60 LAURA MULVEY VISUAL PLEASURE AND NARRATIVE CINEMA 61 Important for this article is the fact that it is an image that constitutes the matrix of the to work against the development of a story-line of subjectivity. This is a moment when an the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation. This esence then has mother's face, for an obvious example) collides with the initial inklings of self-awareness ted into cohesion with the narrative. As Budd Boetticher has put it: found such intensity of expression in film and such joyous recognition in the cinema audience is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents. She is the uman furt from the extran ad mirror(the framing of the the cinema has structures of fasc for her, who makes him act the way he does, In herself the woman has not the slightest wh to perceive it( forget who I am and where I has distinguished itself in the pro ge recognition. While at the same eroticism of the central male fig carry the story without distraction. a complex process of likeness and difference(the glamorous impersonates the ordinary) c Sections A and b have set out two contradictory aspects of the pleasurable structures of ith a shifting Iside of the scr st, scopophilic, arises from pleasure in of the show-girl allows the two looks gh sight. The second, developed egesta. hrough narcissism and the constitution of the ego, comes from ale characters in the film are neatly combined without breaking narrative verisimilitude. For of the inside its own time and space. Thus Marilyn Monroe's first appearance in The River f Ne The first is a function of the sexual instincts, the second of ego libido. This dichotomy w Re between instinctual drives and self- preservation polarises in terms of pleasure. But both are demanded by the narrative; it gives flatness, the quality of a cut-out or icon, rather than verisimilitude, to the screen nification, unless attached to an idealisation. Both pursue aims in indifference to perceptual agoria that affect the subject's perception of the world 体p中如m地h如时mm B An active/passive heterosex figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification. Man is reluctant to gaze ing the als birth: &nary, but its with language, allows the possibility of transcending the insti desire. De the look of the emerges as the representative of ings happen. The man controls the film tor, transferring it behind the screen to neutralise the extra-diegroioo astration complex. Hence the look, pleasurable in form, can be threatening in ntent,and it is woman as representation/image that crystallises this paradox agate,so that the po protagonist as In Woman as image, man as bearer of the look coincides with the active power of the erot omnipotence ordered by sexu has been split between active/ ale an simultaneousl the story can make things happen and control events better than the subject/spectato to-be-loaked-at-nes. Woman man as icon, the active male figure(the ego ideal of the i Busby Berkeley, holds the look, and plays to and signifies male desire. Mainstream film neatly combines spectacle which the alienated subject internalised his own representation of his imagina and narrative. (Note, however, how in the musical, song-and-dance numbers interrupt the He is a figure in a landscape. Here the function of film is to reproduce as accurately as possible