Mulvey's theory of the male gaze and film criticism

Gaze

Seeing, Looking, Regarding

When Mulvey (1975) wrote about the psychological importance of the male gaze, most women would have recognized in her description of the dynamics of phallocentrism and the male observation of women their own experiences. Mulvey argued that men use their ability an authority to look at women as a means of maintaining their power in a patriarchal society, and this use of the gaze is something that women often encounter in their lives. Applying a psychoanalytic approach to film criticism, she compared the force and intent of men's physical penetration of women's bodies with the psychological penetration and control that men can assert over women by capturing them with their eyes, their gaze. The ways that men look at women in movies and television shows reflects this use of the gaze as essentially a weapon that can be used to intimidate women. The power of the gaze in visual media can be even more powerful than it is in non-mediated life, for in the realm of visual media the gaze of the men looking at female characters is underscored by the power of the male (and presumed male) viewer.

Constructing and Deconstructing the Gaze

This perspective that Mulvey laid out was one of the most important principles in film criticism over the next decade, with scholars a filmmakers lining up on different sides as some agreed with her -- especially in terms of the power dynamics implicitly coded in the films created during Hollywood's Golden Age (centered in movies made in the 1940s) -- while others disagreed. Those who questioned the usefulness of Mulvey's theoretical model (which she herself would later question) arose primarily from those who objected to Mulvey's exclusive focus on heterosexual relationships. Mulvey presumed that the audience for the cinematic portrayal of women's bodies was comprised of men, a presumption that other critics problematized. Certainly some of that audience is male, but women also look at women's bodies with various levels of sexual interest and attraction.

An important point more suggested than made explicit by Mulvey's analysis is the point that each one of us (regardless of sex or gender) brings a specific context to how we read gendered bodies and how we understand the role and power of the audience. We each, as viewers (that is, as consumers of visual media) bring preconceived social constructs to mediated images so that our gaze acts as both filter and imprinter of these social codes. As members of any audience, we gather cues from our context to understand what we are seeing: We learn from watching how to see and be seen and how to merge these two actions as we fulfill our functions as consumers of visual images.

To deconstruct Mulvey's concepts of the gaze accurately it is imperative to understand its essentially tautological nature. Tautology is essentially cyclical, and it was the recognition of this fact by first other scholars and then Mulvey herself that allows her model to become more useful through refinement. Her model is far more limited than she initially suggested; this does not, however, mean that it is not still a powerful tool.

Mulvey argued that since the society in which films were made was itself patriarchal, then the films must reflect (and reinforce) that patriarchy. This makes a good deal of sense, especially if one's intellectual foundation is psychoanalytic in nature, but it is logically shaky. That shakiness becomes clear when one applies her perspective to a visual text very different in key ways from a 1940s movie -- an episode of the television show Sex and the City. This series was aimed primarily at a female audience, which calls into question how one can read the ways in which women's gaze of women's bodies changes the nature of the view.

An essential limitation of Mulvey's hypothesis is one that is suggested by Foucault, which is that there can be no proper analysis of power that does is in any way independent of the actual people in their daily relations. In The subject and the power, Foucault describes that all power relations "are rooted deep in the social nexus" and that any attempt to reconstitute power relationships as standing outside of society "as a supplementary structure whose radical effacement one could perhaps dream of" is both inaccurate and irrelevant (p. 784).

The key difference between Mulvey's and Foucault's de/construction of the power dynamics of the gaze (and other aspects of the power choreography between people) is that Mulvey's model allows for an analysis that is in many ways one that stands outside of society because it posits a sort of generically phallocentric society that lacks any of the nuances and negotiations of actual relationships. Mulvey's model, stripped of such nuances, lends itself to an analysis of power dynamics that is hierarchical in a unilateral way. That is to say, Mulvey focuses on the power (and the potential for harm) of the male viewer (because he does in fact have more power) to such an extent that she overly downplays the importance of the constant negotiation of power in any relationship regardless of the overall imbalance of power.

In any case, to live in a society is to live in such a way that action upon other actions is possible

Mulvey's Original Idea of the Gaze

Before deconstructing Mulvey's model of a phallocentric (and heterosexual) gaze, it is important to understand exactly what she was proposing in her original essay. She argues that women's bodies as displayed on the screen (which was derived in no small part from the way in which women had previously been depicted on canvas). Central to her argument is the idea that women on screen stand in as "the Other." This otherness can take on two different forms, occupying that essentialized distinction of the whore and the Madonna. In order for women to serve this function of otherness for the male viewer, she has to be emptied of any intrinsic meaningfulness.

