Psychoanalysis
Is the analysis of the options and controls we choose in life, such as why do we choose one thing over another.
Laura Mulvey
Writer informed by both feminism and psycholanalysis. She wrote 'Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema'. She believes that Hollywood film is sexist as it represents 'the gaze' as powerful and male. She also states that heroes are typically male and drive the plot and women exist in films as sexual objects to be looked at.
Freudian Theories of Psychoanalysis
- Scopophilia - Is the pleasure of looking at others bodies as objects. An instinctual desire to look emerges in childhood.
- Narcisstic identification - Spectators identify with the male hero in narrative film.
- The Mirror Stage (Jacques Lacan) - The projected image of the 'ideal ego' is freflected, where in reality our own body is less perfect than the one we see reflected.
The Mirror Stage.
Cinema thrives on contradiction
- Scopohilia - I want to HAVE her.
- Narcissistic identification - I want to BE him.
The pleasere in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. ‘By means of identification with him, [male actor] through participation in his power, the spectator can indirectly possess her too.'
Suture
Spectators look through the eyes of actors and we are able to follow their gaze without feeling guilty. This suture can be broken when the audience is aware of their own surroundings and are bought into the action, such as in Peep Show when the audience is constantly playing many roles. With this suture broken, the audience can feel guilt.
Forms of gaze
- Spectators gaze - you looking at me.
- Intra-diegetic gaze - you loking at me, and you looking at others.
- Extra-diegetic gaze - direct address to the viewer. Avoided in cinema, but common in advertising and TV newsreaders.
I found this advertisement where scopophilia and narcissistic identifiication are used to sell the perfume. The audience want to have her, and want to be him.
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