#MeToo has raised the issue of violence in the film world, but also that of imagery that affects the representation of bodies. The notion of the “male gaze” and the possibility of an emancipatory female gaze allow us to deconstruct the fantasy machine.
While the film industry is shaken by the increase in sexism cases, the publication in French translation of Laura Mulvey’s book, Fetishism and Curiosity (originally published in 1996), provides an opportunity to delve into the underbelly of the patriarchal cinematic imagination. In a context where sexism in the film industry tends to be approached primarily in its legal dimension, Laura Mulvey’s writings allow us to think about the complexity of power relations when they are played out in the sphere of representation.
The male spectator
Indeed, the accusations made by many actresses in recent years do not exclusively concern the question of violence, but also that of the creation of an imagery that affects bodies, desires and representations. Still too much of a minority in France, feminist theories of cinema have completely shaken up film studies, by proposing a radical alternative to the essentially cinephile approach that has long dominated criticism in France. Laura Mulvey’s writings represent a wonderful opportunity to rethink cinephilia in the light of deconstruction, to continue to love cinema, while questioning it.
Laura Mulvey, a theorist and filmmaker, is a central figure in film studies. Her “inaugural” article, Visual pleasure and narrative cinema (1975), continues to be reprinted and represents one of the most widely read and cited texts in the field. Mulvey introduced the notion of ” male gaze » to think about the gendered structures of the gaze that support classic Hollywood imagery, which associates the spectacle of the female body on screen with the implicit presence of a male spectator.
Fetishism and Curiosity is the second of his books to be translated into French, following the publication of a collection of texts in 2017 which included a new translation of his 1975 essay, which testifies to a growing interest in his writings in France. The texts collected in Fetishism and Curiosity date mostly from the early 1990s and are at the heart of debates on cinema and critical theory of those years in the Anglo-American context.
The questions of fetishism, femininity as representation and female desire had been the subject of a body of texts which analysed the concepts of masquerade, spectacle and fetish from perspectives which crossed film studies, anthropology, literary theory and art history.
The critical apparatus mobilized by Mulvey, based on an articulation of Marxist and psychoanalytic theories reread from a feminist perspective, must also be situated in this context. This is perhaps the reason why Mulvey’s positions can sometimes seem far removed from current issues, particularly through her insistence on a certain binarism and on the notions of “woman” and “femininity,” which leave aside a whole set of variables.
Conceptions of fetishism
It would be wrong, however, to consider this book as dated, because its theoretical and political relevance remains intact. In this book, the author continues her work of deconstructing this fantasy machine that is cinema, through the analysis of heterogeneous examples, which range from classic Hollywood cinema and melodrama to the films of Jean-Luc Godard, David Lynch or Ousmane Sembé, through the works of artists such as Cindy Sherman and Jimmie Durham.
The book’s central theme, as its title suggests, is the dialectic between fetishism and curiosity, which refers to the fascination provoked by the spectacle of femininity on screen and the desire to know that these images arouse in spectators. This dialectic refers firstly to the position that Mulvey herself occupies, between her love of cinema and her desire to understand it:
If curiosity is a desire to see and know, to investigate a secret, fetishism is defined by a refusal to see, a refusal to accept the difference that the female body embodies in the eyes of man. (p. 162)
Mulvey’s conception of fetishism derives from Marxism and psychoanalysis, which she rereads in the light of feminism. For Marx, fetishism is what masks labor power as the production of value, while for Freud, fetishism is what allows the (male) subject to overcome the anxiety provoked by the perception of the castrated maternal body. If the first (commodity fetishism) refers to the need to obliterate the reality of work in order to make the commodity desirable, the second (sexual fetishism) operates on the fantasy level, in order to conceal sexual difference.
These two characteristics are found in cinema, which condenses in its modus operandi the commodity, the spectacle and sexuality. Cinema conceals the material conditions of the production and distribution of films through the establishment of its illusionist device. At the same time, the focus on the spectacle of the female body of the star, represented as pure exteriority, a cosmetic and eroticized body, both an enigma and “trademark of the seductive potential of cinema itself” (p. 126), indicates its fundamentally fetishistic structure.
Belief systems
By mobilizing the notion of fetishism to think about cinema, Mulvey updates the opposition between knowledge and belief, which was at the heart of Marxist and Freudian notions, by posing the question of the desire for knowledge and feminine subjectivity. The notion of fetishism referred to the belief, attributed to non-Western societies, in the power of certain “fetish” objects, while Western rationality thought itself to be immune to belief. Freud and Marx set about questioning this rationality by revealing the belief systems at the heart of the capitalist economy and the modern psyche.
For Mulvey, it is therefore a question of thinking the dialectic between the fascination (belief, denial, illusion) of cinema and the feminine desire for knowledge, which emerges as the true political driving force of the author’s enterprise. She proposes a set of analyses having as their object specific films or motifs, in which the filmic representation is analyzed in its spatial and topological dimension, as a labyrinth of hidden signs, enigmas and meanings.
The chapter devoted to “Pandora’s box” appears particularly illuminating in terms of the approach adopted. The myth of Pandora in fact condenses the image of a fabricated feminine, with the story of feminine curiosity represented as transgressive. However, since the desire to see concerns the enigma of femininity, only a feminist desire for knowledge is able to decipher and make Pandora’s curiosity operational. It is here that Mulvey returns in the most striking way to her previous writings, in particular to the limits of her theorization of ” male gaze “, which did not take into account the possibility of an active female gaze.
Thinking about a feminist aesthetic of curiosity thus allows us to go beyond the overly binary separation between the voyeuristic male gaze and the status of the feminine as an image (femininity “made to be looked at”), by introducing the possibility of an emancipatory feminine gaze. Mulvey constantly reminds us that cinema is a complex phenomenon, traversed by lines of tension that contribute to constituting us as sexual subjects.
At a time when there is an increasing number of voices in the film industry, his writings provide a set of tools for navigating the complexity of the power relations that play out on screen and beyond.