In other words, she has to be stripped of her ability to determine the meaningfulness of her own actions. Mulvey writes:

Woman then stands in patriarchal culture as signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his phantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of women still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning. (Mulvey, 1975, p. 23).

This assessment of the role that women fill in men's fantasies does not seem to be a significant stretch: Most women have been aware in their own lives that they have been used to fill in a blank space in men's inner lives in which they are viewed (and possibly use) to fulfill an existing function that has nothing whatsoever to do with their own nature, expect to the extent that their gender has allowed them to be emptied and transformed into the Other.

Owning the Means of Production

Looking back to Foucault's insistence that no analysis of human relations can be made without stepping inside of their lives, it follows that it is impossible to analyze the ways in which power is construed and slanted without understanding the pragmatics of the world. Television shows in general (and Sex and the City in particular) permit a much greater degree of both authority and power to women as producers of images than was accorded in Hollywood's Golden Age. This does not, of course, mean that the show is either more empowering of women or (alternatively) less hierarchical.

The women in Sex and the City do not at first seem to be basing their value system on the kind of woman-as-eternally-wounded-being that Mulvey is modeling, for they are clearly in control of their sexuality in a way that is not addressed or allowed for within Mulvey's neo-Freudian perspective. One never has the sense with the female protagonists that they ever regret being born into female bodies. Yet neither is there a complete sense that they are fully sexualized beings in the sense that their bodies are at their own command. It is impossible to determine to what extent this arises from the fact that the show had a significant amount of female input, how much arises from the larger culture in the years during which it was being made, and how much arises from the particular texture of the narrative of weekly television drama.

This odd sense of a core asexuality within a show that was entirely about sex (at the most obvious levels) may have arisen from the focus on same-sex friendship amongst women who overtly self-identified as heterosexual. As Holland (1999) writes:

Familialism maintains that sexuality operates only in the family [...] the truth is that sexuality is everywhere: the way a bureaucrat fondles his records, a judge administers justice, a business causes money to circulate; the way the burgeoisie fucks the proletariat; and so on. And there is no need to resort to metaphors, any more than for the libido to go by way of metamorphoses. (p. 322).

If sex is indeed everywhere, then it is present in each episode of Sex and the City. But is this in fact true? Is the kind of female friendship that is performed in Sex and the City rooted in sexuality? And would men and women (in general) provide the same answer to this question?

As Leyte (2010) wrote in a commentary contrasting the movie about the characters with the characters as they had appeared in the television series, there is something both appealing and askew in the ways in which the characters related to their own bodies. This suggests that the television show was more aligned with traditional androcentric (if not fully phallocentric) dynamics than were the movies.

My first encounter of the Carrie kind was with the TV series. It seemed to be about four gay men with breasts. The programme was always saturated in a gay sensibility: Samantha's indiscriminate sex with never a hint of any emotional libido; the obsession with anal sex; the bitchy, quick-fire repartee; the lack of angst about cellulite or weight. But the slick city settings, the sassy dialogue and the fabulous footwear won us all over.

I think the real success of the show lies in the fact that our hedonistic heroines gave us permission to be bad. In our hypocritical society, men seem expected to go straight from puberty to adultery, but women are still supposed to be "good." Sex and the City was the first television show to portray the seismic psychological shift made by women since the sexually liberating women's movement. But it's not just about giving good hedonism. Above all else it's a celebration of female friendship.

A 'celebration of friendship' is not an act of objectification. But was the series in fact such a celebration? An important aspect of any analysis of who looks and who is viewed is that audience members are much more likely to become deeply emotionally committed to a character who appears on a series than one who appears in a one-off movie. The producers of the serial could not afford to create too much distance or too much hierarchy (or objectification) between viewer and viewed because such a distance and distancing hierarchy does not permit a satisfying ongoing relationship.

Any analysis of a visual medium depends on assumptions that one makes both about who was the intended audience for the series and how one models the act of reading. Mulvey, for example, seems to be privileging the author in the complex of the process of reading: It is the power of the male director and producer (the authors of a cinematic text) when she argues that these two types of actors determine the dynamic of the act of moviemaking and movie consumption.

Different models of the process of reading privilege different actors in the process, which leads one to ask what other possible power dynamics exist within the process of making films and consuming them. If the director has the power to define the dynamics of appropriation and the making of meaning (the key elements that are contained within the idea of the "gaze"), and the people who make movies are solely men, then there is certainly the temptation to believe that the primary dynamic at play is that these men are using the power that they have over the women in front of the camera to lay claims of ownership. But, as suggested above, the desire to control like the desire to own is not the same as the process of objectification (Ninivaggi, 2010).

