Sexuality in film: representation and analysis

Sexuality and Cinema

Laura Mulvey's arguments in "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" are readily illustrated with reference to the 1991 Jonathan Demme film "The Silence of the Lambs."

Mulvey's starting point is psychoanalytic, and suggests that the image of the female is the way in which filmic meaning is constructed. This begins with Mulvey's critique of the "phallocentric" mode of thinking, in which a woman is understood to be nothing more than a castrated male, and is therefore the focus of horrified, and desirous, observation. Here, she views film itself as a technological construction designed to increase the activity of "pleasurable looking," even pushing it into the sexualized realm of voyeurism or scopophila: "The cinema satifies a primordial wish for pleasurable looking, but it also goes further, developing scopophilia in its narcissistic aspect." This means that the narcissism of the viewer, understood to be male, is gratified by the way in which psychology, and its social construction, is represented within the film. Mulvey's conclusion identifies the way in which an audience's narcissistically-based sexual instinct (ego libido) is invited to identify with, and also to distinguish itself from, the objects held up for sexual display in the film:

The scopophilic instinct (pleasure jn looking at another person as an erotic object), and, in contradistinction, ego libido (forming identification processes) act as formations, mechanisms, which this cinema has played on. The image of woman as (passive) raw material for the (active) gaze of man takes the argument a step further into the structure of representation, adding a further layer demanded by the ideology of the patriarchal order as it is worked out in its favorite cinematic form - illusionistic narrative film.

Mulvey's conclusions here are particularly fascinating when we consider "Silence of the Lambs." The film was released 16 years after the initial publication of Mulvey's essay, and in some ways it almost seems as though Jonathan Demme were responding to, or grappling with, some of Mulvey's main points. The dynamic of observation within the film itself is one which works both ways -- the clue that Hannibal Lecter gives to Clarice Starling as to how she will find Jame Gumb involves the notion of "what he covets," or desires in a transgressive way, and "we begin by coveting what we see every day." In this sense, it is Buffalo Bill's proximity to his first victim Fredrika Bimmell -- and his chance to observe her and, crucially as we learn, to take eroticized Polaroid photos of her which Starling will discover -- that leads to the construction of desire as "coveting." Jame Gumb's erotic fixation on the girl does not lead to a desire to sleep with her, but a desire to inhabit her body. But this fits in with Mulvey's view of how the female body is constructed in a phallocentric model: obviously Jame Gumb's desire to playact the "identification process" with that desirable body comes in the notorious scene in which he conceals his phallus between his legs and performs (again crucially) for a video camera. That Jame Gumb is, to a certain degree, to be defined by his gaze is indicated not only by Lecter's hint, but by his physical presence in the final confrontation with Starling: he is wearing elaborate night-vision goggles, which indicate that his own capacity to see is identified with the technological construction of a nocturnal predator. The audience is invited to see through these goggles -- revealing the flailing and terrified Starling by plain sight, and also revealing that the desire to view this spectacle is, for Gumb, a stronger motivation than the desire to kill the FBI agent who has discovered him. It is Starling who kills Gumb, and we are then permitted to view him wearing the goggles, in a death agony which clearly makes him resemble one of the insects which have played a part in the murders, and -- in the earlier scene with the entomologists -- Starling's own uneasy path in navigating the various men in the film who find her desirable. In some sense, Demme's film addresses Mulvey's concerns about phallocentrism by making Starling and Gumb, to a certain degree, both outsiders in a culture of gender normativity. For Starling, this involves learning that her gender will be viewed and read by every male in the film -- Crawford uses her gender as a means of gaining the trust of the small-town cops when he excludes her, and she takes him to task; Crawford also uses her gender as bait for Lecter (revealed to her by Dr. Chilton, before he then proceeds to hit on her himself). Lecter asks if she worries that Crawford "visualizes scenarios…fucking" her. Even the dorky cross-eyed entomologists cannot resist the urge to flirt with her. In this world where femininity is viewed as intrinsically desirable, it seems like logic necessitates summoning up the shadowy other: the man who desires the woman not for fucking, but to occupy this privileged position which attracts the desiring gaze. The subjective social position occupied by Starling is, to a certain degree, the position that Jame Gumb wishes to occupy.