The Invention of “the Male Gaze”

In 1973, the film theorist Laura Mulvey used concepts from psychoanalysis to forge a feminist polemic and a lasting shorthand for gender dynamics onscreen.
Profile of a man's head with overlapping circle around the brain. In the center an eye with a film reel for a pupil.
Illustration by David Vanadia

Iwas probably in college when I first learned that movies could commandeer my desires in a manner hostile to my flourishing as a woman. My favorite film at the time was “Sin City,” a 2005 neo-noir adapted from Frank Miller’s graphic-novel series of the same name. The men were smoking hot, fuelling my nascent infatuation with Clive Owen and Bruce Willis and even, maybe, in some corner of my psyche, the comeback bruiser Mickey Rourke. But, as in many a noir, the women provided much of the spectacle. There was Alexis Bledel playing to type as a blue-eyed Bambi named Becky; Carla Gugino as a parole officer with a high ass in a gauzy robe; Brittany Murphy, a pouty waitress draped in a lover’s starched white shirt; Devon Aoki, a gorgeously mum assassin; Rosario Dawson, lethally beautiful sheathed in leather; Jessica Alba gyrating in chaps. Their characters were assembled from new and old Hollywood types—dizzy dames, femmes fatales, “strong female leads”—neither capitulating to those codes, exactly, nor revolting against them. A winking, pulpy pastiche by design, “Sin City” (directed by Miller and Robert Rodriguez) replicated with gusto a cinematic genre that made a tradition out of sublimating its anxieties about womankind via sultry, duplicitous characters. In one shot, the male narrator broods in the background while a fish-netted rear end belonging to no character in particular fills the foreground. What is that ass doing there? Where does it exist within the space of the story? And if it’s there to court our appreciation, who does it think we are?

Men, possibly. Often, these days, we confront such questions by invoking the concept of “the male gaze.” The term was popularized, fifty years ago, by the British film theorist Laura Mulvey, who wrote, in a 1973 essay called “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” of how the “male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly.” Mulvey sought to break down the mechanics of looking to expose how cinematic conventions reinforce patriarchal fantasy, a task that she believed “called out for the vocabulary and the concepts of psychoanalysis.” At the time, the work of the mid-century French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan was de rigueur in cinema studies. His concept of the gaze posited that the act of looking was fundamental to the development of one’s identity. An infant, during what Lacan calls the “mirror stage,” achieves self-mastery by communing with his or her own reflection; in the cinema, the theory went, something similar happened as spectators formed a sense of identification with the figures that they watched onscreen. Before Lacan, Sigmund Freud had argued in his essays on infantile sexuality that looking conferred a voyeuristic pleasure, Schaulust (or, in its Greek approximation, “scopophilia”). These two ways of looking seemed in some senses at odds: in the former case, the subject understands herself via the image reflected back at her; in the latter, she takes pleasure objectifying whatever, or whomever, she sees.

Yet Mulvey argued that cinema, in fact, reconciles this tension, by consolidating both kinds of looking within the consuming of a particular kind of fantasy image. In a darkened theatre, our compulsory gaze is in reflexive sympathy with the camera’s interests and our pleasure stirred by the human forms onscreen, some of whom seem posed for our perusal. Those figures, Mulvey noticed, are often female; like that ass in “Sin City,” they are there not to participate in the narrative so much as to adorn it. This cinematic world does not operate in a void, of course. It is, Mulvey writes, “subject to the law which produces it”—that is, the rules of the surrounding society shape what we watch. So it is no coincidence that cinematic images tend to replicate gender as patriarchy sees it, reinforcing a classic division between passive femininity and active masculinity—the “to-be-looked-at-ness eroticism” of, say, Marlene Dietrich’s famous legs in the 1930 film “Morocco” versus the heroic wanderlust of her co-star, Gary Cooper. As John Berger wrote in his own analysis of the masculine gaze in visual art, from the 1972 book “Ways of Seeing” (adapted from the BBC series of the same name), “One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear.” Sometimes, Mulvey later wrote, “the female spectator may feel so out of key with the pleasure on offer, with its ‘masculinisation’, that the spell of fascination is broken.” But often enough, as for me with “Sin City,” the spell holds.

Though Mulvey’s essay analyzed the work of specific directors—Alfred Hitchcock’s masterfully subjective camera in “Vertigo,” for instance—she was not preoccupied with any one technician or viewer so much as with the technological process by which gender dynamics are asserted onscreen and alchemized through the pleasure of spectators. The way bodies are framed, and the way the camera moves, teaches us to look at women the way that patriarchy already does. Over time, Mulvey’s theory of the male gaze became an obligatory citation for works of feminist film criticism. As the critics Janet Bergstrom and Mary Ann Doane put it, any scholar who came afterward “felt compelled to situate herself in relation.” It also became a favorite shorthand for works of mainstream criticism seeking to critique how gender plays out in film and television. (According to one reviewer, Sam Levinson’s tepidly provocative new HBO series “The Idol,” about a pop star who bares all, “screams the male gaze.”) Various films in recent years, such as Steven Soderbergh’s male-stripper trilogy “Magic Mike” and Céline Sciamma’s lesbian period piece “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” have prompted a parallel preoccupation with “the female gaze,” broadly defined as a humane courting of the pleasure of women viewers. But, as other critics have pointed out, when applied too broadly that term can obscure rather than illuminate. The New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum wrote in a review of the 2016 Amazon series “I Love Dick,” adapted from Chris Kraus’s experimental feminist novel, that the term “female gaze” had become “blunt” from overuse, “particularly with its essentialist hint that women share one eye: a vision that is circular, mucky, menstrual, intimate, wise.” Contrary to Mulvey’s approach, uses of the “gaze” today—be it the male gaze, the white gaze, the straight gaze, and so forth—seem more invested in matters of identity than in the project of aesthetic analysis. They want to name who is doing the looking rather than how. (No wonder Cate Blanchett, in an interview for the 2015 live adaptation of “Cinderella,” misheard a question about the “Disney villain gaze” as “Disney villian gays.”)

