Mulvey’s Theories About Activity And Passivity Essay Samples

According to Mulvey, the narration of a coherent plot is the key element that people find fascinating in Hollywood movies. Based on Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, she argues that cinema creates a space where women are perceived as sexual objects by the male population, by providing visual pleasure with the on-screen male actor, through identification and scopophilia. She also mentions that the patriarchal order of society, combined with voyeurism, make film a female sexual exploitation outlet.
According to Freud, in voyeurism the sexual objective is present in two forms, a passive and active one, and is a perversion, compared to a heterosexual identity. Following Freud’s theories, Mulvey breaks scopophilia down into a passive part that is always female –hence women are the objects looked at- and an active part, which is always male. The patriarchal unconscious in Holywood cinema is help responsible for triggering a chain of binary sexual oppositions, contrasting the (1) passive and active, (2) female and male, (3) contemplative and narrative, and (4) masochistic and sadistic.
At the same time, Mulvey lists the fact that the image of women bears in itself a threat to the male viewers in narrative cinema of Hollywood, as castration anxiety. The male viewers’ castration phobia that the woman in Hollywood represents can be revoked by demystifying women and identifying everything that transforms her into a fetish.
Mulvey concludes that scopophilia is the power that defines the perspective of the camera in filmmaking. The female Hollywood star system turns the audience’s attention on the female stars and all viewers are forced to assume a male gaze perspective via a male camera perspective, given that the cinematic dispositive or apparatus is gender-biased. This turns a woman into an object of the mainstream narrative cinema’s scopophilia.

Works Cited:

Freud, Siegmund. Studienausgabe, Band V: Sexualleben. Frankfurt/Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2000.
Mulvey, Laura. Fetishism and Curiosity. Perspectives: Perspectives (Bloomington, Ind.). Bloomington, IN, London: Indiana University Press. British Film Institute, 1996.