That’s what I like at LP: someone challenging a widely accepted corpus.

I don’t think that castration complex is widely accepted at least by psychologists. Literary/cinema critics tend to use it. I think it’s alright in a way to do this. But to apply it as an authoratative way of understanding the psychology of film viewing goes a bit far. It’s a little like the collective unconscious; as a basis for a work of literature like The Sandman it’s fab. As a means of understanding the workings of the human mind well it’s a bit on the nose.
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I don’t hate Freud and Jung. They started a discussion we had to have. I just don’t think it ends there. I also find it a little obstructive to demonize the ‘male gaze’ if for no better reason then it prevents honest discussion. I’m a male, I gaze; I don’t think it wrong. It can be wrong hence my point viz ettiquette. But I’m always aware that women are people quite capable of gazing back. I know this from experience some of the most ruthless gazers I’ve ever met are women.

It would be helpful to understand that when Mulvey used Freud to underpin Visual Pleasures in 1973, it was a subversive act… It was akin to raising patriarchy’s own weapon against it.

Indeed. I did spend a semester wrapping my head around the application of psychoanalysis to cinema which of course included Mulvey. Funnily enough a lecturer in English Lit/Philosophy once advised me ‘not to listen to the feminists’ and dismiss Freud - she wasn’t anti-feminist per se but she did have problems with some of the tendencies attendant to feminist intellectual discourse.
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Psychoanalysis isn’t patriarchy’s weapon really. The unsurprising fact that the founder of psychoanalysis advocated the sexist notions commonplace in his time doesn’t rule this out. Aristotle was sexist that doesn’t mean that a feminist can’t make use of the notion of catharsis or some such. Patriacrhy existed well before psychoanalysis and many of the conservative custodians of patriarchy were amongst Freud’s most hostile opponents.
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My point is that the Freudian theories Mulvey uses are fanciful. We should move beyond that. I’ve attempted to do this by asking the question: is Disabled Bitch really ‘objectifying’ hereself? And if so what does that mean exactly?

This is where we depart from each other, I think. He made several judgements. How do you know they were simply intuited? Reading them, it seemed to me they were based on his observations, his understandings of film and film critique, his intelligence, his weighing of many social and psychological theories…. etc. That’s what it sounded like to me.

I think Adrien is a thinker rather than a disciple. But his mind is not a tabula rasa: he has done some reading. Of course it’s not either/or as thinker/disciple. But I’m interested in his judgements. I don’t take him as an authority, I read him as a thoughtful contributor.

If his statements don’t “fit” into a 1970s feminism or a 1990s feminism or a noughties feminism or a Lacanian filmcrit schema, well what of it??

If refined and ground-breaking theorists can’t find a way to talk to the unwashed, then so much the worse for both the theorists and the unwashed whose taxes help support the theorising.

I’m very old-fashioned. I still cling to a belief in empirical grounding of theories, and to a hope for effective popularisation of new ideas. Sorry to bang on. Cheerio.

in terms of libido, that is….

The problem is that there is no evidence or alternate readings provided, to back up these mysteriously intuited discernments.

No one here is suggesting Freud is spot on then, now and forevermore. He was the founder of psychoanalysis. He was a patriarch who lived over 100 years ago. People would do well to read his case studies as they reveal just how much of a patriarch he was. eg, A contrast of Hans and Dora illumine this, er, brilliantly.

It would be helpful to understand that when Mulvey used Freud to underpin Visual Pleasures in 1973, it was a subversive act.

Feminists had considered Freud untouchable because of his inherent patriarchy. It would be useful to read Kate Millett’s “Sexual Politics” here. She argued that his theory of sexuality functioned to confirm and sustain masculine dominance and prescribe women’s inferiority. This was in place until Juliet Mitchell came along in 1974 with her book, Psychoanalysis and Feminism. She argued that psychoanalysis is a description of the patriarchy rather than a prescription from the patriarchy. So when Mulvey used Freud, it was still controversial. It was akin to raising patriarchy’s own weapon against it. People need to do some reading on the history of feminism and its use of Freud and psychoanalysis and why it chose to go this way. That way the argument could develop a little nuance.

BTW how do your prove a psychoanalytic theory is wrong? What proof is there? There are developments on theories, and counter theories, but there is no proof regarding socialisation. Unless someone has found the gay gene, or the girl gene, or the boy gene?

anyways for those who seem to be struggling there is this great blog which explains feminism:

http://finallyfeminism101.blogspot.com/

Applying pure freudian principles in therapy today would be equal to bleeding people when they get an illness.

Any time you want to bang on about twaddle you’ve discerned, feel free. That’s what I like at LP: someone challenging a widely accepted corpus.

I thought Freud’s “Leonardo” was amazingly crass. ‘Analysing’ a bloke who’d been dead for centuries, for Pete’s sake; Sigmund never met him. Flimsy. Trite. Twaddle.

cheers

So none of the objections to Visual Pleasures raised here are new.

Actually the principle objection to the essay was made before it was written. Castration Complex is a speculation that is founded on nothing.

