the love or fear she es in the hero, or else the concen he feels for her akes him act the way he does, In herself the woman has not the slightest im C. Sections IL. A and b have set out two contradictory aspects of the ple g nal cinematic situation. The first, scopophilic arises from pleasure in using another person as an object of sexual stimulation (A recent tendency in narrative film has been to dispense with this problem alto-
FILM: PSYCHOLOGY SOCIETY AND IDEOLOGY VISUAL PLEASURE AND NARRATIVE CINEMA in which the active homosexual eroticism of the central male figures can carry the ogy(as exemplified by deep focus in par thout distraction. Traditionally, the woman by the action of the protagonist), comb invisible editing (demanded by re- levels: as erotic object for the characters within the screen story, and as erotic alism)all tend to blur the limits of scr ace. The male protagonist is bject for the spectator within the auditorium with a shifting tension between the command the stage a stage of spatial n which he articulates looks on either side of the screen. For instance, the device of the show-girl allows creates the action the two looks to be unified technically without any apparent break in the diegesis A woman performs within the narrative, the gaze of the spectator and that of the C 1 Sections lil. A and B have set out a tension between a mode of representa male characters in the film are neatly combined without breaking narrative verisimil- tion of woman in film and conventions surrounding the diegesis. Each is associated itude. For a moment the sexual impact of the performin ith a iook: that of the spectator in direct scopophilic contact with the female form displayed for his enjoyment(connoting male phantasy) and that of the spectator fas- cinated with the image of his like set in an illusion of natural space, and through Not. Similarly, conventional close-ups of legs (Dietrich, for instance)or a face him gaining control and possession of the woman within the diegesis. (This tension (Garbo)integrate into the narrative a different mode of eroticism. One part of a frag mented body destroys the Renaissance space, the ilusion of depth demanded by the narrative, it gives flatness, the quality of a cut-out or icon rather than verisimilitue B. An active/passive heterosexual division of labour has similarly controlled nar- rative structure. According to the principles of the ruling ideology and the psych cal structures that back it up, the male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual jectification. Man is reluctant to gaze at his exhibitionist like. Hence the split between supports the man story,making things happen. The man controls the film phantasy as the representative of power in a further sense: as the bearer of the look of the spectator, transferring it behind the screen to neutralise the extra-diegetic tenden- cies represented by woman as spectacle. This is made possible through the processes set in motion by structuring the film around a main controlling figure with whom the spectator can identify. As the spectator identifies with the main male* protago- jects his look on to that of his like, his screen surrogate, so that the power f the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look, both giving a satisfying sense of omnipotence. A male movie star's glamourous characteristics are thus not those of the erotic object of the gaze, but those of the more perfect, more complete, more powerful ideal ego conceived in the original moment of recognition in front of the mirror. The character in the story can ake things happen and control events better than the subject/spectator, just as the image in the mirror was more in control of motor coordination. In contrast to woman as icon, the active male figure( the ego ideal of the identification process)demands a three-dimensional space corresonding to that of the mirror-recognition the alienated subject internalised his own representation of this imaginary He is a figure in a landscape. Here the function of film is to reproduce as Mitchum in a publicity sh of the erotic look, both giving a satisfying sense of omnipo. male protagonist is more apparent than real tence”(MUL
FILM: PSYCHOLOGY SOCIETY AND IDEOLOGY VISUAL PLEASURE AND NARRATIVE CINEMA and the shift from one pole other can structure a single text. Thus both in Only Angels Have Wings and in To Have and Have Not, the film opens with the processes. While Hitchcock goes into the investigative side of voyeurism, Stemberg oman as object of the combined gaze of spectator and all the male protagonists in produces the ultimate fetish, taking it to the point where the powerful look of the male protagonist(characteristic of traditional narrative film) is broken in favour of the film. She is isolated, glamourous, on display, sexualised. But as the narrative the image in direct erotic rapport with the spectator. The beauty of the woman as progresses she falls in love with the main male protagonist and object and the screen space coalesce; she is no longer the bearer of guilt but a per erty, losing her outward glamorous characteristics, her generalised sexuality, her fect product, whose body, stylised and fragmented by close-ups, is