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VISUAL PLEASURE AND NARRATIVE CINEMA

Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975) – Laura Mulvey

Originally Published – Screen 16.3 Autumn 1975 pp. 6-18

I. Introduction

A. A Political Use of Psychoanalysis

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. It takes as starting point the way film reflects, reveals and even plays on the straight, socially established interpretation of sexual difference which controls images, erotic ways of looking and spectacle. It is helpful to understand what the cinema has been, how its magic has worked in the past, while attempting a theory and a practice which will challenge this cinema of the past. Psychoanalytic theory is thus appropriated here as a political weapon, demonstrating the way the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form.

The paradox of phallocentrism in all its manifestations is that it depends on the image of the castrated woman to give order and meaning to its world. An idea of woman stands as lynch pin to the system: it is her lack that produces the phallus as a symbolic presence, it is her desire to make good the lack that the phallus signifies. Recent writing in Screen about psychoanalysis and the cinema has not sufficiently brought out the importance of the representation of the female form in a symbolic order in which, in the last resort, it speaks castration and nothing else. To summarise briefly: the function of woman in forming the patriarchal unconscious is two-fold. She first symbolises the castration threat by her real absence of a penis, and second thereby raises her child into the symbolic. Once this has been achieved, her meaning in the process is at an end, it does not last into the world of law and language except as a memory which oscillates between memory of maternal plenitude and memory of lack. Both are posited on nature (or on anatomy in Freud’s famous phrase). Woman’s desire is subjected to her image as bearer of the bleeding wound, she can exist only in relation to castration and cannot transcend it. She turns her child into the signifier of her own desire to possess a penis (the condition, she imagines, of entry into the symbolic). Either she must gracefully give way to the word, the Name of the Father and the Law, or else struggle to keep her child down with her in the half-light of the imaginary. Woman then stands in patriarchal culture as signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his phantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning.

There is an obvious interest in this analysis for feminists, a beauty in its exact rendering of the frustration experienced under the phallocentric order. It gets us nearer to the roots of our oppression, it brings an articulation of the problem closer, it faces us with the ultimate challenge: how to fight the unconscious structured like a language (formed critically at the moment of arrival of language) while still caught within the language of the patriarchy. There is no way in which we can produce an alternative out of the blue, but we can begin to make a break by examining patriarchy with the tools it provides, of which psychoanalysis is not the only but an important one. We are still separated by a great gap from important issues for the female unconscious which are scarcely relevant to psychoanalytic theory: the sexing of the female infant and her relationship to the symbolic, the sexually mature woman as non-mother, maternity outside the signification of the phallus, the vagina…. But, at this point, psychoanalytic theory as it now stands can at least advance our understanding of the status quo, of the patriarchal order in which we are caught.

B. Destruction of Pleasure as a Radical Weapon As an advanced representation system, the cinema poses questions of the ways the unconscious (formed by the dominant order) structures ways of seeing and pleasure in looking. Cinema has changed over the last few decades. It is no longer the monolithic system based on large capital investment exemplified at its best by Hollywood in the 1930′s, 1940′s and 1950′s. Technological advances (16mm, etc) have changed the economic conditions of cinematic production, which can now be artisanal as well as capitalist. Thus it has been possible for an alternative cinema to develop. However self-conscious and ironic Hollywood managed to be, it always restricted itself to a formal mise-en-scene reflecting the dominant ideological concept of the cinema. The alternative cinema provides a space for a cinema to be born which is radical in both a political and an aesthetic sense and challenges the basic assumptions of the mainstream film. This is not to reject the latter moralistically, but to highlight the ways in which its formal preoccupations reflect the psychical obsessions of the society which produced it, and, further, to stress that the alternative cinema must start specifically by reacting against these obsessions and assumptions. A politically and aesthetically avant-garde cinema is now possible, but it can still only exist as a counterpoint.

The magic of the Hollywood style at its best (and of all the cinema which fell within its sphere of influence) arose, not exclusively, but in one important aspect, from its skilled and satisfying manipulation of visual pleasure. Unchallenged, mainstream film coded the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order. In the highly developed Hollywood cinema it was only through these codes that the alienated subject, torn in his imaginary memory by a sense of loss, by the terror of potential lack in phantasy, came near to finding a glimpse of satisfaction: through its formal beauty and its play on his own formative obsessions.

This article will discuss the interweaving of that erotic pleasure in film, its meaning, and in particular the central place of the image of woman. It is said that analysing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the intention of this article. The satisfaction and reinforcement of the ego that represent the high point of film history hitherto must be attacked. Not in favour of a reconstructed new pleasure, which cannot exist in the abstract, nor of intellectualised unpleasure, but to make way for a total negation of the ease and plenitude of the narrative fiction film. The alternative is the thrill that comes from leaving the past behind without rejecting it, transcending outworn or oppressive forms, or daring to break with normal pleasurable expectations in order to conceive a new language of desire.

II. Pleasure in Looking/Fascination with the Human Form

A. The cinema offers a number of possible pleasures. One is scopophilia. There are circumstances in which looking itself is a source of pleasure, just as, in the reverse formation, there is pleasure in being looked at. Originally. in his Three Essays on Sexuality, Freud isolated scop
ophilia as one of the component instincts of sexuality which exist as drives quite independently of the erotogenic zones. At this point he associated scopophilia with taking other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze. His particular examples center around the voyeuristic activities of children, their desire to see and make sure of the private and the forbidden (curiosity about other people’s genital and bodily functions, about the presence or absence of the penis and, retrospectively, about the primal scene). In this analysis scopophilia is essentially active. (Later, in Instincts and their Vicissitudes, Freud developed his theory of scopophilia further, attaching it initially to pre-genital auto-eroticism, after which the pleasure of the look is transferred to others by analogy. There is a close working here of the relationship between the active instinct and its further development in a narcissistic form.) Although the instinct is modified by other factors, in particular the constitution of the ego, it continues to exist as the erotic basis for pleasure in looking at another person as object. At the extreme, it can become fixated into a perversion, producing obsessive voyeurs and Peeping Toms, whose only sexual satisfaction can come from watching, in an active controlling sense, an objectified other.

At first glance, the cinema would seem to be remote from the undercover world of the surreptitious observation of an unknowing and unwilling victim. What is seen of the screen is so manifestly shown. But the mass of mainstream film, and the conventions within which it has consciously evolved, portray a hermetically sealed world which unwinds magically, indifferent to the presence of the audience, producing for them a sense of separation and playing on their voyeuristic phantasy. Moreover, the extreme contrast between the darkness in the auditorium (which also isolates the spectators from one another) and the brilliance of the shifting patterns of light and shade on the screen helps to promote the illusion of voyeuristic separation. Although the film is really being shown, is there to be seen, conditions of screening and narrative conventions give the spectator an illusion of looking in on a private world. Among other things, the position of the spectators in the cinema is blatantly one of repression of their exhibitionism and projection of the repressed desire on to the performer.

