时间：2022-09-28 05:34:31
Abstract: Frequently quoted but often misunderstood, the work of Laura Mulvey on “the Gaze” is at the heart of feminist film theory, and has been hugely influential since the mid-1970s. This paper examined the film the full monty through the lens of her Lacanian psychoanalytic argument concerning the gaze in cinema. The content analysis was designed to determine whether Mulvey’s argument was applicable to the film the full monty, which is about female gaze.
Key words: Laura Mulvey; female gaze; visual pleasure; mirror stage
I. Introduction
The full monty is set in Sheffied, England, and it features six unemployed men, four of them are former steel workers, who decide to form a male striptease act in order to replenish their empty wallets and boost their flagging moral by following the footsteps of the Chippendale’s strippers. These guys are men with a plan-displaced, unemployed, and feeling suffocated by the women in their lives. They just want to earn a little respect. On the one hand, they are desperate to find their dignity by way of making money; on the other hand they are all with irresistible sense of optimism. They intend to go the “full monty” and strip completely naked. In this hilarious, heartfelt comedy, these six friends discover the inner strength to bare it all in front of the world.
Some people say the dialogue and interaction between these men will have you screeching with laughter, but of equal importance is their sense of camaraderie and caring. It is a comedy, but it also touches on serious issues such as unemployment, father’s rights, depression, impotence, homosexuality, obesity, working class culture and suicide.
Cinema as a medium has a lot to do with how people view the world and how People view others and themselves. It is unarguably a strong medium in that it molds people’s perceptions and impressions. Being an audio-visual medium, it has a wider reach than literature, and transcends barriers of class, literacy, religion, and even language. It strongly captures one’s sense and sensibilities and its verisimilitude definitely has an impact on one’s understanding of how things are and should be. This is what cinema so likeable as well as so potent.
It has been noted by many critics that most of the female actresses are depicted in an exploitative manner in which their images in films cater to the gaze of the male moviegoers and in which their characters are sometimes just reduced to glamorized presences in the films.
But, The Full Monty has also become such an extraordinary cultural landmark. It was the first film to show the presence of female gaze. In this paper, I will discuss how the film The Full Monty relates to Laura Mulvey’s “visual pleasure” and Lacan’s “mirror stage”.
II. Theoretical foundations
The specific theories which will be used as the theoretical support in this paper consist of two aspects: the theory of “visual pleasure” from Laura Mulvey and Lacan’s mirror stage.
A: Laura Mulvey’s “visual pleasure”
Laura Mulvey is a Professor of Media and Film at Birkbeck, University of London. She is also a successful screenwriter, producer and director, and has written and edited many books and articles on the subject of contemporary film and feminist theory and practice. Her most famous work to date is her seminal essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, written in 1973 and first published in 1975 in the British film theory journal Screen. Mulvey’s essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ borrowed from popular psychoanalytical frameworks of the time, specifically Sigmund Freud’s concept of scopophilia during child development, and Jaques Lacan’s reinterpretation of this by his explanation of the child’s ‘mirror stage’.
Scopophilia, put simply, is the pleasure of watching. The concept as it is used by Mulvey is borrowed from the ‘anal stage’ of child development as suggested by Freud. Freud argued that an individual moves through the stages of oral andfixation before reaching the genital stage inmaturity. Applying these ideas to Hollywood film viewing, Mulvey suggested that women in film are represented as ‘objects’, images with visual and erotic impact, which she termed their ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’. Classical Hollywood films positioned the audience as male, and through identification with the male protagonist (Lacan) gave him an active role in viewing the female subject and gaining pleasure from doing so (Freud). This look, from audience to actress, is termed ‘the look’ or ‘the gaze’. According to Mulvey the look could be ‘voyeuristic’ (women are viewed as virtuous and beautiful) or ‘fetishistic’ (women are viewed as excessively sexual beings).
Throughout the decades following Mulvey’s essay, the concept of the gaze was developed to incorporate a number of different viewer-positions. For example:
The spectator’s gaze: the audience looking at the subject on the screen.
The male gaze: in keeping with Mulvey’s theory describes the male viewing the female, either voyeuristically or fetishistically.
The female gaze: accepts that women can also gain voyeuristic pleasure from looking at a subject, and that film techniques can sometimes be used to position the female audience to do so.
The intra-diegetic gaze: when one character in the text looks/gazes at another character in the text. Through the process of identification, this may lead to the spectator’s gaze also.
The extra-diegetic gaze: when a character in the text looks out of the text at the audience, breaking the imaginary ‘fourth wall’.
The gaze is inextricably linked to power relationships the bearer of the gaze has the power. In most cases, the subject of the gaze doesn’t even know they are being looked at (we assume); thus the bearer of the gaze has more knowledge than the subject, and therefore, more power. In Mulvey’s original essay, it is the male who holds this power, and the male film-maker who gives it to him. In developments of the theory, the bearer of the gaze may be female, and the subject may challenge the bearer’s power by gazing right back.
