Psychoanalysis and Cinema

E. Ann Kaplan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138149748
• eBook ISBN: 9781135213169
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

These fifteen carefully chosen essays by well-known scholars demonstrate the vitality and variety of psychoanalytic film criticism, as well as the crucial role feminist theory has played in its development. Among the films discussed are Duel in the Sun, The Best Yearsof Our Lives, Three Faces of Eve, Tender is the Night,Pandora's Box, Secrets of the Soul, and the works of Jacques Tourneur (director of The Cat People and other features).

7

Historical Trauma and Male Subjectivity

Kaja Silverman

... if there is no virility which
castration does not consecrate then
for the woman it is a castrated
lover or a dead man (or even both
at the same time) who hides behind
the veil where he calls on her
adoration.

(Jacques Lacan)

The dominant narrative film encourages the viewer to substitute its “impression of reality” for the lost object, and so to deny the phenomenal lack which he or she “knows” full well. Cinema's reality-effect consequently derives in part from its perceptual intensity, i.e. from the primacy it gives to the imaginary register.¹ However, that effect is also the outcome of a specific ideological operation. A film's sounds and images will only induce general belief to the degree that they belong to “the privileged mode of representation by which the image of the social consensus is offered to the members of a social formation, and within which they [are not only asked to] identify themselves,” but in fact identify themselves. In other words, a cinematic text will satisfy the viewer's desire for reality only if both text and viewer inhabit what Jacques Rancière would call the same “dominant fiction.”²

The phallus stands or falls with the dominant fiction, since it is there that it assumes the properties of visibility, turgidity, and erectness which more appropriately qualify the penis.³ In other words, it is merely within a culture's dominant representational and narrative reservoir that the paternal signifier “grows” into an organ, and becomes available to the male subject as his imago. Since that imago does not so much reflect him as cast its reflection upon him, he will be in a position to deny his castration only so long as he doesn't notice the “frame”—so long as the dominant fiction seems his natural medium. A loss of belief in that fiction will lead to a loss of belief in the phallus as well, and thus to a crisis in male subjectivity.

Unlike its Freudian counterpart, Lacanian psychoanalysis has always been quick to acknowledge that male subjectivity is founded upon lack— to concede that “what might be called a man, the male speaking being, strictly disappears as an effect of discourse ... by being inscribed within it solely as castration.”⁴ Unfortunately, it has been equally quick to neutralize the radical implications of this deviation from the Freudian paradigm, and in the process to shore up both sexual difference and the existing symbolic order. Nowhere is that neutralization more explicit than in an interview conducted by Hélène Klibbe with Serge Leclaire, one of the most orthodox of Lacan's followers (at least until the mid-seventies). Although its ostensible topic is homosexual writing, the interview in question is devoted almost exclusively to the topic of castration, which it describes as the necessary and inevitable basis of both male and female subjectivity. Yet far from challenging traditional gender demarcations, this common heritage is immediately negated by anatomy, which dictates a very different relation to the symbolic for man than for woman.

Leclaire argues that because the male subject possesses the penis, he is in a position to deny his castration, and so to aspire to power and privilege. He is on the “right” side of the symbolic, but on the “wrong” side of knowledge. The female subject, on the other hand, has tangible “proof of her castration, and consequently turns away from what are in the final instance only illusory goals. Although she is on the “wrong” side of the symbolic, she is on the “right” side of knowledge. Leclaire's formulation is sustained throughout by an extended theological analogy, which is evocative in many ways of Lacan's invocation of St. Teresa in Seminaire XX:

Let us call the phallus “god.” It's an old tradition, You don't have to see “God,” properly speaking, you have no image of him. “God” (the phallus) is invisible; therefore, the relation to the phallus is marked by a nonformalizable relation, a relation of exclusion. At the same time, everything is in relation to the phallus; everything is in relation to “God.” Let's suppose that there is a child, Jesus, the son of God, who serves as mediator. Now, let's replace the “child Jesus” with the penis, which happens to be the most convenient representative of the phallus. Because man has in his body a relation with his penis as the representative of the phallus, schematically, his natural inclination leads him to forget the fact that the phallus (“God”) is invisible, unseizable, unnameable. But woman does not have this representative in her body; therefore her relation to the phallus is less veiled. She is less tempted to forget the fact that the phallus is absent. Consequently, man's and woman's relations to castration are profoundly different. I am referring to castration as the relation to the phallus, to the Invisible, to an unnameable term. In Lacanian language I would say that it is both signifier and object. ... In the whole evolution of woman, nothing has ever come as a screen between the invisible “God,” phallus, and the way she speaks. For man, the possession of the penis, which is highly cathected, serves as a screen denying the fundamental character of castration. Man comes to believe that the has not been castrated.⁵