B. The cinema satisfies a primordial wish for pleasurable looking, but it also goes further, developing scopophilia in its narcissistic aspect. The conventions of mainstream film focus attention on the human form. Scale, space, stories are all anthropomorphic. Here, curiosity and the wish to look intermingle with a fascination with likeness and recognition: the human face, the human body, the relationship between the human form and its surroundings, the visible presence of the person in the world. Jacques Lacan has described how the moment when a child recognises its own image in the mirror is crucial for the constitution of the ego. Several aspects of this analysis are relevant here. The mirror phase occurs at a time when the child’s physical ambitions outstrip his motor capacity, with the result that his recognition of himself is joyous in that he imagines his mirror image to be more complete, more perfect than he experiences his own body. Recognition is thus overlaid with misrecognition: the image recognised is conceived as the reflected body of the self, but its misrecognition as superior projects this body outside itself as an ideal ego, the alienated subject. which, re-introjected as an ego ideal, gives rise to the future generation of identification with others. This mirror-moment predates language for the child.

Important for this article is the fact that it is an image that constitutes the matrix of the imaginary, of recognition/misrecognition and identification, and hence of the first articulation of the ‘I’ of subjectivity. This is a moment when an older fascination with looking (at the mother’s face, for an obvious example) collides with the initial inklings of self-awareness. Hence it is the birth of the long love affair/despair between image and self-image which has found such intensity of expression in film and such joyous recognition in the cinema audience. Quite apart from the extraneous similarities between screen and mirror (the framing of the human form in its surroundings, for instance), the cinema has structures of fascination strong enough to allow temporary loss of ego while simultaneously reinforcing the ego. The sense of forgetting the world as the ego has subsequently come to perceive it (I forgot who I am and where I was) is nostagically reminiscent of that pre-subjective moment of image recognition. At the same time the cinema has distinguished itself in the pro- duction of ego ideals as expressed in particular in the star system, the stars centering both screen presence and screen story as they act out a complex process of likeness and difference (the glamorous impersonates the ordinary).

C. Sections II. A and B have set out two contradictory aspects of the pleasurable structures of looking in the conventional cinematic situation. The first, scopophilic, arises from pleasure in using another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight. The second, developed through narcissism and the constitution of the ego, comes from identification with the image seen. Thus, in film terms, one implies a separation of the erotic identity of the subject from the object on the screen (active scopophilia), the other demands identification of the ego with the object on the screen through the spectator’s fascination with and recognition of his like. The first is a function of the sexual instincts, the second of ego libido. This dichotomy was crucial for Freud. Although he saw the two as interacting and overlaying each other, the tension between instinctual drives and self-preservation continues to be a dramatic polarisation in terms of pleasure. Both are formative structures, mechanisms not meaning. In themselves they have no signification, they have to be attached to an idealisation. Both pursue aims in indifference to perceptual reality, creating the imagised, eroticised concept of the world that forms the perception of the subject and makes a mockery of empirical objectivity. During its history, the cinema seems to have evolved a particular illusion of reality in which this contradiction between libido and ego has found a beautifully complementary phantasy world. In reality the phantasy world of the screen is subject to the law which produces it. Sexual instincts and identification processes have a meaning within the symbolic order which articulates desire. Desire, born with language, allows the possibility of transcending the instinctual and the imaginary, but its point of reference continually returns to the traumatic moment of its birth: the castration complex. Hence the look, pleasurable in form, can be threatening in content, and it is woman as representation/image that crystallises this paradox.

III. Woman as Image, Man as Bearer of the Look

A. In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female form which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness. Woman displayed as sexual object is the leit-motif of erotic spectacle: from pin-ups to striptease, from Ziegfeld to Busby Berkeley, she holds the look, plays to and signifies male desire. Mainstream film neatly combined spectacle and narrative. (Note, however, how the musical song-and-dance numbers break the flow of the diegesis.) The presence of woman is an indispensable element of spectacle in normal narrative film, , yet her visual
presence tends to work against the development of a story line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation. This alien presence then has to be integrated into cohesion with the narrative. As Budd Boetticher has put it:

“What counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents. She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act the way he does. In herself the woman has not the slightest importance.”

(A recent tendency in narrative film has been to dispense with this problem altogether; hence the development of what Molly Haskell has called the ‘buddy movie,’ in which the active homosexual eroticism of the central male figures can carry the story without distraction.) Traditionally, the woman displayed has functioned on two levels: as erotic object for the characters within the screen story, and as erotic object for the spectator within the auditorium, with a shifting tension between the looks on either side of the screen. For instance, the device of the show-girl allows the two looks to be unified technically without any apparent break in the diegesis. A woman performs within the narrative, the gaze of the spectator and that of the male characters in the film are neatly combined without breaking narrative verisimilitude. For a moment the sexual impact of the performing woman takes the film into a no-man’s-land outside its own time and space. Thus Marilyn Monroe’s first appearance in The River of No Return and Lauren Bacall’s songs in To Have or Have Not. Similarly, conventional close-ups of legs (Dietrich, for instance) or a face (Garbo) integrate into the narrative a different mode of eroticism. One part of a fragmented body destroys the Renaissance space, the illusion of depth demanded by the narrative, it gives flatness, the quality of a cut-out or icon rather than verisimilitude to the screen.

B. An active/passive heterosexual division of labor has similarly controlled narrative structure. According to the principles of the ruling ideology and the psychical structures that back it up, the male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification. Man is reluctant to gaze at his exhibitionist like. Hence the split between spectacle and narrative supports the man’s role as the active one of forwarding the story, making things happen. The man controls the film phantasy and also emerges as the representative of power in a further sense: as the bearer of the look of the spectator, transferring it behind the screen to neutralise the extra-diegetic tendencies represented by woman as spectacle. This is made possible through the processes set in motion by structuring the film around a main controlling figure with whom the spectator can identify. As the spectator identifies with the main male protagonist, he projects his look on to that of his like, his screen surrogate, so that the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look, both giving a satisfying sense of omnipotence. A male movie star’s glamorous characteristics are thus not those of the erotic object of the gaze, but those of the more perfect, more complete, more powerful ideal ego conceived in the original moment of recognition in front of the mirror. The character in the story can make things happen and control events better than the subject/spectator, just as the image in the mirror was more in control of motor coordination. In contrast to woman as icon, the active male figure (the ego ideal of the identification process) demands a three-dimensional space corresponding to that of the mirror-recognition in which the alienated subject internalised his own representation of this imaginary existence. He is a figure in a landscape. Here the function of film is to reproduce as accurately as possible the so-called natural conditions of human perception. Camera technology (as exemplified by deep focus in particular) and camera movements (determined by the action of the protagonist), combined with invisible editing (demanded by realism) all tend to blur the limits of screen space. The male protagonist is free to command the stage, a stage of spatial illusion in which he articulates the look and creates the action.

