1. Portrait of Sigmund Freud, book cover of Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, 1905..
Psychoanalysis as Desired Theory and as the Theory of Desire. In the first half of Chapter 3 “Spectatorship, Power, and Knowedge”, we investigate the dynamics of the GAZE and issues of SPECTATORSHIP and we utilize concepts and ideas from psychanalysis.
Psychoanalysis was founded by Sigmund Freud in Vienna Austria at the very beginning of the 20th century as a new interpretative method that claimed to unlock the secrets of the unconscious.

2. Gustave Courbet, Woman with a Parrot, 1866.
Psychoanalysis posited that people are not just rational beings who calculate according to reason and self-interest.
Rather they are beings who are full of a range of complex desires and emotions – of fears and fantasies, of sexual drives and libidinal energies that are bubbling under the surface. In 1900, Freud wrote his classic study The Interpretation of Dreams as a means by which to unlock the secrets of the unconscious mind and to interpret its dream-symbols and its often fantastic imagery.
Gustave Courbet’s Woman with a Parrot easily lends itself to psychoanalytic interpretation where sexual drives and libidinal energies are represented in the blatant symbolism of the parrot prop that stands in for the phallus in this painting of a nude driven by heterosexual desire.

3. Film still with Jane Russell in Howard Hawks Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, 1953.
For psychoanalysis, the human mind functions as a kind of nocturnal film projector that plays out its fantasies and its desires on the dream screen of the unconscious in a visually captivating way. Just from this idea alone, the convergence of FILM and PSYCHOANALYSIS is already apparent. In this context, I ask you to think about how we refer to the Hollywood cinema as the dream factory – as it is sometimes called -- as the place that turns out the best dreams that money can buy.
And so, psychoanalysis (as the method used to study and to interpret dreams and fears, desires and fantasies) is applicable to the study of Hollywood and other types of film because these are nothing more nor than the stuff out of which dreams are made.

4. Portrait of Jacques Lacan, book cover of The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, 1981.
However, it is the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and his theories about desiring and looking that have had the greatest impact on visual cultural studies. On the one hand, there is Lacan’s concept of THE MIRROR STAGE which is the stage at which the child of approximately 18 months enters the realm of the image and the realm of the imaginary.

5. Taxi Co images, Children Around a Computer Screen, from Getty Images, ca 2000.
The child looks into the mirror and he recognizes himself. However, this scene of recognition is for Lacan a scene of misrecognition too. The child looks into the mirror and says “That’s Me” mistaking his signifier for the signified. The mirror stage defines a specular relationship -- a relationship that begins by splitting the subject and making her a spectator of her own image.
Sturken and Cartwright believe that the mirror image posits both a reflection (a me) and an ideal (a not me) for the child – again both a recognition and a misrecognition.

6. Hiroshi Sugimoto, Metropolitan LA, Los Angeles (from the book Theatres), 1993.
Lacan’s ideas about the mirror stage have been mobilized to understand how we can invest so much in films whose screens also function as mirrors that reflect back to us ideals and models of behavior with which and with whom we identity.
e.g., IDENTIFICATION WITH THE HERO OF HOLLYWOOD FILMS

7. Unknown, What an Exposure, from the Amateur Photographer, September 23, 1887.
Lacan also articulated the concept of the GAZE PICTURES= TRAPS FOR THE GAZE
GAZE can not be identified with a single viewer or spectator (e.g. Male Gaze) for Lacan
The gaze rather marked the condition of being human and of visibility in general We are beings who are able to see only from one point, but being able to be viewed from all sides. As in the case of paranoia, he understood the gaze rather as something difficult to locate that makes one feel as if one is always being watched from the outside by an unseen Other.
Lacan’s concept of the GAZE already relates to Foucault’s ideas about the PANOPTICON

8. Clarence White, Nude, ca 1909
2. Voyeurism and Exhibitionism via Rear Window. Sturken and Cartrwight define the gaze in a way that tells us that it is not just any type of looking. It is a type of looking that is crossed by desire and by desires and hence it lends itself to the methods of psychoanalysis.
“In theories of the visual arts such as film theory and art history, the gaze is used to describe acts of looking that are caught up in the dynamics of desire. For example, the gaze can be motivated by a desire for control over its object.”
We derive certain kinds of pleasure from looking and from being looked at. This overall pleasure and enjoyment that is derived from looking is called SCOPOPHILIACS. We are scopo-philiacs because we love to scope things out.

9. Alfred Hitchcock, Jeffries and Miss Torso in Telephoto Lens, Rear Window (film still), 1954.
There is the VOYEUR who takes pleasure in looking without being seen. The voyeur is the one who likes to watch. Conversely, there is the EXHIBITIONIST or the one who takes pleasure in being looked at.
If we look at this promotional photo for Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), we already see this dialectic at play. You see the smile or smirk that is on Jeffries (played by Jimmy Stewart’s) face as he captures Miss Torso in the sights of his phallically extended telephoto lens and you see the exhibitionist Miss Torso doing the splits on her bannister in a particularly revealing pose.

