Sexism in Film
At the crux of Mulvey’s thesis is her belief that mainstream Hollywood cinema has been an inherently sexist enterprise. She contends that female characters are fetishized, objectified, and positioned only in relation to male characters. To support this point, Mulvey uses Marilyn Monroe as an example, highlighting the ways certain parts of her body were filmed solely to evoke eroticism and desire in the male viewer. From a psychoanalytic perspective, Mulvey also suggests that female characters are symbolically castrated, and are portrayed solely in the wake of this castration; they are guilty, anxious, and unable to receive pleasure.
Film as a Source of Pleasure
As the title of the essay suggests, Mulvey views cinema as a source of pleasure. Her definition of pleasure, however, is not merely a matter of fun or entertainment, but a deeper psychoanalytical experience inviting associations with desire and fantasy. She indicates that this experience of pleasure is linked to scopophilia, the voyeuristic pleasure derived from viewing others as objects, and the narcissistic relationship the viewer forms with characters on screen. Mulvey goes onto argue that narrative film has traditionally appealed to male pleasures in the form of eroticism toward passive female characters, framed only as objects.
The Power of the Director
Mulvey does not suggest that sexist cinematic tropes have emerged organically. Rather, she looks at specific films and interrogates specific directorial styles. Analyzing Sternberg, Hitchcock, and their respective films, Mulvey gestures towards the ways the directors place male desire, voyeurism, fantasy, and eroticization at the center of their work. In this sense, the role of the director is a powerful and political one. They decide not only what the spectator sees, but how they see it. Through her analysis of two popular male directories, Mulvey tacitly suggests that female directors might offer a new perspective in future cinematic work.
Psychoanalysis as Political Weapon
Writing in 1973, Mulvey bases her approach on the psychoanalytic practice devised and developed by Sigmund Freud many years earlier. Instead of looking to contemporary theory, Mulvey reaches half a century into the past for the organizing structure for her essay. In so doing, she implies that Freud’s theories have continued relevance not only in the field of psychology but in broader social frameworks as well. Freud's work was already being applied to literary studies that, similar to cinematic studies, interrogated the entanglement of narrative and pleasure. As Mulvey writes, “psychoanalytic theory is thus appropriate here as a political weapon, demonstrating the way the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form” (803).
The Male Gaze
Mulvey's essay is often credited with bringing the topic of the "male gaze" into critical discourse about feminism and gender. First used by John Berger in his book Ways of Seeing, the term "male gaze" denotes an artistic convention in which women are depicted specifically for male pleasure. That is, Berger argued that in classical art, male subjects tended to be painted with awareness, often looking directly at the viewer, while female subjects were painted as if being watched without their knowledge. Mulvey extrapolates Berger's concept of the male gaze and applies it to narrative film, arguing that representations of women on screen are also filtered through the perspective of male pleasure, either by way of a male protagonist or a male spectator.
