Page 151 - Decoding Culture

144 D E C O D I N G C U L TURE

male protagonists who (by a variety of means) subject female char­
acters to their will; (2) represents women as erotic spectacle, as
objects to be admired, arresting narrative progression to do so; and
(3) fetishizes the female body, focusing upon different features
(breasts, legs, hair, etc.) in different historical periods and con­
texts. Assuming we can agree that these are indeed widespread
empirical features of Hollywood film - and it would be difficult not
to do so - the task is to explain their presence, to answer the ques­
tion: 'why is this so?'
Reconstructed in this way, the logic of Mulvey's approach is to
take a certain body of psychoanalytic thought as foundational and
therefore giving access to the patriarchal unconscious, derive from
that theoretical material an account of the basic pleasures of look­
ing which are (it is assumed) implicated in cinematic form, and go
on to show how the satisfaction of these pleasures, in conjunction
with a presumed need to disavow the castration threat, explains the
observed phenomena. This chain of reasoning can usefully be
given diagrammatic representation (see Figure 1) .
Several structural features of the argument are immediately
apparent from the figure. First, it depends entirely on prior accep­
tance of the apparatus of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic
theory and on a reading of that theory which presumes that it
gives privileged access to 'the unconscious of patriarchy'.
Secondly, the explanatory chain founded on the triplet of
scopophilia, castration anxiety and narcissistic ego identification
applies in two distinct areas (visual and narrative) and gives rise to
two distinct kinds of claim in each: one founded on the need to dis­
avow castration, the other on the specific form of pleasure
involved (scopophilia, narcissistic ego identification) . Thirdly,
and related to that division, scopophilia and narcissistic ego
identification are general psychic processes (that is, they refer
to pleasures available to male and female) that are here given a

Copyrighted Material