Projected Shadows

Psychoanalytic Reflections on the Representation of Loss in European Cinema

Andrea Sabbadini

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• eBook ISBN: 9781134089284
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Projected Shadows presents a new collection of essays exploring films from a psychoanalytic perspective, focusing specifically on the representation of loss in European cinema. This theme is discussed in its many aspects, including: loss of hope and innocence, of youth, of consciousness, of freedom and loss through death. Many other themes familiar to psychoanalytic discourse are explored in the process, such as:

• Establishment and resolution of Oedipal conflicts
• Representation of pathological characters on the screen
• Use of unconscious defence mechanisms
• The interplay of dreams, reality and fantasy

Projected Shadows aims to deepen the ongoing constructive dialogue between psychoanalysis and film. Andrea Sabbadini has assembled a remarkable number of internationally renowned contributors, both academic film scholars and psychoanalysts from a variety of cultural backgrounds, who use an array of contemporary methodologies to apply psychoanalytic thinking to film.

This original collection will appeal to anyone passionate about film, as well as professionals, academics and students interested in the relationship between psychoanalysis and the arts.

1
THE NIGHT OF MELANCHOLIA AND THE DAYLIGHT OF MOURNING

Anne Fontaine’s Comment j’ai tué mon père

T. Jefferson Kline

The dread of something after death – the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns – puzzles the will.

Hamlet, III, 1

Comment j’ai tué mon père (How I Killed My Father) (France, 2001)
Director: Anne Fontaine
Distributor: A-Film Distribution

Moments into Anne Fontaine’s Comment j’ai tué mon père Jean-Luc Borde (Charles Berling), a successful gerontologist, enters the living room of his sumptuous Versailles mansion, and distractedly opens his mail. A voiceover – apparently ‘reading’ the letter he holds – intones, ‘We regret to inform you of the death of your father which occurred last month in Africa. He was unable to return to France as he had hoped’. As he finishes the letter, Jean-Luc sinks dejectedly onto the arm of a sofa and glances out the window at his wife, Isabelle (Natacha Régnier), reclining in a deckchair, then lapses into a kind of trance which is accompanied by lush but eerie chamber music. Fontaine effects a transition from Jean-Luc’s vacant expression to a gala soirée which his wife Isa has organized to celebrate an award given to her husband in recognition of his civic service, by the Mayor of Versailles. In the middle of his speech thanking the Town of Versailles for this honour, Jean-Luc realizes that the letter announcing his father’s death is apparently either a sadistic joke or a terrible mistake, for there, standing before him, is his father, Maurice (Michel Bouquet).

Rather than rush to greet his father with happy effusion, Jean-Luc simply asks emotionlessly, ‘How long have you been in Versailles [and] what are you doing here?’ Maurice happily answers the first question and ignores the second. His purpose will only gradually, and painfully, become apparent. Indeed, the film follows Maurice as he moves through the next few days as a guest of his son, wandering about the town, visiting Jean-Luc’s clinic, getting to know Isabelle and Jean-Luc’s brother, Patrick (Stephane Guillon) and causing a rapidly escalating degree of discomfort for his son. What Jean-Luc’s father discovers is that his son is emotionally dead, his marriage to Isa overshadowed by Jean-Luc’s false diagnosis of Isa that claims medically to eliminate the possibility of their having children. Maurice’s presence also provokes Jean-Luc’s brother Patrick to break free of his deadening enslavement to Jean- Luc, and Jean-Luc’s mistress to end his manipulations of her. So angered is Jean-Luc by his father’s intrusiveness in his life that he assaults him after dinner one night, throws him to the ground and chokes him to death.

Or does he? Leaving his father’s lifeless body on the lawn, Jean-Luc retreats to the lavatory where he stares bewildered at his image in the mirror. Suddenly a knock on the door jolts him out of his reverie and he hears his father’s voice pleading, ‘Open the door! Don’t leave me in this hole!’ Jean-Luc opens the door to find his father ‘undead’. The scene fades out as Jean-Luc, standing directly behind Maurice, begins gently to stroke his father’s right temple. Fontaine cuts from this scene back to Jean-Luc sitting on the couch in his living room, where we had left him at the beginning of the film, still holding the letter announcing his father’s death, still staring out of the window at Isa, reclining in a deckchair.

