The following post is a response to reading:
The Pornographic Image and the Practice of Film Theory
- Cinema Journal, Vol. 27, No. 2 (Winter, 1988), pp. 27-39
- Published by: University of Texas Press on behalf of the Society for Cinema & Media Studies
The first thing that comes to my mind when I think of "Masculinity and Film" (and this will not surprise you) is "man-bits." Every film class ever touches upon the patriarchal context of every film ever's creation: it all comes down to a man's down-under....doesn't it?
The focus of masculinity's effect on film is a filmic focus of various portrayals of feminitity. Heteronormative film typically caters to men who like to look at women, and what more extreme scopophilic tendency does film have than to lend itself to not merely a voyeuristic, but a pornographic gaze.
Pornography typically emphasises "looking" over narrative, so one could assume that conventional film theories on the male-gaze would apply extra to this filmic medium. This assumption prompted me to do a wee bit of research on men in porn and whether or not that does or does not deviate from the Mulvey, Lacan and Freud schools of thought.
Prince begins his article by attempting to challenge the "shortcomings of post-structuralist, psychoanalytic account[s] of sexual representation." Now, this may be over my head, but it looks like he's picking fights with theoretical conventions that easily diagnose the male-gaze and its castration fear a la Mulvey.
I thought he made an interesting point that a problem of film theory is that is dismisses the object of its study. He gave an interesting example of the lady who studied and theorised on porn in a paper without ever citing a specific film or image.
Before Prince totally banishes Lacan and Freud from the realms of analysing porn, he takes their slant and likens all film to an analog-code; he mentions the film-as-dream idea and how that lends itself to (theoretical) interpretation. Prince also handily recaps Freud's theory that all sexuality begins as perverse (because it is objectless and auto-erotic --much like porn, no?) and, according to heteronormative standards, sexuality is like a journey to the "morally OK" man + woman, and one must be wary that they do not stray along this path to heteronormative monogamy.
Prince then goes on to explain the different usages of the notion of the fetish. When I first learned about Mulvey and her take on fetishism and the fear-of-castration, I was confused by the disjunct of the word 'fetish' that Prince here points out. Freud and co. do not have a place in pornographic analysis (according to Prince) because of the use of the filmic fetish.
Prince quotes "the iconicity of the female disavows the threat of the castration signifier" and recalls conventional film theory which states that the female as "signifier of threat or anxiety or castration within a phallocentric order will generate textual strategies (fetishisms) to contain this threat." This completely goes against the pornographic definition of a fetish and pornography's tendency to highlight, emphasise, zoom-in-on and absolutely flaunt images of female genitalia for male viewing pleasure. According to Prince's take on Mulvey's theory, men who watch graphic pornography would be horrified by the female-lack as opposed to aroused by it.
This is the main paradox of the application of conventional theory to pornography: porn centres around images of the vagina whereas Hollywood film completely denies them.
According to Prince, the term 'fetishism' has evolved into 'scopophilia,' a deviation from its intended meaning when used by Mulvey in her paper.
Freud would also have to condemn pornography as perverse, according to Prince, as Freud believed all sexuality to be driven by impulses of looking and cruelty, therefore pornography would be an extreme case of film based upon "pain and punishment." So...film is mean? And porn's just the meanest?
Prince catches himself by harkening back to his earlier claim that the theory must not ignore the subject about which it is theorising. But to prove any theory about porn is nigh impossible due to the sheer volume and diversity of pornography created. However, Prince does prove a point.
Prince successfully disproves certain assumptions that conventional (aka Mulvey, Lacan, Freud) film theories by applying them to pornography where they have no place, seemingly.
Prince disproves the assumed 'centrality of male sexuality and the male gaze' by using empirical data. Conventional theorists would say that the female form on screen is there for male scopophilic pleasure, even in lesbian porn where the male 'presence' is inserted through the use of sex toys and such, and through the seeming 'goal' or pornography being male penetration of the film. Prince calls upon a UPenn study that showed that only 29% of lesbian porn used male-coded sex toys and only 71% of all pornography studied ended in penetration. Therefore the assumed male-viewer does not 'get his way' as he would with conventional cinema.
The male gaze is also ignored by further statistics which show that males disrobe on screen more than females and that there is almost equal initiation of sex by the male and the not-so-castrating female on screen. Conventional theory says that "man is reluctant to gaze at his exhibitionist like" but pornography shows that this is not universally true.
Whilst Prince's argument is a brave one, he does, in my opinion, a good job of giving film theory a run for its money. I was most interested by one of his final claims that film theorists should assume an empirical lense when approaching the study of film. Of course, any theory or hypothesis needs evidence, but his theories are a good reminder to study a variety and a volume of film before claiming any generalised 'truths' about the structure, purpose of representations of film.
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