Freud: wait, what?

If we talked about the Introduction of Laura Mulvey’s Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema and nothing else in section on Friday, I would be a happy man, and this would probably also run contrary to Mulvey’s intentions with her piece. The reason why I would be happy is twofold, and Mulvey neatly divides it for us in parts A and B. It is because I want to ask two questions. The first question I want to ask is can one be compelled by the theory of the three looks and agree that they, at least in part, contribute to the pleasure of a (positive) cinematic experience, and still find the psychoanalytic foundation on which they are made to be outrageous. To put it another way, to what extent is Mulvey’s argument dependent on Freud, or is Freud being used ironically by her to argue against the patriarchy through one of the 19th and 20th centuries most influential patriarchs? To name one example, when Mulvey argues on page 201 that “…conditions of screening and narrative conventions give the spectator an illusion of looking in on a private world,” I believe that claim to be true both experientially and anecdotally. But, when I look back at the theoretical grounds on which the claim is made—“The paradox of phallocentrism in all its manifestation is that it depends on the image of the castrated woman to give order and meaning to is world” (198)—I find it impossible, first, not to challenge that assertion or at least acknowledge that it’s embedded within a discourse that is currently facing challenges it did not face when Freud was writing; and second, I also find it impossible not to imagine that in some sense Mulvey must be joking, or at least riffing on Freud’s understanding of the world with which I would think she disagrees (I doubt penis envy is a universally agreed upon phenomenon anyway, not to mention among feminists). I think it would be fruitful to talk about the tension between plausible and implausible argument, and about the absurdity (or the lack of absurdity for all you apologists for Freud; I would love to hear your stances) of Freud to the modern ear.
The other thing I would like to discuss is the same question that Professor Chun ended Monday’s lecture with, the question of whether or not analyzing pleasure or beauty destroys it (Mulvey, 200). My inclination from the brief amount of time I have spent in academia is to say certainly not for some people, but I suppose that’s not the interesting question either. The question that really seems worth asking is whether or not a “negation of the ease and plenitude of the narrative fiction film” is possible given the medium itself. Sure, it’s one thing to, as in Ceddo, move away from some of the misogyny, xenophobia, racism, and homoeroticism (to name a few themes) present in classic Hollywood cinema to make way for something else, but does that move actually succeed in destroying pleasure or a certain facile quality to film? And furthermore, I would like to ask what Mulvey means when she claims she does not want the “reconstruct[ion of a] new pleasure” but instead “to conceive a new language of desire” (200). What is the difference, exactly? There’s much to discuss…