Hollywood’s (m)Other Aperture: Pre-Oedipal Mothers, FEMININITY, and the Movies [1 ed.] 1527535878, 9781527535879

Table of contents :
Cover
Hollywood’s (m)Other Aperture: Pre-Oedipal Mothers, FEMININITY, and the Movies
Copyright
Contents
Index

Citation preview

HOLLYWOOD'S (m)OTHER APERTURE Pre-Oedipal Mothers, FEMININITY, and the Movies

JAIME BIHLMEYER

Hollywood's (m)Other Aperture

Hollywood's (m)Other Aperture: Pre-Oedipal Mothers, FEMININIT� and the Movies

By

Jaime Bihlmeyer

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Hollywood's (m)Other Aperture: Pre-Oedipal Mothers, FEMININITY, and the Movies By Jaime Bihlmeyer This book first published 2019 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2019 by Jaime Bihlmeyer All rights for this book reserved, No part ofthis book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in anyfonn or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior pennission ofthe copyright owner,

ISBN (10): 1-5275-3587-8 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-3587-9

Dedicated to my mother, Mary Marjorie

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements Prolegomenon Prologue

...................................................................................

ix

............................................................................................

xi

...................................................................................................

xiii

PART 1: (m)OTHERNESSES IN JANE CAMPION'S FILMS CHAPTER

1 ............................................................................................... 2

THE (UN)SPEAKABLE FEMININITY IN MAINSTREAM MOVIES: JANE CAMPION'S CHAPTER

THE PIANO

2 ............................................................................................. 21

INTERTEXTUALITY AND THE ENUNCIATION O F FEMININITY: BLUEBEARD IN JANE CAMPION'S

THE PIANO

CHAPTER3 .............................................................................................33 HERMAPHRODITE: MATERNAL MASOCHISM IN JANE CAMPION'S

THE PORTRAIT OFA LADY, HOLY SMOKE

AND IN THE CUT PART 2: THE PHALLIC (m)OTHER AND THE VIRGIN QUEEN CHAPTER4 .............................................................................................

57

NOVEL, SCRIPT, IMAGE: A CASE STUDY OF THE PHALLIC (m)OTHER IN MAINSTREAM CULTURE CHAPTER

5 ............................................................................................. 72

MARIANISM IN THE MOVIE EUZABETH: FEMININITY, THE LAW OF THE FATHER AND THE MATERNAL SEMIOTIC PART 3: SPIELBERG'S (m)OTHER DREAM(works) CHAPTER 6 ............................................................................................. 93 A.I: ARTIFICIAL INTELUGENCE, SPIELBERG'S WORMHOLE TO THE REAL

Table of Contents

viii CHAPTER

7

...........................................................................................

112

SPIELBERG'S MINORITY REPORT: A CASE STUDY OF FEMININITY IN MAINSTREAM MOVIES CHAPTER

8 ........................................................................................... 128

(m)OTHER LOVE IN SPIELBERG'S MUNICH: ABJECTION, JOUISSANCE AND THE MATERNAL OBJECT PART 4: RIDLEY SCOTT AND JAMES CAMERON: FROM ALIEN TO A VATAR

CHAPTER 9

........................................................................................... 149

RIDLEY SCOTT'S AllEN: THE PRE-OEDIPAL HORROR OF (m)OTHER CHAPTER

10 ......................................................................................... 165

JAMES CAMERON'S 'ALPHA' TRILOGY: DOPPELGANGER S, THE DEPICTION OF WOMEN AND THE UMBILICAL PHALLUS EPILOGUE ............................................................................................ 1 9 9 FEMININITY, SCREEN MEMORY AND ANIMALITY CODA

.....................................................................................................

229

PRIMAL FEMININITY: THE QUEERING OF MAINSTREAM MOVIES EXTENDED CODA

..............................................................................

THE CARCINOGENIC (m)OTHER: NOTES

...................................................................................................

BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX

245

ANNIHILATION 255

..................................................................................

311

....................................................................................................

331

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

1'd like to salute several scholars whose encouragement and support made all the difference in getting this project out of the inchoate state on to maturity and finally to publication. Thanks to all of you: Dr. Margaret Weaver, Missouri State University; Dr. Kelly Oliver, Vanderbilt University; Dr. Barbara Creed, The University of Melbourne; Dr. Cyndy Hendershot, Arkansas State University; Dr. Frank Tomasulo, National University; Dr. Margret Gurmarsdottir Champion, University of Gothenburg, Dr. Andrew M. Gordon, University of Florida; Dr. Charles Musser, Yale University; Dr. Kylo-Patrick Hart, Texas Christian University; Dr. Leslie Boldt-Irons, Brock University; Dr. Corrado Federici, Brock University and Dr. Emesto Virgulti, Brock University. The Media, Journalism and Film Department at Missouri State University also deserves my thanks for supporting me via its system of scholarly research release time and for travel expenses, in addition to the first to acknowledge my research as a valid addition to academic inquiry. Missouri State University students also helped encourage my research after each of my presentations particularly in my guest speaker engagements in the classes of my many colleagues at the university. Special thanks and love to my family and friends, and especially to my life partner Sandy and our two children Chelsea and Jesse, for all their support and understanding. I am also grateful to Cambridge Scholars Publishing for offering my project a home port in the academic publishing sea of problematic tranquility. Portions of the manuscript have been previously published in article and chapter fOllll from different publishers who have given permission to reprint. I want to thank the publishers and list them now as full citations. "Marianism in the Movie

Elizabeth: FEMININITY, the Law of the Father Film and Sexual Politics, Cambridge Scholar

and the Maternal Semiotic." Publishing,

(2004). "Novel, Script, Image: A Case Study of the Phallic In Mainstream Culture." Images andImagery--Frames, Borders, Limits--Interdisciplinary PerspectivesiPeter Lang Publishing (2005). The (M)Other

(Un)Speakable FEMININITY in Mainstream Movies: Jane Campion's 'The Piano'.

Cinema Journal, 44, No. 2(2),68-88 (2005). Spielberg's

'Minority

Report': A Case Study of FEMININITY in Mainstream Movies.

International Journal of the Humanities, 2(2) (2006).

The

Bluebeard in Jane

x

Campion's

Acknowledgments

The Piano:

A Case Study in Intertextuality as

FEMININITY in Mainstream Movies.

an

Enunciation of

The International Journal of the

Humanities, 9, (1) 17 (2010). Alien: The Pre-Oedipal Horror of (m)Other. Published in December 2013 in The International Journal of Literary Humanities (Vol. 10 Issue 4,2013).

PROLEGOMENON

... gynesis--the putting into discourse of "woman" as the process diagnosed in France as intrinsic to the condition ofmodernity; indeed, the valorization ofthefeminine, woman, and her obligatory, that is, historical connotations, as somehow intrinsic to new and necessary modes ofthinking, writing, speaking. The object produced by this process is neither a person nor a thing, but a horizon, that toward which the process is tending: a gynema. This gynema is a reading effect, a woman-ineffect that is never stable and has no identity. Alice Jardine 1985

Hollywood's (m)Other Aperture: Pre-Oedipal Mothers, FEMININITY and the Movies is a project and a process both of which address the bold plurality of FEMININlTY and the maternal semiotic in mainstream movies. As well as addressing specifically the maternal semiotic in the

bodies

of

work from significant Hollywood filmmakers. The designation for 'Hollywood filmmakers' has broad interpretation these days and generally refers to filmmakers who have developed projects connected to the Hollywood system in some marmer-usually involving contractual commitments to Hollywood studios, distribution networks, and/or Hollywood actors. That is why the films analyzed in this book include movies authored by a broad spectrum of directors ranging from the relatively independent filmmaker Jane Campion, to Hollywood blockbuster filinmakers the caliber of Steven Spielberg and James Cameron.

In place of a more

conventional introduction, I have decided to write an

introductory prologue to my project/process, which, consists of the analysis of the pre-lingual experience1 as it manifests in mainstream cinematic works. As you will see, my Prologue is pre-verbally influenced and, consequently, rhythm-infused;2 it amounts to an overture of syncopated, poststructuralist­ inspired

breakdowns of

the principal tenns and concepts underpinning my

analyses. Following each of these punctuated demarcations, which are enunciated, and

au esprit d'ecriturefeminine/ that is, in the spirit of polysemy signifiance(s), 4 I dissect a brief exemplary scene from one of the films

that I fully analyze later in this tome. After each dissected sampling, or

xii

Prolegomenon

description from the selected film, I provide a preliminary analysis that sheds light on the selected scene.

In

the Prologue below, I address these specific telTIlS and concepts

integral to my project in preliminary demarcations, dissections and analyses: first on the list is FEMININITY, an all-encompassing 'word-figure',' followed by components of Julia Kristeva's maternal

'ordonnancement'

(order).

Kristeva's concept serves as both the umbrella-telTIl and sliding-signifier for the

chora,

which incorporates the maternal semiotic, abjection and

jouissance-all three of which I separate out and define. Then, I continue with a descriptive condensation of the word-configuration, or 'word-figure,' that is '(m)Other.' Finally, to complete the Prologue, I instantiate the

uncannily" symmetrical tropes: doubles, doppelgangers and the opening and endings of movies.

PROLOGUE FEMININITY:

'NAVEL-GAZING' AS PRIMAL SELF-REFLEXIVITY

FEMININITY in all uppercase letters advances an arche-assault on the a priori prohibitions of the Law of the Father by (re )presenting a figural disruption to the phallo-alphabetic structure of culture. In this configuration, this unspeakable word-figure refers to an always already pre-lingual, primal FEMININITY 1 that modulates out concentrically from the originary masochistic2 influence of the maternal dyad in rippling pennutations of extimacy.3 Further, FEMININITY, in part, describes a universal proto­ sexuality.4 The Law reduces and relegates FEMININITY to a narrow signifier,jemininity, that defines a passive, genderized construct for females upon their submission to the only recognized Name in to\Vll: the Name of the Father. FEMININITY is a primal plurality of sexuality and survives in both genders regardless of genital appearance and Symbolic (in)visibilily.5 Moreover, in its English spelling, this always already dark-continent-of-a­ word, FEMININITY, distances itself from the male in '(fem)ftle' while still retaining a residual, oblique phallo-alphabetic trace of '(fem)ale-ness.' FEMININITY also features, introspectively, a kind of 'navel-gazing'6 self­ reflexivity in a play of inner commentary:

'ININ,' a self-contained

connotation indexing doubling, dyadic primacy, and, by association to dyadic dissolution, abjection (including convulsive dyadic purging, and afterbirth) that is intrinsic to the maternal cycles. In addition, FEMININITY suggests a disposition subversively independent of, but nevertheless symbiotic to, the naming of 'woman' as a binary construct: a disposition consisting of an extra-logical plurality of beingness(es) and uoiversal libidinal investments7 Specifically, (m)Other and Woman form singular and dyadic disposition(s) in one body, mind and soul all of which connote epistemological, phenomenological and ontological conundrums of the Symbolic, that islare FEMININITY. Furthermore, FEMININITY overlaps (with) the Real-that is, human self-identity annihilation-despite and

xiv

Prologue

because FEMININITY, this fragmentary, polysemic disposition, undergoes sporadic coalescence(s) in the human psyche. These pluralistic coalescences foment a life-long revisiting of repressed dreams and other condensations from the primal morass that is the effect of maternal materiality in the bio­ psyche. These soma-psyche re-visitations include the

originary fantasies of

phallic (m)Othemess as well as, ultimately, the loss of self-identity in spasmodic surges

In

ofjouissance,

among other recurrences.

sum, as a word re-configured to graphically and organically disrupt

the Name of the Father; and as a re-configuration which doubly distances itself from 'woman' by indexing both the play of

differances as

well as the

human continuum of the pre-lingual proto-sexual plurality, FEMININITY­ in all uppercase letters-remains positioned polysemically outside of the binary oppositions of gender constructs and so, paradoxically and extra­ logically opens space for critical analysis witheout) essentialist impediments'AN EXEMPLAR SCENE OF FEMININITY: Two blue xenomorphs kneel before each other. They reach around behind each other's waist and grab one another's long ponytail-entwined neural appendages that emerge from the back of their craniums. One of the xenomorphs is a hybrid, a male human-xenomorph (the depiction of which communicates a salute to etlmographic imaging in the movies as a science-fictionalized kind of 'half­ breed'). The other is a full-blooded native female xenomorph. Curiously, the overt signs of sexual difference between them are ambiguously designed (other than offering an oblique hint: visible navels which signal human-like reproductive systems in all their viscerality and, by association, these navels also signal the accompanying psychology and

ur-phantasien 10). In

a

spontaneous ritual, the seemingly aroused blue duo hold their serpentine, hair-insulated cranial-protruding, umbilical-like organs up to each other like floral offerings, and the hairs auto-separate revealing the moist neural worm-like tentacles which intertwine sinuously, softly. Both the blue xenomorphs sigh with the gush

ofjouissance. They come together, body to

body, in the primal niche of lush foliage, clinging and consummating, seemingly a/sexually, as if entwined newly born indigo twins. PRELIMINARY ANALYSIS: This is a scene from the recent film that as of the publication date of this book holds the box office record for highest grossing movie. This is a scene from a film, among the several analyzed in this volume, that serves as an index to the traces of FEMININITY in mainstream movies. The film dO\vnplays gender distinction in the scene and the emphasized display of an equally active, equally passive alsexuality indicated by a doubling of the same cranial-umbilical organ in the two

xv

Hollywood's (rn)Other Aperture

xenomorphs: their homogeneous neural ponytails that appear to provide mutually intimate and gratifying intercourse. The two blue humanoids, in a mirror composition kneeling before each other, join their neuron tentacles that

are

the

multi-faceted

organs

of

pre-lingual,

extra-lingual,

and

psychosomatic 11 gratification. Significantly, their pan-sexual appearing, non-sexuated mingling takes place in the chora-space below the Tree of Life, the maio manifestation of Mother Gaia, the ideal

primal Object 10)

referred to as Eywa by the aboriginal xenomorphs. (See Chapter

Maternal Ordonnancement Julia Kristeva's ideas bring to light the maternal semiotic and other pre­ lingual residue always already oozing in through the porosity of the Symbolic order and attest to the extra-logical reach as well as the repression of FEMININITY.12 My project in film analysis is founded to a large degree on her elucidations and the research that has been stimulated by her innovations and refolTIlUlations. The sum of Kristeva's project furthers the workiogs of the ontological compass that is FEMININITY in a symbiotic relation with the Symbolic-the prohibitions

andjouisscmce of which have

already developed proto-symbolically and originally from the prelingual maternal 'order,' Kristeva's maternal entity gleans the maternal

ordonnancement13. The prelingual ordannancement from the rhythmic motility and

stases, restrictions and plenitudes of the primary mutual stimulation of the mother/child dyad.! 4 The primal dyad, in tum, establishes a phenomenological and epistemological exchange in the Imaginary bleeding over into the Symbolic that expands extra-logically the awareness in the topological nuances of the psychic registers.15 The Lacanian triad of registers (the Real, the Imagioary and the Symbolic) in conjunction with Kristeva's maternal semiotic

cryptically

(ordonnancement)

enunciate

the

pre-lingual

and FEMININITY both

maternal

(in)visible

authority

to the simultaneous

narrowing and expansion of the human condition, like the beating of a topological heart, that culture tends to disavow and sublimate. Kristeva's

maternal

' ordonnancement' processes incorporate and chora, the maternal semiotic,

consist of, in part, her concepts of the abjection

andjouissance.

These we will discuss below.

Chora Kristeva's concept of the

chora16 is an

attempt at coming to telTIlS with

the bio-psychical site of, as well as the psychic markings generated from the maternal receptacle in relation to the pre-natal as well as the post-natal pre-

xvi

Prologue

lingual entity, the embryo/fetuslinfant-an entity that as yet has no concept of objectivity or subjectivity; there is only the maternal ordonnancement. As such the chara is slippery in terms of signification and yet replete with signijiance, 17 that is, the preconscious/proto-conscious awareness of para­ logical process(es) and pre-verbal pre-meaning(s) that manifest in the pre­ born and the new born as a plurality of dispositions remaining accessible extra-lingually throughout life. These sparks of energy and psychic accents­ including their intelTIlittent stases-serve as a prototypical ordering, associated with the maternal authority, that initiates a proto-symbolic regulatory pattern in the chora. The most incisive aspect of Kristeva's borrowing from Plato's telTIl chora cited in his Timaeus, is that Kristeva singles out certain Symbolic facets of Plato's use of chora that indicate the maternal. She addresses specifically the maternal inspiration and the correlation between Plato's use of the telTIl and her

0\Vll

in referring to the

chora as: "receptacle, unnamable, improbable, hybrid, anterior to naming, to the One, to the father, and consequently, maternally connoted to such an extent that it merits 'not even the rank of syllable'" (Kristeva

1980, 133).

From this extremely philosophical, extra-lingual description parts of which were gleaned from Plato and parts that Kristeva extrapolates from her own insights, we grasp a sense of the maternal receptacle that Kristeva encourages: a maternal receptacle anterior to the Father. But then Kristeva leaves the chora suspended like a drifting preternatural kite in the massive cage-like infrastructure of the Symbolic, early on in the development of her chora concept18. Nonetheless, Kristeva's articulation of the chora with its positing of the maternal as the biological source of signijiance along with its oblique linkage to an enclosed space,19 can't help but embrace the spectrum of psychosomatic materiality that is the womb experience.

In the

naming of her concept the chara, derived tangentially from Plato, the original

'spelunker'

(cavernous

association(s)

and

pun(s)

intended),

Kristeva gathers (a)historicity into her newly discovered sliding-signifier, chora, and leaves her naming open to 'hybrid' pre-Symbolic/Symbolic signijiance/significance as well as open to the maternal precedence 'anterior to naming.'

In other

words, the chora is ineffable and yet named and so, is

a party to the extra-logical breadth and scope of the maternal semiotic and primal FEMININITY. AN EXEMPLAR CHORA SCENE: The pre-cog detective leads the cocky FBI agent down into the gnt of the pre-cog police unit headquarters, an expansive spelunca, which is cone-shaped like an ancient, yet curiously Sci-Fi-looking, temple. This cavernous space houses the omphalos, the Delphic shrine,20 but in lieu of a Greek stone monument representing Gaia's

Hollywood's (rn)Otber Aperture navel, there is a large shallow pool of "photon-milk."

xvii

In this pool rest three

oracles-one female and two males-floating on their backs with tentacle circuits attached to their heads through which they transmit their pre­ cognitive visions of future murders on to three screens embedded in the dome ceiling directly above them. Like antagonistic twins, the dark-haired Pre-cog detective protagonist, and the FBI agent, both resembling Black­ Irish doppelganger s, spar verbally standing over the milky lagoon as the oracles quietly spasm in agitation. Their geeky caretaker, a minor character, settles the agitated pre-cogs and the room clears of all but the protagonist who bends over the female oracle. She suddenly springs up and grabs him crying out "Can you see?" as she directs her gaze to the ceiling screens. He looks up to the screens and sees the vision of a woman being murdered by a masked figure all in black. PRELIMINARY ANALYSIS: This is a scene from an award-winning Sci-Fi film, one of the several films analyzed in this volume that serves as an index to the imaging of the

chora

(re)presents the return to the originary

in mainstream movies. This scene

omb -space; as well as the vision of

w

the murder of (m)Other-a necessary event for dyad separation-projected from the mind of the female oracle onto the temple ceiling screens purposefully for the trembling, spooked male detective who is caught in her desperate grasp. Thusly, the speaking-subject that is the detective who is now suddenly a

subject-on-trial, 21 gets his first uncanny (in)visih ility.22 (See Chapter 7)

glimpse of the

persistence of the chora and

The Maternal Semiotic and the Cinematic Apparatus Kristeva's semiotic

(la semiotique),23

(Ie semiotique),

not to be confused with semiotics

is so enmeshed with her concept of the

chora

and its

maternal connotations, that a common naming of the nuanced enunciations from her pre-Symbolic semiotic has produced the compound word the 'maternal semiotic.' 24 Kristeva defines her pre-verbal, semiotic as "a disposition that is definitely heterogeneous to meaning but always in sight of it or in either a negative or surplus relationship to it." (Kristeva,

133)

1980,

Her maternal semiotic is the extra-lingual experiential phenomena in

the human condition, which consist of the

chora's primal

energies and the

accompanying stases acknowledged and absorbed by the pre-lingual entity that in turn leave in their wake markings and other traces-'heterogeneous to meaning but always in sight of it'- that are etched on the infantile psyche during the pre-lingual stage. These traces and echoes of the maternal pulsations and absences are generated during the pre-Symbolic period by means of the maternal biological functions and the maternal psychosomatic

xviii

Prologue

processes-as well as similar functions and proto-processes generated by the new pre-entity. This is the period when the pre-entity does not yet distinguish itself from the not-yet-Object, the not-yet-(m)Other, adding to the unspeakable topological register of the semiotic. Given the implied scope of Kristeva's semiotic, we can infer that her discovery consists of the psychic residual effects reverberating from the

music of the intrauterine and

extra-uterine sounds and rhythms, along with all fetal and newborn eye­ stimuli, in further conjunction with the smells, touches and psychic ur­ phantasien25 emanating from both parts of the dyad-and including all the synchronic and diachronic signifiances derived from these processes and effects. All of these pre-verbal residues amorphouslyformulate the maternal semiotic-of which the concept of the chora and its relation to womb serves as a proto-imagining and proto-depiction of the not-yet objectified maternal

mirror-screen26

'receptacle,' like an Imaginary, originary proto-theater,

with its stimulations, suspensions, projections and primal simulations-to which the cinematic apparatus is analogous. The pre lingual sensory stimuli, their periodic suspensions, as well as the primal fantasies germinating in the phenomenological folds of the maternal semiotic and the maternal chora during the pre-verbal stage as well as the effects of the cross-over traces of these coalescing (a kind of secondary elaboration) in the unconscious, the pre-conscious, and daydreams, lend themselves to a comparison to cinema: they fOlTIl a prototypical cinematic machine in and of themselves without the need for the film industry and its external extensions of the semiotic capabilities of the human mind.27 Plus Kristeva's

'Ie semiotique'

and the cinema share what W. R. Bion refers to

as 'alpha elements' and unconscious projective identification28 that fOlTIl (proto-)signiJYing chains and offshoots of links and attachments, condensations and displacements, metaphor and metonymy, that eventually subvert language as much as they validate the Symbolic. Further, the cinema answers and attends to the howling and whispering solicitations of the wistful, ever-present repetition compulsion29 associated with the pre-lingual derived 'alpha elements' of the maternal semiotic. Mainstream film provides this recursive fixation an outlet on a mass scale. Moreover, the effects of the repetition compulsion in life as well as in the movies offer a catharsis along with a recurrent and masochistic gush of the Imaginary plenitude30 -and very occasionally a touch of the Real. 31 The cathartic releases that one experiences from the cinema manifest particularly well when the effects are processed through the therapeutic cinema narrative experience-serendipitous and little-recognized examples of which are the telltale sublimating effects that are the self-effacing seams, a form of suture, inherent to all discourse.32 These imperfect, and yet barely visible discursive

Hollywood's (rn)Other Aperture

xix

seams that all but succeed in sublimating the maternal semiotic, always already index a

pre-verbalizing,

extra-lingual topology in the various

registers of the mind-see the gory reveal of the 'maternal semiotic scene' below that struggles between narrative suture and a pre-lingual inspired sadism. Further, cinema creates a conciliating venue for the masochistic repetition compulsion, a kind of safe Ie-visitation apparatus for the maternal semiotic re-pulsating sporadically on the liminal threshold of the pre­ conscious. The cinematic apparatus becomes a filter that screens (m)Othemess vis-a-vis the spectator subject like the tain in the machinations of the mirror. Ultimately, these cinematic and pre-conscious projections and operations semiotically (re)filter, (re)screen the pre-history, the pre-Oedipal and the post-Oedipal affectations of alienation3} within the human condition; and (re)present at a safe distance, perhaps even therapeutically,34 the images of self-reflexive alienation for the spectator subject-on-trial. AN EXEMPLAR MATERNAL SEMIOTIC SCENE: Two men, one has blond hair, the other has dark hair. They look off screen at a beautiful young woman in front of them. Nervously she says: "No, don't. Such a fucking waste of talent." She parts her kimono showing her bare left breast. Despite her supplications, the blond man raises a phallic object, slams it from behind with his hand and a bullet hole enters the woman above the right breast. Another muted gunshot occurs from off screen sending a second bullet through the woman's chest near the neck. She looks down and grimaces as her robe falls off her shoulders to her waist revealing both her breasts. The two men watch as she stumbles between them to her cat on a nearby counter. She weakly picks the cat up and leaves the screen as the two men follow her while reloading their homemade phallic firearms disguised as bicycle pumps. She sits in her wicker chair and chokes on tbe blood flooding her lungs from the bullet holes in her upper torso and then the blood pumps out from the tiny wounds in a stream dO\vn between her breasts. She gasps for breath as a third man enters between the other two and slams his cylindrical weapon shooting a bullet into her forehead and ending her life defmitively. Her robe is now open showing her raw bloody nakedness as if a pornographic crime scene. One of the men pulls her kimono over her. The last man to shoot steps forward and perversely pulls the kimono back from her body as the blood streams down her torso into her pubic hair. All three men slink away still staring at her naked and dead. PRELIMINARY ANALYSIS: This is a scene from the fihn directed by one of the top filmmakers in Hollywood who made his career specializing in family blockbusters. This is a scene from a film, among the several analyzed in this volume, that serves as an index to abject aspects of a much

xx

Prologue

more expansive topology of the maternal semiotic in mainstream movies. The maternal semiotic imagery includes: a woman's breasts-suggesting gratification and deprivation (primal

ordonnancement);

the (m)Other­

murder implications necessary for separating from the maternal Object; and the display of woman as lacking a penis amidst males brandishing phallicized objects. All these images are graphically, sadistically rendered like an

phantasien

ur­

of anxiety, jealousy and infantile gratification vis-a-vis the

maternal Object. All tbese impulses and intensities linger on in the pre­ conscious liminality of the viewer. (See Chapter

8.)

Abjection Abjection is human afterbirth, waste and the gaping (m)Other. 35 Abjection is placental horror and primal screams. It is the failure to purge, that is, the primal desire not to be purged, the

Thanatos

elements36 of the

maternal semiotic. Abjection overlaps topologically with the archaic

chora

receptacle:

tbe

with its contradictions of being and armihilation. Further,

abjection is everything borderless and body-centered-disease, vomit, corpse-tbat strikes a chord with tbe repressed birth trauma and Real psychosis (non-identity).37 The effect of abjection is the pale, pox-ridden underbelly of the repetition compulsion that is, essentially, a realized attempt at (re)purging, that (re)presents a cleansing: but one that never materializes and must be repeated. The abject as effect never surrenders but only retreats to the morass of the repressed unconscious to wait another appearance cycle. Just as does the maternal monster, the Phallic (m)Other,38 that is, the impossibility of the Real associated obliquely with tbe maternal. 39

In

reference to the abject Real, Slavoj Zizek with his vast

understanding of Lacan and pop culture refers to the Real in graphic, and maternally abject terms: " ... the Real in its most terrifying dimension, as the primordial abyss which swallows everything, dissolving all identities-a figure well known in literature in its multiple guises, from E.A. Poe's maelstrom and Kurtz's "horror" at the end of Conrad's

The Heart of

Darkness... " (Zizek 2006,64) AN EXEMPLAR ABJECTION SCENE: The lone survivor on a spaceship pushes a button to set in motion a process that the computer monitor in front of her

names in large digital letters:

"PURGE." She rushes

to the escape shuttle and closes the door behind her. The shuttle launches from the

mother ship

just in time to escape tbe latter exploding behind her

like a supernova. The relieved lone survivor takes off her clothes and displays for the first time her naturally muted, albeit explicitly (re )presented,

Hollywood's (rn)Otber Aperture

xxi

female body signs-she is finally safe and free of the virulent monster with the ooziog maw (vagina dentata): a 'weapons grade' alien that just won't die. Or is she really free of tlie virulent fanged vagioa? That is, is she really safe from its abject horror? Of course not: she nearly stumbles into the tubular-headed alien creature who is surprisingly letliargic tucked ioto tlie tubular folds on tlie far side of the small escape shuttle. The lone survivor slowly backs away. The Alien hasn't been aroused. The lone survivor has time to dart into a tiny closet and struggles to put on a space suit-a boundary against the Real menace risiog up before her. She then leaves tlie confines of the closet and fearfully crosses to sit cautiously in the pilot's seat-halfway to the monster's hiding place-carrying with her a telltale harpoon-like weapon. She puts on her seat belt nervously singing "You are my lucky star" over and over. Now, just as the tubular head of the creature reaches her from behind, the lone survivor smashes dO\vn on the button to open the exterior door of the ship and the vacuum of space sucks the creature out the opening. But, at the last minute, the preternaturally strong monster grabs the doorframe and struggles to fe-enter. The lone survivor shoots the monster with her phallic harpoon and this launches the monster into space. Unfortunately, the harpoon gun is yanked from tlie lone survivor's hands still attached to tlie harpoon by a cable and gets stuck in tlie closing door of the ship providing the monster an ersatz umbilical cord as a way back in. The lone survivor quickly closes the door, but the monster climbs up the cable and into one of the dOlmant rocket engines. Seeing this, the lone survivor starts the engine and finally, defiiotively

purges

herself of tlie

abject monster which is jettisoned into space. The lone survivor, after once more disrobing, crawls into an incubator sleep pod that forms a transparent womb around her, and sleeps in suspended animation. PRELIMINARY ANALYSIS: This is a scene from a blockbuster filin, among the several analyzed in this volume, that serves as an index to the imaging of the abject in mainstream movies. The abject images include the shuttle purged from the mother ship like a projectile turd, the abject depiction of the insatiable, irrepressible and visceral monster; the ad hoc umbilical cord attached to the harpoon; the purgiog oftlie Alien like voiding excrement/afterbirtli; and fioally, the therapeutic catharsis (a purging in and of itself) of !lie lone survivor's salvation from the Real Object/abject. That is, until the next episode; the next regressive urge in the spirit of Thanatos, the deatli drive.

In

this filin's case, !lie sequel that will prove to be one of

several. (See Chapter

9.)

xxii

Prologue

Jouissance Jouissance

is the orgasmic pulsation-pulsation is derived from the

Latin, and most siginficantly for this project, by way of the French

(im)pulsion (meaning drive, throb, instinct)--the pulsating from the liminal and

oscillating

human

beingness

enveloping

biology

and

culture.

Jouissance

is also the vibrating dissonance between mysticism and logos,

as well

the percussive tension between the

as

visible

and the

invisible.

Further, jouissance is the spark of the heterogeneities of 'I'.40 In order to experience

jouissance-the

French signifier that has no trans-lingual

equivalent in the Real sense that it is used by Kristeva and Lacan-one must intimately

touch and be touched by primal FEMININITY as it (re )produces

the (re)surgence of the near-maternal, the near-death, the near-Real, as well as the originary pansexuality-not that you are consciously aware of these41 during the absolute

coup de loudre42 ofjouissance.

Kristeva, speaking of Bellini's work, attachesjouissance to motherhood: " ... motherhood is nothing more than such a luminous spatialization, the ultimate language of a jouissance at the far limits of repression, whence bodies, identities, and signs are begotten." (Kristeva

jouissance in

a

1984, 269)

As such,

attaches itself to FEMININITY and the materiality of the body

pulsating,

bio-rhythmic

(im)pulsion-urge,

instinct,

pre-lingual

ordering-of psychic spasms, at the germinating margins of the Object and the sign. However,

jouissance

is feared and

named,

marginalized and

institutionalized away from the (m)Other in order to speak a

visible

motherhood into salacious, disparaging and phallocentric subjectivity,43 that is, to speak a semblance

ofjouissance into culture.

The language of art, too, follows (but differently and more closely) the other aspect of maternal jouissance, the sublimation taking place at the very moment of primal repression within the mother's body, arising perhaps lUlwittingly out of her marginal position. At the intersection of sign and rhythm, of representation and light, of the symbolic and the semiotic, the artist speaks from a place where she is not, where she knows not. He delineates what, in her, is a body rejoicing Uouissant]. The very existence of aesthetic practice makes clear that the Mother as subject is a delusion, just as the negation of the so-called poetic dimension of language leads one to believe in the existence of the Mother, and consequently, oftranscendence." (Kristeva 1980, 242) The artist continually charmels the

jouissance

invisible

and conjures the originary

at the "intersection of sign and rhythm, of representation and

light, of the symbolic and the semiotic." Kristeva cites the work of Mallarme and Bellini-the latter, a painter in the realm of the visual arts,

as

Hollywood's (rn)Otber Aperture

xxiii

differentiated from the literary arts that comprises the

ecriture

of the poets

like Mallanne. Bellini's work that sublimates and "delineates" jouissance, pre-dates

sublime

and

foreshadows painting's motion-derivative:

the

equally

art of filmmaking-where the 'body rejoicing' is also delineated,

(re)germinated, and (re)presented. In regards to Kristeva's characterization of the "luminous spatialization," the intersection between "representation and light" "whence bodies, identities and signs are begotten," the cinema, as much as the poetics of painting and

matemal jouissance,

ecriture,

charmels and transposes the

forever fe-releasing (m)Other from subjectivity and

the Symbolic narcissism of transcendence, of ideal-ego; always already in a subversive and symbiotic marmer. Ultimately, the artist's charmeling and creation of sublimating and subversive artifacts as well as the artist's transubstantiation

ofjouissance

into its annihilating maternal effect of the "body rejoicing," is yet another (re)appearance of the repetition comp ulsion. AN EXEMPLAR JOUISSANCE SCENE: The

19" Century Englishman

in the jungles of New Zealand has 'gone native' with thin blue tattoo lines covering his weathered face. He drops to his knees and crawls under the protagonist's elaborate and proper whalebone harness skirt support, a kind of chastity-inspiring frame below the waist of the young English woman, a single mother, who remains excited and yet speechless-selectively mute as she has compulsively remained since an early age. He is searching in her nether world for the return to the originary space, but he is unaware consciously of that drive. She is preparing

forjouissance, and she is vitally

aware of that because she is a (m)Other. They entwine in a gush as outside in the blue forest her husband spies on them through the irregular planks that make up the clandestine lover's miserable shack. The peeping husband hears the echoes and sees the images

ofjouissance but shies away as much

as he stares. The couple copulates-becoming a doubled singularity­ experiencing one of the thresholds to non-identity,

The

voyeuristic husband gushes in turn and absorbs the

and

jouissance. uncanny heat

reverberations of the close encounter. PRELIMINARY ANALYSIS: This is a scene from a multiple Oscar Award-winning film, among the several other films analyzed in this volume, that serves as an index to the potential for the imaging of jouissance in mainstream movies. This scene (re)presents: the return to the originary ur­ fantasy in erotic detail; as well as the explicit and subversive display of the maternal passion; and, fInally, the scene depicts the exemplary husband/keeper­ of-the-Symbolic, keeper of the Name, spying on the

femalejouissance

and

xxiv

Prologue

turning away-but then turning back unable to look away, unable to disavow the

compulsion, and the

'body rejoicing.' (See Chapter

1)

(m)Other in Three Acts Note: in tribute to the bio-psychological scope of mothemess and the range of the collective unconscious and the social Symbolic embedded in the movies, plus an added nod to ecriture feminine, I have decided to detour from the above structure of this prologue for this one section. I have formatted the following explanation ofmy reconfiguring of "(m)Other" to (re)produce an imagined movie treatment in three acts, each with an accompanying doubling of "subtitles: " one subtitle that is less extra­ logically oriented than the Act it deciphers, and the other, a more Symbolically constrained "subtitle. "

Scenario Title: The Origins of (m)Other ACT ONE: (m)Other is the

01:

the

chora, das Ding,

and the Real.44

The originary dyad is with the m (barred two): that is, the Imaginary Plenitude of the fetus and the (m)Other, forming a nurturing and phallic sameness, a consubstantiality-in-process. After material separation from the (m)Other, the potential bi-products, the abject subjects-to-be: one such birth product with an "ini" and one with an "outy"-the fOlmer a Sapien-cum­ womb

(0$),

the latter a Sapien

($),

that is, the womb-Iacking-Sapien-go

on to (re)present to one another, in pubescence, the potential for a reciprocally intimate relationship, a kind of an "object

a " reunion, 45 a

kind

of fetishized, psychosomatic and emotional stand-in for the imagined wholeness of (m)Other46. SUBTITLES: (m)Other is the Originary One. Child is +we (in One) before submitting to the Symbolic. Woman and man come from that plenitude and they are pan-sexual Sapiens first and then gender constructed secondly-both have lost the Thing

(das Ding),

which

is the (m)Other, via the processes of entering subjectivity. And later, through the pubescent realization of each other's inter-subjective sexual and melancholic biologies, whether desiring homogenously or heterogeneously, they sublimate their loss in a (m)Otherless ritual accepted by the Law and submit to arcane and Symbolic prohibitions in order to avoid being sucked back into the melancholic murk and wholeness of the loss of identity, of primary narcissism and the annihilating plenitude of the (m)Other.

xxv

Hollywood's (rn)Other Aperture SUBTITLES

DECIPHERED:

Mother

is

the

primal

plenitude

constituted in both the materiality and the Symbol of the womb, that is, before she is depicted as the visually apparent spatiality of

lack as

well as the Symbolic excuse for the fear of castration: the (m)Other. The maturing humans orphaned from the womb use

love

with a

partner in order to reproduce, to grieve and to SUlTIlOunt the loss of the wholeness of the mother/child dyad. ACT TWO: The polyvalent, tnrncated reductions--{)ften in parentheses­

that hover, like hummingbird phenomena that are

named

jargon,

(in)visibly

in and around the

womb, birth, dyad and primary separation,

instantiate my inspiration for altering the grammatically nonnative signifier 'mother' to the

signtfiance-based ecriture feminine that is

SUBTITLES: The dyadic figures:

01,

'(m)Other.'

and Q;! from Act One make

up the (m)Other which is inscribed 'mother' in the Symbolic order.

She/it is visible in the Symbolic order written as (in)visible configured as (m)Other. So that is why

'mother' and I

figuratively

transcribe mother as (m)Other in this project. SUBTITLES DECIPHERED: I use '(m)Other' instead of mother when I write,

think and speak

of my research. This is in order to

acknowledge her explicit, implicit and disavowed influence on the human condition. ACT THREE: The phylogenetically constituted, tertiary element, the

prehistoric Father47, amounts to the co-opted Other, the" (barred

3),lurking

just offshore at the marginal environs of the primal dyad. He completes the myth of Symbolic separation from the newly

lack,

named,

the institutionalized

the mother [(m)Other]. The contingency of the tertiary influence,

posterior to the infant's fragmenting encounter with the Mirror, culminates in (re)splitting the psyche of the infant (soon to be

$

or

0$) on

his or her

way to the Symbolic.48 A shard of the infant's psyche is lost in the processes and this is the shard

(objet petit a49)

that (re)presents the dyad within the

(m)Other's separating sphere. By means of the paternal signifier the infant ventures on through alienated sublimation, and melancholy, towards wish fulfillment, death. SUBTITLES: The father (re)presents pre-ego-apartness from the (m)Other. The child eventually

speaks

the Symbolic order that

xxvi

Prologue

speaks

himlher

into

selthood, thereby achieving identity and

following in the footsteps of the Father ("). The infant relinquishes the alleged dreams of killing the father and fucking the (m)Other in order to sublimate loss and to make Symbolic sense of primal separation and social structure. SUBTITLES DECIPHERED: The father image is the antediluvian third party who takes Freudian phylogenetic credit for the breakup of the dyad between the (m)Other and child. The child follows the father's institutionalized prohibitions in order to survive, to assume a mis-identity-better than no-identity-and to assuage the loss of the mother [(m)Other]. The happy ending: The Hero(ine) wanders off into the sunset over Gotham, that is, the Subject her

presence

in

the

construct

($ or 0$) of

the

wanders off into his or patriarchal,

Symbolic

culmination of phylogenesis.

Note: I now resume the structure a/the prologue be/ore the above variation reserved/or (m)Other.

Doubles, Doppelgangers, Symmetry Cells fuse, split, and proliferate; volmnes grow, tissues stretch, and body fluids change rhythm, speeding up or slowing do\Vll. Within the body, growing as a graft, indomitable, there is an other. And no one is present, within that simultaneously dual and alien space, to signify what is going on. (Kristeva 1980, 237) The doppelganger, or double (albeit a much more expansive telTIl), is a narrative trope that gelTIlinates from the earthy, extra-cultural relationship that is the originary non-signifying dyad.50 A German word, doppelganger51 describes, in conventional psychoanalytic-literary charmels, the

uncanny

manifestation of a 'look-alike' who affects the host's life usually in a pathological manner within the story-telling machine and who implies, if not instantiates, self-destructive behavior of some sort.52

In 1914,Otto Rank, The Double: A

Freud's protege, dedicated a book on the subject:

Psychoanalytic Study. This was the same year in which Freud cites Rank in his paper On Narcissism that speaks of the early childhood doppelganger ­ like 'ego-ideal' and the self-observing imperative he associated with itY Rank's extensive study, on the other hand, embarks on a comprehensive

Hollywood's (rn)Otber Aperture

xxvii

psychoanalytical analysis of the doppelganger in literature, anthropology and even in psychoanalysis by linking narcissism to the phenomenon. Freud further corroborated Rank's doppelganger insights in 1919,by exploring the narcissistic doppelganger effect in his publication,

The Uncanny.

54

Crediting his protege Rank, Freud commented specifically and positively on Rank's doppelganger study.

In

this

1919

study, Freud connects the

double effect not only with the narrative tropes, but also, in an innovative and crucial stroke of vision, he links the doppelganger with the

uncanny

psychic residue from the initial split in the human psyche when the infant adapts to socialization by means of distancing itself from the earliest 'phases' of primal narcissism 55 This insight opens critical space for the pre-Oedipal influence on the psyche and for mapping in literature in general and the cinema specifically, the pre-lingual maternal influence on the recursive doppelganger(in) symptom.

