The discussion is about how mainstream Hollywood perceives women on screen. Over the years, beauty, makeup, and idolization have been the main focus on screen. Prime examples of these iconic figures as Mulvey mentions are people like Marilyn Monroe. On screen she is portrayed as a sex symbol and is still a sex symbol. In her paper Laura Mulvey, goes in depth about cinema and techniques used to gain the audience’s attention. Little did we know that there is a psychological explanation behind these Hollywood films. It is almost used as a “political weapon” as Mulvey states as what is shown on screen. The patriarchal society has been structuring the film industry. It goes back to women having penis envy and men having the fear of castration.  What is seen onscreen is suppose to be pleasurable. Invoke erotica on screen which comes to define the term, scopophilia. This term in psychoanalytical theory is the pleasure of looking. By seeing the images on screen there is a pleasure that enforces the ego that controls behavior.  Often times we see characters on screen that are overly erotic. Often times women in the industry are often dramatized and are seen as giving the most pleasure on screen. The screen gives sexual simulation through sight and therefore the women are seen as sexual objects.  The problem that arises with this is that people see what’s on screen and there is this desire or want to be like what they see. There is fetishism that arises is this as well because fetish scopophilia focuses on the looks alone. For example, the camera zooms in on the women’s naked body on screen and that’s what’s being portrayed to the audience. It is a patriarchal industry because it is men deciding who should be on the screen and what is shown. The problem that arises is that we are watching portrayals of the industry and that’s what’s projected onto people. As the years go by people may notice that different portrayals of what it means to beautiful often changes. In the past people might think of westernized beauty standards. Now cinema is becoming more diverse and different portrayals of beauty is often seen onscreen. The human psyche is often looking for pleasure and Mulvey convey that pleasure can be through sight. It is through the psyche that we learn about people and what they like. Through cinema however the person behind the camera is controlling what we see. The audience is subject to the final product which is the film.

About midway through the article Lacan uses the development of pigeon gonads to further his theory of the mirror stage. The reference is used to show that just like pigeons human development needs a stage of identification or really misidentification in order to form a sense of identity and complete his development. The theory itself is defined by the moment of identification one has with their mirror self- a self that is described and detailed by external figures. We’ve heard the idea that humans are social creatures, but this theory takes that idea beyond what was an innate desire for companionship and argues instead that in order to have any internal sense of identity the human will need external figures to guide him. While guide implies a more purposeful act, the real guiding would be through example- we want to relate to the people around us. Lacan’s theory makes the point that ego is dependent on an external other.

I’d like to take this theory and apply it to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Lacan’s theory applies itself very well to Shelley’s text as the monster’s development embodies well Lacan’s concept of the mirror stage.

Frankenstein’s monster is immediately rejected by his creator upon the moment of his ‘birth’ and so he does not have the ‘other’ figure as Lacan describes it. The monster at this point of his development is trapped in his own baby stage- distracted by sensory exploration and unable to have defined thoughts without language. He is trapped in a limbo of sorts as he faces constant rejection and is denied the ability to identify with any humans. He’s forced to find his mirror in the DeLancey family, who are all kind and loving to each other, as he lives hidden within their home. They are whom his “Ideal I” is based on, and so he desire to become a kind loving man who is affectionate with his brothers and community. Because of his horrific appearance though he will never be able to achieve this. The asymptotic relationship between a man and his Ideal I is made literal in Shelley’s Frankenstein as the monster strives to be someone he will never be able to be. His trauma is furthered when, after he introduces himself to them and hopes to finally be able to identify himself within them, he is violently rejected by the DeLancey family, kicked out and sent back into the woods.

The disharmony between the monsters reality and his ideal manifests itself in constant suffering, and he seeks out his creator with deadly passion (and consequences) in order to finally have some sense of community. I personally was very interested in Lacan’s theory but had the critique that individuals in his theory have no control over what form their ideal self takes, and wondered how this would relate to mental health as well as impact someone’s relationship with society. Why would there be a need for such power societal modes and methods on control that exist today if we really are “always already” apart of society? What happens if there is no healthy other for the individual to identify with? Shelley’s Frankenstein answers this, arguing to me that without the ability to identify with a community one’s sense of identity is permanently damaged, and can lead to intense mental and emotional consequences.

