by Katie Bonevento
Laura Mulvey changed the world of film criticism forever when she published her essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, in 1975. In her essay, Mulvey argues that the artistic medium of film is centered around scopophilia-- a fascination with looking, and more specifically, the voyeuristic male fascination with looking at women. Drawing on psychoanalytic ideas pioneered by Freud, she posits that women onscreen pose an inherent threat to male filmmakers, audiences, and characters; their sexual differences from the men by whom they are surrounded evokes anxiety from said men. Mulvey claims that by nature, female characters are “subjected to [their] image as bearer of the bleeding wound, [they] can exist only in relation to castration and not transcend it” (Mulvey 838). In order to counteract the threat these women pose, male filmmakers will treat their female characters one of two ways: “[punishing] the guilty object,” or “turning the represented figure itself into a fetish so it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous” (Mulvey 844). Irvin Kershner’s 1978 thriller Eyes of Laura Mars is a film that is seemingly conscious of the ideas that Mulvey puts forward. It inverts Mulvey’s assumptions by allowing a woman to assume the male gaze-- fashion photographer Laura Mars, who experiences terrifying visions from the first-person point of view of a serial killer as he murders her friends one by one. The film makes a few refreshingly progressive insights on male pleasure in cinema-- Laura’s photographs are an obvious representation of the sexually violent nature of the male gaze, and the villain is a man who seeks to stop Laura from assuming the male gaze. However, despite its apparent awareness of Mulvey’s ideas, the film still falls victim to many of the traps she describes. For instance, Laura is masculinized as bearer of the gaze, fetishized because she is a woman, and continually punished for her assumption of the male gaze. Ultimately, Eyes of Laura Mars neither completely submits to traditional tropes nor boldly subverts them. It lies somewhere on the middle of the spectrum, a fascinating oddity that reveals early signs of Mulvey’s influence in the film world.
A clear example of the contradictions held within the film is the simultaneous masculinization and fetishization of Laura Mars. In addition to having the same first name and last initial as Laura Mulvey-- a suggestion of her possible influence on the movie-- her last name is that of the Roman god of war. Mars is often seen in art and literature as a symbol of masculinity, placed in contrast with Venus, goddess of love. The fact that Laura shares his name suggests to the audience that she will take on masculine qualities before the film even begins. However, she is often referred to by her entourage as “Miss Mars,” a feminizing, infantilizing moniker that dilutes the masculine power of her last name. Laura’s career as a photographer also masculinizes her. In her essay, Mulvey discusses the idea of the “subjective camera” (845); the gaze of the camera’s lens, she argues, binds together the voyeuristic gazes of the male characters in the film and the non-diegetic male spectators. Laura’s position as a woman behind the metaphorically male eye of the camera mirrors her visions of being behind the literal male eyes of the killer. Laura draws this parallel herself when explaining the nature of her psychic visions: “Think of the camera as the eyes of the killer,” she says. “What you’re seeing through that lens is what the killer sees.” Despite these masculinizing factors, though, Laura is still a woman and therefore fetishized; her body is “stylised and fragmented” by repeated lingering closeups on her legs and eyes (Mulvey 844).
Laura’s photographs themselves also have commentary to make about the male gaze. They are inspired by her visions of actual murder scenes-- “I see all kinds of murder,” she says when confronted about the suspicious similarities of her pictures to classified police photos. “I can’t stop it, but I can make people look at it.” Mulvey hints at a violence in the way women are “fragmented” by the male gaze-- they are cut into body parts by the camera, considered as collections of fetish objects rather than human beings (844). Laura uses her photographs to shine a light on this violence, but the media within the film fails to see this nuance, instead sensationalizing the nudity and blood that they contain. At the gallery opening near the film’s beginning, a female reporter approaches Laura, asking her if she knows how offensive her work is to women; not long after, a second, male reporter calls her pictures “violent and sexy” and questions whether they can be considered art. The scenes that show Laura’s photoshoots also provide insights into the way her work reckons with the male gaze. The first photoshoot in the film shows models dressed in lacy lingerie and fur coats tussling with each other in front of a flaming car wreck; in addition to the obvious contrast between the foreground of the scantily-clad models and the destruction in the background, the fact that the models wear fur coats, which require the death of animals to be produced, and lingerie suggests a blurring of the lines between sex and violence. The second photoshoot also conflates the two concepts by staging a scene of a man shot dead by a revealingly-dressed woman. Interestingly, the moment this scene comes together, Laura is struck with a vision of a real-life murder and the shoot abruptly comes to a close. Evidently, the male gaze is unable to handle seeing a man objectified in the same way that it objectifies women. .