In

contrast to the abundant male counterparts, examples of the female

double,

the

doppelgangerin

are

extraordinarily

limited

in

narrative

convention,56 and were ignored in classical psychoanalytic theory (Rank and Freud et al).57 By extension, the more

unspeakable

primal connection

between the doppelganger trope and the maternal factor is tellingly obscured or lacking in both narrative and psychoanalytical arenas.58 And yet, the primal dyad stage is arguably the psychical wellspring of the doubling symptom recursively revisited in psychoanalysis (i.e., the Mirror Stage, the ego-ideal, and so on) and in literary texts-including the movies as a dreamlike extension of the written narrative text. Susan Yi Sencindiver succinctly explains the doubling effect and its relationship to the maternal body in the primal dyad: "We were all once doppelgangers, more specifically our mother's doppelganger. ( ... ) we have all been intimately connected yet simultaneously disconnected to and teetering on the brink of an/other's body." (Sencindiver

2011, 66)

Sencindiver's exegesis forefronts

not only the mother's influential precedence in the doppelganger syndrome, but also emphasizes the importance of the (m)Other's body, which initiates and infOlTIls our pre-lingual, pre-cultural experience and its repetitive effects. Sencindiver further argues that because "object relations theory which assumes the mother's presence, rather than her absence, [is] indispensable for generating the individuationiseparation process, ( ... ) oedipal narratives of ego fOlTIlation and the doppelganger must be re-written and re-read respectively so as to include the mother." (Ibid., p.

66) I concur. The dearth

of the (m)Other in narrative and psychoanalytic inquiry and her continuing interrelation with, and subversion of, subjectivity-including the recursive doppelganger trope/syndrome-has created an disavowed blind spot in the human condition.

unspeakable

vacuum, a

xxviii

Prologue

The observations by both Susan Yi Sencindiver and Lucy Fischer, among others,59 on the maternal connection to the doppelganger compulsion create a potential line of inquiry tliat expands as its effects come to light. An instance of this expansion occurs to me from Fischer's gynocentric position that " ... in the possibility of pregnancy (whetlier realized or not)--{)f growth of a second self within the primary being-every woman comes closer to a lived sense of the double tlian do most men." (Fischer 1983,39) And further, Sencindiver's

ideas stress the

importance of the woman's physical

connection to the origination of a 'second self in the womb and its relation to the doppelganger phenomenon: " ... although we were all once our mother's doppelganger - only one sex can physically become a hostess to a double; in other words, it is only tlie female body tliat is capable of generating a potential second self witliin the womb." (Sencindiver 2011,79) Rising from these insights on biological specificity, it occurs to me that the source for the neglect of the female doppelganger(in) in narrative expression and in classical psychoanalysis is the phenomenon of womb envy,60 and the effects on culture of tlie ur-pallic, ur-signifying, ur-bio-Iogical (m)Otlier. Marcia Ian, in an allusion to the ur-phallus in relation to the womb signals tlie importance of the phallic-appearing extension, the umbilical cord, thereby creating a precedence for the concept of the phallus as signifier: "If we psychoanalyze psychoanalysis, we begin to suspect that the phallus might be ( ... ) a phobic substitute for something else. That sometliing else would be the umbilical cord; for it is the umbilical cord after all, and not the penis, which constitutes the historic "locution and link of exchange" from which the subject must be "missing" if he is to be a subject and not a permanent appendage of tlie motlier." (Ian

1993, 21)

This "phobic"

substituting of the overt signifier of lack, the phallus/peins, for the abject umbilical cord, in conjunction with the umbilical conduit's importance in constituting the pre-subject in the pre-lingual, biological context-that is, the cutting of tlie cord to separate materially the infant from tlie dyad­ relays a significance and

signifiance

that constitutes a fixation with the

primal trauma of birth.61 The effects of tlie latter consist of symptomatic doppelganger (re)presentations in the arts (among other affectations tliat go beyond the scope of this particular analysis).

In short, primal trauma and its misrecognition of

effects-primarily womb envy and womb fear-spark a the

phallic

signifier, 62 which

in

tum,

spurs

a

life-long

series

of

phallogocentric-oriented and inadequate attempts at sublimation. Birth trauma symptoms include, among a multitude of other signs, the compulsion to (re )present as producers and to consume as readers and viewers, the varied doubling tropes in literary/cinematic artifacts. If the womb (including its abject extensions, the placenta and the umbilical cord) is the biological

Hollywood's (rn)Other Aperture

xxix

space that only woman [(m)Other1 possesses-after all, practically speaking, most everythiog else biologically related is shared between sexes including the penis/clitoris-then it is little wonder that the womb reverberates through the human psyche manifesting phobic denial and compulsive doubling and revisiting.63 AN

EXEMPLAR

DOPPELGANGER

SCENARIO:

The

beautiful

android boy, disheveled from exhaustive travels, enters the half-submerged buildiog in a dystopian and flooded Manhattan. He enters the doorway of a private library in a penthouse and approaches a swivel chair hiding the identity of an entity sitting there. To the hidden presence, he asks hopefully: "Is this the place they make you real?" The chair swivels around revealing the beautiful, albeit haggard, android-boy's double who, in contrast, is shiny clean and smiling io brilliant white clothes. The dapper doppelganger crosses to a table as the disheveled boy follows all aghast and blurts out another question: "Are you me?" Finally, the stunned 'original' boy, cries out: "You can't have her. She's mine. And I'm the only one." Then he, the original android boy, reaches for a table lamp, grabs it up and batters his doppelganger until his circuitry-filled, head falls off and rolls across the floor. Still swingiog his lamp, the origioal cyborg-boy shouts: "I'm special. I'm unique. You can't have her." Delirious, he keeps swinging his ad hoc battle-ax io the empty air. Later, he walks all forlorn through a room full of non-activated replicas. Then, despairiogly, the disheveled boy-android finds his way to the ledge of the skyscraper overlookiog the flooding oceans. Finally, he murmurs, "Mommy," and falls over the ledge droppiog a hundred floors to splash ioto the waters of the ioundating sea. He sinks into the abyss. PRELIMINARY ANALYSIS: This is a scene from a Sci-Fi film that took

20 years

and two moviemaking geniuses to complete. It is among the

several analyzed in this volume and serves to demonstrate the doppelganger

syndrome as a trope in mainstream movies. This doppelganger manifestation consists of the several levels of doubliog iocluding: the android-boy as a human 'replicant' or 'mecca,' and his first meeting with one of his doubles, followed by the display of an ioventory of replicated 'mecca' boys all boxed up and ready to ship-not to mention that the original android-boy is the replication of an original human model that is the dead son of his maker; and [mally, the association of the doppelganger with the maternal-in this case the cyborg-boy's reference to 'You can't have her,' 'She's mine,' and 'Mommy,' in his deliberations-as well as, ultimately what appears from the stark images of this scene to be his [mal word, "Mommy" as he leans

xxx

Prologue

forward offthe skyscraper falling into the now maternal-associated morass of the sea. (See Chapter

6)

Beginnings and Endings of Films: Bookends of the Maternal Semiotic The symptom of doubling, beyond simply instantiating doppelgangers, indexes the primal dyad as does symmetry: the doubling of phenomenological elements around an axis point or series of loci.

In

the case of the

doppelganger the axis is linked psychically to the extra-logical boundaries between extimacy and intimacy,64 between (m)Other and infant, between superego and ideal-ego. Sometimes the symmetrical axis is the fihn itself separating the

uncanny similarities

of its beginning and ending that fonn a

dyad; an axis that inadvertently emphasizes the

doubling

effect that

constructs a movie conceit: a pair of matching visual bookends that start and end the film. The implementation of

doppelganger-like

beginnings and

endings of movies, this overtly self-evident, self-reflexive symmetry draws attention to authorship, storytelling contrivance and, subliminally, the recursive (re)call of the repressed maternal dyad as the primal agency for doubling. More conventional than the dyadic doubling at the beginning and ending of a fihn, in tenns of repetition in the movies, is the trope of multiple repetitions, for example, leitmotifs or other recmring elements. These offer pleasme to spectators when we perceive the conceit-usually occurring several times throughout the film. These more customary repetitive design elements in the movies generate a link to the

uncanny

reverberations

echoing from the repetitive maternal fixations of infancy. That is, in contrast to the overt symmetry in cinema that indelibly marks the beginning and the end of specific movies, and which creates a distinct one-to-one doubling that carmot be so easily sublimated as a recurring motif. So, although the conventional repetitive design that manifests three or more times in a movie does recall tangentially the pre-lingual maternal, this leitmotif type repetition is in excess of the one-to-one symmetrical doubling found at the beginning and the end of some films. And so, the more common multiple repetitions of movie elements generate diluted comparison to the more overt

uncanny effects

uncanny

allusions in

of the one-to-one repetition

in movies that have specific doubling ofthe beginning at the end ofthe film. In sum, the doubling of the beginning of a film that occurs only at the end separated by the axis of the filin, forms a dyad that figuratively mimics the

Hollywood's (rn)Other Aperture

uncanny

xxxi

doubling of the originary dyad, (m)Other and fetus/infant on

opposite ends of the axis of the umbilical cord. A film organized symmetrically in this one-to-one marmer creates a startling bookends effect that is much more

unheimlich 65

than conventional repetition motifs. It

suggests the boundaries of extimacy and intimacy, the dyad, in a similar marmer to its corresponding doubling contrivance, the doppelganger. The matching beginning and ending of films (re)produces figuratively the

signifiance

of the maternal semiotic, by always already incorporating the

residual traces of the pre-lingual sphere of FEMININITY. AN EXEMPLAR SYMMETRY SCENARIO: After an abrupt opening montage of tryst, murder, and the paranormal, we see the detective protagonist for the first time in the fihn-usually indicating the start of the narrative-as he walks into an office building and is met by his telltale administrative assistant who pats her protruding belly, obviously in a state of very late term pregnancy. Revealingly, in his very first speech in the movie, he asks her: "Any contractions?" Fast forward to the end of the fihn: the very last time we see the detective protagonist-often the indication of the end of the narrative-he has reunited with his formerly estranged wife who is now in a matching telltale state of late term pregnancy. They draw close and he touches her swollen belly softly. They embrace. PRELIMINARY ANALYSIS: This is a scene from a Sci-Fi film, among the several films analyzed in this volume, which serves to demonstrate the symmetrical one-to-one doubling element found at the beginnings and endings of certain films. Further, this film's demonstration of signifiance in this conceit consists of the telltale emphasis in displaying extremely pregnant women at the beginning and ending of the film. This doubling serves narratively to help introduce the main character, and finally to signal the last time we see him. This film's opening and ending scenes fOlTIl an example of an

uncanny

doubling, enhanced by an unabashed intrauterine

allusion. And, in featuring the extended shape of the women characters at the beginning and end of the film, it draws attention to the ur-signifying womb and the film's intent to signal the maternal semiotic in the structuring of the narrative. (See Chapter

7)

PART 1 : (M)OTHERNESSES IN JANE CAMPION'S FILMS

'When I first saw Jane Campion's film

The Piano, I realized that her work

spoke to me with the very pulsations that are the traces of the maternal semiotic and

jouissance.

This film is a treasure and its effect(s) on me

resulted in my original exploratory analysis of the film, then the section of this book based on Campion's work, and ultimately the inspiration for this entire project. This section contains three chapters: the first explores the film

(1993)

The Piano

in aspects elucidating the concept of primal FEMININITY; the

second analyzes

The Piano

in terms of intertextuality and the maternal

semiotic; the third chapter surveys three of Campion's subsequent films:

The Portrait of a Lady (1996), Holy Smoke (1999)

and

In the Cut (2003)

focusing on the maternal semiotic patterns in a more comprehensive marmer in Campion's work. As the

only female director included in this volume, Campion

approaches FEMININITY more closely in her films than do the male directors in this study. This is because her body always already possesses the bio-inspirational nexus for the primary signifier, and so she

lacks womb

envy as a repressed uncanny syndrome that undergoes regressive compulsions. This

lack

could be a blessing and a deterrent in the over-compensating

compulsion often required to follow the phallocentric-political trends, as well as a deterrent to succumbing to the sexist commercial pratfalls and conventionality that often result when attempting to construct the hallmarks of cultural expression that are the movies. The reason Jane Campion is the only female director in this book is not because it was my choice. I did not set out to target female or male directors. Her films, as do the other films in this volume, resonate with me in the register of the maternal semiotic. I am more interested in the film than the filmmaker-with the caveat that as I discovered these telltale films, I was not opposed to recognizing the pattern of the maternal semiotic in the filmmaker's body of work-if their body of work were to produce such a pattern. I have found a pattern of the maternal semiotic and primal FEMININITY in Campion's film work and this section of my book attests.

CHAPTER 1 THE (UN)SPEAKABLE FEMININITY IN MAINSTREAM MOVIEs : JANE CAMPION' S THE PIANO'

FEMININITY in narrative fihns is a topic as illusive and controversial as it is incredibly rich with potential for analysis and research. Particularly illusive is scholarly research on thefemale gaze as a vestige of FEMININlTY in mainstream fihnmaking. Masculinity in the movies is far less illusive and controversial. So pervasive is the male presence in mainstream film fOlTIl that the telTIl the

male gaze 1

has become institutionalized in theory and practice.

The female gaze, a derivative of FEMININITY, eludes institutionalization.2 My essay presents a

glimpse

into the traces

Jane Campion's period film,

The Piano.

(semios)

of the female gaze in

Campion's filmic text creates a

space in mainstream movies where cinematic enunciation intersects with the linguistic and psychoanalytical innovations of the last half-century. I have chosen

The Piano because it presents an overwhelmingly clear demonstration

of the female gaze and does so within the structural limitations of mainstream film conventions. The difficulties in establishing the concept of the female gaze

III

conventional theory are symptomatic of the controversies surrounding FEMININITY attached as much to the maternal semiotic and the pre­ Oedipal Imaginary as to, Symbolically, the Law of the Father. We must first come to terms with the double bind in analyzing FEMININITY, which is founded on pre-lingual human development always already deciphered (decoded/encoded/meta-coded) within the phallogocentric constrictions of language as such. The post-structuralist reflections on FEMININITY in the works of Kristeva, Irigaray, and Cixous, contribute to a revolutionary stage in human self-reflexivity signaled by (post)modernism and emblematic of the emergence of motion pictures as a multivalent signifying system.

In the

First published as the article "The (Un)Speakable FEMININITY in Mainstream Movies: Jane Campion's The Piano" from cinema Journal, Vohune 44, Number 2, pp 68-88. Copyright @ 2005 by the University ofTexas Press. All rights reserved. �

The (Un)Speakable FEMININITY in Mainstream Movies

3

spirit of these ontological depths (heights?) in the human struggle(s), and despite the uncanny nature of the female gaze, I will develop an argument that mainstream movies have begun to incOJporate more fully a maternal semiotic sphere of primal FEMININITY as exemplified by Campion's The Piano. The significant contribution of my inquiry to the copious folds of literature enveloping The Piano lies not only in my paper's emphasis on the film's uncanny discourse on the latent maternal authority in the Symbolic order as enunciated in the signifying system of Campion's germinal film, but also lies in my arguments for the extrapolation of FEMININITY as latent enunciation in the signifying systems of mainstream movies at large.

Unveiling the Female Gaze: The Female Voice in Mainstream Film While the Freud-Lacanian influence on critical theory has led [mally to an emphasis on FEMININITY and post-structuralism, as we see in Irigaray and Kristeva, the phallogocentric sway on the American film industry has remained steadfast as recognized and analyzed by the politicized female voice for years. This is evident if we agree with Elizabeth Cowie that the Classical Hollywood Cinema3 style (re)presents the phallogocentric gaze. . . . a theoretical orthodoxy has arisen which declares that the cinematic look, at least in the classical film, is patriarchal and works only to satisfy the fetishistic and voyemistic pleasme of the masculine look.4 (Cowie, 1 66)

As a reaction to the dominance of patriarchal specificity in the cinematic apparatus, a feminist imperative has made substantial in-roads in the film industry since the 1980s. The efforts of women in the mainstream movie industry have consisted primarily in establishing an articulatioruvoice of political activism. Strategically pragmatic,the female voice replicates the strategies of the established mode of filmmaking. The mimetic process, however, presents a homogeneous, univocal facade of alterity, masking female/feminine specificity. 5 The female voice in mainstream movies replicates hegemonic Classical Hollywood Cinema codes resulting in female produced films that are indistinguishable in many respects from male-produced films.6 The feminist movement in the filin industry has helped establish a few women in the highest positions of control in the production of mainstream films. These privileged positions include executive producers, O\vners of studios and star perfOlmers with box office clout. A stronger female presence in the film industry has resulted. This phenomenon is reflected in

4

Chapter 1

the sphere of politics as the patriarchal-oriented political successes of Margaret Thatcher and Angela Merkel would indicate. Recent female­ oriented movie devices that mirror their male counterparts include female action heroes, Salt (Noyce 2010) and Atomic Blonde (Leitch, 2017), and female buddy movies, Ghostbusters: Another Call (Feig, 2016) and Ocean 's Eight (Ross,2018). These enhancements in the opportunities both in front of and behind the camera for women in the industry have functioned well-if inadvertently and not via example, per se-in spearheading an improved environment for the enunciation of FEMININITY in mainstream movies. Campion's The Piano materializing in the mainstream arena works to unveil the visual and authorial traces of the (un)speakable FEMININITY that underpins the more politicized female voice. For the female gaze to fully manifest itself in the movies in a more in­ depth,polysemic marmer than the politicized female voice,a fe-envisioning of the Symbolic order in respect to its disavowal and masking of FEMININITY must be addressed, if only intuitively for the filmmaker and subsequently for the spectator. The emergence ofpost-structuralist theories on psychoanalysis, linguistics, and FEMININITY as found in the writings of Irigaray and Kristeva, as well as Lacan, offers an innovative and crucial step in the re-evaluating and re-depiction process. However, the pervasiveness of the Law of the Father,with its appearance of co-opting of the "unconscious structured like a language" as Lacan posits, hampers the post-structuralist, maternal semiotic processes in designing and viewing mainstream movies. Laura Mulvey in her gelTIlinal text, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, references the linguistic difficulties that the enunciation of FEMININITY encounters within the constraints of the Symbolic order,when she explains: It gets us nearer to the roots of our oppression, it brings an articulation of the problem closer, it faces us with the ultimate challenge: how to fight the unconscious structured like a language (formed critically at the moment of arrival of language) while still caught within the language of the patriarchy. (Mulvey in Penley 1988, 58)

The display of FEMININITY in mainstream movies, is not only Symbolic and very much an "unconscious structured like a language" but also extra-logically pre-lingual and expressive of the maternal semiotic. The female gaze is necessarily multiplex,problematic,ambivalent,contradictive and productive in terms of its potential for deconstructing the Symbolic order. Further, the enunciation of FEMININITY poses a primal threat to phallogocentric subjectivity, because it (re)asserts an uncanny and non­ linear link to the repressed pre-lingual Imaginary Wholeness. If we

The (Un)Speakable FEMININITY in Mainstream Movies

5

delineate the female gaze in terms of the multiplex spirit that is intrinsic to the enunciation of (m)Other and Kristeva's maternal semiotic, the work of Jane Campion is a(n) (in)tangible effort in the recognition and establisbrnent of primal FEMININITY in mainstream movies.

The Piano: An Ekphrasis Jane Campion wrote and directed The Piano. In 1993, the filin was nominated for eight Oscars and awarded three including "Best Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen." These accolades affilTI1 Campion's welcome under Hollywood's deceivingly motley umbrella and her acceptance into the mainstream. Further,Campion's use ofHollywood stars as well as her adherence to current Hollywood production values and distribution charmels bolster Campion's mainstream classification. The mainstream film category has become a much broader category in telTI1S of style partly because of the box office success of the American Independent film scene over recent decades. Despite the conventional aspects in her movies, Campion's oeuvre exhibits a post-structuralist verve. In The Piano she deconstructs the Freud­ Lacanian canon in a marmer that questions and pokes fun at the self­ absorption of the phallus/penis in reductionist oriented phallogocentrism. She also enunciates cinematically the liminal quality ofthe (m)Other as well as the pre-lingual pulsations and libidinal sensations of Kristeva's maternal semiotic. The integrity of Campion's vision in telTI1S of the enunciation of FEMININITY positions her work as an incarnation, ifyouwill,of Irigaray's speculum-affording us a glimpse ofthe unspeakable: the primal drives and desires always already attached to the maternal authority colliding/meshing with the Symbolic order. The film takes place in the early 1800s. A single (m)Other, Ada, has been compelled by her Scottish father to marry Stewart, an English ex­ patriot in colonial New Zealand. A young sounding female voice7 narrates from the start of the movie that she is Ada and that she has willed herself not to speak since she was the age of six. No explanation is given,and we are left to wonder if she has tapped into the power of passive aggression, or if she is simply displaying an extraordinary quirk of character.8 Or both. The film thus begins its (dis )play of polysemy with this plurality and an asynchronicity of age in the voice-over narration that continues for the rest of the film. Ada's chosen non-speaking state deconstructs the dominance of the spoken language in the symbolic order and references obliquely the unspeakable nature of the repressed (m)Other. Moreover, she and her daughter communicate in sign language-a para-linguistic and extra-

6

Chapter 1

linguistic (dis)play that connotes the lack of hearing as much as a lack of speaking (in Ada's case, a rejection of phallogocentric speech)-not to mention the self-reflexive connotation of the visual sphere of communication involved in sign language that is analogous to motion pictures. The tension between Ada's semiotic, signaled in part by her silence and her gaps in language as (re)presented by her extensive use of sign language9, and Stewart's phallocentric Symbolic order is highlighted in the film from the beginning. Ada's one passion-far exceeding her attachment to speech and Symbolic subjectivity-is to play her piano. Her musical penchant references the maternal semiotic per Kristeva who posits that musicality in language and the arts (re)presents traces (semios) of the chora, i.e., the womb-like portal/receptacle/space from which the maternal semiotic resonates in the human experience. Stewart,Ada's contract-husband,meets the mother and daughter fresh from Britain on the beach in New Zealand where they have been crudely deposited by burly seamen quick to relieve themselves in more ways than one,and depart. Much to Ada's consternation, and against her protests,Stewart decides to abandon her piano on the beach. Ada subsequently pines away for her piano and plans ways to have it returned to her. Stewart marries Ada on a rainy day and Campion painstakingly shows Ada awkwardly getting fitted with her white wedding gown over her dark quotidian dress. Later, Ada is led to a photographer's backdrop out in the pouring rain. She wears her wedding dress, analogous to a feminized, conjugal veil or mask sloppily in place over her restrictive, stark attire of everyday. The emphasis on Ada's costume over her regular clothes is a critical and well-integmted reference to the female masquerade. 1 0 The gloomy, claustrophobic scene ends with an extreme closeup shot looking from the position of the camera lens into the camera towards the aperture as the eye of the photographer appears and then is ousted by another male eye asserting itself at the opening-this latter eye appears to be Stewart's. Stewart and the male photographer before him seem all too comfortable with scopophilia-the desire in observing sexual difference from a safe distance associated with the male gaze. ll Curiously, though, we are not sho\Vll the CRC convention of Stewart's POV, i.e., his exact point of view, back out through the lens. Surprisingly, Campion retains Stewart's eye on the screen gazing eerily through the lens and the aperture back at the spectator who is the position of the movie camera. In this shot, Campion deconstructs the male gaze and makes a pun of scopophilia and its mediating device,the camera and lens. She isolates the b( eye)ological apparatus of the male gaze without completing the look in the conventional reverse angle marmer. The conventional technique is completed via an "eyeline match,"

The (Un)Speakable FEMININITY in Mainstream Movies

7

which is traditionally the reverse shot after a character is depicted glancing out of frame; specifically, a cut to the reverse angle to be able to see the object of tbat glance from the original character's perspective). Stewart's gaze, oblique and ambiguous in its isolative framing, remains unfulfilled and,spectacularly, he is being gazed at in return from the (m)Otber side of the aperture,that is,from the POV ofthe Object supposed-to-be "looked at." It is as if Campion has positioned the spectator at tbe interior threshold of the chara looking back at Stewart while he postures from tbe voyeur's position,his gaze mediated by a camera lens. Campion successfully deconstructs the male gaze poised at the present and tbe absent threshold of tbe Imaginary, at tbe liminal space of (m)Otberness. Although the maternal semiotic remains subdued witbin tbe narrative, the liminal and polysemic quality inherent to FEMININITY in the movies is superbly articulated in this scene. Campion has condensed in one or two edits an acute display of differance 12 interrupting actively and passively the cinematic discourse. Campion's film, a (de)construct throughout, draws out and highlights the symbiotic/subversive relationship between Kristeva's semiotic and the Symbolic as (re)presented by the univocal linearity of the mainstream narrative. To patch over the hole, the absence created by the irresolution of tbis striking shot through tbe camera lens in this scene, Campion simply ignores the non-fulfillment of Stewart's gaze as the filin slips back into the narrative. After his impotent glance through tbe looking glass, Stewart, actively and passively, takes his limp, soggy place next to Ada in front of tbe photographer's backdrop in tbe pouring rain. Not long after tbe wedding,Ada gatbers the courage to ask her neighbor, Baines, to take her to the beach to play her abandoned piano. Baines,who appears to have incorporated native culture into his life,at least superficially as the tattoo markings on his face imply, consents to her request. On the beach while she plays tbe piano tbrough a dislodged plank in its shipping crate, he bombards her with glances in a terse yet relentless marmer. The emphasis of the scene is on Ada's love for her 0\Vll music, but we carmot help but notice Baines's attraction to her passionate abandon. By highlighting Ada's 0\Vll original,non-transcribed music,while emphasizing Baines's mesmerized demeanor,Campion signals Kristeva's concept of the chora/womb filled with pre-lingual rhytbrns, pulsations and libidinal investments. Richard Allen concurs stating: Music seems to short-circuit language and somehow evoke raw, lUllllediated feeling. The relation to the mother's body and a pre-rational body centered subjectivity is evoked both by the character of Ada's relationship to the piano, her music making, and the cOllllotations that are attached to it. (Allen 2000, 54)

8

Chapter 1

Soon after this scene,Baines requests of Stewart a trade of land for the piano and accompanying lessons to be given to him by Ada. When Stewart enthusiastically agrees, Ada complains \Vfiting adamantly on a sheet of notepad paper: "The piano is mine. It's mine.,,13 Stewart then pounds on the table and states that nWe are a family now. We all sacrifice and so will you. n He storms out of the room. Ada glances sullenly into the camera abruptly making eye contact with the spectator. Here, Campion plays with mainstream movie illusionism, i.e., the creation on the screen of a separate illusory world of the narrative. Within the univocal context of mainstream narrative conventions, her glance directed to the audience pierces the "invisible" fourth wall (the camera lens/screen), and so invites an interruptive and multiplex reading. Suddenly the narrative is arrested, and we are confronted by the female look directed at us as we begin to squilTIl in our voyeuristic position-we carmot disavow the stare ofthe (m)Other as she gazes dO\vn from the screen. The splitting of the narrative from its illusion of wholeness threatens dissolution of the story. And yet Campion does not permanently disengage from the illusory functionality of the narrative; she returns us to the world of the narrative in the subsequent scene. Nevertheless, strategies for interrupting and deconstructing narrative illusionism necessarily privilege the maternal semiotic exposing uncarmy fissures in the Symbolic order/Law of the Father and (re)presents a primary characteristic of enunciating primal FEMININITY. Soon Ada is giving piano lessons to Baines while her daughter waits outside his shack. Baines states that he wants only to listen and to watch her play under the ruse that he will leam by observing. One day,however,after much gazing and hovering,Baines lunges at Ada's neck awkwardly landing a kiss. She jumps up and away startled from her trance at the piano. She has been stirred from her communion with the chora. Baines quickly proposes a way she can earn her piano back. He offers her the equivalent of one white key per visit with the eventual repossession of the piano if she pelTIlits him to perform "things I'd like to do while you play." Ada circles her piano and barters for more keys per visit. Baines concedes and the deal is made.14 During subsequent piano lessons,Baines continues to circle Ada as she plays piano for him. One day however, his actions once again go beyond watching. He crawls under the piano then requires her to lift her skirts higher and higher. He gazes at her stocking covered legs then reaches past her elaborate hoopskirt frame to a hole in her black hose and puts his finger tip on her exposed skin. 15 He has now explored beyond the fetish of her garments and has inserted himself metaphorically into this deconstructed Imaginary portal with the intent to discover the trace of the body of the (m)Other. The experience alters him. His active desire diminishes as he

The (Un)Speakable FEMININITY in Mainstream Movies

9

seeks to become the passive object of Ada's desire, the (m)Other's desire. He tries to re-enact the Imaginary 'Wholeness,the pre-subject wholeness. He performs a semblance ofthe repressed pre-lingual subject/object relationship. The phallus is now displaced for him-he has been transformed into an alterity other than he was before as he encounters the (m)Other through touch and transgression. Soon thereafter,Baines displays his alterity by presenting his 'passive' object-self to Ada via full frontal nudity-he has re-situated his identification from the phallus/penis to the phallus/(m)Other and has gained an inkling of jouissance. 16 Baines appropriates a state of ambiguity: he feigns the active while (re)presenting the passive posture. Do we read that he is at once lost and found in multiplicity-or is he just love sick?17 Is love­ sickness residual separation anxiety,that is, separation from the (m)Other? Has Baines regressed and is now re-staging the Imaginary 'Wholeness of the splitting subject-to-be prior to the mirror stage? The multivalent implications of his actions are consistent with the enunciation of primal FEMININITY. Depicting Baines as transfonned after tactile contact with Ada, Campion seems to concur with Kristeva that the primal influence for the subject-in­ process is the (m)Other. 18 As a subject-in-process, Baines has become unstuck from the linear subjectivity of the Law of the Father in his display of the Other-than-subject, the fragmented subject before the presence of (m)Other. Hesitantly, and yet matter-of-factly, Ada eventually lies in bed with Baines in compliance with the tacit contingencies of their transaction. Both are naked as Flora spies on them through a crack in the outside wall. He embraces her awkwardly as we look on with difficulty through the crack in the planks-the editing and the hand-held camera work signals that this is Flora's point of view. Campion creates a pun by attaching to Ada's young daughter the traditionally voyeuristic hand-held point of view (POV) shot gazing through the crack in Baines' cabin. The male gaze is effectively deconstructed by attributing it to a pre-pubescent female. The choice of the handheld camera use in this shot replicates the male voyeuristic convention in filmmaking, and yet Campion clearly designates Flora as the originator of the look. Flora is not capable of actuating the prurient desire of the adult subject to which this voyeuristic convention is traditionally attached. The sequence displays voyeurism at once present and absent. The (photo)play here is simultaneously humorous and iconoclastic. And the object of that deconstructed gaze is the awkward robotics of two naked bodies that lack: Baines lacks objectivity because the (m)Other,Ada,does not desire him and he also lacks subjectivity because he has identified with the Imaginary and the missing object of Ada's desire. Ada lacks complete phallogocentric

10

Chapter 1

subjectivity because she is (m)Other and because she resists speech and the Symbolic. They both are experiencing an imagined sense of being pre­ subjects-in-process; the one, Baines, imagining wholeness in a clumsy false-intimacy, the other fulfilling her contract with Baines that is void of desire. This is before they move on to experiencing a deeper intimacy once Ada's opens her heart to this lovesick Baines which we will discuss below. In a later scene, Stewart disciplines his stepdaughter when he catches Flora mimicking the Maori children as they hug and kiss tree trunks with lewd hip movements. He makes her wash all the tree trunks with soap and water. The adult Maori's who observe Stewart's unease at Flora's lascivious imitations are bewildered by his prudish admonishments. Campion's imaging of the Maori reflects obliquely the female gaze in terms of the double bind: the Maori are colonized, objectified and co-opted by the European males. They can only mimic the colonizers to achieve a semblance of empowelTIlent, which locks them more into indentured servitude. Campion features two particular Maori: a matronly bi-lingual woman who flirts with Baines from time to time with lewd insinuations; the other Maori is a multi-sexual, bi-lingual male who also directs suggestive remarks to Baines. The polyglot status of both these Maori characters connotes the false sense of empowelTIlent inherent in the colonial double­ bind but also at a subtext level, it references Kristeva's maternal semiotic. Campion engages in the representation ofnative peoples to further highlight the symbiotic/disruptive relationship between the maternal semiotic and the Symbolic. We see that the 'noble savage' excels at mastering the paternal European vernacular at once reinforcing both the dominance of phallogocentrism over alternative dispositions as well as reinforcing the derivative concept of the Euro-centric dominance over the primitivism of the other. The English-speaking Maoris are in the double bind of displaying their ability in learning languages but at the same time, by learning the language of the subjugating Europeans, they display submission. And yet, paradoxically, the cross-language facility of the cultural "other" signals a fissure in the binary oppositional tradition for the Euro-centric speaking subject vis-a-vis non-European other. This ethnographic incongruity mirrors the incommensurate and disavowed symbiosis between primal FEMININITY and the symbolic order. The filmmakers' imaging of the Maori, especially in the figure of the pansexual male, in this context not only speaks to the plurality of the maternal semiotic within the Symbolic order,but also references and addresses,in a polysemic manner,the double bind for the female voice in the realm of language and mainstream movies. 19 Later in the film when a dejected Baines sends back the piano to Stewart's house,he tells Ada: "The arrangement is making you a whore and

The (Un)Speakable FEMININITY in Mainstream Movies

me wretched.

I

11

want you to care for me." At first Stewart rejects the piano

supposing that Baines will try to break their deal and get his land back. But Baines explains tbat the piano is for Ada and has nothing to do with tbe land deal. Once appeased, Stewart accepts tbe return of tbe piano. But he is bewildered when Ada loses her passion for the piano now that it has been returned. He sees Ada leave the house and walk to tbe edge of the forest outside his window. At this point Campion cuts to a full shot of Ada from behind and tben dollies the camera towards Ada while craning up into the back of Ada's head. The camera continues to dolly in to an extreme closeup of the circular braids of Ada's hair. A dissolve occurs repositioning the camera in the forest. The forward movement continues gently into the foliage as the camera cranes higher. Ada's spirit, in reaction to the melancholia spurred in her by Baines' inadvertent ultimatum of love, has delivered her being into tbe unspeakable space: tbe

chara

and tbe return of

the repressed.

In the

next scene, Ada walks through the forest toward Baines' house

with her daughter following. At one point, Ada refuses to allow Flora to accompany her and sends her daughter back home, signing angrily. This is the first time we see Flora rejected by her mother. Later , when Stewart finds Flora stomping through the woods alone and swearing passionately, she notices him and suddenly ends her tirade based on the telltale abject word " . . . bleed . . . " He asks Flora where her mother has gone. Angrily, Flora answers: "To hell!" The importance of this short transitional scene is that suddenly the reverberations from the trauma of primal Oedipal dynamics (between Flora, her mother Ada and step-father Stewart) and abjection ("bleed" in Flora's tirade) are coalesced in tbe film in order to foreshadow primal reenactments: the bloody trauma at birth and its follow up in the Oedipal triadic drama are soon to be revisited in a climactic moment raising subliminal cause and effect questions: Will the Law oftbe Father (Stewart's restrictions) rise up and reassert itself on the melancholic, prelingual subjects-in-process, Ada and Baines? How will Campion deconstruct this Oedipal-leaning narrative climax?

In the His

meantime, Ada finds Baines in his bed supine, passive, desolate.

sensitivity

to the

unspeakable

semiotic, his

lovesickness,

has

discouraged him. He has no hope for her desire. He guides her despondently to the door to send her away admonishing her for not caring. She slaps his face and sinks to the floor. As he squats beside her, she embraces him and clings to his neck. They are released to their desires, their defiling, disrupting bodily-centered

jouissance.

Outside Baines' cabin, Stewart

arrives. He peeks through one of the cracks in the cabin and notices Baines kneeling before Ada as she takes her clothes off. Baines reaches under tbe

12

Chapter 1

framework ofher Victorian dress hoops,raises her white undergatments and crawls under and up into her (m)Other-ness. Outside, Stewart pulls himself back from the sight and looks away. Still,he remains active and fe-pursues safe voyeuristic pleasures. When his eyes return to the peephole crack, Campion completes the eyeline match with a reverse handheld view through the crack towards the interior-in a similar voyeuristic trope in camera use as before in the similar scene with Flora spying on Ada. Baines is no longer visible lUlder Ada's lavish undergarments. It is as ifhe has disappeared into Ada's liminal space. Campion deconstructs this truly voyeuristic scene with quirky humor and image play. A dog licks Stewart's hand and he brings his hand up in a daze, then rubs the fluids from the dog's muzzle off on the outside wall of the cabin before continuing his gaze at the illegitimate and primal fluid exchange transpiring between Baines and Ada in the cabin. Baines and Ada consummate their desire--both are active. Subjectivity and objectivity oscillate between them like polarities of alternating currents. At one point they look into each other's eyes and Baines pleads: "'Whisper it." And she places her face next to his,her mouth at his ear as if whispering something to him. By doing so does she re-enact the speaking subject's entry into the Symbolic order or does she speechlessly communicate the maternal semiotic? Does she accomplish both? As depicted by Campion, the silence we observe and the mimetic gesture of Ada's moving lips indicate that an exchange in excess of the Symbolic is taking place.20 Both lovers are experiencing thejouissance at once underpinning and destroying language. Campion has thus foiled and fulfilled Baines's plea for the spoken word from Ada. Baines and the film's spectators are both satisfied and frustrated with Ada's silent communique. Ada simultaneously complies with and disregards his request. A symbiosis between the phallus (the originary and the stand-in) andjouissance, that is, a trace of reciprocity between the Symbolic and the semiotic, synthesizes, materializes: the multiplicity of the sequence belies, misreads and both (deJere)constructs masculinityIFEMININlTY and spectatorship relationships. After their lovemaking, Ada re-attaches her garments. She approaches the foreground and leans down to pick up a button that slips from her fingers and drops through a crack in the floorboards. It lands on Stewart who is now watching from below the planks (an awkward and,most likely,unrewarding voyeuristic position). We are surprised to see Stewart there. He is supine and vulnerable now as his demeanor suggests that his voyeurism has been satiated. The possibility of Ada discovering him seems for a split second inevitable but then wanes. As a tiny nexus between the illicit lovers and Stewart's surveillance of them, the displaced button brings to the spectator a pun on the fetish, on Lacan's petit objet a-the Other's lack-penetrating

The (Un)Speakable FEMININITY in Mainstream Movies

13

Stewart's voyeuristic space and creating a sight gag: at once a blatant contrivance of the cinematic apparatus while presenting an illusion of narrative spontaneity, an ad lib. Linear narrativity in this instance, an illusory strategy,is at once disrupted and sutured. The button rolls dO\vn his pale neck into his shirt and his fingers feel for it. The scene asserts closure as the loose thread of Stewart's voyeuristic whereabouts and his immediate response to his wife's infidelity seems resolved. And yet the knowledge Stewart acquires from his subterranean position under the floorboards designates narrative irresolution: 'What will become of Ada after her betrayal of the marriage vows now that the husband has found out? Ada prepares herself to leave Baines cabin after her tryst while Baines traipses after her. She finds a mirror on a wall. He asks her if she loves him while the borders of the screen re-situate to enclose the frame of the small mirror on the wall that provides a reflection of Ada's face as she completes her toilette. She pauses in her grooming, almost a freeze frame,and makes eye-contact with the (m)Other in her 0\Vll reflection. Baines persists on knowing if Ada loves him. Her eyes tben wander ever so slightly. Witb a final glance into the mirror, she catches her 0\Vll glance for a second, and then turns to Baines. She takes up his shirt and rubs her moutb and face on his bare chest to end the scene. This miJTor sequence marks the beginning of the portrayal of a duality for Ada tbat features, on tbe one hand, her identification with the Imaginary 'Wholeness consisting of pre-lingual narcissism, and, on the other hand, an identification with the applied secondary narcissism of active desire within the prohibitive,mis-recognized ego parameters of the Symbolic order. Via image-play between lingering glances in the mirror and the display of Ada's sexual desire, Campion deconstructs Lacan's Mirror Phase,the developmental stage that marks both the beginning of tbe subject's entry into tbe Symbolic order and tbe repression of the maternal semiotic. Ada, however, does not relinquish the Imaginary 'Wholeness, she does not repress the maternal semiotic. She still partakes of the desire once removed of the speaking subject.21 Again, the multiplicity of the images belies the binary-oriented phallogocentric construct. Later, on the way back home, Stewart surprises Ada in the jungle and wrestles her to tbe ground. As she struggles, he pulls and tugs at her garments. Encumbered by his groping, Ada pulls herself along the ground and the foliage around tbem is full of vines and supple branches graphically accentuating the birdcage appearance of her exposed hoopskirt. Stewart continues grappling after her, attempting awkwardly to mount her on the run. Flora's off-screen voice calling out in the distance for her mother finally

14

Chapter 1

puts an end to this pathetic display of the hysterical, emasculated subject, Stewart. In the very next scene, Stewart (re)establishes order by sequestering the unheimlich22 (m)Other within the alleged heimlich structure, his house. Arms crossed,Ada stands helpless with the backside of her body reflected in a full-length oval mirror as Stewart hannners wood planks over the windows of his cabin,barricading her inside. Flora jumps on a chair near a window,places her hand on a top section that has not yet been covered and shouts: "Here, Papa." The word papa resonates because it is the first time that Flora calls her stepfather "papa" and it signals the growing disparity between her identification with her (m)Other and a new identification with the Law of the Father. A plank goes up in that space closing little Flora in, as well. Ada's time depicted while barricaded in Stewart's cabin is imaged in an extremely sensual and tactile marmer creating a reversal in the patriarch's intent: instead of a prison, his enclosure becomes the chora/womb. One night, Ada surreptitiously enters Stewart's room and caresses him provocatively as she strips him of his bedclothes. The explicit sensuality continues as Ada visits him over the course of several nights. Stewart is overwhelmed and submissive as if in shock at her sexuality-new to him­ and his sudden sexual fastidiousness. One night, Stewart breaks from his apprehensions and reaches for her. She immediately draws back from him. Questions arise for the spectator. Does Ada disavow her apparent desire? Is it Ada's plan to only re-enact figuratively for Stewart's benefit the uncanny and distantly familiar,the bitter sweet conjoining-and-separation cycles,the providing-and-the-taking-away of the breast, within the primary dyad with the (m)Other? Stewart starts grasping at the straws. He mistakenly imagines that she desires him, and that eventually she will play her part in his household and become the Symbolic stand-in for woman. He interprets her actions in a phallocentric manner because he carmot recognize literally, figuratively or even intuitively her (m)Othemess. The spectator is also reluctant to acquiesce to Ada's display of disruptive multiplicity. We are tempted to react with a disavowal of the maternal semiotic and to consider Campion's direction obtuse even quirky and cruel. It leaves us as viewers in a tension that condenses and (re)presents the relationship of the maternal semiotic in symbiosis with the Symbolic. Ada's surprise display of sensuality towards Stewart,tranSfOlTIlS the "homely" cabin of Stewart's into the unheimlich space. Even the lighting in this makeshift prison becomes a wann intrauterine glow. Ada communicates the primal dynamics via caresses and withholding of caresses, that is interpreted often as rejection. The (m)Other comes and the (m)Other goes. Tactile communication

The (Un)Speakable FEMININITY in Mainstream Movies

15

(re)produces the uncanny sensuality and severity previous to and inclusive of human sexuality. Directed at Stewart, Ada/Campion (re)enunciates abjection{iouissance, as ifperfOlming remedial lessons from the pre-lingual developmental stage. In addition, Campion laces her re-enactment of the maternal jouissance/abjection cycles in this scene with the implication of the phallogocentric double bind: How can Ada hope to communicate the tactile, sensual and pulsating maternal semiotic to Stewart, the speaking subject, within the cultural stronghold that is the lingual construct of the Law of the Father? She is not even visible there. In Stewart's mind Ada has realized several cultural transgressions. She does not dutifully display the lack that the Symbolic order designates for the other-than-male. She does not defer to the Law of the Father. Moreover, Ada displays the active desire associated with the phallus/penis. Before releasing her from imprisonment in his cabin, Stewart indicates to Ada that he can reconcile these transgressions if only she will stay away from Baines. Ada acquiesces,so he takes dO\vn the barricades. However,once freed,Ada professes her desire for Baines by attempting to send him a sign, which, paradoxically, is suggestive of a castration: Ada dislodges a key from her dear piano and etches upon it her words oflove. However,when Ada forces Flora to deliver the piano key to Baines,Flora delivers it instead to Stewart. Stewart's reaction is to "clip her wings." He grabs up an ax, pulls Ada from his cabin and revealingly chops off her index finger causing a projectile spurt of (m)Other's blood to fall on her screaming daughter Flora. Later,in Ada's decrepit recovery bed when Stewart attempts to rape her, the maternal semiotic is brought home to him in a surprisingly extra-lingual communication. Campion signals Ada's speechless enunciation by means of a sequence of eyeline matches back and forth from Ada's eyes to Stewart's suddenly vulnerable expression as he backs away from her. Bewildered,he asks: "\Vhat?" She does not answer, but gazes at him serenely. Later,with musket in hand,Stewart infonns Baines that he "heard" Ada "speak" inside his head of the power of her will. Neil Robinson interprets Ada's will as retaliatory and sufficiently threatening as to cause Stewart to re-direct the ending of their marriage as an articulation of his own will. . . . she [Ada] retaliates with a(n) extra-linguistic threat which Stewart later names to Baines: "She said, "I am afraid of my will, of what it might do, it is so strange and strong." Whether these words are Ada's or the voice of patriarchy's unspoken fear of women, the intimation that the patriarch might have to pay with his body for the desires he inscribes onto the woman's body is more than Stewart can stand, so he masquerades that he chooses to end the relationship ("I wish her gone. I wish you gone"), and gives into Ada's desire to be free from him. (Robinson 2000, 33)

16

Chapter 1

Before this extra-logical scene, Campion foreshadowed Ada's extrasensory skills and its effect on patriarchal agents. Earlier in the movie, Ada explains in sign language that Flora's father became afraid when he began "sensing" her thoughts,that is,her telepathic pulses. It is also implied here that her fOlmer lover abandoned her due to his misgivings ofher extra­ linguistic, telepathic abilities. Baines, in contrast to Flora's father and Stewart, is not shown to be vulnerable to her semiotic, telepathic pulses. In fact,he seems to be liberated from phallogocentric phobias. In the end,the spectator finds it easy to collude with Campion as she depicts Baines to be, at the very least, a worthy mate. He appears to have distanced himself from the patriarchal prerogative, that is, the univocal, oppositional posturing of the speaking subj ect. There seems to be a positive outcome to Ada's telepathic address: she and Baines depart together for the mainland. They take the piano with them balanced in the middle of their narrow boat powered by Maori oarsmen. Unexpectedly, Ada makes them throw the piano over the side and impulsively steps into the coil of rope attached to the piano. She is pulled overboard. Sinking fast below the surface, she does not struggle for the longest time as if complacent in her return to the primordial abjection/chora represented by the abysmal ocean brine. 'When, after a long period of paralysis and still attached by the umbilical rope to the piano at the bottom of the sea, she suddenly squinns, kicks her shoe off and resurfaces. Ada's voice-over armounces that she is surprised that her "will" has "chosen life." Despite overt signs of having survived her ordeal, covert filmic signs during the conclusion ofthe film suggest multiple readings. These cinematic signs include: slow motion (re)presenting hyper-reality; Ada's narration exclaiming "What a death! What a chance! ( . . . ) My will has chosen life," this last statement of hers is enunciated as if it were a question; then,as her inanimate body is grappled from the sea, Ada's eyes appear closed; and lastly, the camera moves up and away from the boat to a bird's-eye-view suggesting that her spirit is departing her body. These filmic techniques indicate the deconstruction of Ada's apparent survival while suggesting a heightened, transcendent experience for both the protagonist and the spectator who, via the camera movement, become the plurality: subjectiobject.23 The subsequent scenes further this polysemic reading and results in a deconstruction of closure.