Mulvey’s essay was much discussed in the decades following its publication; she herself re-assessed it in 1981, when she pointed out that she had written the original essay as a starting point for further study and debate, rather than a reasoned academic study.
The original essay assumes that the film audience is a heterosexual male. This denies the possibility that women can enjoy films as much as men and considerably dates her argument. We now consider that an individual makes their reading from a highly subjective personal standpoint: male, female or transgender, straight, gay or bisexual, as well as influences from class and age and region.
It also assumes the protagonist is male, which may be the case for much of the classical Hollywood output (1910s-1960s, approx.), but is no longer always the case.
It is also generally accepted now that the male audience can enjoy, or even identify, with a female character’s point of view, and vice versa. Richard Dyer, for example, has written about the complex relationship created by many gay males with female stars.
B. Lacan’s Mirror Stage
In essence, the Mirror Stage, according to Lacan, refers to the moment in early childhood when the child perceives itself as an independent being.
In early infancy, the child has an imaginary identity with the mother, and forms their only sense of self as part of her. At some stage, generally between six and eighteen months, the child looks in the mirror and recognizes itself. It feels a sense of jubilation at its own independent existence, and this feeds into its ego and a sense of narcissistic pleasure.
When children first perceive themselves as independent of their mother by way of their mirror reflection, it is at a stage of frustration in their personal development; as their physical desires are greater than their physiological ability. They then consider their mirror reflection to be more able, more perfect, and more complete than they currently feel.
Mulvey believes that this stage leads into the process of film viewing in adulthood, as the mirror is replaced by the screen. The typical audience member gains a sense of narcissistic pleasure from identifying with the film’s protagonist, and following fascination with their filmic counterpart.
III. A Case Study of The Full Monty
This part aims to examine The Full Monty through the lens of Laura Mulvey’s “visual pleasure” and Lacan’s “mirror stage”.
How it works――The Full Monty
The Full Monty is a 1997 British comedy film with frequent use of British slang, and in particular the slang of Sheffield. The film’s title is a phrase generally used in the UK to mean ‘the whole lot’, or ‘the whole hog’; in the film, the characters use it to refer to full nudity ― as Horse says, “No one said anything to me about the full monty!”
The plot is simple. The once-successful steel mills of Sheffield, South Yorkshire, have shut down and most of the employees have been laid off. Gaz is facing trouble from his ex-wife over child support payments that he’s failed to make since losing his job.
One day, Gaz spots a crowd of women lined up outside a local club to see a Chippendale’s strip tease act. He gets the idea to form his own strip tease group using local men in hopes of making enough money to pay off his child support obligations. And the others, Dave, Lomper, Gerald, Horse, Guy, joined in one after the other.
Gaz was not agreeing to the idea of striptease at first. He thought it was disgusting. But when his son, Nathan, the most important person for him, said:” your house is messy. It’s cold and all.” “You always do stupid stuff like last night. Others’ dads don’t do that.” Here, his word is like “gaze”. The gaze is linked to power relationships. The bearer of the gaze has the power. But It’s not the power that bearer of the gaze has more knowledge than the subject, but the gaze from the one who “the be gazed” really care about. This gaze can work on the be gazed.
As for before they go to the stage, Dave decided to join the rest of the group minutes before they go on stage because of his wife’s gaze:” I do, I want to see you.” , which gained his confidence. Gaz, who himself refused to do it finally stand on the stage due to his son’s gaze:” Listen, I really get mad at you if you don’t get out and do your stuff.” And it is a huge success.
The film does make use of the gaze to make meaning throughout. It is clear that it is gaze, for me, anchors the meaning of the film.
Mulvey believes that the mirror stage leads into the process of film viewing in adulthood, as the mirror is replaced by the screen. The typical audience member gains a sense of narcissistic pleasure from identifying with the film’s protagonist, and following fascination with their filmic counterpart. So in this movie, the female audience can get a kind of visual pleasure of identification in the scene that Jane’s friend pees like men do, in this patriarchal culture. They want to do that, too. And they could even get much more pleasure when they hear Gaz says:” we will finish up, extinct. There will be no man except in the zoo.”
IV. Conclusion
Through the analysis of gaze and mirror stage, we can see this film more thoroughly. We all human beings can never escape from the influence of being gazed at. Make good use of it then we can achieve our goals, gain the confidence in living in this world better make life meaning just like people in the full monty do.
Notes:
[1]Laura Mulvey. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema[J]. 1975
[2]Jacques Lacan. The Mirror Stage[M]. 1977
[3]Slavoj zizek. How to Read Lacan. 2007
[4]Ananya Sensharma. Laura Mulvey and Bollywood songs: male gaze and female Spectatorship. 2007
作者简介：
唐茜（1989～ ），女，四川达州人，四川外国语大学研究生部2011级英语语言文学专业硕士研究生，研究方向：主要英语国家社会文化研究。