How Has Photography Been Used To Reflect Upon The Ways In Which Looking Is Socially Structured - Essay Example

Ergo, what exists for women is a sort of masochistic pleasure of observing one’s own pain. In her work, “Visual Pleasure And Narrative Cinema” (1975), Mulvey states that women’s place in society is to compensate for the weakness in men by submitting her own strength, thus removing the threat of emasculating and upsetting the male world, or as Mulvey calls it, the phallocentric order. She goes on to state that mainstream cinema was formed in the language of the dominant group, that being men, and that only a cinema that rejected the mainstream cinema’s oppressive format and paternal structure could truly be considered alternative.

In her analysis of cinematic visual pleasure, Mulvey refers to Sigmund Freud’s definition of scopophilia, that being the taking of a person as an object, and subjecting them to a controlling gaze. The extreme version of this, Freud explains, can develop into a fixated perversion where the viewer can only attain sexual satisfaction from objectifying others by watching them. The narcissistic aspect of scopophilia occurs at the time of mirror phase during childhood, where the viewer not only recognizes himself or herself in the mirror, but also perceives the mirrored image to be superior to the real image.

In an attempt to understand the relationship spectators have to film and cinema, earlier theorists, such as the auterists, formalists, structuralists, and Marxists, attempted to measure how moviegoers respond to films. Their attempts proved to be inaccurate, however, because the theorists failed to take into account the dissimilar natures of the spectators, and thus wrongly assumed that they would respond to the same text in the same manner. Any individuality that the spectators brought to the act of viewing the film was not considered in the study’s conclusion; therefore the resulting determination can not really explain the significance or meaning that the film