What too often gets elided from current gaze talk is the possibility of looking as an act of ambivalence. As Frantz Fanon wrote in “Black Skin, White Masks,” his psychoanalytic study of colonialism, even the oppressor’s gaze can be a site of uncertainty; no one’s viewpoint—or projection—is entirely secure. In a 1989 critique of mainstream film criticism, bell hooks turned her attention to the previously ignored experience of the Black female spectator. Alienated by the exclusionary and racist fantasies of Hollywood cinema, Black women developed their own way of looking, in which a critical awareness of stereotypes preëmpted any straightforward identification with the mammies or tragic mulattas onscreen. One did not acquire this “oppositional gaze,” as hooks called it, by virtue of being Black and female; rather, one cultivated it through the tug and pull of resisting dominant ways of looking. Mulvey, in that sense, like other film theorists of the time, had made too much of the idea that cinematic images could impose a point of view.

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In the introduction to a 1989 collection of her essays, “Visual and Other Pleasures,” Mulvey wrote that her essay on the male gaze had erupted from the ecstatic feminist thinking of its time. Feminists of the seventies understood the political utility of a polemic. Mulvey, in that spirit, had forfeited a degree of nuance, she noted; any revisitation of her essay should consider it part of the “historical moment” rather than as a concept made to last. But Mulvey’s essay also had a forward-looking bent that gets overlooked when present-day critics invoke the “male gaze” as a cudgel. A lifelong cinephile and a filmmaker herself, Mulvey saw in the emerging independent filmmaking of the sixties and seventies an opportunity for cinema to detach itself from the patriarchal conventions and monied priorities of Hollywood. Invoking directors of the avant-garde including Hollis Frampton and Chantal Akerman, Mulvey called for the “birth of a cinema which is radical in both a political and aesthetic sense.”

What remains invigorating about Mulvey’s essay, above all, is its interest in the capacity of psychoanalysis to teach us new ways of looking. Film theorists who return to Lacan have pointed out that even he did not treat the gaze as a site of clear-cut self-knowledge. The film professor Todd McGowan, in a 2003 article called “Looking for the Gaze,” revisited Lacan’s reading of the Hans Holbein the Younger painting “The Ambassadors,” in “The Seminar Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis.” The large-scale work shows two men, one richly garbed and another in religious dress, leaned against a table stuffed with objects. A memento mori in the lower third of the canvas looks different from different points of view—from head on it appears as a mere smudge, but from the high-right or lower left the shape becomes a skull—courting an active exchange between viewer and art object. When we look, Lacan wrote, “something slips, passes, is transmitted, from stage to stage, and is always to some degree eluded in it.”

In a book published this spring, “A Black Gaze,” Tina M. Campt, a Black feminist theorist of visual culture at Princeton, picks up that strain in Lacan’s thinking. The gaze as she presents it is not another decisive site of power; it is not a diagnosis or a settled definition. (“My choice of the indefinite article is intentional,” she writes, of the book’s title.) She is interested, rather, in how different art works—she cites, for instance, Arthur Jafa’s quotidian video assemblages or Deana Lawson’s boldly intimate photographic portraits of Black life—set new terms for an active and varied engagement between the viewer and the visual. Like Mulvey’s essay, Campt’s book is forward-looking, exhorting us to “think beyond our comfort zone,” toward something new and speculative.

There is a sketch from Terence Nance’s kaleidoscopic HBO comedy series, “Random Acts of Flyness,” that enlivens possibility. It opens with Jon Hamm slouched on the couch in front of a TV set; in voice-over, we hear him ask, “Do you suffer from white thoughts?” We are watching an infomercial for a topical sludge called White Be Gone that promises to eliminate racial prejudice from the psyche, with Hamm as both spokesperson and patient. On the TV set, footage of political protests is playing. He mutters, “Violence isn’t the answer” and thinks, “All lives matter?” before another besuited Hamm poofs into view behind him and rubs White Be Gone on his temples. But soon the perspective shifts: we are watching not the final version of the infomercial but its filming. Hamm takes a beat to sidebar with the Black director, insisting that he is “not white white,” like the target audience of the product. The infomercial resumes—“ ‘I’m not racist’ spoken out loud is a classic white thought,” Hamm explains to the camera—but a minute later the perspective shifts again: we are in Nance’s workspace, where what we’ve just seen is revealed to be a rough cut of a sketch perhaps intended for the very program we are watching. As Nance edits the piece on his computer, he receives a text message from a friend who has viewed the sketch and has some feedback: “it seems to me that as ARTISTS we should be addressing whiteness less… and affirming Blackness more.” The scene ends with Nance texting back, “You right…”

A frictionless interpretation of the sketch would home in on its critique of whiteness. We’re meant to be amused by the ailing soul who professes, as Hamm does, “I’m not racist!” But is this a parody of whiteness or a parody of the critique? Should the viewer sympathize with Nance’s preliminary sketch or his friend’s final feedback? Each scene upends viewers’ positions and redoubles our sense of doubt. Rather than making us feel known, the sketch makes us feel ashamed of our self-assurance. It is not an unpleasurable experience. As we can glean from Lacan, sometimes it is useful to feel the gaze turned back at you. ♦