Traversing the Fantasy

The Dialectic of Desire/Fantasy and the Ethics of Narrative Cinema

Sandra Meiri, Odeya Kohen-Raz

• Editorial: Bloomsbury Academic
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501328718
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Media & Performing Arts
• Categoría: Film & Video

Traversing the Fantasy: The Dialectic of Desire/Fantasy proposes a new and comprehensive model of spectatorship at the heart of which it draws an analogy between the ethics of Lacanian psychoanalysis and the ethics of narrative film. It demonstrates how spectators engage with narrative film, undergoing unconscious processes that generate a shift in the adherence to fantasies that impede assuming responsibility for one's fate and well being. The authors discuss the affinities that the ontology and aesthetics of narrative film share with subjective, unconscious processes, offering new insights into the popular appeal of narrative film, through three film corpora, analyzed at length: body-character-breach films; dreaming-character films; and gender-crossing films. With a range of case studies from the old ( Rebecca, Vertigo, Some Like it Hot ) to the new ( Being John Malkovich, A Fantastic Woman ), Sandra Meiri and Odeya Kohen Raz build on psychoanalytic ideas about the cinema and take them in a completely new direction that promises to be the basis for further developments in the field.

PART ONE

Body-Character-Breach Films

1

Desire, Fantasy, and the Ontology of Film

Desire/Fantasy, the Ontology of Film, Characters, Actors, and Spectators

What roles do the body and the physique of actors play in the dynamic of desire/fantasy in narrative film? No narrative medium can do without characters, for they are the agents of subjectivity. Unlike the theater or the opera, in cinema the spectators’ engagement with characters via actors depends on the latter’s physique, as evinced, for example, by the close-up. More than any other object whose image appears on the screen, the character (mostly the protagonist), as embodied by a specific actor, has become an anchor for engagement with narrative film. Although today’s employment of computerized images of extras replacing humans has become common practice, it is, nevertheless, hard to imagine in the near future films in which “flesh and blood” actors embodying the protagonists will be replaced with digitally produced characters, given the uncanniness of the latter.¹ The corporeality of the actor in film inexorably operates within the bounds of a larger mechanism that engages us with the dynamic of desire/fantasy in relation to the structure of the film’s narrative, its filmic space, its language (editing, camera positions, the use of sound, mise-en-scène, etc.) and the unique ontology of film (the dynamic of absence/presence).

Desire is what arouses our interest in narrative film, especially when it is enmeshed in that of the characters’. Desire is intrinsic to the cinema at large (the emptiness of the screen—the material absence of actors and objects) and to the narrative in particular, starting with the desire of the protagonists (what they do not have and wish to obtain) and followed by the unfolding of the narrative (what is left off-screen momentarily or throughout the film). It is the entwining of the two (the lack inherent in the medium and narrative) that draws us into the film. Nöel Carroll ([1985] 1996) divides the unfolding of the narrative between “macro” questions (What does the protagonist want? Will they obtain it and if so—how? What will happen in either of the cases?) and “micro” questions related to how the narrative unfolds (What is the protagonist seeing? What are they not seeing? Why is an object rendered in close-up? Who is the enunciator of a specific shot and why? What is left off-screen and why?). Underlying all these questions pertaining to the unfolding of the narrative and to the filmic forms through which they are raised is the spectators tapping into the experience of lack. When it comes to the protagonists, whatever they might be after marks a lack that sets the spectators’ desire in motion. In the linear classical narrative structure, the intertwining of the macro and micro questions is achieved in a condensed form. It has been characterized as driven by the desire of the protagonist, who engages in action, to overcome various obstacles posed by the antagonist, reaching their goal at the end of the film and leading to definitive closure.

Since the answers supplied to both the macro and micro questions are related to lack/absence, we might have simply argued that they function as pieces of a fantasy veiling lack. But the dynamic of desire/fantasy in narrative cinema is much more complex than that. Answers to the questions posed by spectators (especially macro questions pertaining to the desire of the protagonist, like “Will the protagonist get the boy/girl s/he is secretly in love with? Will s/he manage to avenge the murder of a loved one?”) are carefully and gradually supplied until we reach closure. The reason is to sustain our desire. On the micro level too, that is, the forms through which the questions are answered, cinema is a medium that has an inherent affinity with desire. As Christian Metz ([1977] 1982: 77) observes, “Both camera movements and framing are in themselves forms of ‘suspense.’ . . . They have an inner affinity with the mechanisms of desire, its postponements, its new impetus.” This is true, to various extents, also of nonlinear narrative forms, such as multiple-draft narratives, forking-path plots, and alternate stories. Thus, fantasy in its relation to the narrative plays a double role: It veils the lack in the Other (castration) and sustains desire. For Todd McGowan, as well as previous theorists of film and fantasy, desire emerges in a film through the very fact that film is a public form of fantasy, a way of allowing us to see the impossible:

