Page 150 - Decoding Culture

G E N D ERED SUB E CTS, WOMEN'S TEXTS 143
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other resorts to fetishism, transmuting the represented woman
by, typically, fetishizing female beauty in the cause of disavowing
castration and thus reassuring the male spectator.
All this is captured in cinema through its characteristic play of
looks. The looks of the camera and of the audience in classical
narrative film are concealed by the codes of film form, subordi­
nated to the looks of the characters as they relate to each other in
the illusory film world. But this seamless illusion is endangered by
woman as castration threat, and the suppression of the looks of the
camera and of the audience ensure that this threat is defused. The
camera's concealed look produces a verisimilitudinous world in
which the spectator's ideal ego can control activity while the look of
the audience is caught in a fetishistic denial of castration. If these
pleasures are to be undermined, Mulvey argues, the looks of
camera and audience must be freed from the codes that govern
them. The visual pleasures of film are rooted in the patriarchal
unconscious. In the cause of resisting patriarchy those pleasures
must be destroyed.
This summarizes Mulvey's argument as she presents it. Now let
me reconstruct her case with a view to pinning down more specif­
ically what it involves. In effect, I shall conduct a kind of
epistemological experiment, turning Mulvey's analysis around and
viewing it as if it were what it is not: a formal, deductive attempt to
explain a particular set of observed features of cinematic repre­
sentation. This eases the task of unpacking the implicit structure of
the theory but, hopefully, without sacrificing the main substance of
Mulvey's views. Seen in this way, our point of departure lies not in
a political claim about psychoanalytic theory (which is where
Mulvey begins) but in an empirical claim about Hollywood cinema:
that there are certain recurrent gender-related features that we
can observe in classic Hollywood film. Specifically, this form of
cinema: (1) presents narratives which are routinely controlled by

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