FETISHISM AND CURIOSITY Laura Mulvey INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS Bloomington and Indianapolis st, V &*» "2£ >of( BFI PUBLISHING First published in 1996 by the British Film Institute 21 Stephen Street, London W1P 2LN and the Indiana University Press 601 North Morton Street, Bloomington, Indiana 47404 The British Film Institute exists to promote appreciation, protection and development of moving image culture in and throughout the whole of the United Kingdom. Its activities include the National Film and Television Archive; the National Film Theatre; the London Film Festival; the Museum of the Moving Image; the production and distribution of film and video; funding and support for regional activities; Library and Information Services; Stills, Posters and Designs; Research; Publishing and Education; and the monthly Sight and Sound magazine. Copyright €> Laura Mulvey All rights reserved British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0-85170-5480 0-85170-5472 pbk US Cataloguing data available from the Library of Congress A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 0-253-33211-7 (clothbound) ISBN 0-253-21019-4 (paperbound) Cover design: Romas Foord Cover image: Les Vampires. Hartfort, 1916 (from Les Affiches du Cinema Francais by Jean-Louis Capitaine) Typeset by D R Bungay Associates, Burghfield, Berks Printed in Great Britain by St Edmundsbury Press Ltd, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk For my son, Chad Wollen, with love and gratitude for the extent of his enthusiasms - most especially, movies and Marxist theory. Contents Acknowledgments ix Preface xi Intoduction Fetishisms 1 PART ONE WHAT PRICE HOLLYWOOD? Chapter 1 Americanitis: European Intellectuals and Hollywood Melodrama j 19 Chapter 2 Social Hieroglyphics: Reflections on Two Films by Douglas Sirk 29 Chapter 3 Close-ups and Commodities 40 PART TWO DIALECTICS OF DIVISION Chapter 4 Pandora's Box: Topographies of Curiosity 53 Chapter 5 Cosmetics and Abjection: Cindy Sherman 1977-87 65 Chapter 6 The Hole and the Zero: Godard's Visions of Femininity 77 PART THREE DOLLAR-BOOK FREUD Chapter J From Log Cabin to Xanadu: Psychoanalysis and History in Citizen Kane 97 Chapter 8 The Carapace that Failed: Ousmane Sembene's Xala 118 Chapter 9 Netherworlds and the Unconscious: Oedipus and Blue Velvet 137 Postscript Changing Objects, Preserving Time 155 Notes 177 Index 185 Acknowledgments Introduction has been adapted from 'Some Thoughts on the Theory of Fetishism in the Context of Contemporary Culture', October no. 65, Summer 1993. Chapters 1 and 2 have been developed from 'It Will Be a Magnificent Obses• sion. The Melodrama's Role in the Development of Contemporary Film Theory' in Jacky Bratton, Jim Cook, Christine Gledhill (eds), Melodrama. Stage Picture Screen (London: BFI, 1994). I would like to thank Christine Gledhill for inviting me to the conference on which the book is based. Chapter 3 is based on a lecture entitled 'Cinema and Sexuality' given as one of a series in honour of the centenary of cinema at the Museu da Imagem e do Som, Sao Paolo. I would like to thank Ismail Xavier for inviting me to contribute to this event. Chapter 4 has been adapted from 'Pandora. Topographies of the Mask and Curiosity', first published in Beatriz Colomina (ed.), Space and Sex• uality (Pririceton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992). I would like to thank Beatriz Colomina for inviting me to the conference from which this volume is drawn. Chapter 5 was first published as 'A Phantasmagoria of the Female Body. The Work of Cindy Sherman' in New Left Review July/August 1991. Chapter 6 was first published as 'The Hole and the Zero. The Janus Face of the Feminine in Godard' in Colin MacCabe and Raymond Bellour (eds), Jean-Luc Godard: Son + Image (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1992). Chapter 7 has been adapted from my book Citizen Kane (BFI Film Classics; London: BFI Publishing, 1992). Chapter 8 was first published as 'Xala: Ousmane Sembene 1976. The Carapace That Failed' in ThirdTextnos 16 and 17, Autumn/Winter 1991. Chapter 9 also appears as The Pre-Oedipal Father; the Gothicism of Blue Velvet\ in A. Lloyd Smith and V. Sage (eds), Modern Gothic: A Reader (Manchester: Manchester University Press 1996). Postscript is reprinted with kind permission of Phaidon Press. It originally appeared as Changing Objects, Preserving Time' in Jimmie Durham (London: Phaidon Press, 1995). I would like to acknowledge the generosity of the following: The Society of the Humanities, Cornell University, for a Senior Fellow• ship, Fall Semester 1990; The Regents of the University of California for a Regents' Professorship at the University of California, Davis, Spring Quarter 1992; The Department of Women's Studies, The Ohio State University, for a Visiting Professorship, Fall Semester 1992. I would like to thank: Jonathan Culler Director of the Society of the Humanities at Cornell, and