The Finale/Overture The film's ending is striking in its concise enunciation ofthe female gaze attached to (m)Othemess, intertextuality, and the extra-lingual. It is an

The (Un)Speakable FEMININITY in Mainstream Movies

17

epilogue consisting of a summary of narrative film techniques coalescing into pronounced traces of primal FEMININITY. The five final shots of The Piano, which are linked overtly by Ada's narration, afford the narrative an implied closure symptomatic of the Symbolic order. This implied ending, however, is compromised by Ada's final voice-over speech: she recites serenely the last stanza of a poem while the spectator views a progressive array of disconcerting visuals. Ada's final (re)citation celebrates the abjection{iouissance venerated in a 19th Century male poet's ode to the bottom of the sea.24 The following breakdown and discussion of tbe last images in the movie serves as an overture to and a coalescence of the primal FEMININITY applied to mainstream movies. The five final shots of The Piano are as follows: 1 . Closeup on Ada's hand playing the piano. The silver prosthesis replacing her index finger is ornate and prominent in the frame. Ada's Voice-Over: "I teachpiano now in Nelson. George hasfashioned me a metalfingertip; I am quite the townfreak, which satisfies. " 2. Medimn Shot of a female whose features are veiled in a dark kerchief walks towards the camera along a white exterior wall. Ada's metal finger with its leather binding clicks the wall as she guides herself along. In the backgrOlUld through the white lace drapes of an open patio glass door, a bookshelf with many volumes is visible. Two other such doors are visible along the wall that Ada is using as her guide. The lace curtains from these windows blow outward in the breeze like petty-coats or the lace dresses of period bridesmaids. Ada turns and walks away from the camera uttering consonants under her veil. Ada's Voice-Over: "I am learning to speak. My sound is still so bad I feel ashamed. Ipractice only when I am alone, and it is dark." 3 . Medimn Shot ofFlora doing cartwheels in slow motion against a rich green background of foliage. Ada's voice-over continues pronOlUlcing phonemes. 4. Continuation of (2) above. Ada is returning towards the camera along the porch wall. Baines enters from frame right and positions himself against the white wall waiting for the veiled Ada to reach him. Just as she reaches him, she pronOlUlces the phoneme "pa" twice in sequence: "pa-pa. " She pauses, and then slowly passes him dragging her hand across his chest. As she starts moving past, he lifts his hand to secure hers and a short dance occms as he twirls her to the wall and caresses her face over her dark veil. He then folds back the black kerchief from her face, and they kiss. As Baines continues to kiss and nuzzle Ada, the camera moves back from them. The piano melody in the background fades out. Ada's Voice-Over: "At night... " 5. Medimn shot of the ivory keys of Ada's piano lUlder the sea. The camera pulls back and up to reveal the rope, Ada's shoe, and finally Ada herself still attached to her piano floating above with her gO"WllS transforming

18

Chapter 1 her into a giant dark balloon. The camera continues to float farther and farther away. The figure of Ada still attached to her piano becomes increasingly difficult to see lUltil every trace disappears into the blue saline sea of the uncanny. Ada's Voice-Over: " . . . 1 think of my piano in its ocean grave, and sometimes ofmyselffloating above it. Down there everything is so still and silent that it lulls me to sleep. It is a weird lullaby and so it is; it is mine. There is a silence where hath been no sound There is a silence where no sound may be In the cold grave, under the deep deep sea.25"

Before analyzing each of these shots,we should consider that the first of the final five shots was predicated by an edit and that there is a prior shot significant to its meaning. In the split-second interval between the shot of Ada's prosthetic finger at the piano and the prior shot of her pulled from the sea with her eyes closed, we have colluded with the filmmaker in the construction of a jump in time and space. What this jump signifies is up for grabs despite Ada's apparently reassuring narration to come. It is up to the spectator to (re)construct meaning from this abrupt edit. Following Ada's cryptic, albeit appeasing, voice over, most spectators will be tempted to collude with the semblance of narrative closure-despite the chilling,post­ structuralist visual evidence to the contrary. In the first shot of the final montage described above, Campion plays intertextually with the myth ofcastration. Baines has fashioned a prosthesis to make up for Ada's digital lack after suffering a figural castration at the hands of Stewart. On the one hand we have the image of Ada's recovery and return to piano playing as if to validate conventional narrative and cultural structure, i.e., the happy ending; on the other hand, the image of the prosthetic finger becomes a stand-in for and deconstructs the primal struggle between the absence and presence of the phallus while creating an ornate image-play by means of a qinrky fetish object. Ada, as if to reinforce this image-play, comments in a voice-over referring to herself as a freak in the eyes of society, which satisfies her. Ada's satisfaction reflects Campion's allusion to differance that she has cultivated throughout her film from the image of the non-speaking, selective mute Ada (as passive and active sign, a "middle voice" differing and deferring), to her communion with the maternal semiotic in her vision for the film, and, finally to the film's deconstruction of the Law of the Father and the male gaze. In the second shot in this sequence, we read the deconstruction of the marriage ceremony: Ada (re)enacting the veiled bride's leisurely march down the aisle during a lace-strewn ceremony with the figural Good Book on display,if only discreetly positioned in the background. To punctuate the

The (Un)Speakable FEMININITY in Mainstream Movies

19

marital allusion, Baines, the groom figure, will soon enter the frame to lift the veil and kiss the bride. With this allusion to marriage,the comedy trope is signaled in the traditional poetics of the narrative: comedies end in marriage. However, since the bride is arrayed in a black veil, we find ourselves conceding that an element of death is manifest. In the spirit of infinite semiosis,other more liturgical connotations arise from the dark veil that reaches down her back. Connotations that range from marriage to God in a continuing spin off from the Virgin Mary image for women sequestered in the "Universal" Church to the increasingly mythologized and ostracized hijab. The dark veil transposes into a multi-metaphor. It is sardonic on Campion's part to mix intertextually the allusions of marriage, death and religion. The overt peculiarity of the veiled woman image is subdued only somewhat by Ada's soothing extra-diegetic narration and the diegetic whispering of plosives below her veil of mourning. However, before Baines "walks dO\vn the aisle" to join her, the ceremony gets interrupted by a cutaway to Shot 3 in the sequence. The cutaway is reminiscent of a prior scene in which Flora perfOlms joyous cartwheels in "real time" rather than slow motion while screeching out gleefully to her mother who is totally immersed in playing piano on the beach. This time, however, Flora is seen perfOlming silent cartwheels in slow motion-an altered state indicated by this filmic technique that is reserved mostly for (re)presenting memories and occasions of heightened reality such as fantasy, hallucinations, dreams and dying thoughts. The heightened sense of reality in this final montage in the film, is particularly coalesced in this playful shot,and yet once again attenuated by Ada's voice over. This time Ada's voice,still pronouncing phonemes,is a diegetic bridge over the insert of the cutaway depicting Flora's ethereal cartwheels. Again, we collude with the filmmaker who has crafted the guise of a pleasing narrative closure at the end of the film; and yet, barely below our consciousness,we fear the worst. Shot 4 perfunctorily continues the wedding deconstruction and seals it with a kiss-not before deconstructing the Law of the Father with Ada's phoneme-play. The plosive vocalization "pa-pa" uttered under the dark veil is diverse in its meaning and tone-an indictment/pun,at once playful as it is clinical,as Baines joins Ada. The final shot of the movie pays homage to the intertextual inclination of the female gaze and the plurality of FEMININITY. Ada's narration during this shot overlays the visual at the bottom of the sea and ends with a male-composed intertext of poetry. This last shot contains many layers of punctuation many of which are communicated aurally via speech: Ada's language in voice-over suggests narrative closure. We assume this from her

20

Chapter 1

own poignant though cryptic musings, as well as from the poetry she (re)cites. Ada's voice-over creates multi-metaphors: she refers to silence as a lullaby (songs associated often with the music often used to calm the pre­ lingual pre-subject); she claims ownership of the weird lullaby that is the silence of her own watery grave (lullaby as silence and death [perhaps a womb-death?]); and finally, the overall sense of Ada's identification with the linaginary Wholeness of her finalloriginary resting place in the saline depths of the ocean/chora of (m)Other. Within the final five shots and based on a consistent use of these strategies throughout her film,Campion affords us an abstract for the female gaze and primal FEMININITY in mainstream movies. Her strategies include deconstruction, which, for the purposes of our discussion, designates image-play and word-play ofwhich the fimction is to circumvent phallogocentrism. The purpose of circumventing phallogocentrism is to (re)present the multiplicity in signification, which, in tum, valorizes the maternal semiotic enmeshed in and colliding with the univocal Symbolic order. In conclusion, filmmaker Jane Campion in her film The Piano opens a significant portal for the analysis of FEMININITY in mainstream movies consistent with post-structuralist feminist theory. This threshold had appeared foreclosed in the disavowed and glistening folds of the commercialized film industry. After The Piano, this portal with its uncanny multivalent space beyond appears open and accessible to mainstream artists and audiences-that is, if language does not always already insert itself. Therein lies the double bind, the (un)speakable facet of primal FEMININITY: is it real ifit is (not) spoken?

CHAPTER 2 INTERTEXTUALITY AND THE ENUNCIATION OF FEMININITY: BLUEBEARD IN JANE CAMPION'S THE PIANO

Vis-a-Vis Dialogue The Bluebeard folktale is reproduced in Jane Campion's The Piano (1993) as the featured performance in a pageant that a minister organizes for his colonial New Zealand congregation. This play, a construction en abyme, is representative of extra-textual quotes and their interactions with/in a text, i.e., intertextuality, in telTIlS of Julia Kristeva's "affimmtive negativity" (Kristeva 1984,110-113). As such,intertextuality is a process I link to primal FEMININITY and the maternal semiotic as we have seen in the last chapter. Kristeva's position on intertextuality is derived from Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of dialogism,that is,the interaction between a text,its antecedent, and its synchronous influences both textual and historical, as well as the interaction between all of these and the reader or interpreter's adaptation of the text in his or her mind. (Kristeva, 1980, 68-70) Kristeva expands on Bakhtin's dialogism by coining the tenn intertextuality in reference to the dialectic that is produced within the text by the intersection of extra-textual quotes. Kristeva posits that when an extra-textual quotation is inserted into a text, a transposition occurs that transfOlTIlS the text into a transgression of linear univocal meainng (Kristeva 1984, 59-60). In other words,through a dialectical transposition within the narrative, the multiplex potentiality of the intertext expands the original text's meanings multidimensionally as if in an explosion of polysemy. This is consistent with Kristeva's theory on the transgressive and expansive effect of the maternal semiotic transposed into and always already within Lacan's Law of the Father. Further, Kristeva's intertextuality integrates the heterogeneous processes of dissolution and productivity that rests at the core of her concept of affimmtive negativity.

22

Chapter 2

Referencing Hegel's concepts on the extra-logical mediation aspects of negativity as opposed to negation and nothingness, Kristeva defines negativity as the mediation, the supersession of the "pille abstractions" of being and nothingness in the concrete where they are both only moments. Although 'negativity' is a concept and therefore belongs to a contemplative (theoretical) system, it reformulates the static "terms" ofpme abstraction as a process, dissolving and binding them within a mobile law" (Kristeva 1 984, 109).

For Kristeva, negativity is a mediating process between being and nothingness that forms an organizing and binding motility, an independent flow of arbitrating refOlTIl. Kristeva's designation strikes a chord with my understanding ofthe mediating,motile nature of another of her innovations, the maternal semiotic. Derived from the developmental stages prior to the subject's entrance into the Law of the Father, the maternal semiotic consists of the repressed signs and traces of the dissolving and binding processes between objectivity and subjectivity. In other words,the maternal semiotic consists of all the material and sensory stimulations as well as their psycho­ linguistic influences and processes produced and established during the dyad-oriented pre-natal stage as well as the pre-subjective stage between birth and the entry into language. The material parallels between Kristeva's maternal semiotic and her "affirmative negativity" are substantive. Kristeva explains the material aspect of negativity in terms of the logic of matter: Yet what the dialectic represents as negativity, indeed Nothing, is precisely that which remains outside logic (as the signifier of a subject), what remains heterogeneous to logic even while producing it through a movement of separation or rejection, something that has the necessary objectivity of a law and can be seen as the logic of matter" (Kristeva, 1 12).

Kristeva's affirmative negativity therefore always already proceeds from the material separation/rejection of the subject-to-be fromfby the maternal object in a birthing logic of matter based on an originary movement of separation and rejection and maternal authority. Ifwe agree with Kristeva that negativity,the processes of Nothingness, corresponds to a "productive dissolution" (Kristeva 1984, 113) between being and nothingness that is heterogeneous to logic, and that negativity is the productive element in Bakhtin's dialogism, it follows then that intertextuality is a process built on a dialectic that materializes outside language/logic. Intertextuality,then,is an enunciation of Otherness that is

Intertextuality and the Enunciation of FEMININITY

23

negating and affirming. Given the uncanny (unheimlich) productivity of the extra-logical dialectic within intertextuality, I argue that the disposition of the female gaze, as a facet and effect of primal FEMININITY, is engaging in dialogical/extra-logical displays in a nonlinear, extra-logical and self­ referencing intertext with the Symbolic, the Law. This disposition and effects are always already subliminally apparent and (re )presented, albeit disavowed, in mainstream movies no matter the gender of the director. However, in this chapter's case study, that is, the case study of intertextuality in The Piano, and given Campion's intervention and the plurality of textual allusions including overt extra-logical intertextualities, the maternal semiotic achieves a level of enunciation rarely seen.

The Female Gaze in Mainstream Movies The semiotic displays of the tension and balance between heterogeneity and homogeneity negate, underpin, and sustain the Symbolic order. They also function as indicators of FEMININITY as prelingual experience and enunciation. The female gaze is partially a political position, in reductionist terms, and partly a universal strategy in the arts-just as the male gaze amounts to a political position and a strategy derivative of the structural limitations of binary oppositions. However, the female gaze inherently features an applied FEMININITY, that is, the reverberation and the enunciation of the polysemic and extra-logical traces of the maternal semiotic particularly centered on non-essentialized libidinal investments. Because the maternal semiotic remains repressed and always already enmeshed in the Symbolic order,i.e.,the phallogocentric culture,it follows that the female gaze, as an effect, in part, of FEMININITY, should (re)present traces from the fountainhead of the maternal in subversive and integrating enunciations directed at and collusive with the Symbolic order and its binary disposition. In mainstream movies,the female gaze connotes a multiplex pattern in the flow of the cinematic signifying practice that works to extra-logically circumvent linearity as a process of reductionist logic in narrative conventions. In expanding on the univocal narrative tradition, the female gaze with its links to primal FEMININITY and the maternal semiotic, replicates and promotes, in the domain of mainstream movies,the tensions and struggles involved with the 'productive dissolution' of the culture of language. The process of the female gaze creates a nexus of plurality and transgression that results in the expansion of the awareness of plurality in the human condition. However,the Law of the Father is not able to embrace the potential in FEMININITY for excess and psychosis and plurality, nor the potential for abjection and jouissance in the human

24

Chapter 2

experience; and so, the construct of language and linearity is irrevocably challenged while simultaneously experiencing emiclnnent in the always already presence of absence, the 'affimmtive negativity,' of the maternal semiotic. Moreover,the Symbolic order is neither impaired nor transcended but transposed intertextually by !be processes of !be female gaze and !be enunciation of FEMININITY. The 'affimmtive negativity' in the female gaze,that is,in its enunciation of FEMININlTY, is very pronounced in Campion. The Piano, specifically via the dialogic mise en abyme of the Bluebeard intertext, celebrates Kristeva's maternal semiotic and 'affimmtive negativity' while generating signifiance at an extra-logical level accessible to the mainstream spectator.

The Dialogic Bluebeard The Bluebeard legend encompasses the courtships and murders associated with an aristocratic man who goes by the name Bluebeard owing to the pronounced blue sheen of his beard. At !be beginning of !be story, Bluebeard courts a young lady by working irrepressibly to diminish her trepidations. Once achieving success, he marries her and continues to treat her graciously and with much generosity. However,despite his magnanimity, Bluebeard issues one caveat: he provides her with a key to a secluded door and forbids her from opening it. The Bluebeard folk tale was adapted from legend (two such examples include Comorre the Cursed in the 6th Century, and the infamous 15th Century despot and serial killer Gilles de Rais1),that was shaped by similar themes in biblical and mythological fables including Eve partaking of !be forbidden fruit of knowledge,Pandora's Box,and Eros. Not too long before the period designated in Campion's film, Perrault and the Brothers Grimm created the most famous renditions ofthe Bluebeard tale and published them in well-circulated tomes. Thus, the perfOlmance of Bluebeard in a colonial congregation's theatrical soiree seems plausible given the historical period. The transposition of the folk tale into Campion's film-text fOlms a "mise­ en-abyme" siginficant to !be construct ofthe fibn itself. The mise-en-abyme is a convention that Levi- Straus refers to as Ie modele reduit or small-scale model that (re)presents, in the case of narrative fOlTIl, a repetition or imitation of the narrative on a smaller scale reproduced as a kind of citation. In intertextual telTIlS the mise-en-abyme is often referred to as a quotation derivative of many quotations that are both self-reflexive and reflexive of external sources sliding historically and ahistorically, as well as diachronically and synchronically in culture. In adapting a chain of intertextual citations into The Piano, the Bluebeard theatrical play in The

25

Intertextuality and the Enunciation of FEMININITY

Piano transposes a historical chain of references including the Perrault and Grimm Brothers' adaptations of the tale as well as buried, more obscure allusions

to

Campion's

biblical,

mythological

mise-en-abyme

in

her

and

legendary

intertextually

texts.

Moreover,

'future-proof

film

potentially references all forthcoming Bluebeard quotes and adaptations from yet-to-be-constructed adaptations and interpretations based on the Bluebeard myth.

This dialogic continuum

signals the negating

and

productive vigor in the intertextual process. FurthemlOre, by transposing Bluebeard into her filmic construct, Campion (re)presents intertextual fissures in narrative linearity. For the spectator, the Bluebeard intertext creates a "productive dissolution" in the narrative that opens a space for (m)Othemess.

This produces an unfolding of dialectic indices

self­

referential to the cinema, the narrative, and FEMININITY. And so, produces a post-structuralist process of self-reflexivity in and of itself.

The Self-Referential Bluebeard The small-scale model of the Bluebeard story in Campion's film

IS

particularly representative of self-reflexivity within the sphere of the cinematic apparatus. The perfOlmance of Bluebeard's story before the congregation features screen proj ections in a hybrid live-theater/motion picture pageant. The character of Bluebeard is backlit and projected onto a sheet that fOlms a screen. And the woman who portrays his wife joins him there after she is sho\Vll discovering in horror the previous wives' heads displayed like bloody trophies in the forbidden chamber. The cinema-like distancing of the characters on the screen of silhouettes with its bigger than life quality of proj ection causes an angry reaction in the Maori tribesmen and they interrupt the (re)enactment of Bluebeard's attempt to mutilate his latest wife. They climb up on the stage and rip apart the makeshift screen in an attempt to get at the evil Bluebeard. To end the scene, after they all calm do\Vll, the matron of the parish reveals to the Maori the theatrical/proto­ cinematic devices used in the live perfOlmance to accentuate the appearance of violence. The use of proj ections onto a flat surface for the purpose of spectator entertainment has occurred on an even smaller scale previously in the movie. During the planning stage for the pageant, the local minister demonstrates how the illusion of an

ax

dismembering a body part will be exhibited by

means ofthe back-proj ection of silhouettes onto a screen. The unsuspecting young maid recruited for the impromptu demonstration screams as the minister brings the

ax

do\Vll towards her wrist and she giggles nervously as

the ax misses her hand. The minister then directs her to look at the silhouette

26

Chapter 2

of her hand and the falling ax projected larger than life on the opposite wall. After another simulated dismemberment,the optical illusion and the impact it will have on the audience registers in the maid's mind and she relaxes then settles back into the spirit ofthe ruse. Campion takes pains to highlight the severing potential of the ax in a comical marmer, but there is a more serious reason for the demonstration: it foreshadows and rhymes polysemically with Ada's future dismemberment at the hands of Stewart, the Bluebeard figure in the large-scale narrative of the film itself. The ecclesiastical setting for this ad hoc demonstration suggests a certain sanctioning by the church of the Bluebeard theme and the perfOlmance of illusionism, which signals another instance of Campion's post-structuralist image-play. Campion not only achieves emphasis with this strategy, but on a subversive level, she deconstructs the patriarchal economy, its offshoot, the institution of religion, and the Bluebeard play implying that it is all an illusion, a sleight of hand. Over the course of the large-scale narrative that is Ada's story, as well as during events in the Bluebeard mise-en-abyme, Campion creates a (photo)play on the notion of castration and the Oedipal Complex in culture. This is achieved via the images of the faux-dismembelTIlent of the hand of the maiden,the simulated severed heads ofthe wives,Ada's actual dismembered finger,as well as the depiction of Baines's impotent display of full-frontal nUdity. Further, the narrative, although interrupted by the performance of the cinema-esque mise-en-abyme, discovers its 0\Vll deluge of self-referential indices generated in part by the intertextual transposition of the Bluebeard motif. Campion constructs parallels to the Bluebeard story throughout her narrative. Just as Bluebeard pre-arranges for his marriages by means of socio-economic conventions, so, too Stewart, Bluebeard's counterpart in The Piano, pre-arranges his marriage to Ada. Just as Bluebeard gives an ultimatum that will soon be disobeyed, so too Stewart forces Ada to promise never to see her lover Baines again. Finally, similar to Bluebeard dismembering his wives, so,too, Stewart dismembers Ada's index finger in a gesture he describes as "the clipping of her wings." At the end of the age­ old despot's tale, however,the infamous Bluebeard's intentions are foiled by the sudden appearance of helpers (a convention in fables),who,in most Bluebeard adaptations, are presented as the wife's family members. After Bluebeard's comeuppance at the hands of family members, the wife is resurrected from abjection to wealth in a curious reversal of fortune. Likewise, Stewart's will is foiled at the end of Campion's film. However, Stewart's will is not done in by the deus ex machina involving folk tale helpers, but by another sleight of authorial hand: Ada's telepathic ability warns Stewart on the power of her 0\Vll strange and strong will. Despite

Intertextuality and the Enunciation of FEMININITY

27

these intertextual correlations,and in some regards,because ofthe intertext, Campion's images are less concerned with the poetics of the fable than with the female gaze as the extra-logical enunciation of FEMININITY and the maternal semiotic, all performing a topological sphere of influence over the film. The Bluebeard mise-en-abyme interrupts and reaffilTIls the narrative in such an explosive extra-logical marmer that the intertextual fallout for the spectator is palpable. The Bluebeard play/citation splatters Campion's fihn into multiple gushes of self-reflective FEMININITY, along with a nod to the more political female voice. Included in these semiotic globules are the traces of the female double bind; the liminal space of the (m)Other; and the post-modem revision of the Bluebeard fable, all three of which we will discuss below.

The Female Double Bind Deconstructed The double bind is a situation that marks the universal dilemma of women in the phallogocentric economy. As Kelly Oliver states: "( . ) woman is set up as inarticulate Other but then she is articulated within the Symbolic order. Of course, the trick is that the inarticulate carmot be articulated and retain its status or power. When represented, the umepresentable woman becomes what she is not." (Oliver 1993, 108) This paradox is particularly noticeable in the realm of language since the effect of the Law of the Father is to repress the maternal semiotic and disavow its co-existential synergy within the Symbolic order in favor of a contrived univocal phallogocentrism. The Bluebeard fable,however,features the pre­ lingual proto-imaginings of the double bind by means of its metaphors of phallicized keys and forbidden abject knowledge in secret spaces (stand-in wombs) behind locked portals (stand-in vaginas) in the hidden recesses of the patriarch's domain (of hidden lack). Clarissa Pinkola Estes posits that "Bluebeard forbids the young woman to use the one key that would bring her to consciousness. To forbid a woman to use the key to conscious self­ knowledge strips away her intuitive nature,her natural instinct for curiosity that leads her to discover "what lies underneath" and beyond the obvious." (Pinkola Estes, 47) Pinkola Estes suggests that the key in the Bluebeard fable opens the door to the self-knowledge that lies underneath or repressed, if not co-opted, in the Symbolic order. Bluebeard's young wife finds herself stuck in the double bind: If she obeys the command from the patriarch then her identity, her being, wilts on the vine. However, if she disobeys Bluebeard the patriarch,then her body is threatened with death. And this is assured by the bloody chamber containing transformational knowledge . .

28

Chapter 2

contained in the affirmative negativity generated by the abject body parts of Bluebeard's previous wives. Transposed to the film The Piano, the Bluebeard metaphor for the double bind plays out in close parallel to the main narrative. If Ada obeys Stewart, she loses her freewill; if she disobeys him, she could lose her life to his axe,which his unrepentant violence towards her at the end of the film indicates. In a display of productive dissolution and the maternal semiotic, however,the wives in both the traditional Bluebeard tale and in Campion's film acquire the forbidden knowledge and prosper while the patriarch succumbs to misfortunes. Further,in the same marmer that Bluebeard's last wife chooses to disobey him, so, too Ada chooses to defy the patriarch, Stewart. She disobeys the spirit of Stewart's demands by sending a dislodged piano key (the deconstructed phallus) to Baines with an inscription of love etched on its side. The oblique image-play between the love-inscribed piano key and Bluebeard's blood-stained key is another aspect of the polysemy generated by the intertextual dynamics in the film. The juxtaposing and the transposing of the two types of keys in these two texts reference the ambiguity and plurality ofthe musical pulsations and the body-centered abject elements of the maternal semiotic. FurthemlOre, the dislodged piano key,because it is etched with Ada's written words, alludes obliquely to the parapraxis, the pun and mimesis of a verbal double bind that Campion features as a running motif in Ada's elective speechlessness. As a woman, if Ada speaks, she is not heard; if she doesn't speak, she is also not heard. A much narrower double bind,but double bind nonetheless, which Campion turns on its head with Ada's selective mutism. At the very end,the intertexts in the film dovetail in the demolishing of the double bind syndrome. Bluebeard's last wife escapes from his murderous intentions to a more rewarding life in the tale, and as the Maori take over the stage (re)production, stopping the play. Ada also experiences a change of fortune when she escapes from her marriage of convenience. She seems,in one interpretation,to depart fortuitously with her lover Baines to a future as a piano teacher in to'Wll.

The Liminal Space of the (m)Other To address the liminal space of the (m)Other evident in the Bluebeard tale, we retrace our steps in the legend to the space before the locked door of the forbidden chamber. This threshold, or liminal space, (re)presents the slippery and porous boundary ofthe maternal semiotic in its integration with the Symbolic, as well as the taboo of the extra-logical, the nothing of the "logic of taboo." Menninghaus argues that "Bluebeard's wife is punished

Intertextuality and the Enunciation of FEMININITY

29

for opening the door, not for what she discovers behind it. This mystery behind the door is "nothing" in terms of the logic oflaboo. The mystery can be completely empty, less a mystery of nothing than a nothing of mystery; for the sanction elicited by the transgression of the taboo all this changes­ nothing" (Menninghaus, 61). Menninghaus is referring to the power of the taboo as marking the point of no return in cultural transgression. That is, the taboo is the transgression; it is not the specific consequences. Freud in his Totem and Taboo bears this out in telTIlS of the taboo's ambiguous relation to cause and effect: Taboo restrictions are distinct from religious or moral prohibitions. They are not based upon any divine ordinance, but may be said to impose themselves on their own aCCOlmt. They differ from moral prohibitions in that they fall into no system that declares quite generally that certain abstinences must be observed and gives reasons for that necessity. Taboo prohibitions have no grOlmds and are of lUlknown origin. Though they are lUlintelligible to us, to those who are dominated by them they are taken as a matter of course. (Freud 1950,18).

The transgression in and of itself is the compelling issue of the taboo since it marks a structural breach in a culture and triggers a burst of Kristeva's negativity, the productive dissolution disavowed in the Symbolic. Moreover, using Kristeva's position on being and nothingness discussed above, I argue that whenthe threshold ofthe forbidden chamber, this liminal space, is traversed the first time, the breach of taboo that this represents results in affilTIlative negativity exploding from the nothingness to generate Bluebeard's serial marriage-murders and eventually even his dO\vnfall for the same. The negativity from the chamber also produces the blood, which, in many versions of the tale, will not go away and marks indelibly Bluebeard's key once a wife transgresses the threshold of the forbidden room. Eventually the productive dissolution pulsating from the forbidden chamber resolves the vicious circle of the serial murders by reconstituting for the last wife the extra-logical self-awareness emanating from the abject flesh of the former wives' body parts. This heralds the destructive and compelling force of the maternal semiotic in a state of being unencumbered and dis-articulated from the Symbolic order. The transgression of the forbidden chamber ultimately causes the deconstruction of Bluebeard's cultural construct as well as the apparent cautionary stance of the folk tale. The post-structuralist plurality of the tale rises from the liminal space causing the cautionary elements of the story to oscillate between the transgression of the patriarchal mandate and the discharge of the nothing logic of the taboo, that is the extra-logical productive dissolution and

30

Chapter 2

affirmative negativity. The liminal space challenges the patriarchal mediation ofthe pure, binary abstractions of being and nothingness. In sum, the last wife opens to all a space that is "taboo as a matter of course" beyond the liminal tlireshold of the maternal semiotic. The space in Bluebeard' s forbidden chamber beyond the phallogocentric taboo is the space of the Other, the repressed Otherness filled with abjection andjouissance. This is the milieu of the (m)Other whose liminal space serves as the point of no return for the Symbolic order. Ada herself constitutes this liminal space in The Piano. She is (m)Other and she transgresses the phallocentric directive by means of her elective mutism and by producing a female child outside of wedlock. This leaves the threshold of the (m)Other open for the duration of the narrative while Ada lingers within the productive nothing of the logic of the taboo at the liminal space.

(post)Modern Bluebeard Campion's truncated stage version of the Bluebeard myth is also consistent with the salient adaptations of the fable in recent times. Bela Bartok composed an opera entitled Duke Bluebeard's Castle (191 1) that also ignores the reversal of the wife's fortunes, albeit in a less ambiguous and a less deconstructionist marmer than Campion's. In Bartok's version, Bluebeard's wife, Judith, in the grips of patriarchal dominance, joins his previous wives in a type of living-wives archival space behind the relocked 7th of 7 forbidden doors. The castle then returns to its darkness under the mastery of Bartok's fatalistic despot, Bluebeard. So, the wife remains unfulfilled, suspended and objectified in a gallery of still living, heavily be­ jeweled, former wives-an artifact ofpatriarchal mastery. Campion's Judith, the latest wife in the staged mise-en-abyme also finds that her story gets suspended by Maori outrage and interference at the point of Bluebeard's attempted murder of her. Since Bartok's Judith neither dies, nor rids herself of Bluebeard, and Campion's staged Bluebeard pageant is interrupted at the moment of no return for Bluebeard and Judith, the two versions parallel each other and speak to the 20th Century and the present. Bartok's operatic Bluebeard story in 1 9 1 1 foreshadows Modernism's decline, and Campion's version in 1994 helps usher in post-feminism, a post-structuralist influenced anti-political and anti-metanarrative version of the legend that works to expand the awareness of plurality in the human condition. So, post-feminism is both modernist and post-modernist, at least in theory. At any rate, Campion's large-scale narrative with its traces of intertextual Bluebeard throughout, ends with a postmodern-Ieaning faux-modernist bent as we discussed above

Intertextuality and the Enunciation of FEMININITY

31

in the last chapter when we analyzed the montage sequence that ended the film. The viewer watches this montage with a sinking feeling that Ada might not have survived her chosen path to oblivion that resulted in her ankle tangled in the umbilical-cord rope that keeps her suspended from her piano in the murk. Perhaps the montage like an epilogue is her last wistful vision of life with Baines on the fringe of culture, a last daydream from her dire perch above her piano "in the cold grave, under the deep deep sea." This scenario obliquely parallels Bartok's Judith who parades with the other wives back into the castle's 7th forbidden room to take up her living-statue perch with the other wives as the door closes and Bluebeard tums the key to lock it. Both ofthese Bluebeard versions work against the grand narrative of closure that includes a moral as was provided by the traditional cautionary fable of Bluebeard. Despite their postmodernist leaning stance, both these versions provide a fatalist imitation of modernist closure: Bartok's Judith lives on in the forbidden room and Campion's Ada is provided an ambiguous montage of what could have been, if, indeed, the ending sequence was only a kind of daydream during her dying moments attached umbilically to her piano at the bottom of the seam. Moving on to another version ofthe fable, Margaret Atwood is prescient and parodic as well as postmodem in her writing that includes a Bluebeard reference. In Lady Oracle (1976), she compels her heroine, Joan Foster, to enter the forbidden space of multiplicity and murder where she discovers and revels in her multifaceted self(ves). Further, she makes Bluebeard an ambiguous entity, or better, plural entities (re)presenting the animus, ifnot the 'spermatic word,' 2 which is the letter of the Law. Atwood's Joan develops a disposition subversive and very different from cultural dictates that encourage the construct of a linear, univocal self vis-a-vis a world of binary oppositions. Her life unfolds as an escape artist fleeing a series of animus-males and attempts to work against the grain of the convention and archetypes that seems to be embedded in culture. As Sherrill Grace suggests in summing up the novel: "( . ) Lady Oracle makes explicit: we are Bluebeard, wife, and castle, repeating the story of our destruction, continuing to think in tenns of hostile dualities, reducing our relationships with ourselves, each other, and the natural world to castles, to rooms with metal doors, to spaces separated from their context, exclusive and closed." (Grace, 260-1). Atwood and Campion in different ways suggest a scintillating and postmodern interpretation of the traditional cautionary tale of "hostile dualities." 'Whereas Bartok, a Jung contemporary, takes a quasi­ modernist, quasi-postmodernist approach and so, an ultimately fatalistic pre-WWI approach to the phallogocentric meta-narrative, Campion and Atwood implement the Bluebeard myth as a Kristevan intertext rooted in . .

32

Chapter 2

iconoclasm, the maternal semiotic and primal FEMININITY. This is exemplified by the authors' emphases on affIrmative negativity, multiplicity and deconstruction. Campion and Atwood deconstruct the Bluebeard legend through image-play featuring cinematic, narrative and female self­ referential displays that emphasize the gaps in the structure of the Symbolic order. These fissures leak the bodily-centered traces of the maternal semiotic and turn the Bluebeard myth on its head.

Conclusion As much as the Bluebeard intertext in Campion's The Piano exudes surface levels of meaning (a)synchronous to the period depicted in the film, it also prompts more subtle levels of meaning (a)synchronous to the current times. The Piano 's adaptation of the Bluebeard tale, on the one hand, obliquely (re)produces the cautionary, the logic of taboo and the maternal semiotic, while, on the other hand, it also transposes the contemporary Bluebeard mythologies for contemporary spectators and so exhibits postmodemist mistrust of culture. It is clear that Campion's Bluebeard mise­ en-abyme integrates intertextually within its larger scale narrative in the movie as the latter embodies FEMININITY and the maternal semiotic within the sphere of mainstream movies.