Objectification is the process of denying agency to another person. But is this in fact what occurs in movies and television? Are directors (who remain primarily male even today and in both the worlds of film and television) trying to turn women into objects? (This requires us to set aside at least for the moment what it is that male directors might be intending to do to the men in front of the cameras.) Even if one imputes the basest of possible motivations to male directors, it does not necessarily follow that these male makers-of-visual-texts are intending to objectify women. They male be, instead, attempting to demonstrate that while women are in fact agents and actors on their own, they are still subject to male control.

This might seem to be a distinction without a difference, but there is a fundamental difference between stripping a person (or, in this case, a class of people that includes all of women) of agency and subjecthood and acknowledging that agency while at the same time seeking to control it. Both of these dynamics can be discussed under the rubric of phallocentrism, and both might be considered through the lens of the "gaze" as a controlling mechanism. But if we recast the idea of the gaze as a struggle between men and women, it becomes an ongoing negotiation between the sexes. Women may still be the losers (in terms of power in all aspects of meaning-making) in this negotiation. But they are never passive.

Another commentary on Sex and the City prompted by the release of the movies vis-a-vis the original dynamics of the television series by a man rather than a woman casts the relationship among the female protagonists of the show, the beind-the-camera talent, and the audience as one in which women are far less powerful (Rayna & Rapp, 1981, p. 54).

I always championed Sex and the City from a man's point-of-view. It was as if a group of single, heterosexual male TV executives had got together and said: "Hey, guys, wouldn't it be funny if we made a TV show that persuades attractive women in their twenties and thirties that it's fashionable to have sex with men like us without demanding any sort of emotional commitment? Not only that, but we'll convince them to spend several hours a day on incredibly painful personal grooming procedures and then squeeze themselves into these fantastically uncomfortable shoes. The beauty part is, we'll persuade them that doing all this stuff for our benefit is a post-feminist choice rather than a sexist male fantasy." (Young, 2010)

This passage, while a little flippant in terms of the ease with which women can be conned into accepting the strength of the male view/er, does point to a way in which Mulvey's concept of the way in which the male gaze can objectify women. Sex and the City from the first episode had a fetishistic quality about it, with the shoes being the stars of the show.

Mulvey's model of the phallocentric, controlling gaze divided that gaze into two different albeit associated functions, that of the voyeur and that of the fetishist. While the former gaze had the effect (more or less) of the collector pinning a butterfly to the wall, the latter is something like a man rubbing his face against the silk of a desired woman's chemise as he presses his own hands to his body in arousing circles. The shoes in the shoe are truly objects, and to the extent that they became metonyms for the women, then the show is an example of the objectifying power of the gaze. To the extent that the women were reduced to their shoes was not a uniform process, varying from character to character and episode to episode -- and viewer to viewer.

We Know Lily Bart, and Carrie is No Lily Bart

The dynamics of power, objectification, and the power of the gaze in terms of sexuality and agency are provided a foundation by the first episode in the series. It is not incidental to note that this episode, like nearly all the others in the series, was directed by a man. (The series as a whole was also conceived by a man, Darren Star.) Of the 94 episodes of the series, only sixteen were directed by women. Women faired far better in terms of writing credits, with Candace Bushnell receiving a writing credit on all of the episodes; along with Star she was the only person to receive writing credit on each episode.

How much relative power directors and writers have for a television show can be endlessly debated. Certainly, Bushnell had significant influence on the series since it arose from a newspaper column that she wrote. This does not mean that she had greater power over the course of the series than did the directors. Nor, of course, did it mean that she herself was not projecting the kind of phallocentric views that Mulvey (and, of course, others) described as arising from the male desire to control women by denying women agency or the right to claim their own ability to be seen or hidden.

Bushnell in an interview described one of her inspirations as desiring to write the kind of female character that was the opposite of Lily Bart, the protagonist of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth:

Books have varying degrees of impact depending upon the age at which one reads them. For instance, when I was 32, my best friend and I read House of Mirth by Edith Wharton. Put simply, it's about a young woman, Lily Bart, who manages to destroy every possibility of marriage and in the end, with no hope for her future, kills herself. Probably because we were around the same age as Lily, my friend and I vowed that "we must never end up like Lily Bart!" Now when I read the book, I frankly find Lily kind of annoying. She refuses to save herself; she refuses to act. There is something irritating and slightly un-American in her lassitude. (Hellstern, 2010)

This is a fundamental misreading of Wharton's 1905 novel. Lily Bart is a tragic figure, not a passive one. Her fate, which is both painful and poignant, arises because she refuses to be owned (or objectified) by men.