Mulvey herself offered her own response to these criticisms in 1981 and this can be found here

No she didn’t. She made a response to one criticism. That criticism was that she’d positioned the viewer as male and didn’t adequately address the female viewer. She does so in the afterword by reference to Freud’s theories on sexual development.
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Freud’s theories on sexual development have been widely excavated to be the purest shite. However they persist. Why? Because when a really elegant doctrine proves completely ungrounded in anything life on the planet Earth actually does well we stupid monkeys turn it into a quasi-religious dogma. A perfect little circle of the most eloquent and beautifully rendered twaddle.
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Why Freudians always crap on about the Oedipus complex and not about the ideas of his that were, like, good. I’ll never know. Maybe it’s genetic. A genetic predisposition to read books and come away with the bollocks. That’d explain the Trots I ’spose.
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Mulvey writes:

It would not be surprising if it were to turn out that each sexuality had its own special libido appropriated to it, so that one sort of libido would pursue the aims of a masculine sexual life and another sort those of a feminine one. But nothing of the kind is true. There is only one libido

See again - nonsense. There is not one libido. There are as many libidos as creatures who harbour sexual urges. Also it appears if one refers to, y’know, the brain n stuff, that males and females have differently structured libidos. That libido in heterosexuals is different from taht in homosexuals and so forth.
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But forget that. Let’s talk about little girls, their phallic phases and penis envy and why that’s why Pride and Prejudice adaptations are always so successful.
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Discussions like this always remind me of clerical objections to Columbus’s voyage. Always on the basis of something Aristotle wrote.

My mother. In fact I’ve had so much Cary Grant pushed on me I should hate him.
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But he’s just sooooo cool.
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So is my mother objectifying him? Well he was a fine lookin’ chap. In Charade Audrey Hepburn asks him: You know what’s wrong with you?
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He says: What?
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And she bats those beautiful eyes and purrs: Nothing!
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My mother concurs. But am I objectifyng Hepburn.
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The reason I ask is that I have a problem with this notion objectifying. If I see someone and think they’re attractive; if I check them out - if I gain visual pleasure looking at another person am I objectifying that person? Does my gaze hit the side of her face?
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Well not literally. In reality the light is reflected off her and reaches my eyes. My brain processes the image. I imagine what is referred to in the popular lingo as ‘pleasure centres’ light up. She is an object - in the sense of being of material substance. But do I render her, in my mind, a thing - as in a lifeless object. An object without feelings or thoughts or interests? I don’t think so.
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Doubtless people do. It’s hard to read about that nasty business in Werribee last year and not think of objectifying. It’s also quite impossible to totally disregard the omniscience of pornography as a factor in that very unpleasant occurence. History is crammed to the brim with humans denying humanity to other humans and often on the basis of difference: sexual, racial, social, economic.
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But I’m not certain that that is what happens when we fancy that someone’s nice looking. Or that we’re inviting that to happen when we dress or act ’sexual’. In fact the reason that Cary Grant, that Audrey Hepburn are so attractive goes beyond their pleasantly shaped ‘meat n bone’. It’s inextricably wrapped up in who they are, how they talk, dress, move and crack a joke.
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So back to the picture above are these women inviting us to ‘objectify’ them. In one sense yes. They appear in a manner that is suppsed to invoke sexual desire: they’re in lingerie. But I don’t think they’re intention is to have us dehumanize them I think it’s quite the contrary. They’re saying they are human, they are sexual. They are resisting the notion that their disabilities render them otherwise. Of course there is, in these costumes, some imlpied sexual stereotype; but is this because of their servility or their lack of imagination. Or perhaps our lack of imagination generally?
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Unfortunately we deploy classifications that are harsh and puritan. If you see someone and think ‘yum’ that’s objectification. If you like looking at pictures of people with their clothes off, that’s objectification. If it’s not, what is. When does that sort of thing become objectification?
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Perhaps instead of treating the ‘gaze’ (of straight guys or otherwise) as morally nefarious we might instead seek to develop a new version of the age-old solution to this reality: ettiquette. Just a thought.
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And now back to the castration complex.

I first read it about 15 years ago when I was doing post-grad cinema studies, which I loved. I think Mulvey’s essay is a useful provocation. I don’t think it’s a case of Mulvey being wrong, but I do think it’s a case of Mulvey looking at films in a very specific post-Freudian way. This opens up a interesting ways of thinking about classic Hollywood film, but it’s only part of the story. Basically, I’d agree with Adrien here. Actors such as Hepburn, Lombard, Davis, Crawford, Stanwyck etc. were used by women viewers in a variety of ways. But they were such livewires and so much more interesting than the bulk of the male actors that Mulvey’s essay does do the way they were viewed a disservice. Male actors such as Grant and Cooper were also objectified in similar ways. Who were the viewers of these images? Women. And I’m sure a great deal of visual pleasure was taken in the viewing.

Bu of course, Casey is right. None of this is new. I just wish women in mainstream Hollywood films now had such strong roles as they used to. Now it’s teenage boys who drove the box-office and the films are pitched mainly to that market.

cheers

[Emily, they’re talking about “the male *gaze*,” not the male gays.]