CHAPTER 3 HERMApHRODITE: MATERNAL MASOCHISM IN JANE CAMPION'S

THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY, HOLY SMOKE AND IN THE CUT

The water nymph Sahnacis loved Hermaphroditus, the son of Hermes (Mercury) and Aphrodite (Venus), so much so that she prayed to the gods and they granted that she be conjoined with her beau in a single body with a double sexl They were syncretized in heterogeny that harkens back to the stage of human development before sexuation with its extra-logical sexual singularity, duality and plurality. Back to a pansexual libidinal time that occurs during the several years of pre-verbal-to-Oedipal stage transmigration for the subject-to-be before the Oedipal triadic relations speak the castration myth and its Symbolic order. The legend of the conjoined Sahnacis and Hemmphroditus became the first inscribed example of the mercurial nymphomaniac cum phallus-entity associated with arcane experiences. So, the myth speaks to the unspeakable state, that is, to the pre-lingual pluralities and worrisome oneness ofjouissance within the (m)Other/child dyad. In the spirit of the myths of the plurality of conjoined sex in one body and bodily drives reflecting the prelingual stage and the maternal, Deleuze, that philosopher of masochism and the post-humanities posits, in a more literary rather than a sociological marmer, a sexual transgression-inspired analogy on the difference between the masochist and the sadist: "We might say that the masochist is hermaphrodite and the sadist is androgynous . . . . "(Deleuze 1971, 60) We may extrapolate from Deleuze that hermaphroditic masochism, in the sense of the pre-Ovidian myth appropriated by Ovid in his body­ centered disposition,2 poses a direct material challenge on the Law of the Father. This is because we can argue that the hemmphrodite condition, whether in body or legend, amounts to a maternal body-centered plurality that enunciates a biological, psychological and mythological parapraxis signaling the maternal authority and sexual influence. 3 Further, the hermaphrodite condition enunciates the sexual ambiguity/plurality self-

34

Chapter 3

generated psychologically in libidinal investments during the pre-Symbolic stage. The latter of Deleuze's more sadist-leaning dispositions mentioned above, androgyny, signifies only a certain ambiguousness, more of an artificial appearance in and of itself and so less of a challenge against the Law because of its less overt bodily transgression. Androgyny's polysemic display amounts to a semblance ofperversion but, in effect, plays lip service to challenging the Father's authority that seeks to overshadow the (m)Other, the primal authority. These two psycho-sexual theoretical dispositions used by Deleuze as analogies related to the two, androgyny as a more ego-centric sadism and hermaphroditism as the other more (m)Other-oriented ur­ fantasy of masochism, might be taken further in their literary license, to my O\Vll poetic foray in analyzing the difference between masochism and sadism based on Deleuze's creative analysis. In a less Deleuzian and sexually fluid analogy, the difference between masochism and sadism might hold up as an analogy using as examples a hypothetical Gandhi and a hypothetical Marx. In this analogous scenario Gandhi's non-violent stance would assume the position of the hermaphrodite of political change signaling the invalidation of the Father and the primacy of the preOedipal authority of nonviolence and love, the idealized (m)Other. 'Whereas Marx's structural avowal of violence in revolutionary pursuits arguably would take on the stance of appearing to run against the grain of the Law but nevertheless remains safely within its sphere of phallogocentrically accepted modes of political re-structuring within the institutionalized and paternal Symbolic order. We see these distinct dispositions, a polymorphic masochism and an oppositional sadism in the human condition as Deleuze' s "irreducible dissymmetry" that reaches across the pre-Symbolic and Symbolic divide to describe a differentiated set of perversions but not a singular sadomasochistic conjunction. As he expands on his statement above, positing: ( . . ) . .sadism stands for the active negation of the mother and the inflation of the father (who is placed above the law); masochism proceeds by a twofold disavowal, a positive, idealizing disavowal of the mother (who is identified with the law) and an invalidating disavowal of the father (who is expelled from the symbolic order). (Deleuze 1971, 60) .

In other words, Deleuze's hermaphroditic masochism is an ur-fantasy of the ideal prelingual (m)Other that works perversely and not so perversely to reverse the disavowal of the maternal phallus (a 'twofold disavowal') thereby invalidating the Symbolic authority of the Father and subverting the Symbolic Order. Deleuze links masochism directly to the pre lingual (m)Other enfolding the pre-Oedipal non-sexuated and yet libidinal stage of

HermAphrodite

35

human development. This stage imprints on the pre-lingual entity the pleasure/pain range of preverbal references and libidinal investments that communicate naturally shifting cycles of maternal absences and presences. These libidinal investments are at times provided for and other times withheld in cycles and find themselves expressed in Freud's discovery of the pre-lingual, absence/presence imitation-game,jortlda4. The prelingual stage of human development amounts to a supercharged plenitude of extra­ logical hennaphroditic and psychosomatic intensities and lack that remain with us as reminders of the primal maternal authority, despite and because ofthe restrictive tendencies ofthe Symbolic order and the Law ofthe Father. Deleuze's position distances masochism from the father and so disavows, if only in theory, the misrecognized phallocentric authority that ultimately subsumes and appropriates from the (m)Other the impetus for the structural organization of the Symbolic order. Jane Campion's films are in sync with Deleuze's hennaphroditic masochism as we have seen in The Piano, specifically in the dissolution of the faux Oedipal triad in the film, which features the disavowed and dislodged superego in the estranged husband Stewart, the father image; while also featuring the hennaphroditic masochist,Baines, who becomes enthralled in a "masochistic contract" with Ada in her capacity as the combination female masochist and oral (m)Other image. Ada winds up like a masochistic twin to Baines (and vice-versa) by the end of the fihn as they are depicted together all alone within a quirky fantasy relationship seemingly in oblique disavowal of the Law of the Father. 5

Maternal Masochism: Disposition and Aesthetic Before we continue to our analysis of the three Campion films mentioned above and their relation to masochism, a more in-depth discussion of masochism is in order. In situating masochism as germinating in the prelingual stage of human development, a specific pleasure/trauma cathexis surfaces in the psyche that will often coalesce and perpetuate this originary disposition. Specifically, the loss of the (m)Other theme as an umbrella for most infantile losses which include the loss of the mother's body, her nipple, and other castration anxieties6 including the loss of feces and the loss of the penis. All of these losses are associated with the pain and pleasure extremes and their separate and conjoined recurrences. Primal narcissism and (m)Other loss transgress the filter of the Symbolic, through the phallocentric-laced Oedipal dynamic as well as through the intuitional maternal semiotic,and these primal intensities generate a life-long series of telltale fissures in culture many of which leak the masochistic syndrome.

36

Chapter 3

We see this as recurring themes in Campion's work and particularly in the three films we explore below. Further, in order to investigate the influence of masochism on the creative psyche as well as the spectator, we will talk about masochism as a film aesthetic. Masochism in general is a catch all signifier that (re)presents cultural ambivalence and attraction to excesses and transgressions. 7 Masochism also manifests itself in disparate literary and clinical areas of interpretation and application. Extensive studies of these can be readily found in other works on this subject. 8 However, because of the polysemic quality of the telTIl 'masochism,' we will confine ourselves in this chapter to the prelingual influences on masochistic themes and the masochistic aesthetic. The following is a breakdO\vn of several elements in these two areas to guide us before segueing into specific examples in the three exemplar films chosen for this chapter. These elements center on two directions for masochism research: the loss of the Oral (m)Other and the preponderance of the masochistic aesthetic. Then we will explore the three films listed above specifically in terms ofthe maternal 'give and take away' cycle as expressed in the following masochistic enunciations: variations on the fortlda game, the abject as underpinning the maternal dyad, and the masochistic contract. Finally, we will discuss the traces of Jane Campion the film director as the film's ad hoc primal maternal authority.

The Gaping Gory Oral (m)Other9 of Milk and Loss In the specular domain our first struggles to apprehend order in our envirOlll1lent (re)present themselves on our mother's body acting like a precursor to a movie screen10 before our eyes. Our mother's body that we first grasp with indifferentiation in a plenitude that precludes identity and sexuation. However, there is trauma as well as bliss involved: the parts of our prelingual dyadic semblance of 'self include all the abjection, gaping gory holes, bulbous breasts and erotic zones responding reciprocally to each other in enjoyment and pain and loss and recovery and more loss. The (m)Other, even when partially differentiated in late infancy, is not only the first authority, but also the first lover-more a meta-lover, and the first "I." The effect of this meta-relationship is unforgettable even when disavowed by entry into the Law of the Father that occurs when speech develops. Plus, despite the Symbolic syndrome that pervades culture and disavows (m)Other, her effects circle around repeatedly in a frisson of love and grimace, plenitude and reserve, as well as jouissance and misrecognition. These seemingly oppositional cycles of maternal-based libidinal investments are recalled and repeated ad infinitum in the psychell to the

HermAphrodite

37

extent that humans see the love/rejection cycles as a kind of sameness with a certain fluidity of engagement and disavowal. As masochists one and all, we accede to the pleasure that is pain taking place during our nascent libidinal existence well before ego development and sexuation. That is, we libidinally submit to the pleasure that is pain and vice-versa within the sexual multiplicity that accompanies primary narcissism before the phallic stage. 12 This dyad-related bliss prior to the Father and the Law never leaves our body-memories nor our structured and post-structured spectrums of brain activity. The Oedipal castration period and the phantasmagorical pivot point it portends are only coalescing elements of socialization and structure that kickstart language after the Father symbol appears on the scene. But before the Father, primary castration and plentitude wrapped in the gory maternal package of lack, authority and the dream screen re-achieve over time a recurring exoneration of the primal and extra-logical exuberance of (m)Other in spite ofthe prevalence ofthe Law ofthe Father. An exuberance both plentiful and prohibitive and rooted in a syndrome of masochism. In other words, despite the loss of (m)Other at the entry into the phallogocentric Symbolic order, a fantasized cycle of maternal plenitude and pain encompasses us and persists. All in a taste of bliss that we seek more and more in cycles of maternal masochism (often referred to judgmentally as perversion) and social masochism (the same as maternal masochism only ambiguous in the direct disavowal of the Father) or the combination of both. The manifestation and influence ofmasochism(s) will be further elucidated in our application ofthese to Campion's movies below.

The Masochistic Aesthetic: Literary, Inspirational and Disarticulating In telTIlS of the masochistic aesthetic, Deleuze realized, as did Freud in his heart of hearts 13, that masochism resonates universally to some extent and lends itself uncannily to creative and literary outlets. 14 Leopold von Sacher-Masoch intuited, expressed and then championed this very idea, if in a limited geme and political niche. In contrast one might argue that masochism in texts, including the movies, has been far more extensive and ethically oriented15 than von Sacher-Masoch's risque oeuvre. After all, what could be more literary (even Biblical) and inspiring, than Reik's reduction of the masochistic phenomena to three words representing the masochist's ultimate aim: "Victory through defeat." (Reik, 429) Then, Reik continues rather liturgically: "( . . . ) By attaining satisfaction not only despite suffering but through suffering he [the masochist] ingeniously changes the Via Dolorosa into a triumphal road. In the same way the road to Golgotha

38

Chapter 3

became the road to eternal salvation." (Reik 429-30) Reik's 'victory in defeat' slant on masochism, a disarticulation in some ways of the logic of the Symbolic order, easily becomes fOlmalized as a theme in narratives. We see this in Campion's work with her focus on the reversal of the disavowed aspect of tbe pre-lingual autbority of tbe (m)Other, which she achieves by means of the (re)presentation of the oral and anal stages in her imagery while lacing it with transgressive sensuality, abjection and eroticism thereby linking primal prohibitions to pleasure. Reik's literary and biblical allusion to tbe "the road to Golgotba" becoming "the road to eternal salvation" winds its way through the pleasure/pain principle that is masochism, a compulsive attempt at a return to the primal dyad. This has become in Campion's hands all tbe more aesthetically influential to the telos of tbe masochistic aesthetic in the arts. And this aesthetic outcome of masochism in the arts ultimately equates to an expansion in the awareness of the scope of the human condition16 . And consequently, the masochistic aesthetic adds to the growth of the public's acceptance of the influence on culture of the maternal semiotic tbat is embedded in a symbiotic relationship with tbe Symbolic. Jane Campion's affinity for featuring the masochistic aesthetic in her creative expression has appealed to an extensive world-wide audience. Her natural inclination for tapping the pre-lingual experience, just as it is for the other filmmakers in this tome, seems to gravitate to the implementation of an expressive palette of excess, disarticulation and transgression that shapes the masochistic aesthetic. The following paragraphs investigate specific examples of masochism and its aesthetics in three Campion's films: The Portrait of a Lady (1996), Holy Smoke (1999) and In the Cut (2003).

Fortlda17:

The Game of the Telltale Heart

Early on in Campion's film, The Portrait of a Lady, tbe protagonist Isabel Archer rejects for a second time her American beau Caspar Goodwood who has followed her to Europe unannounced. She greets him with mixed body language that signals her sublimated inner commitment to the (m)Otber: on the one hand she responds to him with downward glances and the timid batting of her eyes as well as with the submissiveness constructed in a nOlmative marmer to express female sexuality in response to his constructed male counter-displays; while on the other hand, she holds herselfback from him frostily and then verbally rejects him in order to stay true to her original pain-as-pleasure cathexis. Her dictate forecloses on what she refers to as "mere sheep in the flock" conventions of marrying-she refers obviously to tbe institution of marriage that overtly (re)presents the Law and disavows the maternal authority. There's a plurality of nuance in

HermAphrodite

39

her perfonnance that results in his charisma failing him. He winds up accepting her contract of suspense and anticipation. He retreats into his 0\Vll pain-as-pleasure fantasy. Goodwood departs from her presence with a final touch of her cheek and gentle stroke of her chin depicted in closeup. Isabel's 'come hither/go thither' interaction with Goodwood, and with all her suitors, is typical in the film as she projects vaguely the image of an independent woman going against the grain of nonnative society. In this way, she builds a force field to protect the integrity of her commitment to masochism. On two levels she enacts a seemingly political rebellion: on one level, she postures quietly and vaguely as a voice of feminism: she portrays herself in the role of an isolated bastion of the independent woman; while on the other more subversive level, she languishes psychologically in the realm of primal FEMININITY that is driven by maternal masochism within a continuum of unabated pre-lingual dynamics. Her theatrics are part and parcel to masochism and the masochistic contract as well as to the masochistic aesthetic. 18 Her exaggerations and posturing seems to affect the men around her such that they also find themselves, if subliminally, seeking a similar pre-Oedipal regression into the fort/do game, which is the repetitive 'give and take away' fantasy game replicating the sporadic prelingual intercourse with the primal (m)Other. The relationship with the prelingual (m)Other is an on-again-off-again experience from the infant's perspective as the (m)Other seems to willfully withhold and then provide originary plenitude intermittently. Eventually the infant acquiesces to this pleasure/pain contract. The replication and repetition of this binary game offers a wide range of intense emotions all harkening back to the originary nonidentity, desire, and object relations. Recycling desire is all that's left of the primal (m)Other ideal. Studlar describes masochism's recursive complex thus: "Masochism's dynamic of pleasure does not depend on resolution or the recreation of the original plenitude; pleasure is found in the obsessive repetition of desire." (Studlar 1988, 60) This equates to primal desire adhered to and restrained in a revolving door of self-contained lack, all for the sake of the fantasized reunion with the (m)Other. This holds true not only for Isabel Archer but also for her suitors and particularly for Goodwood. After Goodwood leaves with the implied ' contract' between them intact­ and not for the first time-she kicks the door shut. But then she touches her own face where his hand had gently caressed her and the background music swells as she sighs to herself, her hand lifting and grazing her lips auto­ erotically in the rich penlUllbra. The floating, driving violins come to the forefront as she walks away from the camera still caressing her face and she sighs more passionately turning toward the camera at the side of her canopy bed. As she rubs her face against the tassels hanging from the upper frame

40

Chapter 3

of the canopy, the sensuality swells, and she opens her eyes to acknowledge someone off screen. She then sits on the bed allowing Goodwood, now entering the frame unexpectedly, to stretch her out on the bed and caress her face as the camera pans with her O\Vll hand that leads one of Goodwood's hands seductively toward her bosom. Finally, her hand continues on to her dress area above her most private region revealing, also unexpectedly, to the left side of the frame another pair of hands fondling her legs and pulling her dress slowly up her leg as a man comes into frame kissing and mauling his way up her legs and exposing her 19th Century knickers: the man is finally revealed to be Lord Warburton, another of her suitors also in contract with her. The camera widens and we see another man, her benefactor-to-be, Touchett, who, curiously, is the only one not touching her as she writhes in the throes of jouissance. A jouissance not of post-Oedipal nOlmative sex, but one of excess and primary narcissism as the film presently discloses. When Isabel notices Touchett watching her, however, she suddenly becomes aware of her surroundings and sits up. His were the only eyes open and watching. He sits up also and backs away from the bed stiltedly as do the others. Then he disappears into thin air in a self-conscious manipulation of cinema technology. The others start to fight like rivals and then disappear, as well, in the same use of special effects. The viewers by now have fully recognized that this has been a fantasy for her, a fantasy of caresses and ultimately, fidelity to the oral (m)Other in a passionate, if interrupted, imaginary, and masturbatory release of phantasmagoric primal sexuality. However, Touchett's controlling, voyeuristic gaze interfered with her solitary trance even though he was there only in fantasy. He gashes her solitary masochistic bliss because he is the only one who represents the superego, if a reluctant one, as her benefactor-to-be. He is more threatening to her because he has not committed to the masochistic contract with her and she is not independent of him and his grand experiment of paying to watch that which he describes as 'what is about to play out for her.' Now, through Touchett, she will have ties that bind her to the Law and to culture that she has been trying to disarticulate, to deconstruct so that she may achieve the goal of total surrender to the oral (m)Other. The (m)Other's contract that is manifest in Isabel's masochistic and recursive compulsion to regress to the all-consuming imaginary maternal dyad. So, in sum, Touchett's phantasmagoric presence in her fantasy fractures it and awakens her to her Symbolic identity that she was pleasantly in the process of obliterating, if only temporarily in a day dream. This sensuous scene is director Campion's mini-tribute to the plenitude of the newborn, when the oral (m)Other is the breast and the authority, the presence and the absence in a conflation of libidinal investments. Not only

HermAphrodite

41

does Campion execute this scene aesthetically in a faux realist vein, but she guides our subliminal interaction with the scene by means of rich mise-en­ scene and sound. The lighting becomes wanner and lush as the scene progresses only to end with a closeup on Isabel after her fantasy suitors disappear, and then the lighting darkens once more to the former stark penumbra at the scene's start during her telltale preamble with Caspar Goodwood. Isabel's movements and positioning on the bed during the choreography of the scene refer not only to seduction, orgy and masturbation, but also reference birth, as if the men were newborn triplets, gushing in plenitude. That is, until the Oedipal scenario reared its head prompted by Touchet!, sardonically and poignantly, star-crossed and voyeuristically, stares and acknowledges her fantasy. And yet, Touchet! in contrast to the others, also gazes at her with a staid expression, as a curator of the Symbolic, as if scientifically observing a specimen of the new 20th Century woman. I am touched by this entire scene and its oblique similarity to another mini-tribute to the same maternal plenitude and abandonment that Campion inserted into The Piano: it is the scene described previously in the first chapter, a scene in which Ada tries to return Stewart to the primal maternal presence/absence stage by means of afortlda game that the oral (m)Other teaches all newborns. In this scene, Ada gives him an intimate caress and then takes away her favors suddenly when he starts to respond. Then she continues to give and take away her caresses while disallowing him to move or to enjoy or to speak. Over and over again she mercilessly reenacts the fortlda game with Stewart in the orange light of his bedroom that night in his cabin after he had boarded up the windows and doors. One might say Ada is behaving in a sadistic manner but for the fact that Campion's mise­ en-scene of plenitude was so womblike in walTI1 light, and their velTI1illion light-caressed skin and intimacy was so primal and welcoming. Thusly, in these two scenes and in others, the aesthetics of masochism derived from the lifelong fantasy and paraphilia!9 involving the primal (m)Other and the dyadic residue winds its way through Campion's oeuvre. This very same paraphiliac aesthetic that Campion along with the other filmmakers in this tome deploy to understand themselves and their art more deeply. Along with their personal artistic goals, these filmmakers intuitionally contribute to expanding sensitivities and range in the understanding of the human condition well beyond culture's cognitive dissonance that has resulted in the disavowal of the maternal authority and its accompanying primal FEMININITY. We will continue our fortlda, pleasure/pain discussion of Campion's work, by investigating in that regard her two movies Holy Smoke and In the

42

Chapter 3

Cut. Campion, rather than remaining entranced with period pieces per se, with their rich nostalgia and high art mise-en-scene, changes direction in these two of her contemporary pieces in which the one, Holy Smoke, explores a more country setting in the Australian outback and the other, In the Cut, an urban landscape in New York City. Still, for Campion, the aesthetics of masochism remain in the realm of high art even as the elaborate sets and the nostalgia of Portrait and The Piano take a back seat to other aspects of mise-en-scene: specifically, the quality of acting in the films, plus the location shooting in Holy Smoke, and the camera work in In the Cut, among other aspects of mise-en-scene. In Holy Smoke we will discuss the abject as the trigger for the masochistic contract and the fortlda game. Whereas in analyzing In the Cut, we will discuss thefortlda, presence and absence interaction between the dramatic intervention of the director as (m)Other and overt perpetrator of the masochistic aesthetic.

The Abject and the Masochistic Contract Perhaps the most significant oralianal stage event in mainstream movie history occurs in Holy Smoke, a cautionary tale of superego disavowal and the recovery of the maternal authority. The scene that contains this most significant performance of pre-lingual erotica, abjection and power-plays takes place out in the Australian desert where the protagonist, Ruth Barron, a swami cult convert, finds herself sequestered in an isolated hut after a family intervention. In this exemplar scene, she is in the midst of a cult de­ programming process in which she has been left psychologically devastated because of various isolative and reprogramming strategies. In the dead of night, she burns her cross-cultural clothes. The scene opens for us with "Cult Exiter" P. I Waters awakening in the middle of the night to a fire outside his window and the image of Ruth's burning sari hanging from a tree in the air. He runs outside to find Ruth in an extreme emotional state, naked and whimpering. She exclaims to him that she's splintered in pieces and that all the love is gone. She wants him to kiss her as she fights to recover from her fragile and fractured state. As a professional 'exiter,' Waters discourages that impropriety and turns to walk away back to the hut. Suddenly, a release of liquid is heard, and the film cuts to a handheld camera in slight slow motion as it tilts down Ruth's naked body then cuts away back to Waters who turns and looks at Ruth. From a low camera height, a new shot reveals her legs walking toward the camera as urine cascades dO\vn them. Campion's film then makes a jump cut to a shot that is full front on Ruth, her swollen-appearing breasts bare and prominent in the medium shot that reveals her looking just off camera back at P.I. Waters as if hailing him with

HermAphrodite

43

her transgressive display. She then approaches him with an expression that belies her previous devastation and seems confident in her power over the 'cult exiter. ' She kisses him, and he returns the kiss this time. After several kisses P. I. Waters pronounces these cautious and telltale words: "I think we'd better phone your mother." Still kissing him, she answers equally telltale and cryptically, "Okay, let's fmd mom." Neither of them contacts 'mom,' although the viewer gets the uncarmy sense that 'mom' is the primal (m)Other and their search for her is just beginning. The masochistic contract is thusly sealed between them: the invalidation of the Father occurs and the total innnersion into the originary pleasure/pain, fortlda masochistic relationship takes up most of the rest of the film. Then, Campion suddenly cuts away from this urination love scene to start a new one with a shot of Ruth and Waters in coitus with P.I on top of Ruth in the shadows of a bedroom. She connnands him: "Don't come, don't come! " Of course, he does, and the fihn once again cuts away suddenly in the middle of this curious contra-tonal and brief attempt at humor. Campion seems to enjoy lacing the film with contra-tonal goofy humor throughout the film. That goofiness includes sight gags, but also a curious pun with the characternames: Ruth Barron and P.I. Waters. Their last names are spoofs. Ruth's last name 'Barron' suggests the word 'baron,' that masculine designation for a low-level nobleman of the past. And then there's P.I. 's curious last name 'Waters:' in the context of the above scene between Ruth who passes water by urinating naked before her tOlmentor and then followed by P.I. reacting so amorously, the name affords us an oblique pun and sarcasm given his sudden loss ofthe phallus and her rise in power over him. These overt stabs at contrapuntal gags and pratfalls unbalance the fihn nearly toppling it. No doubt this is a strategy that corresponds to thefortlda game in that the director's curious 'on-again-off­ again' strategy of providing and then withholding the goofy, contra-tonal and disruptive strategies throughout the fihn plays with the attention of the audience in an almost self-destructive way. The revelatory urination scene between the two protagonists carries the dynamics of the main relationship between the two into the sphere of the pre-lingual oral and anal stage when sexuality, in contrast to sexuation, as well as the pleasure/pain of (m)Other, govern in sensuality, suspense and eroticism. P.I. Waters eventually sinks so low in this maternal masochistic relationship that he allows himself to be dressed up as a woman and humiliated to the extent that he suffers a mental breakdown in the end. This mental collapse becomes the culmination ofhis submission to and his desire for the idealized Oral (m)Other. He achieves the state of disassociation and loss of self that masochism strives for: "victory in defeat."

44

Chapter 3

The rest of the film follows the disintegration ofP.I. Waters at the hands ofRuth, the "punishing (m)Other'°," in a reversal ofthe first half of the film. Once again in Campion's work, in a beveled mirror-image ofthe ending of The Piano, the masochistic contract remains upheld in the end between the two protagonists. As a side note, it is intertextually relevant that in both films Harvey Keitel plays the male masochist's role. In Holy Smoke 's case, at the end of the film P.I. Waters conveys his love for the absent Ruth who he is able now to communicate with after recovering his mental health. He continues to email her as he settles into a kind of social masochistic relationship, whimsically pining for Ruth the goddess while keeping a telltale picture of a Hindu goddess next to him. And yet, he remains with his wife and the family they have started. A certain social stability reigns at the end of the movie. In contrast, in The Piano, the two protagonists don't wind up living apart and their relationship seems to enter a maternal masochistic sphere that turns phantasmagoric as Ada is depicted attempting to learn speech under a black kerchief covering her face while Baines seems to treat her with deference kissing her through this bleak erotically and deathly transposed veil. In both films, however, the Father remains invalidated, although more ambiguously in Holy Smoke, and so the Symbolic remains subverted. Meanwhile the (m)Other, two-fold disavowed-that is, her disavowal by the Symbolic is overturned and so reversely disavowed-sustains her idealized primal authority.

Victory in Defeat: The Director's Heavy Hand The Maternal Authority The beginning of the film In the Cut that is, after its opening credits that are full of focus play and askew camera angles that feature an urban landscape, we are introduced to the resplendent courtyard garden outside Frarmie's apartment and Frarmie's doppelganger, her step-sister Pauline, is drinking from a cup in the early morning. Then Campion cuts to a golden lit bedroom and the radiant Frannie in bed. Campion then cuts away to silent-film style footage of Frannie's fantasy of her father skating on ice on a pond. His skates leave a bloody streak in the ice pointing to the title credit ofthe film: 'In the Cut' that dissolves onto the screen in beige letters on cue. All of this presents itself in a poetic montage accompanied by what will become a running musical theme, the popular 1950's song 'Que Sera.' After this final frame containing the title of the film: 'In the Cut, ' which is a telltale choice of words as we will find out over the course of the film, the two step-sisters-same father but different mothers-leave the apartment

HermAphrodite

45

through the front door to start the main body of the narrative. They are talking about Frannie's interest in slang words. Pauline specifically asks about the word 'broccoli' for pubic hair, and 'Virginia,' a slang word for 'vagina. ' The latter word appears innocuous enough in their offhand discussion as it accompanies their closing and locking the front door of Frarmie's apartment. However, the threshold and door (re)presents the location of the originary authority, the vagina of the (m)Other-cued by their discussion of slang fonns of pubic hair and vagina. And so, this closing and locking of the door marks the interior of Frannie's apartment as the maternal space, the chora, as much as Frannie's space. This scene also designates that the film itself is a (re)presentation of the extra-logical and libidinal machinations of the primal maternal authority. It's as if the beginning of the fihn presents the audience with a subliminal masochistic contract direct from the maternal authority, which the audience accepts implicitly by continuing as a spectator. Plus, the film as text, as picture, as dream screen,21 elucidates Real topological signifiances and significances22 related to the (m)Other throughout and that continues until the very last shot of the film. The ending of the movie, a 'bookend' effect, supports this conclusion by mirroring the opening scene of the fihn-only in reverse: in the end, it is the protagonist, Frannie, returning and reentering the apartment rather than exiting-and marks the end of the director's telltale maternal authority over the film. These traces of the maternal semiotic in the film trigger what Freud referred to cryptically and presciently as 'screen memories' 23 and they also trigger the Lacanian Moebius Strip cum Borromean Knot24 of specular representation which we will investigate more in depth below. Further, the matching 'bookends' at the beginning and the end of the movie and their oblique reference to the womb signal that the entire movie amounts to a return to the primal authority of the maternal chora with its oscillating pleasure/pain that originates and resonates the masochistic dynamic. But, like The Piano, she is not alone. At the very end of the film, the womb-apartment shelters a captive: the masochistic male (Malloy) chained to the plumbing pipes and humiliated lying there in a pool of fluids on the floor. We have gone full circle with Campion as she presents and withholds and builds cycles of suspense and anticipation like vicious circles deploying the art fonn of our times: the cinema with its inherent potential to reproduce and disseminate the maternal semiotic, and specifically its ability to reverberate the implications and creations of the fortlda game par excellence. By viewing this film in its entirety, by allowing the images to rearrange our synapse responses as reconfigured memories do, we, the viewers, have accepted the masochistic contract from Campion's loving and punishing depictions. We also accept her emphasis on the chora

46

Chapter 3

with its pre-Oedipal ambiguities of body and mind from which the human condition distills itself. We are as complicit with Campion's masochistic contract as we are also with the masochism of Marlene Dietrich in furs and her melancholic director von Steinberg from a past generation whose work is still potent today. Just like with these artists of yesteryear, we are captivated vis-a-vis Campion's primal game of providing and withholding that mirrors and encircles us just like the (m)Other's originary authority once engulfed us and still does.

Handcnffs and Carnality Campion's fortida, pleasure/pain schema in In the Cut flows from her intuition to the surface of the big screen in a marmer that excites in the viewer the psychic residue of primal carnality and carnage gelTIlinating from prelingual libidinal investments. I will start this part of the analysis with the handcuff scene between the protagonists, Frarmie and Detective Malloy. It is rife with the traces of prelingual carnality provided by Campion in an erotic and masochistic manipulation of the mise-en-scene. This is the scene after Pauline's murder in which Malloy submits to Frannie's desire to play out their masochistic contract by becoming the very image ofthe dominatrix and 'Punishing (m)Other.' She straddles Malloy as he sits passively in a chair and handcuffs him to a water pipe near a radiator. As she unzips his pants between her legs, she rejects his attempts at touching her by batting his free arm away and firmly commanding "No! " In contrast to a previous, more graphically sadistic scene of fellatio, Campion, in this scene, withholds nudity from the audience as the two lovers still dressed appear to reach orgasm with the thrusts of their loins. As they appear to be conjoined while fully clothed, they become the very picture of the hennaphroditic masochism: conjoined and in the throes of a kind of surrogate performance of the primal dyad. However, in withholding the nudity, Campion implies a certain distance from sexual consummation thereby also implying a less than pleasurable outcome: a pleasure disarticulated with denial, restraints, and a maternal plenitude followed by a subliminal rejection-especially vis-a-vis the spectator. This is a good example of the depiction of masochism coinciding with a certain masochistic aesthetic that impacts the viewer. In addition, the execution of the scene is consistent with much of the pain/pleasure imagery in the film. What Campion has achieved here in this scene is a display of masochism that sets the stage for the dire carnality and carnage at the climax of the mOVie.

HermAphrodite

47

The Tattoo Campion, as (m)Otherly film director, then tums her back on Frannie. She withholds the warm glow of plenitude from the narrative. Frannie, after dismounting from apparent sex with Malloy, suddenly finds in Malloy's suit jacket what she believes to be conclusive incriminating evidence that Malloy is guilty as the elusive serial killer of the film. Having planted this evidence in a previously unbeknO\vnst to us, Campion convinces the viewer of the veracity of Frannie's romantically painful, but possibly fortuitous discovery. So, we start to root for Frarmie as she runs off into the street with Malloy's jacket leaving him handcuffed to the pipe. Out in front of her apartment building on the street Malloy's partner, Detective Rodriguez, unexpectedly sweeps in as if to rescue Frannie. And because she is obviously traumatized by her discovery, and after trying to calm her, Rodriquez drives off with her taking her across the George Washington bridge to an oblique likeness of Bluebeard's phallic castle, an isolated and gated lighthouse. He locks them both within the steel gate. This is where masochistic carnality Campion has presented us is about to be exchanged for its sadistic fun-house mirror reflection: abject, Bluebeardian carnage. Campion creates a reversal in narrative direction suddenly by allowing Frannie to catch a glimpse of Rodriguez's telltale tattoo on the inside of his wrist that matches Malloy's. This reveal of the tattoo marks Rodriguez as the true serial killer occurring at a moment of realization that the audience and Frarmie share, a moment of clarity, dread and fatalism that is strangely calming in its absolute horror and inevitability. However, the proverbial magician's "tell" or "reveal" that signals outright the beginning of the end for this oblique libidinal vision that Campion has created for us is the serial killer Rodriguez's uncarmy monologue that comes out of the blue at the lighthouse once the gate is locked. He talks ofthandedly about a 'girl' he met that he has been "thinking about my whole life" and, "you know, dreaming about her." But then he adds that he doesn't know if she loves him. Then, he asks Franine to marry him while presenting her with a blood-soaked engagement ring---one of the gruesome "signatures" that identifies the real serial killer of women in this movie. At the introduction of the engagement ring, his uncarmy comments about a girl he has been thinking and dreaming about his whole life become not just rambling banter: the viewer suddenly realizes that Rodriguez must be talking about his mother. A mother figure that he loves and hates in an inner struggle of (pre-)Oedipal proportions and distortions that remains for him an abject cathexis. This pathological whirlpool of maternal-based libidinal investments sends him into a spiraling stream of enunciations

48

Chapter 3

consisting of engagement rings and female bodily 'disarticulations'-a tenn Malloy uses to describe what happened to Frarmie's sister Pauline. Campion unnervingly serves us these clues but withholds the explanation, the full articulation of the backstory. Then, like a poet savant of the cinema, she provides us a play of sinister and revealing images containing the traces of the maternal semiotic that enhances and, in the end, subverts the serial killer subgenre of thrillers. She further creates (dis)plays of absence and presence that are reflected in the abject submissiveness of Frannie trapped at the lighthouse and countered by the aggressiveness of Rodriguez as he circles in for the kill. Frannie remains paralyzed in the headlights of her awareness of his lethal pathology and her inability to escape. Campion has tom Frannie away from the bliss of carnality with Malloy only to bring her to the brink of carnage in a pleasure/pain cycle that transfers from the film to the viewers filling us with anticipation, suspense and fear. Campion fills us with titillation and disgust just as the (m)Other does in the pre-lingual fantasies of the proto-subject, the baby, when she cyclically provides plenitude only to eventually withhold her presence in a vicious cycle of proto-masochism and abjection.

Carnage As Rodriguez moves in for the final kill, all seems lost. But Frannie does unexpectedly manage get off a shot with the gun planted in Malloy's jacket that she is wearing, which was foreshadowed several scenes beforehand when Malloy broke his ankle holster and the camera showed him nonchalantly switch his gun to his sports jacket pocket. In surprise, Rodriguez falls back on his rear end but does not seem to be wounded and he quickly subdues Frannie choking her into unconsciousness, perhaps death. Then he leans in and kisses her still warm lips. Campion fades the scene to black frustrating us with an apparent lack of closure that seems to signal but not confirm Fratmie's death and disarticulation at the hands of Rodriguez. The black screen marks the absolute suspension of the dream screen (m)Other, as much as it suggests, albeit inconclusively, the death of our protagonist and the end of the filin. But suddenly after several seconds, the projection of the film starts up again. Campion has not left us hanging after all. She delays the ending credits we expect because she intends to provide us an ending that, in its poetic plurality, is created to placate the viewer by giving lip service to happy endings, as well as a nod to primary masochism, while, in addition, providing the telltale doubling of symmetrical beginnings and endings occurring in certain movies. In other words, Campion provides us a fantasy

HermAphrodite

49

conclusion that is maternally masochistic in orientation, presenting plenitude and then withholding it. A sudden cut from the utter vacuum of the black screen reveals Frannie's young father kissing her mother (while holding her neck in an allusion to Rodriguez's grip on Frannie's neck) and they get up hand in hand from their seated positions. And then, in a silent­ movie type, peach-sepia tone footage, they joyously skate in a circle before the camera totally enraptured with themselves. By presenting us with this nostalgic dream screen, or, specifically, Frarmie's screen-memory consisting of her originary dream-screen fantasy, Campion, like the (m)Other, has returned us from the abyss of absence, the sudden black screen, to provide the now disoriented viewer with a continuation of the phantasmagoric narrative in this recurring dream scene. All of this is suggested in what at first appears to be Frannie's last fantasy dream of her young parents before expiring at the hands of Rodriguez. Unexpectedly, though, there's another gunshot and the camera cuts from Frannie's young and happy parents to several suspenseful seconds of a black background with snowflakes streaming through the frame as if a continuation of the snow falling in the previous short interlude with the parents skating. The abyss, the Real, the nothing, appears to joke with the universal misrecognition inherent to the human condition, a joke in the fOlTIl of a capricious interaction: there is no reason for this interlude of snowfall on the black screen that mirrors obliquely the parents' snowy scene. This is a parapraxis of the Real. Except perhaps the interlude functions to generate a vague cryptic sense of timing and suspense. Finally, though, Campion relinquishes the grip ofthe Real nothingness by cutting to a birds-eye-view, an omniscient and godlike POV recorded overhead as if from the top of the lighthouse looking directly down on Rodriguez lying on top of Frannie both on the cement walkway roundabout inside the surrounding protective prison-bar fence. Neither of them moves. He has a bloody stain on the back of his shirt as if from a bullet hole and she is covered with his blood. And her blood, too?

The Faux Happy Ending Then Frannie starts to move and pull herself out from underneath Rodriguez, the camera still presenting a long take of the foreboding and omniscient overhead point of view shot in the night. However, an edit again brings us disoriented to another shot: one of a vehicle slightly out of focus driving past the camera in overcast daylight on an unknown urban highway. Then, quickly Campion cuts to Frarmie in a trance-like demeanor on the highway trying vaguely to flag down cars as one passes her out of focus in

50

Chapter 3

the background. Haunting music starts to swell and continues until the end of the film. A fragmentary montage ensues showing isolated shots of Frannie: blood streaming down her legs toward her ankles as if the blood were menses; and then continuing with a shot of isolated cars driving dO\vn the highway without Frannie even in the frame. Finally, a wide shot shows Frannie walking away from the camera on an empty multilane highway before cutting to a faux POV shot from Frannie's apartment window as she walks through her apartment building's garden in soft light with a soft blue cast. This is the same garden from the first scene in the movie only this time without Pauline. Frannie comes into focus still carrying Malloy'sjacket and looks up at the window while continuing her walk. We, the viewers, and Frannie have come full circle after the deaths of the two doppelgangers of the film, Pauline (Frannie's ad hoc 'twin') and the implied death of Rodriguez (Malloy's double) at the lighthouse. We find ourselves back again in the garden and heading for Frannie's womb-apartment. The montage continues until the final shot of the movie, featuring focus-play, similar in style to much ofthe film, however, in a much more concerted and overt manner. This play with distortion seems to signal an altered state and the shock that Frannie may be experiencing, or, it might signal that the end of the movie might be in excess of the Symbolic thereby suggesting in turn that there will be even more surreptitious, more morbid and more sardonic enunciations from the filin-director (m)Other. The absence of any other people and the disjunctive editing during this long montage, as well as the implausible ease at which Frannie arrives at her apartment, barefoot and bloody, reinforces our sense of suspicion regarding our heroine's escape and return. Nevertheless, hope springs eternal and our director, our (m)Other, soothes the incongruences in a gush of plenitude with the final shots of the film: Frannie enters the lobby of her apartment and walks by the camera, her hand turns the out-of-focus doorknob of her apartment door and opens the door revealing Malloy in the background recumbent and face up in a pool of broken plumbing water (and pee?), bare chested and his arm held up by the handcuffs around his wrist still attached to the pipe. Frannie enters into the soft light and the soft shallow focus past the door and into the room. She walks away from the camera still positioned at the doorway. She then steps through the liquid on the floor to lay dO\vn in its wetness beside Malloy. His free aim embraces her. And the door slowly closes on the camera motivating the [mal cut to black and the actual demise of the film. The two protagonists, Frannie and Malloy, now safely behind the closed threshold of the (m)Other space, seem to be safely back in the plenitude inherent to the maternal chara in the womb of Frannie's apartment.

HermAphrodite

51

This ending to the fihn forms a telltale bookend like an echo to the very beginning ofthe fihn. The viewer is left with the question: Has the (m)Other in the fOlTIl of Campion, the film director, provided a primal masochistic fantasy between the bookends of the symmetrical beginning and ending scenes of the film in order to placate our plenitude-seeking compulsion? Is this a happy ending? Still, with the information we are given, we don't rest easy as the credits come up. The traces of FEMININITY and the maternal semiotic like stepping stones strewn throughout the fihn in collusion with the bookends symmetry of beginning and ending to this film indicate that there is something unheimlich beyond Frarmie's door, the opening and closing symbol of the (m)Other's heimlich threshold.

