Psychoanalytic approaches Week 9

Lecture outline i What’s involved in looking? ii Unconscious structures: Freud’s Oedipal Complex iii Unconscious structures: Lacan’s Mirror stage iv Scopophilia, voyeurism, fetishism v Visual pleasure and narrative cinema

i What’s involved in looking? Laura Mulvey (1941-) Filmmaker and film theorist

Mulvey’s article is polemical, a call to arms: ‘Psychoanalytic theory is thus appropriated here as a political weapon, demonstrating the way the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form’. (Mulvey, p.1)

The article ends in this way: ‘Women, whose image has continually been stolen and used for this end, cannot view the decline of the traditional film form with anything much more than sentimental regret’.

ii Freud’s Oedipal Complex

The Electra Complex (girls) -Female child initially attached to mother -Realization of mother’s lack (of penis) -Transfers her desire from mother to father (rival to her mother) -Represses desire, accepts her place -Identifies with her mother

The Electra Complex in Hitchcock: Marnie (1964)

Marnie (1964) Marnie steals from her employers (male) She appears to be a pathological liar Early trauma is revealed: -her mother was a prostitute -Marnie witnessed her being attacked by a client and killed him -Marnie’s transgression (killing of a father- figure) is rehabilitated by her love of a man

The Oedipal Complex (boys) -Male child initially attached to mother and is a rival to his father -Realization of mother’s lack (of penis) -Castration anxiety (trauma - fears he will lose his penis) -Identifies with his father (realizes he will inherit the power his father has) -Represses desire, accepts his place

The Oedipal Complex in Hitchcock: Psycho (1960)

Psycho(1960) -Norman Bates has failed to separate from his mother and accede to the world of the father -The Motel is a world within a world -Bates cannot desire women without being punished by his rivalrous mother

iii Jacques Lacan (1901 – 1981)

-Lacan was influenced by structuralism -The unconscious is structured like language (it is not outside of language) -Language is not neutral but value- laden -We come to know ourselves through language

The Mirror Stage (developmental stage of differentiation) -The mirror stage describes a split that takes place between what the child ‘feels’ and how s/he appears as an image (age months) -The mirror image reflects a more coherent, unified ‘self’ (an image ideal)

- a fundamental recognition of the self as ‘ideal’ - cinema reproduces this pleasure of the fantasy of an ideal self

Lacan also offers a tripartite system akin to Freud’s id, ego and superego: imaginary, symbolic, real

imaginary: maternal space, visual symbolic: culture, language, law of father real: that which cannot find recognition in the symbolic

iv Scopophilia, voyeurism, fetishism Mulvey draws on a mix of Freudian and Lacanian theory. In particular, she deploys these 3 psychoanalytic terms to describe the gendered nature of looking within the cinema.

Scopophilia – the pleasure of looking at another person as an erotic object. -Objectifying -Investigative

Voyeurism – the pleasure of looking without being seen. -Power of invisibility -Obsessive quest

Fetishism – obsessive focus on a substitute object -Psychically displaces threat by an object of desire -Alleviates anxiety

‘While curiosity is a compulsive desire to investigate something secret, fetishism is born out of a refusal to see, a refusal to accept the difference the female body represents for the male.’ (Mulvey, continued…)

In Mulvey’s reading, the fetish takes on greater significance than that of an object within a scene: -Woman as fetish

In Mulvey’s reading, the fetish takes on greater significance than that of an object within a scene: -Woman as fetish -The male gaze as fetishistic (both of these divert attention away from the anxiety of what a woman might be / want / do with an obsessive focus elsewhere)

v Visual pleasure and narrative cinema

Mulvey’s theory of cinematic looking: - the apparatus of cinema has developed through a patriarchal symbolic order - the ‘drive’ of cinema is to satisfy the unconscious wishes and alleviate anxieties

How does the apparatus work to this effect? - the focal point of the narrative is a woman - the naturalization of shot types focuses on the woman as object - the framing of woman is contained by a relay of looks: the male protagonist directs the spectator’s look towards the woman t

How does the narrative work to this effect? - woman as site of investigation - man as active investigating subject - man moves narrative forward (action) - woman as spectacle arrests narrative Vertigo – Scottie is a voyeur, he obsessively pursues a woman, or an image of a woman (perfection). He has the law on his side. But, ‘erotic involvement with the look is disorienting…’ (Mulvey).

‘ These complex series of turnings away, of covering over, not of the eyes but of understanding, of fixating on a substitute object to hold the gaze, leave the female body as an enigma and threat, condemned to return as a symbol of anxiety whilst simultaneously being transformed into its own screen in representation. ’ (Mulvey, Fetishism and Curiosity, 1995)

‘Hitchcock has never concealed his interest in voyeurism, cinematic and non-cinematic’. (Mulvey, VP+NC)

Limitations of Mulvey’s theory: Can it be applied beyond Hollywood films of mid- twentieth century or is it limited to these? What about gay looks and cross-gender desires? What about race and objectification?