What Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" has to do with my film...

Ok so this is a pretty heavy piece of work about Mulvey's Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema and how it relates to a planned film for uni. This may actually end up having a lot to do with Outbreak file 3. Also it includes a few little personal rants about Mulvey and reading too far into films. Basically this is what I do for uni, its pretty heavy stuff but it is interesting and a little enlightening as is the article itself which you can find a link to at the bottom of the page. Enjoy!... or fall asleep, like I said its pretty complex stuff....

My zombie film is to be all about identification and getting the audience on the side of my hero, Andy, a zombie. This may be difficult as zombies are generally not what audiences aspire to be, rather they aspire to be the survivors that fight off zombies in a survivalist fantasy. When looking at identification and differences between audiences and on screen presences it is always helpful to look back at Laura Mulvey's seminal essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1975) Originally Published - Screen 16.3 Autumn 1975 pp. 6-18. Whilst this strongly relates to Jaques Lacan's theories on the "gaze" and focuses on female audiences being forced to identify with male protagonists the method of which this identification is made is important to me as I can replicate it to make audiences identify with Andy.

One of the first important points and possible stumbling blocks for me is that "the image recognised is conceived as the reflected body of the self, but its misrecognition as superior projects this body outside itself as an ideal ego, the alienated subject. which, re-introjected as an ego ideal, gives rise to the future
generation of identification with others." This very first comment about recognition and identification brings about the point that we, when looking and therefore watching, identify with a character that represents the ego. This presents a problem as many of the things that define the ego are actually the opposite of what defines a zombie, who is more like the id.

The other "aspect of the pleasurable structure of looking" is that of scopophilia and the pleasure gained by "using another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight" again this will be difficult within a post apocalyptic world. However as this article points out the literal act of sex or even sexualised images isn't necessary often the presence of a woman is enough for spectators to gain gratification as Hollywood conditioning and all sorts of psychoanalytic, Freudian and Lacanian processes take over. I am planning on having a living female protagonist in my film that develops a connection with Andy so perhaps this will help my cause. Also I understand that Mulvey's article is saying that most of these processes are bad and that women shouldn't be used in this way and I do agree but a film is a film and not a political tool after all. I think that the education of people into filmic ideas such as these does more to solve the problem than to stop using them, people recognising the problem is better than film makers not using the techniques because they are just ways of writing media that people enjoy and if it stopped and nobody knew why there would be no progress, no learning and no development for society, within a year or two people would start again and no one would be any wiser. That little detour just justifies in my mind the use of these techniques, I'm not an anti feminist trying to force women and men to see women as sexual objects, thats not my aim but I do understand that my ideas do do this.

Skipping over the arguments of women as passive and icon (not particularly relevant to my study) Mulvey continues to explain how "the active male figure (the ego ideal of the identification process)"  need the film to "reproduce as accurately as possible the so-called natural conditions of human perception." These include "Camera technology (as exempified by deep focus in particular) and camera movements (determined by the action of the protagonist), combined with invisible editing (demanded by realism)" which "tend to blur the limits of screen space." All of this is pretty basic, things like invisible editing and conventional cinematography are such staples of cinema they would be difficult to avoid when creating my own film.

Mulvey's final few paragraphs before her conclusion put into evidence her theories and show how Hitchcock has used the gaze and identification in a more intelligent way than most film makers. She that in many of his films he "uses the process of identification normally associated with ideological correctness and the recognition of established morality and shows up its perverted side." She also says that when scopophilia is concerned in his film the "hero portrays the contradictions and tensions experienced by the spectator". These ideas are pretty complex and I am not an expert on Hitchcock. The idea though of identification with a hero portraying contradictions and  tensions experienced by the spectator is interesting especially when looked at with a parallel to my narrative, even just my final scene.

Mulvey's analysis is always interesting and helpful however in this case the ground work theory itself is more interesting to me than her conclusion or her actual aims. To me the idea of identification and the encoding of specific characters to identify with is important and whilst gender is always an important topic in cinema I think the identification of females with males isn't a problem, at the end of the day they are characters and in many cases the genders could be swapped without any trouble. The article has given me a lot of ideas for theories to write into my film and questions to address in the subtext. I am not too worried about my audience struggling to identify, as Mulvey points out it has been such a common thing in cinema, and questioned so little that it is almost automatic. Possibly the fun and interest in my film will be in playing with the identification of the audience with Andy and his interanl stuggles in a Hitcock kind of way.

1. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1975) Laura Mulvey Originally Published - Screen 16.3 Autumn 1975 pp. 6-18. Accessed on: http://imlportfolio.usc.edu/ctcs505/mulveyVisualPleasureNarrativeCinema.pdf