Down With... Neighbours

This year (2023, for the benefit of any anthropologists reading this thousands of years from now) marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Laura Mulvey's landmark essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.

Mulvey's essay has become famous for drawing a parallel between cinema and voyeurism, pointing out that the pleasure we get from looking at a movie is effectively the voyeuristic pleasure of watching (unobserved) characters engaged in intimate activities. 

As she puts it:

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 fantasy onto the female figure, 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 leitmotif of erotic spectacle: from pin-ups to strip-tease, from Ziegfeld to Busby Berkeley, she holds the look, plays to and signifies male desire.

As John Berger more concisely put it in Ways of Seeing, "Men look at women. Women look at themselves being looked at."

Laura Mulvey's point here was that traditional gender roles present women as objects for male enjoyment and desire. To derive pleasure from looking is to take the "male" position. To be on the receiving end of that gaze is to be "female". 

In traditional narrative cinema, every character in the film is an object for the enjoyment of those of us in the audience. We pay our two dollars, buy our popcorn, then sit and watch as characters act out their most personal and intimate moments for our delectation. Thus (says Mulvey) we are adopting "the male gaze" and the pleasure we experience when we watch a film is the sexual pleasure of the voyeur.

To back up her theory, Mulvey gives prominent mention to three films in particular, two of which are directed by Alfred Hitchcock. It could be argued that this says more about Hitchcock than it says about narrative cinema in general, but that's a discussion for another day.

In any event, one of those films is Rear Window, which is why I am bringing all this up in the first place.

Rear Window is remembered today as one of Hitchcock's most iconic films. It was released in 1954 and stars James Stewart, Grace Kelly and Thelma Ritter, adapted from a short story by Cornell Woolrich. It tells the story of L. B. Jeffries, a professional photographer temporarily stuck in his sweltering New York apartment with a broken leg. He passes the time by watching his neighbours out the window, and grows increasingly obsessed with what he sees.

For Laura Mulvey, Rear Window is an easy target, since this is a story that is explicitly about voyeurism. Far from being a radical new reading of the film, Hitchcock specifically intended his work as a metaphor for the relationship between the spectator and the characters on the screen. 

As Jeffries becomes inevitably drawn into the private lives of the strangers he is watching from his bedroom window, he becomes a stand-in for the cinema audience itself, sitting in the dark and watching (safe and unobserved) the daily dramas and emotions of strangers whose private lives unfold for our enjoyment.

As long as we are sitting in the audience, we are the male gaze.

The female gaze?

It may or may not be a viable theory for cinema as a whole, but it certainly made for a captivating film in 1954. And we will be screening it at 7.30pm on Thursday, the 27th of July at the Victoria Park Baptist Church.