Lily Bart has several chances throughout the novel to become the possession of various men who could have saved her from penury and the death that arises from her poverty. Each time she refuses to make the choice to be a "kept woman" even though each time she is aware of the fact that her choice will result in a life that will be harder for her. But she chooses not to be absorbed into a world in which women have no agency and no claim to a healthy sexuality.

This is a choice that we do not see being made by any of the characters in Sex and the City. They choose to be sexual in a way that allows them to be sexualized by both the directors and the viewers (and the other characters on the show). Being sexualized is very different from having agency. One particularly relieving parallel (or non-parallel, rather) between the two books is that the four women in Sex and the City the women are defined by the clothes (and those shoes!) that they buy while Lily Bart is in the end defined by the hats that she makes.

Hats for the Edwardian woman were as defining of female nature and status as were shoes for the professional women in the 1990s (Marshall, 1996, p. 53). But Lily is a maker of hats, and therefore (in a narrow way, to be sure) a creator of the meaning of what it means to her to be a woman. If the women in Sex and the City are objectified in the series, it is because they are consumers not because they are women. (Bearing in mind that an important dynamic in contemporary popular culture is a push to define women as consumers: Think about all of those jokes about women as shopping fiends engaged in constant retail therapy.)

In the Beginning: Sex and Gender

The first episode of the television series, Sex and the City focuses on a birthday party thrown for thirty-something Miranda. The conversation at this party centers on a promise that Carrie and her friends make to themselves that they will stop worrying about finding that perfect man to marry and have a family with (even as the birthday party symbolizes the ongoing progress of their biological clocks). Instead of looking for a man, they tell each other, they will start having sex like men.

For the four women, sex like men means sex focused on the physical and the present. Sex with no emotional strings. Sex with no promise of anything to come beyond that night. To this end, Carrie has engages in serial sex with Mr. Big, a hunky tycoon. Miranda turns her sexual sights on Skipper Johnston, the sort of sweet, dependable, nice guy that women often say that they want, but Miranda does not pursue him for the typical security-minded reasons. Charlotte goes out with Capote Duncan, although decides not to have sex with him -- a marker of sexual agency perhaps greater than the decision simply to have sex with any available penis-possessor. However, in what can be seen as an assertion of typical male-female power relationships and the desire of men to control women through sexual relationships, Duncan decides to go home with Samantha, a more docile partner.

Certainly in this first episode there is an overt emphasis on the idea that women can choose their own sexual partners, and indeed choose not to have sex if they do not want to. (For women, the power to say no and the power to enforce this refusal is at least as important as the power to say yes.) But there is also a conflation between sex and gender. For while the women in the show are seen as agents in their ability to buy those expensive shoes and in their (certainly not unimportant) desire to have sex with partners of their choosing, they have at the same time been stripped of much of their authentic gender identity.

Gender and sex have been recognized for many years as being different from each other. While sex is a matter of biology (both chromosomal and physiological, with most individuals clearly identified by both themselves as others as being either male or female, although there are many individuals who are intersex in that their external sexual characteristics are ambiguous). Gender encompasses both sexual orientation and an individual's concept of what it means to be female or male as well as feminine or masculine. For many women, for example, gender includes both the desire for a male or female partner (or both) as well as a celebration of their ability to produce children. (Any number of other combinations of attributes is also possible.) Gender also consists of the idea of agency, because it always comprises a sense of what a person thinks it is possible and preferable for her or him to do and with whom.

Sexuality, on the other hand, is a much more external process because it does rely much more on the perspective (that is, the view) of others. One of the key attributes of the first series of the season was that it was shot in 16 mm film. This technology is one that is used in general for non-theatrical purposes because it is cheaper to use in contexts in which there is not the possibility to make a lot of money -- not the case for a television series.

The aesthetic effect of this choice is that the television show in its first season resembles an educational film, or an industrial short. We are being either taught or sold something, we have the feeling, both of which incline us to take ownership of what we see, to view the women in terms of the sex of the title rather than in terms of gender and agency. It's enough to make one nostalgic for Lily Bart, in whom we find a woman who both understands and performs gender. And more than enough to remind us that television is a medium that both encourages a controlling gaze and undermines the power of that act.