Newsletter #4

 Happy autumn!

Zworsky’s Children

Here it is. Last Stand is now available to pre-order! The paperback and hardcover will be available to purchase on November 11.

 

Thank you to Stuart Bache for designing another amazing cover. A huge thank you as well to Lynda at Easy Reader Editing for copyediting the book. I’m so excited to share the conclusion of the Zworsky series. With that being said, I’ve also written another story set in the Zworsky universe, which I’ll share next year.

Hitchcock Project Update

The journal did not accept the revisions I made to my article. Rejections are always tough, but they come with reviewer feedback that can really help improve the work. In fact, the pressure to address the comments got me back into the groove of academic writing.

The Hitchcock project is moving along faster than I expected. All five chapters are now written, including the introduction, and I’m currently doing a fine edit. After that, I’ll write the conclusion. I’ve even started working on a textbook proposal form, which I plan to begin submitting to publishers next year.

My Lovely Dark Summer

My new mystery and coming-of-age novel will be sent for copyediting in November. I designed the cover myself and will reveal it toward the end of the year. The release date is set for the first week of February, and I’m very excited to share this one with you.

“It lives in the rocks.” That’s the opening line of the synopsis. Stay tuned for more!

Charlie One: Run to the Future

I never thought I’d be writing another Charlie One story—but here we are! This new book started with two vivid images I couldn’t get out of my head. After sitting with them for about a year, the pieces finally clicked, and I found a way to connect them into a story.

You don’t need to have read the first book to enjoy this one, though there are a few connections for returning readers. The title is Run to the Future, and I’m aiming to have it ready by 2027.

Books Read

I’ve read a lot about Alfred Hitchcock this year as part of my research. One standout was Patrick McGilligan’s massive biography of Hitchcock, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I also immensely enjoyed Todd McGowan’s Introduction to Jacques Lacan and wrote a short review for it.

Movies
One Battle After Another really stood out for me—I loved it. It might now be one of my favorites of Paul Thomas Anderson.

You can always read what I’ve watched and read by subscribing to my Substack.

Well, that’s it for me.

Enjoy the fall. Happy Halloween.

Keep reading. Watch movies.

Tom C.

www.tomconnellyfiction.com

Review - Todd McGowan's Introduction to Jacques Lacan

Todd McGowan's new book is an excellent read and important book for those who are interested in Lacan. Over the years, I have read a lot of Lacan, along with Zizek, McGowan, Copjec, etc, and this by far is one of the best introductory books with lots of great examples. 

 

I love McGowan’s interpretation of Kant and Hegel in contextualizing Lacan’s three stages. The connection between Kant’s sensibility, understanding, and reason nicely line up with Lacan’s imaginary, symbolic and the Real in the first stage of Lacan’s work. But Lacan’s middle period turns to Hegel’s dialectic with his introduction of objet a (object cause of desire). McGowan claims that objet a, which is linked to the Real, is the fundamental object and perhaps one of Lacan’s greatest contributions. 

 

 

An example is Lacan’s concept of the gaze (which should not be confused with the look). The gaze (as the visual drive) demonstrates how our unconscious desire distorts the visual plane, something we don’t recognize in the everyday, but something movies can make apparent. McGowan offers Spielberg’s Duel as a great example. Lacan's examples are paintings, such as Las Meninas (see image below). The painter is painting a couple who we think are in the mirror image, located in the far background. For Lacan, the canvas is too big to be the mirror image. The canvas embodies the gaze because it does not fit within the representational world of the painting. As McGowan explains, the canvas demonstrates a resistance toward representation. 

  

Another example is The Ambassadors (see my blog post). When we encounter the gaze, we realize how our desire distorts the visual plane. The gaze is objet a within the field of vision. Encountering the gaze exemplifies that our spectatorship is not from a transcendent standpoint but within the painting or movie itself. That's where we locate the dialectic component of Lacan's work on desire.