Certainly, Anne Fontaine is not the first director to choose to introduce into her film a character who is entirely the product of another’s imagination. The Swimming Pool (Ozon 2004; see Chapter 13), A Beautiful Mind (Howard 2001) and Fight Club (Fincher 1999) have used this narrative ‘trick’ with enormous effectiveness. Both of these latter two films catch us off guard at the end and cause us to re-evaluate what we have seen as the hallucinations of a schizophrenic (split personality). Like Ozon’s film, what makes Fontaine’s film different, and very much worth our attention, is the fact that we are not dealing with a delusion, but a fantasy – what Anne Fontaine terms ‘a blend of dreams and memory’.¹ The more we look at Fontaine’s film, the more we realize that the letter Jean-Luc is reading produces a long fantasy involving his dead father – indeed a fantasy that is the product of mourning and melancholia. This interpretation seems to have entirely escaped most critics of this film, including such ‘stars’ as Roger Ebert, Tom Dawson, Elvis Mitchel and Ty Burr, who either bemoan the film’s flatness or, sensing that something is going on, resort to such labels as ‘a Freudian self-help pamphlet’.²

What is remarkable, then, in Fontaine’s narrative structure is not the fact of dissociation per se, but the process of mourning in which Jean-Luc engages and the interpretation that this process elicits. The factors that determine the ‘irreality’ of the diegesis of this film are subtle, but multiple. Not only does the film use a return to ‘the present’ (Jean-Luc sitting, reading the same letter, dressed in the same clothes, with Isa in the same position, also wearing the same clothes as in the opening scene), but it punctuates every one of its scenes with the same portrait of Jean-Luc, with the same faraway look in his eyes as he had at the fading of this first scene, accompanied by the same darkly emotive chamber music. It is thus that Fontaine situates the point of view of the entire film in Jean-Luc’s ‘imagined perception’ of the events. Frequently we will view a scene and then discover that Jean-Luc has magically materialized at a window or doorway or shadowy corner looking on.³ In other cases, Fontaine abandons the semblance of reality (e.g. his brother Patrick’s comic monologues presumably delivered in a comedy club in Versailles) for a dream-like fantasy (e.g. all of Patrick’s monologues after the first two are delivered in a dreamy tone against a blue backdrop, without any of the audience responses we expect in a nightclub).

From his first appearance Maurice presents his status as existentially ambiguous. He makes no answer when Jean-Luc says, ‘I thought you were dead!’ but confirms that he has been able to make this visit ‘à mes risques et périls’. When his son guesses, ‘Are you retired now?’, he cleverly equivocates, ‘Oh, not entirely, would you believe?’ When asked if he’d like to try Jean- Luc’s gerontological experiments, Maurice replies artfully, ‘Oh no, I don’t want to delay the call . . . Perhaps it will surprise you but I don’t think about death any more.’ While at the restaurant, faced with another ‘guess’ at his condition (‘You’re in very good shape’), Maurice allows that ‘the machine has had a few classical breakdowns’ – we might read ‘death’ here! And finally, in a highly ambiguous exchange with Jean-Luc purportedly about Africa, Maurice exclaims, Orpheus-like, ‘There are even people who are returning!’ And, to Jean-Luc’s incredulous reply, ‘Don’t tell me you’re one of them!’, Maurice intones with a sphinx-like smile, ‘Listen, I wouldn’t have believed it, but it seems as though it IS possible.’

Maurice manages, moreover, to find his way into the lives of every one of Jean-Luc’s intimates (wife, brother, mistress) in ways that defy rational geography or explanation. Even his old white Dauphine makes an appearance in a purely associative way after Jean-Luc’s own car has crashed and Jean-Luc is remembering a moment when his father’s car had broken down in Spain.

In a film that is presumably about his father’s effect on his life, it is astonishing that there is not a single flashback. Everything in the film has an eerily produced sense of present tense with no reference to any clock or calendar to situate present time. We can only conclude that this is a fantasy constructed like a dream, but clearly situated in the mind of a man awake. Like a dream, it seems to compress a large amount of imagery into a very brief period of time. What is this fantasy – how would it be different from psychotic delusion and what implications does it have for our reading of this film?

