Example research essay topic: Vanessa Ewing Feminism In Mainstream Hollywood Cinema - 1,202 words

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Mainstream Hollywood cinema has for decades represented an erotic realm by using language and images of our patriarchal culture. It has satisfied and reinforced the masculine ego and repressed the desire of women. Feminist film theorist, Laura Mulvey's essay, 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' published in 1975 has proved to be one of the most influential articles in the whole of contemporary film theory. Mulvey's essay is heavily invested in theory.

The essay makes use of Freudian psychoanalytic theory (in a version influenced by Jacques Lacan) to not only highlight sexual differences and pleasures within cinema but to discover the patterns of fascination that have moulded us. She used it to ground her account of gendered subjectivity, desire, and visual pleasure. Mulvey has used psychoanalysis as a political weapon to uncover the ways in which patriarchal society has structured the sexual subject within cinema. It is cities as "the founding document in feminist film theory" (Modleski 1989), as providing "the theoretical grounds for the rejection of Hollywood and its pleasures" (Penalty 1988), and even as setting out feminist film theory's "axioms" (Silverman, quoted in Byars 1991). (1) In this essay in intend to briefly summarise Mulvey's essay and highlight what I consider to be her key themes and how they relate to psychoanalytic theory and perspectives of feminism criticism. In the second half of this essay I will apply these main themes from Mulvey's essay to Michael Powell's 1960 classic horror film, "Peeping Tom." Mulvey begins her essay by saying that the patriarchal society is a phallocentric society.

I believe this means that it recognises the male gender and the sexuality of men as the hegemonic norm. However, phallocentrism depends, in Freudian terms, on the image of the castrated woman. This image gives some sort of order to the world that the male dominated conception of society, suggests a masculine subject is at the core of all social interchanges. Since the woman represents the absence of a penis, ('lack' of phallus) she highlights the fear of castration. This is important for the foundation of the male subject. Women are second-class citizens, allowed only to participate in the male 'symbolic order' through having a child that is nurtured to accept the 'symbolic' norm.

One of Mulvey's first key themes is to do with the 'cinema' offering a number of sensual pleasures. She notes that Freud had referred to scopophilia - the pleasure in looking at other people's bodies as erotic objects. Mulvey further extends Freud's notion. In psychoanalytic theory 'scopophilia' is defined as, "a basic human sexual drive to look at other human beings, a conscious and concentrated way of looking that causes particular feelings of lust and satisfaction that are not directly related to erotogenic zones." Scopophilia is associated with taking people as objects, and subjecting them to a curious gaze. This gaze is not just 'curious' it can be callous or 'dangerous'. The subject of the gaze is unaware they are being 'looked' upon; therefore it is different to the voyeuristic gaze because the subject cannot control it.

Scopophilia is also concerned with the atmosphere under which films are watched. Laura Mulvey says, "the extreme contrast between the darkness in the auditorium (which also isolates the spectators from one to another) and the brilliance of the shifting patterns of light and shade on the screen helps to promote the illusion of voyeuristic separation. Although the film is really being shown, is there to be seen, conditions of screening and narrative conventions give the spectator an illusion of looking in on a private world." Because we are in the darkness of the cinema it is obvious that we can look without either being seen by those on screen or by other members of the audience. According to Mulvey the screen plays with our scopophilia and voyeuristic fantasies. It gives us a world in which to submerge and allow our gaze to wonder free.

Cinema, she feels, satisfies our basic need for pleasurable looking. It also develops scopophilia in its narcissistic aspect. The conventions of mainstream cinema focus attention in the human form. In film our scopophilia and narcissism intermingle for our needs of likeness and recognition. Mulvey says that cinema plays for the audience a function similar to the encounter a child has with his / her image in the mirror. This leads me to talk about Mulvey's second key theme. 'The Gaze' is a theme, which ultimately begins at the 'mirror phase'.

Mulvey describes the mirror phase as a time when the child's desire of movement is bigger than his actual physical capabilities. The child's image appears to himself more perfect and complete than it actually is. Mulvey describes this encounter with the child's image as the 'matrix of the imaginary, ' or of all the mental images and representations we will form. In a way the recognition the child has of his image in the mirror is mis-recognition, as the imagined 'real' is always somewhere completely un accessable (such as the mirror's reflection).

The image in the mirror is not a real image but an ideal one. However, this is also the same for us as audiences because the screen works as a mirror for us. While watching film we simultaneously lose the ego while we reinforce it. Therefore, there are two contradictory aspects in the act of deriving pleasure from 'Gazing' at the screen. The first is the scopophilia aspect of looking at an object of sexual stimulation and the second is the narcissistic identification with the image in the screen. Mulvey then goes on to say that in our society pleasure of looking shows the very imbalance of the patriarchal system.

The male gaze is active and the female gaze is passive. Women, in the world of images, are displayed as sexual objects. The presence of women is an indispensable element in spectacle. Traditionally, the displaying of women in the world of cinema has functioned at two levels. The first as an erotic object for male characters in the screen story, and second, as an erotic object for the spectator in the auditorium. The active male gaze / passive male gaze dichotomy also affects the narrative structure of movies.

The narrative prevents the male figure from the burden of objectification; therefore, men need to make things happen. They are active and they help bring forward the story. The man controls the film phantasy and is the representative of power as the bearer of the look. The man carries this look behind the screen into the film.

The spectator identifies with the male protagonist and projects his look to this protagonist that he takes to be his like or his screen surrogate. Mulvey says that, "the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look both giving a satisfying sense of omnipotence. " A male movie star who is glamorous does not have characteristics of the erotic object of the gaze but is looked at as "the more powerful ego conceived in the original moment of recognition in front of the mirror. " Mulvey stated in her essay that the gaze can only ever be directed at the female, however...

Research essay sample on Vanessa Ewing Feminism In Mainstream Hollywood Cinema