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Shklovsky's dog and Mulvey's Pleasure: The secret life of defamiliarization
Comparative Literature, Fall 1998 by Naiman, Eric
in memory of William Nestrick
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SINCE THE 1975 PUBLICATION of "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" in the sixteenth volume of Screen, Laura Mulvey's essay has become perhaps the most frequently cited and anthologized article in contemporary film criticism.' Although Mulvey claims in the article that her conclusions are specific to the medium of film and to the conditions of its consumption, she herself soon expanded her work's application, and now, nearly twenty years later, it is a standard item in the repertoire of literary criticism dealing with gender. Mulvey herself appears rather in awe of her article's success. In the introduction to a 1989 collection of articles entitled Visual and Other Pleasures-a title insisting that the words "Laura Mulvey" should connote more than this one article-Mulvey writes about her most famous creation, which, she says, seems "to have taken on a life of its own." "Written in 1973," Mulvey reflects, "polemically and without regard for context or nuances of argument, published in 1975, after many references and quotations in the following years, it has acquired a balloon-like, free-floating quality." "I hope," Mulvey adds, "that publishing it here will not explode it, but bring it back to earth" (vii-viii) . Although the essays surrounding "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" do indeed provide several keys to bringing the article down to the contextual earth of Mulvey's other writings about cinema, here I want to try to take the balloon down a little further-into the underground of its pre-history in theory and, perhaps, into the textual unconscious of its sources.
Mulvey's article has been the object of much discussion, but generally criticism has involved what Janet Bergstrom and Mary Ann Doane have called its "theoretical matrix" (7) rather than close readings of the article's text. In the pages to come, I propose to undertake a "symptomatic" and comparative reading of Mulvey's article in relation to an earlier text that has influenced both Mulvey's writing and film theory in general: Viktor Shklovsky's "Art as Device."2 In the process I want to consider what the affinities between "Visual Pleasure" and a founding text of Russian Formalism can tell us about both of these texts. How does Mulvey make ostranenie (making strange) stranger or, if two negatives make a positive, how does Mulvey make defamiliarization uncomfortably familiar?
I
"Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" attempts to describe how desire functions in traditional cinema. Explicitly "appropriat[ing]" psychoanalytic theory "as a political weapon" (14), Mulvey examines how the cinema has functioned as a mediating channel for libidinal energy and ego formation.3 According to Mulvey, the spectator in the cinema derives pleasure in two manners. The first, libidinal, way is through scopophilia-the pleasure of looking at the body of an other, a pleasure that in traditional cinema has been directed at the female body. This pleasure is extradiegetic; it tends to work against narrative progression and, since contemplation of the female body arouses fear of castration, potentially threatens the viewer.
The second cinematic avenue towards pleasure is achieved through identification with a glamorous, idealized reflection of the self. This identification, which Mulvey treats as a more sophisticated, later variation on Lacan's Mirror Stage, is essential to the reinforcement of the ego. The fear of castration produced by the sight of the other's lack is handled in the cinema in two ways: the male unconscious can "escape" through "preoccupation with the re-enactment of the original trauma (investigating the woman, demystifying her mystery), counterbalanced by the devaluation, punishment or saving of the guilty object (an avenue typified by the concerns of the film noir); or else [through] complete disavowal of castration by the substitution of a fetish object or turning the represented figure itself into a fetish so that it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous (hence overvaluation, the cult of the female star)" (21). While in "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" Mulvey dodges the question of the female viewer, she returns to it in a sequel in which she discusses the plight of a female viewer who is led to identify with masculine figures on the screen in an ego sustaining move that becomes second nature, albeit a "Nature [that] does not sit easily and shifts restlessly in its borrowed transvestite clothes" (33).4
Critical uses of Mulvey's work may be described as either hard or soft core, depending on whether they explicitly refer to the importance of castration and its Freudian and Lacanian baggage. (The uses of Mulvey made by Slavists, for example, tend to be of the softcore variety; recent work by Svetlana Boym (165) and Helena Goscilo (211) refers to the gendering of the gaze but not to the psychoanalytic path by which Mulvey reaches her conclusion.) Yet we should not forget that the route by which Mulvey accounts for the gendering of the gaze, and thus by which she herself brings the gendering of the gaze to consciousness, lies through castration -a route that is essential to the article's programmatic import as well as to its analysis.
