‘Visual pleasure and Narrative cinema’

Laura Mulvey's essay, 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema'


Laura Mulvey's essay, 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,' reflects on how the psychoanalytic context is essential to the pleasure given by traditional narrative films. In particular, the author exhibits the scopophilic impulse (the element of seeking gratification by perceiving another human as a sexual object) in a number of typical films (Laura 806). Women are the most vulnerable to being viewed as sexual subjects, whether by their male characters in the screen story and by spectators or auditorium audiences. Precisely, in the traditional narrative cinema, the woman is viewed as a passive raw material for the active gaze of a man, as well as the ego libido (the aspect of forming identification processes in which a narrative cinema has played on) (Laura 808).

Psychoanalytic background applied to the poem, 'Hymn to Aphrodite' by Sappho


This psychoanalytic background can be theoretically applied in the poem, ‘Hymn to Aphrodite’ by Sappho in a number of ways. For example, the poem opens with Sappho begging the Aphrodite to bring back the love of her life, and by this aspect itself, is deemed to create scopophilic instinct to her audience if she happens to perform it on stage. According to Mulvey`s article, spectators are highly deemed to perceive women as erotic objects when the latter opens the film (Laura 811).

In addition, in the poem, Sappho pleads with the Aphrodite to bring her beauty and love so that her man can return to her (Gale 4). According to Mulvey, the male protagonist is capable of enhancing his ego (ego libido) to his spectators by controlling the film phantasm as well as neutralizing the extra-diegetic characteristics of the woman as spectacle. In this poem, by Sappho falling in love with the man, she turns to be his property, and this makes her lose her outward glamorous characteristics, her show girl connotations as well as her generalized sexuality (Laura 810).

The power of the male protagonist to neutralize the glamorous features of the woman on the stage is made possible by the processes that are set in motion by the setting the film or poem around a manipulating figure in such a way that the spectator can easily identify. Moreover, as the audience proceeds to identify the core male protagonist in a poem or film, the latter projects his look on his screen surrogate in such a way that his active power of erotic look coincides with that of controlling events, both portraying a satisfying sense of omnipotence. In this poem, the fact that Sappho takes the stage space from the start to the end makes the main male protagonist (the man that Sappho is in love with) to gain the active power of erotic look, while her aspect of begging for his love enables him to gain the power of controlling the events.

The power dynamics in the poem


Consecutively, despite Sappho being the main protagonist in her poem, the power of controlling the events rests with the man who she is in love with. This is due to the fact that in the psychoanalytic terms and traditional narrative cinema, the eroticism of a woman is subjected to the male star alone, and through the processes his identification means especially by neutralizing the extra-diegetic tendencies that have been represented by the woman, the likelihood of the audience indirectly possessing her as well cannot be under-estimated (Laura 810-812).

Works Cited


Laura Mulvey. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Frech Department of the University of Wilsconsin, Madison. 1973 Print.


Gale Cengage Learning. Study Guide for Sappho’s “hymn to Aphrodite.”. Detroit: Gale, Cengage Learning, n.d.. 2001Print

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