the content of show-girl connotations; her eroticism is subjected to the male star alone, By means the filn, and the direct recipient of the spectator's look, Stemberg plays down the of identification with him, through participation in his power, the spectator can illusion of screen depth; his screen tends to be one-dimensional, as light and shade, directly possess her too. lace, stearm, foliage, net, streamers, etc, reduce the visual field. There is little or ne But in psychoanalytic terms, the female figure poses a deeper problem mediation of the look through the eyes of the main male protagonist. On the con- connotes something that the look continually circles around but disavows of penis, implying a threat of castration and hence unpleasure. Ultimately shadowy presences like La Bessiere in Morocco act as surrogates for the di- rector, detached as they are from audience identification. Despite Stermberg's in ing of woman is sexual difference, the absence of the penis as visuall able, the material evidence on which is based the castration complex es sistence that his stories are irrelevant, it is significant that they are concerned with the organisation of entrance to the symbolic order and the law of the father. Thus situation, not suspense, and cyclical rather than linear time, while plot complica- tions revolve around misunderstanding rather than conflict. The most important ab- the woman as icon, displayed for the gaze and enjoyment of men, the active con- trollers of the look, always threatens to evoke the anxiety it originally signified. The sence is that of the controlling male gaze within the screen scene. The high point male unconscious has two avenues of escape from this castration anxiety: preoccu of emotional drama in the most typical Dietrich films, her supreme moments of erotic meaning. take place in the absence of the man she loves in the fiction. There pation with the re-enactment of the original trauma(investigating the woman,de are other witnesses, other spectators mystifying her mystery), counterbalanced by the devaluation, punishment or savin with, not standing in for, that of the audience. At the end of Morocco, Tom Brown f the guilty object (an avenue typified by the concerns of the film noir); or els complete disavowal of castration by the substitution of a fetish object or turning the has already disappeared into the desert when Amy Jolly kicks off her gold sandals and walks after him. At the end of Dishonoured. Kranau is indifferent to the fate represented figure itself into a fetish so that it becomes reassuring rather than dan- of Magda. In both cases, the erotic impact, sanctified by death, is displayed as a fetishistic scopophilia, builds up the physical beauty of the object, transforming spectacle for the audience. The male hero misunderstands and, above all, does not into something satisfying in itself. The first avenue, voyeurism, on the contrary has In Hitchcock, by contrast, the male hero does see precisely what the audience associations with sadism: pleasure lies in ascertaining guilt(immediately associated sees. However, in the films I shall discuss here, he takes fascination with an image with castration), asserting control and subjecting the guilty person through punish- hrough scopophilic eroticism as the subject of the film. more cases ment or forgiveness. This sadistic side fits in well with narrative. Sadism demands the hero portrays the contradictions and tensions experienced by the spectator. In a story, depends on making something happen, forcing a change in another person Vertigo in particular, but also in Marnie and Rear window, the look is central to battle of will and strength, victory/defeat, all occurring in a linear time with a be- the plot, oscillating between voyeruism and fetishistic fascination. As a twist, a fur ginning and an end Fetishistic scopophilia. on the other hand, can exist outside lin- ther manipulation of the normal viewing process which in some sense reveals it, ear time as the erotic instinct is focussed on the look alone. These contradictions Hitchcock uses the process of identification normally associated with ideological and ambiguities can be illustrated more simply by using works by Hitchcock and Stemberg, both of whom take the look almost as the content or subject matter of correctness and the recognition of established morality and shows up its perverted of their films. Hitchcock is the more complex, as he uses both mechanisms side. Hitchcock has never concealed his interest in voyeurism, cinematic and non- cinematic. His heroes are exemplary of the symbolic order and the law-a police Stemberg's work, on the other hand, provides many pure examples of fetishistic man(Vertigo), a dominant male possessing money and power(Marnie)but their erotic drives lead them into compromised situations. The power to subject another person to the will sadistically or to the gaze voyeuristically is tumed on to the woman 2 It is well known that Sternberg once said he would welcome his films being as the object of both. Power is backed by a certainty of legal right and the estab he specator's undiluted appreciation of the screen image. This statement is re- shed guilt of the woman(evoking castration, psychoanalytically speaking). True vealing but ingenuous. Ingenuous in that his films do demand that the figure of the perversion is barely concealed under a shallow mask of ideological correctness the man is on the right side of the law, the woman on the wrong. Hitchcock's skil- yoman (Dietrich, i the cycle of films with her, as the uitimate example)should be lentifiable. But revealing in that it emphasises the fact that for him the pictorial ful use of identification processes and liberal use of subjective camera from the point f view of the male protagonist draw the rs deeply into his position, mak space enclosed by the frame is paramount rather than narrative or identification ing them share his uneasy gaze. The audience is absorbed into a voyeuristic situa-
