Favorite Books on Cinema - Part 2

Looking Awry is one I always go to when I'm working with Lacanian concepts. 

 

Looking Awry was significant for me when I wrote Cinema of Confinement. I recommend it if you want to learn more about the intersection of psychoanalytic theory and cinema.

There are lots of great examples from movies and books to help understand these complex concepts. Žižek is not suggesting that using examples from popular culture avoids the complexity of theory. Rather, it is a way of exploring theoretical concepts, but looking at them from a different perspective--thus looking awry.

One example that stuck with me is Patricia Highsmith's "The Black House," a story about a group of men who get together at a bar and reminisce about an old house in the town that is associated with nostalgia and memories. A young engineer, who just moved into town, hears about the myth of the old house and decides to visit it. Finding nothing mysterious about it, he tells the men that it is just an old, filthy ruined house. The men freak out and attack the young engineer and windup killing him.

 

As Žižek explains, the young intruder reduced their fantasy space to an everyday, common reality. "He annulled the difference between reality and fantasy space, depriving the men of the place in which they were able to articulate their desires” (9). 

The old house is an empty screen for the men to project their nostalgic desires and memories upon, which was then reduced to nothing by the engineer. Here, Žižek draws our attention to the fantasy screen, the protective screen from the Lacanian Real, the "thing" that haunts and disrupts the symbolic order. A point Žižek makes over and over is that if you remove the fantasy screen, you don't get "reality." Instead, you get a nightmarish form of reality. The fantasy screen provides a sense of reality, keeping the Real at a distance. In the case of the engineer, he unplugs the men's fantasy screen.

In Cinema of Confinement, I discuss the ending of Rope (1948), how the penthouse becomes a strange and distorted space after Rupert (James Stewart) discovers the corpse Brandon (John Dall) and Phillip (Farley Granger) had hidden throughout the dinner party. 

The big window acts as a sort of fantasy screen for Brandon and Phillip, which keeps danger at a distance. But when their secret is exposed, Rupert opens the window and fires a gun, calling attention to the authorities. The space then becomes flooded with lights from a nearby neon sign, the sounds of the city amplify. The characters movements are suddenly protracted and creaturely. The orderliness of space becomes distorted as an the fantasy screen collapses.

 

There are lots of great examples in Looking Awry from cinema and worth checking out. Also see Enjoy Your Symptom and Žižek's book on Krzysztof Kieslowski. Of course, there is his collection of essays on Alfred Hitchcock. I also recommend Matthew Flisfeder's excellent book on Žižek's work on film. 

 

 

Desire, Coca-Cola, Zizek and Cinema

Following up on my last post on the gaze, I thought it would be important to explain a little bit of Lacan's concept of desire. 

Desire is the desire to desire. What does this mean? For Lacan, the logic of desire operates on lack, not fullness. Think of your favorite song that you listen to over and over, or watching a movie such as Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings repetitively. 

For Lacan, these "empirical" objects stand in for what he terms the object cause of desire, or sometimes referred to as the "lost object." As long as the lost object remains lost, desire sustains its force. Listening to a favorite song or watching a movie repeatedly - both objects stand in for the lost object, but can never be the "thing" itself. And because this empirical object (song, movie, book, coffee, etc.) can not fill the shoes of the psychical lost object, desire continues to desire. 

Slavoj Žižek offers a great example of the lost object using Coca-Cola's old slogan: "Coke is It." Žižek asks: What is this "it"? Why do we keep drinking coke if "it" is indeed "it"? There is a failure in drinking Coca-Cola that keeps us drinking more. Why? Because Coke is not it. This is the logic of desire.  As long as we keep "missing" the lost object, desire continues to desire.

 
Desire also has a temporal component which can be found in classical Hollywood narrative.  Classical narrative films exemplify the notion of desire because they demonstrate that the story's solution resides in the future. Die Hard (1987) is a great example of the logic of desire and classical narrative form. 

John McClane (Bruce Willis) finds himself alone in the Nakatomi building where Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman) and his group of thieves seize the tower and hold a group of employees hostage, including John's estranged wife, Holly (Bonnie Beldelia). John's goal is to outsmart Hans. John is constantly backed into a corner as we wonder how he will survive. The goal is for John to win - to reach his goal - to defeat Gruber. 

It is no surprise that this winning aspect of desire has a strong correlation to the logic of capitalism as explored in Todd McGowan's outstanding book, Capitalism and Desire.

Lastly,  although desire operates on lack, it paradoxically provides the subject pleasure. This is why Lacan argues that the lack of lack (to be lacking lack) equals anxiety. We enjoy our desire. For example, I love to collect DVDs. I think the worse thing that can happen to me is to lose my desire for buying DVDs.

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. But more importantly, in order to encounter the gaze, you must be invested in the film. 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. 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 observed 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 embodies the gaze. But 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.  

The gaze is the moment when our seeing falls apart. 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.

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.