ABSTRACT

In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. This chapter discusses the psychoanalytic background is relevant to the pleasure and unpleasure offered by traditional narrative film. The man controls the film phantasy and also emerges as the representative of power in a further sense: as the bearer of the look of the spectator, transferring it behind the screen to neutralize the extra-diegetic tendencies represented by woman as spectacle. The male protagonist is free to command the stage, a stage of spatial illusion in which he articulates the look and creates the action. The image of woman as raw material for the gaze of man takes the argument a step further into the structure of representation, adding a further layer demanded by the ideology of the patriarchal order as it is worked out in its favorite cinematic form—illusionistic narrative film.