84 FILM: PSYCHOLOGY SOCIETY, AND IDEOLOGY VISUAL PLEASURE AND NARRATIVE CINEMA tion within the screen scene and diegesis which parodies his own in the cinema. In he, too, becomes complicit as he acts out the implications of his power. He controls is of Rear window, Douche takes the film as a metaphor for the cinema money and words, he can have his cake and eat it is the audie the screen. as he watches, an erotic dimension is added to his look a central im- IV SUMMARY the drama. His girlfriend Lisa had been of little sexual interest to him, more drag, so long as she remained on the spectator side. When she crosses the The psychoanalytic background that has been discussed in this article is relevant between his room and the block opposite, their relationship is re-bom erot- to the pleasure and unpleasure offered by traditional narrative film. The scopopl ically. He does not merely watch her through his lens, as a distant meaningful im instinct (pleasure in looking at another person as an erotic object), and, in con- ge, he also sees her as a guilty intruder exposed by a dangerous man threatening tradistinction, ego libido(forming identification pr cr with punishment, and thus finally saves her. Lisa's exhibitionism has alrea anisms, which this cinema has played on. The image of woman as(passive)raw een established by her obsessive interest in dress and style, in being a passive im material for the(active)gaze of man takes the argument a step further into the struc- age of visual perfection: Jeffries voyeurism and activity have also been established ture of representation, adding a further layer demanded by the ideology of the pa through his work as a photo-journalist, a maker of stories and captor of images triarchal order as it is worked out in its favourite cinematic form-illusionistic nar- However, his enforced inactivity, binding him to his seat as a spectator, puts him rative film. The argument turns again to the psychoanalytic background in that squarely in the phantasy position of the cinema audience woman as representation signifies castration, inducing voyeuristic or fetishistic In Vertigo, subjective camera predominates. apart from one flash-back mechanisms to circumvent her threat. None of these interacting layers is intrins Judy's point of view, the narrative is woven around what Scottie sees or fails to see. to film, but it is only in the film form that they can reach a perfect and beautiful The audience follows the growth of his erotic obsession and subsequent despair pre. the of shifting the emphasis of the cisely from his point of view. Scotties voyeurism is blatant: he falls in love with a look. It is the place of the look that defines cinema, the possibility of varying it and exposing it. This is what makes cinema quite different in its voyeuristic potential tant: he has chosen (and freely chosen, for he had been a successful lawyer) to be from, say, strip-tease, theatre, shows, etc. Going far beyond highlighting a womans a policeman, with all the attendant possibilities of pursuit and investigation. As a o-be-looked-at-ness, cinema builds the way she is to be looked at into the specta- result, he follows, watches and falls in love with a perfect image of female beauty cle itself. Playing on the tension between film as controlling the dimension of time and mystery. Once he actually confronts her, his erotic drive is to break her down (editing, narrative)and film as controlling the dimension of space(changes in dis and force her to tell by persistent cross-questioning. Then, in the second part of the tance,editing), cinematic codes create a gaze, a world, and an object, thereby pro film, he re-enacts his obsessive involvement with the image he loved to watch se ducing an illusion cut to the measure of desire. It is these cinematic codes and their cretly. He reconstructs Judy as Madeleine, forces her to conform in every detail to relationship to formative extermal structures that must be broken down before main- the actual physical appearance of his fetish. Her exhibitionism, her masochism, make stream film and the pleasure it provides can be challenged her an ideal passive counterpart to Scotties active sadistic voyeurism. She knows To begin with (as an ending ) the voyeuristic-scopophilic look that is a crucial her part is to perform, and only by playing it through and then replaying it can she part of traditional filmic pleasure can itself be broken down. There are three