Commemorating Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”: An Enduring Theory Gaining More Truth With Age

This year marks the 45th anniversary of the publication of Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”- the groundbreaking 1975 essay that introduced the concept of the “male gaze” to film theory for the first time. 

Mulvey was the first to shed light on the impact of the deleterious manner in which females, and more specifically, the female body, are portrayed in film. Mulvey’s theory inaugurated the concept of the male gaze, the fetishization of female bodies, the idea of castration and scopophilia within film, and the breakdown of the patriarchal order using psychoanalytic theory. Mulvey highlighted Hollywood’s reinforcement of “physical obsessions” of society in the way men view women as an object poised purely for sexual gratification, and she exposed the inherent theme in film that women are presented as passive and men as active. 

The male gaze exhibits the notion that women are seen as an erotic source not only for the characters within the diegesis, but also for the audience.  Mulvey illuminated the idea of the “three cameras” that help foster this idea: that of the camera, the audience, and the characters within the enactment. A trailblazer in her forward thinking, Mulvey outlined the revolutionary crossroads the film industry had come to: continue to perpetuate dangerous gender stereotypes that would further infiltrate our society’s psyche, or use its unique position of power to change the course of this phenomenon. 

Even in 1975, Mulvey made a call for “passionate detachment”- something we are still waiting for film to embrace in 2020. With the youth revolution ascending and growing more powerful each day, we yearn for the new generation of cinema to distance itself from the fetishizing of women in film, and one step that remains vital in this achievement is the promotion of more women to positions in power.