Concluding Comments on Campion's Trilogy of Masochism Campion seems to recreate a semblance of the ending of The Portrait of a Lady at the end ofthis, her later film Both films end featuring a doorway, a threshold. This decision of Campion's fOlTIls a kind of an intertextual rhyme. In the fOlTIler movie, however, Campion stopped the protagonist, Isabel, from entering through the threshold, but not in the later film. Isabel stops at the threshold and turns back toward the Symbolic, while Frainne crosses the threshold to join her masochistic twin in the womb. Moving on to another element in the ending scene of Portrait, Campion also presents a play with slow motion that fOlTIls a separate intertextual exchange, this time not in the film In the Cut, but in the second fihn of this Campion trilogy, Holy Smoke. I am referring to the protagonist, Ruth's slow-motion walk in the urination scene. Both Isabel and Ruth's slow­ motion actions, one toward (Ruth's) and the other (Isabel's) away from the masochistic male character in the fihns, are exaggerated and emphasized, just as their masochistic contracts with the male characters in these movies are exaggerated and emphasized through various film narrative strategies. In the case of Portrait's Isabel Archer, she escapes in slow motion from Goodwood's affections at Touchett's house, while in Holy Smoke, Ruth's slow motion toward Waters seals their masochistic contract that lasts until P.I. Waters's mental breakdown. Let's return to the significant emphasis of the doorway in both In the Cut and Portrait and discuss the phenomenon of the happy ending as it differs in each film. We've already discussed the significance of the doorway bookends at the beginning and ending of Campion's In the Cut. Specifically in terms of the threshold to the chora, the prelingual maternal space. And we've mentioned that these bookends mark the fihn as

52

Chapter 3

purposefully focusing on the theme of the prelingual libidinal effects on adult actions. In telTIlS of the masochistic contract, the end of In the Cut depicting Frannie and Malloy together creates the illusion of Frannie returning to her relatively socially acceptable masochistic relationship with Malloy. This is an ending that works ultimately as a faux happy ending. Something similar, if even more cryptic, happens at the very end of Portrait. After rejecting Goodwood verbally beneath the good wood of a special tree featured as bookends at the beginning ofthe film and now at the end, Isabel breaks dO\vn as Goodwood forces her gently to focus on him. She suddenly embraces him fervently with a passion that breaks their masochistic contract, the one that keeps him confined in the pleasure of suffering and well away from her, but always coming back to her for more rejection. The same contract that keeps her confined in her masochistic spiral of 'victory in defeat' and so, aloof. But, as she returns his embrace, the long-term goal of hers is in danger. Her ultimate goal is the pursuit of the idealized (m)Other, a goal that sustains her lifestyle of pleasure/pain cycles and masochistic contracts-including the painful self-destructive relationship with the infamous Gilbert Osmond. Instead of relinquishing herself to Goodwood's amorous attempt at breaking their masochistic contract at the end of the film, Isabel finally tears herself away from his embrace and from her more normatively inclined self that has finally kissed Goodwood with abandon. Tearing herself away from Goodwood who pled with her to see the rationale and the sensuality in a union between the two­ no matter how unconventionally she might want to proceed. He seems to be trying to convince her of a life without the fortlda type of masochistic contract they have now. He is negotiating a new, more nOlmative, if unconventional, contract. And she runs from him unable to renegotiate with him. She runs toward the camera in slow motion and, upon reaching the threshold of Touchet!'s house, she grabs the doorknob in closeup on her hand, reminiscent of Frannie grabbing the doorknob of the threshold of her womb-apartment in In the Cut. However, Isabel in contrast to Frannie, stops at that point and Campion, the (m)Other director, has Isabel turn and look back from whence she has come. Back, perhaps, towards Goodwood? Perhaps to accept his new contract? We don't know because Campion leaves the ending inconclusive: Isabel's sullen and slightly quizzical expression is all we are left with. Campion creates a freeze frame on Isabel looking back from the doorway at Touchett's house, back past the camera, then she fades the frame to black. Has Campion left us the hope for a happy ending with Goodwood, married to each other and outside their masochistic contract? Or has the (m)Other director only played lip service creating an implication of a

HermAphrodite

53

fantasy ending and, similar to the ending of In the Cut does she have the intention to placate our plenitude-seeking compulsion always already signaling primary masochism? Will Isabel return to her pattern of seeking cyclical pleasure/pain scenarios of idealized maternal masochism? Or will she make a change from that cycle? The viewer is left with both and with neither. In all these Campion films, the masochistic aesthetic, a pre-lingual "hemmphroditic" disposition towards art, functions in creative and ultimately ethical ordonnancements, that are the polyvalent regulatory intensities and traces of the maternal semiotic communicating a more expansive symbiotic relationship between the originary authority of the polyvalent (m)Other and the subsequent regulatory binaries of the Law of the Father. A more expansive symbiotic relationship between the two that ultimately offers plurality and inclusivity all depicted in accessible movie tableaux reaching mainstream audiences.

PART 2 : THE PHALLIC (M)OTHER AND THE VIRGIN QUEEN

The two films analyzed in this section of the book appear disparate in many ways including historical period and narrative focus as well as being produced in different countries and on different continents. And yet they (re)present two marginalized archetypical female characters: one based on ur-phantasie, the pre-historical phallic matriarch in all her abject glory; and the other on an historical figure that turned into a fantasy stemming from the sarne matriarchal ur-phantasie albeit through the lens of the subliminal iconography of the goddessNirgin Mary. This Virgin/goddess iconic imaging of a queen happens to intersect in time paradoxically with the commencement of religious iconoclasm in the renaissance period in Western history. The fonner abject, phallic matriarch imaging is featured in the film entitled The Thirteenth Warrior (McTiernan, 1999) and the latter Virgin queen matriarch is found in the film Elizabeth (Kapur, 1998). Originally a novel, The 13,h Warrior was first entitled The Eaters ofthe Deadby the late Michael Crichton-appropriate title given the unspeakable climax of the story featuring a lethal proto-Cro-Magnon matriarch leading a tribe of what appear to be the last Neanderthals. Crichton, a medical scholar and novelist, placed a bet that he could write an entertaining tale based on 'Beowulf. ' His book went beyond that and tapped his intuitional link to FEMININITY, the maternal semiotic and phylogenetic cognitive and emotional inheritances. 1 Shekar Kapur's Elizabeth is a tribute to and an indictment off iconoclasm while thematically focusing on the iconic image of the Virgin Mary superimposed on Queen Elizabeth the First. However, the film expands the bi-polar imagery of women to the breaking point through the sublimating genre of the historical bio-pic. This bio-pic depicts the not-so-virgin girl­ queen (Elizabeth) as she subjects herself to the Law of the Father (Henry VIII) but then redefines herself iconically and iconographically, in the age of religious iconoclasm, through 'self-branding,' to become a paradoxically disavowed, co-opted and extra-logical picture of the always already subversive Virgin Mary (the sublimation ofthe pre-Christian goddess). And

56

Part 2

Elizabeth I's historical public, as well as the spectators of this movie, apprehend the conflation in a startling pre-conscious epiphany, followed by a sudden reflex of revulsion at her preternatural will to power, and ultimately acquiescence. Then finally we pursue a pragmatic fixation on the self-established Virgin Queen in the spectacle brilliantly captured in the final scene of the film. It is a joy to witness dream work of this intuitive quality (re)presenting the conflated iconic facets of historical culture attempting clumsily to interpret a glimpse at the cracks in the Symbolic barrier keeping primal FEMININITY at bay.

CHAPTER 4 NOVEL, SCRIPT, IMAGE: A CASE STUDY OF THE PHALLIC (M)OTHER IN MAINSTREAM MOVIES

This chapter discusses the intersection in mainstream movies of the written and spoken word in conjunction with abject imagery all of which on the surface work to reinforce the dominance of the Symbolic order in opposition to the (m)Other. The Thirteenth Warrior (Crichton's novel­ originally named The Eaters ofthe Dead-and McTiernan's movie released in 1999), tests the Symbolic boundaries of mainstream culture since it highlights the figural in text as well as the maternal semiotic in historical (re)presentation in a manner at once revelatory, revisionist and intertextual 1 . The Thirteenth Warrior presents the (m)Other in its most extreme: s!he is depicted as the Phallic All exemplifying alterity, virulence and abjection. The Arabic protagonist, Ibn Fadlan is the keeper of the text, the purveyor of the Symbolic order, and as such, is charged ultimately with repressing (m)Othemess. Curiously early in the film, a female seer's figural, extra­ logical, language foresees that Fadlan is destined to partake in the quest of the still illiterate Norsemen's to rid the world of the "unspeakable" Otherness. Later on during this journey for the conquest of Otherness, that is, in the film version, another female soothsayer provides Fadlan with a riddle that he reduces to a plan for vanquishing the Phallic (m)Other 2 The climax ofthe film, as we shall discuss later, is scatological-consistent with its chosen abject theme, and heavy-handed in its (re)visitation of the abject aspects of the womb and the pre-lingual trauma of separation from the maternal object.

(m)Other: Kill or be Killed The maternal semiotic finds enunciation in the (re)presentation of pre­ lingual referencing sensations, libidinal and otherwise, and their psycho­ linguistic reverberations that pelTIleate the Symbolic order. Mainstream movies, such as The Thirteenth Warrior (1999) are striking in their potential

58

Chapter 4

for revealing the turbulent relationship between the maternal semiotic and the Symbolic order. Intersecting novel, script and motion photography, Crichton's book and McTiernan's film adaptation effectively re-trace tbe journey back to the birth trauma that, in many respects, is the generator of the Phallic (m)Otber cathexis. Slhe, tbe Phallic (m)Otber, coalesces tbe focus of existential negativity as s/he does in Crichton's story. S/he also resonates mytbologically like an eidolon or banshee through the Symbolic, which is why s/he can sustain such a significant role in Crichton's novel and its adaptation into film. The narrative's version of phallic (m)Otbemess functions in oppositional ways: on the one hand, heir depiction reinforces the Law oftbe Father by signaling tbe virulence ofthe primal (m)Other, and on the other hand, the film serves as a veiled, inadvertent indictment of the binary and linear proclivity, as well as of tbe gender bias in tbe Symbolic order/culture. Crichton's novel and, even more so, McTiernan's film, delve deep into the pre-lingual mire to justify the existential need to murder the (m)Other. So deep, that a phantasmagoric adaptation of ancient mytbs with misogynistic themes was needed to bolster the narrative's 'bad mother' conceit. Society's most identifiable infrastructure, the Symbolic order, aligns itself in opposition to the maternal semiotic, that is, the traces and influences of the pre-lingual stage in human development as theorized by Julia Kristeva. And this oppositional disposition is well reflected in the novel and the movie via several strategies including abject imagery attached to the maternal, emphasis on literacy and linear logic, as well as the meta­ denouement oftbe story (re)establishing tbe demise oftbe (m)Other and tbe dominion of the spoken and written word. However, the veil of logic that provides the illusion of sustaining this dominion of speech and inscription is easily displaced to reveal the repressed far more familiar, uncanny space beyond; that is to say, tbe womb-like chara space described cryptically by Plato 3 and developed psycho-linguistically by Kristeva. The tension between the univocal veneer of logic and its readily discernible, albeit disavowed, semiotic underpinnings provide Crichton's story and its filmic representation with its unheimlich vigor.

The Law of the Father, Abjection and Alphabetic Misogyny Three interwoven theories rooted in psycho-linguistics and the alphabet find tbemselves at the core of tbe Phallic (m)Other image depicted in The Thirleenth Warrior. These theories are Lacan's Law of the Father, Kristeva's concepts on abjection and the maternal semiotic, as well as

Novel, Script, Image

59

Leonard Schlain's hypothesis on the influence of the alphabet in sustaining mIsogyny. Before addressing each of these theories in relation to the film, we must make note that Crichton is a popular novelist with an academic background that includes a postdoctoral fellowship at the Jonas Salk Institute for Biological Science. He has written many books including The Eaters of the Dead (The Thirteenth Warrior) that reference his academic predisposition. Although a work of fiction, Crichton's Eaters blurs the line between fiction and academic documentation by (re)presenting itself as an historical artifact documenting real events. Crichton's penchant for academic research and fact-based details for his fiction adds substantive psycho-linguistic significance to The Eaters a/the Dead and by association, to McTiernan's photoplay The Thirteenth Warrior. ,

Phallogocentrism In terms of phallogocentrism, i.e., FreudianiLacanian emphasis on the phallus conjoined with resonances of Derridean logocentrism, the Arab protagonist and purveyor-of-the-written-language, Ibn Fadlan, fimctions to exemplify the superiority of the written language and male dominated culture over illiteracy and the unspeakable Phallic (m)Other. lbn Fadlan, the protagonist, is literate and revered while the Vikings are depicted as limited by illiteracy and so diminished in status. Great pains are taken on the part of the novelist and the fihnmaker to show the Vikings as semi-bestial and above all strikingly abject in terms of hygiene-as exemplified by the spit­ in-the-cammunal-washbasin scene that takes place when Fadlan first meets the Vikings. In terms of gender relations, the women, the bearers of 'lack' in the novel and the film, are pictured in subordinate roles including as sexual objects, submissive attendants and marginalized, extra-logical soothsayers. The rumored evil creature, the unspeakable Otherness, that the Vikings are obliged to eliminate is also female. Both the Arab culture and the Vikings are depicted as men-centered societies with fringe female influences that amount to the extra-logical in nature and are attached to one or two women who, ifnot all together threatening, are pictured as anti-social and disgusting. And yet the extra-logical enunciations of the female oracles prove themselves productive in advancing the male prerogative. Thus, with inadvertent deference to Derrida, unspeakable gender di.lferance is implied as being a disruptive force (active) and an oblique assistance (passive) in the fihn-and yet, despite the female extra-logical powers, phallocentric hegemony unambiguously prevails. This is less than surprising in (his)story­ telling. It is a theme and interpretive strategy common in Western

60

Chapter 4

Civilization if not also wherever binary-oriented signifiers irrevocably structure language. However, within this lack of novelty lies the potency of the (tell)tale: the phallocentric cliche is highly visible throughout making the maternal semiotic within the narrative accessible to a wide audience as the discrepancies in univocal linearity present themselves at every tum.

The Female Soothsayer Attempting to carry out his perfunctory mission as reluctant emissary from Arabia, Ibn Fadlan, makes contact with Buliwyf, the Viking leader. The narrative takes place in a time when the illiterate Nordic tribes are suffering from what they refer to as an unspeakable threat which remains invisible in its unnameable marginality, lying in wait in the far North and existentially outside of speech and its implied prohibitions. Eventually in the film we find out what the unspeakable is when the characters find out: the ineffable threat that they are charged with eliminating equates to culture's annihilation at the hands of the Phallic (m)Other, the phallic AlllNothing, set to overwhelm culture. From the linear perspective of literate cultures as represented by Ibn Fadlan, the illiterate Vikings are stuck between the primordial unspeakable state and a more advanced literate subjectivity. This makes them in some ways more susceptible to the regressive threat of (m)Otherness, depicted in the imaging of the extra­ Symbolic horde of "Wendols," the last of the ancient Neanderthal flesh­ eaters, and their all-powerful phallic matriarch. Before Ambassador Fadlan, can exercise his trumped-up political charge from his homeland, however, the Vikings arrange for a woman's figural, extra-logical perfOlmance: a female soothsayer reads her collection of bones in an attempt to access from the skeletal body parts, these hallowed abject artifacts, a strategy for overcoming the unmentionable horror from the far North. She aIUlounces that thirteen warriors must go on the quest to save the northern kingdom and that the thirteenth must be a foreigner. At this pronouncement, all who are present turn toward Fadlan, the only person there from another land. Hesitant, but rising to the occasion, Fadlan agrees to accompany the Norsemen on their dangerous quest.

Inscription's Left-Hemisphere Bias At one point during their travels, Fadlan takes up a stick and writes a few words in the dust proving to the incredulous Buliwyfthat he can "draw sounds." In the novel, Fadlan writes the prosaic phrase "Praise be to God." However, a change occurs during the scripting and filmmaking process. In

Novel, Script, Image

61

the movie, Fadlan ends up writing "There is only one God and Mohamed is his prophet." This change is significant because it signals a difference in emphasis that modulates from the verbal illiterate form of subjectivity implied by the novel to tlie literate subjectivity indicated by the film. "Praise be to God" is relatively ambivalent regarding sex in and of itself, and this phrase doesn't necessarily reference literary antecedents, whereas the phrase "There is only one God and Mohamed is his prophet" is gender specific and implies patrilineal privilege along with a tacit oppositional disposition towards women. Further, this phrase change from the novel to the film reinforces the dominance of the written word since it is derived from an ancient religious text and one ofthe world's most influential books, the Koran. [fwe subscribe to Leonard Shlain's hypothesis that societal dependence on the written word strengtliens the left hemisphere of the brain to tlie detriment of tlie right hemispheric lobe and that tlie left hemisphere is male biased in the sense that it is the center of language, logic and linearity (all central to the Symbolic and phallogocentrism), tlien it follows tliat the fine tuning between the novel and the film version of Crichton's tale would indicate an emphasis on the importance of the written word and thereby reinforce male privilege in a manner once removed from, and traditionally more male-dominated than, spoken language. It follows such because in the film we are shown Fadlan "drawing sounds," as the Vikings call his writing, and thus demonstrating a position of higher status over the Vikings. Plus, this scene references intertextually similar hierarchical sentiments regarding sounds "drawn." Indirectly, the written word in the New Testament becomes one of these intertexts: for example, the following quote is from the Gospel of John (1: 1): "In the Beginning was tlie Word, and tlie Word was with God, and tlie Word was God ( . ) And tlie Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Fatlier,) full of grace and trutli." So, not only the reference in the film to the Koran, but a similar phallogocentric statement exists in the New Testament also reinforces male dominance in written texts. With these implications and intertexts, the reader can't help but recognize, if subliminally, tliat tlie fihn itself does privilege the written word and phallogocentrism. However, there is a snag: the film is pictorial in nature and the verbal expression "drawing sounds" is featured in the dialog, plus words are 'drawn' by Fadlan for the Norsemen leader in a closeup shot. Therefore, the film always already overflows from linear, univocal structure and highlights tlie figural, polysemic gaps in tlie Symbolic order. Since writing is a kind of "drawing" that is specific to words, the pluralities in the skill of writing and the graphics which writing produces are also . .

62

Chapter 4

emphasized. By highlighting the fissures and pluralities ignored, if not disavowed in the Law of the Father, the film alludes to Lyotard's figural aspect of text/discourse,4 and Kristeva's maternal semiotic-both are in excess ofthe Law and subversive. In this way, the film cannot help signaling, via aural and pictorial images, as well as the figural excesses underpinning spoken and \Vfitten words, the signifiances of the maternal semiotic in linear, univocal enunciation. The trajectory from novel to script to screen in this instance leads us towards a deference to phallogocentrism only to arrive at the maternal semiotic always already embedded there. "Indeed, \Vfiting causes the subject who ventures in it to confront an archaic authority on the nether side of the proper Name. The maternal connotations of this authority never escaped great writers, no more than the coming face to face with what we have called abjection." (Kristeva, 1982, 75). Kristeva's philosophical and poetic-writing oriented observations ring true as Crichton's story in the novel and in film signal the "nether side of the proper Name", that is to say, the disavowed symbiotic and contrasting side of the "Name of the Father," Lacan's "Law of the Father" referring to phallocentric language. The reader of the novel and the viewer of the film are confronted by the "netherworld" with its disavowed maternal images of the pre-lingual authority dominant before the Symbolic order establishes subjectivity; that is to say, the primal maternal authority who, in this movie's case, is reduced to the role of the antagonist of Fadlan's chronicle: the Phallic (m)Other depicted as the matriarch of the Neanderthal flesh-eaters swarming threateningly at the Norsemen's northern borders.

The Abject Kristeva's maternal semiotic is comprised of traces and residue from pre-lingual sensations and extra-logical enunciations that include sensual pulsations, music, tactile intercourse, extra-lingual utterances, multiplex meanings of words, word configurations, and expressions (such as Derrida's differance that draws attention to the figural and extra-Iogocentric aspects of inscription), as well as jouissance. Kristeva's semiotic also emphasizes abjection, the potentially virulent fountainhead of "affirmative negativity" (see Kristeva 1984, 1 13). Kristeva describes the polluting aspects of abjection in telTIlS of binary opposition: danger coming from without or within, excess materiality: bodily defilements, and origination in (m)Othemess: Excrement and its equivalents (decay, infection, disease, corpse, etc.) stand for the danger to identity that comes from without: the ego threatened by the non-ego, society threatened by its outside, life by death. Menstrual blood, on the contrary, stands for the danger issuing from within the identity (social

Novel, Script, Image

63

or sexual); it threatens the relationship between the sexes within a social aggregate and, through internalization, the identity of each sex in the face of sexual difference. C . . . ) [excrement and menstrual blood] those two defilements stern from the maternal and/or feminine . . . (Kristeva 1982, 71) It is evident that much of the abject is attached to the (m)Other since primal separation involves discarding objectivity and its carnal remnants in the quest for subjectivity. In a way, becoming a subject requires the abject dissolution of the dyad by disposing of the (m)Other who is identified by reproductive oriented defilements such as menstruation cycles. Kristeva suggests that phallogocentrism tries to purifY itself figuratively via binary differentiation acknowledging a focal point at reproductive defilements. These reference a primal maternal authority that must be disavowed in culture. Reframing this universal abject aspect of the hlUllan condition to the narrative of The Thirteenth Warrior, it is evident throughout the film that Fadlan and the band of Vikings ultimately re-enact this material separation from the archaic authority of the (m)Other and this results in an oppositional, hyper-emphasis on the abject. As Ibn Fadlan continues his travels with the Vikings and eventually mastering their language, he begins to bond with them on their quest to salvage subjectivity in the face of an onslaught from the effects of (m)Othemess disavowed. As the Vikings' counter-offensive progresses against the unspeakable "danger to identity from without," that is, the onslaught from the "eaters of the dead," Fadlan experiences several significant encounters with the abject. In the novel and in the movie, the abject is (re)presented by the imaging and referencing of: excrement, menses, the lUllbilical cord, hlUllan carrion, and castration. Early on, Fadlan encounters the abject when he enters a ransacked outlying farm house and discovers the body parts ofthe occupants, headless, disarticulated and displaying bite marks. In the film he vomits at the horrific sight while the Vikings remain stoic. At the end of the scene, however, an uncanny object is held up in abject disdain for all to see on the edge of a Viking sword. It appears very much like a dark lump of feces. Upon closer examination, Fadlan notices that it is a dark, small rock-sculpture of an atmless, headless, and pregnant appearing Venus: a tribute to the fertile female. In the novel, however, the Vikings experience an extreme reaction to this image, they vomit violently, and it is referred to as "purging themselves." This display found only in the novel, a display of an abject reflex-response by the Vikings is used in direct oppositional reaction vis-a­ vis this primordial (m)Other sculpture. This pre-historic Venus references other such well doclUllented pre-historical sculptures, and, along with the abject response in both the novel and the movie, demonstrates an acute

64

Chapter 4

condensation of the phallogocentric-influenced roles that the abject associated with (m)Othemess play in culture. The Venus-object is presented in the film as if it were dung on the blade of a sword, and then is revealed in a closeup shot to be a (re)presentation of the universal (m)Other at the sight of which, the males in the novel (and Fadlan only in the movie) "purge" themselves. The males vomit in a compulsive (r)ejection of the abject, a telltale response to the sculptured icon of differance (at once figural turd and universal mother, as well as graphic disruption of phallogocentrism in this scene), abjection and (m)Othemess. In contrast to the novel, though, the film stops short of displaying the Norsemen "purging" themselves at the sight of the maternal icon. In the movie version, the Vikings do, however, destroy the artifact with great distain, and this is a purging process. Near the end of Crichton's novel, although not enunciated in the film, Fadlan makes a specific reference to abject (m)Othemess in the form of a disparaging remark on menses, the reproductive abject event cycle that signals the ending of a woman's recent state of potential fertility. Just before scaling down a cliff for the first time, Ibn states: "Also it is true that I was much aggrieved at the prospect of climbing down the cliff. Verily I felt in this manner: That I should rather do any action upon the face of the earth, whether to lie with a woman in menses, to drink from a gold cup, to eat the excrement ofa pig, to put out my eyes, even to die itself. . ." (Crichton, 1976) Albeit abject, menses is a sign of fertility and reproduction both highly regarded in nature that has been altered traditionally in culture to merit disdain reflected in Fadlan's disparaging comments in the novel. This disdain of Fadlan's could be interpreted as uncanny, as if the process of bodily contact with a woman in the state of menstrual release should conjure the same dissonant chord of disgust reverberating from the primal struggle to separate from (m)Other's primordial orifice with its folds of flesh that produce at birth an engulfing, choking flood of blood, placenta and saline flow. In its translation from the written page to the screen this phobia of Fadlan's is edited out. Perhaps this is due to the filmmakers' reluctance to reiterate the revealing biases of the novel's imagery in this case. The film does not transpose from the novel Fadlan's malaise at the thought of intimate contact with a woman experiencing menses.

The Umbilicus of the Dream Both the novel and the film show specific, if oblique, concern with another reproduction-related abjection: the umbilical cord. The ambiguity and the ambivalence of the allusion in both the movie and the novel versions of the story is due to the terrifying and primal nature of the material

Novel, Script, Image

65

separation from the maternal Object The discarded residue of the umbilicus, the umbilical cord, amounts to the ultimate signifier of linkage and severance to tbe (m)Other, of material objectivity and, ultimately, symbolic subjectivity. Even Freud could not shy away from recognizing its signijiance, although he could only approach it ambiguously, ambivalently and with astute imagination, by describing the phenomenon ofthe umbilicus scar, the navel, as associated with the invisible, disavowed side beyond the Symbolic, and beyond tbe dream. There is often a passage in even the most thoroughly interpreted dream which has to be left obscure; this is because we become aware dming the work of interpretation that at that point there is a tangle of dream-thoughts which cannot be unraveled and which moreover adds nothing to our knowledge of the content of the dream. This is the dream's navel, the spot where it reaches do"WIl into the lUlknO"WIl. (Freud 2010, Kindle Location 494)

Quintessential literary figure, popular culture tbeorist and talking curator, Sigmund Freud concerned himself mostly, except for an occasional lucid foraging at the cusp of the pre-lingual, in the study of the obvious­ his psychological discoveries, many might argue, are obvious only in hindsight. The structurally-oriented psychological frontier for him was tbe signifier-laden, phallogocentric rationale for pursuing exceptionalism and binary dominance: language. 'What Lacan would refer to as the Law of the Father. As with many of his outstanding male contemporaries, Freud was interested in language and how it involves his new discovery, the unconscious. At the same time, despite his efforts to the contrary, his insights on the pre-verbal experience inadvertently manage to remain instrumental if not genninal in opening new space (in the culture-enclave of language) for acknowledging the signifying precedence of (m)Otbemess. As the above 'dream-thoughts' quote indicates, Freud's use of the umbilicus scar as metaphor for the unknowable in the unconscious reveals much more in terms of pre-lingual influences and denial than its intent to mystify tbe extra-logical pre-lingual experience and its maternal authority would indicate. The navel, the remnant of the umbilical liaison between subject and Object, is an indelible separation mark on the abject-born and discarded subject-to-be and functions as an uncanny cicatrix. 5 However, phallocentric culture, dependent in many regards since tbe tum ofthe 20th Century on tbe literary and metapsychological influence of Freud, substitutes the signifying precedent of the umbilical cord witb tbe much later occurring Oedipal influence consisting ofthe sexuated penis as the irreducible sign ofpresence versus absence: the phallus. Marcia Ian notes: " . . to assign, as psychoanalysis does, to the penis, "raised" to the symbolic function of the

66

Chapter 4

phallus, the status of universal signifier, ( . . .) is to make of it a fetish ( . . . ) against the threat of the presence ofthe umbilical cord, eerily attached to us at the center of our physical being, yet attached at the other end to what or to whom-God?" (Ian 1993, 32) In other words, since Freud we can argue that the penis as phallus substitutes for the umbilical cord, that originary serpentine life-line to the fetus and subsequent abject-artifact produced and discarded by the archaic authority, the (m)Other. In The Thirteenth Warrior, there is an umbilical cord image and it takes the fearful form of the "fireWOlTIl," the mysterious entity winding down the hills in flames that the script indirectly attaches to the Phallic (m)Other. S!he is depicted as the maternal authority and source of uncanny, archaic (m)Otherness for the relict horde of Neanderthals in the story. Marcia Ian defines the Phallic (m)Other as the "phobic unknowability" (Ian 1993, 40). Further, her description includes: "( . . . ) a grown woman with breasts and a penis" (Ian 1932, 1). "She is neither hermaphrodite nor androgyne, human nor monster, because she is emphatically Mother. ( . . .) She is a fantasmatic caricature, and a caricature of the fantasmatic." (Ian 1993, 8) Despite her fantasmatic appearance, according to Ian, s!he is Mother and so the generator of the umbilical cord-the primordial signifier. 6 The Phallic (m)Other in Crichton's story remains in her underground lair and sends out the sinuous cord comprised of her Neanderthal "Wendol" progeny carrying torches to attack the speaking subjects. The Norsemen speak ofthe "fireworm" as if it were a mythological beast, an otherness that snakes its way down the mountain out of the mist. Upon witnessing the fireWOlTIl for the first time, Fadlan states in Crichton's novel: "These glowing fIre points appeared in a line, which undulated like a snake, or verily like the undulating body of a dragon." In McTiernan's movie: One Viking says, "The worm, they roused the fIreWOlTIl." And we see the glowing line descending the mountain, after which the screen is fIlled with the image of the Norsemen's phallic, spear-like defenses propped up ready for battle. These images of the erect phallus/penis defend Fadlan and the Vikings' Symbolic order against the serpentine umbilical cord that (re)presents the prior authority of the Phallic (m)Other. Our protagonist, Fadlan, then discovers with relief that the fireworm is actually hundreds of torch-bearing "Wendols" on horseback descending the mountain in the mist. Fadlan recognizes that it is much less disconcerting to be attacked by an overwhelming onslaught of identifiable warriors than to be reminded of the uncanny, "phobic unknowability" triggered by the serpentine imagery ofthe umbilical abjection.

Novel, Script, Image

67

Castration In the fOlTIl of dozens of dismembered bodies, human carrion is featured prominently in the novel as well as in the movie. Body parts, skulls, blood, open lesions and the consumption of human flesh landscape the frame in several scenes culminating in the archived abject-artifacts of carnage that the Norsemen witness in the lair of the Phallic (m)Other. To be discarded as carrion, i.e., lifeless and abandoned, the epitome ofabjection, is arguably one of the primal fears for the speaking/writing subject. But the ultimate horror in phallogocentric culture is to suffer castration. This entails the loss of the purported primary siginfier, that is, the Symbolic phallus conflated with the penis, and so by consequence, the loss of signification. Any disarticulation of the body could serve as a reminder of the castration fear and loss. For an epistemological infrastructure solely reliant on language, which itself is dependent on binary oppositions, the loss of signification leaves only lack, a void, a nothingness that precludes subjectivity. Lack at this level far exceeds the anxiety over a missing body part although, to be sure, dismembelTIlent triggers the cognitive castration reflex which summons forth the specter of originary lack, if only subliminally. In both the novel and the movie castration is a running motif that includes the continual severing and collecting of the heads of the Vikings, their disarticulation of limbs, and the emphasis on their tiny sculpture of the headless and armless maternal Object who is visibly pregnant. Further, and in contrast to the novel, the movie contains the most striking, and curiously multifaceted reference to castration. Whereas in the novel Buliwyf stabs the Neanderthal matriarch to death with a dagger, a phallic substitute, in the movie version ofthe battle he beheads the Phallic (m)Other with a broadsword, a much larger phallic symbol. In addition, this decapitation amounts to a castrating gesture severing her potent Phallic quality of the maternal authority. The matriarch dies but not before she penetrates his skin with a phallus symbol of her own attached as a prosthesis over her index finger. Despite Buliwyf's prowess at decapitating the Phallic (m)Other and liberating culture of the potent and extra-logical threat of the (m)Other, the Phallic (m)Other nevertheless conquers her conqueror by means of a phallus, a sharp poisoned-laced fmger-extension. Further, the prosthetic nature of her phallus symbolically transforms the phallus/penis into fallacy, a prosthetic signifier, a stand-in for the real signifier, which, according to Lacan, is the lacuna that (re)presents the unattainable desire of the Other to the subject-in-process7 The prominence and potency of the Phallic (m)Other's phallus prosthesis undermines the gender-specific "presence" of the oppositional-oriented penis-endowed Father. In counter-

68

Chapter 4

intuitional support of the film's inadvertent depth and scope, the primacy of the Phallic (m)Other is reinforced in her final combat with the Father figure, the warrior chief Buliwyf. And yet, at the same time, s/he, the Phallic (m)Otber, is disavowed through matricide and tbrough tbe primal revisionism inherent to this and most narratives. The novel and the movie fe-enact the primal separation drama in a cautionary, ideologically charged marmer typical of mainstream constructs and yet, inadvertently and paradoxically, the texts shed light on tbe fissures that always already exude the extra-logical traces of the maternal semiotic. Before leaving the discussion ofthe cave battle that results in a Medusa­ like decapitation of the Phallic (m)Otber, tbere is anotber component in tbe scene that is associated with phallic power-and, counter-intuitively, associated with fertility, rebirth and deatb just as (m)Otber is. There is a latent imagery bolstering the primacy of tbe Phallic (m)Other and is particularly apparent during tbe climactic battle between Buliwyf and tbe (m)Other tbat features a symbol oftbe umbilical cord/penis as phallus. The Phallic (m)Other, at tbe moment of her fight to the death, is pictured with the antediluvian symbol of objectivity, fertility and erection that symbolizes the umbilical/penile duplicity: the serpent. A coiled, aroused snake (matching the arousal of tbe Phallic (m)Otber herself) adorns the neck of the maternal Other, the pre-lingual authority. Altbough displayed prominently before the final battle, this sinuous, abject/fertile symbol of (m)Otberness loses emphasis in the final battle between tbe patriarch and the Phallic (m)Other-as if the serpent has escaped. The umbilical snake, disavowed in tbe defeat of the Phallic (m)Other, remains portentous and sublimated, primordial and repressed. And so, sme(it), the (m)Other, although castrated, always already remains an image that is multiplex, abject and body-centered.

The DwarC Patriarch I will now make briefnote ofthe overt instances of the phallogocentric prerogative featured in the novel but then substantively changed in the movie. These instances that are only found in the book include the appearance of the dwarf patriarch/soothsayer, the marmer in which the Phallic (m)Other was killed, and the Vikings' trajectory into and out oftbe Phallic (m)Otber's intestinal cave. Crichton writes in his novel that it is a male soothsayer and leader of a tribe of dwarves who supplies Buliwyfwith tbe key to resolving his horrific, uncarmy problem at the end of his quest. In the movie, however, a female soothsayer provides the ultimate, albeit cryptic, solution to the Viking's

Novel, Script, Image

69

dilemma. In front of Buhwyfs companions and all the other dwarves, Crichton's dwarf patriarch berates Buliwyf for his impotence in resolving his dilemma by himself and then boasts of his own virility and father-like position before which the child-like Buliwyf comes begging for help. After this paternal admonishment, the dwarf soothsayer gives the Viking warlord the daggers that will be used to kill the Phallic (m)Other in her cave. In the novel, using the Dwarf Patriarch's weapon, Buliwyf stabs the matriarch to death in her cave in contrast to the Medusa-inspired beheading that takes place in the movie. The stabbing gesture with the dagger mimics a more aroused penile penetrative action and so is arguably phallocentric in its implication, as opposed to the beheading that uses a wide swipe with a broadsword and so can be linked to the act of castrating, a much more multiplex underpinning concern in the human condition for Freud and Lacan. The difference here is made more significant when considering that the castrating action contains a prelingual association to the severing of the umbilical cord, an event of developmental importance prior to the mirror stage with its subsequent, much more phallogocentric Oedipal fear of castration. In sum, the novel attempts in this instance to align itself with Freudian Oedipal convention via the patriarch and the penis-as-active focus. But since the phallus as signifier could in fact reference a pre-Freudian, maternal castration, that is, the severing of the umbilical cord, the cutting of the abject subject-to-be from the (m)Other in an underrated developmental stage at birth, the film's focus on the maternal semiotic is heightened. The movie corrects the novel's shortcoming by keeping the imagery at the pre­ verbal stage in which the maternal authority retains its primacy. Until the umbilical cord is severed by means of the (m)Other's beheading followed by a rebirth reenactment in which the Norsemen are purged from the cavernous womb back into the world of sUbjectivity. After eliminating the Phallic (m)Other in the novel, via tInusts of the daggers, the Vikings leave the bowels of the earth by the land entrance, walking out of their 0\Vll accord away from the ocean. In the movie, however, their trajectory is more indicative of the birthing process: the Vikings enter the cave from the land side and then escape after killing the Phallic (m)Other via an underwater channel reminiscent of the birth canal. Further, after traversing the submerged canal, the men are depicted in the film as springing forth to the surface of the sea and gasping as if taking a breath for the first time, indeed, as if at birth. This revealing change of trajectory for the Vikings, decided upon during the process of modulating from the written word to the screen, indicates that the movie, either by intuition or by premeditation, works to display the primacy of the maternal Object in contrast to the novel's more reactionary inclination. This telltale

70

Chapter 4

overall change also makes sense because the motion pictures medium inspires a more maternal semiotic plurality in its expression as opposed to the more constructed, univocal linearity that lends itself to the commercially-oriented written narrative.

Conclusion The fe-enactment of the primal drama, that is, the material separation from the pre-lingual maternal Object, is a perpetually recurring theme in mainstream literature and motion pictures. The transposition of the primal drama from the implicit novel to the extra-logical screen makes the turbulent and symbiotic relationship between the Symbolic order and the maternal semiotic more accessible to the mainstream while instituting subliminal vectors that (re)establish the primal authority of (m)Otherness. Fundamental to this fe-enactment is the depiction of abjection. Despite, and because of the movies' consumer-oriented function, abjection is displayed with a graphic viscerality that affects the mass audience at many levels. These include registers of the unconscious and the collective unconscious as well as registers that sustain both the individual and collective apprehension of society and culture. Abjection depicted in the movies triggers the cognitive gag reflex while re-affirming subliminally the prelingual familiarity with the maternal semiotic and the maternal authority. This ongoing primordial tension is as life affinning as it is horrific. "The time of abjection is double: a time of oblivion and thunder, of veiled infinity and the moment when revelation bursts forth." (Kristeva 1982, 8). In The Thirteenth Warrior, the Norsemen refer to the distant crashing of waves on the seaside cliffs near their enclave protectorate as "Thunder Water." Later in the film the thundering waves signal escape for the outnumbered Vikings and their curator-of-the-written word, Ibn Fadlan. The final escape for them from the abject bowels of the Phallic (m)Other's cavernous lair is through the veiled infinity and the revelation that bursts forth inherent to separating from the material objectivity of the (m)Other and her cave-womb. However, the beheading of the (m)Other and their escape from the cave, a process symbolic of birth, on the one hand, disparages the primal authority, the Phallic (m)Other, while simultaneously allowing space for the plurality and signifiance of the maternal semiotic in the birth-inspired imagery. Motion pictures, exemplary of the multivalent aspect of pictorial imagery, depict the compelling linear logic in the murder ofthe (m)Other and yet generate the oblivion and thunder of polysemy. And polysemy in its relentless ambiguity and insight signals the irrepressible, plural nature of the maternal semiotic embedded and disavowed in culture.

Novel, Script, Image

71

At the very end of the novel as well as the movie, the author and the filmmakers pay tribute to the \Vfitten word and the dominion of the Symbolic order-but also in conjunction with the figural maternal semiotic embedded therein. In the last scenes, Buliwyf, the patriarch, dies of his wounds suffered from the phallic prosthesis wielded by the Phallic (m)Other. In the movie, one of Buliwyfs last comments requests metaphorically that his adventures be \Vfitten do'Wll. He states that a man would be considered " . . . wealthy if someone would draw the story of his deeds." After which a determined looking Fadlan is pictured in closeup with the strong indication that Buliwyf s request will be fulfilled. Thus, the body becomes word and the phallus/penis becomes further embalined, mummified in the annals of linear culture-while, simultaneously, the graphic nature, the "drawing," of the spoken word, a figural reference, suggests that the polysemic aspect of the \Vfitten word is also reinforced. The filmmakers seem to be obliquely in tune, in sync, and in consort with the paradoxical and the symbiotic relationship of the Symbolic with the maternal semiotic. In conclusion, mainstream movies continually address the pre-lingual developmental stage and feature the polysemic crux of the symbiotic relationship between the Symbolic order and the maternal semiotic. The Thirleenth Warrior exposes this intersection in an accessible manner and produces a testimonial artifact to this symbiotic, pluralist relationship that is palpable to mainstream spectators despite of and precisely because of its overt attempt to (re)construct and reinforce univocal linearity.

CHAPTER S MARIANISM IN THE MOVIE ELIZABETH: FEMININITY, THE LAW OF THE FATHER AND THE MATERNAL SEMIOTIC

As a system of signs not dependent on Lacan's Symbolic order, motion pictures lend themselves to the enunciation of Kristeva's prelingual­ generated maternal semiotic. In contrast to the latter, both spoken language, and what some regard as its secondary, more phallogocentric fOlTIl the written word, work to suppress the extra-logical and creative plurality of the pre-lingual experience. Further, the written word as a cultural tool for political dominance, given the phallogocentric hegemony influencing both the spoken and written word, functions to diminish role of women in society. The film Elizabeth (Kapur, 1999) adroitly (re)presents the intersection of the Symbolic order and the maternal semiotic in a mainstream movie, a bio­ pic, while creating an intertextual dialectic (Kristeva, 1984 59-60) between its imagery and the historical record, among its other influences. The film accomplishes this not only by featuring this specific culminating historical and political moment when the pre-h(y)st(e)rical goddess image reached its zenith of resurgence in European culture, but also by inadvertently, intuitionally, focusing on FEMININITY and the maternal semiotic in the cinematic apparatus.