Freud mentions his ideas about the Oedipus Rex moves the “modern audience no less than it did the contemporary greek one, the explanation can only be that its effect does not lie in the contrast between destiny and human will, but is to be looked for in the particular nature of the material on which that contrast is exemplified”(Page 790). Freud explains the differences with Oediups Rex as if the child’s “wish” is “phantasy” were it brings it to be an open realization as it is in “a dream”. AS for  Hamlet shows a “type of man whose power” has a “direct action” and its “paraplysed by an excessive development of his intellect.”Freud lays out his new task of interpretation on dreams as “the task, that is, of investigating the relations between the manifest context of dreams and the latent dream-thoughts, and of tracing out the processes by which the latter have been changed into the former.” (page 793).  where Freud wants to make dreams understandable and it’s a dream of two versions in the same “subject-matter” and into “different languages”.Freud describes language as “a new class of psychical material between the manifest conet of the dream and the conclusions of our enquiry:” where its name as “their latent content,or as we say ) the dream thought” and “dream manifest” its by “mean of our procedure. Freud wants to make dreams and once you understand them it’s one “subject matter in two languages.”Displacement is a “Psychical intenties occurs in the process of dream-formation, and it is as a result of these” that are different “between the text of the dream-content and that of the dream-thoughts comes about.”The grammar of dreams is language condensation displacement which is the mean of red. The Connections of dreams that you get to become flashbacks. Freud sees it as the ego language where it represents logical connections as a “simultaneity in time.”And dreams carry a “method of reproduction” and it is connected to “dream-thoughts”. The grammar of dreams are not logical and are not meant to press on one or the other where you need to choose on them. The interpretation of dreams is that “Then the commoner method of representation would be to introduce the dependent clause as an introductory dream and to add” “principal clause” as the “main dream” . Where sometimes your dreams sometimes it’s “more extensive part of the dream always corresponds to the principal clause”. 

In “The Mirror Stage as Formative” by Jacques Lacan, a young child looking at themself in the mirror for the first time is the main image that sets off and forms the basis of his argument. This event is major to a child’s development, and allows the child to turn themself into an object that can be viewed by the child from outside themselves. By seeing themself as an outside being, the child experiences self-alienation through the mirror image. The child can either grow to hate or love this image, and it will have a major impact on the development on their character and sense of self. We are all affected by the mirror image, according to Lacan. The mirror image is a phenomena that follows us throughout the rest of our development and our lives.

What the child sees in the mirror, however, is not real. It is only a quick representation – a snap shot, if you will – of who they are. It is not a full representation of their person, but rather an idealized version. It does not show all aspects of who they are; it only shows their appearance, which is what we place a lot of emphasis on, especially in our modern world. It does not show their health (especially at an internal level), their relationships, their aspirations, their goals, their everyday thoughts and feelings, their day-to-day routine, how they view themselves, their failures, etc. Everything on your outer appearance, or what is seen in the mirror, can seem normal and put-together, while everything on your inner appearance, or what is not seen in the mirror, can be in complete chaos, and vice versa. Therefore, what the child, and what we see in the mirror are fictional. As much as we want to believe that what we see is real, we are only seeing a small particle of our entire being. We may never reach this idealized version of ourselves that we see in the mirror. This can also be applied to social media use in our modern world, as we craft our online personas, which are our “mirror images”. We want these personas to be who we truly are, even if they do not show the ugly and unidealized parts of ourselves. This ideal can never be fully realistically achieved as much as we try. As human beings, we cannot rely solely on the mirror image on our journey to self-realization.

Freud makes a bold claim in the beginning of “Fetishism”. He claims that “the fetish is a substitute for the woman’s penis (817)…” He goes into this interesting discussion about how the male has repressed the fact that women don’t have penises; he then discusses the castration complex in which the male is threatened by this idea of castration which the woman has obviously had to go through; the man’s narcissism and masculinity have greatly increased when it comes to this organ as a result. Freud further mentions that this fetish of the female genitals also saves the fetishist from being homosexual.

