In the essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey exposes many arguments about how women were oppressed in an industry where most screenwriters are men and dominated from a masculine point of view. Mulvey, a British feminist film theorist of the 1970 generation, argues how women are seen simply as subjects to satisfy masculine scopophilia in films as objects of sexual pleasure without being seen either by those on screen or by other members of the audience. Mulvey points out, “The visual techniques of cinema afford viewers two contradictory pleasures. First, through the process Freud terms scopophilia (pleasure in looking), we enjoy making others the object of a controlling gaze.”
Her writing published in 1975 in the influential British film theory journal Screen was one of the earliest pieces of feminist criticism of women in films as passive objects than subject matter according to the narrative film. All of these, because of sexual differences and inequality conditioned first to privilege masculinity by giving pleasure to the male gaze, and the desire to look at the female form as an object to find sexual stimulation, “scopophilic.”
The woman, unlike men, goes beyond the content of a film because they are seen as a visual apparatus within a complete system opposite how a classic narrative film should be. A complete industry where the men are who occupy the active positions, the hero who makes things happen compared to women who are mainly an erotic objects for the spectator, the characters at each other within the screen illusion and the camera. Women frequently occupy passive positions where the principal focus were to illustrate a woman’s body and scenes aimed to male viewers instead of specifically enjoying the spectacle and narrative of the film involved in looking.
Also, Mulvey extends her psychoanalytic insights of both Sigmund Freud with his term scopophilia which is the “pleasure in looking” and Jacques Lacan in his development of selfhood through “The mirror stage,” which highlights the pleasure of an ideal ego on the screen to understand how films that are widely released in cinemas provide the perfect atmosphere for pleasing scopophilic desires. The screen reflects our fantasies and desires but also creates illusions of ideal characters by exerting our own desire while we are watching in the light of the screen. Mulvey explains, “In film terms, one implies a separation of the erotic identity of the subject from the object on the screen (active scopophilia), the other demands identification of the ego with the object on the screen through the spectator’s fascination with and recognition of his like.”

Ngai has an interesting perspective upon the analysis of humans and their feelings, particularly “ugly” feelings. Mentioning feelings in the grand tradition within literature, she prattles about how it’s prone to last forever and how they’re interchangeably embedded within us. Ngai expresses how we are grounded to it, and no matter the strength of that infatuation we feel more human and more fulfilled no matter the feeling, whether it be anger, envy, or essentially wrath which can’t sustain itself indefinitely. One might feel but also want to disembark from it. When you feel envy of someone you might feel jealous, and when jealousy arises one might hate that cycle of oppressed feelings. It builds up to irony, and being stuck in between two positions. Towards the end of her argument on “ugly” feelings she states an interesting theory on the relationship of irony and “ugly” feelings. We use irony when we want to express a critical distance, more so like pushing ourselves away from something. We have a rhetorical mode that we adopt to distance ourselves from something. Perhaps it could be a form of manipulation in one way, but it’s a hinging strategy to deny something in an evasive way. Ngai puts pressure on how these “ugly” feelings are the irony they swim in. One can’t help but to experience this mode of feelings. These “ugly” feelings tend to be phobic, and quite scary to experience internally. Taking a look at paranoia, it can be seen as an example of it locating and controlling everything within someone. 

Additionally within her study, she forms an interesting analysis towards the “aesthetic emotion” one can feel. She gives examples pertaining to how it’s quite “amoral” and “non cathartic” in a sense of interfering with what is originally meant to be displayed. It’s a changed occurrence that interchangeably changes the meaning of that specified feeling. When one feels a sense of anger, it could start to perhaps mean, a feeling of anxiety. With a positive connotation of “aesthetic” it’s more so meant to examine the work of “ugly” feelings/emotions. In particular, she highlights Aristotle, where he engages in tragedy within poems. Aristotle argues that as the audience, we should feel apathetic towards Oedipus as he killed his father and began a relationship with his mother. To feel this way, according to Ngai, is horrible. We shouldn’t feel sympathetic towards a concoction such as that.

Lacan brings to us a really interesting conversation with his essay “The Mirror Stage”. Lacan explores the development of the human psyche and its relation to the external world. This stage is important as it marks the point at which the child first becomes aware of itself as an independent entity separate from the world around it.

Lacan argues that the mirror stage occurs around the age of six months when the child first recognizes its own reflection in a mirror. When a youngster recognizes its own picture, they feel joy and satisfaction, and this experience serves as the catalyst for the development of the ego, or concept of self. Lacan points out that the picture the kid sees in the mirror is not a true reflection of their physical selves, but rather a gestalt, a more complete view than the child’s own fragmented perception of themselves. In this context, the mirror stage indicates a point of mistaken identity or the development of an imagined bond between the infant and its reflection. I find it really interesting that we can get past that idea as we’re so used to our reflection at an older age, but as a younger human with no answers, that’s what we perceive.

One of the most interesting aspects of Lacan’s theory is his account of the “scission” or split that occurs in the mirror stage. Lacan believes that the separation between the “I” and the “me,” between the subject who sees and the observed picture, results from the child’s experience of its own reflection. As the subject realizes that its image is not truly this but rather an outside object, this split makes the subject feel alienated.

Overall, Lacan’s idea of the mirror stage provides an argumentative explanation of how the human psyche grows and how the ego is formed. His focus on the significance of early childhood events in forming our sense of self is generally acknowledged and continues to have an influence on modern psychology.