FEMININITY Versus the Law of the Father The oppositional bias inherent in language, that primary artefact of the Symbolic order, taints FEMININITY because the latter stems from the pre­ lingual and so (re)presents biological and extra-logical precedence over a univocal linearity dominating at the onset of language dependence. Body­ centered primacy in human development fmds itself always already construed to be in binary opposition to the Symbolic order. The maternal semiotic, which consists of the psychological traces generated from the pulsations, libidinal investments and repressed pre-memory experienced in the pre-lingual developmental stage incorporates primal FEMININITY, a

Marianisrn in the Movie Elizabeth

73

sexual disposition ofmaternal plurality. Within the image-making constructed by the mainstream fihn artist, primal FEMININITY corresponds to the enunciation of the maternal semiotic as centered in prelingual pansexual libidinal investments via emphasis and play articulating the pluralities, the split seams and the fissures of the narrative as a construct. These gaps in the narrative amount to the overt referencing of the maternal, the polysemic and the sensory. Mainstream filmmakers, especially those cultivating aesthetic impulses, intuitionally highlight these fissures in narrative film structure. These imaged anomalies, no matter how overt or how subtle, are analogous to the disavowed crevices and cracks in the Symbolic order through which the unconscious seeps onto, into and through consciousness. Shekhar Kapur taps into the artist's semiotic urge in his film Elizabeth from the very first frames of his film The opening title montage consisting of symbols on a bloody background superimposed with period images of Henry VIII, Queen Mary and Elizabeth, is striking in its multi-layered graphic work topped with simple titles recounting the immediate historical events leading up to the opening moments of the bio-narrative. The background is visceral in its resemblance to amorphous organic ooze in and out of which period renderings of the principals appear in rack focus from blurred blobs into crisp detail and back out of focus again as they disappear along the z-axis. At one point the titles state, "THE COUNTRY WAS DrvIDED" and a large cross, semi-translucent like a cell's membrane in the bloody background, splits in two as if a microbe were cloning itself to make a double image. The motif of the double reoccurs shortly afterwards as the name "Elizabeth" dissolves into the center of the screen and we suddenly recognize that the rectangular shapes in the background also form the name Elizabeth in a much less Symbolically transparent manner than the previous foreground letters in their signifying display. This multi-layered strategy in the opening montage obliquely references the amorphous tenacity of the figural maternal semiotic vis-a-vis the Symbolic order and emphasizes the illusionism of the written word superimposed, also subjacent and inscribed with graphically emphasized letters. Within the context of Kapur's film, the organic, nebulous struggle between the Symbolic and the maternal semiotic in this opening title sequence kick-starts the Kristevan intertextual dialectic 1 that rapidly spills over into the recounting of the historical record in tenns of the cult of the Virgin Queen(s): on the one hand overt recounting of the historical chronicle featuring the figural self-construct of Elizabeth I during her ascension to the role of queen mother of England; and on the other hand, the covert depiction of the myth and the iconography of Mary, Mother of Jesus and Queen of Heaven that destabilizes the Symbolic univocality by

74

Chapter 5

unveiling its disavowed symbiosis, if not collusion in this case, with the maternal semiotic. Near the beginning of his film, Kapur directly references the maternal semiotic by displaying the abject in the grisly form of the torture and burning of declared heretics, and later, the dismembered head suspended above a cavernous moat that the young Elizabeth witnesses while under arrest and being escorted by boat to the Tower of London. Since Elizabeth's half-sister, Mary I is the Queen of England and sole monarch, the Tower, with its water ways of caverns, (re)presents the phallus ofthe Phallic Mother, the primordial destructive (m)Other in the form of Queen Mary I, 'Bloody Mary,' who at this time is attempting to forcefully carry out her ambition to reverse the Protestant refOlTIl in England after the death of their father, Henry VIII. The abhorrent cold tunnels of the Tower now with castrated male heads impaled on poles always already index the dripping and abject, cavernous maternal authority, the birth trauma and the subversion that the image of the Phallic (m)Other generates. The dire circumstance of Elizabeth's imprisonment in the environment of a civil war of religions is what conjures the iconic intervention of the Virgin Mary, as a Phallic Mother stand-in and antediluvian goddess par excellence, into Elizabeth's career and into the narrative dynamics of this film. One night during her internment Elizabeth is ushered brusquely from the Tower as she muses out loud to her entourage that tonight she thinks she will die. Her short journey takes her by carriage through the night of mayhem in the street-as depicted with a montage of women brutalized by soldiers. Suddenly the screen is filled with the mural of the Madonna with Baby Jesus at her breast, her nipple erect. The Madonna's eyes are closed injouissance. Suddenly the part ofthe painting that contains the Baby Jesus at the Madonna's nipple shifts open and the upper body of Elizabeth leans in. We then realize this is a hidden doorway in a mural, but we don't know where she is for several moments. Elizabeth steps in, closes the door and stands there, nearly covering the Baby Jesus, side by side with the extra­ proportional Madonna towering over her injouissance. This heavy-handed, yet exquisitely photographed composition, enunciates the start of the director's conceit that continues throughout the film and it foreshadows all the textual intersections and allusions between Elizabeth I and the Virgin Mary. Elizabeth finds herself in her half-sister's chamber and Mary I mentions the importance of the Virgin Mary as the Holy Mother of her people that so guides her crusade against Protestant refOlTIl. She wants Elizabeth to promise not to take away the Holy Mother from the people, The Mater Dolorosa. Elizabeth tells her that when she is queen she will "act as my conscious dictates." Her half-sister becomes livid with her but

Marianism in the Movie Elizabeth

75

nonetheless reinstates her, still under arrest, to her 0\Vll house in Hatfield. The extra-logical Cult of the Virgin has thereby been indelibly marked in Elizabeth's mind according to the 'dream workings' of the film.

The Virgin Mary and the Maternal Semiotic Milk and tears became the privileged signs of the Mater Dolorosa, who invaded the West beginning in the eleventh century, reaching the peak of its influx in the fourteenth. But it never ceased to fill the Marian visions of those, men or women (often children), who were racked by the anguish of a maternal frustration. Even though orality threshold of infantile regression is displayed in the area of the breast, while the spasm at the slipping away of eroticism is translated into tears, this should not conceal what milk and tears have in common: they are the metaphors of nonspeech, of a "semiotics" that linguistic comrlllmication does not account for. The Mother and her attributes evoking sorrowful hmnanity, thus become representatives of a "return of the repressed" in monotheism. They reestablish what is nonverbal and show up as the receptacle of a signifying disposition that is closer to so-called primary processes. (Kristeva 1987,

249-50). The Virgin Mary's mystique lies in her Otherness. She is other than man, other than the Law ofthe Father and other than other women-she is "alone of all her sex" as Marina Warner argues quoting Caelius Sedulius in her 1976 tome 2 She is also Queen of Heaven. She is the milk of the pre-lingual developmental stage and she cries the tears of death. As Kristeva implies in the quote above, representations of the Virgin mark the return of the repressed Otherness (woman) to the cult of monotheism. Christianity was and is the cult of monotheism that dominates the European cultural arena. The Virgin Mary has accumulated a wide following among the faithful, although not among the Fathers of the Churches that subscribe to Christianity. This implies that the Virgin's otherness, that is, her link to the body-centered and repressed semiotic strikes a chord in the populace much more than the male elders. This is not surprising when considering the long (pre-)history of goddess worship and its continuance among the common folk in contention with the paternal monotheists. However, the leaders of the monotheistic cults have had difficulties in their avid attempts to eliminate her influence. 'What is not surprising, then, is that a mystical and rather convoluted adaptation of the earth goddess would eventually be canonized opportunistically within the monotheistic doctrine. This doctrine of the Virgin Mother cryptically reverses the original disavowal of the goddess and seems to obliquely reference, in its implications of plurality, the friction as well as the collusion between the originary maternal authority

76

Chapter 5

and the Law of the Father. The Virgin Mary as Christian doctrine and archaic matriarchal dispositions provide an unlikely cathexis of the Symbolic cum maternal semiotic that (re)presents a symbiosis and a plurality. Further, the Roman Catholic Church exploited imagery depicting the Virgin that was and is suggestive of mythological enunciations of ancient Earth goddesses in order to retain the peasantry and the masses within the monotheistic fold. 3 A similar opportlUlistic, skewed and regressive iconography found its way into the cult of Elizabeth 1 4 The pre-h(y)st(e)rical goddess image, a vestige of pre-history and pre­ hysteria, reflects the fecundity and excess of the body and draws much association from the concept and the phenomenon ofthe Earth as (m)Other 5 The paleolithic Venus of Willendorf is a prime example of the excess and the opulence, as well as abjection and jouissance attached to the maternal semiotic. She is robust and fecund like an overtly nubile consort. She is compact, round and folded like a turd (see the movie The Thirteenth Warrior, based on Michael Crichton's book, particularly the small stone icon that a Viking holds up on his sword so as not to touch it. Refer to Chapter 5). She is encoded and revered. Ultimately, she is milk, blood and libidinal investments. Gradually, through the eras of spoken history culminating in the written Word, she becomes, on the one hand, the disavowed repressed singularity,6 while on the other hand, she is the milk, tears and fetish for the disenfranchised. This is the telltale transformation she receives through the filter of language, particularly the written Word, which co-opts the skewed goddess effect and incorporates it within the linguistic and iconographic depictions of the Virgin Mary. The distorted appearance of the earth goddess within the Virgin Mary liturgy constitutes not only the co-opting agency of the Law of the Father, but also the myriad folds of the maternal semiotic as it performs its symbiosis within and beyond the Symbolic order. The Virgin Mary Goddess image became Mater D% rosa, Madonna della Misericordia, Maria Regina, and ultimately "alone of her kind," posed on a pedestal. As goddess she retained the maternal, but as the Virgin, a divine singularity. Thus, she was distanced from the Earth. Unofficially she was sanctioned by the Church of Rome as Queen of Heaven and Mother of the Church since the Dark Ages (officially sanctioned as such in 1954 and 1964 respectively). The Church nevertheless censured the Virgin Mary in paradoxical ways. She was detached from carnal knowledge, but not from birthing. She was freed from the stigma of Eve by means ofthe Immaculate Conception and granted, as per Pius XII's dogma (see below), immunity from the grave's bodily decomposition in the Assumption. The Church then acknowledged her as mystically and subliminally part of the Trinity previously thought of as only composed ofthe three incumbents: the Father,

Marianism in the Movie Elizabeth

77

the Son and the Holy Spirit for whom she became daughter, mother (and sister) and spouse, respectively7 in an incestuous caldron of repressed extra­ logical fusion. The subversive significance in this familial arrangement, however, is that she carries with her into the phallocentric trinity traces of the maternal authority from the human pre-lingual condition. She was a person born of and who became a mother and yet is still distinguished for this by God the Father and allowed to rise into heaven without the decrepitude of the dying process as the miracle of the Assumption assumes-once again, an extra-logical doctrine that some deny.8 Thus, the Virgin Mary impinges on phallogocentrism unless she can be co-opted, however obliquely, into the Law of the Father. And culture has succeeded in doing just that by creating an image of a woman's role-model that effectively controls women9 while also and simultaneously succeeding in unveiling, if subliminally, the primal maternal authority and the univocal limits ofthe Symbolic. This is perfectly fitting for the group of religions that are open to maternal mysticism and yet founded emphatically on male dominance. Elizabeth I's iconoclastic father and Church of England founder, Henry VIII, certainly dedicated his life to the concept of male dominance. However, it was Elizabeth's half-sister also born of Henry VIII's loins, Mary I, the Catholic monarch intent on reversing the Protestant reform, who took the Cult of the Virgin to heart and to the streets via abject persecution as we see in Kapur's film. Considering the influence of these two monarchs, Elizabeth's determined family members, it is little wonder that the iconography of the Virgin should factor in Elizabeth I's own iconography and mythology-but in an amorphous plurality and tolerance that ultimately unified the divided Britain. Kristeva, having explored the phenomena of the Cult of the Virgin, describes the psycho-social dynamics in the dissemination of the Virgin iconography laced with the maternal semiotic: A skilful balance of concessions and constraints involving feminine paranoia, the representation of virgin motherhood appears to cro-wn the efforts of a society to reconcile the social renmants ofmatrilinearism and the lUlconscious needs of primary narcissism on the one hand, and on the other the requirements of a new society based on exchange and before long on increased production, which require the contribution of the superego and rely on the symbolic paternal agency." (Kristeva 1987, 258-9)

Kristeva implies that the duality, Woman and the Mother of God have been "reconciled," if not co-opted, in culture. In a sense, the effects of the Law of the Father embedded in the doctrines of the Catholic Church and its effects on culture have salvaged the abjectjouissance of the body-centered

78

Chapter 5

primordial goddess along with her matrilineal implications, but then filtered her effects through the paternal agency oflanguage. Then the Church placed her on a new pedestal of liturgical imagery and dogma and co-opted her, albeit in a less than complete, and porous phallocentric manner. However, the maternal semiotic is extra-lingual and so the goddess's age-old effects seep and leak their subversive influence extra-logically onto the psyche despite culture's disavowal. Still, the collective unconscious and its passion for the primal goddess(es) required another way for displaying the maternal semiotic overtly. Thus, the moment for Elizabeth I had arrived. Without the co-opting of the goddess into the Virgin Queen, Elizabeth, society might lack the overt incorporation of the primordial (m)Other in an image accessible to those disenfranchised ofthe goddess. Plus, the influence of the goddess was further proliferated by means of imperialism and opportunism over the Elizabethan years. Certainly, incorporated in such an exceptionally astute politician as Elizabeth I with her acute sense of self-branding, the conflated iconography of the arcane goddess and the Virgin Mary, Queen of Heaven and Mother of God, has manifest productively in both the phallogocentric as well as the maternal semiotic channels of political advancement. The latent and overt impact of the iconography of Elizabeth I in turn has been driven by culture's 10ng-telTIl cathexis on the arcane goddess traditions that have been always already in syncretisation with the Christian maternal demi-goddess inculcated reluctantly in Western religion.

Elizabeth I and the Maternal Semiotic Elizabeth I was two and a halfyears old when her mother was beheaded, and she was subsequently branded a bastard. She was barely a speaking subject when the (m)Other was severed from her Oedipal equation by her father, Henry VIII. Elizabeth was born of Anne Boleyn who lacked the salient organ, the Symbolic appendage, and who lost her head in a second castration. This early experience with castration no doubt affected Elizabeth. Her age that positioned her at the end of the pre-lingual stage during this maternal abandonment and male posturing-and their effects-certainly suggests a potential in the child Elizabeth for the return of the repressed not only during her bifincated monotheistic upbringing, both Protestant and Catholic, but also during her psychological growth as subject-in-process throughout her life. Martha Reineke explains fascination in abandomnent and rejection with its disavowal of the return of the repressed to the psyche occurring later in life in terms of the Kristevan perspective: What does Kristeva mean by fascinated rejection? With this paradoxical term, Kristeva refers to intertextual practices of negativity--jouissance and

Marianism in the Movie Elizabeth

79

rejection--undertaken by the subject. These practices attest to the work of the unconscious. A maternally marked metaphor, fascinated rejection marks the emergence in the world of a nascent subject in process and on trial. C . . . ) . . . historically, fascinated rejection has alluded to the stance of one who would become the master of its house by repressing all that is heterogeneous, wholly sacrificing to subjective and societal order all vestiges of the lUlbounded economy of the semiotic." (Reineke 39)

Young Elizabeth was certainly "in process" as a subject and "on trial" from the start and given her resilient fortitude, she packaged her interrupted and stunted 'fascinated rejection' into a survival mechanism that implemented the vestiges of the maternal semiotic, the negativity that affillll s, as well as the unconscious that is not quite repressed and that resonates with primal jouissance. At least according to the artistic license in Kapur's film. If she must suffer abandonment, both maternal and paternal, then subjective, independent and heterogenous she shall paradoxically remain-especially in the face of Symbolic disavowal and abject horror. She does not kowtow in her principles to her half-sister Mary I, the abject monarch who fOlllls a cathexis related to the Virgin Mary and situates herself as the mirror image of her father's zeal. Mary I becomes her father in reverse religiously by persecuting Protestants instead of Catholics-both Mary I and Henry VIII's ventures reflect the "historical" cathexis on being "master of its house" and repressing all that is heterogeneous of societal order. Elizabeth varies from both. Elizabeth I, as depicted in the film, has mastered the Law of the Father despite acknowledging her plurality as a subject-in-process. Disavowal of her pre-lingual connection, in Elizabeth's case has not been fully inculcated. She is free to intuitionally implement both the extra-logical force of the repressed pre lingual maternal authority as well as the structure of the Symbolic order-that is, "as her conscience dictates." "The Virgin assumes the paranoid lust for power by changing a woman into a Queen in heaven and a Mother of the earthly institutions (of the Church). But she succeeds in stifling that megalomania by putting it on its knees before the child-god." (Kristeva 1987, 257) Popular interpretations of Queen Elizabeth I's monarchy that allege that the monarch did exploit the cult of the Virgin Mary support Kristeva's take on the paranoid power-lust of the singular phenomenon of the Virgin. Elizabeth reenacts the Virgin Mary state iconically, which, in tum, results in the public eye to a pseudo­ disavowal of megalomania as if she were placing her 0\Vll power ambitions "on its knees before the child-god." Once again, this is what the film suggests. In hindsight, we can argue that the Virgin Queen of England interpreted the Symbolic and the maternal semiotic signs of the times by

80

Chapter 5

implementing the cult of the Virgin within the schism of Christianity (Catholic versus Protest) to perfection in terms of helping her to sustain her role as female monarch. Elizabeth I professed virginitylO and marriage to her citizenry in all its paradoxical Symbolic constructs while fostering its skewed body-centered heterogeneity in poetic and pictorial self­ representations. By doing so, she discovered that the Law of the Father was not able to effectively restrain her in binary opposition. In this regard and considering the censorship of religious imagery in the Protestant worship, her figurative displacement and replacement, in her O\Vll image, of the cult of the Virgin Mary, and vice versa perhaps, established her sovereignty. This phenomenal psychological and iconographic sleight of hand comes into play emphatically in the film Elizabeth. Before focusing entirely on the film in relation to the Virgin Queen(s), our inquiry turns to the examination of the struggle between the written Word and the emergence of the iconography of the Virgin. This discussion will underscore the primal FEMININITY in iconography and motion pictures that arouses artists and spectators as if they were dra\Vll physically, mentally and emotionally to an altered state of the human condition where the repressed has returned and sustained itself metaphorically.

The Virgin Queen(s) and the Written Word Mary, Mother of Jesus The goddess image was depreciated aggressively in the patristic canon and therefore ostracized despite the emergence of the cult of the Virgin. Evenbefore St. Augustine's influential onslaught against Eve as woman and the sexual transmission of a rhetorically imagined original sin, the deliberate marginalisation of women and the goddess was apparent in literate monotheistic societies. ll The Immaculate Conception that results in the Christ's virgin birth is only mentioned few times in the gospels. The first English translation of the New Testament and one of Elizabeth's biblical resources tmnslates Matthew 1 : 1 8 this way: The byrtb of Christe was on this -wyse, When bys mother mary was rnaryed lUlto Joseph, before they cam to dwell togedder, she was [mUlde -with chylde by the holy goost. Then her husbande Joseph beinge a parfect man, and loth to defame her, was rnynded to put her awaye secretly. \¥hill he thus thought, behold the angell of the lord apered lUlto him in slepe sainge: Joseph the sonne of David, feare not to take unto the, Mary thy -wyfe. For that which is conceaved in her is of the holy goost. She shall brynge

Marianism in the Movie Elizabeth

81

forthe a sonne, and thou shalt call his name Jesus. For he shall save his people from theire synnes. All thys was done to fulfill that which was spoken of the lorde be the prpht saynge: Beholde a mayde shall be with chylde, and shall brynge forthe a sonne, and they shall call his name Emanuel, which is a moche to saye be interpretacioun, as God with us. Joseph as sone as he awoke out ofslepe, did as the angell ofthe lorde bade hym, and toke hys wyfe unto hyrn, andknewe her not tyll she had brought forth her fyrst sonne, and called hys name Jesus. (Tyndale 22)

The Book of Luke also references Mary as a virgin when visited by tbe angel Gabriel and yet remains significantly less forthcoming specifically about the immaculate conception: And in the. vj. moneth the angell Gabryel was sent from god lUltO a cite off galile, named nazareth, to a virgin spoused to a man, whose name was Joseph, of the housse ofDavide, and the vergins name was Mary. And the angell went in lUltO her, and sayde: Hayle full of grace, the lorde is with the: blessed arte thou amonge wemen. \¥hen she sawe hyrn, she was abasshed art his saynge: and cast in her mynde what maner of salutatcion that shulde be. And the angell sayde lUltO her: feare not Mary, thou hast fOlUlde grace with god. Loo: though shalt conceave in thy wombe, and shalt beare a childe, and shalt call his name Jesus. He shalbe greate, and shalbe called the sonne offthe hyest. And the lorde god shall geve lUltO hyrn the seate off his father David, And he shall raygne over the housse off Jacob forever, and of his kyngdom shalbe none ende. Then sayd Mary unto the angell: Howe shall this be, seinge that I know no man? And the angell answered, and sayd unto her: The holy goost shall corne apon the, and the power offthe hyest shall overshaddowe the. Therfore also that holy thynge which shalbe borne, shalbe called the sonne of god. (Tyndale 89)

Several telltale signs of intertextual dialectic occur within each gospel verse above as well as between both texts. In Matthew, the angel appears to Joseph in his sleep when her pregnancy is discovered. In Luke's version, the angel Gabriel appears to Mary who is fully awake during the event. Further, Matthew, at tbe end of the verse, implies that Joseph had sexual relations with Mary but not until after Jesus was born-which makes sense since Jesus is credited with having a brother named James in other scriptures. Luke, on tbe other hand, suggests that tbe "holy goost" will affect her some way, and that God's power will "overshadow" her. But Luke stops just short of saying that the conception is consummated by the Holy Ghost. Finally, in Luke we find an Annunciation description tbat reflects tbe popular legend that speaks to the prominence of tbe Virgin Mary apart from Joseph.

82

Chapter 5

Whereas in Matthew Joseph is the one who receives the angelic vision in a dream while Mary remains objectified and peripheral to the event. Not only do the two writers differ in terms of the status of Mary in the proceedings leading to the birth of the Messiah, but Matthew's version, by specifying the appearance of the angel in Joseph's dream, seems to allude to an accessing of the repressed unconscious by dreaming. Joseph's contact with the workings of the Trinity in this conception takes place in the surrealist state of a dream whereas in Luke, the extra-logical experience is afforded directly to Mary while she is conscious. Supported by the irrefutable link to the Immaculate Conception found in Matthew's gospel, Luke's more woman-centered version becomes canon once the cult of the Virgin Mary starts to pervade the European liturgical rituals, specifically in rites concerned with the Immaculate Conception and the Arumnciatioll. Luke's version and its special status given to the Virgin Mary would not have been lost on the precocious Elizabeth as a young student of the New Testament.

Elizabeth I The inconsistent nature of the gospels' recounting of the same events from different perspectives as outlined above coalesces in the arenas of both ritual and institutional identity in a manner that opens space for strategy in manipulating the same. Elizabeth, as a precocious youngster would have recognized the implications of the two differing gospels in relation to women in general and the Virgin Mary specifically. Given popular readings of Elizabeth's political career, especially as it regards the growing Cult of the Virgin Mary, in conjunction with her own education and academic interests, it is plausible and noted historically, as well, that Elizabeth was extremely adept at the spoken and written world. And given the historical archives containing Elizabeth's speeches and writings, it is feasible to argue that Elizabeth's words greatly influenced the contemporary cultural and political currents that in turn fueled her ambition to align herself with the Virgin's acculturated archetypical inspiration. Kapur's filin does support this argument in its depiction of Elizabeth's verbal interactions with political opponents and the public. Elizabeth would have sensed, given her educational background and as she grew into her reign, the religious and political potential in the references to the Virgin in the Church's canon, that is, the potential it would provide in the face of Britain's violent religious schism and her rising future as monarch of England. In addition to having a finger on the religious pulse of her era and full recognition of her precarious role in the political

Marianism in the Movie Elizabeth

83

environment, she also connected extra-consciously to the potential of the maternal semiotic disavowed by culture, altbough still readily apparent and coursing through it. Arguably, she could intuit that tbe secret to the longevity of the cult of the Virgin Mary springs from tbe silent presence of the iconography along with the inherent extra-logical gaps in the written Word. The powerful and voiceless iconography along with tbe sparse written scripture on the Virgin both stood the test of time despite disavowal from the Symbolic. The same extra-Symbolic processes which closely paralleled her

0\Vll

exceptional iconic and political situation via the over­

arching coincidences that she observed and cultivated served her well. She intuited tbe power of tbe myth, the sanctity and the plurality of the concept of virginity, as well as her unexpected virginal

assumption

to Queen of

England, contributed to her uncanny understanding of tbe extra-logical maternal singularity attributed to the Virgin in the canon and in myth. The Immaculate Conception and motherhood resonated to her and her people, but instead of the Motber of God, Elizabeth became tbe self-proclaimed mother of her citizenry. Elizabeth was known for her ability to put togetber words in striking literary and rhetorical fashion verified in her poetic works and above all in her well-documented speeches. One of Elizabeth's lesser known literary achievements

that

demonstrates

her

precocious

perspicacity

in the

apprehension of the relationships between the Symbolic order and tbe maternal semiotic takes the form of an editorialised translation of Queen of Navarre, Margaret Angouleme 's

Le Miroir de l 'ame pecheresse.

The

underlying subject matter of this academic translation work of Elizabeth's demonstrates the significance of her precarious position in the Tudor dynasty in a manner that also prepares her for court politics and tbe complexities of the human condition. Elizabeth was eleven years old when she accomplished this literary marvel. The original text reflects a meditation on the author's part that encompasses several themes that reoccur in the politics, religion and psychology of the times. Elizabeth' s translation verges on adaptation in its editorializing and serves as a microcosm of the cultural transfOlmations that would culminate in her monarchy. Marc

Shell

succinctly argues for the importance ofthis translation in the understanding of tbe women stakeholders of this period in tbe British Court and specifically for understanding Elizabeth as a precocious girl in the Tudor line:

What is most interesting about the "Glass" may go some way toward explaining its relative obscurity. Elizabeth's work expresses, as we shall see, an ideology both important and discomforting in its personal and historical aspects. Its treatment of bastardy and incest, for example, has potentially

84

Chapter 5 disconcerting ramifications for ideas of liberty and politics generally and ilhuninates the historical rise of the English nation and biographical role of Elizabeth herself. For the most profound themes of the "Glass" involve the reworking and expansion in nationalist and secular terms of such medieval theological notions concerning kinship as lUliversal siblinghood, whereby all men and women are equally akin, and dorrnitioll, wherein the Virgin Mary plays at once the role of mother and daughter as well as wife. Above all, the "Glass," whose French original had a subtitle about the hlUllan conflict between flesh and spirit (Discord elan! en /'homme par contrariete de l'esprit et de la chair), concerns the transmutation of the desire for or fear of physical incest into the desire for or fear of spiritual incest. It thus reflects the beginnings of a new ideal and real political organization, which, partly out of Elizabeth's mvn concerns with incest and bastardy and partly out of political exigencies of the time, England's great monarch introduced as a kind of "national siblinghood" to which she was simultaneously the mother and wife. (Shell, 6-7)

This exemplar of Elizabeth's early journey through adult subjects on religious and psychosexual themes speaks for her sense of self-possessed female identity. At the age of eleven Elizabeth connects multi-linguistically to aspects of conventional femininity (and intuitionally, FEMININITY), the limitations of female influence in society and the monarchy that all signal the symbiosis and subversive interactions between the maternal semiotic and the Law of the Father. The featured artefact in Shell's essay as well as Elizabeth's literary translation is the telltale mirror or "glass," which becomes, several centuries later, the symbol for Lacan's crucial developmental stage that amounts to a self-reflexive threshold signalling the entry into subjectivity. Elizabeth references this crucial threshold just by choosing Queen of Navarre Margaret's melancholy text to translate. This translation signifies a turning point in Elizabeth's precarious and exhilarating young life that reinforces her identification with the pre-lingual maternal singularity as enunciated by the recurring constructs of the Virgin Mary.

The Maternal Semiotic and the Virgin(s) The Annnnciation Early in the film, Kapur's Elizabeth enters the regal sanctuary of her half-sister, Queen Mary I, 'Bloody Mary,' that is resplendent with iconography of the Virgin Mary. We described this scene above in terms of a turning point for Elizabeth's rise to monarch of England. It should also be made clear how important this interaction between the two sisters

Marianisrn in the Movie Elizabeth

85

emphasizes the Virgin Mary, which Kapur's film depicts eloquently. The desperate pleading of Queen Mary to try unsuccessfully to make Elizabeth promise not to "lake away from the people the consolations of the Blessed Virgin, their Holy Mother," sets the scene's hidden objective to emphasize Elizabeth's familial connection to the Cult of the Virgin. Plus, when Elizabeth ends the discussion in a manner diplomatic and yet fIrm in her detelTIlination to follow her 0\Vll conscience as Queen, we get the impression that Elizabeth truly believes in her fortitude as progressive thinker. When Mary backs down, Elizabeth survives the singular death­ defying moment of her youth, as streamlined narratively in this scene of the film. This scene, cinematically constructed and rich with nuances of the maternal semiotic, focuses on the telltale verbal exchange and the opulent display of the Virgin Mary imagery and so coalesces the historical record for Elizabeth as well as the breadth of her self-possessed strength as the future monarch and eventual living effigy of the Holy Mother, Virgin Queen of Heaven. Elizabeth, Virgin Queen of the Church of England and mother of her citizens. Wben Queen Mary I dies, Elizabeth assumes the throne but not before the film chooses the event of the announcement of Mary's death to the sequestered Elizabeth. The film's intent is to revisit the Virgin Mary mythology in an extra-logical and cinematic way. The event of this announcement is bracketed by fades to and from absolute white that signal a spiritual intertext in the making and thereby takes the first step in attaching the subsequent scene to the biblical Amrunciation according to Luke. The monarchy's representative, like God's envoy to Mary, appears before Elizabeth in a surprise moment of life-changing significance. The stylistic trope of fades to white before and after the scene, also signals in poetic grandeur, a departure from the linear, sutured structure of the mainstream film by drawing attention to the cinematic transitions that comprise a bookends effect around the scene. This breach in illusionist structure has a payoff in the proclamation from the envoy: "The Queen is Dead, Long Live the Queen!" just after Elizabeth receives Mary's royal ring. All this in a composition dominated by a large tree in the foreground dwarfIng the crucial event, which is both paradoxically pastoral and regal. The unorthodox use of this bracketing in the film with the interjection of the briefwhite-screen dissolves suggests as much spirituality as it does virginity in an intertextual manner and so remains consistent with the themes explored in the fIlm. The rather fOlTIlal composition of the main shot in the bracketed sequence reinforces the separateness of Elizabeth "alone (of her sex)" in the middle ofthe frame with attending maids like a chorus of angels at a distance and the messenger also at a distance bowing towards the new

86

Chapter 5

monarch. At the end of the scene, Elizabeth proclaims her approval in a triumphant manner tapered with a telltale caveat: "This is the Lord's doing and it is marvellous in our eyes."

The Assumption In referencing the Virgin Mary in this scene with the allusion to the Annunciation, Kapur further acknowledges the multifaceted, extra-logical importance of the Virgin as metaphor. Kristeva explains the significance of the Virgin by referring to the heterogeneity she brings to the univocal Symbolic: " . . . extending to the extra-linguistic regions of the unnamable, the Virgin Mother occupied the tremendous territory on this and that side of the parenthesis oflanguage. She adds to the Christian trinity and to the Word that delineates their coherence the heterogeneity they salvage." (Kristeva 1987, 50) Kapur's interpretation of Elizabeth's jubilant assumption to the monarchy with its overtones of biblical events, signals the heterogeneity of the Virgin that England will salvage in Elizabeth their queen in this period of lU1lllitigated semiotic cathexis and the \Vfitten Word.

The Eyes and Ears of Heterogeneity Heterogeneity in its multifaceted, contrasting, and extra-logical implications, surrounds the cult of the Virgin and the cult of Elizabeth. One example of this pluralistic scope of Elizabeth's existence is featured in her officially sanctioned virginal state(s) juxtaposed with her relationship to Sir Robert Dudley who is featured in legend and in the movie as Elizabeth's lover. In the one scene that shows them in the royal bed making love, the transparent drapes that surround the bed have eyes and ears painted on them in a reference to the Rainbow Portrait of Elizabeth in which she wears a dress decorated with ears and eyes to represent the vigilance of her courtesans who infolTIl her of the goings on in the court. However, transferred to the Virgin Queen's bed, the reference is conflated with a surrealist enunciation of the maternal semiotic as much as the implication of courtesan voyeurs privy to Elizabeth's romantic interludes-depicted in this scene by her hand maids overlooking Elizabeth and Robert's tryst. In specific telTIlS of the maternal semiotic, the eyes and ears factor as disembodied organs and body parts, that, in conjunction with the sexual activity and a brief appearance of an aroused nipple, reflect an argument that Kristeva presents referring to the Virgin Mary: "The Virgin obstructs the desire for murder or devouring by means of a strong oral cathexis (the breast), valorization of pain (the sob), and incitement to replace the sexed

Marianisrn in the Movie Elizabeth

87

body with tbe ear of understanding." (Kristeva 1987, 257) The drapes in the boudoir of Kapur's Virgin Queen (re)present tbe eye that sobs, tbe ear of understanding and the corporal signifier of the oral cathexis. These objects are body-centered and precede the Symbolic. They reference the maternal semiotic as well as the return of the repressed. The film's pictorial emphasis on these signs of extra-logical and surrealist incongruity bolsters the film's theme of heterogeneity that colludes with, but also flies in tbe face of tbe Symbolic order.

The Iconography of the Virgin before the Law Soon Elizabeth's reign suffers a derailment because her atmies are defeated in Scotland. In her moment of anguish over this seemingly obvious sign connoting incompetence as leader, she falls to her knees dejected and vents her tears. Then she looks up to see a huge painting of her deceased father King Henry VIII. Kapur skews the expected male-centered inspirational cliche subtly by lending emphasis to the strong influence of the maternal semiotic in Elizabeth's life. In front of Henry VIII portrait Kapur has positioned a cloth-covered statue of a fOlTIl reminiscent of the Virgin with Child. The covering of the statue is an historical reference to the treatment of the images of the Virgin and the Saints by Protestants who have censored icons during the RefolTIlation because they are considered objects of idolatry. The polysemy of connections and implications between the elements in the composition are familial, political and uncanny. The placement of the canvas-veiled statue, the Virgin tethered as if an abject object, plus tbe fact that the dyadic body ofmother and child seems prepared for disposal, seem to accentuate and conceal that the Virgin in the overall composition precedes and supersedes the Symbolic order as (re)presented by the colossal portrait of Henry VIII. There is a plurality and a binary opposition enunciated here. Henry VIII's portrait itself, an iconic (re)presentation of tbe Law of the Father, is subtly diminished altbough visible in the background, as if to reinforce the subliminal semiotic presence in the foreground of the camouflaged statue of the Virginal, maternal fOlTIl with what appears to be the form of the baby Jesus. These elements of tbe composition conjure the pre-lingual developmental stage at the moment that Elizabeth, as if regressed to the genderless pre-lingual stage, recognizes in the painting the outside presence ofthe tbird party, tbe paternal subject who is separate from tbe (m)Otber and the pansexual prelingual child barely distinguishable in her arms. The residual traces of the maternal Object manifest obliquely in tbe other abject signs surrounding Elizabeth: tbe rope like a severed serpentine umbilical cord hangs from the top of the frame;

88

Chapter 5

the decrepit cloth-covered shapes that contain soft lines and yet frighten because they contain uncarmy fOlTIlS made of cold stone and death; the dirt and filth of abandonment in the air ofthe storeroom. As the subject-an-trial, At the end of the scene, Elizabeth recovers and slices herself from this oblique Oedipal drama/trauma and leaves the storage area detelTIlined to not fail. The movie thus foreshadows, via semiotic Marian iconography, subtle but salient in this transitional scene, that the Virgin is becoming more and more the source of and inspiration for the distinguishing breadth of her historical, political and extra-logical awareness.

The Abject Virgin Not long afterwards, however, the abject resurfaces as Elizabeth sanctions violence against the Catholics who are conspiring for her downfall in an attempt at forcing a return of the Church's dominance in England. Walsingham, Elizabeth's Joint Secretary of State, initiates a pogrom and we witness the death of a Catholic bishop while the cast shadow of a small statue ofthe Virgin with Child is projected on the bloody wall in the firelight as ifto indicated that the Virgin were watching over the entire assassination powerlessly as the slumped body bleeds out. The subsequent montage of state-sanctioned murders features the abject: the bishop flagellates his back to a bloody pulp; one of the treasonous conspirators sits on a communal wood plank toilet attending to body functions; and another victim, Norfolk, is arrested while consorting with his mistress who betrayed him to Walsingham. Then Norfolk is beheaded for treason. Soon, and in a display of the abject and ofjouissance, the four dismembered heads of the prime traitors are displayed on stakes in gruesome detail setting up paradoxically the culminating burst of semiotic Marianism in the movie. In the aftermath of the pogrom, Elizabeth languishes in her chapel tormented about her role as phallic Queen. Walsingham counsels her that "all men need something greater than themselves to look up to and to worship." Every shot in which Queen Elizabeth finds herself in this soul­ searching scene, contains what appears to be Elizabeth's personal statue of the Virgin Mary with the Baby Jesus. Every shot except for one shot that arrives at the turning point when Elizabeth seems to heed the advice of her council, Walsingham, when he says cryptically: "They have found nothing to replace her," referring to the Virgin Mary. In this shot the camera framing is the closest to Elizabeth and at her eye-level for emphasis and this is significant because all the other shots of her are from a high angle looking down on her as if from the POV of a divine presence, perhaps the (m)Other goddess, the Holy Virgin Mary. The last shot of the sequence also varies

Marianisrn in the Movie Elizabeth

89

from this high angle strategy and consists of a closeup on the statue of the Virgin Mary's face and replicating the relative low position of Elizabeth looking up at the statue's face, however the camera then cranes upward while tilting down keeping the Virgin's stone face in the center ofthe frame. This is a curious camera movement strategy for ending the sequence because it draws so much attention to itself. Plus, if we analyze the beginning of the shot as from Elizabeth's perspective, then the subsequent camera movement in the shot seems to give her an ability that exceeds the human-at the very least it indicates the possibility that she is able to levitate, figuratively if not physically. But when we cut away from this shot to another scene, the message of the rising shot seems to be more metaphorical suggesting Queen Elizabeth is about to self-elevate her stature to at least the level of, ifnot higher, than the Virgin Mary in the eyes of her citizenry. And this, she effectively accomplishes in a surprising and abject display in the final scene of the filin.

Conclusion The soul-searching jouissance depicted in the above described scene reflects the maternal semiotic that Kapur uses to form an impression of singularity in Elizabeth's resolve and the effect of the scene bleeds over into the religious, the sacrificial and the abject during the ultimate scene of the film. In the last few shots ending the film, Elizabeth assumes the pedestal of worship on her throne figuratively and physically after sacrificing her hair to scissors, which connotes the transfOlmation from her earthly/carnal self to the goddess anomaly that she becomes in mimetic display of an iconic Virgin Queen. At one point, her hair shorn, she states "I have become a virgin." In the final scene, as she ascends to the throne, she crosses the great hall in stone-cold white-lead makeup as the members of her court, surprised at her change of appearance, follow her with their shocked, yet acquiescent eyes. She then mounts the raised platform to sit at her throne with a bearing more resolute than the contentious, complicit imitation of the Virgin in her private chapel. She has become alone among her sex: queen, mother, and spouse to her country. That is, she has become in excess of subjectivity, a singularity-in-progress, a singularity-on-trial: The Virgin Queen (m)Other of her Citizenry.

PART 3 : SPIELBERG'S (M)OTHER DREAM(WORKS)

The work of Steven Spielberg pushes the boundaries of the artistic envelope of the commercial filmmaking world creating in its expanding wake films from delightfully fatuous box office blockbusters to poignantly dark visions of political-religious and science-fiction storytelling that draws on the technological reach of the Hollywood cinematic apparatus. His work demonstrates the scope of an artist tainted and yet boosted by the mainstream movie machine, which results in bursts of signifiance and overall in the expansion and the emichment of the artistic scope in commercial film arenas. Although Spielberg's work is noted for its recurring absent father and orphaned-boy themes, the maternal semiotic in his films has been miss­ recognized and so mirrors culture's meconnaissance of the primal maternal ordonnament in favor of the Oedipal phallus. Acceding to some degree to these tendencies in the analysis of Spielberg's work, film scholar Andrew Gordon, does, however, imply a much broader reading in his fOlmidable book on Spielberg, Empire of Dreams: The Science Fiction and Fantasy Films of Steven Spielberg. Gordon makes the connection to the (m)Other theme underpinning the lost boy syndrome in Spielberg's work by arguing that these boys in Spielberg's films seek a mother/child reunion­ interestingly enough, he cites the scene of the boy hiding in the latrine in Schindler's List as an example of abjection in the sarne paragraph as he identifies the theme in Spielberg films of boys in peril seeking their mother-as if to reinforce a kind of correlation between excrement as abjection, and the (m)Other. It is not coincidental that abjection is a major aspect of the maternal semiotic especially in Kristeva's writings. Gordon intuits this importance-a kind of condensation-perhaps from his prior extensive research into psychoanalytic literary theory, as well as his acknowledgment of the powerful and dark, pre-lingual imagery in Spielberg's expansive moviemakng palette. 1 Three films exemplify Spielberg's intuitional connection to primal FEMININITY and the maternal semiotic in a concise fashion. Other fihns of his are less coalesced in this regard-although one, Schindler's List

92

Part 3

(1993)-not analyzed in this tome-does approach the abject in the NAZI pogroms, and so implements, as mentioned in the above paragraph, the maternal semiotic. But the richly dark and heroic Holocaust remembrance film remains a precursor to Spielberg's acuity to come in the intuitive and increasing unveiling of the maternal semiotic in his work. The three films in this study, A.!, : Artificial Intelligence (2001), Minority Report (2002) and Munich (2005) surpass all Spielberg's other fihns to date in coalesced signifiance on the movie screen.