This passage is characterized by a major internal contradiction. Its entire argument rests upon the assertion that the phallus cannot be seen, grasped or named—that it is, in short, unrepresentable. However, the penis (which can be seen, grasped, and named) is described as both “the most convenient representative of the phallus,” and as the latter's incarnation or “son.” The relation between the phallus and the penis is thus totally mystified; it seems at the same time miraculous (i.e. beyond rational or secular explanation) and natural (i.e. existentially or ontologically motivated). In either case the relation seems to escape social determination. We are told that it just “happens to be.”

A similar refusal to admit that the phallus could be in any way culture-bound is evident both in Leclaire's subsequent claim that “Man comes to believe that he has not been castrated” (in the implication, that is, that this perception is entirely spontaneous), and in his sweeping generalization that “In the whole evolution and history of woman, nothing has ever come as a screen between the invisible ‘God,’ phallus, and the way she speaks.” Sexual difference and the paternal signifier are situated in a space beyond historical causation or political intervention—in a kind of “sacred time.” The overriding theological metaphor not only contributes heavily to this sense of changelessness, but helps to soften the passage's contradictions into paradox.

The present discussion shares with Lacan and Leclaire the assumption that male subjectivity is founded on castration. It also shares with those two theoreticians the view that the lack which the male subject must somehow disavow is finally his own. However, it takes a very different position on the relation of gender to that lack—the position that while the loss of the object and the subordination to a pre-existing symbolic order may be the necessary “price” of entry into language, no imperative dictates that lack be exclusively identified with one sex. It is by no means inevitable that the male subject be constructed through a series of defensive mechanisms calculated to protect him from any knowledge of the terms through which he enters meaning, nor that the female subject be constituted through the obligatory assimilation of both her own and the male subject's castration. As Martin Thorn observes, “Both symbolic castration and the phantasy of the fragmented body are universals of human experience, since they represent the fact of having been born, embodied, into a world where language is. [However] their articulation, one with another, in a particular social formation . . . will differ.”⁶

What I am trying to suggest is that Lacanian psychoanalysis has focused attention on the universal experience of symbolic castration rather than upon the ways in which it is (variably) articulated. Although it teaches us the vitally important lesson that the penis is not the phallus, it diminishes the value of the lesson by defining that term as “the signifier intended to designate as a whole the effects of the signified, in that the signifier conditions them by its presence as a signifier.”⁷ It thus deflects critical attention away from the discursive practices which install the phallus not merely as the privileged signifier within our cultural order, but as the signifier of privilege—its status as the marker of a complex of psychic, social, political, and economic differences.

Far from belonging to a kind of “sacred time,” beyond the vicissitudes of history and the particularities of different social formations, the phallus is always the product of dominant signifying and representational activities, activities which are vulnerable to interruption and transformation. It is consequently never more than a distillate of the privileged semes and values of a given symbolic order. It is, indeed, often less than this collective “vision,” since its meaning and function may vary somewhat even from one discourse to another. What makes the phallus seem somehow “larger” and more “palpable” is the constant representational support the dominant fiction gives to that signifier—the endless circulation of a wide variety of ideal paternal images and sounds. It is also through this image and sound production that the penis “happens” to seem “the most convenient representative of the phallus,” since that production asserts over and over again the identity of these two disjunctive terms.

Thus the male subject does not just spontaneously happen to believe that he is not castrated. That belief is instilled in him through the unceasing flow of paternal images and sounds within which he is encouraged to “find” himself; through the externalizing displacement onto the female subject of the losses that afflict him; and last, but by no means least, through his subordination to the dominant fiction by means of which his social formation coordinates its diverse discourses. Since this final operation generally necessitates a series of additional castrations, phallic male subjectivity might also be said to be predicated upon a massive cultural disavowal of the lack upon which it rests.

Classic cinema plays a vital part in the construction of this subjectivity. Not only is it an important supplier of paternal representations, but it orchestrates for the male subject the projections so necessary to his sense of personal potency. Its images, sounds, and narrative structures are drawn from the ideological reserve of the dominant fiction, and its suturing mechanisms function both to insert the viewing subject into that fiction, and to inspire confidence in its capacity to resolve conflict and neutralize opposition. This confidence is a prerequisite both for the male subject's identification with the phallus, and for the female subject's disavowal of male lack.

