I Freaking Love and Disargee With Laura Mulvey

(but not as much as i love carol clover)

Laura Mulvey is a feminist of the first order, yet her lack of of a decided upon counter to "Phallocentrism" that she refers to, thus I tend to take a much less political reading to the text, and view it more as a state-of-things assertion. It is certainly true that the vast majority of narrative cinema is directed by males for a male-dominated culture, and thus that the camera has assumed the role of the male viewer. In 1975, many of her political assertions may have been true, however, Mulvey's core argument, that the destruction of this fear of castration that the female gaze represents has developed and changed after a long history of feminist filmmaking, which began in the 1970s and continues to this day. the 1980s especially, with the birth and subsequent growth of the slasher film and other developments in the horror film have given rise to a new era of the phallic woman, both a sex symbol and castrator. The rape-revenge genre alone creates an image of woman-as-castrator that would counter every political assertion that Mulvey makes.
This having been said, while I may disagree with Mulvey's politics, her study and analysis of film are astute and tight. Film is an inherently vouyeuristic medium, it is impossible to distance the two, considering that in order to watch a film, one must take on the point of view of a third party. Which is why film is the only medium in which I can tolerate psychoanalysis in without rolling my eyes (drama and literature perhaps in some cases, but too often it is a stretch). Nonetheless, Mulvey's theories on the Look and the way that we identify with figures is how we have sex symbols in our culture. She talks about Dietriech, who is perfect example (along with Veronica Lake, Ingrid Bergman, and Audrey Hepburn), such a iconic figure could not exist without film. In much the same way that Rennaisance painting and Greek sculpture excenturated the human form in an idealized way, we use film and television to search for physical perfection. So, I agree with her assertion that film is a medium that sexualizes its subjectmatter using images and perspective as well as idetification with characters. But such is not solely the case with women, i mean, look at Brad Pitt.