Study Task 3- Triangulation

 There are many theories based upon ideas about the role of men and women within film, one of which can be found in British feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey’s essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, written in 1973 and published in 1975. The text uses ‘psychoanalysis’ to explain ‘socially established interpretation of sexual differences which control images, erotic ways of looking and spectacle.’ (Mulvey, 1975, p.14). Mulvey first talks about the idea of Scopophilia, or in simpler terms, the pleasure one experiences in the act of looking. She suggests that women in movies are exclusively there as a means of fulfilling a man’s erotic desires, as an object, whether here referring to the male protagonist within the narrative on-screen or the spectator within the confinements of the cinema (p.20). She suggests that women appear to possess a ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ and that in most situations, the male watches not to follow the story, but for the images presented (p.19). This is supported by English Academic John Storey in his text titled ‘Cine-psychoanalysis’ (1996), which proceeds to break down Mulvey’s text and explain in detail the ideas and opinions suggested. He states in response to Mulvey’s explanation of men as spectator and women as object, that ‘Women are therefore crucial to the pleasure of the (male) gaze’, here referring to a phrase coined by Mulvey to describe the above proposition.  However, there have been many arguments constructed against Mulvey’s theories, one of which is suggested by English academic and film critic, Richard Dyer. In his book ‘Stars’- published in 1979, but more specifically his chapter on ‘Stars and Audiences’, he challenges Mulvey’s statements by suggesting that narrative film ‘includes looks directed at the male body and also looks between male characters’ (Dyer, 1979, p.188), a factor Mulvey chooses to exclude in her argument.