10. Alfred Hitchcock, Lisa Fremont smoking a cigarette, Rear Window (film stills), 1954.
Jeff prefers the carefree voyeurism of the Rear Window where he can let his imagination run free to the responsibilities of an inter—subjective relationship with Lisa Fremont whom he considers to b e “too perfect.” And it is only when Jeff enlists Lisa as his “private eye” in the second half of the film and makes her an actor in his voyeuristic fantasies about Thorwald as the murderer of his wife that he becomes more and more into Lisa as an object of visual pleasure and desire. As Laura Mulvey puts it in Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, “When she crosses the barrier between his room and the block opposite, their relationship is reborn erotically.” (p. 371)

11. Alfred Hitchcock, Jeffries with a Telephoto lens, Rear Window (film still), 1954.
As your textbook states, “Rear Window is a quintessential example of the male gaze in relationship to female objects of visual pleasure.” (p. 78) But even more so, Rear Window is “a metaphor of the act of film viewing itself, with Jeffries standing in for the cinematic audience.” (p. 77). Rear Window is a meta-commentary on the way in which filmic spectatorship converts us into voyeurs one and all. This is a crucial point to remember as we sit in the darkened chamber of the cinema munching on our popcorn and drinking our pops and as we watch without being seen the stories of these Hollywood characters in whom we identify and whom we idealize, as we get sucked into their lives and forget about our own troubles for the space and time of the two hours that is the standard cinematic experience.

12. Barbara Kruger, Your Gaze Hits the side of My Face, 1981.
Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” (1985)
This essay was influenced by the rise of feminist theory as much as it was by psychoanalysis in its approach to the question of the gaze.
Mulvey’s essay was influenced by the struggle to challenge structures of viewing that privilege the heterosexual male spectator.
Mulvey saw the traditional filmic gaze as PHALLOCENTRIC -- as putting the phallus in the center of its visual pleasures. Thus the gaze is a male-dominating formation designed to objectify women, as the means to make the female the object of the male’s erotic enjoyment.

13. Michael Powell, Peeping Tom (film still), 1960
MULVEY: “At the extreme, it can become fixated into a perversion, producing obsessive voyeurs and Peeping Toms, whose only sexual satisfaction can come from watching, in an active controlling sense, an objectified other.”
This extreme and perverted version of the gaze – a version of perversion -- is played out in the British film about a sadistic killer, Peeping Tom directed by Michael Powell in 1960.
As you have seen, Peeping Tom is the story of an unbalanced individual who can only get off by killing his objects of desire with his camera weapon and then by playing back these perverse acts on the silver screen for his own narcissistic enjoyment. As your textbook analyses it: “Powell’s film is an extreme dramatization of another sort of fantasy about the power of vision, a fantasy in which the camera is imagined to grant sexualized power over life and death.”
By playing back the scene of the crime in tandem with the opening credits, Michael Powell has utilized what might be referred to as an ALIENATION effect to make the SPECTATOR step back, and to realize that this is a film and to have some critical distance about it and what is going on in it. And in doing this, the film forces us to reflect on how we (as cinematic spectators) are always at risk of becoming Peeping Toms ourselves – which is perhaps a terrifying thought.

14. Ridley Scott, Thelma and Louise (film still), 1991
CHANGING CONCEPTS OF THE GAZE. The classical model of the gaze as criticized by Mulvey has changed to some extent in recent years and part of this change may be attributed to the feminist perspectives which motivated her critique.
STRATEGY OF INVERSION typified by a new Hollywood film by Thelma and Louise directed by Ridley Scott in 1991 and starring Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis. Your textbook notes that the film “defies traditional formulas of the gaze” (p. 83) and that this happens from the start, as the movie begins when they photograph themselves in a booth (SELF-REPRESENTATION)
However, we should not forget that the plot of the film is set up as a reaction to the dominant view of the male gaze and that their resistance to it leads to tragedy. Thelma and Louise run away and become outlaws because they kill a man who tried to rape one of them.

15. Courtesy of Coty, Davidoff Cool Water (advertisement), no date.
And in the world of advertising, the strategy of inversion makes men into objects of the female gaze. It seems to be saying, hey no problem, if this is what will sell and if this is the new configuration of the marketplace, then we have no problem sprinkling advertising with a little less phallocentrism and a little more gynocentrism.
The cologne advertisement for Cool Water is a perfect example that puts the male model figure in the pose of the classical nude whose body is in full view for the pleasure of the female gaze …

16. Titian, Venus with a Mirror, ca1555
and whose own gaze is turned away from the camera as in the paintings of Titian or Courbet.
As reviewed in this Chapter, the history of the classical nude in Western painting or of Playboy magazine in present times can easily be understood in terms of the gaze of the male viewer as its ideal spectator -- as the ideal viewer to whom it is addressed, as the ideal viewer to whom it is marketed.

17. Courtesy of Coty, Davidoff Cool Water (advertisement), no date.
Here, for a change, the man is now made available and he is rendered less threatening by his averted gaze. Such an image might also be viewed as appealing to a market of gay consumers as well who would have no problem with this imaging of this object of male beauty.
The upper left hand corner of the ad notes the stores where this product is itself available for whomever the customer – whether female buying for her beau, gay or straight man buying for himself, etc.

18. Napoleon Sarony, Eugene Sandow, (early Body Builder) 1908
Does this type of inversion really solves anything if the real culprit here is objectification in general, of making people into objects? This is certainly Mulvey’s position in contrast to her critics who argue such a position demonizes all visual and erotic pleasure to be derived from practices of looking.

19. Reebok, “I Believe” advertisement, no date.
Ads that cast woman in strong and active roles asking the IDEAL SPECTATOR/CONSUMER to identify with particular codes of self-empowerment (exercise, control of one’s body, determination)” (p. 91) And it is important to point out that the woman in this advertisement is a visible minority which is something that never would have been done within the classic model. Rather than making the sexy man the object of the female gaze, the black female bodybuilder is made the site/sight of power and of empowerment. But, in discussing the power relations staged in this ad, we must also consider that this “empowered figure” is still only an actress who represents a sneaker manufacturer in an ad campaign.
We will think further about the relations of power and the gaze in the theories of Michel Foucault and their relevance to the study of visual culture next time.