ABSTRACT
Cine-psychoanalysis is founded upon the proposition that film-viewing and subject-formation are reciprocal, that the cinema reinscribes those structuring processes which form the human psyche. In a move consistent with the heightened visual apprehension of film viewing, Laura Mulvey centres her argument upon specularity: In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The opening sequence of Dancing Lady enables elaboration of Mulvey's specular model. A paean to late modernity, the number begins with figures moving, via a split-screen effect, from past to present, from period to modern dress, and from a wooded fountain to an urban street set. Yet this is late modernity as appropriated by Hollywood and governed, according to the song, implicitly by patriarchy. The economic, social and political changes wrought by postmodernity have resulted in widely discussed shifts in the production, reception and textual operation of Hollywood cinema.
