Laura Mulvey's Gaze Theory in The Silence of the Lambs

Introduction: Mulvey and the Male Gaze

Laura Mulvey's arguments in Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema are readily illustrated with reference to Jonathan Demme's 1991 film The Silence of the Lambs. The two texts together offer a striking opportunity to test Mulvey's psychoanalytic film theory against a Hollywood thriller that both embodies and complicates her central claims about gender, desire, and the cinematic gaze.

Scopophilia and the Cinematic Apparatus

Mulvey's starting point is psychoanalytic, and suggests that the image of the female is the means by which filmic meaning is constructed. This begins with her critique of the "phallocentric" mode of thinking, in which a woman is understood to be nothing more than a castrated male, and is therefore the focus of horrified — and desirous — observation. She views film itself as a technological construction designed to intensify "pleasurable looking," pushing it into the sexualized realm of voyeurism, or scopophilia: "The cinema satisfies a primordial wish for pleasurable looking, but it also goes further, developing scopophilia in its narcissistic aspect."

This means that the narcissism of the viewer — understood by Mulvey to be male — is gratified by the way in which psychology and its social construction are represented within the film. Mulvey's argument identifies how an audience's narcissistically-based sexual instinct (ego libido) is invited to identify with, and also to distinguish itself from, the objects held up for sexual display:

The Gaze in The Silence of the Lambs

"The scopophilic instinct (pleasure in looking at another person as an erotic object), and, in contradistinction, ego libido (forming identification processes) act as formations, mechanisms, which this cinema has played on. The image of woman as (passive) raw material for the (active) gaze of man takes the argument a step further into the structure of representation, adding a further layer demanded by the ideology of the patriarchal order as it is worked out in its favorite cinematic form — illusionistic narrative film."

Mulvey's conclusions are particularly illuminating when applied to The Silence of the Lambs. The film was released sixteen years after the initial publication of Mulvey's essay, and in some ways it almost seems as though Demme were responding to, or grappling with, some of her main points. The dynamic of observation within the film works in multiple directions. The clue that Hannibal Lecter gives to Clarice Starling about how she will find Jame Gumb involves the notion of "what he covets" — what he desires in a transgressive way — and the principle that "we begin by coveting what we see every day."

Jame Gumb and Transgressive Desire

In this sense, it is Buffalo Bill's proximity to his first victim, Fredrika Bimmell — and his chance to observe her and, crucially, to take eroticized Polaroid photographs of her that Starling will later discover — that leads to the construction of desire as "coveting." Jame Gumb's erotic fixation on the girl does not produce a desire to sleep with her, but a desire to inhabit her body. This fits squarely within Mulvey's account of how the female body is constructed under a phallocentric model.

Gumb's desire to enact the "identification process" with a desirable female body reaches its most explicit expression in the notorious scene in which he conceals his phallus between his legs and performs — again, crucially — for a video camera. The presence of the camera is not incidental: it reinforces the link between technological mediation, the gaze, and the construction of gender identity that Mulvey identifies as central to the cinematic apparatus.

That Jame Gumb is, to a significant degree, defined by his gaze is indicated not only by Lecter's hint, but by his physical presence in the film's final confrontation with Starling. He wears elaborate night-vision goggles, which identify his capacity to see with the technological construction of a nocturnal predator. The audience is briefly invited to see through those goggles — revealing the flailing and terrified Starling in eerie monochrome — and this perspective makes clear that the desire to view this spectacle is, for Gumb, a stronger motivation than the desire to kill the FBI agent who has discovered him.

It is Starling who kills Gumb. The audience is then permitted to view him wearing the goggles in his death agony, an image that clearly makes him resemble one of the insects that have played a part in the murders — and that recalls an earlier scene with the entomologists in which Starling must navigate yet another group of men who find her desirable.

Conclusion: Phallocentrism and Outsider Status

In some sense, Demme's film addresses Mulvey's concerns about phallocentrism by making both Starling and Gumb outsiders in a culture of gender normativity. For Starling, this involves the constant experience of having her gender observed, interpreted, and instrumentalized by the men around her. For Gumb, it involves a radical and violent form of gender envy — a desire not to possess the feminine but to become it. The subjective social position occupied by Starling is, to a significant degree, the very position that Jame Gumb wishes to occupy. In this way, The Silence of the Lambs does not simply illustrate Mulvey's framework; it dramatizes the psychic and social costs that framework describes.