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.”

Italian philosopher and writer, Antonio Gramsci has been enormously influential as a Marxist theorist of cultural and political domination. In one of his essays written during his imprisonment years, “The Formation of Intellectual,” he describes and discussed the concept of the intellectuals and its functional sense in two “strata” which expresses its notions to keep society together and in harmony. These distinct social categories have the role to create consciousness of the importance of one’s position in society. To him, each class produces its own intellectuals, composed of various groups in a society with specific roles in the process of economic, political, and cultural assembly. These intellectuals are identified by Gramsci in first place as the “traditional” and then “organic” intellectuals.
Traditional professional intellectuals are those in the sense of independence and autonomy of the dominant social groups and express a pre-existing historical, social, and cultural situation. Gramsci pointed out, “Traditional intellectuals are the administrators and apologists for existing social and cultural institutions, such as schools, various religious denominations, corporations, the military, the press, political bureaucracies, and the judicial system” (928). They represent a historical continuity that tends to represent and direct the interests of those in power. For example, the school system has a curriculum and standard base to maintain the hegemony of the capitalist state by producing employees instead of independent thinkers. The education system is a group of institutions that provide instructions, so people are “educated” to be part of the society (big masses) in accordance with norms already established by those people in power.
In contrast, organic intellectuals come into existence from the working class in social groups, a specialized scholars with specific both economic and political knowledge who challenged for the minds of the underclass body. They represent those who cannot express for themselves. Gramsci argues that “The organic intellectual does not simply parrot preexisting group beliefs or demands but brings to the level of public speech what has not been officially recognized” (928). They speak for the interests of subaltern populations who are incapable of doing and are able to direct and organize people. For example, Sharice Davids and Deb Haaland are the first Native American women elected to the United State Congress. Native Americans have been considered a marginalized minority and have never produced intellectual at the political level. These two characters have risen to power within their communities to a level never seen before while keeping their ties with their social class.
According to Gramsci, one’s class membership will determine whether one is an organic or traditional intellectual. These two classifications of intellectuals are responsible for social stability and change because they are in charge of the masses’ behavior and consciousness. They are at various levels within a society to defend their established superstructure and ideology.

Karl Marx, a German philosopher was best known for being a critic of political economy and socialist revolutionary during the 19th century. In that period, he was very analytical about the era of the industrial capitalist economy which in turn he had the vision that the nature of consciousness under capitalism brought the origin and impact of alienation to workers. To Marx, capitalist economies stimulated avarice and war amongst the greedy where competition was capital growth but in a few hands, unequal distribution of income. It created the world market which brought negative ideologies, misery, high social costs, and new social classes as well as private property, and propertyless workers where exploiters and the exploited came into being. Also, under capitalism, industrialists had more political power and used the private property to make profits from the exploited working class, making them just a means of gain. Marx emphasizes, “Relationships between workers and owners… are mediated through the things produced” (564).

From economic and philosophic manuscripts of 1844, Karl Marx developed the idea of “alienation of labour” which can be analyzed from different points of view where his ideas are that each worker acted as an instrument exploited and impoverished. What Marx meant by the word, “alienation”, is that the factory labour was separated and excluded from the product of their own labor, something like ceasing control which no longer belongs to them because it becomes an alien object. Marx says, “alienates” individuals from the work that they do; unable to control their own labor, which they must “give” (sell) to another, they lack control and knowledge of themselves and never achieve their full human potential (653).

Marx believes that capitalist labor dehumanizes people because capitalism breaks social bonds between members of the society, alienates workers from their own activities, and even alienates them from their own products they produce since “the laborer makes a wage and not a product.” According to Marx, the dehumanization occurs because workers are not compensated for their value of being human but rather by the wages imposed by employers converting employees into commodities. Marx believes this because the value of products is not dictated by the laborers but rather by the market which most of the time benefits the owners instead of the workers.