The serial killer-- an alternate personality of Laura’s love interest, a police officer named John Neville-- claims that he is motivated by his disgust toward Laura’s photographs, which he believes glorify violence. However, it soon becomes clear that beneath the surface, he is disgusted by Laura herself for being a woman who bears the male gaze. Neville targets Laura’s closest friends and colleagues, almost exclusively women, viewing them as stand-ins for Laura. Even his two male victims-- Donald, Laura’s manager, and Michael, Laura’s ex-husband-- are feminized. Donald is dressed in Laura’s clothes when he is murdered, and Michael is portrayed as emotional, weak-willed, and needing to rely on the women with whom he is romantically involved throughout the film, emasculating him. The method the killer uses on his victims is stabbing them in the eye with an ice pick; in effect, blinding them with a phallic weapon. Mulvey writes that in film, the man takes on the role of “spectator” and the woman is reduced to “spectacle” (842), and it is clear that Neville’s rage at Laura for stepping into the traditionally male role drives his actions. At the film’s end, it is revealed that Neville witnessed his neglectful mother’s murder as a child, noting that her dried blood was “the color of [Laura’s] hair.” This episode from his past suggests possible Oedipal motives for his disdain towards Laura, as well as a possible origin for his conflation of sex and violence.
In spite of her subversive photography and co-opting of masculine power, Laura Mars is ultimately punished for assuming the male gaze. She is literally forced to watch the murders of all her friends, from the point of view of the murderer; throughout the film, she lives in a constant state of anxiety, never knowing when the next violent vision will come. Laura also shoulders an enormous amount of guilt over the deaths of her friends. She sees the murders as they happen; thus, by the time she is aware of their imminent demise, it is always too late for her to do anything about it. She is aware that it is her friends that are being targeted, and blames herself for it. A guest at Lulu and Michelle’s funeral tells her, “No matter who did the killing, you’re to blame,” and Laura’s despondent conversation with Neville after the funeral suggests that she shares this mentality. Laura’s suffering reaches its apex at the end of the film, when she discovers that the killer she fears and the man she loves are two aspects of the same person. “If you love me, kill him,” Neville commands Laura, and she shoots him with the gun he gave her earlier in the film. In the classic film noir tradition, the gun is another phallic symbol; Laura is punished for attempting to take on the male role by using her masculine power to kill her lover. Mulvey writes that in cinema, the man is “the main controlling figure” (842), and in the end it is Neville who is in control; he tells Laura to kill him, and she unquestioningly obeys.
Eyes of Laura Mars is a film that breaks new ground in its conscious reckoning with the concept of the male gaze, but ultimately, it does not go far enough. Even though Laura’s photographs brilliantly encapsulate the sexualized violence of the male gaze and Neville-- a man whose goal is to force Laura out of the spectator role-- is villainized, Laura is still fetishized and punished for daring to assume the gaze. Its inability to fully commit to denouncing the male gaze speaks to Laura Mulvey’s assertion that the artistic medium of film as we know it is inherently tied to the male gaze, and that change will not come until the film industry “[transcends] outworn or oppressive forms” and “[dares] to break with normal pleasurable expectations” (839).
Works Cited
Eyes of Laura Mars. Dir. Irvin Kershner. Columbia Pictures, 1978. Amazon Prime Video. Web. Accessed 1 April 2020.
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, 6th ed., Oxford University Press, 2004, pp. 837–848.