all the administrative staff at the A.D White House, for their kindness and hospitality; also, the Fellows of the academic year 1990-1, especially Jonathan Nagate, for viewing and discussing Xala with me. Irit Rogof, for suggesting and supporting my appointment as Regents' Professor, Sabrina Barton and Phil Barish for extraordinary help during my stay at University of California, Davis, and everyone who attended my seminar there. Judith Mayne, for inviting me to Ohio State, and Christina Lane for her help with my administrative and academic work. My colleagues at the British Film Institute, especially Paul Willemen for his patience during the many exacting moments he spent editing this book as well as his lively engagement with its contents, and Colin MacCabe for continuing, over the last ten years, to encourage me to publish my work. My sister, Rosamund Howe, officially for her exemplary copy-editing, but also for many other acts of help and support. Preface The essays in this collection were written over the last five years. Although they are presented in thematic groupings rather than in the strictly chrono• logical order of their writing, the sequence roughly corresponds to shifts in my ideas or, rather, to the inflection of my preoccupations. The Introduc• tion represents an attempt to give an overview of the notions of fetishism deployed throughout the book. While writing most of these essays, I thought of fetishism as a psychological and social structure that dis• avowed knowledge in favour of belief. At the same time, I was interested in considering curiosity, a desire to know, as a counterpoint to the blind- spots of fetishism. By degrees, I came to realise that the psychoanalytic concept of fetishism, because it could maintain knowledge and belief si• multaneously, was more open to processes of decoding than other symp• toms of unconsciousness. Its symptoms appear reified as things that at• tract the gaze but also provoke curiosity. Rather than seeing fetishism and curiosity as irreconcilably polarised, I tried to find a more dialectical rela• tion between them. The cinema is the main, but not the only, cultural area under considera• tion in this book. And my ideas are explicitly influenced by feminism, even if issues of femininity are not, for instance in the last few chapters, obvi• ously under discussion.1 More and more, I have tried to bring together questions of history with the theories that have formed my way of think• ing. Part One is about Hollywood cinema of the studio system and so re• mains within the framework of most of my earlier writing about cinema. The chapters in Part One very obviously go back over ground that I have covered before, such as the Hollywood melodrama, Douglas Sirk, woman as spectacle in Hollywood cinema, and so on. But here I have also at• tempted to provide a historical dimension to my discussion of these famil• iar topics. My use of the term 'history' here is too monolithic. Chapter 1, 'Americanitis', is explicitly autobiographical and traces the imbrication of xi my intellectual development with successive waves of British film theory. Chapter 3 is only a "sketch towards a mapping' of familiar questions of spectatorship and femininity onto a more historical framework. It sug• gests that, while the iconography "woman as spectacle' persists through• out the Hollywood cinema, the meaning and address of the icon may alter significantly according to inflections within the social, economic and even political dimensions. My new concern with questions of history is partly a grateful re• sponse to the research into the history of the Hollywood industry that is taking place, primarily in the United States. However, I can only re• spond to, rather than participate in, these important discoveries and, even more importantly, nuances given to our understanding of film his• tory. As my work with film theory only very gradually acquired an aca• demic context, I have remained an "essayist' and, I would say with no intended self-denigration, a dilettante. This book reflects the strengths and the weaknesses of my intellectual formation, and I hope that it will be read in this light. In the process of editing these essays, most of which have been pub• lished previously in more or less different forms, I found that certain themes kept recurring almost to the point of repetition. I have left the repetitions, particularly in Part Two, seeing them as a thread of ideas which, as they accumulate, bear witness to a struggle to articulate images of femininity which I find both fascinating and difficult. In this section, I shift from the deciphering spectator, who is not so distantly related to Barthes's "reader' and who responds to the semiotic regime developed so particularly by Hollywood, towards the "rebus' of the fetishised female body. I found that I returned over and over again to the way that this body materialises as an imaginary spatial relation, a phantasmatic topography.