Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema Essay Questions

What are the two primary psychic functions that are carried out in the male gaze?

According to Mulvey, the male gaze manifests in film in two major ways. One is the process of narcissistic identification of the male viewer with the male protagonist, and the other is the scopophilic pleasure enjoyed by the male viewer in watching the female characters as objects of desire and consumption. The first involves the constitution of the ego through narcissistic drives and the second involves the libido and deriving sexual pleasure from sight.

What does Mulvey mean by the term "narrative cinema?"

Readers—especially contemporary, twenty-first century readers—might find Mulvey's particular case study difficult to grasp, in part because of the term she uses to describe her subject matter. For Mulvey, "narrative cinema" denotes mainstream Hollywood films that are composed of two major elements: plots that work to alienate and subjugate female characters, and camerawork that turns female characters into fetishized objects for male characters and male spectators alike.

What solution does Mulvey offer to the problem of patriarchal film production?

Mulvey does not provide an explicit alternative to the problem she identifies. Instead, she gestures toward the potential for feminist film production (though she does not use this term) as that which would include: (1) freeing the camera from the constriction of the male gaze, and (2) freeing the audience from the illusion that they are participants in the film. As such, Mulvey imagines a self-conscious and meta-cinematic version of film that would call attention to artifice in order to make its biases explicit rather than unconscious.