Fetishism and Curiosity

Cinema and the Mind's Eye

Laura Mulvey

• Publisher: British Film Institute
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781838715687
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Film e video

Writer and film-maker Laura Mulvey is widely regarded as one of the most challenging and incisive contemporary cultural theorists, credited for incorporating film theory, psychoanalysis and feminism. Part of the pathbeating 1970s generation of British film theorists and independent film-makers, she came to prominence with her classic essay on the pleasures – and displeasures – of
narrative cinema, 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema'. She went on to make her own avant-garde films, co-directed with Peter Wollen, and to write further, greatly influential works – including this one. Fetishism and Curiosity contains writings which range from analyses of Xala, Citizen Kane and Blue Velvet, to an extended engagement with the creations of Native American artist Jimmie Durham and the feminist photographer Cindy Sherman. Essays explore the concept of fetishism as developed by Marx and Freud, and how it relates to the ways in which artistic texts work. Mulvey returns to some of the knottier issues in contemporary cultural theory, especially the links between looking, fantasy and theorisation on the one hand, and the processes of historical change on the other. What are the modes of address that characterise 'societies of the spectacle'? How might 'curiosity' be directed towards deciphering the politics of popular culture? These are just some of the questions raised in this brilliant and subtle collection. Published as part of the BFI Silver series, this new edition of Mulvey's classic work of feminist theory features a new, specially commissioned introduction and stills from the films discussed.

Contents

Foreword to the 2nd Edition: Fetishism and Curiosity Revisited

Acknowledgments

Preface

Introduction: Fetishisms

PART ONE What Price Hollywood?

1:Americanitis: European Intellectuals and Hollywood Melodrama

2:Social Hieroglyphics: Reflections on Two Films by Douglas Sirk

3:Close-ups and Commodities

PART TWO Dialectics of Division

4:Pandora's Box: Topographies of Curiosity

5:Cosmetics and Abjection: Cindy Sherman 1977–87

6:The Hole and the Zero: Godard's Vision of Femininity

PART THREE Dollar-Book Freud

7:From Log Cabin to Xanadu: Psychoanalysis and History in Citizen Kane

8:The Carapace that Failed: Ousmane Sembene's Xala

9:Netherworlds and the Unconscious: Oedipus and Blue Velvet

Postscript: Changing Objects, Preserving Time

Notes

Index

Fetishism and Curiosity Revisited

The Introduction to the first edition of Fetishism and Curiosity, written in 1995, is about certain key structures of misunderstanding that brought both Marx and Freud to apply the concept of fetishism (hitherto applied only to 'primitive' beliefs) to their own societies. Fetishisms disguise, on the one hand (Marx), the worker's labour as productive of value under capitalism and, on the other (Freud), the anxiety provoked by the maternal body perceived as castrated. These, too real, material bodies disappear into the spectacular forms of commodity fetishism and fetishised femininity. In the 1995 introduction, I turned to the idea of curiosity, the intellectual energy behind the drive to investigate and to know, as a counter to the visual excess, illusion and disguise that characterise fetishism. Curiosity invokes a spectrum of investigative activities, from a casual pleasure in decipherment, to seeing with the mind's eye, to the use of ideas that can throw light directly on these mis-understandings central to the comparative novelty of the capitalist system as well as the archaic human psyche. In this book, I suggest that feminist curiosity is specifically alerted and aroused by spectacular images of woman. The very excess of these images indicates that they conceal, or distract from, something troubling to the psyche, a mask, as it were, that, once reconfigured as a sign, reveals coded traces of repression and abjection.

The essays in Fetishism and Curiosity are divided into three sections. Part One deals with the Hollywood cinema of the studio system and so remains within the framework of most of my earlier writings about the cinema. Its chapters return to topics that I have considered before, such as melodrama, woman as spectacle and so on. In Parts Two and Three, on the other hand, I was attempting to move forward. Curiosity as a 'figure' for a feminist desire to think analytically about the fetishised female body is central to Part Two, which moves across Greek myth (Pandora), cinema (Godard) and art (Cindy Sherman). I hoped to dismantle the images of enigmatic femininity that typically produced a topographical opposition between inside and outside: an exterior (of cosmetic masquerade, seduction and artifice) concealing an interior (of abject 'stuff', bleeding and aging). I notice in retrospect the repeated use of terms such as rebus, puzzle, riddle, hieroglyph, for instance, and 'constantly searching for clues', and I visualise (in my mind's eye) the fetishised body falling apart once it has been reconfigured, out of a spatial pattern of inside/outside, the masquerade/the abject, into an enigma or a pattern that can be decoded.

