This project begins as an act of mourning. For a lost cinematic past. For a longstanding critical tradition. For film noir. It is about the loss of an idea, and how we came to have it in the first place. This loss was precipitated by three works: James Naremore’s More Than Night, Marc Vernet’s “Film Noir on the Edge of Doom” and Thomas Elsaesser’s Weimar Cinema and After. The history offered by these revisionist accounts necessitated a wholesale re-evaluation of my understanding of film noir: it was not the one I had been taught by Paul Schrader or Raymond Durgnat, where—for example—noir was the articulation of German Expressionism in Hollywood, or an American response to war-time turmoil. Instead, the idea of film noir appeared as the product of complex discursive construction, an overdetermined site of critical concern and academic investment. An entire tradition had been founded on something that now appeared not to exist. Film noir crumbled before me, and left in its place were fascinating accounts of trans-Atlantic cultural influence and complex timelines of discovery and rediscovery that seemed to pose fundamental questions regarding historiography and our relation to the past. It was in the work of Jacques Lacan that I found both a way to come to terms with this loss and the possibility of proposing answers to these questions of (film) history. Reading texts from his Écrits, such as “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious” and “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire”, I saw a structural corollary between the characterisation of noir as a retroactively constituted critical category and Lacan’s investigation, through structural linguistics, of the retroactive production of meaning. Here, then, was another lost past—of psychoanalysis and cinema—that called out to me. And as I watched again films such as The Maltese Falcon (1941), Double Indemnity (1944) and D.O.A. (1950) and saw them to be concerned throughout with the retroactive production of knowledge, it seemed to me that, despite the sense in which “the time of Lacan”—or at least, a certain version of Lacan—had somehow passed in the study of cinema, there remained the richly suggestive possibilities of an exploration of Lacan and film, even over the heretofore well-trodden ground of film noir. I mourn the loss of the idea of noir and seek through this study to honour its memory; however, I also insist upon a more melancholic attachment to the project of psychoanalytic film theory. Lost for a while, perhaps, but certainly not dead: it is an object I refuse to relinquish because of the unexplored possibilities it offers. No longer should Lacan be made to play the part of Jeff Bailey in Out of the Past (1947), held forever responsible for the sins that went before. This book will seek to revisit that intersection of psychoanalytic and film theories first articulated in the 1970s, to plot a new trajectory—alongside that of Slavoj Žižek or Todd McGowan—for Lacan and cinema. My aim is therefore to present a new reading of the constitution of the critical category of noir through Lacanian psychoanalysis. Both noir and Lacan are areas that have in the past been well explored in Film Studies, and this project engages with the corpus of work on each, but my purpose will be twofold: first, I will engage with Lacanian theory in order to perform a meta-critical analysis of the writing on noir in the last seven decades in order to present an original theory of criticism and historiography for the cinema; and, second, through this account—and through the exploration of Lacan with particular noir films, such as Double Indemnity and The Maltese Falcon—I will aim to demonstrate the possibilities for a Lacanian Film Studies (as one that engages fully with Lacan’s entire body of work) that has hitherto not been realised.
1.1 Film Noir/Film Theory/Psychoanalysis: Parallel Histories
The developments of cinema, psychoanalysis and film noir present important intersections in the history of Film Studies. These stories are so well known that they hardly need repeating here: from the Lumière Brothers and Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer in 1895, to the Surrealists, and Sam Goldwyn’s $100,000 offer to Freud for a screenplay about love in 1925, the early developments of cinema and psychoanalysis are intimately connected. 1 Indeed, Janet Bergstrom’s collection Endless Night charts the “parallel histories” of cinema and psychoanalysis through the twentieth century: parallels that I seek further to nuance through this investigation of noir, theory and Lacan. 2 Furthermore, as a number of critics have noted, the popularisation of psychoanalysis in America coincided with the emergence of film noir. 3 So while Freud, CG Jung and Sándor Ferenczi travelled to the US in 1909 and, as their steamship pulled into New York harbour, Freud is said to have joked, “They don’t realise we’re bringing them the plague”, it was not until films as diverse as Bringing Up Baby (1938)—manifestly not noir, in which an analyst’s expertise is mocked—and Stranger on the Third Floor (1940)—arguably the first American noir, featuring a surreal and expressive dream sequence—that the “symptoms” of psychoanalysis could truly be discerned in Hollywood. 4
