In 1975, film theorist Laura Mulvey published a short essay that permanently changed how we think about cinema. 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' argued that Hollywood film is structured around a gendered act of looking — that the camera, the protagonist, and the spectator are all positioned as male, and that women on screen exist primarily to be looked at. Fifty years later, the essay remains one of the most cited and contested texts in film studies. And no director's work illuminates its arguments more than Alfred Hitchcock.
Key terms
- Scopophilia
- The pleasure of looking; the drive to observe others, often without their knowledge.
- Voyeurism
- Looking at others in private or unguarded moments; a form of scopophilia associated with power and control.
- Exhibitionism
- The pleasure of being looked at; in classical cinema, coded as feminine.
- Fetishistic scopophilia
- Elevating the female figure to an idealised, unthreatening image to manage male anxiety.
- The oppositional gaze
- bell hooks's term for the resistant, critical look of those marginalised by dominant cinema.
Mulvey's framework: the male gaze
Mulvey drew on psychoanalytic theory, which helps to demonstrate human unconscious behavior — particularly the work of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan — to argue that mainstream cinema reproduces a fundamentally patriarchal structure of looking from the male perspective (Mulvey, 1975). She identified two key pleasures that cinema offers its (male) spectator: scopophilia, the pleasure of looking itself, and narcissistic identification (Voyeurism) with the on-screen protagonist (Mulvey, L. (1975)). pp 60-61
Scopophilia — literally, love of looking — is the pleasure of watching without being watched. Cinema creates ideal conditions for this: the darkened auditorium, the screen, the spectator shown to be invisible while the image is fully exposed. Freud associated scopophilia with voyeurism and looking at others as mere objects, the desire to observe others in private or unguarded moments. Hitchcock, more than any other director, built his entire philosophy around this theme (Mulvey, L. (1975)). pp 59-61
Exhibitionism is the pleasure of being looked at, of displaying oneself for another's gaze. In classical Hollywood cinema, Mulvey argued, women seem to be put on display for exhibitionism — their appearance, movement, and presence methodically put together for visual pleasure — while men are looked at more for action. The woman is spectacle; the man is the bearer of the look. Mulvey, L. (1975) pp.61-63
The Male Gaze, in Mulvey's formulation, operates on three levels: the look of the camera as it records the event; the look of the male characters within the narrative; and the look of the spectator or audience as they watch the film. In classical Hollywood, these three looks are aligned — the camera shows us what the male protagonist sees, and we are invited to see through his eyes. Mulvey, L. (1975) pp62-63
The camera does not simply record what is in front of it. It constructs a relationship between the one who looks and the one who is looked at — and that relationship is never neutral.
Rear Window (1954): the architecture of voyeurism
Rear Window is perhaps one of the most candid films on voyeurism in the history of cinema. L.B. Jefferies — 'Jeff' — who is a photojournalist confined to his apartment with a broken leg. He passes the time watching his neighbors through his rear window, using his telephoto lens to observe their lives in intimate detail. The film is set entirely around his point of view. The audience is watching everything that he sees. We are observing everything from his perspective.
Hitchcock makes the voyeuristic structure quite obvious. Jeff is a perfect subject for the cinema spectator: he is immobilized, in the dark, watching a series of images of other people's lives. His neighbors are arranged like a sequence of screenshots — each window a different story, a different kind of woman. The women Jeff watches are not characters in their own right. They are merely images — objects of his (and our) gaze, distinctly made entirely by how they appear to the watching eye.
Jeff's girlfriend Lisa — played by Grace Kelly — initially fights his voyeuristic fixation. But the film eventually includes her in it: she crosses the courtyard and enters the suspected murderer's apartment while he is gone. Jeff watches her through his lens as she gets threatened and thrown around. The moment is deeply horrifying to Jeff. Lisa is in danger, but the camera frames her as a striking sight to see — her elegant dress, her composed face, her hands raised. Jeff watches; we watch. The film implicates us as we look on.
Vertigo (1958): the gaze as possession
If Rear Window is about the pleasure of watching, Vertigo is about its ferocity. Scottie Ferguson, a retired detective who has a fear of heights, is hired to follow Madeleine — a woman his client believes is possessed by the spirit of a dead ancestor. Scottie follows her through San Francisco, observing her from a distance and falling in love with an image he has constructed rather than with a person he has known.
Mulvey identifies two strategies by which the male gaze manages the threat that the female figure poses in classical cinema: voyeuristic sadism and fetishistic scopophilia. Vertigo establishes both, often simultaneously. Scottie personifies the male gaze; he basically wants to take away Judy's identity to show she has been lying about being Madeleine.
When Madeleine dies — or appears to — Scottie encounters Judy, a working-class woman who resembles her. He sets out to remake Judy in Madeleine's image- this, of course, forcing her to dye her hair, change her clothes, and adopt a different posture and even mannerisms. The transformation sequence is one of the most dramatic in Hitchcock's work. Scottie does not love Judy. He loves the image he is molding and constructing. The camera watches the transformation with the same fetishistic attention it gave to Madeleine — lingering on hair, clothing, and her form and body.