In their early lives, men “scotomize” or create mental blind spots when it comes to what organ women have in their bottom regions; they refuse to believe, in a sense, that there’s a lack of a penis. However, Freud then makes the point that “scotomization seems to me particularly unsuitable, for it suggests that the perception is entirely wiped out, so that the result is the same as when a visual impression falls on the blind spot in the retina (817).” There’s a blind spot for this simple fact that women lack penises or have been “castrated”, but Freud prefers to call it “repression.” He then states, “Furthermore, an aversion, which is never absent in any fetishist, to the real female genitals remains a stigma indelebile of the repression that has taken place. We can now see what the fetish achieves and what it is that maintains it. It remains a token of triumph over the threat of castration and a protection against it (817).” He writes that this repression has caused a stigma regarding the female genitals that can’t be removed and the fetish that has been born as a result of this is seen as triumph and protection over the threat of castration. Women’s genitals essentially are a representation of castration, which is why men are so narcissistic when it comes to their penis. Freud expands on this by claiming that the fetish prevents the fetishist from being homosexual, “It also saves the fetishist from becoming a homosexual, by endowing women with the characteristic which makes them tolerable as sexual objects […] Probably no male human being is spared the fright of castration at the sight of a female genital. Why some people become homosexual as a conse­quence of that impression, while others fend it off by creating a fetish, and the great majority surmount it, we are frankly not able to explain (817-8).” There’s no way to explain why some men take the route they do (becoming homosexual, fetishizing female genitals, etc.) when it comes to the female genital organs.

          In Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud proposes the idea that dreams give insight and aid in understanding our conscious mind. The idea is that our dreams are intense repressed thoughts or beliefs that are trying to come out or make themselves known in our dreams. Freud also possessed the idea that dreams have more than one meaning, “Each of these two versions had a meaning of its own and led in a different direction when the dream was interpreted” ( Page 798). The idea of waking up and writing down your dreams in a journal or notebook could be a means to understand/ interpret your dreams as our dreams don’t tend to be expressed with words as it is a common belief that dreams tend to be more on the artistic side with pictures being the default form of expression “A speech of this kind is often no more than an allusion to some event included among the dream-thoughts, and the meaning of the dream may be a totally different one” (Page 796).

          I found it interesting that Freud possesses the idea that our dreams shield us from our disturbing thoughts, “We shall be led to conclude that the multiple determination which decides what shall be included in a dream is not always a primary factor in dream construction but is often the secondary product of a psychical force which is still unknown to us” (Page, 794). This is very interesting to me as this belief me comes across as more of a nightmare, the polar opposite of a dream, as they tend to be darker in content and portrayal. I think that the correlation between Oedipus and one’s parents that Freud draws, that children have subconscious sexual desires revolving around their parents, to be a nightmare or something that our mind finds disturbing enough to censor.

We are more or less familiar with the idea of “fetishes.” Sigmund Freud has a very curious explanation of fetishes. According to him, it all has to do with penises. A male child imagines that, like him, his mother also has a penis. When he realizes that she does not have a phallus, it causes him to fear losing his penis as well. That is, he fears being castrated. Idolizing his mother, he goes through two processes that work in parallel: on the one hand, he does not come to terms with the fact that his mother does not possess a penis. However, in order to deal with the fear that he too might lose his penis, he substitutes the idea of his mother’s penis with that of another organ (could be his nose or his foot, for example), deriving sexual pleasure from it. According to Freud, “[a fetish] remains a token of triumph over the threat of castration and a protection against it” (817).

If we are to follow Freud’s reasoning, it seems like that it is, at the end of the day, the penis that a man is sexually attracted to, not a person. By attributing his attraction to a penis to another organ of a woman, a man continues to feel attracted to a woman. Does that organ, then, become the repository of his mother’s non-existent penis?

