A key argument made in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975) by noted feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey postulates that in cinema the ability to sadistically submit another person to one's will, or to the voyeuristic gaze, it is aimed at the woman as the object of both (23). Mulvey argues that the female figure as a cinematic icon is ultimately representative of sexual difference, a signifier of the male castration complex. The woman is “exposed to the gaze and enjoyment of men, the active controllers of the gaze,” but threatens to evoke castration anxiety. The male unconscious escapes castration by denying it, replacing it with a fetish object so that “it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous” (21). Mulvey describes this phenomenon as fetishistic scopophilia, which emphasizes the physical beauty of the object and converts it into something satisfying in itself. Mulvey argues that Alfred Hitchcock's film Vertigo (1958) uses processes of identification and subjective camerawork from the point of view of the male protagonist, John “Scottie” Ferguson (James Stewa...