Mulvey — Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975)
The essay that named the male gaze. Sixteen pages that reorganised film theory.
- essay
- theory
Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", Screen 16.3 (1975), pp. 6–18. DOI ↗ · Essay overview ↗
Good for
The scopophilia argument behind The camera as voyeur: narrative cinema positions its spectator as an empowered, hidden watcher, with the look gendered male and the woman positioned as spectacle ("to-be-looked-at-ness"). Hitchcock is one of her two central exhibits, which makes the essay a natural companion to Psycho (1960) even though her named cases are Vertigo, Rear Window and Marnie.
Handle with care
A polemic and a product of its moment — 1970s Screen theory, psychoanalytic scaffolding and all (see Psychoanalysis in postwar America for the longer arc of that inheritance). Mulvey herself revisited and complicated the argument in "Afterthoughts" (1981). Teach it as an argument that changed the field, not as settled mechanism.