P1: TIX/XYZ JWST145-c02
P2: ABC JWST145-Young
January 6, 2012
9:51
Printer Name: Yet to Come
The Search for Meaning
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to be looked at by the male characters. Therefore, viewer identification is located in a masculine perspective. Mulvey uses Freud’s notion of castration anxiety to argue that staring at a woman is anxiety-provoking; for a woman viewer, the female star is a reminder of what she has lost, and to a man, what he could lose (literally, the penis; figuratively, power). Mainstream cinema copes with this voyeuristic anxiety by either punishing the woman (“bad girls” and “bitches”) or fetishizing her, making her into an untouchable superstar.60 Mulvey exemplifies her argument by considering several Hitchcock films that express both sadism toward women and fetishism. In Vertigo, the first half of the film is dedicated to Scotty’s (Jimmy Stewart) trailing of the graceful and sophisticated Madeleine (Kim Novak). Hitchcock uses long tracking shots that lovingly capture the beauty of both the perfect blonde and the city of San Francisco. The second half of the film explores Scotty’s sadistic attempts to transform the unsophisticated lookalike Judy (also played by Novak) into Madeleine. Given the pleasure that the audience receives from Hitchcock’s manipulation of the gaze, Mulvey argues that the purpose of her essay is to “destroy pleasure” by revealing the underlying sexist ideology behind the movie.61
Closing Shots: The Boons and Banes of Interpretation This chapter has focused on interpreting movies as texts, symbolic containers that can be unpacked and found to contain meaning. Some critics have argued it is a mistake to focus on anything other than the text—that focusing on filmmakers risks limiting interpretation to what they might have intended, which is largely inaccessible and sometimes inane and inarticulate (the intentional fallacy). On the other hand, focusing on viewers risks getting caught up in momentary emotional experience that takes the analyst away from the real truth contained in the text (the emotional fallacy).62 Very few, if any, of the interpretations presented in this chapter succeed in completely excluding filmmakers and viewers. Some refer to the motives (particularly the unconscious sort) of filmmakers. And many interpretations, especially in the spectatorship section, discuss the experience of the viewer. Even when there are no explicit references to viewers, the use of language associated with psychology suggests an implied viewer.63 If critics refers to a film as “disturbing” it is reasonable to assume that they were disturbed or that they believe that the film is likely to disturb at least some