dif- ep Scottie's erotic interest. But in the repetition he does break her down and st ferent looks associated with cinema: that of the camera as it records the pro-filmic ceeds in exposing her guilt. His curiosity wins through and she is punished. In Ver event,that of the audience as it watches the final product, and that of the charac tigo, erotic involvement with the look is disorientating: the spectator's fascination ters at each other within the screen illusion. The conventions of narrative film deny Is turned against him as the narrative carries him through and entwines him wi the first two and subordinate them to the third, the conscious aim being always to the processes that he is himself exercising. The Hitchcock hero here is firmly placed eliminate intrusive camera presence and prevent a distancing awareness in the au thin the symbolic order, in narative terms. He has all the attributes of tl dience. Without these two absences(the material existence of the recording process. archal super-ego. Hence the spectator, lulled into a false sense of security by the the critical reading of the spectator), fictional drama cannot achieve reality, ob apparent legality of his surrogate, sees through his look and finds himself exposed nd truth. Nevertheless, as this article has argued, the structure as complicit, caught in the moral ambiguity of looking. Far frorn being simply an in narrative fiction film contains a contradiction in its own premises: the female im side on the perversion of the police, e as a castration threat constantly endangers the unity of the diegesis and bursts tive/looking, passive/looked-at split in terms of sexual difference and the power of through the world of illusion as an intrusive, static, one-dimensional fetish. Thus the male symbolic encapsulated in the hero. Marnie, too, performs for Mark Rut the two looks materially present in time and space are obsessively subordinated to gaze and masquerades as the perfect to-be -looked-at image He, too, is on the neurotic needs of the male ego. The camera becomes the mechanism for pro of the law until, drawn in by obsession with her guilt, her secret, he longs ducing an illusion of Renaissance space, flowing movements compatible with th to see her in the act of committing a crime make her confess and thus save her so human eye
FILM: PSYCHOLOGY, SOCIETY, AND IDEOLOGY surrogate can perform with verisimilitude. Simultaneously, the look of the audience is denied an intrinsic force: as soon as fetishistic represe tion of the female image threatens to break the spell of illusion, and the erotic im age on the screen appears directly (wthout me MANTHIA DIAWARA n)to the spectator, the fact fetishisation, concealing as it does castration fear freezes the look, fixates the spe BLACK SPECTATORSHIP: PROBLEMS OF tator and prevents him from acheiving any distance from the image in front of him This complex interaction of looks is specific to film. The first blow against the IDENTIFICATION AND RESISTANCE monolithic accumulation of traditional film conventions(already undertaken by rad ical film-makers) is to free the look of the camera into its materiality in space and the look of the audience into dialectics, passionate detachment no doubt that this destroys the satisfaction, pleasure and privilege of the guest, and highlights how film has depended on voyeuristic active/passive mecha- ually been stolen and used for this end, car not view the decline of the traditional film form with anything much more than sen- timental regret Whenever blacks are represented in Hollywood, and sometime mits blacks from its films altogether, there are spectators who denounce the resul and refuse to suspend their disbelief. The manner in which black spectators ma circumvent identification and resist the persuasive elements of Holly wood narrative and spectacle informs both a challenge to certain theories of spectatorship and the esthetics of Afro-American independent cinema. In this article I posit the inter rangeability of the terms" black spectatorand'resisting spectator'as a heuristic vice to imply that just as some blacks identify with Hollywood's images of blacks ome white spectators, too, resist the racial representations of dominant cinema. Fur ermore, by exploring the notion of the resisting spectator my aim is to reassess ome of the claims of certain theories of spectatorship which have not so far ac counted for the experiences of black spectators indmarks in the debate, such as articles like Christian Metz s on the Imaginary Sig nifier', Laura Mulvey's on Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema and Heath's on Difference3 with their recourse to Freud and Lacan, tended to argument around gendered spectatorship. More recently, debates cus on issues of sexuality as well as gender, yet with one or two excep- the prevailing approach has remained colour-blind. The position of the in the cinematic apparatus has been described by recou account of the mirror phase, suggesting that the metapsychology of ident WThis article is a reworked version of consin, Madison, in the Spring of 1973 the French Department of the University Homi k bhabha. "The Other Qucstion, Screen November-December 1983, vol 24 no 6, pp 18-36