Sexuality in Film Essay

Sexuality and Cinema

Laura Mulvey's arguments in "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" are readily illustrated with reference to the 1991 Jonathan Demme film "The Silence of the Lambs."

Mulvey's starting point is psychoanalytic, and suggests that the image of the female is the way in which filmic meaning is constructed. This begins with Mulvey's critique of the "phallocentric" mode of thinking, in which a woman is understood to be nothing more than a castrated male, and is therefore the focus of horrified, and desirous, observation. Here, she views film itself as a technological construction designed to increase the activity of "pleasurable looking," even pushing it into the sexualized realm of voyeurism or scopophila: "The cinema satifies a primordial wish for pleasurable looking, but it also goes further, developing scopophilia in its narcissistic aspect." This means that the narcissism of the viewer, understood to be male, is gratified by the way in which psychology, and its social construction, is represented within the film. Mulvey's conclusion identifies the way in which an audience's narcissistically-based sexual instinct (ego libido) is invited to identify with, and also to distinguish itself from, the objects held up for sexual display in the film:

The scopophilic instinct (pleasure jn 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.

Mulvey's conclusions here are particularly fascinating when we consider "Silence of the Lambs." The film was released 16 years after the initial publication of Mulvey's essay, and in some ways it almost seems as though Jonathan Demme were responding to, or grappling with, some of Mulvey's main points. The dynamic of observation within the film itself is one which works both ways -- the clue that Hannibal Lecter gives to Clarice Starling as to how she will find Jame Gumb involves the notion of "what he covets," or desires in a transgressive way, and "we begin by coveting what we see every day." In this sense, it is Buffalo Bill's proximity to his first victim Fredrika Bimmell -- and his chance to observe her and, crucially as we learn, to take eroticized Polaroid photos of her which Starling will discover -- that leads to the construction….....