Susan Isaacs (1943) has noted that phantasy is a common means of externalizing psychic contents and that fantasy often works (as it seems to here) in sudden unintentional representations that intrude on the ego. In this sudden break in continuity, there occurs an incongruous shift from present conscious concerns signalling that the ego has renounced its own selfgovernment and becomes a spectator of psychic images, often representations of libidinal destructive instincts. Inasmuch as, like dreams, the content of phantasy arises from the unconscious, it is less dependent on words than on plastic images. Often, Isaacs notes, the phantasy is produced as a kind of call for help. These images do not form the basis for the ego’s continuing interactions with its surroundings (as would be the case in a psychotic delusion in which a fictional person would be understood to enter the subject’s real situation) but rather represent a kind of ‘time-out’ from the real during which the ego may ‘work through’ previously unconscious material (p. 112).

To understand quite suddenly, as Fontaine’s viewer is forced to do, that all that we have imagined to be reality is but fantasy, is to necessitate a retrospective re-evaluation and interpretation of everything we have heretofore believed to be simply ‘how things are’. And as our viewers’ minds move backwards through the material represented to us (presumably by Jean-Luc Borde), we find ourselves exactly replicating the work of at least three other important states: that of the mourner confronting his loss, that of the dreamer confronting the manifest content of his dream, and that of the analyst faced with material produced by the analysand. Let us examine each of these three psychological moments.

Mourning, as Freud (1917: 243–5) notes in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’,

is regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved person [and] although mourning involves grave departures from the normal attitude to life, it never occurs to us to regard it as a pathological condition . . . Profound mourning involves loss of interest in the outside world and the turning away from any activity that is not connected with thoughts of him . . . and can be so intense that a turning away from reality takes place and a clinging to the object through the medium of a hallucinatory wishful psychosis. Normally respect for reality gains the day . . . bit by bit, at a great expense of cathectic energy, but in the meantime the existence of the lost object is psychically prolonged . . . Each single one of the memories and expectations in which the libido is bound to the object is brought up and hypercathected, and detachment of the ego is accomplished in respect of it.

As Alicia Ricciardi has noted, there are numerous connections between mourning and psychoanalysis, first of all because ‘for Freud, analysis will always be an act of mourning, for without its focus on the subject’s lost history, psychoanalysis would lose its raison d’être’. Thus, the ‘Trauerarbeit, like psychoanalysis, is a transformative activity that occurs over a long period. And like analysis, the work of mourning assumes a productive value’ (2003: 19, 21, 22).

Although Freud himself was careful to separate Trauerarbeit from his work on dreams, it is significant that the first word of his essay on mourning is, in fact, the word ‘Dreams’ (1917: 243). Thus, despite his attempt to keep them separate, I would like to suggest that the two activities, the Trauerarbeit and the Traumarbeit may be to some degree unconsciously conflated, despite Freud’s argument that the former was more concerned with reality testing and the latter with primary process and associations. Yet, as Ricciardi notes, ‘The work of mourning mimics the labor of analysis in the sense that the very rhythms of the subject’s withdrawal from the object and of the analysand’s uncovering of repressed material are similarly defined by a pars destruens that resolves otherwise obscure psychic components into their discrete elements and that represents the necessary conditions of any further reshaping of the psyche’ (2003: 26–7). Indeed, such might be the very latent sense of Freud’s essay, for the more mourning and analysis progress, the more indistinguishable become the subject’s distortions of reality and the very reality he seeks to recover ‘bit by bit’.

Such would certainly be the sense of the second reading necessitated by the structure of Anne Fontaine’s film, for the conclusion of the film jolts us into the realization that what we have been watching is not a distressing reality to which Jean-Luc begrudgingly submits, but a self-punishing fantasy which he unconsciously creates. Now we are forced to attempt to parse out two Jean- Lucs: the one whose unconscious produces the images we see vs the Jean-Luc represented as a fantasy.