Freud doesn’t end there. He has another point that I found quite curious: “It also saves the fetishist from becoming a homosexual, by endowing women with the characteristic which makes them tolerable as sexual objects” (817). He soon sums up the three options that a man has, by admitting that he does not know why some men become attracted to women by creating a fetish, while others just become gay and, once again, it also goes back to genitals: “Probably no male human being is spared the fight of castration at the sight of a female genital. Why some people become homosexual as a consequence of that impression, while others fend it off by creating a fetish, and the great majority surmount it, we are not frankly able to explain” (818).

There are, therefore, in Freud’s view, three directions that a man goes on: a straight man without a fetish, a straight man with a fetish, and a gay man. Those without a fetish are startled by the sight of a female genital and manage to overcome it. A straight man with a fetish substitutes his mother’s penis with a certain organ that makes women attractive to him because that organ then becomes the invisible penis, while a gay man, well, remains attracted to the penis.

As a gay man, I found this essay quite interesting, even though not entirely believable. Curious is the word. I guess we will never know for sure how exactly it all works.

According to the author in on page 819 Fetishisms meant”  A fetish of this sort, doubly derived from contrary ideas, is of course especially durable. In other instances the divided attitude shows itself in what the fetishist does with his fetish, whether in reality or in his imagination.  He also states that there are many and weighty additional proofs of the divided attitude of fetishist to the question of the castration  of women”. The definition shows the concept of fetishism and the divide in fetishism towards their actions and thoughts whether it’s in reality or in imagination.

In this article talks about divided attitude which says” Returning to my description of fetishism, I may say that there are many and weighty additional proofs of the divided attitude of fetishists to the question of the castration of women”. Some of the examples stated is ” In him the need to carry out the castration which he disavows has come to the front. His action contains in itself the two mutually incompatible assertions: ‘ the woman has still got a penis’ and my father has castrated the woman”. Another variant which is also a parallel to fetishism in social psychology, might be see in  in the Chinese custom of mutilating the female foot”. These examples try to example the idea about women which reflect a phycological phenomenon to fetishism. The second example try to explain the Chinese practice of foot binding which is a culture tradition involving the mutilation of female feet to make them smaller and pleasing.

Some of the barrier Freud encounters is Cultural sensitivity which is the awareness of regarding sexuality. Also there is  Human psychology which Freud tries to express that human sexuality is multifaced and has a difficult processes. There is also Empirical evidence which shows how Freud has a theory on different definition explain fetishism due to the empirical date.  There is also Subjectivity of interpretation which tries to show awareness of the psychoanalytic interpretation and the different behaviors of fetishism, Lastly there is evolution of psychoanalytic theory this shows Freud ideas evolve and all his different theories. His hesitation about fetishism about his reflecting about different concepts.

Freud hesitation in his analysis about fetishism from combination of factors including cultural sensitivities, the complexity of human psychology, limitations in empirical evidence, the subjectivity of interpretation and the evolution of his own theoretical framework. These are all the different types of ideas and how Freud tries to explain about fetishism in this article.

In his work “Fetishism” Freud makes a bold statement where he announces that every fetish is a substitute for the penis, not just any penis but the woman’s penis. He gives an example of one of his patients whose fetish was the nose, he ruminates on why the fetishist (the patient) fetishizes the nose. His first assertion was that the patient simply refused his perception that women do not possess a penis which Freud immediately shuts down however his reason was not in any way conventional in regards to how me or you would think why this assertion is wrong. He says “No, that could not be true: for if a woman had been castrated, then his own possession of a penis was in danger.” Meaning that rather than it being something pleasurable or arousing for the boy which a fetish supposed to do in this context, the image of castration would quickly replace that feeling with revulsion or rebellion. Also, the reason why I believe he uses castration here is because if the boy refuses to believe that a woman does not possess a penis and thus believing that they do have a penis then that would imply that the woman has been castrated because it just isn’t there or not there anymore. His next assertion is that the boy “scotomizes” (forgets) his perception of the woman’s lack of a penis. However, this would not make sense because it also implies that his perception of a woman not having a penis would be entirely wiped out and as Freud rebuttals, “on the contrary, we see that the perception has persisted, and that a very energetic action has been undertaken to maintain the disavowal.” Thus assertion 2 isn’t correct either because rather than forgetting, the patient seems to be keenly aware of that fact a woman doesn’t have a penis but is also actively believing that they do. His third and final assertion is that the boy represses his perception of a woman’s lack of a penis by substituting it with something else. As Freud says “He has retained that belief, but he has also given it up…in his mind the woman has got a penis, in spite of everything; but this penis is no longer the same as it was before…Something else has taken its place… and now inherits the interest which was formerly directed to its predecessor” Meaning that the boy still believes that a woman possesses a penis but since doing so would put the image of castration in his mind, he instead focuses on the idea that maybe a woman does possess a penis but it’s not in the location that you would normally think a penis is located at, say, the nose for example and thus a fetish is born at least according to Freud. This however has a downside and it’s the aversion to the actual female genitals which is the symbol of repression that takes place within him.  

