In “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, Laura Mulvey explicitly states that she is out to annihilate the, frankly, pervy delights audience members extract from their experiences at the cinema. Despite her aggression, she claims to be doing us a solid: through her destruction of the subconsciously engrained voyeuristic “pleasure centre”, Mulvey guarantees that we will receive “the thrill that comes from leaving the past behind without simply rejecting it” (2085), which will ultimately result in learning “a new language of desire” (2085). Basically, it is sort of like she is forcefully changing our car insurance on our behalf – she is switching out a lacking plan we are currently covered by (ie: where the pleasure of observation is derived entirely from the degradation of the female form to mere source of spectacle) in exchange for a more beneficial/substantial one.

That false reality we enter each time we sit in a pitch black theatre and the film is projected onto the screen in front of us? Our delusions about the similarities between ourselves and the characters we observe in that film? Mulvey wants us to get rid of all that, as well; to destroy our suspension of disbelief and to remain wary of the fictitious nature of films and the storylines they depict. We do not fight the bad guys and win. We do not get the smoking hot babe whom we have saved from danger countless times. A film’s protagonist is not the “projection of [our] repressed desire” (2087). Quit being a ninny, Mulvey is ultimately saying.

Scopophilia is defined as the “pleasure of looking”. Through our cinematic experiences, we are given the power to “[take] other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze” (2086). As spectators, we easily attain this power via the stark visual contrast of the movie theatre-going experience: Again, we are in a dark auditorium. All the while, these luminescent images flash on the screen before us. The physical divide between ourselves (people present in the real world and in real-time) and the manifestations on-screen (immortalized beings in an artificial construct of a world) gives the illusion that we are looking in on a private world. What is so appealing about this is that it is not a two-way street: we can do the observing without our self-consciousness being heightened by being observed ourselves. We can be “obsessive voyeurs” (2088) and get as creepy as we like and no one is the wiser.

 However, this perverse joy is almost restricted to men. Their active leering preys on the forcedly imposed passivity of the female, who makes an appearance in film primarily to be gawked at. She plays this role for two distinct audiences: the males within the story and those in the auditorium. This degradation of the female form is promoted further by stylistic choices, like the camera’s prolonged focus on fragments of the body.

 Women can be objectified and reduced to masturbation material, sure. But men? Not on your life. Mulvey states that this is due to their inability to “bear the burden of sexual objectification” (2089). The observer in the audience cannot take it upon himself to gaze at his eroticized likeness. This leaves the male protagonist to bring out the action and further the plot.