ABSTRACT

In earlier chapters of this book, we have seen how ideas borrowed from psychoanalysis were used in the 1970s and 80s for poststructuralist feminist film theory. Laura Mulvey’s canonical essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975), used concepts of scopophilic desire for the feminized object, and masculine identification with the onscreen protagonist, to explain the gendered and sexuate dynamics of cinematic desiring. Mulvey’s work and the responses it provoked drew mainly on Lacan’s early concept of the ‘mirror stage’, introduced in a lecture given in 1949. The mirror stage describes both a developmental stage of imaginary identity formation through which the child must pass, and a scene or stadium in which the adult will continue to play out fantasies of desired wholeness and fearful fragmentation. Early

psychoanalytic gaze theory by Metz and Mulvey mapped the spectator’s relation to the figure on the screen onto the child’s relation to the mirroring parent or other object of wholeness in the figurative mirror. The work of classic cinematic editing sutures over the gaps that haunt the subject, and provides reassuring images of wholeness –masculine subjects with which to identify and shiny feminine body-objects at which to look. I attempted in the last chapter to show how Foucault’s critique of power might nuance some of the assumptions of psychoanalytic gaze theory; however, this work of making-more-subtle is also already being undertaken within current psychoanalytically informed scholarship. Žižek, for example, has claimed that the gaze is the object, rather than the possession, of a (patriarchal) subject and, therefore, that ‘when I am looking at an object, the object is already gazing at me’.1 Joan Copjec has stated that the viewer is never the master of what he gazes at, but a divided subject of trauma, as well as a subject desiring mastery over that division.2