Mulvey’s essay was a difficult essay for me (not just me, I hope), but I wanted to try to break it down and contribute with a bit of my own experience. Apart from the very great detail Mulvey takes to break down the dichotomy between scopophilia and ego libido, what stood out to me was the discussion of camera work and the camera’s place in highlighting those two aspects of narrative film. The camera is human perception — at least it tries its best to replicate it — and its ultimate goal is to remove/blur the screen space so as to better integrate ourselves into the screen. This is essentially ego libido, as it gives the spectator a sense of power that the protagonist has. 

While reading this, it reminded me of Oppenheimer, and the “ideal” viewing experience instructed by the director, Christopher Nolan. Nolan said that the intended way to view the film was in 70mm IMAX, it was the most immersive formatting that would project you into the film in the closest way possible. However, I do not think that the tragedy of the atomic bomb is necessarily what Mulvey is arguing. For that, look at 2011’s Drive, where Ryan Gosling is a strong, silent stuntman-criminal who pushes Carey Mulligan into the corner of the elevator to kiss her before killing the hitman next to him. It feels as though the film epitomized Mulvey’s work to a tee, Mulligan is only seen as a mother in dresses and skirts, tending to her child and being submissive to her husband. Gosling, on the other hand, is domineering, literally driving the plot of the story (which revolves around him “helping” her without considering her desires). 

As a cisgendered, straight, white man, it took an embarrassingly long time to not only be made aware of this reading of narrative film, but it is truly only very recently where it has become apparent to me. Most teen comedies of the 80s (Fast Times, Sixteen Candles, etc.) revolve around the portrayal of women as strict, still images that are there solely for the attention of the male-centric audience and protagonists. Another unfortunately too-perfect moment is when Anthony Michael Hall’s character in Candles takes advantage of and rapes a drunk girl he was going to “take home.” That film supports Mulvey’s argument because of how awfully true it is, and why this analysis of narrative cinema needs to be more popular.

The last film I will relate to the text is Chantal Ackerman’s Je, Tu, Il, Elle, as it is a great example of alternate cinema that Mulvey states will break up this traditional pleasure-driven view of cinema. In the film, a depressed girl, recently broken up with her girlfriend, removes all the furniture from her apartment except her mattress, walks around the room naked, and eats sugar from a bag while trying to come up with a letter to send to her ex. character finally gets to see her ex again, in which the film cuts to a fifteen minute sex scene between the two characters, ending with Ackerman being kicked out once again. A perfect example of how cinema does not have to be pleasure-driven, as the full frontal nudity of the final scene is very raw but certainly not glamorous. It does not portray one dominating another, it does not even portray a man and a woman. It is just sex, the authentic experience of emotion, and does not attempt to sexualize it in any way. Bringing it back to camera work, which Mulvey finds so profound (as do I), it is fixed, only switching angles sparingly. Unlike most sex scenes, which highlight the bodies of women in gross ways and attempt to make the viewer feel that he is the one taking control over the woman, Je, Tu, Il, Elle pairs the often-isolating nature of sex with the emotional intimacy it provides. The fixed camera angles only keep the audience away from that moment because it is not our moment, it is theirs and theirs alone.

I hope I did not stray too far from the text, but I am minoring in film and combining it with my English major scratches the analytical part of my brain.