University of Cape Town – FAM2004F

Second Precis: Laura Mulvey dishes it out

‘Alfred J. Hitchcock: Arch-pervert of the Big Screen?’:

Or, Is that a gigantic photo lens or are you just happy to watch me?

“Cinema is the ultimate pervert Art: it doesn’t give you what you desire, it tells you how to desire.”
-Slavoj Zizek

Formal Précis:

In her self-consciously provocative Second-Wave feminist critique of the psycho- sexual underpinnings of [Classical Hollywood] Cinema, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975), Laura Mulvey flaunts (and quite achieves) her ‘intention’ of using Lacanian psychoanalysis to isolate and deconstruct what she claims to be “the dominant ideological concept of the cinema”1: the immanent structural logic of the eroticized-objectification of the ‘castrated Woman’ in just about all hitherto mass- distributed products of the Dream Factory.

She accomplishes this indictment by means of a three-stage analysis, exponential in its increased particularization of the Spectator’s filmgoing experience: first, she explains ‘Cinematic Pleasure’ (the trademark expectation of traditional audiences) as entailing a combination of the inherent ‘Scopophilia’ of film diegesis and the construction of the screen’s characters as ‘ego-ideals’ through a repetition of the ‘mirror-phase’ of childhood identity2; second, she exposes this scheme of anonymous sensationalism as being overwhelmingly a male-sanctioned fantasy of fetishistic gender dominance, reflected almost unerringly in the obligatory ‘realistic’ tropes of Classic Hollywood narrative3: a morally-justified dude protagonist we identify with as he trundles the plot along, a spectacular (in every sense) woman he encounters and takes conspicuous opportunities to watch with us, and an unambiguous denouement

1. In a recognizable word, what we could call the ‘Magic’ of cinematic titillation.   2. That is to say, first we just want to get off on watching the beautiful Screen Stars, and then we want to become, and wish we already were, just like them, they being essentially ‘more whole’ versions of ourselves.

3. Creating in its accepted diegesis, as Mulvey splendidly states, “an illusion [for the audience] cut to the measure of desire”.

that either deposits her in his possession or punishes/de-humanizes her for the anxious ‘danger’ she poses to men in general for her founding lack of a penis (her ‘de- subjectivity’, or radical ‘thing’-ness); third, in typically Lacanian form, she demonstrates the truth of her insights by noting their variations in the respective auteur-oeuvres of two apparent exceptions to her overview- Josef Von Sternberg and Alfred Hitchcock.

It being an unabashedly feminist critique of the domination of male desire within the most ubiquitous of all public entertainments up to the time of its writing, Mulvey openly intends her essay to help “advance our understanding of the status quo, of the patriarchal order in which we are caught”4, in order to potentially inspire a self-aware alternative to the taken-for-granted codes and conventions of traditional Hollywood Cinema- an Alternative-Cinema movement even- that stands on its own as more than just “a counterpoint” to the monolithic phallocentric institution the movie industry has seemingly always been and still, forty years later (!), mostly remains.

Thus, I would claim, the audience she seeks for her analytical cold-shower would not just be the usual suspects in academia- theory-stoked film students, teachers and radical feminists- but also 1975’s generation of young ever-aspiring filmmakers now newly conscious of the political and aesthetic opportunities afforded by the grand continuing decline of the Studio System and the temporary kaleidoscopic proliferation of cinematic ‘New Waves’ that exemplified World Cinema in the Sixties and early Seventies; the “status quo” of Cinematic Narrative has hardly been in a more disputed condition since.

