Embed Notice

There's specific language in a subsection of Laura Mulvey "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1973) titled "Destruction of Pleasure as a Radical Weapon" that I find really useful:

"It is said that analysing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the intention of this article."

I'm doing her a disservice by taking this little passage so severely out of context, but I want this portion in particular because it's been meaningful to me as a killjoy, and it's meaningful to me because I've been taking it out of context (I do not support psychoanalysis, a subset of psychiatry, and I'm opposed to projects that incorporate it, even as a metaphor-based framework). I do like, regardless of context, that Mulvey asserts her project as a killjoy project. If it ruins your fun at the cinema to be made more aware of how centrally it relies on the objectification of women, then you can die mad about it. (I'm not not thinking here of people who respond to feminist and other social justice-related critiques of popular media with an accusation that the critic is ruining their fun. Then suffer!)