C.1 Sections III, A and B have set out a tension between a mode of representation of woman in film and conventions surrounding the diegesis. Each is associated with a look: that of the spectator in direct scopophilic contact with the female form displayed for his enjoyment (connoting male phantasy) and that of the spectator fascinated with the image of his like set in an illusion of natural space, and through him gaining control and possession of the woman within the diegesis. (This tension and the shift from one pole to the other can structure a single text. Thus both in Only Angels Have Wings and in To Have and Have Not, the film opens with the woman as object the combined gaze of spectator and all the male protagonists in the film. She is isolated, glamorous, on display, sexualised. But as the narrative progresses she falls in love with the main male protagonist and becomes his property, losing her outward glamorous characteristics, her generalised sexuality, her show-girl connotations; her eroticism is subjected to the male star alone. By means of identification with him, through participation in his power, the spectator can indirectly possess her too.)

But in psychoanalytic terms, the female figure poses a deeper problem. She also connotes something that the look continually circles around but disavows: her lack of a penis, implying a threat of castration and hence unpleasure. Ultimately, the meaning of woman is sexual difference, the absence of the penis as visually ascertainable, the material evidence on which is based the castration complex essential for the organisation of entrance to the symbolic order and the law of the father. Thus the woman as icon, displayed for the gaze and enjoyment of men, the active controllers of the look, always threatens to evoke the anxiety it originally signified. The male unconscious has two avenues of escape from this castration anxiety: preoccupation with the re-enactment of the original trauma (investigating the woman, demystifying her mystery), counterbalanced by the devaluation, punishment or saving of the guilty object (an avenue typified by the concerns of the film noir); or else complete disavowal of castration by the substitution of a fetish object or turning the represented figure itself into a fetish so that it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous (hence over-valuation, the cult of the female star). This second avenue, fetishistic scopophilia, builds up the physical beauty of the object, transforming it into something satisfying in itself. The first avenue, voyeurism, on the contrary, has associations with sadism: pleasure lies in ascertaining guilt (immediately associated with castration), asserting control and subjecting the guilty person through punishment or forgiveness. This sadistic side fits in well with narrative. Sadism demands a story, depends on making something happen, forcing a change in another person, a battle of will and strength, victory/defeat, all occurring in a linear time with a beginning and an end. Fetishistic scopophilia, on the other hand, can exist outside linear time as the erotic instinct is focused on the look alone. These contradictions and ambiguities can be illustrated more simply by using works by Hitchcock and Sternberg, both of whom take the look almost as the content or subject matter of many of their films. Hitchcock is the more complex, as he uses both mechanisms. Sternberg’s work, on the other hand, provides many pure examples of fetishistic scopophilia.

C.2 It is well known that Sternberg once said he would welcome his films being projected upside down so that story and character involvement would not interfere with the spectator’s undiluted appreciation of the screen image. This statement is re
vealing but ingenuous. Ingenuous in that his films do demand that the figure of the woman (Dietrich, in the cycle of films with her, as the ultimate example) should be identifiable. But revealing in that it emphasises the fact that for him the pictorial space enclosed by the frame is paramount rather than narrative or identification processes. While Hitchcock goes into the investigative side of voyeurism, Sternberg produces the ultimate fetish, taking it to the point where the powerful look of the male protagonist (characteristic of traditional narrative film) is broken in favour of the image in direct erotic rapport with the spectator. The beauty of the woman as object and the screen space coalesce; she is no longer the bearer of guilt but a perfect product, whose body, stylised and fragmented by close-ups, is the content of the film and the direct recipient of the spectator’s look. Sternberg plays down the illusion of screen depth; his screen tends to be one-dimensional, as light and shade, lace, steam, foliage, net, streamers, etc, reduce the visual field. There is little or no mediation of the look through the eyes of the main male protagonist. On the contrary, shadowy presences like La Bessiere in Morocco act as surrogates for the director, detached as they are from audience identification. Despite Sternberg’s insistence that his stories are irrelevant, it is significant that they are concerned with situation, not suspense, and cyclical rather than linear time, while plot complications revolve around misunderstanding rather than conflict. The most important absence is that of the controlling male gaze within the screen scene. The high point of emotional drama in the most typical Dietrich films, her supreme moments of erotic meaning, take place in the absence of the man she loves in the fiction. There are other witnesses, other spectators watching her on the screen, but their gaze is one with, not standing in for, that of the audience. At the end of Morocco, Tom Brown has already disappeared into the desert when Amy Jolly kicks off her gold sandals and walks after him. At the end of Dishonoured, Kranau is indifferent to the fate of Magda. In both cases, the erotic impact, sanctified by death, is displayed as a spectacle for the audience. The male hero misunderstands and, above all, does not see.

In Hitchcock, by contrast, the male hero does see precisely what the audience sees. However, in the films I shall discuss here, he takes fascination with an image through scopophilic eroticism as the subject of the film. Moreover, in these cases the hero portrays the contradictions and tensions experienced by the spectator. In Vertigo in particular, but also in Marnie and Rear Window, the look is central to the plot, oscillating between voyeurism and fetishistic fascination. As a twist, a further manipulation of the normal viewing process which in some sense reveals it, Hitchcock uses the process of identification normally associated with ideological correctness and the recognition of established morality and shows up its perverted side. Hitchcock has never concealed his interest in voyeurism, cinematic and non-cinematic. His heroes are exemplary of the symbolic order and the law– a policeman (Vertigo), a dominant male possessing money and power (Marnie)–but their erotic drives lead them into compromised situations. The power to subject another person to the will sadistically or to the gaze voyeuristically is turned on to the woman as the object of both. Power is backed by a certainty of legal right and the established guilt of the woman (evoking castration, psychoanalytically speaking). True perversion is barely concealed under a shallow mask of ideological correctness–the man is on the right side of the law, the woman on the wrong. Hitchcock’s skillful use of identification processes and liberal use of subjective camera from the point of view of the male protagonist draw the spectators deeply into his position, making them share his uneasy gaze. The audience is absorbed into a voyeuristic situation within the screen scene and diegesis which parodies his own in the cinema. In his analysis of Rear Window, Douchet takes the film as a metaphor for the cinema. Jeffries is the audience, the events in the apartment block opposite correspond to the screen. As he watches, an erotic dimension is added to his look, a central image to the drama. His girlfriend Lisa had been of little sexual interest to him, more or less a drag, so long as she remained on the spectator side. When she crosses the barrier between his room and the block opposite, their relationship is re-born erotically. He does not merely watch her through his lens, as a distant meaningful image, he also sees her as a guilty intruder exposed by a dangerous man threatening her with punishment, and thus finally saves her. Lisa’s exhibitionism has already been established by her obsessive interest in dress and style, in being a passive image of visual perfection; Jeffries’ voyeurism and activity have also been established through his work as a photo-journalist, a maker of stories and captor of images. However, his enforced inactivity, binding him to his seat as a spectator, puts him squarely in the phantasy position of the cinema audience.

