Freud, Hollywood and the male gaze

Summary

Laura Mulvey revisits her 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” which examined how Hollywood films reflect and reproduce unequal relations between men and women. Although cinema technology and viewing habits have changed, she says the essay’s concept of the male gaze has become widely used—sometimes helpfully, but also at risk of becoming an overgeneralized cliché. She returns to the feminist and psychoanalytic ideas behind it through three questions.

1. Why Freud?

• Mulvey used Freudian psychoanalysis to interpret how patriarchal assumptions become embedded in popular culture and film.
• She argues that Hollywood’s gender inequality is not just a matter of story content: it is built into film form, including framing, lighting, camera angles, color, and point of view.
• Drawing on Freud’s account of castration anxiety, she describes how images of women could be shaped by male fears and desires. Fetishistic idealization—making women into beautiful, polished images—could function as a defense against anxiety about sexual difference.
• She also applies psychoanalytic oppositions such as voyeurism and exhibitionism to Hollywood’s gender roles. Although these drives are not inherently limited to one sex, film culture tends to associate the active, looking position with masculinity.

2. Why Hollywood?

• Mulvey chose Hollywood because it was a powerful and highly organized film industry, especially under the studio system. Production relied on hierarchies, repetition, familiar formulas, and recurring stars.
• The Hays Code restricted explicit sexual material, but films still centered heavily on sexuality through stars and visual style.
• In Mulvey’s analysis, Hollywood’s gender roles were expressed through a division of labor on screen:
  • Female stars were presented as spectacles—highly visualized, sexualized, and made available to be looked at.
  • Male stars generally drove the action, controlled the narrative, and occupied the active position of looking.
• She argues that this arrangement also shaped the spectator’s experience. Viewers—whether male or female—were guided by the film’s visual language to see through a perspective organized around presumed male pleasure.
• A taboo on homosexual desire also influenced how the stars were displayed: the male star was less often made into an erotic spectacle, while the female star carried much of the film’s visual and erotic appeal.

3. What about a female gaze?

• Mulvey is wary of treating a “female gaze” as a simple reversal of the male gaze. Replacing one dominant position with its opposite, she suggests, can preserve the same system of power and domination.
• Instead, she proposes thinking about women’s looking through curiosity: a desire to see, know, and understand.
• Curiosity can interrupt habitual ways of seeing, encourage reflection, and make familiar subjects appear unfamiliar.
• Mulvey welcomes the growing number of women making films and telling stories that patriarchal culture may have ignored or considered irrelevant. She is particularly curious about women’s visual imagination and experiences that have previously remained unspoken or difficult to express.
• As examples, she mentions The Eternal Daughter and Petite Maman, films that explore relationships between mothers and daughters. She also notes curiosity in Barbie’s desire to see the real world.

Speakers and Sources Mentioned

• Speaker: Laura Mulvey
• Works and thinker mentioned: Sigmund Freud; Mulvey’s essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema
• Films and cultural examples: Joanna Hogg’s The Eternal Daughter; Céline Sciamma’s Petite Maman; Barbie