Fantasy is not secondary in relation to desire. Fantasy establishes the scenario and the coordinates through which the subject experiences itself as a desiring subject. Without fantasy, there would be no initial impetus for desire, and yet, paradoxically, fantasy compromises the subject’s desire, providing a justification or a rationalization for the impossibility that it presents. In other words, despite its supplementary position in the psychic economy of the subject, fantasy has a phenomenological priority. This is evident nowhere as clearly as in the cinema. Even the film that tries most steadfastly to strip away the dimension of fantasy sustains it at a minimal level. In this sense, a cinema of fantasy is a mode of cinema that merely accentuates a direction that inheres in the medium as such. (2007b: 24)

We argue that leaving too many “holes” in a story (i.e., radically breaking with the tenets of classical narrative) might frustrate spectators to a point where desire is “left out” of the film altogether. In other words, if a film leaves its spectators solely in the domain of desire, some might abandon their seats and leave the movie theater or switch to another channel. The same might occur if we are given the answers too soon or too abundantly.

Engaging with a film thus means engaging with the operation of the mechanism of desire/fantasy. In our view, for this to happen we do not have to identify with the contents of the protagonist’s desire nor with their actions to fulfill it. If identification is at all a factor in engagement, what characterizes it is the fundamental common denominator of any subjective structure—the desideratum to deal with castration (the lack in the Other). To sum up this point, the structure of film, in its affinity with the structure of fantasy, reflects the double nature of fantasy: to defend the subject against castration and to sustain desire.

In our lives, “Visually, desire concerns what we don’t see, not what we see. . . . In the visual field . . . the subject desires to see precisely what is not visible in the Other, and what results is that the subject continually seeks without ever finding” (McGowan 2007b: 69). Narrative film allows us to see more than we see in our everyday lives in relation to the Other by maintaining a “satisfactory” economy of desire/fantasy. This visual economy then is based on what any film chooses to make visible and how it does so as well as what it does not show. In the narrative, this is manifested in the distinction between story and plot.

Given that when viewing a film, our relation to the screen onto wh ich it is projected is one related to lack (because of the screen’s emptiness as well as the unattainability of the film’s objects), we identify the absence of the cinematic object from the screen, including the human character in film as embodied by an actor with what in Lacanian psychoanalysis is called objet (petit) a. This object that can never be attained can exist only in fantasy, like the cinematic object. Gaze and voice, two of the four partial objects, around which the scopic and invocatory drives circulate, respectively, are the two most relevant to cinema—involved in the experience of viewing a film. Indeed, objet a is translated in the imaginary as a fantasy object, an object that fills the lack in the Other. This is basically the ontological status of the cinematic object, hence the imperative that a plot should show its characters embodied by actors. This means that the mechanism of desire/fantasy is contingent on the embodiment of characters by actors, in compliance with film’s unique ontology and techniques. Unlike literature, in which the reader is free to imagine the corporeality of the protagonist, in film this corporeality is visualized, a visualization that has at its heart the fundamental desire inherent in the experience of viewing a film—the desire to see the characters embodied by actors.

It is precisely this desire that a film like the classical noir, Robert Montgomery’s Lady in the Lake (1947), an adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s novel The Lady in the Lake (1944), resists. It is a cinematic version aspiring to simulate a first-person narrative style. The protagonist (the narrator), Philip Marlowe (Robert Montgomery), appears only in three frontal shots in which he tells us about story developments and in six shots in which the front of his body is reflected in a mirror. The rest of the film is rendered from his point of view; therefore, we cannot see him (we occasionally see his hands) but only what and how he sees, and, of course, we hear his voice while his body remains off-screen. To the best of our knowledge, such an experiment in classical/mainstream narrative cinema has never been repeated.² For what works in literature cannot work in film. In film we desire to see the protagonist, or alternately, to see their subjectivity visualized.³ The rendering of point-of-view shots alone, without linking them to a body that appears on the screen or to mental/subjective images, may hardly be expected to work.

