Psychoanalysis, spectatorship and the gaze

Why do we take pleasure in watching films, and what kinds of pleasure are they? In the 1970s, film theorists turned to psychoanalysis, the theory of the mind developed by Sigmund Freud and reinterpreted by Jacques Lacan, to answer these questions. They argued that cinema engages unconscious desires and fears, and that its pleasures are shaped by sexual difference. The most influential result was Laura Mulvey's theory of the male gaze, which remains one of the most widely cited ideas in all of film studies. This lesson explains the psychoanalytic concepts involved, Mulvey's argument and the many responses it provoked.

Lesson 6 introduced apparatus theory and suture, which drew on psychoanalysis. This lesson develops those foundations and focuses on spectatorship and gender. Lesson 9 extends the discussion to feminist and queer theory more broadly.

Psychoanalytic concepts film theorists use

Freud argued that much of mental life is unconscious, shaped by repressed desires and early childhood experiences, and that these surface indirectly in dreams, slips, symptoms and art. Several of his concepts became central to film theory. Scopophilia is the pleasure of looking, which Freud linked to curiosity and sexuality; voyeurism is pleasure in looking at others who do not know they are watched. Fetishism is the substitution of an object or part for something that provokes anxiety. The uncanny describes the eerie feeling when something familiar becomes strange, often because it recalls something repressed.

Lacan, a French psychoanalyst, reinterpreted Freud through linguistics. His concept of the mirror stage proposed that an infant, seeing its reflection, identifies with an image of itself as whole and coordinated, though it does not yet feel that way. The self is founded on this misrecognition. Lacan distinguished the imaginary, the realm of images and identifications, from the symbolic, the realm of language, law and social roles, into which the child enters. Film theorists saw obvious parallels: a viewer sitting before a screen of images, identifying with figures who appear more complete and powerful than themselves.

Metz and the imaginary signifier

Christian Metz, whose semiotic work appears in Lesson 7, turned to psychoanalysis in The Imaginary Signifier (1975). He argued that cinema is more perceptual than other arts, involving sight and sound richly, yet what it shows is absent: the actors and places are not really there. The film image is an imaginary signifier, present to perception but absent in reality. Metz proposed that viewers engage in primary identification with the camera, the all-seeing look that organizes the image, and secondary identification with characters. Cinema, in his view, is fundamentally voyeuristic: we watch people who cannot see us, in a darkened room, as if through a keyhole.

Mulvey and visual pleasure

In 1975, the British filmmaker and theorist Laura Mulvey published Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema in the journal Screen. She described her essay as a political use of psychoanalysis, intended to expose and destroy the pleasures of classical Hollywood cinema. Her central argument was that mainstream narrative film is structured by a patriarchal unconscious that divides looking along gender lines. Men are active bearers of the look; women are passive objects of it. In her phrase, which is often paraphrased, women on screen are coded for their to-be-looked-at-ness.

Mulvey identified three looks in cinema: the look of the camera as it records, the look of the audience as it watches, and the looks of characters at each other within the film. Classical narrative subordinates the first two to the third, so that viewers seem to see through characters' eyes and forget the camera. When the male protagonist looks at a woman, the camera and the audience share his look, aligning spectators with a male point of view whatever their own gender.

Mulvey argued that the image of woman also provokes anxiety in psychoanalytic terms, because it signifies sexual difference and the threat of lack. Classical cinema manages this anxiety in two ways. Voyeuristic investigation examines the woman, discovers her guilt and punishes or saves her, a pattern Mulvey found in film noir and in Alfred Hitchcock. Fetishistic scopophilia turns the woman into a spectacle, an object of beauty that stops the narrative, as in the stylized close-ups of Marlene Dietrich in Josef von Sternberg's films.

Responses and revisions

Mulvey's essay provoked debate for decades, including her own response. In Afterthoughts (1981), she considered the female spectator, who may oscillate between identifying with the active male hero and with the passive female figure, and she discussed melodramas centered on women. Other theorists challenged and extended her argument.

• Masquerade: Mary Ann Doane argued in 1982 that femininity can be performed as a masquerade, a deliberate excess that creates distance and lets female spectators view the image critically.
• Masculinity as spectacle: Steve Neale argued in 1983 that male bodies are also displayed, in westerns, epics and action films, though often disguised by violence or contests.
• Masochism: Gaylyn Studlar argued that cinematic pleasure can be masochistic, involving submission to a powerful image rather than control of it.
• Cross-gender identification: Carol Clover's Men, Women, and Chain Saws (1992) showed that young male viewers of slasher films identify with the final girl, the resourceful woman who survives and defeats the killer.
• The oppositional gaze: bell hooks argued in 1992 that Black women spectators, excluded from Hollywood's address, developed a critical, oppositional way of looking that refuses identification and interrogates the image.
• The abject: Barbara Creed's The Monstrous-Feminine (1993) drew on Julia Kristeva to show how horror films figure women as monstrous through bodily horror.

hooks's argument is especially important because it challenged the universal spectator assumed by psychoanalytic theory. Mulvey and Metz described a single position that the film constructs. hooks insisted that real spectators are shaped by race as well as gender, and that looking can be an act of resistance. Her essay connects psychoanalytic film theory with Stuart Hall's oppositional reading in Lesson 6 and with the theories of race in Lesson 10.

Counting looks

Some researchers test claims about the gaze by coding point-of-view and eyeline shots, noting who looks and who is looked at. The example below uses invented data from a single film to show how such coding can support, or challenge, an interpretation.

from collections import Counter
pov = [("man", "woman"), ("man", "woman"), ("woman", "man"), ("man", "object"),
       ("man", "woman"), ("woman", "object"), ("man", "woman"), ("man", "man"),
       ("woman", "woman"), ("man", "woman"), ("woman", "man"), ("man", "woman")]
lookers = Counter(a for a, b in pov)
targets = Counter(b for a, b in pov)
print("Point-of-view shots by who looks:", dict(lookers))
print("Point-of-view shots by who is looked at:", dict(targets))
share = sum(1 for a, b in pov if a == "man" and b == "woman") / len(pov)
print(f"Man looking at woman: {share:.0%} of point-of-view shots")

Point-of-view shots by who looks: {'man': 8, 'woman': 4}
Point-of-view shots by who is looked at: {'woman': 7, 'man': 3, 'object': 2}
Man looking at woman: 50% of point-of-view shots

Counts like these cannot capture how a look is framed or what it means, but they can test whether a film's structure of looking is as one-sided as a reading claims. A critic might combine such data with close analysis of key scenes.

Critiques of psychoanalytic film theory

Psychoanalytic theory has been criticized on several grounds. Cognitive theorists, discussed in Lesson 11, argue that it relies on unproven claims about the unconscious and cannot be tested against evidence. Audience researchers point out that it describes an ideal spectator constructed by the text rather than real viewers. Others note that it often treats heterosexual desire as the norm and assumes a single structure for all films. Even critics who reject its foundations, however, often keep its key insight: films organize looking, desire and identification in ways that are shaped by gender and power.

The term male gaze has also traveled far beyond academic theory. It is now used in journalism, filmmaking and social media to describe images that present women as objects for a heterosexual male viewer. Filmmakers such as Céline Sciamma, whose Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) was widely discussed as an exploration of a female gaze, have consciously built alternatives. When using the term, distinguish Mulvey's specific psychoanalytic argument from its broader popular meaning.