hi folks and welcome to our unit on gender and spectatorship uh we are going to be spending all of our time looking closely at more or less this one film vertigo and this one text so it's a lot less reading than the other weeks though the reading is a bit harder but it's also reading that i hope means something to you this is a famous famous text it is responsible for the term male gaze which has made its way into popular culture so i hope that you get something out of this reading this text even though it is quite a difficult read because it's so academic so let's just try to wade through the text by looking closely at what laura mulvey herself says she begins the paper by saying this paper intends to use psychoanalysis to discover where and how the fascination of film is reinforced by pre-existing patterns of fascination already at work within the individual subject and the social formation that have molded him what is she saying well she's basically saying i have this discourse called psychoanalysis that has already helped us understand what the human subject is and how the human subject thinks and she's saying i can help you figure out how this fascination with this medium we called film and this thing we called we call narrative movies is tied to the psychoanalytic structures of human subjectivity that is the way people are according to this field of thought she then says psychoanalytic theory is appropriate here as a political weapon demonstrating the way the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form now it gives you a sense that what she's after is uncovering the way in which patriarchy works that is the rule by men and masculinity that has seeped into civilization she's trying to say that this has structured film form so what does she mean by film form well lucky for us that's the whole point of this class so she might look at this class with some skepticism and say why are you thinking about the politics of form right think about not just how films work with things like continuity editing or shot reverse shot or eyeline match or pov shots but actually think about how these things might be tied to particular ideological ideological structures and it's not just these kind of editing terms it's also importantly and almost more so classical hollywood narrative this is what we talked about in our last unit what maura mulvey is doing is very much a continuation of what we did last unit which was about narrative and narration she's particularly interested in this idea the character is the principal causal agency and causality is the prime unifying principle she wants to say if that's the case what does it mean that in 30s 40s and 50s hollywood cinema usually our principal causal agency is a man often a heterosexual white man and often when women are involved they don't have agency but are kind of acted upon she is interested in this tendency and interested in what this tendency does um in a world that subjugates women and is privileged according to men now what about psychoanalytic theory i'm not going to presume that you know what this is i'm going to do a little bit to kind of at least give an introduction to what she means by psychoanalytic theory so what is it psychoanalysis first of all is not psychology they're not the same thing though the histories of disciplines kind of converge at certain points it's a set of theories you can say and therapeutic techniques related to the study of the unconscious mind and there's one big name here that's associated with this field and it's sigmund freud there's another name you might not know as much or as intimately and that name is jacques lacan and some of lacan's theories are mentioned throughout the article i'm not going to get too deep into them but you should just know that lacan is a 20th is a kind of mid-20th century french thinker who draws a lot on segment freud and they are both by our estimation in the field of psychoanalysis so what are the main tenets of psychoanalysis well you've probably heard of this notion of the unconscious and the unconscious is related to the conscious so the simplest way that we can summarize this is say that the conscious is a small portion of the mind we're aware of in our day-to-day lives the thoughts that i have the sense perceptions that i have the opinions that i form the unconscious however according to theory is the desires and drives that we are unaware of but often influence our actions and behaviors things like fears that i'm not quite say mindful of unacceptable sexual desire that society by virtue of its repression um will not encourage me to acknowledge um or things like violence or violent motives or things like shameful needs and experiences these are often relegated to the unconscious for this psychoanalyst um some more tenets of psychoanalysis that draw out of this tension between conscious and unconscious so according to freudian psychoanalysis a person's development is determined by often forgotten events in early childhood rather than by inherited traits alone those forgotten events heavily revolve around the family unit mother fathered child and a discovery of sexual difference that literally means the say primary or first sighting of the fact that biologically male and biologically female individuals have different sex organs that's literally what that means that human behavior and cognition are largely determined by irrational drives that stem from repressed memories of these particular events and finally that deliberation from these effects of the repressed unconscious effects which are often harmful or not good for me is achieved by bringing this material into the conscious mind through therapeutic intervention right imagine the stereotype of the freudian subject lying on freud's couch um talking in a kind of automatic way letting words just flow and the freudian kind of writing down the thoughts interpreting them imagining or trying to theorize what those words kind of suggest rather than what they say literally depict psychoanalytic feminism um if you're familiar with the theories of freud but not familiar with the idea of psychoanalytic feminism you might think this seems like an oxymoron freud after all very much