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...
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