In Vertigo, subjective camera predominates. Apart from flash-back from Judy’s point of view, the narrative is woven around what Scottie sees or fails to see. The audience follows the growth of his erotic obsession and subsequent despair precisely from his point of view. Scottie’s voyeurism is blatant: he falls in love with a woman he follows and spies on without speaking to. Its sadistic side is equally blatant: he has chosen (and freely chosen, for he had been a successful lawyer) to be a policeman, with all the attendant possibilities of pursuit and investigation. As a result. he follows, watches and falls in love with a perfect image of female beauty and mystery. Once he actually confronts her, his erotic drive is to break her down and force her to tell by persistent cross-questioning. Then, in the second part of the film, he re-enacts his obsessive involvement with the image he loved to watch secretly. He reconstructs Judy as Madeleine, forces her to conform in every detail to the actual physical appearance of his fetish. Her exhibitionism, her masochism, make her an ideal passive counterpart to Scottie’s active sadistic voyeurism. She knows her part is to perform, and only by playing it through and then replaying it can she keep Scottie’s erotic interest. But in the repetition he does break her down and succeeds in exposing her guilt. His curiosity wins through and she is punished. In Vertigo, erotic involvement with the look is disorienting: the spectator’s fascination is turned against him as the narrative carries him through and entwines him with the processes that he is himself exercising. The Hitchcock hero here is firmly placed within the symbolic order, in narrative terms. He has all the attributes of the patriarchal super-ego. Hence the spectator, lulled into a false sense of security by the apparent legality of his surrogate, sees through his look and finds himself exposed as complicit, caught in the moral ambiguity of looking.

Far from being simply an aside on the perversion of the police, Vertigo focuses on the implications of the active/looking, passive/looked-at split in terms of sexual difference and the power of the male symbolic encapsulated in the hero. Marnie, too, performs for Mark Rutland’s gaze and masquerades as the perfect to-be-looked-at image. He, too, is on the side of the law until, drawn in by obsession with her guilt, her secret, he longs to see her in the act of committing a crime, make her confess and thus save her. So he, too, becomes complicit as he acts out the implications of his power. He controls money and words, he can have his cake and eat it.

III. Summary

The psychoanalytic background that has been discussed in this article is relevant to the pleasure and unpleasure offered by traditional narrative film. The scopophili
c instinct (pleasure in looking at another person as an erotic object), and, in contradistinction, ego libido (forming identification processes) act as formations, mechanisms, which this cinema has played on. The image of woman as (passive) raw material for the (active) gaze of man takes the argument a step further into the structure of representation, adding a further layer demanded by the ideology of the patriarchal order as it is worked out in its favorite cinematic form – illusionistic narrative film. The argument returns again to the psychoanalytic background in that woman as representation signifies castration, inducing voyeuristic or fetishistic mechanisms to circumvent her threat. None of these interacting layers is intrinsic to film, but it is only in the film form that they can reach a perfect and beautiful contradiction, thanks to the possibility in the cinema of shifting the emphasis of the look. It is the place of the look that defines cinema, the possibility of varying it and exposing it. This is what makes cinema quite different in its voyeuristic potential from, say, strip-tease, theatre, shows, etc. Going far beyond highlighting a woman’s to-be-looked-at-ness, cinema builds the way she is to be looked at into the spectacle itself. Playing on the tension between film as controlling the dimension of time (editing, narrative) and film as controlling the dimension of space (changes in distance, editing), cinematic codes create a gaze, a world, and an object, thereby producing an illusion cut to the measure of desire. It is these cinematic codes and their relationship to formative external structures that must be broken down before mainstream film and the pleasure it provides can be challenged.

To begin with (as an ending) the voyeuristic-scopophilic look that is a crucial part of traditional filmic pleasure can itself be broken down. There are three different looks associated with cinema: that of the camera as it records the pro-filmic event, that of the audience as it watches the final product, and that of the characters at each other within the screen illusion. The conventions of narrative film deny the first two and subordinate them to the third, the conscious aim being always to eliminate intrusive camera presence and prevent a distancing awareness in the audience. Without these two absences (the material existence of the recording process, the critical reading of the spectator), fictional drama cannot achieve reality, obviousness and truth. Nevertheless, as this article has argued, the structure of looking in narrative fiction film contains a contradiction in its own premises: the female image as a castration threat constantly endangers the unity of the diegesis and bursts through the world of illusion as an intrusive, static, one-dimensional fetish. Thus the two looks materially present in time and space are obsessively subordinated to the neurotic needs of the male ego. The camera becomes the mechanism for producing an illusion of Renaissance space, flowing movements compatible with the human eye, an ideology of representation that revolves around the perception of the subject; the camera’s look is disavowed in order to create a convincing world in which the spectator’s surrogate can perform with verisimilitude. Simultaneously, the look of the audience is denied an intrinsic force: as soon as fetishistic representation of the female image threatens to break the spell of illusion, and erotic image on the screen appears directly (without mediation) to the spectator, the fact of fetishisation, concealing as it does castration fear, freezes the look, fixates the spectator and prevents him from achieving any distance from the image in front of him.

This complex interaction of looks is specific to film. The first blow against the monolithic accumulation of traditional film conventions (already undertaken by radical filmmakers) is to free the look of the camera into its materiality in time and space and the look of the audience into dialectics, passionate detachment. There is no doubt that this destroys the satisfaction, pleasure and privilege of the ‘invisible guest,’ and highlights how film has depended on voyeuristic active/passive mechanisms. Women, whose image has continually been stolen and used for this end, cannot view the decline of the traditional film form with anything much more than sentimental regret.