CHAPTER 6

A.I: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, SPIELBERG' S WORMHOLE TO THE REAL

A specific Spielberg film transports the viewer as if through an uncanny wormhole 1 attached to the Real (Ie vreel 2 )-which is the ineffable impossibility and the foreclosure of the sign occurring in psychosis3 that always already forms a boundary for and within the speaking subject. That film of Spielberg's is A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001), which takes the viewer on a psycho-linguistic and linaginary trip departing from the Symbolic realm to arrive at the Real, a non-sequitur to the human condition. This germinal, Sci-Fi foray into the Oedipal morass, has transmogrified Spielberg into "Psy-Fi" cinema's idiot savant; or more accurately, it has transubstantiated him into Science Fiction's variant of Lacan's "sujet­ suppose-savoir," i.e., occupying a psychoanalyst's therapeutic position in his capacity as maker of psychoanalytic-oriented filins. Further, on the shoulders of Sci-Fi master, Stanley Kubrick-original writer of the filin­ Spielberg creates a jarringly accessible cine-treatise on the limitations of the always already phallogocentric Symbolic, a symptom of sUbjectivity. A.I. 's enunciation and display of the pre-lingual unheimlich that is subversively symbiotic and yet disavowed in the human condition, drives home the realization that gaps and problematic suturing exists in the Symbolic order through which the maternal semiotic leaks and signals the always already existing potential for the Real via annihilation and psychosis. The display of the uncanny, the maternal semiotic, subverts prohibitions and coherence, but also indexes the more extreme potential for psychic armihilation and bliss, that is the Real-mherently inconceivable and abys51l1al to human culture. In terms of the filin suggesting subliminally that the Real can be depicted in a filmic tableau, the final scene ofA.!, (re)produces an imagined and an imaged echo or effigy of the ultimate human lack (annihilation) in the depiction of a lone speaking-automaton, all alone after the obliteration of human kind, a robot child alone in the world, and reflexive of, yet obliquely opaque to, human speaking-subjectivity. At the end of the filin, David, the cyborg Pinocchio, remains marooned on earth now a museum to

94

Chapter 6

the utter annihilation of humanity, which, for the viewer, suggests the always already insubstantiality of the Symbolic order, and tbe dissolution oftbe Name ofthe Father, language, as symptom of human self-identity and presence. This cataclysmic film utterance reverberates unexpectedly off the screen into our suddenly frigid heart of hearts. And the film's last apocalyptic cinematic take, like an orphaned signifier filled with absence, leaves tbe Real not unrealizable: if the Symbolic order is humankind's symptom and its raison d'etre, as will be argued in this chapter, then Spielberg's filin provides us an ad hoc "talking cure" for this nagging prodrome via its cinematic suture/syntax play and sensory display(s) that (re)present finally and utterly tbe dissipation of the Law while eclipsing the visceral unconscious that makes up human existence(s).

Through Spielberg's Oedipal!Apocalyptic Eyes: Kubrick's Sci-Fi Pinocchio During the 1980s and 90s, Stanley Kubrick developed A.!, for the big screen from a short story by Brian W. Aldiss (Super-Toys Last All Summer Long). Eventually Kubrick corresponded with Spielberg about the project and he grew to realize that it might be better off in Spielberg's hands. After Kubrick's death, Spielberg definitively picked up the mantle and finished the project, an AmbliniStanley Kubrick production, by making it as much as possible his own including the rewriting of the script. "Stanley was sitting on the seat behindrne, saying, 'No, don't do that!' I felt like I was being coached by a ghost! I finally just had to kind of be disrespectful to the extent that I needed to be able to -write this, not from Stanley's heart, but from mine . . . I can't know what Stanley knew. I can't be who Stanley was, and I'll never be who Stanley might have been." (Abramowitz quoting Spielberg, 2001)

Despite Aldiss's misgivings on the matter 4 , but certainly with a posthumous nod from Kubrick, Spielberg spends much of the filin illustrating the pre-lingual unheimlich, the Imaginary, via aPinocchio-esque tale about a child-replicant named David. Throughout tbe film, the pristine boy-android remains trapped in a perpetual whirlpool of faux proto-Oedipal drives. Further, David (re)presents an existence filled with maudlin, at times mawkish, episodes of dyadic splitting from the (faux) maternal Object. At one point in the film, the hesitant and still grieving mother, Monica, looks from a room toward a door with a window full of beveled vertical contours for privacy and sees tbe newly brought home David who looks up and back at her. His gaze is replicated in each narrow bevel as if his face were sliced

A.L Artificial Intelligence, Spielberg's Wormhole to the Real

95

and repeated in small sections several times resulting in an uncarmy, disorienting figure of a fragmented young boy. The mother image wants to remain estranged from this faux robot boy who her husband has brought home to replace their comatose son. Once the mother, Monica, imprints herself on David's artificial intelligence forming a pelTIlanent imitation of the maternal dyad, A.!, shows us multiple iterations of David's separation anxiety that would nOlTIlally have tapered off for a real child with age after the dissolution of the real maternal dyad. Spielberg's film, however continues repeating the maternal dyad trope over and over again all the way to the film's cataclysmic, skewed eschatological ending. After ending the fihn at the bottom ofthe ocean with David trapped at the altar ofthe Blue Fairy, then, like an eerie epilogue 2000 years later, the film jumpstarts again and regresses one final time to reference two (m)Otherly themes: first, the depiction of the catastrophic impossibility of the Real as background for David's inability to separate fully from the faux (m)Other-object brought back from the dead, and, second, Sci-Fi's recurring apocalyptic theme depicted here in the irony­ laced form of a greenhouse-gas infected Mother Earth. A Mother Earth who appears to have purged her-Real-self of the parasitic, egotistic symptom of humankind. Serving as hollow nonhuman reverberations of human existence, the only human derived entities left behind in the frozen aftermath of human extinction at the end of the film, are the impervious, unchanging cyborg child, David, and his robotic teddy bear. After a truly alienating intervention which will be explained more fully below, David, in the last shot of the film, remains pictured in bed with the peacefully re-animated, then peacefully dead again faux (m)Other, Monica Swinton, while the sardonically omniscient narrator (credited as the The Specialist and voiced by Ben Kingsley) waxes poetic stating that David is experiencing his first sortie into the realm of dreams, "where dreams are born." Left with this uncanny image, the viewer must consider the extra-logical (im)possibility that David shall indeed become a real boy, succeeding in his Pinocchio-esque aspirations. However, questions surface insidiously: Will David, as a real boy, succumb eventually to the fate of his cloned, ephemeral (m)Other object and die a human death? Or, more plausibly, will he continue to exist, not as a real boy, but as an animated artifact of phallogocentric hubris? Will he then remain an excavated relic, a remnant of an extinct culture under the curatorship of the beings that found him 2000 years after he short-circuited at the bottom of the ocean? And what of the slick humanoid creatures that salvaged David from his comatose position at the foot of the submerged Blue Fairy mannequin-who and what are they? All is left disconcertingly unanswered.

96

Chapter 6

In the end, Spielberg's "Oedipalytic5" vision, and this uncanny tale remain purposefully florid and stillborn.

Suture: The Problematic Margins of the Symbolic Order within the Commercial Cinematic Apparatus As with language, the systemic processes of the commercial cinematic apparatus rely on oppositions as the structural unit. Mimetically linked to the binary underpinnings of phallogocentrism as discourse, the movies favor narrative convention over experimentation, male filmmakers over female, and, in telTIlS of film narrative techniques, seamless continuity over fragmentation. Further, the movies, like language, foster collusion on the part ofthe viewer-triggered by the processes of narcissism(s) and suture(s). Driven by the systematic cinematic apparatus, the spectator expects and delights6 in being lulled into ego-based narcissism and the traces of primary narcissism by the immediacy of the specular field that brings jouissance on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the Symbolic-saving 'suturing'-the stitching over-ofthe Real-revealing gaps and fissures at the margins ofthe narrative-cinematic system of signs. Within the contrasting semiotic and discursive space in the commercial cinematic apparatus, the movies (re)produce a subliminal primal-dyadic fantasy within the womb of the cinema and the narrative experience, that is dependent on the illusion of phallogocentrism via the sinister agency, misrecognition, and the collusion­ seeking quality of suture to disguise the movie as discursive construct. Ironically enough, given the logocentricity of Symbolic discourse, suture originated as a body-centered procedure, the purpose of which focuses on the promotion of stitched-over severed boundaries, and often the appearance of invisibility at those boundaries, which is frequently attempted and failed to achieve in medicine when a wound is stitched up. Suture in medicine frequently results in a telltale scar. In the discursive sense, suture attempts to abolish the subversive extra-logical elements leaking through the gaps and fissures in univocal linearity and binary opposition Plus, suture tries diligently to hide the stitched seams of suture in discourse. In the movies, suture, an evolving process, capitalizes on the movie-viewer's nOlmal sublimation of the semiotic triggers of urphantasien. 7 Narrative film suture consists of an evolution of strategies that has required years of incorporating and learning the structure and the techniques of narrative cinema and adapting proto-lingual and trompe 1 'oeil illusions of continuity. These ocular manipulations8 help produce a "stitching together" of the signifying chain of pre-fabricated parts of the cinema narrative that work to capture the spectator/speaking subject within

97

A.L Artificial Intelligence, Spielberg's Wormhole to the Real

the suturing processes of cinematic discourse. 9 The system of signs that cinema and language create attempts to "stitch over" the fragmentation of the spectator/speaking subject vis-a-vis the screen resulting in a faux coherence-seen as useful but inherently self-misrepresenting nonetheless. In other words, the recurring "stitching over" in the movies binds the spectator into a sliding series of signifiers in a similar marmer as does language. Suture in film, which is inherently a univocal-resistant system of 10 signs, works to paradoxically (re)institute and, paradoxically, subvert subjectivity within the war m

chorall of the cinematic apparatus.

sleight-of hand stitching along and across the raw edges between sliding signifiers that The strategies of suture in commercial filmmaking create

introduce gaps between absence/presence, character, mise-en-scene, shot and scene. The 'classical' suture strategies of simulating transparency and continuity techniques along with the therapeutic healing/scarri ng processes 12 of filmic allure serve to mask, and force back, the polymorphic, libidinal incoherence inherent to narrative discourse. All the while, the cover-up, the stitching processes of suture in film overtly fuse and reduce, like language, the mar ginalized pluralities of cinematic discourse through which the maternal

semiotic

always

already

seeps

and

then

pulses

into

(un)consciousness. Suture in a film, then, cannot avoid emphasizing the eerie recognition by the speaking subject of the external gaze of the absent presence, as much as it cannot avoid emphasizing its intent to cover up and bind-in the identification of the spectator into its own cinematic system of sliding siginfier s, which (re)presents a qinrky mimesis of the Symbolic.

Suture's "Absent One" and the Scopic Drive The most telltale aspect of suture in narrative film, and the most psychoanalytically significant feature, is reflected in the initial moments of the film, that is, in most cases, the first shot-a shot may consist of up to thousands of frames of film and can last from seconds to several minutes. The opening shot, any shot can also consist of multiple camera movements and other camera and postproduction techniques. The opening shot in

A.I.

(possibly handheld-suggested by tbe slight erratic movement, whetber intended or not, and constituted by two nearly indiscemibly different shots edited together) depicts a stor my seascape at eye-level to the wave from an undefined vie\vpoint with very little camera movement. Nothing more-a seascape left to languish on the screen for a relatively long time, a "long take." Since tbe point of view of this opening shot has not yet been attached to a character in the film-nor will it ever be visually attached to someone's POV-as we will discuss more fully later-the shot gradually begins to

98

Chapter 6

cause a de-centering feeling of loss that soon troubles the spectator despite and because of the accompanying male voice-over. However, this lack is not experienced until after the viewer, through the agency of the scopic drive,B (mis)recognizes the immediate and short-lived euphoria of bodily self-presence, self-positioning and masterly self-possession vis-a-vis the image before heir. Shle senses a bliss, better yet, ajouissance, 14 as if to say "I'm in control, I projected that representation, and I O\Vll the gaze." The bliss is just a blush, and short-lived. Soon, however, after what Oudart describes as the viewer's immediate 'erotic' 15 jouissance, the honeymoon is over: the spectator/subject-to-be suddenly finds herself positioned in the space that is not hers as she recognizes her vie\vpoint is limited by the frame, the POV of the someone else. She fmds herself in the position of an Other's gaze provided for her as she deciphers that the frame, the filmic field, is a positioning that exists outside her diminishing sense of dominion. In sum, the opening shot in most films-as is the case in A.I., is not yet designated by the film as a signifi;ing field; neither is it designated as signifying while the spectator experiences the first immediate blissful, misconceived reaction to the opening image projected on the screen. However, every silver lining has it's cloud: soon during that inchoate and momentary silver-halide glow, 16 the spectator, starts to sense paradoxically the presence of an absence, the position of an unknown field-of-view signaled by the actual frame of the film in the first shot, which designates the position of the Other's gaze, and not the look of the narrative's stand-in for the viewer. These narrative stand-ins, furthemlOre, are characters of the world of the narrative who assuage the spectator's 0\Vll sense of split being and split spectatorship that she has grO\Vll to expect when entering the movie theater. Thus, in the case ofA.I., the opening shot of the film presents to the viewer an unheimlich viewpoint that Oudart describes as the perspective of the "Absent One."17 For Oudart, the concept ofthe Absent One in films, as with discourse in general, corresponds to the creation of a lack, in this case an absent POV and what it "sees," that has the potential to de-center the viewer 18, and which actually prepares her for entry into the cinematic discourse!'. The spectator's displeasure tums to desire for filling the lack and so finds herself receptive to the suture effect. After this unexpected jolt from the Absent Other, the narrative constitutes itself, usually in the following shot of the fibn often forming the second half of a "shot-reverse­ shot" syntax in film when the 'Aha !' moment of (self-reflexive) epiphany occurs. This second shot usually solves the problem of the Absent One since the "reverse shot" often reveals the character that happens to be O\Vller of the camera's gaze at that point in the film. The viewer tends to submit to the system of the film by identifying with the characters and the story rather

A.L Artificial Intelligence, Spielberg's Wormhole to the Real

99

than worry about a more philosophical Other that cannot readily be explained. This moment of identification with the characters amounts to the (re)activation of the ego-Ideal experience of the baby in Lacan's mirror stage, a recursive syndrome and specular effect. But in this case, instead of the spectator's 0\Vll reflection in a mirror, the film and its characters serve as idealized stand-ins in the film's processes of subjectifying the viewer. A misrecognition effect occurs that causes a scenario of psychic (re)fragmentation and the spectator's split in shot 1 upon recognizing an Other's gaze, and then with shot 2, the film produces for the spectator a position of self identification with the stand-in character(s) in the chain of signifiers comprising the cinematic discourse. And that is the moment when the suspension of disbelief ([mis]recognition), when the return to subjective positioning kicks in. The viewer submits to the signifying order and identifies with subjectivity in the narrative film-that is, if the chain of cinematic signifiers follows the logic of suture and fOlTIlS a relatively closed set of narrative cinematic strategies of coherence. To recap, briefly, the suturing process in film is analogous on several levels to Lacan's concept of subjectivity as a recursive (re)signifying journey through the falling dominos effects of the mirror stage, the Oedipal dynamics and the effects of the external presence both specular and paternally systematic of the Name of the Father (the Absent One) that is found lacking in the prelingual dyad.20 This chain of causes and effects is very much a structure based on the epistemologically visible21 dimension that is signification, and of primary concern to our discussion of cinematic discourse.22 This cascading domino-like signifying cause and effect chain is certainly traceable in most narrative films, including A.!, Once the film transitions away from the position of the Absent One reflected in the first shot of the film and the film's different scenes, the subsequent shots structurally and narratively assuage the primal fear associated with the absent gaze, and, by means of suturing23, the 'stitching up' of the uncanny gaps and pockets of invisibility in the constructed visible sphere, the film shores up Symbolic discourse. As Stephen Heath so (re)presents the process of 'binding-in' that suture in a Symbolic system of signs produces for the ego and the subject: At the end of the suturing function is the ego, the "me": "it's me!," the little linguistic scenario of the ego - that I am the only one who can say, can say insofar as I am one. The ego is not to be confused with the subject: it is the fixed point of imaginary projection and identification, where the subject as such is always on the side of the symbolic, the latter the order of its very constitution: but then, precisely, there is no ego without a subject, terrain of its necessity and its hold: function of the symbolic, suture is towards the

100

Chapter 6 imaginary, the moment ofjunction - standing in, a taking place, a something, a some one there. (Heath 1 9 8 1 , 86)

Once the "standing in," "a some one there" and "It's me!" moment occurs, that is, once the initial sense of a kind of syncopated identification with the film occurs, the speaking subject in flux with the repetition of absence (Absent One) and presence (Subjectivity) in the film's univocal linearity,24 this is when the legislative story-structure, the syntax element of the cinematic narrative, anchors the viewer in the film by means of her identification with the main character(s); along with the 'binding in' effect of the suturing machinations from all the conventional cinematic techniques.25 This chain of cinematic signifiers also consists of the ignored symbiotic relations discourse sustains with the maternal pre-lingual resonance that are the residues of both the originary specular event(s) and the incipient unconscious that Lacan envisions as like a language. This symbiosis is specifically traceable through the inherent maternal semiotic imagery and pulses in film: the rhythms of the editing and the sounds, the flickering patterns of the light and the intermittent gaps between the frames of the film among other sensuous and sensorial stimuli. There is, however, an initial point at which that nascent signifying chain in the film becomes concretely visible, as SilvelTIlan paraphrases Heath's analogy: "The syncopated operation of suture is first successful at the moment that the viewing subject says, 'Yes, that's me,' or 'That's what I see. '" (SilvelTIlan 1983, 205) From then on, as we mentioned previously, the film's discourse enunciates the viewer as subject ofthe film discourse,26 disavowing the uncanny allure and the threat of the scopic field and its Absent One.

The Absent One Speaks:

The Specialist

A further analysis of the opening sequence inA.I. illustrates the concept ofthe "Absent One," and the multiplex potential of suture. The opening shot of the overbearing ocean is lacking narrative attachment: it has not yet been established as a character's POV, nor do we know yet if it ever will. The Absent One's gaze, though, is not only established visually in this first shot by means of the frame that designates the ulterior field of view, but it is also linked by association to an accompanying voice-over that remains also undesignated at this point in the story. The masculine resonating voice-over that describes the effect of global warming in terms of the rising oceans, is perfolTIled by Sir Ben Kingsley, which further reinforces a sense ofpresence of the Name of the Father in this "lack" or "castration" component of the

A.L Artificial Intelligence, Spielberg's Wormhole to the Real

101

suture system. In a more conventional film, the next shot would offer closure to the Absent One's gaze by means of a reverse shot revealing the narrative's stand-in for the viewer, and that narrative-constituting shot would consist of the main character looking out over the seascape. We long for and expect to see a shot of a character played by Ben Kingsley since, recorded over the opening open-sea visuals, we recognize his Hollywood "A-list" voice that seems to be laying claim to this opening shot. However, our expectations are foiled because the next shot also (re)presents the Absent One. Shot 2 consists of an android-appearing statue behind a wall of glass upon which rain pummels dO\vn in rivulets. The Absent Narrator continues his speech as the shot widens but when his voice stops, 27 a different male voice (that of William Hurt, another highly recognizable voice in Hollywood) starts up. The source of this voice slowly appears in frame as the shot widens and Professor Hobby (William Hurt) who is the figure coming into frame, fmishes his first speech of the film in a closeup composition. Finally, we are presented a character visually and aurally attached to the world ofthe narrative--even though this shot still echoes the Absent One's POV since an actual reverse shot has not occurred yet. Plus, the beginning ofthe shot does not yet reveal a character ofthe story and the Ben Kingsley voice-over has continued over from Shot 1 before the character Professor Hobby is finally revealed in Shot 2. It is only after Kingsley's opening voice-over halts and after this widening second shot of the film reveals Professor Hobby for the first time, that the film finally cuts to an establishing shot for the movie (re)presenting the first narrative signifying convention. The expository shot depicts the owners of the narrativized gaze(s), amidst whom the viewer finds herself in the crowd and gazing over the shoulders of others. And so, the film starts to constitute its discourse. In this establishing shot, Shot 3 of the fihn, the owners of the fictional gaze include both Professor Hobby and his pro-filmic interlocutors sho\Vll in the same wide framing. However, the cinematic suture, that is, in Oudart's 'shot-reverse-shot' conception of the telTIl, is slow in resolving itself because this second shot ofthe movie is not a 'reverse shot' ofthe first shot of the fihn that would normally show the one not shown yet in the position to create the point of view for the first shot of the film-nor is the second shot that revealed Professor Hobby the reverse shot. Further, the third shot of the film has been composed so that we don't fully notice the Professor for a split second in his position at the lower right-hand comer of this extreme wide shot. He is between speeches at the moment of the edit, which makes it more difficult to realize that he is even in the wide shot composition. We wonder for an instant if the Absent One's gaze has continued dominating the screen. At the very least, we oscillate between the

102

Chapter 6

Absent One's perspective and our O\Vll as spectator in the theater. We're in After this brief disorientation, Professor Hobby's second speech starts up and he moves forward into a large group of admiring young people­ one of which the viewer expects just might soon be heir stand-in. Professor Hobby and his entourage find themselves in a nostalgic environment reminiscent of a middle-to-Iate 19th century medical classroom. Finally, in this expository shot, the third shot in the fihn, the viewer experiences a bit of relief from the implications of the Absent One's gaze and can release herself to her stand-in character(s)-either Hobby or one of Hobby's employees. This is because the Absent One has been tentatively abolished by the establishing 'over-the-shoulder shot' that begins the semblance of a chain of signification-even though this expository shot is a hybrid: it is vacillating between the Other's gaze and a suggested POV from one of the students in the lecture. The 3,d shot of the film, this establishing shot, becomes a type of substitute for a more conventional reverse shot that would have sho\Vll Professor Hobby's admiring audience from Hobby's perspective. Nevertheless, from this establishing shot forward until the last shot of the sequence, the stitching effect continuously reinforces itself as Professor Hobby interacts with his audience by means of the conventional shot-reverse-shot progression. flux.

Spielberg'sjortida of Cinematic Suture: The Strategic Use of the Absent One Despite the reassuring anchoring of the scene in narrative convention after the first three shots, the integrity of suture in this film is short-lived. Spielberg constructs a pattern of sporadic hesitancy towards narrative convention and the film's signifying system. He purposely, intennittently and temporarily compromises the suture more than is nonnally acceptable: he tends to challenge the limits of binding the spectator seamlessly into the film discourse. This causes the film to teeter ever so slightly at the brink of disorientation with its potential for the return of the repressed more than is customary in commercial filins. This pronounced display of absence/invisibility before settling into presence/visibility in Spielberg's film is similar to the discovery of manipulation and the sense of self-mastery that the young player of the fortlda game in Freud. Spielberg creates great expectancy for the viewer vis-a-vis the gaze of the Absent One before re-establishing discourse, with an even stronger, albeit more visible seam, in the subject's comfort zone of suture. Further, as the emphasizedjonlda game progresses in the film, the spectator starts to formulate heir own sense of the fort/do game once removed. She starts to fonn her 0\Vll misrecognized pleasure of

A.L Artificial Intelligence, Spielberg's Wormhole to the Real

103

self-mastery in the flow of discourse on the screen. She fmds herself phasing back and forth alternating as both enunciated subject of the film and enunciation as speaking subject watching the fihn. By strategically and sporadically withholding suture in this fihn, specifically by means of the insertion of the Absent One's POV accompanied by a voice-over that is cryptically designated (if designated at all-refer to the Epilogue at the end of this essay), Spielberg expands the parameters in the effective use of suture in commercial cinema. Further, Spielberg's emphasis on the Absent One at the brink of narrative incoherence, compels the audience to cling even more to the improbable pro-fihnic 'stand-in' for subjectivity in this movie: surprisingly enough, it is the automaton David, introduced ten minutes into the film-somewhat late to introduce a protagonist in mainstream fihn. Once the narrative belatedly claims David as its protagonist, we would rather suspend our disbelief and identify with a cyborg child imprinting with a mother figure than find ourselves reeling at the brink of the Absent One's abyss. Before we leave this topic of the strategic and pronounced use of the scopic field of the Absent One in the film, one more example will suffice to represent many more in the film. Early in the film, after David is brought home to replace Monica's son who has fallen into a seemingly pelTIlanent coma, a scene begins with a strange shot of David from above looking dO\vn at him through an oblong donut-like lamp over what appears to be a dinner table while sounds of eating occur off camera. The oval lamp takes up most of the screen and frames David's face as he looks first to his left and stares, then switches to looking to his right and stares. As spectators, we have very little to go on from this composition at this strange dO\vn angle, the camera just above the light fixture pointing down. This is not an establishing shot used conventionally to start a scene. It is disorienting, plus, this strategy draws attention to the camera position and emphasizes the scopic field of the Absent One. But Spielberg is not done yet (re)presenting the Other's gaze: he 'jump-cuts' to the same exact composition but from back a few feet displaying a wide shot through the lamp at David. It is a wider shot, so we can see Monica and her husband outside the smaller oblong lamp eating at a dinner table while David, still framed by the oblong light fixture, stares back and forth at them. The jump cut is an editing pattern that circumvents continuity by remaining on the same angle from one shot to another to suggest the same unexpected and undisclosed point of view-in this case, of the Absent One-and therefore serves as an emphatic directorial gesture usually reserved for strong dramatic effect. But there is no drama in this situation and so Spielberg's choice in this sequence calls for more scrutiny than conventions of continuity would nOlTIlally pelTIlit. Monica and her

1 04

Chapter 6

husband as well are viewed in the same attention-grabbing down angle of this second shot of the scene that replicates exactly the first shot only from farther away. Although this second shot (re)presents more of an establishing shot for the scene, the extreme angle disorients slightly and so emphasizes the lack that the unattached viewpoint of the camera suggests at the start of this scene. These two shots seem to taunt us with the undisclosed, hidden Other's POV delaying reconciliation in suture for several seconds. Finally, the scene cuts to an eye-level shot of Monica's husband and the suturing shot-reverse-shot sequence develops between Monica, her husband and David at the dinner table, allowing the spectator to suspend her disbelief. She submits to the signifying chain of images and thus, the discourse of the film.

Threshold to the Real: The Maternal Semiotic in A.!, 's Cinematic Apparatus The semiotic activity, which introduces wandering or fuzziness into language and, a fortiori, into poetic language is, from a synchronic point of view, a mark of the workings of drives (appropriation/rejection, orality/anality, loveihate, life/death) and, from a diachronic point of view, sterns from the archaisms of the semiotic body. Before recognizing itself as identical in a mirror and, consequently, as signifying, this body is dependent vis-a-vis the mother. At the same time instinctual and maternal, semiotic processes prepare the future speaker for entrance into meaning and signification (the symbolic). But the symbolic (i.e., language as nomination, sign, and syntax) constitutes itself only by breaking with this anteriority, which is retrieved as "signifier," "primary processes," displacement and condensation, metaphor and metonymy, rhetorical figures but which always remains subordinate subjacent to the principal function of naming­ predicating. Language as symbolic flUlction constitutes itself at the cost of repressing instinctual drive and continuous relation to the mother. (Kristeva 1980, 136)

Among the registers of human experience, the pre-lingual stage of development pertains to the months and years of sensory and legislative experience related to body-centered functions occurring before and throughout the separation physically and psychically from the folds of primary narcissism. This register of the human mind is often referred to as the Imaginary which the Symbolic register, in Lacan's work, supersedes in terms ofpreeminence via language and the naming ofthe Other as the Name of the Father. 28 Much of pre-lingual sensory experience is comprised of what Julia Kristeva refers to as the maternal semiotic, which is suppressed in the Symbolic and relegated to the spheres ofpsychosis or poetic language

A.L Artificial Intelligence, Spielberg's Wormhole to the Real

105

upon entry into the Symbolic. The splitting off from the pre-lingual object(s), the dyad, culminates in submission to the Name of the Father, which constructs an oppositional stability overriding the phenomenological and epistemological plurality ofthe semiotic. However, the repressed "fuzziness" and "wandering" in language stemming from the pre-lingual semiotic that is maternal-body centered also (re)surfaces in the arts and to the screen of the commercial cinematic apparatus in imagery and pulsations that trigger the return of the repressed, if subliminally. Despite the syntactical and discursive bias of narrative film, but consistent with the potential for the (re)surfacing of the semiotic in the movies, the theatrical experience itself facilitates a shift in the prominence ofthe Symbolic in culture. It hearkens the audience back to an archaic space and the semiotic modalities ofthe maternal dyad, which comprise the origin of Kristeva's chora. Amidst the darkened, welcoming and cherished environment of the movie theater space there exists an emphasis on body­ functions (breathing, coughs and other body noises) as well as the abundant traces of reverberating sensory experiences culled from the Imaginary and, in addition, the "wandering" visual stimuli on the screen and the pulsations from the speakers. All of these 'signals' create an environment conducive to the maternally (retro-)transformative experience. Specifically, the leaking, non-discursive sensory aspects of film that (re)generate the pre-lingual uncanny, are the libidinally-oriented aural and ocular effects that are in excess of purely syntactical restraint and conventions. They create a surfeit of resonating primal reminiscences and dyadic regressions. Further, the shifting and symbiotic interactions between the narrative discourse and the (retro-)transfOlmative experiences within the commercial cinematic apparatus go beyond the primal effects of the maternal semiotic in the topology of the human condition to allow for the apprehension of fleeting meta-psychological flickers of the Real.29 This is especially evident in A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. Spielberg's fihn, in a valiant attempt to restrain and simultaneously preserve its open-ended narrative, boosts the archaic resonances of its sensory and Imaginary semiotic effects, allowing for their cumulative Borromean Ring30 overlap with the Real, an invisible impossibility that manifests in annihilation. A.I. effectively stretches the envelope of cinema syntax beyond the strict parameters of commercial fihnmaking by finding a way to thinly veil the surging of the Real. The nexus of the extra-discursive sensory effects in A.!, create an overflow of extra-logical, regressive linkages to the maternal semiotic that compellingly, via the manipulation of the Symbolic and the Imaginary, deliver the viewer to the threshold of the Real of annihilation only lightly

106

Chapter 6

veneered with the misrecognition of reality. Further, the Real is what remains after the Law of the Father and its designated opposition(s) in the human condition no longer exist. In other words, the Real is the singularity(s) of impossibility in relation and external to the Imaginary and the Symbolic in the human condition. To bear this out, the human condition on occasion receives 'answers from the Real,' which the arts and the movies at times incorporate in surprising flickers of the extra-logical and psychosis. As a useful illustration of the flickering linkages to the Real that are present in the inherent potential for excesses in the commercial cinematic apparatus, and which are suggested in his expression "answers ofthe Real," Slavoj Zizek posits: For things to have meaning, this meaning must be confirmed by some contingent piece ofthe real that can be read as a "sign." The very word sign, in opposition to the arbitrary mark, pertains to the "answer of the real": the "sign" is given by the thing itself, it indicates that at least at a certain point, the abyss separating the real from the symbolic network has been crossed, i.e., that the real itself has complied with the signifier's appeal. (Zizek 1991,

32) Certain sound and visual events in Spielberg's filin as well as the theatrical environment within the traditional commercial cinematic apparatus make up both pre-lingual and skewed Symbolic references that help convey A.!, 's "answers of the Real," that is, the signs, sans arbitrary mediation, that reach across the abyss. We will explore more fully the "answer of the Real" in A.!, below when we talk about David and the Blue Fairy, and then in the epilogue for this chapter, when we discuss David and The Specialist. Although a comprehensive analysis of the music and sound effects in this film goes beyond the scope of this chapter, a discussion of the ocular enunciations and 'signs' in A.I do fit within the confines of this analysis. One prime example of these visual enunciations that (re)produce a 'sign,' in particular an "answer ofthe Real," occurs at the point in the movie when the child-replicant, David, at his lowest moment in the narrative, sees his very O\Vll "answer of the Real," the impossible sign which confilTIls for him a tangible possibility for fulfilling his impossible quest. I am referring to the submerged Coney Island statue of the Blue Fairy resting at the bottom of the ocean. But before allowing him to rest his gaze on her, Spielberg's filin takes David in his amphibian copter-pod through the primal soup of the sunken, maternal semiotic seascape. He drives past the written word in the fOlTIl of the film's fairytale narrative trope (a Pinocchio-esque chronotope31), graphically embellished in a giant book mock-up that states: "Once upon a

A.L Artificial Intelligence, Spielberg's Wormhole to the Real

107

time . . . . " Then David passes by the statue of his narrativized predecessor, Pinocchio, accompanied by Geppetto, who Professor Hobby obliquely reflects. Geppetto in this sunken diorama display is carving tlie finishing touches on his famous puppet creation. Finally, David arrives at the answer to his impossible supplications: his maternal fixation-in-effigy, the Blue Fairy, precariously (trans)fixed before him in statue form while the voice­ over of tlie Absent Narrator, Ben Kingsley's paradoxical The Specialist, recounts: "And David continued to pray to the Blue Fairy there before him. She, who smiled, softly forever. She, who welcomed forever." During David's supplications, the nearby derelict Ferris wheel topples over against the amphibicopter, and David's talking teddy bear companion warns "We are in a cage." Now David remains, as if he were ensnared, in Kristeva's chora; the archaic space where one might return to an existence before the Law of the Father, to the time before subject-hood, a return to primary narcissism that had been signaled when David first sees the Blue Fairy: this is when Spielberg visually represents tlieir dyadic union by the overlapping of the Blue Fairy's face onto his face in the reflection on the windshield as his amphibicopter soars gently up to her. Their faces systematically come together until tliey match up, his face behind tlie wind shield and hers reflected there on his, in an astute visual (re)presentation ofthe primal dyad. And then, as if to encourage the final magical consummation of his "answer of the Real," David beseeches the Blue Fairy to "Please, please, make me into a real live boy. Please, Blue Fairy. Please, please, make me real. Please, Blue Fairy, make me into a real boy," repeatedly as the camera cranes away from him and the Absent Narrator's paternal voice describes the freezing of the oceans that marks a Real implication slipped in oftliandedly: tlie extinction ofthe human race. This shot seems to (re)present the end of the movie, another Absent One point of view shot. . . . . . until the Absent One's voice, still nonchalantly paternal, resumes: "Thus, two tliousand years passed by . . . " and a long dissolve takes us from under the ocean to the frozen surface ofthe now dOlmant ice-covered planet over which we travel in a fast moving POV shot (again implied, by default, as tlie Absent One's gaze) traveling towards the mostly ice-buried Manbattan skyscrapers cityscape in the background. In the next expository shot, a reveal, starting in a tight shot of futuristic non-human figures at a window then pulling back tlirough the interior of a flying box, a modular aircraft, and pulling back farther to reveal in a long shot a Sci-Fi flying vehicle cruising to and then dO\vn an excavation site in the ice amid the top of vacant skyscrapers. At the bottom of the excavation in the ice, we find the still-trapped and stationary David before his Blue Fairy statue in tlie now-frozen space. 'When the snow-covered windshield hatch opens, as if

108

Chapter 6

opened by the unknown figures, David is there staring wide-eyed and comatose. We do not see any other real human for the rest of the film. Just an uncarmy series of "answers of the Real."

Conclusion: The Talking Cure The psycho-linguistic inferences we have discussed in relation to A.!,: Artificial Intelligence hearken back to Freud by way of several thinkers who have expanded on Freud in the 20th and 21" Century. Spielberg heavy­ handedly makes sure we do associate these psychoanalytical thinkers with his film because, perhaps wryly, he alludes to Freud directly. This we see early in the film in a scene in which David, before Monica has imprinted herself indelibly on his memory chip, opens the door to the bathroom while Monica is sitting on the toilet with her pants down reading the book Freud On Women: A Reader. He stands there smiling proudly and says, "I found you," as if they were playing hide and seek. Monica screams in terror and embarrassment while David watches smiling. He has no idea of the embarrassment nor of the Freudian libidinal implications, nor the intertextual dialectic of Freud's successors that he might be referencing at that moment as Monica admonishes him and sends him away. She still hasn't gotten over the "otherness" of the robot boy David. Spielberg's allusion to Freud seems off-handed as if a passing joke while demonstrating the difference between a robot boy and a real boy in this situation. By David's age, a real boy would intuitionally be showing telltale reserve in opening a bathroom door on a mother figure in his life. However, in demonstrating the power of intertextuality in this scene, Spielberg might inadvertently be referencing a bigger topic, one that has bearing on the signification of the film, perhaps a topic that might ultimately and subliminally disrupt the discourse of the film. Freud is commonly knO\vn for his theories on psychoanalysis that have been used successfully in therapeutic practice helping speaking subjects in a procedure referred to as the "talking cure" which, in clinical mental-health instances, has been instrumental in causing aberrant symptom(s) to dissipate. This therapy is based on helping the analysand know what she refuses to know, that is, the repressed fimdarnental truth about herself. Ifwe bear this in mind, Spielberg, with his end-of-mankind conclusion to this film, has intuitionally created a cure for humankind's repressed fimdarnental truth about itself: language is the symptom of the human condition. The therapeutic, transference-like analysand to movie-analyst processes in the film encompass the effects Spielberg's intermittent play with and delay of cinema syntax, specifically with the extended gaze of the Absent One that

A.L Artificial Intelligence, Spielberg's Wormhole to the Real

109

undermines more than reinforces discourse; along with the outrageous ending of the film with its suggested foreclosure of the maternal and its semiotic in the depiction of Monica's "undead" reappearance and her final permanent death. Spielberg's foregrounding of all these skewed syntactical and pre-lingual effects of dissolution in his film result in the subliminal unraveling of the stitch-work in narrative suture and they also result in the forging of a "Psy-Fi" wormhole, a twist in the Symbolic time/space continuum, that manifests in the film's warm and horrific epilogue: all the scenes after David's 'frozen time' in his submerged cul-de-sac cause the narrative to forge ahead extra-dimensionally and extra-logically to the Real ending of the film. The extra-logical workings of the extra-dimensional wormhole itself are the subversive, subject-atomizing effects of the "automaton who wants to be a real boy" theme of the movie that takes us on a faux return of the repressed, the appearance of a faux "Name of the Father." This theme ends in the foreclosed journey to the faux maternal dyad, while traversing David's ersatz primary masochism to arrive at what's left: the abyss, the impossible: yes, annihilation. A Symbolic-annihilating twist in time and space that results in a lone personification of a faux Symbolic, and an obliteration of human existence that was the phenomenon of the speaking subjectivity attached to the maternal body. Further, the A6sem Narrator's32 ending voice-over confitms sardonically the irreversible faux-lack that is intrinsic to the viewer's surrogate, David, in the filin. The leader of the aliens, Ben Kingsley's voice states: "David had never had a birthday party because David had never been bom." Lacking the Oedipal potentiality inherent to being born, lacking the developmental pre-lingual dyadic stage, David, the viewer's stand-in, lacks the nuances ofthe human symptom. David's programming only mimics the speaking subject's symptom. But the viewer does not lack this lack . . . . . until she gains the knowledge ofthat which she refuses to know: the non­ knowledge of her intrinsic invisibility. That she is visible only via language-and that is predicated on the fragile Symbolic-cum-Real-cum­ Imaginary existence of the human species. In the nostalgically morbid grand finale of the film, David enjoys the (re)produced faux-mother and faux-child reunion" before the ephemeral cloned-Monica lapses into "more than sleep" and the � Narrator further explains that David "for the first time in his life, went to that place . . . " an undefined space, perhaps the (faux)Oedipal unconscious, perhaps an extra-logically (m)Otherless modality, " . . . where dreams are born." And with this last shot of the movie, the Affieft! Narrator's gaze, the last shot of the film, mirrors obliquely the opening of the movie with his cinematic look-the camera rises and pushes away from the scene which darkens

1 10

Chapter 6

around the infinite-appearing black edges of space-absent of human (woman's) time,34 and the fatalistic utterance of the last speech of the movie referencing the barred lffi8Sftse:istls "where dreams are born."

Epilogue: The Specialist In the polysemically significant moment that takes place prior to Monica's provisional cloning at the end of the film, Spielberg introduces visually The Specialist character, who is the apparent leader ofthe creatures that find David. The extra-logical twist of this new non-human character's appearance is that the faceless Specialist speaks telepathically with the voice of Sir Ben Kingsley, which was first introduced in the film as the voice of an opening narrator, seemingly positioned as Oudart's Absent One in a film field that finds itself in oblique existential opposition to the spectator, the speaking subject spectator. However, just prior to the resurrection of Monica, The Specialist has a telepathic chat with David on the subject of cloning thereby confronting the viewer as well as David with an unresolved, splitting set of puzzles regarding the Absent One and the now visible (and so "barred") ASseRtNarrator as the newly introduced alien (or, perhaps, he might be an uber-replicant, a 'mecha' of the future, but the film doesn't confirm this). Are both the Absent One from the beginning and the Specialist at the end two separate entities? The credits of the film suggest they are one and the same in the voice ofBen Kingsley. Then, are they really one and the same? If so, how can that be? Further, since The Specialist and the Absent One have the same voice, although neither the Absent One nor The Specialist's "acts of speaking" are visible acts, does this signify that the two are not really speaking subjects-but faux-speakings, 35 like David ? Whatever the conclusion, this discrepancy in enunciated identity(s) and speaking subjectivity is part oftheReal wormhole's torsion and the splitting of the cine-narrative syntax into parallels of dangling, sliding signifiers within its extra-logically syncopated segue to the Real ending. Finally, the viewer realizes, if only subliminally, that the ending voice­ over narration, which speculates on David's first dreams as he closes his eyes, amounts to an ancient echo of a language from an extinct species, extinct for perhaps two thousand years. All that's left at the end of the film that directly (re)presents speaking subject-hood are an automaton and its toy teddy bear companion reflecting what we refuse to know but now realize, if we care to, the phenomenon that language is the existential symptom of humanity. And our symptom has dissipated as we know it in the world of the film, and as the camera backs away from the temporarily cloned and conjured Imaginary plenitude, we are left with the image ofthe faux-mother

A.L Artificial Intelligence, Spielberg's Wormhole to the Real

111

and-faux child reunion enveloped in the wannest of faux mise-en-scenes. The camera cranes out the window of the skeletal house into the abyss, the annihilation, the register of the Real. David's impossible journey as the viewer's stand-in comes to an end . . . . . .in a talking cure for humankind: the dissipation of the Symbolic order and the Imaginary as reverberations of the human unconscious. All of us: we, the subjects of the film's discourse in our capacity as spectators, and our stand-in David, as well as the faux­ Monica who is the faux (m)Other, we now rest speechless. We, as subjects enunciated in the film, like the faux-David, we now subliminally lack the starting point, the lack even of the lack of castration. Spielberg's movie ultimately abandons the spectator subject-of-the-film to the armihilation that is the Real.

