"It takes as starting point the way film reflects, reveals even plays on the straight, socially established interpretation of sexual difference which controls images, erotic ways of looking and spectacle."
In the first paragraph of the essay, Mulvey lays out the framework of her argument: she suggests here that film manipulates the difference between man and woman, or rather the conceptions of difference between man and woman. The female body is highlighted for its figure and qualities deemed attractive by society. As a result, eroticized images and characters are created, from which "visual pleasure" is derived.
"Psychoanalytic theory is thus appropriate here as a political weapon, demonstrating the way the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form."
Here, Mulvey introduces and explains her use of Freudian psychoanalysis in the paper. In keeping with Freudian analysis, she note the importance of the unconscious, which suggests that sexist film tropes have developed not so much intentionally but rather through patterns of the male psyche.
"It is said that analysing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the intention of this article."
Here is perhaps Mulvey's most pointed and political statement. Not only does she intend to address the beautification of the female form on screen but by her own admission, she seeks to dismantle it. In declaring her intention to "destroy" beauty, Mulvey calls into question what elements of narrative film are considered beautiful, and who determines that beauty in the first place.
"In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive female."
Here Mulvey outlines the dynamic that has traditionally been established between male and female characters on film. As she opines, the male character is active and capable of enacting change, thus driving the plot forward. In contrast, the female character becomes nothing more than an object upon which the plot is projected. Mulvey goes one step further, and suggests that this imbalance pleasures the viewer, as it validates the values society has instilled into them.
"The presence of woman is an indispensable element of spectacle in normative narrative film, yet her visual presence tends to work against the development of a story line."
This line most directly relates to the title of the essay, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. After outlining the trope of the female character, Mulvey here suggests that as a result, the female character is not only passive in the plot but she goes so far as to obstruct it. As an object of beauty, her mere objectness distracts from the plot and does not effect action. In a sense, she exists outside the plot itself.
"Woman as representation signifies castration."
This line succinctly summarizes Mulvey's view of the female character and her relation to eroticism and pleasure. She does not mean castration in a physical sense but rather in the symbolic order that Freud distinguished in his own work. The female character is distinguished from the male, hence the castration, and as a result is robbed of power and ability to effect the plot. By this measure, she becomes an object onto which the desires and fantasies of male characters and male viewers is then positioned.
