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