privileged the masculine subject and many of his theories have been interpreted as misogynists themselves because they seem to suggest that man by his very nature has something that woman lacks namely the phallus right um however there is a way in which a particular discourse of feminism draws on these collections of theories in order to diagnose why patriarchy exists in the first place and then uses those principles to try to fight patriarchy by by spreading the understanding of how it works right um so these universal unconscious forces can be examined as explanations for all kinds of phenomena including misogyny and its cultural exponents including hollywood cinema right um so mulvey herself will make a claim to this she'll say there's an obvious interest in psychoanalysis for feminists a beauty in its exact rendering of the frustration experienced under the phallocentric order it gets us nearer to the roots of our oppression so moby doesn't even acknowledge or moby doesn't want to say that psychoanalytic feminism is an oxymoron she wants to say that psychoanalysis and its very explanation gets us to the heart of this complete lack of power balance between men and women and by understanding that it'll get us nearer to the roots of our oppression to our understanding of the roots of female oppression of women's oppression um so what are the key tenets for moldy what is what is she getting from psychoanalysis that informs her work in the visual pleasure essay well namely this idea that comes from this moment and this might seem strange to you and indeed it should seem strange but really this is what she means by this term castration anxiety remember what i mentioned um that the forgotten events that shape our desires and anxieties revolve around the discovery of sexual difference where there's a particular narrative of discovery of sexual difference that happens to little boys that the male fear of emasculation that is what a freudian might diagnose as a general fear that men have of losing the power that they claim or that they have been given is founded upon the childhood discovery of sexual difference that is when boys discover that cis girls biologically female children don't have penises i know it seems rather strange to say that a fear of loss of power revolves around a discovery of uh sex organs but this is kind of a cultural myth making attached to say things like having a mother a father or things like discovering sexual difference okay so if men fear castration and this is where the visual pleasure and narrative cinema argument starts to begin right movie will say something like if men view castration not consciously of course you might say then the image of woman signifies the threat of castration so wow how are men going to deal with that and you see the the logic here she says if men fear castration right the loss of their power symbolically through the loss of their phallus or their penis then the image of woman that is a kind of person who lacks the phallus would itself signify the very threat of castration in her theory then how are men who are watching these movies or making these movies going to deal with that idea that woman signifies threat and this is where the the two parts of the male gaze come in right um this video we're only going to talk about the first part of the male gaze which is the one that i think most of us are most familiar with the idea of looking at women as objects right if women pose a threat strategy number one is to subjugate the image of woman by objectifying the image of woman she says in their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed with their parents coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to be looked at miss women displayed a sexual object is the light motif of erotic spectacle just think about the very idea of these kinds of images and how these are pervasive images in society they're not just merely confined to the 1930s and 40s with um say sex symbols like marilyn monroe they are all over the place they are not just part of cinema they are also part of painting they are part of civilization writ large so i want you just to think about this if you google male gaze you'll get images like this right where you have a male looker and a female person who is there as if to be looked at is her sole purpose of living right this is the theory so she will say uh moldy will say the structure of looking in classical films encourages the spectator to objectify women with their gaze and when i have italics here it means i'm paraphrasing not quoting notice how scotty here is looking at madeline but she doesn't look back he's looking and she exists to be looked at so it's important to notice moments in these films in which men look at women but women don't look back at them with the same level of power with the same connotation of objectification right that voyeurism that idea of looking without getting a look back is emblematic of the a of the lack of balance in the power structure or one person looks often a man and the other person is being looked at and here's where the uh theory gets interesting because multi is tying the idea that men look at women in films not just as just a a claim by itself that men shouldn't look at women um because it objectifies them no she takes that and she actually says that it is baked into the way in which narrative works in films and she'll say that the look halts narrative progress she'll say something like classical films will often have moments like these where the narrative is suspended so we can appreciate the spectacle of a woman performing and in many ways this is literal there are many many many examples of classical hollywood films in which the narrative flow will stop so that we'll have a moment where say maybe a female character or not even characters will perform on a stage and our protagonist simply looks and then the characters look and then the the spectator is allowed to look and and allow the kind of flow of narrative progress suspend for a little bit as everyone's ogling women who are singing or dancing or what have you but um in rear window we have an example of this which is almost a kind of meta version uh check it out no lisa