Marx argues that the main reason for the alienation is the fact that each worker is just a part of a complex system necessary for the production of goods and services and that workers do not own the means necessary to produce but rather they are only given access to the means necessary for production. Additionally, the conditions of production are not established by the workers themselves but by their employers. In essence, the few have the power over the many.

Marx’s view is that alienated labor will only cause “the perpetuation of the concept of private property.” Under this belief, Marx only solution is the complete overhaul of the entire economic system as we know it today by eliminating capitalism and private property.

Saussure’s approach in “From Course in General Linguistics,” teaches us linguistics in some different ways to understand language as a base on rules, “a social system”, not from one origin but through the principle of the “arbitrary,” which makes sense the desire to create meaning, the choosing of names for things, through our interpretation and intend of “nature of the signs.” The nature of the linguistic signs takes form and is founded when we invest in them, the sound image and the concept. Saussure’s theory is “The atom of language is the sign, which is functionally split into two parts: a signifier (sound-image) and a signified (concept), brought inseparably together like the two sides of a sheet of paper” (Saussure, 822). They are two different ways to look at and describe language or the semiotic world.

Saussure’s powerful model of the linguistic sign is composed of a signifier and a signified. The sound image according to Saussure is “the psychological imprint of the sound, the impression that it makes on our senses” (Saussure, 829), a fixed visual image of language accompanied by the synchronized sound of movements in speaking, the sum of a limited number of elements or phonemes that can in turn be called up by a corresponding number of written symbols which allow language to work. And the concept “immaterial,” is the individual mental construct, the free way I can speak to others in a society.

From the beginning of humanity, from the period of human being started to evolve, and the notion of communication was crucial to develop a society, our world became composed of thousands of cultures, hundreds of subcultures and tribes in each country, and even within a region in the same country. That is why language is a diversity of descriptions (signs), an arbitrary specific view and perception of each culture not on individual utterances. Where signs become a social building block of communication to express what we see in our own way unconsciously to then relate them to our familiar systems of conventions.

The sign is a recognizable bond of the association of the signifier with the signified, but this relationship is arbitrary because there is not necessarily any logical connection between the two, that is why there are different words, in different languages, for the same thing. In other words, the relationship between signifier and signified is made up of signs in different contexts.

In “What, then, is truth”? Nietzsche focuses on this word as a mysterious drive that humans do to preserve themself in relation to other individuals because human beings cannot be alone by nature, thus creating consciousness through the formation of arbitrarily repetitive concepts from subjective norms to fit in societies and to interact with others. Thereby, Nietzsche argues that truth has its basis not in absolute reality but in human language which was needed for expression and dissimulation of the sudden forms of thinking.

That is why he argues that the ideal concept of truth is a lie in the sense that it arises from various numbers of interests, historical context, and rules to which the eventual concept of truth does not properly apply because there is no distinction between what is factual and what is made up. Truth is the blindness of reality.

The kind of truth which in turn gives the first step towards something that must count as truth by designating something desired by human beings like peace and love; making those kinds of feelings common in a society in which the opposite is harmful and destructive and as a result are feelings of deception. Here is how the word “lying” was born to release our thoughts to make life more tolerable.

Nietzsche goes further suggesting that “truths are illusions of which we have forgotten that they are illusions”, Nietzsche’s argument is that the truth was formed when our beliefs, our words, and our concepts were based on our illusions instead of the way things really are in on themselves. An example is when you can see a constellation whose concept is “a group of stars that were imagined—at least by those who named them—to form conspicuous configurations of objects or creatures in the sky”. It relates in the same way that you do not know how and when humans started to imagine in their own perceptions created by their own minds which are based on individual experiences and perspectives.

He answers himself by saying that truth is just an interpretation based on our own perspective, all the things we think are real, are not really real. In a concept that is based on the idea that there is a single, absolute reality that exists independently of any individual’s beliefs or perspectives, which is seen as a universal, abstract concept that is not affected by individual opinion or interpretation. Truth is an elusive concept, as it is subjective and based on the individual’s perception of reality or simply facts.