–Laura Mulvey, originally published – Screen 16.3 Autumn 1975 pp. 6-18

视觉快感与叙事电影

作者：劳拉 马尔维 著 金虎 译 周传基 校

序言
A对精神分析学的政治性运用
本文旨在运用精神分析的方法来发现，电影的魅力是在何处并如何被事先存在的诸种魅力模式所强化的，这些魅力模式早已对个性主体以及塑造个性主体的社会构成物发生作用。作为基点，本文首先要说明电影是如何反映、揭示甚至是利用社会所承认的关于两性差异的直接阐释的，即控制着形象、色情的观看方式和奇观的阐释。在试图从理论和实践上对过去电影提出挑战的同时，了解电影过去是怎样的，其魔力过去是如何发挥作用的，这是有所裨益的。因此，这里更适合于把精神分析理论用作一种政治武器，以阐明父系社会的无意识是如何构建电影形式的。
从各种表现形式来看，菲勒斯中心主义（phallocentrism）的自相矛盾之处在于，它依赖于被阉割了的女性形象来赋予其世界以秩序和意义。关于女性的观念是这一体系的关键：正是她的缺乏使得菲勒斯成为象征性的存在，而菲勒斯所指代的则是她弥补缺乏的欲望。最近，《银幕》上有关精神分析学与电影的文章并没有充分地阐明象征界中表现女性形体的重要性，唯一有价值的就是谈到了象征界中的阉割。简而言之，女性在形成父系无意识中的作用是双重的，首先由于她确实没有阳具，她象征着阉割的威胁，其次她就由此把自己的孩子带入了象征界中。一旦完成这个，她在这一过程中的意义也就终结。它的意义并不进入法律和语言的世界之中，除非是作为一种徘徊于母性丰满和缺乏之间的记忆。这两种记忆均以本性为依据（或者是以对弗洛依德的那个著名短语的剖析为依据）。女性的欲望从属于她那作为流血创伤的承担者形象，她只能联系着阉割而存在，而不能超越它。她把她的孩子变成了她渴望拥有阳具的能指（她想象这是进入象征界的条件）。她要么必须体面地屈从于那个名称，即父亲和法律的名称，否则她只能在半明半暗的想象界中努力压制她的孩子。这样，女性在父系文化中作为男性他者的能指而存在，为象征界所束缚；而男性在其中可以通过那强加于沉默的女性形象的语言命令来保持他的幻想和强迫观念，而女性依然被束缚在作为意义的承担者而非制造者的位置上。
女权主义者对这种分析显然怀有莫大的兴趣，这种分析的美感在于准确地描绘出了女性在菲勒斯中心主义秩序下所经历的挫折。它使我们更接近了解我们受压制的根源，更进一步地表述问题，面对最终的挑战：怎样同以类似语言的方式构建的无意识作斗争，这种无意识在语言出现的关键时刻形成，现在仍受制于父系语言。我们无法从苍天中另造一种替代体系，但是我们可以通过父系制度所提供的工具来审视这种制度从而开始突破，其中精神分析法不是唯一但却是重要的手段。我们仍旧不能全面深入地认识女性无意识的一些重大问题，它们几乎与菲勒斯中心主义的理论毫无关系，如阴道，女婴的性行为以及她与象征界的关系，作为非母亲的性成熟女性和菲勒斯意指作用以外的母性。但在这一点上，目前的精神分析理论至少可以促进我们对现状、对我们所受制于的父系秩序的理解。
B毁灭快感是一激进的武器
作为一种先进的表象系统，电影提出了（由主导秩序所形成的）无意识构建观看方式和观看快感的诸种方法的问题。在过去的几十年里，电影已经发生了很大变化。它不再是以巨额投资为基础的巨大单一体系，其最佳典范是三十年代、四十年代和五十年代的好莱坞。技术的进步（16毫米电影等）已经改变了电影生产的经济条件，电影生产现在既可以是资本主义的，也可以是手工艺式的。因此发展另一种电影就成为可能。无论好莱坞如何具有自我意识，愤世嫉俗，它始终反映的是电影的主导意识形态观念。另一种电影则为在政治和美学意义上激进的电影的诞生提供了空间，并对主流电影的基本假设提出了挑战。这并不是要从道德意义上否定主流电影，而是要彰显主流电影在形式上的偏见是如何反映社会的精神强迫观念的，主流电影就是这个社会的产物；而且，它还强调另一种电影必须开始专门针对这些强迫观念和假设做出具体的回应。现在，一种在政治和美学意义上的先锋电影已经成为可能，但它依然只能作为一种对位旋律而存在。
好莱坞风格（以及所有受其影响的电影）的魔力充其量不过是来自于它对视觉快感游刃有余的操纵，这虽然不是唯一的因素，但却是一个重要方面。在毫无挑战的情况下，主流电影把色情编码纳入了主导的父系秩序的语言之中。在高度发达的好莱坞电影之中，只有通过这些编码，异化的主体才得以通过好莱坞电影形式的美和好莱坞对他自身造型的强迫观念的利用，接近于寻找到一丝满足，而那些异化的主体已被失落感和缺少幻想的潜在恐惧撕碎了想象性的记忆。本文将探讨电影中的色情快感、色情快感的意义和女性形象的中心位置这三者之间的相互关系，尤其是要探讨女性形象的中心位置这一问题。有人说，对快感或美进行分析，就是破坏它，这正是本文的意图所在。那迄今为止代表着电影历史巅峰的自我满足和强化，必须受到抨击。这并非主张重建一种不能以抽象形式存在的新的快感，也不是要把不愉快理性化，而是要为彻底否定叙事性虚构电影的安逸性和丰富性开辟道路。另一种电影给人的刺激在于，为了孕育一种新的欲望语言，它将过去抛在脑后而并不拒绝它，超越了陈旧或压制的形式，或敢于破除常规的快感期望。
观看的快感和对人形体的迷恋
A电影提供了若干可能的快感。其一就是观看癖（scopophilia）。在有些情况下，观看本身就是快感的源泉，正如相反的情况，被看也具有快感。最初，弗洛伊德在《性学三论》中把观看癖分离出来作为性本能的成分之一，而这些性本能成分是作为独立于性感应区的内驱力而存在的。在这一问题上，他将观看癖同以他人作为观看对象这一行为联系了起来，认为被观看的对象处于控制性的好奇观看之下。他举的特例都集中在儿童的窥淫活动上，集中在他们想要观看弄清私处和禁看的事物的欲望（对他人的生殖器和身体机能的好奇，关于有没有阳具和回顾原始场景的好奇）上。在这种分析中，观看癖本质上是主动的。（后来，弗洛伊德在《本能及其变迁》中进一步地发展了其观看癖理论，认为它最早属于前生殖期的自淫，此后观看的快感就按类同的规律转移到他人身上。主动的本能和本能以自恋的形式发展这两者之间关系密切。）本能虽然为其它因素特别是自我构成这一因素所调整，但是它依旧作为以他人作为观看对象来取得快感的色情基础而存在。发展到极端，它可能固置为一种性倒错，产生入魔的窥淫狂和偷窥狂；他们唯一的性满足从主动控制性的意义上说，可来自观看对象化了的他者。