Application to Hitchcock and Rear Window:

If there is something altogether revelatory (if still occasionally perplexing) to us in Mulvey’s analysis-report, it would not have been so at all for Alfred Hitchcock himself. Hitch indeed (as only bears repeating here for the sake of demonstrated understanding) remains today as Cinema’s one great self-created Artist-of-the- Audience; his technique throughout his career being almost entirely centered around the ‘Modernist’ realization of the audience’s intimate complicity in the fictions they

4. Ironically, achieved using one of ‘the tools provided by the patriarchy’ itself: Psychoanalysis a la two conspicuous guys, Jacques Lacan and Sigmund Freud.

so ‘enjoy’ spying into. 5 In this career-spanning exegetical sense, we can- quite thankfully for the needs of brevity- tout Rear Window as being Hitchcock’s certifiably synecdochal-work, if not his magnum opus.6 The protagonist is an analogue for the aggregated audience-member and his ‘neurotic male’ perversions are equally our own. Thus, in simplest terms: Jeff is stuck in his wheelchair in just the way that we ‘can’t leave our seats’ for the film’s duration. His newly discovered libidinous enjoyment (or erotic ‘Jouissance’, if we want to get brownie points for having read other Lacanian texts) therefore comes from the manifold presentation of easily recognizable fantasies (story genres?), right before his gaze, in the distinct self- contained worlds of his neighbours’ apartments. He likes to look, and we like to look at him looking.7 Then he bestows on the ‘characters’, in every diegesis he can see, names and partial narratives (Miss Lonelyhearts, Miss Torso etc.). We can here make the analogy that this process reflects the respective ‘mirror-phase’ in Hollywood’s own history, when the earliest ‘stars’ were sold to the public not on name-recognition but via catchy descriptive monikers (‘The Biograph Girl’, ‘The Vamp’, ‘The Boy/Girl Next Door’). As such, he controls the terms of the stories he’s not involved in (as the ‘active participant’ in the construction of framed meaning) in just the inverse proportion to the anxiety & impotence he openly displays as a lead-role in his own apartment’s developments- his seemingly unavoidable oncoming marriage to Lisa. This is what Mulvey quite un-complexly implies by the term ‘female castration’: that Jeff subconsciously equates his self-possession as a man with the unencumbered mobility his career as a photo-journalist has always afforded him (between countries, stories and, presumably, women) whereas Lisa’s conspicuous ‘lack’ of agency- of a symbolic and literal ‘phallus’- as a fashion-model, tireless consumer and potential housewife admits the disturbing void of her ambition and the imminent domestification of his id. She might be the most beautiful woman alive in 1954, but

5. Or, as Mulvey phrases it: [Hitchcock] takes fascination with an image through scopophilic eroticism as the subject of the film.”
6. Which current cinephile fashions would no doubt claim to be Vertigo, with which I’d quite agree.

7. And it must say something about the state of mutual acceptance in American voyeurism that the inhabitants of seemingly every apartment in the block- including Jeff- keep the blinds on their gigantic rectangular windows unreservedly open until certain key private moments become absolutely necessary. Everyone likes to keep in mind they might be being looked at at any time too.

Jeff still gets more turned on by the spectres he ‘can’t’ encounter displaying themselves just across the courtyard. Of course, it is only when Lisa freely inserts herself into Jeff’s fantasy world (proving her spontaneous agency) by ‘crossing over’ into the murder mystery he’s been paying most attention to that he regains his sincere concern for her fate. It would be remiss to re-apply a Lacanian analysis of Rear Window without at least mentioning the supposed crux of Jeff’s fascination in Thornwald’s wife-killing: that it reflects his true underlying fantasy of marriage, that Lisa- like Thornwald’s wife- is the real invalid holding him to a boxed-in life and that the only means of his escape is her de(con)struction. The metaphorical accuracy of this analysis notwithstanding, the trick for the film-reader here is to keep in mind how plainly aware Hitchcock himself would have been of such a critical interpretation. If Jeff is contented to keep his anxieties tucked within his subconscious then the film’s conclusion demonstrates the return of the repressed in the form of a shattering of the fantasy. When Thornwald returns Jeff’s stare and subsequently confronts him alone in his apartment, it is as if he breaks the Fourth Wall and walks right off the screen into our reality, and here we really are: defenceless, silent, anonymous and scared of the sudden materialization of a nightmare. Thus, despite a typically upbeat and comprehensive Hitchcockian denouement, the lingering note of Rear Window is the violent shriek of the return of the repressed misogyny of the cinematic image.