【Four-Corner Book Shadow】 Visual pleasure performance in "Ecstasy"
A visual pleasure performance in Ecstasy
Shen Yuxiao/Wen
Laura Mulvey's essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Film" is considered a pioneer in the field of film theory on feminist film criticism, translated into China as a benchmark paper, and is regarded as a model for Chinese feminist film criticism, so that popular scholars understand what women's film is.
First, Laura Muville used psychoanalytic theory as the theoretical basis for the paper, arguing that cinema offers many possible pleasures, and voyeurism is one of them. Freud associated voyeurism with the act of objecting others, subordinateting others to a controlling, curious gaze, essentially active.
Ecstasy is a 1958 suspense film directed by British director Alfred Hitchcock. The film tells a thrilling suspense story that unfolds from the love affair between Detective John Scotty and the client's wife, Mei Ling. Private detective Scotty's former classmate Ace finds him and entrusts him with stalking his wife, Mei Ling. Because Ace believes that his wife has been poisoned and is under the control of her dead grandmother, Charlotte. Scotty still stalked Mei Ling, although he thought it was ridiculous. The tracking process director completely uses Scotty's perspective to show what the people in the play see and hear in sync with the audience. The mysterious soundtrack and repressed framing provide the viewer with the thrill of voyeurism. The camera's imitation of the male protagonist's line of sight enables the audience to project themselves onto the actor in the process of watching the film, thus constituting a better image of fantasy in the audience's mind, the action of slowly approaching in the dark, the tracking that is always undiscovered, the discovery of the comparison in secret observation... Through this narcissism, the thrill of watching the film is obtained, and the audience experiences doubt, curiosity and nervousness.
Hitchcock touches on the probing side of the voyeuristic, and he makes his fascination with an image the subject of the film. In Ecstasy, the camera's subjective perspective dominates, and with the exception of a flashback from Judy's point of view, the narrative is organized around the male protagonist. Scotty's voyeurism was obvious: he fell in love with the woman he stalked and spied on. And the love of the two women in the play, Mickey and Judy, is completely subservient to the male protagonist Scotty.
Murvie believes that men can escape castration anxiety in two ways: by investigating the woman, deciphering her mystery, and by devaluing, punishing, or saving the guilty person. Scotty through the observation and investigation of Judy, cracked the secret of the mysterious Mei Ling, it turned out that Judy played Mrs. Ess Merlin, to Scotty to create the illusion of insanity, in the bell tower Ace pushed the real mrs. Merlin down, because of fear of heights Can not go to the bell tower Scotty heard Mei Ling fell from the building and thus became a witness to Mei Ling's suicide, everything is Ace and Judy co-starred in the drama.
The second way is to replace the object of fetishism with it or to transform the reproduced character itself into a fetish so that it becomes safe rather than dangerous. After Mei Ling committed suicide, Scotty re-enacted the seemingly Mei Ling Judy into Mei Ling, and his active, sadistic voyeurism forced her to match the actual appearance of her object of love in all details. As Bud Berticher points out: What matters is what the heroine inspires, or rather what she represents. She is the person, or rather she inspires feelings of love or fear in the hero, otherwise it is his concern for her, she makes him do that. And women themselves don't matter at all.
It is mentioned that to analyze pleasure or beauty is to destroy them, and this is the purpose of this article. We must attack the act of satisfying the self and reinforcing the self. The theoretical core of "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Film" lies in the deconstruction of the visual pleasure generation mechanism of classic Hollywood narrative films, in order to achieve the purpose of disintegrating the patrilineal social unconscious hidden in it.