I agree with McGowan that Lacan is the philosopher of the subject. The subject is always a split subject, a subject that is never at home with itself because of the unconscious. Lastly, it was great to read how many of Lacan’s concepts changed throughout his three periods, particularly the Real and jouissance. Highly recommend!

The Record Store Can Read My Desire

Damon Krukowksi's great book (and podcast) Ways of Hearing explores how digital media have transformed the way we hear. 

In the chapter on "power," he considers the difference between Spotify's "Discovery Weekly" and visiting a record store. Spotify's algorithm considers what you listen to, adapting to your tastes and likes. He notes, "At Spotify, the dream is to provide you with music without your participation-the algorithm will know what you want" (111).

 

 

But when we visit a record store, one has to navigate its space. As Krukowski states, "You adapt to it" (11). If you ever been to Amoeba in Los Angeles--clearly the case!

 

(Me at Amoeba Music)

By adapting to the store's layout, you might come across a surprise, maybe a record you hadn't thought about purchasing. This process involves your unconscious desire. As I explained in an earlier posting, the logic of desire operates on absence. The object cause of desire (what Jacques Lacan terms objet a) can never be satisfied.

 

 

At the same time, the object cause of desire sustains the psychical force of desire because it is unattainable. It is sometimes described as the real of one's desire. Real - meaning the impossible, or in this case, the stumbling block of desire. 

In a previous post on the gaze, I noted how cinematic forms can elicit our desire. Like the narrative and formal construction of a movie, the design and layout of a record store considers your desire. A record store is already designed for you to engage with it.

Not all stores will elicit your desire. But in my recent journey to Amoeba, the store reads my desire in how it displays its merchandise. It is not adapting to me (as Spotify does with Discovery Weekly), but is trying to elicit my unconscious desire in anticipating a surprise purchase.

 

 

But this raises a question: can algorithms such as Discover Weekly read your desire? In a podcast on the Lacanian Real with Todd McGowan, he argues they can't because they repeatedly tell you what you want.

I think McGowan's claim lines up with Slavoj Zizek's critique of technological singularity. For Zizek, singularity can't account for the unconscious. Likewise, algorithms don't know how to read our unconscious desire. 

Instead of a "surprise," (something unexpected which emerges from your encounter at a record store), you discover something new with Discover Weekly, which is based on your tastes. As Krukowski writes, "You find the answers you want to the questions you already know to ask. . . . This makes an ideal experience if all you want is what you want. But what if you're looking for something else?" (112). That "something else" is what Lacan call objet a which algorithms can not provide. 

Another way to think about algorithms is they operate on mastery. By contrast, a record store operates on both absence ("something else") and mastery ("all"). As you navigate the story, you try to master it. At the same time, what draws you into the store is absence (unconscious desire).

The Lacanian Gaze and Psycho

The Lacanian gaze is one of the hardest concepts I teach for my Film Theory course. The way we commonly think of the gaze (to look) is not what Jacques Lacan argues. Rather, he argues that when we encounter the gaze, we encounter an impasse, a blind spot within the field of vision. As Todd McGowan states, "the gaze is a distortion within the visual field" (72). The gaze is how our unconscious desire distorts the visual plane. But because this process is unconscious, the field of vision appears objective. The visible field is not objective but mediated by our desire. Movies can express the distorting effect of the gaze. 

One of the important things that must happen in order to encounter the gaze is that you must be invested in the film. That way, when we encounter the gaze in cinema it demonstrates the activity of our unconscious desire. So what does that mean? And why is the gaze is not defined as the look?

One of the best examples of the gaze (from Slavoj Zizek and Todd McGowan) can be found in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960). After Marion (Janet Leigh) has been murdered by "mother" in the shower, Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) cleans up the mess. Notice how long it takes for Norman to clean the bathroom. This is important because Hitchcock is a laying a trap for our encounter with the gaze.

After Norman cleans the bathroom, he place Marion's body in the trunk of her car and drives out to the swamp near his motel. Norman pushes Marion's car into the swamp. Norman anxiously watches the car as it begins to sink. Suddenly, for a brief moment the car stop sinking. I always ask my students what their reaction was when the car stops sinking. Their response: they want the car to sink. How does this happen? Why are we suddenly complicit in Norman's cover up of the murder?