咋一看，电影似乎远离那个对未觉察不情愿的牺牲者进行偷窥的隐秘世界。从银幕上所看见的是如此昭彰地表现了出来。但是主流电影以及电影在其中有意识演变的成规，描绘了一个封闭的世界，它无视观众的存在，魔术般地展现出来，为他们创造了一种隔绝感，并激发他们的窥淫幻想。此外，观众厅（它也把观众隔离开来）里的黑暗和银幕上移动的光影图案的耀眼光亮形成了鲜明的对比，这也有助于形成单独窥淫的幻觉。虽然电影诚然是放映出来准备给人看的，但是放映的条件和叙事的成规赋予了观众一种幻觉，即他们仿佛是在向内窥伺一个隐秘的世界。尤其需要指出的是，电影院观众的裸露癖( exhibitionism)明显地受到了压抑，他们公然地将被压抑的欲望投射到了表演者身上。
B电影满足了观看的快感的原始欲望，而且它还进一步从自恋的方面发展了观看癖。主流电影的成规集中关注的是人的形体。景别、空间和故事都被赋予了人性。在这里，好奇心和观看的愿望同对类似和识别的迷恋融为了一体，即同对人脸、身体、人形体与周围环境之间的关系和人在世界中可见的存在的迷恋融为了一体。雅克?拉康曾描述过一个孩子从镜子里认出自己的影像的时刻对于自我的构成是多么的关键。这一分析的若干方面在这里是有意义的。镜像阶段发生的时间正是孩子对身体的憧憬要超越其原动力的时期，因此他认出自己时所感受到的愉悦在于，他想象他的镜像要比他体验到的自己的身体更完全更完美。因而错误的识别被误以为是正确的识别：被识别的影像被想象成是对自身身体的真实反映，但这种更为完美的错误识别把这个身体作为理想的自我投射到自身之外，而这个异化的主体又把它作为理想的自我重新摄取，导致了下一步认同他人。这种镜像时刻出现在孩子的语言之前。
对于本文重要的一个事实是，是影像构成了想象界的母体，构成了识别/错误识别和认同的母体，因而构成了第一次表述“我”的母体，主观性的母体。在这一时刻，对观看先前的迷恋（明显的例子是看母亲的脸）和最初的自我意识的朦胧感觉产生了冲突。因而，形象和自我形象之间的漫长恋爱/失望就产生了，这在电影中强烈地表现了出来，并在电影观众身上引起了愉悦的识别。不同于银幕与镜子外在的相似性（例如把人的形体框在其周围的环境里），电影具有这样一种魅力结构，它强大得足以使自我暂时丧失，而同时又强化了自我。自我随后感知的那种忘记世界的感觉（我刚才忘记我是谁，我曾在何处），是对影像识别的前主观时刻怀旧性的回想。同时，电影在塑造自我理想上引人瞩目，这尤其体现在明星制度之中；当明星表现相似与差异的复杂过程时（妖冶的人扮演普通的人），他们既是银幕现场的中心，又是银幕故事的中心。
C第二部分的A段和B段提出了在传统电影情境中观看的快感结构的两个相互矛盾的方面。第一个方面，观看癖，产生于观看以另一个人作为性刺激的对象所获得的快感。第二个方面，是由自恋和自我的构成发展而来的，它来自于对所看到影像的认同。因而，用电影术语来说，一个暗示主体的性欲认同与银幕上的对象是分离的（主动的观看癖），另一个则通过观众对类似他的人的迷恋与识别来要求自我认同银幕上的对象。第一个方面是性本能的机能，第二个则是自我里比多（libido）的机能。这种两分法对于弗洛伊德是至关重要的。虽然他把两者看作是相互作用相互交叠的，但是本能的内驱力和自卫本能之间的张力，从快感的意义上说仍然处于极端的对立之中。两者都是造型结构，是机制，而非意义。它们本身并无表意作用，而不得不附属于一种理想化之物。两者都旨在创造意象化性欲化的概念世界，对感知现实并无兴趣，而这个概念世界形成了主体的感知，并嘲弄了经验主义的客观性。
在历史进程中，电影似乎发展形成了一种特殊的现实幻觉，其中里比多和自我之间的矛盾找到了一个极其和谐相辅相成的幻想世界。实际上，银幕上的幻想世界服从于创造这一世界的法则。在表述欲望的象征界中，性本能和认同过程都具有一种意义。随语言而诞生的欲望提供了超越本能和想象界的可能性，但其参照点仍然返回到其诞生的创伤性时刻：阉割情结。因此，从形式上获取快感的观看，在内容上可以具有威胁性，而正是作为表象/形象的女性把这一矛盾具体化了。
作为形象的女性，作为观看承担者的男性
A在一个由性失衡安排的世界里，观看的快感分为主动的/男性的和被动的/女性的。发挥决定性作用的男性目光把他的幻想投射到按此风格化了的女性形体上。女性在她们传统的裸露性角色中同时被人观看和展示，她们的外貌被编码成具有强烈的视觉色情冲击力的形象，从而具有了被看性的内涵。作为性欲的对象而被展示的女性是色情奇观的主旋律：从墙上的美女画到脱衣舞女郎，从齐格非歌舞团女郎到伯斯贝?伯克莱歌舞剧的女郎，她们承受视线，并迎合指代男性的欲望。主流电影把奇观和叙事有机地结合了起来。（但请注意，在音乐歌舞节目中故事世界（diegetic）的流程是如何被打断的。）在常规叙事电影中，女性的出现是奇观中不可或缺的因素，但她在视觉上的出现往往会阻碍故事线索的发展，在观看色情的时刻冻结了动作的流程。因而，女性的这种格格不入的出现不得不同叙事有机地融合起来。正如勃德?波埃蒂舍所言：
“重要的与其说是女主人公所引起的事物，还不如说是她所代表的事物。她与其说是那个人，还不如说是她在男主人公身上所启发的爱与怕，或者说是男主人公对她的关心，而正是她使男主人公那样做的。女主人公本身并没有丝毫的重要性。
（最近叙事电影中的趋势是完全省去这一难题；从而发展如莫利?哈斯克尔所说的“男伙伴电影”。其中男性中心人物主动的同性恋性欲可以不受干扰地将故事发展下去）。传统上，被展示的女性在两个层次上发挥着作用：即作为故事中人物的色情对象和作为观众席上观众的色情对象而发挥作用，其中银幕内外的两种视线之间存在着不断变换的张力。譬如，表演女郎使得这两种视线在技术上统一起来而故事世界没有任何明显的中断。表演女郎在叙事中表演；观众的视线和影片中男性人物的视线有机地结合起来而不会破坏叙事的逼真性。在那一刻，表演女郎的性冲击力就把影片带到它自身时空以外的无人世界。玛丽莲?梦露在《大江东去》中第一次出场和劳伦?贝考尔在《有钱人和没钱人》中唱的歌就是如此。同样的是，陈规蹈矩的大腿特写（如玛琳?戴德丽的）或面部特写（嘉宝的）在叙事中融入了另一种不同的色情主义模式。分解的身体局部破坏了文艺复兴风格的空间和叙事所要求的纵深幻觉，赋予了银幕以平面感，剪纸或肖像画的性质，而非逼真性。