To clarify this point, Rouben Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931) is also an adaptation of a novel (The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson, first published in 1886). Its opening sequence, in which the desire to see the protagonist—the connection between desire/fantasy and the character’s body—is suspended, exemplifies not only that the experiment of rendering subjective shots without seeing the protagonist cannot work throughout the viewing of a film but also that such a suspension must be justified in the film’s diegesis with which we become engaged. The whole sequence is shot from the protagonist’s (Fredric March) point of view, marked by the iris shape of the frame.⁴ It begins with a shot showing his hands playing an organ and his shadow on the music sheet. Then it renders a dialogue between the protagonist and his valet. The editing alternates shots showing the valet from the protagonist’s point of view, rendered in the iris shape, and shots showing the shadow. This conveys the idea that the dialogue is conducted between the valet and Dr. Jekyll’s “shadow”—Mr. Hyde, who will emerge later in the visual field through a physical transformation. But for now, he remains “hidden,” represented visually by Jekyll’s shadow alone. Then a one-take point-of-view tracking shot commences, sustaining our desire to see the protagonist, which is answered when we see his reflection in a mirror. As he leaves his house, we return to camera movements rendering his POV. This subjective sequence comes to an end with Dr. Jekyll addressing his students about the two sides of the human soul—evil/good. The protagonist is a physician who experiments with splitting between evil and good because he cannot accept his dark side, which he associates with his sexual drive as well as with nineteenth-century social hypocrisy regarding this matter. This split is visualized by two different and distinct physical appearances. While in the part of Dr. Jekyll, a handsome and respected physician, we may easily identify March, in the part of Mr. Hyde, March hides under heavy makeup that conceals his physique, making him look and behave like a Neanderthal (although dressed like Jekyll in a tuxedo, March evinces this animal-like comportment in his acting). The rendering of subjectivity by means of poetic, cinematic devices instructs spectators of the protagonist’s insistence to separate his good side from his dark one, an experiment doomed to failure. In contrast, Lady in the Lake is a film rendered from the point of view of the protagonist whose desire is to write gore fiction. It seems almost superfluous to point out the disadvantage of a film that neglects the visual in favor of an attempt to render subjectivity solely through simulating a first-person narration in a novel.

Indeed, this comparison raises the question of the relationship between the act of viewing a film, the dynamic of desire/fantasy, and the figuring of the embodiment of characters by actors in this dynamic. In the complex operation related to the very ontology and language of film, namely the dynamic of absence/presence, the desire to see and hear (hearing alone, however, will never suffice in cinema), as Metz ([1977] 1982: 58–66) maintains, is at the heart of cinema. However, the two sexual drives—scopic and invocatory—are characterized by a distance that keeps the object apart: We can neither touch nor smell nor taste the objects on the screen, for these are senses that relate to the tangibility of the object viewed and its materiality.⁵ Metz writes: “These two sexual drives are distinguished from the others in that they are more dependent on a lack, or at least dependent on it in a more precise, more unique manner, which marks them from the outset . . . as being on the side of the imaginary” (58). By “imaginary” Metz means the world of fantasy. In other words, although the scopic and the invocatory drives remain unsatisfied (in their relation to desire), maintaining a gulf between the spectator (the “voyeur” in Metz’s terms) and the object (one on which the very act of “voyeurism” depends), the imaginary objects on the screen are nevertheless satisfactory precisely because they are not there. Voyeurism is then the act through which the two partial drives (the scopic and the invocatory) aim to be satisfied, the act on which our libidinal investment (en gagement with the dynamic of desire/fantasy) depends: Fantasy might be what veils lack, but it only does so in the imaginary, hence the immanence of voyeurism. Indeed, this is why nudity and sex (both involving humans) are so popular in film.

It is also in this light that we may understand Metz’s other argument that it is precisely the absence of the object from the screen that necessitates the richness unique to cinema, one that answers the desire to see by compensating for the lack of the screen (and, we might add, for its two-dimensionality⁶):

What distinguishes the cinema is an extra reduplication, a supplementary and specific turn of the screw bolting desire to lack. First because the spectacles and sounds the cinema “offers” us (offers us at a distance, hence as much steals from us) are especially rich and varied: a mere difference of degree, but already one that counts: the screen presents to our apprehension, but absent from our grasp, more “things” (The mechanism of the perceiving drive is identical for the moment but its object is more endowed with matter; this is one of the reasons why the cinema is very suited to handling “erotic scenes” which depend on direct, non-sublimated voyeurism.) In the second place (and more decisively), the specific affinity between the cinematic signifier and the imaginary persists . . . in a primordial elsewhere, infinitely desirable (= never possessible [sic]), on another scene which is that of absence and which nevertheless represents the absent in detail, thus making it very present, but by a different itinerary. (61, italics in the original)

What Metz seems to be saying is something like this: Film spectators are deprived of an object, say, a cake, that they can neither touch nor possess, but not of the recipe: its ingredients, how it should look, when and how to eat it, how to enjoy its taste, smell, and so on (tactile and haptic theories have amply elaborated on this). Film will show us every aspect of the cake that will make us desire it. At the beginning of The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (Sophie Fiennes 2006), Žižek states: “The problem for us is not whether our desires are satisfied or not. The problem is how do we know what we desire? . . . We have to be taught to desire. Cinema . . . doesn’t give you what you desire, it tells you how to desire.” The “how” is indeed achieved through the film’s fantasy, by directing it to an object. In minutely visualizing a fantasy, it externalizes how a desired object should look and make...