In fact, film noir is replete with references of one sort or another to Freud’s science of desire: from This Gun for Hire (1942), where Alan Ladd’s Raven reveals, “Every night I dream. I read somewhere about a … about a kind of doctor. A psycho-something. If you tell your dream, you don’t have to dream it anymore”, to the topography of the conscious/unconscious that a psychiatrist draws for Oedipal anti-hero Al Walker in The Dark Past (1948). And from the less pronounced Freudianisms of elicit or repressed sexuality in Double Indemnity, Gilda (1946) and The Big Sleep (1946) to the extended explorations of psychology and psychiatry in Spellbound (1945), The Woman in the Window (1944), The Dark Mirror (1946) and Whirlpool (1949), a popularised version of psychoanalysis can be seen as a key determinant of the noir universe. Indeed, this has been recognised by key critics from Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton, who list psychoanalysis in their “Sources of Film Noir” and note that questions of “hidden meaning” and the play between eroticism and censorship characterise the series, to Schrader, who insists that “the roots of film noir are World War II, and German Expressionism, existentialism and Freud”. 5 Frank Krutnik is more specific, suggesting that it was between the emergence of hard-boiled fiction and its adaptation into film noir that psychoanalysis came to prominence in American culture, rendering it a dimension particular to the cinematic rather than literary exploration of noir; and more recently, Marlisa Santos has devoted a book-length study—The Dark Mirror: Psychiatry and Film Noir—to the argument that film noir was utterly dependent upon the introduction of psychoanalytic principles, through, for example, the psychiatric treatment of war veterans. 6
In fact, we should note that both psychoanalysis and noir are themselves also crucial to the development of academic Film Studies and film theory as a discourse. 7 For example, Naremore notes the parallel trajectories of the terms “auteur” and “film noir” in the work of the Cahiers du Cinéma group, both operating as the triumph of “style”—one individual and one collective—over the constraints of the studio system; he adds that “it is no accident that the two terms would enter the English language at the same time”. In America, the rise of academic Film Studies in the late 1960s coincided with renewed popularity of film noir (for example, in college film societies). 8 Mark Bould argues that in Britain, E Ann Kaplan’s Women in Film Noir—as “an intersection of feminism, Marxism, Lacanian psychoanalysis and (post-)structuralism”—was at the centre of the theoretical developments then shaping Film Studies. 9 And it is, moreover, the British tradition I would argue—in its relation to the French and American—that was central to the development of psychoanalytic film theory.
The principal site of this discourse was, of course, the journal Screen, which, as Philip Rosen notes, made a concerted effort to publish English translations of foreign critical works on film with the aim of establishing new modes of thinking in British film culture. 10 Through this combination of continental theory and the analysis of Hollywood films, Screen—as we know—rapidly established itself as a leading venue for the critical examination of the cinema. Such discourse can ultimately be traced back to 1970 and Jean-Louis Baudry’s essay “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus”, published in Cinéthique (and only later translated in Film Quarterly), but for Anglophone studies it is the same year’s collaborative reading of Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) by the Cahiers du Cinéma group, translated in Screen in 1972: from this point, psychoanalysis became the dominant discourse of the journal, which itself became the leading publisher of Anglophone film theory informed by Freud and Lacan. 11
The most significant statement in this conjunction of psychoanalysis and cinema was, however, Christian Metz’s essay, “The Imaginary Signifier”, published in 1975 in France in the journal Communications and soon after by Screen. 12 Metz began his career as a semiologist of the cinema, producing studies that expounded a structuralist understanding of film. He concluded that film was a language without a langue (a Saussurean language system of intercommunication, arbitrary signs, and double articulation); it could nonetheless be considered a language because it consisted of the ordering of signifying elements. 13 Metz’s turn to psychoanalysis in “The Imaginary Signifier”—broadly, I would say, in the structuralist mode developed by Lacan—was then a logical progression of his semiological endeavours. There he posed a fundamental question: “What contribution can Freudian psychoanalysis make to the study of the cinematic signifier?” His answer was a theory of spectatorship that, for example, considered the modes of presence and absence in film as compared with theatre, leading him to the conclusion that “every film is a fiction film”, which is to say, predicated upon the presence of absence. 14 Moreover, taking up Baudry’s suggestions regarding the cinema and the mirror stage, Metz formulated a theory of cinematic identification (with both the mechanism and the content of the film) situated in the Lacanian Imaginary. The possibilities of such a connection between psychoanalysis and Film Studies led to a proliferation of psychoanalytic film theory in the work of critics such as Stephen Heath, Ben Brewster and Colin MacCabe and moreover to some of the most influential works of film theory in general: such as Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema”, in which psychoanalysis, noir and film analysis all converge to produce a theory of male castration anxiety formulated in terms of the noir femme fatale. 15 ...