B一种主动/被动的异性分工也同样控制了叙事的结构。根据主导的意识形态原则和支持它的精神结构，影片中的男性人物不能承担性的对象化的负荷。男性不愿意注视他同类的裸露癖者。因此奇观与叙事之间的分离，支持影片中男性角色作为积极推动故事发展、促成故事的角色。这个男性控制着电影的幻想，同时还进一步作为权力的代表出现：作为观众观看的承担者，他把观看转移到银幕之后，从而把作为奇观的女性所代表的外故事世界(extra-diegetic)的倾向中性化。这之所以成为可能，是通过围绕一个观众可以认同的主控人物来构建影片，从而推动这个过程来实现的。当观众认同男主人公时，观众把他自己的视线投射他同类的身上，他银幕上的代理人身上，从而使控制故事发展的男主人公的权力和主动的色情观看的权力相合，两者都提供了一种全能的满足感。因此的男影星的魅力特征不是被观看的色情对象的特征，而是孕育于最初在镜子前识别时刻的更为完美、更为完全、更为有力的理想自我的特征。故事中的这个角色比主体/观众更为有效地促成故事、控制故事情节的发展，正如镜像更为有效地控制着原动力协调。与作为影像的女性相对的是，主动的男性人物（认同过程的自我理想）要求一个与镜像识别相一致的三维空间，异化的主体在镜像识别中把对这种想象性存在的自我表象内化了。他是风景中的一个人。电影在这儿的作用就是尽可能准确地再现出所谓的人类感知的自然条件。摄影技巧（特别是大景深的例子），摄影机运动（取决于主人公的动作），再加上隐藏的剪辑技术（由写实主义所要求的），都有助于模糊银幕空间的界限。男主人公能随意地支配舞台，而这是一个空间幻觉的舞台，男主人公在其中进行观看并创造动作。
C1第三部分的A段和B段已经阐明了电影表现女性的模式和关于故事世界成规之间的张力。这两个方面都和观看联系在一起：观众直接窥淫癖似地观看供其享受而展示的女性形体；观众迷恋于在自然空间幻觉中其同类的男性形象，并通过这个男性控制占有故事世界中女性。（这种张力及其它在两极之间的移动就可以构成一个单一的文本。因此在《只有天使有翅膀》和《有或没有》这两部影片中，它们都是以女性作为观众和片中所有男主人公的共同观看的对象而开场的。她被隔离开来，魅力四溢，被展示并性感化了。但当故事向前发展时，她爱上了主要的男主人公并沦为他的财产，从而失去了她外在的魅力特征、大众化了的性感和歌舞女郎的内涵；她的性行为仅仅服从于男明星。观众通过认同男明星并参与他的权力，也可以间接地占有她。）
但是从精神分析的角度看，女性人物提出了更深层次的难题。她还暗指了某些人们虽然仍然在观看但却否认的事物：她缺乏阳具，这暗示着阉割的威胁，因而也就是不愉快。最终，女性的意义就是两性差异，她没有阳具这是可以看见的；而以此物质证据为基础的阉割情结对于组织进入象征界和父法是极其重要的。因此，女性作为影像，是为男性――主动的观看者观看和享受而展示的，她始终威胁着要引起她原来指代的焦虑。男性无意识有两条逃避这种阉割情结的途径：专注于重新搬演她原先的创伤（调查那个女性，破解她的神秘性），通过对有罪对象的贬值、惩罚或拯救来进行弥补（这一途径典型地表现在黑色电影所关心的事情之中）；第二条途径则是彻底地否定阉割，用恋物对象来替代或是把再现的人物本身转变为恋物从而使它变为保险而非危险（因此出现过高的评价，对于女明星崇拜）。第二条途径――恋物的观看癖――确立了对象的外表美，并把它改造成了自身就能令人满足的某种事物。第一条途径――窥淫癖――正相反，同虐待狂有关。快感在于确定有罪（立即与阉割联系起来），在于获得控制权，在于通过惩罚或宽恕有罪的人使之臣服。而虐待狂的这一面有机地融入了叙事之中。虐待狂需要故事，需要某种事情发生，需要迫使另一个人发生变化，需要一场意志与力量的较量，需要胜利/失败，而这一切都发生在有头有尾的线性时间之内。另一方面，由于性本能只是集中在观看上，恋物的观看癖就可以存在于线性时间之外。这些矛盾和暧昧性通过希区柯克和斯登堡的作品可以更为简单地阐明，他们在各自的许多影片中几乎是把观看当作了内容或题材。希区柯克的影片更为复杂，因为这两种机制他都使用。而另一方面，斯登堡的作品则提供了许多纯恋物观看癖的实例。
C2众所周知，斯登堡尝言，他欢迎把他的影片前后颠倒过来放映，这样故事和人物纠葛就不会干扰观众对银幕形象一丝不苟的欣赏。这句话既具有启发意义，也是坦率真诚的。坦率真诚在于，他的影片的确要求女性人物（黛德丽，由她扮演的一系列影片就是极端的例子）必须是可以认同的。富有启发意义的是，他强调了这样一个事实，即对他而言，由画框所框住的画面空间比叙事或认同过程更为重要。希区柯克表现的是窥淫有关调查的方面，而斯登堡则创造了最终的恋物，一直发展到为了使形象与观众发生直接的色情关系而宁可中断男主人公聚精会神的观看（也就是传统叙事电影那种特征）。作为对象的女性美和银幕空间融合在了一起：她不再是有罪的承担者，而是一个完美无缺的产品，她那由特写所分割和风格化了的身体就是影片的内容，就是观众直接观看的内容。斯登堡削弱了银幕的纵深幻觉 ；由于光影、花边、水蒸气、树叶、网、飘带等等削弱了视野，他的银幕趋向于一维。影片中没有或很少以主要男主人公的眼睛作为观看的中介。尽管像《摩洛哥》中拉?贝谢尔这样的人物是脱离了观众的认同的，但他们影子似的出现是作为导演的替代而出现的。尽管斯登堡坚持认为他的故事是无关紧要的，但具有重要意义的是，他的故事所关注的是情境而非悬念，是循环的而非线性的时间，而情节的纠葛是围绕着误解而非冲突展开的。它所缺乏的最重要的东西就是在银幕场景中那男性控制性的观看。在黛德丽最典型的影片中，感情戏的高潮时刻，她那色情意义的高潮时刻，是发生在故事中她所爱上的那个男性不在场的情况下的。在银幕上有其他目击者其他观众在观看她，他们的视线和观众的视线是一致的，但没有替代观众观看。在《摩洛哥》的结尾，汤姆?布朗已经消失在沙漠中之后，爱米?乔利才踢掉脚上的金凉鞋，尾随他而去。在《羞辱》的末尾，克拉瑙对玛格达的命运漠不关心。在这两个例子中，被死亡神圣化了的情欲的冲击力是作为奇观展示给观众的。男主人公产生了误解，最重要的是，他没有看见。
作为对比，在希区柯克的影片中，男主人公看见的正是观众所看见的。但这里将要讨论的几部影片中，他通过观看癖的性行为把对形象的迷恋当作了影片的主题。而且，在这些例子中，男主人公表现了观众所体验到的矛盾和紧张关系。尤其是在《晕眩》中，还有《玛尔妮》和《后窗》里，观看是情节的中心，它徘徊于窥淫癖和恋物迷之间。作为一种花招，在进一步操纵从某种意义上也揭示了这一花招的正常观影过程时，希区柯克运用了通常与意识形态的正确性相联系的认同过程和对所承认的伦理道德的识别来表现其性倒错的一面。希区柯克从来不隐瞒他对窥淫癖的兴趣，不论是电影的还是非电影的。他的男主人公都是象征界和法律的楷模――一个警察（《晕眩》）、一个有钱有势处于支配地位的男性（《玛尔妮》）――但是他们的色情内驱力却把他们引入了折衷的情境中。迫使他人屈从于其虐待狂意志的权力，或者屈从于其窥淫癖观看的权力都对准到那作为这两者对象的女性身上。这种权力得到确定无疑的合法权利和那女性被证明了的罪(从精神分析的角度来说，即引起阉割)的支持。