Lilian Gish: 'female glamour and the development of cinema as industry fall into step' (see p. 53)

In Part Three, the question of fetishism relates more allegorically to dislocations in history, and I discuss two films (Citizen Kane and Xala) in which a proliferation of fetishised 'things' have distorted and obscure political reality so that its alienated subjects can no longer comprehend or tell their own stories. Here it is the films themselves that create a 'curious' mode of spectatorship, making visible, in their own formal organisation, the symptoms that fetishism leaves in coded traces or encryptments. These films incorporate the spectator into the process of decipherment, so that narrative and cinematic images demand to be seen with 'the mind's eye'. In this section too, the essays mix questions of cinema with Greek myth, in this case Oedipus, with its emphasis on a misunderstood history and the fatal relationship between fathers and sons. The Oedipus story provides the theoretical framework for the chapter on Blue Velvet. In the final essay, I discuss the way that Jimmie Durham builds a deciphering mode of spectatorship into his work, creating gaps and questions that can only be addressed by critical inquiry. His art is insistently incomplete and offers a commentary on fetishism's insistence on surface, finish and polish. The objects bear witness to the lost history of the native people in the Americas that can only be rendered in fragments, through traces, memories and stories and bits of things. The violence of conquest and its aftermath could only produce the conqueror's self-justification, the construction of an illusory 'wholeness', and an investment of the national imagination in the polished 'things' of commodity fetishism.

Although in Fetishism and Curiosity the concept of fetishism is by and large associated with belief, illusion and the refusal of knowledge, I was also interested in Freud's concept of disavowal and its strange psychic structure. While the psychoanalytic concept 'repression' implies that an unconscious idea has been successfully buried or transformed beyond recognition, disavowal implies that the psyche partially 'knows' what the fetish conceals. The fetishist, in Freud's locus classicus, maintains in uneasy balance two incompatible positions: he knows that the female body has no penis but, at the same time, he constructs the fetish object as a defence against this external reality. This theoretical point has an analogous relation to the disavowal of external realities within the fetishisms of mass spectacle, images of women and the social symptoms of commodity capitalism. As Christian Metz first pointed out (see my discussion below), the cinema shares the same dual structure, collecting into itself these paradoxes of knowledge and belief, reality and disavowal. While flourishing in popular culture as an industrial illusion, the cinema also attracts curiosity, the desire, that is, to 'figure out' its mechanism and unmask its illusion. Although this unmasking process is usually associated primarily with the avant-garde, it is worth remembering that Hollywood always enjoyed revealing its processes of production in the 'film within a film' genre, that its star system slips into an almost Brechtian distanciation and its conventions and repetitions are very far from the credibility demanded by a realist aesthetic.

But the occasional self-reflexivity of commercial cinema is also far from the investigative strategies that characterise avant-garde film, its concern for the machine's materiality and the reality of its mechanical process. There are particular paradoxes at stake in the process of projection: a machine for throwing light through celluloid frames onto a screen, it also manipulates the human eye, the source of the illusion of movement fundamental to the cinema's range of illusions. Disavowed as the source of the screen's eye-catching illusion, the projector stood concealed at the back of the theatre so that its clunky and noisy machinery could be invisible in inverse relationship to the visibility of the screen. Allegorically, within the structure of cinematic apparatus, the projector parallels the workers' labour power, unglamorous and invisible, concealed by the captivating qualities of the commodity as it circulates in the market. The projector (alongside, of course, the camera and the editing table) vividly embodies the way that the cinema belonged to the machine age of cogs and wheels, of moving parts. To emphasise the truism at stake in this allegory: just as the cinema's mechanisms belonged to industrial technology, so did its standardised production of entertainment belong to industrial capitalism and its mass audience belong to the industrialised working class.

In 1995, the concept of fetishism was useful as a theory that addressed the question of disavowed materiality and reality: whether of the labour power of the workers, the anatomical reality of the maternal body or the mechanisms of the cinema. At the time, in spite of television and, from the early 1980s, VHS home viewing, the cinema itself remained the same. In 1996, as Fetishism and Curiosity was published, it was possible to celebrate its hundredth birthday with confidence. Looking back, however, the book's introduction gives an intuition of social and technological change while being unaware of what was to come. 1995 now seems a pivot point, at which the critical centrality of materialism, so crucial for the concept of fetishism, would itself be displaced into the past. Fleetingly, an intimation of change intrudes into the book's consciousness. In a critique of post-modern 'dematerialisations' in which meaning detaches itself from, and floats free of reference, I wrote:

the aesthetics of post-modernism might reflect, in turn, new economic and financial structures. The problem of reference, from this angle, is not restricted to the image and aesthetics, but leads back to the economics of capitalism itself'.¹

I go on to suggest that, as finance capitalism flourishes, and 'money makes money out of money', producing profit outside the exploitation of the labour power of the working class, 'the free -floating signifier may, itself, be a signifier of changes in the economic base.' While, earlier, disavowal had seemed a psychic mechanism that could maintain in balance illusion and the materiality of labour, by this time the infrastructure had shifted: 'the disavowal of the processes of industrial production now disguises the collapse of industrial production itself'. These tentative thoughts were clearly a response to the 'dematerialisation' of the industrial working class in the UK during the Thatcher period and were intended only to reflect on the national fate of industrial capital; commodity production was shifting elsewhere (to Asia, for example) in the reconfiguration of capitalism under globalisation. The 'free-floating' nature of capitalism was, at the same time, assisted and aggravated by other neo-liberal policies taking off through the 1980s and 90s, such as deregulation of banking and investment and the privatisation of social services. These economic trends, from a semiotic perspective, loosen the links of reference and meaning between the workings of capitalism and society while strengthening links across its increasingly multifaceted, obscure and global structures.

In 1995 I was unaware of th...