This is the moment when we encounter the gaze. The gaze demonstrates your unconscious desire at work in the film. The gaze is an absent structure at work in the scopic field. The halting of the car in the swamp makes this evidence. This is why film form is so important to understand in studying the gaze in cinema. In my book Cinema of Confinement, I explain how directors set up these types of cinematic moments such as the swamp scene in Psycho. They are designed so that we encounter the shocking impact of the gaze.

An example I use is the final sequence in Alien (1979) when Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) learns that the alien sneaked aboard the escape shuttle. The way in which director Ridley Scott films this scene sets up the viewer for an encounter with the gaze--namely, when Ripley shockingly discovers the alien. We think Ripley has defeated the alien, which is emphasized when she says: "I got you, you son of a bitch." Even the soothing musical score suggests that Ripley is safe. But as we know, she is far from safe. Alien's final scene is so scary because of the way Scott lays a trap for us to encounter the gaze. This is why it is important that Hitchcock show us all the details of Norman cleaning up the murder in Psycho. He is a laying a trap for the gaze: when the car stops sinking in the swamp. That's when we all go "Oh shit!" You're now siding with Norman's cover up of Marion's death.

What does the gaze tells about how we watch movies? First, it demonstrates how our unconscious desire is at work when we watch a movie. And we can locate the activity of desire through cinematic form. Second, you must be invested to look in the movie, otherwise you are less likely to encounter the emotional impact of the gaze. Lacan's example of Hans Holbein's painting The Ambassadors explains this point.

As you observe the painting, you see the riches that surround the men. But when looking  toward the bottom of the painting, there is a stain. When looking awry, you see that the stain is a skull that looks back at you.

 

The skull reveals the gaze as objet petit a in the field of vision. This is why you have to be invested in looking at the painting in order to discover the skull. When we encounter the skull, it takes our desire into consideration. Likewise, when Marion's car stops sinking in the swamp in Psycho, we have a visceral reaction, demonstrating that we are complicit in Norman covering up the murder. It illustrates how our desire is at work in the film. Yet it is these moments in cinema, such as Ripley seeing the alien aboard the ship and Marion's car that temporarily stop sinking in the swamp, that draws us to the movies.

 

The gaze is no to look but an absent structure that distorts the field of vision. It emerges in the limits of our looking. Or as Lacan states in Seminar XI, "The gaze is presented to us only in the form of a strange contingency, symbolic of what we find on the horizon, as the thrust of our experience, namely, the lack that constitutes castration anxiety" (72-73).  For Lacan, castration anxiety is the what constitutes the subject as lacking when becoming a part of the symbolic order. This obstacle in seeing, the limits of the horizon, is the impossible object or objet petit a in the scopic field.

 

References:

Todd McGowan,  Psychoanalytic Film Theory and the Rules of the Game (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015).

Slavoj Zizek, "In his Bold Gaze"  in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan. . . .  But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock, ed. Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 1992). 

 

Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978),  

Some Excellent Books on Jacques Lacan

Over the winter I read a number of great academic books on Jacques Lacan. If you are interested in reading about the intersection of Lacanian thought and cinema, check out Matthew Flisfeder's book The Symbolic, The Sublime, and Slavoj Zizek's Theory of Film. Flisfeder's book offers an excellent introduction to a number of key Lacanian terms and concepts and how they are employed in a number of Zizek's writings on cinema. 

 

Todd McGowan's Capitalism and Desire is also worth checking out. McGowan examines the intimate relationship between the logic of desire and the logic of capitalism. Also, see my post on desire for introduction on this concept.

Another book worth checking out is Traumatic Encounters in Italian Film by Fabio Vighi.  This book examines the unconscious in relation to film language in Italian cinema. Vighi considers a variety of Italian films from filmmakers such as Pasolini, Bertolucci, and Rossellini. Vighi's reading of Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura is indeed one of the film's many highlights.