Kim Novak's performance complicates the film's gaze in ways that Mulvey's original essay perhaps underestimates. Judy's awareness of what is being done to her — her compliance, her resistance, her grief — introduces a subjectivity that the film's structure tries to suppress but cannot entirely contain. The spectator who identifies with Judy rather than Scottie sees a different film: one about the cost of being remade in someone else's image.
The three looks and how cinema hides them
Mulvey's concept of the three looks — camera, character, spectator — describes how classical Hollywood cinema naturalises the male gaze by making it invisible. The camera appears to be neutral, objective, simply recording what is there. But every choice of angle, framing, duration, and focus is a choice about who looks and who is looked at.
In both Rear Window and Vertigo, Hitchcock makes this structure unusually visible. The point-of-view shot — in which the camera adopts the literal perspective of a character — is used extensively, aligning the spectator's vision with Jeff's telephoto lens or Scottie's following gaze. We are not merely watching a man watch a woman. We are seen as that man, invited to share in his desire and his control.
Two moments, two concepts
Moment 1 — Scopophilia And Voyeurism
The opening pan and watching Ms. Torso — Rear Window (1954)
Consider two specific moments that crystallize these concepts. The first is the opening sequence of Rear Window, in which the camera slowly pans across the courtyard, introducing each window and the people who live there. This isn't the character Jeff's point of view. It is the camera's own gaze, allowing the voyeuristic structure before the full story has even begun. The spectator or audience is cast as a watcher before they are given a character to watch through. This is scopophilia in its purest cinematic form: the pleasure of looking, and the spectator or audience is also put in a position that Alfred Hitchcock liked the audience to be in: to be part of voyeurism, watching what is going on in each window. Another scene from the movie is Ms. Torso. She is seen dancing in the window. This would be what Mulvey called "to-be-looked-at-ness". Jeff is using his binoculars to watch her without her knowing he is watching. She is wearing revealing clothes, and Jeff just watches her passively, but there is a slight smile that invites the spectator/audience to look into Jeff's mind. This can also be looked at as the Male Gaze. But Hitchcock also enjoys making the audience part of the voyeurism.
Moment 2 — Fetishistic Scopophilia And The Male Gaze
The necklace scene — Vertigo (1958)
One part of the movie where fetishistic scopophilia is shown is when Scottie has Judy dye her hair and change her clothes. He is very controlling in this scene. He wants Judy to look exactly like Madeleine, the mirror image of her. He is looking at Judy like a fetish image and not as someone he loves. He needs that control and power. He needs to strip Judy of any identity she may have left. The second moment is the 'necklace scene' near the end of Vertigo. Scottie has turned Judy into Madeleine. She emerges from the bathroom, and the camera circles her in this shot, the world spinning around the object of desire. Then Judy puts on the necklace Scottie recognizes as Madeleine's, and the illusion disintegrates before Scottie and the audience alike. The necklace is the fetish object brought to light: the detail that both maintains and destroys the fantasy. Scottie's gaze, which has been both fabricating and controlling Judy throughout the film, is finally destroyed — and what it reveals isn't love but obsession, not desire but possession. Judy and Madeleine are the same person.
What narrative cinema reveals about looking
What Hitchcock's films reveal, when read through Mulvey's framework, is that narrative cinema doesn't simply tell stories. It builds them— it plans out who sees and who is seen, whose view is centered as most important and whose is marginalized, what counts as desire and what counts as undesirable. The camera is never innocent.
This does not mean that films are simply propaganda for the patriarchal order, or that spectators are passive recipients of the gaze they are offered. Feminist film theory has consistently argued that the audience is more complex than Mulvey's original model suggested — that viewer bring their own ideas to the film. (Mulvey, L. (1975)).
When we watch a film and ask who the camera is looking at, and why, and how — we are doing the work that Mulvey's essay made possible. We are refusing to take the gaze for granted. We are insisting that the act of looking is always already a political act, shaped by the structures of power that organise the world in which cinema is made and watched.
Hitchcock's films are not feminist texts. But they are perhaps the most honest films ever made about what the male gaze actually does — and what it costs the women caught within it. Design Statement - I went through both movies, as well as digging a little deeper to look up the movies online. It is quite amazing how Alfred Hitchcock boldly used Voyeurism, Scopophilia, exhibitionism, and the Male Gaze deliberately. He seemed to know exactly what he was doing, and this seems to work well when trying to draw the viewer/audience in. He also did this in many of his movies to make even the audience part of that voyeurism. I also decided to add a bit of a glossary of the terms I needed to use so that the reader would have a bit of a better understanding. I myself also used Google to help myself understand what I am trying to say or write. So, looking up the terms and getting their meaning does help me more when writing a paper or writing for my blog. It's important to me to know what I am writing and to get more of a feel for those involved in the research and coining of phrases, such as Laura Mulvey and the Male Gaze. The movies themselves were very fun to watch. Millmore, M. (2016, October 2). Understanding Visual Culture. Retrieved from Project 4-4: Gendering the Gaze: https://michaelmillmore.wordpress.com/tag/the-mirror-phase/ Mulvey, L. (1975). Visual pleasure and narrative cinema