i don't think he did what do you think i will rephrase the question thank you yes i like it so notice that this is a pivotal scene in the film or rather it's right before a pivotal scene in the film when the woman screams because her dog has died this is at the moment in which almost everything is lost for jeff because he has been delivered a kind of death blow of evidence by his friend doyle but at this moment this is a kind of interim moment where it's almost as if we alongside jeff are going to be given the chance to simply look and jeff's kind of his his her performance here is very much giving up giving off the idea of an objectifying look right his eyes move upward even before he's able to remove his glass from his face right the eye kind of says everything and what do we get an eyeline match right an eyeline match that shows us the object of his gaze it's lisa his girlfriend who has been wearing fabulous clothes throughout the film but here she's wearing something a bit more revealing with a connotation of sexuality kind of night gown um but interestingly of course hitchcock who seems to be uh privy to the kinds of structures that molve is talking about has this moment interrupted interrupted by narrative so not only would you say uh generally that that the look halt narrative progress in this instance we get it right back to narrative progress the narrative progress signified by the scream also halts the look or the cessation of narrative for the sake of pure objectifying visual pleasure and we can see something similar in here not quite as meta but absolutely illustrating what mulvey says about the look halting narrative progress just think about the time it takes for when jimmy stewart looks screen left for us to find madeleine right it's almost here as if the slow movement of the camera which moves which moves backward right and then slowly finds madeline it's almost as if the way the camera moves and the misonsen of the scene forces us to do the very thing that jimmy stewart is doing which is pick out madeleine from the crowd right because there's this moment where it stops and our eyes are darting around the screen because we aren't told explicitly where the object of our interest is but the misonsen that is lighting and costume will event eventually tell us that right there is the object of our gaze right the green pops out against the red right that's just kind of color theory the two opposite colors clash in a way no one else is wearing green to pop out against the red of the walls and of course the lightness right the the bright um platinum blonde hair also signifies just a graphic contrast that might catch our eye so that we are forced to experience what it is like to pick out someone from the room right and we have this long uh this long lingering camera that really slows down narrative progress so that we can feel the experience of looking in the way that scotty is looking you know interesting to note that this is a real pov shot one that represents the position of jimmy stewart but this whole thing is something like a pov shot but not at all a camera movement and an angle that gives us the impression of what it's like to be like scotty and yet we are completely different from scotty at a different point in the room moldy will continue when woman when women appear on screen as erotic objects they often halt narrative progression and we are encouraged to possess them with our gaze right you can also see a similar version of this here in this sequence just to show you that hitchcock is thinking about these issues that he's creating parallels notice just how structurally similar this sequence is this is after scotty has brought back madeline after her dip into the water and now he's brought her back to the to his own apartment right he's kind of setting the stage for almost a romantic encounter and yet the sequence begins with this lack this utter lack of balance of power where he is the one who possesses the gaze and he is located here on the right side of the frame he looks left toward toward where madeline is and then the camera almost simulates the time it takes for him to look by beginning to rotate in that direction just like we got in the early sequence but here we'll get new pieces of information that make things a bit darker and a bit more sexually objectifying for one of course if we have been paying attention we notice that in our journey from the looker to the looked we see madeleine's dress not on her right suggesting that at some point um scotty uh maybe undressed her right giving us this imagination of this kind of sexual uh display of power something that we should be kind of nervous about in a sense if we are really paying attention to the film right there is sexual subjugation happening and it's being suggested merely with the movement of the camera i'll give you one more example of the look halting narrative progress with this famous shot from the film it's yet another example in which a visual display seems to slow down narrative progress and it's a shot that really participates in the history of cinema it's a shot that should remind us of a famous shot from the wizard of oz dorothy opens the door to us just like this and what we get is a world of technicolor here we get a similar thing a kind of dark beige and brown alleyway is turned into a complete visual display of vibrant uh vibrantly colored flowers right and we're not getting narrative right now we're simply getting the idea of one person looking at another who is not aware of that person looking at them but of course as we'll talk about later in this series of video lessons when you watch the film again you'll realize that it's not as simple as that madeleine in fact knows exactly what she's doing she is in on this whole display and she has created herself as an image to be buffeted by the the saturated color brilliance of the image that these flowers provide so these are examples not only of what molvia is talking about but there are examples that think about the issues that molve is talking about so i'm going to leave you there and next time we'll start with the second part of the male gaze identifying with a male protagonist i'll see you next time