Not only does a loss of belief in the dominant fiction generally lead to a loss of belief in male adequacy, but the spectacle of male castration may very well result in a destructive questioning of the dominant fiction. Male subjectivity is a kind of stress point, the juncture at which social crisis and turmoil frequently find most dramatic expression. Major rifts between the dominant fiction and the larger social formation can almost always be detected within a classic narrative film through the breakdown of sexual difference—through the disclosure of male lack or impotence.

A number of films made in Hollywood between 1944 and 1947 attest with unusual candor to the castrations through which the male subject is constituted—to the pound of flesh which is his price of entry into the symbolic order, as well as to the losses he subsequently suffers within that order. Pride of the Marines, Hail the Conquering Hero, State Fair, Those Enduring Young Charms, The Lost Weekend, The Guilt of Janet Ames, Spellbound, It's A Wonderful Life, Gilda, and The Best Years of Our Lives all dramatize the temporary collapse of the mechanisms through which the female subject is “normally” obliged to assume male lack.⁸ Indeed, many of these films attribute to a female character the scopic and narrative control which are the usual attributes of a male character. As a contemporary viewer remarked, “The first thing one has to note about these films is that the descriptive term—‘boy gets girl’—no longer fits. In Lost Weekend, it is the heroine, not the hero who gives the kisses. . . . In Spellbound it is she who walks into his room in the middle of the night. ... In Pride of the Marines, when letters and telephone calls get her nowhere, the heroine resorts to abducting the hero ‘bodily’ home, there in the face even of his desperate ‘Get me out of here!’ to insist that they shall be married.”⁹

These films are also characterized by a loss of faith in the familiar and self-evident. The hero no longer feels “at home” in the house or town where he grew up, and resists cultural (re)assimilation; he has been dislodged from the narratives and subject-positions which make up the dominant fiction, and he returns to those narratives and subject-positions only under duress. He is unable to align himself with the phallus because he is no longer able to believe in the vraisemblable. In a number of instances the revelation of male lack is shown to be the symptom of a larger historical crisis. Love Letters, Pride of the Marines, Hail the Conquering Hero, The Lost Weekend, The Best Years of Our Lives, and The Guilt of Janet Ames all clearly identify that crisis with World War II and the recovery period. In each case the hero returns from the war with a physical or psychic wound that renders him incapable of functioning smoothly in civilian life.

I will turn in a moment to what is perhaps the most interesting of these films, one which focuses obsessively and at times erotically on the psychic and social castration of its three male protagonists, and which stubbornly refuses to suspend disbelief in the face either of the dominant fiction or its phallic representations, insisting that the ideological formulations of pre-war America are incapable of resolving the contradictions of post-war America, and consequently of concealing male lack—William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). First, however, I would like to clarify the theoretical model which will be used to account for the relation between it and its historical “moment.”

The textual analysis that follows will rely heavily upon three broad theoretical categories: social formation, dominant fiction, and history. The first of these categories will be understood as the “complex, overdetermined and contradictory nexus of discursive practices, in which the human subject is constituted and lives in a relation of absolute inferiority”¹⁰— as a nexus which includes not only language, literature, cinema, the “academic” discourses, the social sciences, the law, and politics, but all social activity and exchange. Far from cohering around a single mode of production, as it ultimately does within the Althusserian paradigm,¹¹ social formation will here designate the non-unified totality of discursive practices within and through which the subjects that make up a given socius conduct their material existences.

The second of my categories, dominant fiction, is here opposed neither to an ultimately recoverable reality, nor to the condition of “true” consciousness. “Fiction” underscores the constructed rather than the illusory basis of reality, while “dominant” isolates from the whole repertoire of a culture's images, sounds, and narrative elaborations those through which a consensus is established—those which mediate between the often contradictory discourses which comprise a social formation, permitting a group identification and collective desires. For a dominant...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: From Plato's Cave to Freud's Screen
• Feminist Film Theory and Its Revisionings
• Sexual Difference and Jacques Tourneur: A Case Study
• Beyond the Impasse? History and Psychoanalysis in Reading Select Films
• Avant-Garde Film: Theory and Practice
• Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Subject Index
• Name Index