Shklovsky's dog and Mulvey's Pleasure: The secret life of defamiliarization

29 Cf. Linda Williams's suggestion that in Psycho "the monster who attacks both looks like and, in some sense, is a woman." Elsewhere in the same article she also makes the point that in horror films women often see in monsters " a potentially subversive recognition of the power and potency of a non-phallic sexuality." She adds: "Precisely becauser this look is so threatening to male power, it is violently punished"(90). To be relevant to Psycho, however, this insight must be projected onto a metacinematic plane" the woman in the film (Marion Crane, along with her monstrous, frequently trouser-clad double, Mrs. Bates) then becomes all women, and especially the female spectator with access to Mulvey's insights into Hollywood film.

" The supplementary article, "Afterthoughts on `Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' inspired bv Duel in the Sun," in which the two "transvestite" phrases appear, begins with an assertion of Mulvey's subjectivity: "So many times over the years since my `Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' article was published in Screen, I have been asked why I only used the male third person singular to stand in for the spectator." Mulvey's emphasis on "male" masks another fundamental pronominal change that occurs in this article: in its first paragraph the first person singular appears at least six times. In "Visual Pleasure," on the other hand, Mulvey refrains almost entirely from using the first person singular; it surfaces only in her discussion of Lacan ("the first articulation of the I," etc.) and in the qualification repressed in the anthologized version: "in the films [by Hitchcock] I will discuss here." Elsewhere, the first person appears in the collective plural encouraged by the manifesto genre. The supplement, therefore, restores the first person author and films that she ("I") did not choose to discuss earlier; through the first person it leads the reader into a much closer contact with Mulvey's subjective world.

22 See, inter alia, Douchet (Alfred Hitchcock 86-95), Durgnat (212), Rothman (292-301), Silverman (206-13), Wood (146-47).

' In her recent collection of articles, Mulvey does mention Psycho-in a quite intriguing context. She describes the entry of Marion's sister and the camera into the Bates home as an emblematic moment of female curiosity. She then contrasts this moment with fetishism, which is "born out of a refusal to see." She adds: "These complex series of turnings away, of covering over, not of the eyes but of understanding, of fixating on a substitute object to hold the gaze, leave the female body as an enigma and threat, condemned to return as a symbol of anxiety while simultaneously being transformed into its own screen in representation" (Fetish

ism and Curiosity 64). This moment, I would suggest, is symptomatic of Mulvey's own series of turnings away from, and of finding substitute objects for the shower scene in Psycho.

In arguing that Mulvey resisted identification with Mrs. Bates, I am. of course, implicitly projecting Mulvey into Psycho. Moreover, by deconstructing her resistance to the film, I am treating her as Mulvey's male viewer treats a female character in a Hollywood film: investigating, mystifying, punishing. My argument, however, follows closely the lesson of much of Mulvey's own work, which insists on the porousness of the screen and the extent to which the spectacle and the spectator are "vulnerable" (3-5,14-26).