Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema

In 1975, Laura Mulvey published “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” in Screen magazine, an essay that rapidly became the cornerstone of feminist film theory and remains one of the most widely cited texts in contemporary film studies. Mulvey boldly appropriates concepts from Freud and Lacan as “political weapons,” aiming to dismantle the established, problematic visual pleasure provided by traditional narrative cinema. Her core argument suggests that classical Hollywood cinema reflects and reinforces the subconscious structures of a patriarchal society, wherein “looking” is an operation of power typically held by the male. She introduced the groundbreaking concept of “The Male Gaze,” pointing out that scopophilia—the pleasure in looking—is sexually asymmetric in cinema: the male is the “bearer of the look,” while the female is the “image” to be looked at.

This gendered division of labor is deeply embedded within the cinematic narrative itself. Male characters are typically the drivers of the narrative, controlling events through action; their gaze is powerful and can project freely within the cinematic space. In contrast, female characters are often functionally static, existing “to-be-looked-at” to satisfy the visual desires of the male audience and male characters through the display of their appearance. This display often freezes the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation, fixating on fetishized close-ups of the female body. Thus, women in film perform the function of “to-be-looked-at-ness.” Mulvey further dissects the intertwining of three looks in cinema—the camera’s look, the audience’s look, and the character’s look—which are seamlessly sutured together through editing and narrative conventions ensuring that the audience unconsciously accepts and internalizes this patriarchal mode of seeing.

Introducing the core of psychoanalysis, Mulvey argues that while the female image offers visual pleasure, she also evokes a deep male anxiety: “castration anxiety,” since the woman symbolizes lack. To cope with this, the male unconscious develops two defense mechanisms that perpetuate the standard treatment of female images in Hollywood. The first is sadistic voyeurism, which typically operates through narrative; the male character asserts control over the female by investigating, accusing, punishing, or saving her, thereby demystifying her and neutralizing the threat she poses. Alfred Hitchcock’s films are frequently cited by Mulvey as prime examples of this type. The second mechanism is fetishistic scopophilia, which operates through spectacle; by over-valuing and idolizing the female body or its fragments, she is transformed into a perfect, reassuring “fetish,” disavowing the fact of castration. Films directed by Josef von Sternberg starring Marlene Dietrich exemplify this mechanism, where narrative often gives way to pure visual display.

Mulvey’s essay carries the tone of a political manifesto, calling for a new, avant-garde feminist “counter-cinema” that destroys traditional narrative coherence and visual continuity to break the “visual pleasure” encoded by patriarchy and built upon the exploitation of the female image. Although “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” was later critiqued for its rigid gender binary and neglect of female spectatorship—points Mulvey herself later revisited—its revelation of the core proposition that “looking is power” remains profoundly resonant. It taught us how to interrogate seemingly natural images and identify the ideological manipulations hidden behind the lens.