The Intellectual Shortcomings of Other People's Fields; or, See this Gauntlet? Consider it Dropped (But Politely, in Case I'm Mistaken)

I have a quick question regarding the status of Laura Mulvey’s concept of the gaze in film studies.

(At this point, the hastily crafted “blog-work” cedes pride of place to something I wrote this afternoon.  Now you can account for the ungainly tonal shift you’re about to experience.  Were I not genuinely interested in hearing what you think of the following account of Lacanian influence in film studies, I would take this opportunity to wax free-association about the difference between this here parenthetical prose and what you see beyond its elliptical fortifications.  Now, where was I?)

The first sentence of her most frequently cited article, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” clearly states its purview: “This paper intends to use psychoanalysis to discover where and how the fascination of film is reinforced by pre-existing patterns of fascination already at work within the individual subject and the social formations that have moulded him.”  Twenty years later, David Roberts summarizes her initial exposition of the male gaze in this essays as having two functions:

The first is narcissistic: male spectators gaze at the male subject they aspire to resemble.  The second is voyeuristic: the same spectators gaze at the female performers they desire to possess and subject.

In the thirty years between Mulvey’s article and Roberts’, the psychoanalytic framework has become invisible, so much so that Roberts can claim that “however [her] ideas are challenged or inflected, they say something important.”  The means by which they do so—the authority of psychoanalytic accounts of human consciousness and social interaction—exist now only subterraneously. 

What had been a decidedly Lacanian argument in which film, abetted by the gaze and its imagined mastery, functions like the mirror stage, deceiving the viewer into believing there is no underlying symbolic structure, becomes a truism whose assumptions need not be addressed so long as the results of its application “say something important.”  Such a subsumption has consequences both for the theory being subsumed and the work to which it is applied. 

As Todd McGowan [JSTOR] notes, the emphasis on the gaze in film studies has pushed the third element of the Lacanian triad, the Real, past the vanishing point, a “crucial omission, because the Real provides the key to understanding the radical role that the gaze plays within filmic experience.”  Doing justice neither to the art object under examination nor the examining theory, the routinization of “the gaze” in film studies speaks to the intellectual deficit caused by professional isolation.

Am I wrong? 

Comments

[Carrie Shanafelt]

I have often wondered what "gaze theory" would say about directors like Tartovsky, Herzog, and Malick, whose lenses seem often to answer the demands of neither self-reflection nor desire, but instead obsessively focus on what the director believes is the Real. Maybe this speaks more to my own favorite films than to the bulk of what is made. When I was an undergrad studying film, T, H, and M somehow seemed beside the point, not useful as texts underlying film theory. Now, they're incredibly helpful to me for understanding poetry.

[Tom Hitchner]

I don't think you're wrong. It seems symptomatic of a larger problem with lazy applications of Theory, which is the tendency to treat all theories one agrees with as settled questions. Like, "You're talking about the study of history, but Nietzsche already showed the problems with that" (this jerk, almost-actual quote). Without continual debate, development, and modification, theories inevitably calcify into mere cliché, useful only as "food for thought."

Didn't I read somewhere Oh yeah, it was in the Properties of a Dinosaur Comic: http://www.qwantz.com/index.pl?comic=859. Sources don't get any more reliable than that.

[Tom Hitchner]

Er. That last paragraph should begin, "Didn't I read somewhere *that Mulvey later described her theory of the male gaze in film as just provocation, rather than an actual argument?* Next time I'll use that preview feature.

[CR]

Yes, of course you're right. Especially with psychoanalysis. Which, I think, is the theoretical branch that is crumbling the fastest and, it follows, which defends its pissed-out boundaries with all the more unthinking vehemence because of its decline.

I'm slowly changing sides in all of this, under the pressure of insistent (and revelatory) assholery. I went to a good graduate institution where there was very little charlatanerie. Now...

[Chuck]

Tired after a long day of teaching, but I'll try to make some comments here. I think this account probably overstates Lacan's influence on film studies to some extent, especially over the last decade, but I could be ignoring some of my own unconscious biases. I certainly teach Mulvey, and her essay helped to shape one of the major debates in the field (about how spectators are positioned), but one of the major strains of film scholarship--the cognitivist approach advocated by Bordwell and Thompson--operates from much different assumptions about film spectators and how they watch films. There's also quite a bit of work inspired/influenced by Bourdieu and others that focuses on audience behaviors and activities, etc.

I can't really comment on Roberts' essay specifically, unfortunately, because I haven't read it. I do find Macgowan's re-reading of Lacan fairly convincing, but I think a lot of film scholars would be suspicious of relatively sloppy homologies between film watching and the mirror stage. Again, I'm pretty sleepy, so I may be missing something.

