Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema Literary Elements

Academic Essay, Film Criticism

The essay was published in 1973.

The essay is written from the perspective of the author Laura Mulvey. Given its academic nature, the essay is written in formal third-person.

Mulvey's tone is passionate and intellectually sharp. At moments, the mood of the piece is fervent in its call for change in film, though her ideas build on each other deftly and incisively. The reader might experience her criticism of the patriarchal film industry as scathing at times, though her tone is not one of contempt, but of tenacious appraisal.

Due to the genre of the text, there is no obvious protagonist or antagonist. However, Mulvey argues in favor of alternative film styles that would enact a more feminist approach, while she criticizes patriarchal control and the for-profit nature of Hollywood cinema.

The major conflict described in the text is the fact that conventional Hollywood films are created and informed by an unconscious patriarchal order and understanding (which Mulvey describes in psychoanalytic terms). This unconscious structure ultimately turns women on screen into fetishized objects rather than whole, fleshed-out characters in their own right.

There is no climax in the text due to its carefully ordered structure as an academic essay. At the end of the essay, Mulvey gestures toward the potential for alternative and feminist film, a moment that could be considered a type of theoretical climax to the polemic essay.

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There are few instances of understatement in the text, as Mulvey must communicate her points clearly and with precision in order to show the different layers of patriarchal consciousness at work.

Mulvey makes numerous allusions to various Hollywood films with which her contemporaries would have been familiar. She also alludes to Sigmund Freud and Jaques Lacan throughout the essay, as the entire structure of her argument relies on these scholars' contributions to psychoanalytic theory.

Mulvey paints a negative picture of Hollywood as an overly-powerful system invested only in large profits. She also describes the female character in great detail, such as the bodies of Marilyn Monroe and Marlene Dietrich, to show how they are represented as empty vessels for male desire and frustration. Finally, she invokes imagery from psychoanalytic concepts like castration, which focus on the relationship between one's conscious and unconscious self.

The central paradox of Mulvey's argument is that narrative films attempt to cultivate the illusion of truth and reality while at the same time subordinating reality to the male gaze.

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Mulvey speaks metonymically of the camera as though it is representative of cinema in general. Hollywood is also described with a similar effect; she uses the word to refer to mainstream cinema in general, not the geographical location.

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