What becomes gradually and painfully apparent in our re-reading of the film is the massively deadening nature of this fantasized self. In Fontaine’s presentation of Jean-Luc’s father’s imagined return, the director mobilizes two dominant allusions to ‘explain’ this deadness: Hamlet and Pygmalion. As he begins to make his speech accepting the honour that the Mayor of Versailles has just bestowed upon him, Jean-Luc suddenly catches sight of what we may now call ‘the ghost of his father’ standing in the crowd before him. The apparition of his father’s ghost leads Hamlet, as we remember, to his confrontation with a series of terrible truths about his incestuous and murderous feelings about his mother and father, that culminate in his conclusion that life is but ‘the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to’.⁴ Indeed, Hamlet asks ‘who would fardels bear, to grunt and sweat under a weary life, but for the dread of something after death’ (Hamlet, III, 1). As if on cue, Jean-Luc, faced with his father’s ghost, loses the thread of his acceptance speech and finds himself intoning, ‘Mais tout le monde sait que la vie est tout de même un fardeau . . .’ (But everyone knows that life is a burden, all the same . . .), and his voice trails off into perplexed silence. ‘Fardeau’ is an exact ‘replica’ of Hamlet’s word ‘fardels’ and this allusive lapsus unveils a side of this very successful physician we had not expected to see: the melancholic.

From here on out, we witness a fantasy that puts into play an image of Jean- Luc that is, as R.D. Laing (1965: 40–1) would put it, ‘life without feeling alive’, or ‘cathecting his ego-as-object with mortido’ (p. 112). Elsewhere Laing refers to this state as ‘petrification . . . the dread of being turned from a live person into a stone’ which often results in ‘the “magical” act whereby one may attempt to turn someone else into stone . . . since the very act of experiencing the other as a person is felt as virtually suicidal’ (pp. 46–7).⁵ As we come to realize, Jean-Luc is not only unable to express any feeling for others, he is massively dedicated to transforming everyone around him from living beings to statues – an uncanny reversal of Pygmalion’s ‘birthing’ of Galatea from her stone statue, but one very much in keeping with Ovid’s more general tendency in The Metamorphoses toward prosopopoeia, a rhetorical figure that J. Hillis Miller (1990: 4) labels ‘the trope of mourning’.⁶

In their first scene alone together, Jean-Luc’s wife Isa mechanically takes a smorgasbord of pills before going to bed, all presumably prescribed by her doctor-husband to help her sleep. Later we are to learn that Jean-Luc has also medically proscribed having any children, thereby depriving her of her life’s fondest wish and, along the way, turned their relationship into what Isa will angrily denounce as ‘une vitrine’ (window dressing) and allowed her only to ‘greet the guests, open the door, smile, put flowers on the table’. And this accusation is accompanied by her realization that he is ‘a dried up man, all shrunk to nothing, which speaks, but nothing comes out. There’s no flesh and blood there’. To which Jean-Luc confesses helplessly, ‘Tout ça [the idea of raising and loving children] ça m’effrayait. Prendre en charge, élever, s’inquiéter, punir . . . Pour tout ça je suis inapte’.⁷ And in yet another confession of the lonely sterility of his life, he has earlier confessed to Maurice that, ‘the truth is that nine out of ten times we screw alone [tout seul]’.

Every shot of Jean-Luc up until this accusation fully corroborates Isa’s fury: he treats his patients with undisguised disdain, as (largely unsuccessful) experiments. His brother Patrick is only good enough to chauffeur him from party to party or else ‘only stand and wait’, a condition against which Patrick, like Isa, revolts – in his case by wrecking their expensive car and walking off into the night. Jean-Luc’s associate and mistress, Myriem (Amira Casar), exists only as a puppet whom he can undress on demand and move about like a chess piece when it suits him. When Mau...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Night of Melancholia and the Daylight of Mourning
• 2 Quest for a Lost Mother
• 3 Is There Light at the End of the Tunnel?
• 4 The Anorexic Paradox
• 5 Reparation and the Emphathic Other
• 6 The Talking Cure , From Freud to Almodóvar
• 7 Intergenerational Transmission
• 8 Cut and Laced
• 9 Two Short Films by Jan Svankmajer
• 10 Compilation Film as ‘Deferred Action’
• 11 Moving Beyond the Constraints of the Mortal Self
• 12 Tricycles, Bicycles, Life Cycles
• 13 Loss, Mourning and Desire in Midlife
• 14 Three Sisters
• 15 Time Regained