[Rich Puchalsky]

I don't have enough context on this, not having read the Roberts essay -- but don't sufficiently influential theories within the humanites become self-fulfilling prophecies? If Mulvey's idea has been so highly cited, then it's certainly influenced film criticism and possibly influenced filmmakers. Like Freudianism, it may have assumed a folk-pyschological reality that exists as a social belief whether the "science" is bogus or not. (I used to write folk-psychoanalytic instead of folk-psychological, but that led to too many questions.)

So in that sense, her ideas are now important, however challenged, whether they were originally right or not.

[Carrie Shanafelt]

Slagging on psychoanalytic theory used to be one of my favorite pasttimes, and yes, it's crumbling fast. But I'd argue that it served the incredibly important function of validating affect as a topic of theoretical inquiry. Just like none of us really does "New Criticism" anymore, even when we pretend to, but it has left behind a fascinating value system that has infiltrated the way we read.

[Carrie Shanafelt]

Rrg, I wish I'd seen what Rich posted before I did. Yeah, that! And!

[The Constructivist]

Didn't Mulvey herself write an update on the original gaze essay oh, about a decade ago? Might be worth tracking how her own ideas have changed.

If psychoanalysis is so dead, why all the work on trauma, mourning, loss this past decade--and not just from a Lacanian perspective? There are incredibly vibrant debates among multiple psychoanlytic traditions on these concepts, as well as from cognitive scientists, filmmakers, writers, poststructuralists, marxists, postcolonialists, critical race theorists, etc.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Constructivist, your comment brings up once again the question of a distinction between folk-psychology and folk-psychoanalysis. Trauma, mourning, and loss are generally considered to human universals; it's not like psychoanalysis discovered them. Psychoanalysis got to set the modern framework through which they are perceived, though, so that now one can refer to trauma, mourning, loss and automatically think that psychoanalytic theories are relevant. But psychoanalysis could be dead, and trauma, mourning, and loss would not disappear from human experience, from art, or from reactions to art.

[Chuck]

The Constructivist: actually I think that "update" is at least twenty years old, but I could be wrong. Mulvey's most recent work focuses on how new media technologies affect our experience of film. It's solid work, and it rethinks the focus on voyeurism from her earlier work. Not sure I buy all of her arguments, but I think it's worth underscoring the fact that film theorists are not in thrall to the male gaze.

[Carrie Shanafelt]

Eve Sedgwick, for example, has done incredible things with the ideas of sexuality, trauma, loss, and even therapy itself, all because she knows her psychoanalytic criticism, but I'd gladly argue that her work outstrips her predecessors.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Thanks for all the feedback. Means I have some re-writing to do, damn you folks. I chose "the gaze" because it seems the most denuded-but-still-prevalent psychoanalytic subsumption, but it looks like not.

Also, I know Mulvey's updated that essay, which I thought only underscore the unusualness of the large number of citations of the original. However, back to the drawing board...

[Joseph Kugelmass]

I am certain that Mulvey's argument holds for many films, by many filmmakers, not because of transcendent universals, but because of the way the medium has evolved historically.

For example, every single discussion I have heard about Casino Royale has involved the voyeuristic gaze, particularly since the film semi-seriously makes Bond (as well as his girls, the traditional objects of desire) subject to the gaze.

Likewise the narcissistic gaze: there is tons of evidence (for example, in dozens of hip-hop songs) that the Al Pacino film Scarface continues to be interpreted narcissistically. Likewise Legally Blonde, most Tarantino films, and various acclaimed television shows (including Buffy and The Sopranos).

It is true that desire doesn't work the same way in Herzog or Malick (I haven't seen anything by Tarkovsky). It may not work the same way in Kieslowski, either. However, it is still desire of some sort, and voyeurism of some sort -- how can one overlook the desire in Wings of Desire, the voyeurism of the angel's melancholy visions of a humanity from which he is excluded? Meanwhile, a film like The Thin Red Line is suffused with yearning for God. This spirituality is also a yearning for the Real (the capitalization seems particularly appropriate), but then arguably so is the more earthly yearning of voyeuristic carnality.

[Timothy]

"Without continual debate, development, and modification, theories inevitably calcify into mere cliché, useful only as "food for thought."

I wonder if this might be good reason for 'wild scholarship', scholarship which intentionally sets out to ignore it's predecessors. It wouldn't work if it was the norm but occasionally "cultivating naivety" as my favourite science fiction author Frank Herbert put it might be edifying. As he put it there is no better impediment to learning new things than an accumulation of “things I know”.