Oooohhh.

Never mind.

Surprising but true, since then, the essay has been endlessly critiqued, and responded to. Mulvey herself offered her own response to these criticisms in 1981 and this can be found here:

http://afc-theliterature.blogspot.com/2007/07/afterthoughts-on-visual-pleasure-and.html

wiki provides an overview of some of the critiques here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_film_theory

So none of the objections to Visual Pleasures raised here are new. I read that Mulvey did say Visual Pleasures was written to provoke.

Which is what it has done here. Beautifully. Even, if you like, brilliantly.

Traditionally, the woman displayed has functioned on two levels: as erotic object for the characters within the screen story, and as erotic object for the spectator within the auditorium, with a shifting tension between the looks on either side of the screen.

I wonder what Katherine Hepburn would have to say about that. Well perhaps her characters are exceptional. Perhaps Mame Denis in Auntie Mame is exceptional. Perhaps Gloria Swanson’s last film role is likewise an exception. I could go on with these exceptions all day. But then I’d be banging on.
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Mulvey reduces the female actors, the writers, the (very few) directors, their characters and stories - to ’sexual objects’. She reduces female audience members to conduits of male oppression and male viewers to bludgeoned gorillas who use their willies for thinking with. She seems oblivious to the fact that according to the best knowledge of the market available during the classic Hollywood era - it was women who decided which flick to see. She might read Hitchcock by Truffaut for an articulation of this. She’d also find a very insightful discussion on Rear Wondow.
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Is Greer Garson’s Elizabeth Bennet merely decoration for us the viewers? Does she merely serve to give something for Laurence Olivier to look at while he strolls about proudly in his classic Dandy finery dismissing any suggestion that he should indulge the middle-classes at play?
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That’s an insult. I’m sorry if I were Greer Garson or Tallulah Bankhead or Audrey Hepburn I’d throw a glass of claret in Mulvey’s face. Women are more than ornaments. Mulvey is plain wrong there. Likewise:

…the male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification. Man is reluctant to gaze at his exhibitionist like.

Which is why Arnold Schwarzanegger, Sylvester Stallone, Steve Segal (whince) and the rest all cover up their glistening torsos onscreen. It’s why boxers always wear a head to toe shroud.
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Oh wait they don’t.
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But anyway. This notion that men need to control women because the fact of their bodies is somehow productive of an anxiety that they will lose their willies is nonsense. There are much more basic materialistic and psychological reasons for patriarchal dominance. Likewise the notion that little girls are psychically clouded with envy on becoming aware that todgers abound. I’ve seen little girls looking at statues of male figures in art galleries. Their reaction to the todgers they are s’possedly so envious of is almost always hysterical laughter. Freud’s theories in this regard are unsubstantiated swill. There has never been a single skerick of evidence backing any of ‘em up.
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Now to be sure cinema was and is still a male dominated industry. To be sure likewise it is conventional (I would not say traditional) for the female star to be treated as an ornament. However that’s simply not the whole story. There were, and are, female actors who labour an artistic vocation. Be nice if they got a little respect; especially from feminists! That said it’s simply beyond me how one can address the issue of male dominance, of sexual stereotype, of derogatory ideas about women by reference to a theory that is sexist tosh.
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What any of this has to do with the above is a good question. Disability Bitch is not part of the matrix of a male-dominated industry, she’s doing this of her own volition. Now what happens? Is it because she’s brainwashed by dominant male codes or is she simply doing it to express herself? How does this theory get applied? Does it? Ever?
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Of course not. Because if it did we’d realize that it’s a load of cobblers.

And I really don’t know what Kubrick has to do with it, except as a form of idol worship.

I cite Kubrick as an example of a filmmaker with probably unequalled control over his product - Mulvey’s hopes for ‘artisanal cinema’ come to mind - who disregarded the various assertions of film theorists arguing that narrative is somehow political. Yet he, during the course of his entire career, experimented with film narrative.And did so in a way that did not alienate audiences: The Killing, Lolita, 2001, Full Metal Jacket and Eyes Wide Shut all diverge from the classic 1, 2a,2b, 3 structure of Hollywood cinema.
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In many other ways he challenges the assumptions of the 70s film theorists viz ‘Hollywood’ cinema and emotional v intellectual cinema. I suspect that’s why he isn’t popular with those who set the curricula. I dig his work but the citation was in aid of the argument.
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The argument was that there is divergence in artistic practice from the theory which is more or less irrellevent to it.

I wasn’t accusing you of intolerance. Sorry you took it that way.

Okay. But how else was I supposed to read #32?

And thats a brilliant observation.

Until I read your comment Laura, I was more inclined to see the anxiety that the missing limbs might generate as coming from Kristeva’s idea of the Abject. However the castration complex is much more applicable. The starkness of the missing limbs, amdist the comforting traditional objectifications in this picture would indeed provoke the sorts of anxieties which come from the idea of woman as the symbolically castrated male. Well argued, as always.

Wish you would come back and post sometimes.