真正的性倒错仅仅由意识形态的正确性这一层浅浅的面纱所遮掩――男性处于合法的一边，女性处于非法的一边。希区柯克娴熟自如地运用认同过程和以男主人公的视角为视角的主观摄影，把观众深深地引入了男主人公的位置，并且使他们分享他那心神不宁的观看。观众被吸引进银幕场景和故事世界的窥淫癖式的情境之中，而这种故事世界谐谑地模仿了观众在电影院中的处境。道舍在对《后窗》的分析中把这部影片看作是对电影院的隐喻。杰弗里是观众，对面公寓楼中的事件相当于是银幕。当他观看时，他的观看增添了一种色情的维度，故事也增添了一个中心形象。只要他的女友丽莎待在观众的这一边，她对他几乎就没有什么性魅力，基本上是一个累赘。然而当她越过他的房间和对面公寓楼之间的障碍时，他们的关系就在情欲上发生了巨大变化。他不仅仅是通过照相机镜头来把她看作是远处的一个具有意义的形象，而且还把她看作为一个有罪的闯入者，她暴露于一个恐吓要惩罚她的危险男人的威胁之下，因此他终于去救她。丽莎的裸露癖已经通过她对服装与样式的强迫性的兴趣和作为视觉完美的被动形象而表现出来；杰弗里的窥淫癖和活动也通过他作为一名摄影记者、新闻记者和形象的捕捉者的工作而交待出来了。然而，他被迫地作为观众而被束缚在椅子里不能活动的状态，将他完全置于电影院观众的幻想位置上。在《晕眩》中，主观摄影镜头居于主导地位。除了从裘蒂的视角有一次闪回外，叙述是围绕着司各迪所看见和没有看见的事物所组织的。观众正是从他的视角来了解他那色情强迫观念的发展和随后的失望。司各迪的窥淫癖是露骨的：他爱上了他跟踪监视但从未说过话的那个女性。其虐待狂的一面同样是露骨的：他选择当一名警察(而且是自愿地选择，因为他曾经一直是一位成功的律师)，甘心参与一切可能的追捕和调查活动。结果，他跟踪、监视并爱上了一个具有女性美与神秘感的完美无缺的形象。他曾一度实际面对她，他那色情的内驱力要把她整垮，并通过不断的反复盘问来迫使她交代。然后，在影片的后半部分，他重新演绎了他对他喜欢偷偷监视的形象的强迫性的迷恋过程。他把裘蒂复原成麦德琳，强迫她在细微末节上都符合于他那恋物的实际外貌。她的裸露癖、受虐癖（masochism）使她成为司各迪主动的虐待狂窥淫癖的最理想的被动配对物。她知道她的角色就是表演，只有彻底地并且反复地表演，她才能维持住司各迪的色情兴趣。但是在反复的过程中，他确实把她整垮了，并且成功地揭露了她的罪。他的好奇心最后获得了胜利，而她则受到了惩罚。在《晕眩》中，色情的观看是令人迷惑的：当叙事带着观众发展，并且用观众自己正在实施的那些过程来缠住他们自己的时候，观众的迷恋又掉转来对付他们自己。从叙事的角度来说，希区柯克这儿的男主人公牢牢地处于象征界之中。他具有父系超我的一切属性。因此，当观众被其替身的表面合法性骗入一种虚假的安全感时，他自己看见并发现自己成为了共谋，陷入了观看的道德暧昧性中。《晕眩》绝不仅仅是对警察性倒错的一个旁白，它集中表现了从两性的差异角度来说的主动的／观看，被动的／被看的分裂的含意，和密封于男主人公身上的男性象征界的权力。玛尔妮也是为马克?鲁特兰的注视而表演的，并化装成被人看的完美形象。马克?鲁特兰本来也是站在法律的这一边的，直到他迷恋于她的罪、她的秘密而被拉了过来，他渴望看到她犯罪的行为，渴望使她坦白，然后拯救她。所以，当他在表现他的权力含意时，他也成为了共谋犯。他控制着金钱和语言，并且能两者兼得。
总结
本文所讨论的精神分析的背景和传统叙事影片所提供的快感和不愉快是有关系的。观看癖的本能(把另一个人作为色情对象来观看的快感)，和与之形成对比的自我里比多(形成认同过程)，发挥着这类电影所利用的造型、机制的作用。作为供男性(主动的)观看(被动的)素材的女性形象，把这一论证进一步带入表象的结构，增添了父系秩序的意识形态所要求的层次，因为这种意识形态正是在其最喜爱的电影形式――幻觉性叙事影片中得到最佳的实现。这一论证又再次转向精神分析的背景，因为作为表象的女性指代着阉割，并诱导了窥淫癖或恋物淫的机制来回避她的威胁。这些相互作用的层次都不是电影所固有的本质，但是它们唯有通过电影的形式才能形成完美而和谐的矛盾，这是由于电影能够转移观看的重点。正是观看的重点界定了电影，也就是变换观看的重点和暴露这一重点的可能性界定了电影。正是这一点使电影从其窥淫的潜能来说大大不同于比如说脱衣舞表演、戏剧、歌舞演出等等。电影远远不只强调了女性的被看性，而且为女性的被看开辟了通往奇观本身的途径。电影的编码利用作为控制时间维度 (剪辑、叙事)和控制空间维度的电影(距离的变化、剪辑)之间的张力，创造了一种观看、一个世界和一个对象，因而制造了一种按欲望剪裁的幻觉。正是必须分解打破这些电影编码及其与外部造型结构的关系，才能对主流电影和它所提供的快感提出挑战。
(作为结束)首先，窥淫――观看癖的观看对于传统电影的快感是至关重要的，它本身是可以分类的。有三种与电影有关的不同的观看：摄影机纪录具有电影性的事件的看，观众观看拍好的电影时的看，和银幕幻觉内人物相互之间的看。叙事电影的成规否认前两种看，使它们服从于第三种看，其明确的目的始终是消除闯入的摄影机的存在，并防止观众产生间离的意识。没有这两者的缺席(纪录过程的物质存在，观众的批评性的读解)，虚构的电影就不能获得现实感、明显性和真实感。然而，正如本文所认为的那样，叙事性虚构电影中的观看结构在其自身前提中包含着一种矛盾：作为阉割威胁的女性形象一直危及着故事世界的统一，并且作为干扰的、静态的、一维的恋物而闯入那幻觉的世界。因此以物质的形式存在于时间和空间的两种观看，强迫性地屈从于男性自我精神病似的需要。摄影机就成为了这样一种机制，即创造文艺复兴风格的空间幻觉、令人赏心悦目的流畅运动和围绕着主体感知的表象观念的机制；为了创造一个观众的替身可以进行逼真表演的世界，摄影机的看被否定。同时，观众的看也被否认为是一种固有的本质的力量：一旦对女性形象的恋物淫式的表现威胁着要破坏幻觉的魔力，银幕上的色情形象(没有通过中介)直接显现给观众时，尽管恋物淫的事实像阉割的恐惧一样隐秘，它也会冻结观众的观看，将其定住，并阻止他与眼前的形象产生间离效果。
观看的复杂相互作用是电影所特有的。对如磐石般积重难返的传统电影成规的第一个打击（已经由激进的电影制作者开始实施）就是让摄影机的看在时空中获得物质性的自由，并且解放观众的看，使它成为辩证的、超离感情的。毋庸置疑，这破坏了“隐身客人”的满足感、快感和特权，而且着重揭露了电影是如何依赖于窥淫癖的主动的/被动的机制的。女性的形象继续被盗取并用于此目的，她们至多不过是把这种传统电影形式的衰落看成是感伤的憾事。