CHAPTER 7 SPIELBERG' S MINORITY REpORT: A CASE STUDY OF FEMININITY IN MAINSTREAM MOVIES

In order to discuss the enunciation of FEMININITY in Spielberg's Minority Report, an exploration of text in telTIlS of the aspects of graphics and structural storytelling is necessary to reveal the struggle and the collusion of these against avowing the signifiance that the maternal semiotic offers the human condition. Culture's dependence on the written word along with the alphabetic text's proliferation via mechanical reproduction have led to an exaggeration ofthe Law ofthe Father and the suppression of(m)Other. The commercial cinematic apparatus draws not only on the written text and on mechaincs of story structure but also fundamentally on (re)presentation that is extra-textual. In addition, it affords the maternal semiotic an excellent, widely accessible vehicle in which to feature traces of psychological patterns and effects from our individual and collective pre­ lingual and pre-alphabetic psycho-libidinal experience. This is extremely evident in Spielberg's screen adaptation of Phillip K. Dick's Minority Report, the Sci-Fi short story. I will discuss this film adaptation in terms of the enunciation of primal FEMININITY, the movie's alphabetic expression as it pertains to the maternal semiotic and the figural, as well as the extra­ logical significance of (m)Otherness in the film text's imagery and narrative.

The Maternal Semiotic and the Enunciation of FEMININITY For the purposes of this manuscript, text is defined as a construct that is reproducible whether by means of the written word or by other systems of signs structured linguistically. The cinematic narrative is a system of signs and as such often defers to the written word and its artefacts as a model for linear, mechanically and digitally fe/produced communication. In the case

Spielberg's Minority Report

113

of the film auteur Steven Spielberg as classical filnnnaker in the Hollywood sense, the text is the mainstream movie and the Hollywood studio system is the principal structuring authority that defers to the written word and the Symbolic order. One extra-Symbolic advantage of the movie text over the written text, as we have discussed before, is that the movies by their semiotic nature are not confined to the oppositional structure and the graphic limitations of the alphabetic lingual expression, the written word. The movies fonn a text that goes beyond univocal linearity by its very pictorial nature and its direct appeal to the scopic drive. The maternal semiotic as presented in the work of Julia Kristeva is the extra-logical system of signs that undulates parallel to and in symbiosis with Lacan's Law of the Father, language. The maternal semiotic resonates from the pre-lingual and so, by its nature, subverts as much as it symbiotically integrates with language esoterically. Plus, the maternal semiotic, as pre­ lingually derived, forms a cathexis with FEMININITY that extra-logically parallels and integrates with a language-constructed feminism that the Law of the Father reduces to an oppositional disposition. Richard Allen offers a feminist and FEMININITY related perspective to Lacan's theories in terms of patriarchal society's linguistic conventions that are founded on fiction, fantasy and self-misrecognition within the Symbolic order, which the extra­ logical enunciations of FEMININITY and the maternal semiotic help to expose: The significance of Lacanian psychoanalysis for feminist thought in this respect is that it seems to offer a way of exposing the fiction of subjectivity upon which a patriarchal social order is fOlUlded. A patriarchal culture that deems women mad, mute, body-centred hysterics, beyond the pale of culture is predicated upon a fantasy of linguistic mastery and autonomy. It is women's 'madness' that gives lie to this fantasy by speaking the truth of subjectivity and revealing the proximity of life to a mortality that the patriarchal social order consistently seeks to deny. (Allen 2000, 50)

In contrast to the paternal social order and its systemic subjugation of women, the maternal semiotic (re)presents the unconscious, the repressed register of the human condition always already attached to the maternal in tenns of its developmental precedence to the structural influence, the Symbolic order. Submission to the latter register occurs in human development over time during the late stages of the material separation of the subject from the Object, the (m)Other, and the primal dyad. Proceeding from a stage prior to language, the maternal semiotic equates to trace resonances of a repressed primal connection to the maternal that manifests in extra-alphabetical and extra-lingual enunciations linked to (m)Other. A

1 14

Chapter 7

connection to these traces of the maternal semiotic is reinforced in Spielberg's Minority Report, by overt maternal references as well as by emphasizing extra-lingual, extra-logical enunciations that exploit the sensory efficiencies of the cinematic apparatus. During the analysis of a text, specific examples torn from the fabric of the whole become not only citations and artefacts produced by the analysis, but also become citations belonging to the text and are reflective of the artist's work, whether or not the artist's intention was to make such a quote an artefact. The intertextuality between the text, the artist's analytically deconstructed creation as well as the spectators' interpretations, speaks to the multiplex nature of the symbiosis and intertextuality occurring between the Symbolic order and the maternal semiotic. Spielberg and other mainstream artists tap into the extra-logical potential of this intertextuality as they practice their films or other artistic texts. As Kristeva suggests: One might ask, proceeding in reverse, if all -writing is not a second level rite, at the level of language, that is, which causes one to be reminded, through the linguistic signs themselves, of the demarcations that pre-condition them and go beyond them. Indeed, -writing causes the subject who ventures in it to confront an archaic authority on the nether side of the proper Name. The maternal connotations of this authority never escaped great -writers, (Kristeva 1982, 75)

Spielberg's design decisions in his adaptation ofthe short story Minority Repan into a motion picture text exude the maternal semiotic in the overt sensual and sensory aspects ofthe medium: moving images and sound. Most of the pertinent allusions in the movie's images focus on maternal body parts and functions in one way or another, examples of which we will discuss below. Further, the relevant audio references place emphasis on the distortions of sound as if through a barrier of filters similar to the layers of maternal organic material sheltering the embryo in the womb. All of these images and sonic suggestions contributing to a system of signs cause one "to be reminded ( . . . ) of the demarcations that pre-condition them and go beyond them. ( . . . ) . . . to confront the archaic authority of the nether side of the proper Name." My analysis of Minority Report focuses on the visual manifestations of the pre-lingual semiotic and the other sensory displays of the maternal.

Co-Opting the Maternal Semiotic In telTIlS of moving images that signal the maternal semiotic and so enunciate FEMININITY, there are several overt images that when placed

115

Spielberg's Minority Report

under close scrutiny are emblematic of Spielberg's connection, if only intuitional, to the "archaic authority on the nether side ofthe proper Name." Images of the womb as well as sequences citing Lacan's Mirror Stage and its rather matricidal aftemmth are abundant in the film.

In fact, mirrors

and

reflections become a running motif in the movie and parallel another theme, that of vision and the scopic drive. Further, images of the abj ect, that discarded corporal and psychic residue that signals the bodily and dyadic link to the (m)Other abound in the film. Taken together, these images (re)present a consistent theme that effectively changes the immediate male focus of this Sci-Fi Noir film in a manner at once sophisticated and overt. There is a reoccurrence of images that specifically signal the womb and emphasize

the

maternal

reproductive

function.

Though

apparently

forthright once identified, these images simulate a futuristic environment that distances their maternal significance from the viewer. Subliminally, however the subversive imagery is insidious and ultimately exhilarating. For instance, the transparent tubular apparatus for transporting the pre-cog's murderer and victim-engraved wood orbs is one of the first examples in the film of the womb motif. It features a small round wood ball rolling through a tubular network to its final resting place, a clear receptacle that functions as a display case. By means of closeup shots, Spielberg presents in this depiction an

uncanny,

albeit non-organic scenario reminiscent of the non­

fertilized egg travelling through the fallopian tube to its resting place in the womb. Another, more pronounced example of the womb theme and sho\Vll a little later in the filin is the dark sanctuary in which the pre-cogs are kept. It is a huge egg-shaped tabernacle in which the pre-cogs are resting in a shallow pool of liquid appearing to be a mixture of milk diluted with saline solution. Further, in continuation of the pre-natal references, the pre-cogs are hooked to umbilical-like tubes that, curiously, are attached like electrodes to their head. At one point, the caretaker of the three pre-cogs states that they get their nourishinent from the white liquid that he calls photon

milk and he explains that this substance enhances their prescient In other words, the mother' s milk/placental solution not only feeds

abilities.

them but also boosts their extra-logical powers. This allusion to a connection between the maternal and the extra-logical and the prescient is usually disparaged in phallogocentric culture. More often in culture, extra­ logical connections to the (m)Other image are associated with the nether world of magic, specifically linked to the image of a witch or mad woman. In Minority Report, we also get this oppositional imaging to some extent, but since the substance ofthe story on one level is about society's co-opting of the maternal semiotic, the "nether side of the proper Name," the maternal semiotic, at least regarding technology, remains coded to Sci-Fi innovation

1 16

Chapter 7

at least to a partial extent. The futuristic culture persists in dissimulating the

signijiance

of (m)Other until the male protagonist gets subdued in a

comatose state and his estranged wife solves the crime.

In

sum, as I will

explore more fully in the "(m)Other as Goddess" section below, the imaging of (m)Other, although marginalized for much of the film, at the same time also retains a revered position in Spielberg 's images and in the narrative of this film. This is demonstrated in the film's emphasis on and the reverence paid to the pre-cogs' womb-like sanctuary and the photon milk that facilitates the prescient powers of the pre-cogs.

The Mirror The mirror motif flows parallel to the other salient scopic drive theme related to vision and sight, the eye. Both involve a way of seeing and being seen at multiple levels of human experience including the conscious and the unconscious. Spielberg plays liberally with both motifs and the two ofthem overlap at times. For example, when Agatha, the most talented of the pre­ cogs, pleads with John Anderton to stop in the middle of a rnall's grand hall as they try to escape the Pre-Crime Police closing in on them, he has no idea why they must stop. But he stops with her anyway and the tension mounts as his capture appears imminent. At the very last minute a balloon seller also stops not too far from them to sell one of the balloons from his huge floating horde and these balloons hide them from the cops who are just turning toward the grand hall from the level above to look for the fugitives. Further, as these cops give up and wander off to look elsewhere, there is centred in the background of the frame as they leave a strange billboard of moving images, a billboard that 'mirrors ' certain implications of the cinematic apparatus: the central figure in the billboard is a bluish-white, gender-ambiguous person or android in a crowd of like-creatures with red lips. Heir one distinguishing asset is a pair of sunglasses. SJhe separates helrself from the crowd and approaches the camera happy with heir style­ setting glasses while the others look on with envy. The large caption at the lower section of the billboard-screen is a bar code with extended and justified bars placed to the left and right of elongated letters themselves mirroring the bar code style and forming the words, "See What Others Don't." Suddenly we, the spectators, are mirrored figuratively in the billboard's conceit-as is Agatha, and for that matter, the filmmaker, who all see what others don't in this short cinematic epiphany. Rather than get ensnared in the pluralities of this vertically layered nexus between the motifs of the mirror and sight, I will continue now with examples that are

Spielberg's Minority Report

117

more directed to only mirrors and reflections. We will get more into the "eye" part of vision later. One of the first most striking uses of mirror imagery takes place during the first murder to be presented in the movie. The opening scene of the movie is a series of short vignettes from the future murder as charmelled psychically in a montage by savants we will discover are the 'pre-cogs.' The spectator watching this film within the theatre tabernacle views this opening montage as an extra-logical, erratic stream of sensual experiences filtered by the cinematic apparatus featuring images ofthe sexual exchange of body fluids and then murder. Only later does the director guide us through the logical sequence of events as the vignettes are repeated and extended to fOlTIl a linear narrative segment showing the domestic disturbance in progress. When the husband catches his wife having an affair, he is standing barely hidden near an open door behind which his wife and her lover are cavorting. At one point, his wife in her lover's arms closes the door revealing a mirror on the door and a reflection of the husband seeming to be gazing at himself. At this point he fully apprehends the certainty of his wife's infidelity and, like a pre-lingual entity, he realizes anew his split from the maternal Obj ect in the figure of his connubial surrogate (m)Other as she joins her lover in coitus. Suddenly a causal and abject cathexis coalesces between this carnal rej ection of her husband and the husband's all­ consuming murderous impulse. Finally, husband is about to kill his wife with scissors when the Pre-Crime head detective John Anderton arrives to avert the pre-crime just in the nick of time. They haul the husband off to a prison of other pre-criminals all subdued in induced comas.

In sum, and in

keeping with the subj ect of this section of my analysis, the mirror signals the trace of the pre-lingual maternal rej ection that in tum triggers in the husband the overwhelming impulse to kill the (m)Other who tums away from him and whom he must tum away from eventually in order to submit to subj ectivity. Spielberg has tapped into this repressed stage in the guise of adult jealousy in order to (re)present it with the abj ect and Oedipal imagery of the Freud-Lacanian-Kristevan analysed kind. Although heavy handed when analysed, the design strategy for this scene is consistent with the enunciation of the pre-lingual experience of maternal object relations. Further, in this scene, and in the opening montage, the filmmaker adeptly signals the maternal semiotic by means of other more technically refined, extra-logical cinematic displays of the maternal semiotic that include montage editing, over-exposure, de-saturated colours, focus play and muffled, filtered audio accompanied by the pulsations ofthe accompanying non-diegetic score.

118

Chapter 7

The Abject and the Scopic Drive The abj ect, that is to say, the disgusting, expulsed and discarded objects linked to body functions, and the disruption of bodily boundaries, is treated in this film in a revealing marmer.

In

the one sequence of images that

indirectly addresses the medical profession, Spielberg not only features the clandestine practice of a specialized fOlTIl of eye surgery but also constructs a most unsanitary and clandestine caricature of the profession. After the pre­ cogs inadvertently identify protagonist John Anderton as a pre-crime perpetrator, he becomes a fugitive. But changing his identity can only be done effectively by replacing his eyes due to the prevalence of retina scarmers in the urban environment of the future. So, he retains a disbarred doctor, sneezing and snotty with the flu, to perfolTIl the operation that takes place in a tiny, absolutely filtby flat. Altbough the former doctor informs Anderton tbat he will provide him a pletbora of designer antibiotics to counteract the nasty environment for the operation, our squeamish gut reaction is not assuaged.

The doctor 's operating stage, the fleabag

apartment, is a Petri dish for hatmful microbes and Spielberg underscores this with extreme graphic prejudice. The spectator cringes from the abject imagery. Granted, the presentation of the abject in mainstream movies is a trope that helps sell tickets and can be considered one motivation for Spielberg 's indulgence, nevertheless, his graphic extravagance has telltale implications signalling reverberations from the prelingual experience of visceral, body-boundary subverting abjection:

oral, anal, intrauterine,

birthing and infuntile boundary-busting bodily expulsions and manifestations. But before we dissect fully the scene that features this caricature of the Hippocratic profession, let's rewind to a previous event during Anderton' s flight before he has had a chance to replace his eyes at the ad hoc clandestine eye-replacement service in a seedy apartment. Soon after becoming a fugitive, Anderton gets cornered by the Pre-crime cops hot on his trail and they threaten him with "sick sticks." The use of these police batons has a more effective albeit less traditionally brutal result than normal police batons: at their touch, they debilitate you by making you regurgitate your guts out. Anderton turns a baton on one of his pursuers and the cop vomits immediately and voluminously. Although this event appears to be fleeting and (re)presenting more humane and futuristic advances in restraining suspects, the precedence for displays of abj ect imagery becomes re­ established and this helps set the tone for the director 's inclusion of the abject in the workings of the construct of his film. The later scenes at the hotel operating room that include the removal of Anderton's eyeballs and

Spielberg's Minority Report

119

their replacement, follow up on the abject theme of the "sick stick" in much more graphic detail.

In a flippant, yet telltale manner,

Spielberg makes his first overt spoken

reference to the maternal in the eye-replacement scene when the doctor questions why Anderton would want to keep his old eyes once replaced. Anderton responds, "Because my mother gave them to me." Once again Spielberg creates an event that seems nearly out of place, an event that gives a stutter to the narrative flow. This time we dismiss it as an attempt at giving the protagonist a glib attitude accompanied by a "one-liner" type retort to titillate the audience, a convention in mainstream movies. However, given the repetition of the maternal citations in Minority Report, Anderton's glib remark referencing his mother becomes another signal of an imagery-based citation of (m)Other and the archaic abj ect in the guise of conventional character-centered stereotypical play. Very soon after this exchange, the doctor speaks a banter of GelTIlanic words to someone off-camera and then

introduces his "gorgeous assistant, Miss van Eyck (pronounced 'EYEck ') . It

is

uncanny,

and flippant, that Spielberg should use a fragmented, and

sonically figural rendition of Freud's GelTIlanic class of languages to introduce a less than positive female image with a curious mark on her face: a huge mole on her upper lip. However, the first look at the assistant is through a broken and dirty mirror as we hear a flushing toilet and she stands pulling her pants up just before entering the frame as if rounding a comer of a partition. The difficult visual perspective in this short sequence is achieved by means of two barely delineated mirrors and seems incongruent with space and time as Miss van Eyck ('EYEck') enters unnaturally quickly into frame singing a jingle. The post-menopausal Miss van Eyck

eyes

Anderton aggressively with apparent lust as she crosses to assist the doctor (later in the scene, she fondles his derriere when she helps him fall into the operating chair). Since the doctor armounces her as his "gorgeous assistant," and given her subsequent abrupt and theatrical "entrance," the impression of a magic show with a magician's assistant resonates quickly through the mind as we see her briskly handing objects to the doctor while continuing her jingle.

In

just a few short images, Spielberg modulates from the poignant image of a female in the act ofvoiding--a reference to the (m)Other expelling the abj ect obj ect with its implications of the subject's separation from the (m)Other obj ect at birth, juxtaposed to the image of the female as (m)Other bearing the sign of alterity in the fOlTIl of Miss van Eyck's mole with its connotation of a telltale stain, Lacan's

'petit objet a.

'

To close the quotation marks on

this sequence dedicated to the maternal abj ect, the doctor deliberates making a pun while his assistant hands him the replacement eyes: "Ah, Miss

120

Chapter 7

van Eyck, I'm afraid she is smitten. She only has eyes for you." At the punch line, the camera frames the defrocked doctor in a closeup and from a low angle as he holds the eyes up to the camera in a composition seemingly much too insistent for this narrative moment and yet conveying the emphasis appropriate to marking the end of his proclamation. Miss van Eyck, matronly and yet clinging to the seductive, is in the background staring again tenaciously with perhaps a small amount of melancholy at Anderton who seems to smile in his drug-induced stupor at the pun. She stares at him as if she were the very image of the off-kilter (m)Other who desires the

taboo

of the mother-child reunion. After this extravagant long

take, a jump cut takes us further into the transplant process and away from this specific reference to the abj ect aspects of (m)Othemess. The abj ect imagery continues through the events taking place while Anderton recovers from eye replacement as a pun on the scopic drive that, for Anderton, is 'blind' given his recovery time after surgery. But these misguided attempts at eating that result in mistaking an old moldy sandwich and old curdled milk in the refrigerator and spitting them out, one could argue, reflect more the "gross-out" convention in block-buster oriented mainstream movies, also a nod to abj ection. Although from the scopic drive perspective, the

sight gag

does allude and appeal to the spectator's field of

view and so can be counted as another instance of Spielberg reinforcing his running motif involving the scopic drive.

Scatological Allusions and Birthing Conflation Another abj ect image (re)presenting theflushing

out, or rejection of the

material subj ect in the process of separation from the maternal Object at birth, occurs when Anderton breaks into the pre-cog's sanctuary in the Pre­ Crime building to retrieve his "minority report" that might clear him of the alleged the pre-crime. He believes Agatha's memory retains the only existent copy of the minority report. But then the Iudicial Department agent Darmy Witwer discovers Anderton in the pre-cog tabernacle as he desperately tries to search Agatha's memory with help from Wally the caretaker of the pre-cogs. Suddenly Anderton must flee or the Pre-Crime police will capture him. This is a dilemma for two reasons: the building is secured and locked down once the alarm has been given and he still hasn't retrieved the crucial minority report. Anderton pulls a rabbit out of his hat so to speak by jumping into the pool where the pre-cogs float in a milky placental tranquillity and flushes the system as if it were a giant toilet bowl. He and Agatha are voided down the drain and make their escape. There is a correlation between the toilet bowl imagery in this scene and the ej ection of

121

Spielberg's Minority Report

the foetus from the womb: the escape fits neatly into both the womb imagery of the pre-cog sanctuary and the needs of the narrative, the combination of which makes the directorial sleight of hand multi-layered and more powerful, if subliminal for the viewer, in terms of subtly revealing the maternal semiotic. This directorial sleight of hand is powerful because the narrative structure of the film and its maternal semiotic underpinnings are exposed in their symbiotic plenitude in one culminating moment before receding again into the conventions of narrative structure. Witwer ends the scene by explaining to his subordinates the ramifications of the escape as they pertain to the crime narrative. This onscreen explanation serves as a sanitary cover to diminish the immediate result of the maternal abj ect and the scatological as represented by the flushing toilet bowl escape.

FEMININITY and the Figural in Alphabetic Expression Scintillating innovations in the linguistic perspective related to the interpretation of the maternal semiotic and its symbiosis with the Symbolic order have retained longevity in analytical circles. These include the resurfacing of de Saussure's concept of the arbitrary and oppositional system of signifiers, Derrida's deconstruction and Lyotard's figuraP Vis­ a-vis the (re)presentation of the spoken and written word, these linguistic theories ranging from structuralism to poststructuralism open spaces in gender

politics

and

awareness

of

FEMININITY

always

already

incorporated in textual expression and deconstruction. FEMININITY is less politically oriented in theory, but these thinkers have opened space for this polysemic libidinal aspect of the maternal semiotic by including plurality in the human condition via the promotion of iconoclastic, sliding meanings in linguistics. For gender politics, on the other hand, the political significance of these pluralist linguistic innovations is revealed more readily when considering the historical implementation of language as a means to reinforce male dominance. Leonard Shlain in his extensive study on the subj ect,

The Goddess versus the Alphabet,

develops a chronology of the

cultural-wide oppositional imbalance due not only to society's dependence on the spoken word, but also specifically on the written word.

In direct response to,

or as an intuitional reaction to these theories, or

both, the image play that Spielberg creates in Minority Report features the written word in a more opaque, graphic manner. He frequently highlights text for its figural and compositional value as well as for alluding to and reinforcing the mirror theme in his film. This emphasis on the graphical nature of the written word not only visually enhances the images, but also works to undennine the phallogocentrism historically dominant in the

122

Chapter 7

implementation of text. Further, the graphic play in the use of text in the movie expands the significance of the alphabetic artefact to include the extra-logical plurality of the maternal semiotic. Essentially, in European cultures the written word is a graphic composed of independent parts, i.e., letters, that (re)present a spoken word. Recently, however, the graphic nature ofthe alphabet has been increasingly taking the foreground in media and Spielberg has integrated this stylistic tendency into the fabric of the

Minority Report.

A significant vehicle for this graphic

prominence in the movie is Spielberg 's use of futuristic computer screens that consist oflarge panes of transparent plexi-glass shields. These futuristic devices allow for Spielberg 's film cameras to be set up behind the computer monitor screen to record the image through the screen aimed at one of the characters, which, often is the protagonist John Anderton. Moreover, shooting the camera through the transparent computer screen creates the effect of presenting all the artefacts on the screen in a mirror image, that is, in reverse. The letters and diagrams that show up this way on the profilmic computer screens emphasize not only their graphic nature but also reinforce the theme of mirrors, reflections and doubles-all associated with imagery attached to the maternal semiotic and primal FEMININITY. A few of the less emphasized and yet revealing examples of the graphic nature of the alphabetic expression coincide with important moments in the film. When John Anderton's name appears on a wood ball in the Pre-Crime lab, we first see his name as he holds the future perpetrator's ball in his hand that inculpates him. The extreme closeup shot of the small ball in his hand shows his name upside dO\vn and so also in reverse, which amounts to another oblique reference to the mirror theme and the display of the alphabetic expression as intrinsically a graphic. Later, at the end of Anderton's abj ect eye-replacement sequence, when the eye doctor has finished his operation, he waltzes around the bandaged Anderton while making last minute preparations to leave. All the while he is wearing a t­ shirt with a cryptic message dO\vn the centre which seems to be letters but try as you may, you carmotmake out a word and the suggested letters remain just marks as they run down from the neck of his t-shirt into his pants. This is an example of what resembles a line of text that retains only its figural quality. Finally, it should be reiterated that the billboards and other text-rich objects in the film usually are in motion and feature the figural aspect of letters and words. As described above, the billboard with the bar code on either side of the words "See What Others Don't" takes up a good portion of the billboard screen at a juncture in the film that puts together several motifs and cinematic puns that come together in this one graphically emphasized sequence of \Vfitten words. Other examples of text-dominant

123

Spielberg's Minority Report

objects include cereal boxes and newspapers that are shO\vn emphasis by Anderton. At one point he throws a cereal box across the room to stop its obnoxious cereal jingle and the name of the cereal jumps around the box like a cartoon. Later, when he stares menacing at a fellow subway rider reading the moving text of the newspaper he's holding that features a story about Anderton as a fugitive. All these lesser examples add to the consistently alphabetic, gender-political tenor of Spielberg 's vision in

Minority Report

which is evident in his devaluing of the written word in

preference to the figural in alphabetic expression. Plus, as a type of deconstruction and polysemic expansion of the written text, Spielberg's strategy foregrounds the figural 's poststructuralist allusion to the plurality of FEMININITY and the maternal semiotic.

(m)Other as Goddess Arguably the most evident and significant outcome from culture's dependence on the univocally transparent and oppositional tendencies of the written word as constructed historically, is the elimination of the goddess image, as (re)presentive of the maternal authority, from overt influence on society.

Prior

to

literacy

and

its

pervasive

hold

on

culture,

the

(re)presentation of women in the spectrum of the spiritual and the magical and the powerful in cultural nuance, was much more accepted and useful to society. Increasingly, as the alphabet became more invasive in culture, the goddess was progressively marginalized until finally restricted to an oppositional alterity. 2 During this revisionist process, phallogocentrism dominated in both the secular and liturgical realms of society to the exclusion of the archaic maternal significance along with its plurality and layering(s) of meaning(s) . This has led to an exaggeration in left-brain importance to the detriment of the right temporal lobe and its extra-logical contribution.3 Phallogocentrism depends on the short-telTIl effectiveness of the exclusivity inherent to binary oppositions. However, within the subversive artistic artefact that is the figural construct which works to break dO\vn the transparency of the written word, a space opens that allows a rediscovery of the goddess in a non-oppositional marmer in all its seemingly random polysemy. In Spielberg ' s MinorityReport, emphasis on the figural incorporates a recovered, pseudo-futuresque and multiplex image of the (m)Other in one of the characters in the film. Before Anderton can formulate a plan to exonerate himself after the pre­ cogs identify him as a future murderer, his only recourse is to visit the "inventor" of pre-cog psycho-technology, Dr. Iris Hineman. Anderton drives out into the country and stops at a mailbox in a location that marks

124

Chapter 7

the beginning of the sequence's emphasis on compositions dominated by the plant-life there. The frame is immersed in green plants and Iris's mailbox, although made of metal is colour-coordinated to fit in with its environment. As if to reinforce this new focus on the plants in the picture frame, the next shot is a handheld-Steadicam shot moving forward through dense foliage towards a barely discernible gate. This strategy positions the audience in the environment as if we were Anderton making his way through a plant filled environment. Thus, the emphasis on the foliage is greatly augmented for the audience given the handheld way it is photographed. This accumulating emphasis on plants prepares us for the appearance of the goddess/mother-earth image. And we shall be rewarded. Anderton climbs over the shattered-glass protected stonewall and, upon reaching the ground, is attacked by a myriad of vines reaching out like emaciated anns and entwining themselves around him. He falls and pulls himself free only to realize he has been scratched and finds it hard to breath. He makes his way into the greenhouse where Dr. Iris Hineman is nurturing her plant creations to the seemingly archaic sound of symphonic music. As he squeaks out breaths that are so laboured, he must cling to a table near Dr. Hineman, she advises him that her hybrid creation a "Doll's Eye" has poisoned him. She prepares him an infusion that allows him to recover. In these few moments we get the strong sense that this woman possesses arcane earth-mother powers that also include an expertise in bio-genetics. When Anderton recovers and mentions that Iris is the inventor of Pre-Crime, she laughs and describes Pre-Crime in pejorative terms as " . . . unintended consequences of a series of genetic mistakes and science gone haywire .... " She goes on to give us the history of Pre-Crime by describing the discovery of the pre-cogs' abilities to foresee murders in their dreams as a side effect of pre-natal drug exposure and the zeal of "science gone haywire." This chronology, although a wonderful fantasy about the "invention" of Pre­ Crime also works to reveal the haphazardness of its beginnings and suggests possible irregularities. The allusion to murder in dreams occurring to drug­ affected post-partum human entities, the 'pre-cogs,' now all grO\vn up but still attached psychically to the extra-logical (m)Other, lays bare the telltale seepage of the maternal semiotic in the narrative. Walking around tending to her plants during their conversation and wearing a transparent straw hat with a light lavender colour positioned like a turned-up veil, Dr. Hineman continues her history lesson. Her round­ brimmed hat takes on the look of a halo lending her appearance an ethereal and religious bearing. The halo effect becomes strongly pronounced when she sits in a pool of light. Her impressionistic halo is curiously reflected in the dialog as Anderton admonishes her for her decision to eliminate the

Spielberg's Minority Report

125

minority reports as standard operating procedure for the Pre-Crime system. He states: "Are you saying I've 'halo-ed' innocent people?" The halo that Anderton refers to in this admonishment is the headgear that simulates a comatose state and is the automatic sentence for those captured in the process of a pre-crime. The accusatory statement furthers the narrative but works as a substratum, subliminal pun juxtaposed to the more spiritually oriented and extra-logical suggestion of halo in Dr. Hineman's humble straw hat. A pun of this type fits within the context of Spielberg 's design that continually deconstructs the univocal dominance ofthe Symbolic order because puns can interrupt the linear progress of a narrative in a subversive, although relatively accepted, manner. After Anderton's admonition, Iris is sho\Vll in closeup and full front as she bends over a bed of stems with tri-angular serpentine heads that sway in her presence as if reacting to her as a cherished benefactor. Her hands balance over them with fingers lined with crumbly dark topsoil. As Anderton draws near her and continues his aggressive posturing, the plantlets become defensive and lunge at him. He draws away. During this interaction, Iris makes the comment "I used to joke with Lamar that we were the mother and father of Pre-Crime . . . . "

In an off-handed way, Dr. Hineman

directly

binary

acknowledges verbally the

oppositions

in normative

parenthood while reinforcing, in an alternative stratum of significations, the mother earth image as she stands above her plantlets swaying for her like worshiping offspring. 'When their discussion gets to the crux of Anderton's dilemma, that is, the way in which to get a copy of the minority report from the memory of the pre-cog who originally produced it, Dr. Hineman suddenly leans over and kisses Anderton on the lips in an extra-logical gesture that integrates levels of perverse and extra-narrative meanings into the scene. Most significant of which is that this gesture stops the narrative in its tracks from which it recovers only by ignoring the event. The perversity of this interruption and the libidinal connotations of the erotic maternal signal a moment of spontaneous reference to the extra-logical dimension and influence of the maternal semiotic vis-a-vis the Symbolic order: in this case, the event of the Mother Earth image breaking through in all its primal plurality to disrupt the system of the narrative film. We, the audience may dispel the perversity, as does Anderton, because we might be able to dismiss the uncanny kiss as the onslaught of senility in an old woman. But how can we dispel the fact that Spielberg retains this narrative-stopping event when he could keep the narrative flow by editing the scene in another marmer? Plus, why does this kiss seem so queer-and in what sense of queer? Another, more phallogocentric level of meaning for this kiss could be the

126

Chapter 7

filmmaker's desire to reconstitute the dominance of the Symbolic order by discrediting the goddess, making her appear 'mad' as is the standard operating procedure in culture when dealing with the extra-logical and women. Nonetheless, the importance of this event is that the polysemic strata of meanings generated from Dr. Hineman's gesture taken in context with the gender-political and, by association, the eerie iconography consistent throughout the film that reinforces the concept of the enunciation of FEMININITY in Spielberg's art. As Anderton backs away from this strange woman, and perhaps tasting the presence of her lips on his, he calls her insane. . . for suggesting he could break into the Pre-Crime building. Suddenly, a plant with a large flat enfolded flower reminiscent of a vagina with an enlarged clitoris stretches into the frame beside Anderton atop a long sinewy stem. The plant moves tenuously as if ready to attack and, after noticing the plant, Anderton takes evasive action. Thus, the gender-specific iconographic presence of the goddess/earth-mother re-establishes her position of primal

uncanny power.

As a final punctuation to the exchange between Anderton and Dr. Hineman, she mentions to Anderton that the minority report is usually in the pre-cog with the most talent.

In a tight closeup shot, Anderton queries:

"\Vhich one is it?" Iris turns to him with a slight bemused expression: "The female." Communicating the silent subtext: "of course!"

Conclusion In

a less post-structural mallller, Spielberg continues the consistent

emphasis on the maternal all through the film. Although the protagonist John Anderton is male and a father, the image of pregnant motherhood is added to the narrative in a nearly disjunctive marmer and yet, because of its heavy-handed insertions, becomes that much more significant in the overall design of the film. Spielberg positions the first appearance of the mother image just after the introduction ofthe protagonist. As John Anderton enters the Pre-Crime building at the very beginning of the film, his administrative assistant, who is a woman very prominently with child, is awaiting him at the door. Anderton makes a comment drawing further attention to her pregnancy. He asks her: "Any contractions?" She replies, "Only the ones you give me." This exchange and the pregnant woman's foregrounded presence in the frame introduces a multiplex discourse that establishes itself as the promise of the enunciation of the maternal semiotic and primal FEMININITY in the film. Further, just before the end of the movie, there is a symmetrical ending punctuation to the multiplex maternal theme in the film: the very last time we see John Anderton in the film, he is with his wife

127

Spielberg's Minority Report

who is also large with child. She approaches him in profile from the right side of the frame, a direct mirror opposite from the side that Anderton's administrative assistant, also in profile, had approached him at the very beginning of the film. The symmetry and the mirror-image quality of these maternal images function to signal an elaborately designed and polysemic fOlTIl of quotation marks, or bookends to the movie that overtly taps into the pre-lingual experience. Implementing the artist's daring and intuition, Spielberg has harvested from the unconscious the marmer in which the vestiges of the maternal semiotic manifest in the register of the Symbolic. It is as if Spielberg's artistic intent was to create a film that mimics and unveils the ways in which the maternal semiotic and the Symbolic co-function in a culture that disavows plurality. His movies

Schindler 's List and Artificial Intelligence,

among his other recent work, demonstrate the depth and sophistication of his extra-logical muse despite the Hollywood studio system 's Symbolic proclivity. Certainly,

Minority Repon

is a case study that unveils a

concerted effort, if only via the artist's intuition, to tap from the multivalent topologies of the pre-lingual human experience that exude the maternal semiotic. As the quintessential mainstream moviemaker and Hollywood studio mogul, Spielberg, through his body of work, has become a watershed conduit

for the

enunciation

of the maternal

FEMININITY in mainstream movies.

semiotic

and primal

CHAPTER 8 (M)OTHER LOVE IN SPIELBERG' S MUNICH: ABJECTION, JOUISSANCE AND THE MATERNAL OBJECT

Spielberg's film, Mtmich is a study in abj ection, of which the source is primal (m)Other love that culminates in body-centered abj ect birth and ongoing

material

rej ection

during

the

pre-lingual

stage

of human

development. "Abjection preserves what existed in the archaism of pre­ objectal relationship, in the immemorial violence with which a body becomes separated from another body in order to be." (Kristeva

1982, 10)

Abj ection as a physical and emotional process continues to gelTIlinate progressively through the pre-lingual stage and then becomes repressed at a subj ect's entrance into language. And yet traces of the pre-lingual abj ection andjouissance that is the rej ection ofthe maternal Obj ect and (m)Other love resurge recursively from the unconscious in the form of Kristeva's semiotic. Spielberg has been successful at implementing the medium of commercial narrative film, a structural, phallogocentric artefact, while simultaneously unveiling the traces of Kristeva' s maternal semiotic that precedes and extra­ logically underpins the Symbolic order. Munich (re)presents a very specific glimpse into the repressed registers still associated with the

unheimlich1

love Object, the loving, absorbing (m)Other, and the fihn ultimately (re)enacts the internalized murder and discarding of the (m)Other, always already concealed and (re)produced by the Symbolic. This chapter will explore the telltale signs in the movie Munich that resonate the pre-lingual dirge of the uncanny (m)Other love and its return of the repressed.

Dreamworks, the Chora and the Unheimlich Cathexis During the pre-lingual stage, there are topologies of separation and primal semiotic experience that, although eventually repressed, become indelibly coded cryptically in registers of the mind and subsequently reverberate against the grain in the phallogocentric culture. The first of these semiotic phenomena is the stage that (re)presents both time and space that

(rn)Otber Love in Spielberg's Munich Kristeva refers to as the

chora

chora,

129

and that is the primal womb experience, The

generates a plenitude of pre-lingual

obj ectivity and plurality

unfettered by subj ectivity. The maternal semiotic, that is, the traces of the sensory experience are additional topologies originating in the early

material

processes of separation, mixed with the primal narcissisms and

desires for tbe (m)Other. These become extra-logically imprinted during this time. Later, however, during the soon-to-be subj ect's entrance into the Symbolic, the pre-lingual stage gets repressed-accessible only through dreams, altered states and "dreamworks," which encompass the cinematic apparatus. Speaking to the cinematic apparatus and its potential as a virtual machine for dreaming, if only intuitionally, Spielberg named his production company, Dreamworks. The logo for the studio name "Dreamworks" creates a most pronounced graphic-cum-alphabetic signature in the brief studio credits for tbe studio's films. At the very beginning of the fihn

Munich

a female singing voice caresses the dreamy 'Dreamworks' logo

intoning a mournful and incoherent, vaguely syllabic lament. This same woeful dirge leads into the first scene and becomes the leitmotif that characterizes,

extra-lingually, the film's reenactment of the Munich

Massacre, the murder of Jewish Olympic atbletes in Munich in

1972.

The

encoded signature Dreamworks display and the maternal enunciation that the accompanying dirge signals summons the pre lingual the (m)Otherly abj ection

unheimlich

love,

andjouisssance of the chora.

Returning to the experience of the pre-lingual stage, Kristeva's

choratic

state eventually ruptures and the blissfully sinister envelope that is tbe (m)Otber's womb and her enthralling love is breached just as tbe newborn entity approaches the extreme proximity of perdition if its obj ectivity were to be allowed to continue too longer within the

chora.

At this time, the

(m)Otber normally disallows tbe return to the chora and the pre-subj ect, tbe infant, starts to sense heir own abj ect objectivity at the brink of tbe Real. This is the time for violence, matricide and jouissance, a mixture of bliss consisting of wholeness giving way to the materiality of abj ect separation, which Kristeva argues, amounts to " . . . a j ouissance in which the subj ect is swallowed up but in which the Other, in return, keeps the subject from foundering by making it repugnant." (Kristeva

1982, 9) This jouissance is a

double-edged bliss which prepares the pre-subject for entry into tbe Symbolic by means of instigating a repugnance, an oppositionality to the (m)Otber that is the new stage for the infant, tbe soon-to-be subject. According

to

Kristeva,

experiencing

"precondition of narcissism." (Kristeva

this

primal

1982, 13)

abj ection

is

the

With narcissism, that

estranged doppelganger of primary narcissism, and whose milestone

130

Chapter 8

moment is conceived belatedly by Lacan to be a Mirror Stage of misrecognition, the first steps to submitting to the Symbolic order occur. And this submission to the Law of the Father amounts to a ritual separation from the primal Obj ect. But what if the Object, the (m)Other, were not to succeed at keeping the subj ect-in-process2 from foundering? What if the subj ect-in-process were to become stuck in the enveloping bliss of the pre-lingual plenitude and abjection? What if the

unheimlich

cathexis of (m)Otherly love were not

imagined as repugnant? What if the (m)Other and child feigned separation. Spielberg quickly sets this regressive scenario up in Munich. Early on the film develops imagery that signals the cathexis of the (m)Other's love stymied at the primal stage before separation. Then, the film repeatedly continues to depict the subject-in-process as he founders in the folds of the extra-logical abj ect stage of pre-lingual human development.

Inspired by Real Events Before starting the examination of the significant scenes in the film, it should be noted that as the lights go down and the sounds and images start to pulsate through the speakers and on the screen encouraging the stretching of the Symbolic order to tolerate this virtual machine of dreams, the theatrical sphere of the commercial cinematic apparatus evokes the suspension of subjectivity as the spectator's environment takes on the sensual aspects of the pre-lingual plenitude of objectivity that amounts to the temporary sensation of an enveloping gush of the return ofthe repressed (m)Other love. The theatrical womb-effect fosters the subversive semiotic. As the film opens, as we mentioned above, a syllabic-sounding proto­ lingual dirge starts up just before the appearance of the studio ' s promotional imprimatur, 'Dreamworks,' and the lament continues solenmly. Then the final opening title in this opening sequence proclaims, "INSPIRED BY REAL EVENTS" and transitions to the first shot of the film that depicts a man starting to climb over a gate. At this time the dirge fades away. A nine­ minute encapsulated version of the Munich Massacre ensues using actual news footage from

1972

along with scenes re-created for the movie. The

sense of abjection fills the somber mood that this historical montage evokes and triggers the surge ofthe extra-lingual signs ofthe maternal semiotic and maternal cathexis that continue for the rest of the film. The final shot of this sequence is of a period TV set showing the actual footage of Jim McKay from ABC in shock referring to the fate of the Israeli hostages, as he states, "They're all gone."

(rn)Otber Love in Spielberg's Munich

131

Finally, the protagonist of the film is introduced. Avner, is depicted in his home solemnly watching the broadcast of the event.

In

the very next

shot, Spielberg introduces Avner's wife emphasizing her late stage of pregnancy as she crosses in front of the camera framing her torso heavy with child. She crosses to her husband watching the newscast in the background. Avner's wife, Daphna, receives most of the attention in this scene and we are tom between the two characters vying for the position of protagonist, which ends in a stalemate as they are depicted in profile facing each other in the arched entryway to their kitchen. She asks him, "What now?" He answers "Now, we're going to have a baby." This scene is the tangible start of the enunciations specifically about motherhood, birth and the dyad that contextualizes and punctuates the film's theme of pre-Symbolic abj ection and jouissance that recurs throughout the filin.

In the very next scene, another female character usurps the focus of the 1972, is (re)presented in

narrative as Golda Meir, Israel 's Prime Minister in

conference with her advisors advocating revenge on the "architects of the Munich murders." "I have made a decision. The responsibility is entirely mine," Prime Minister Meir states at the end of the scene in which she is positioned at the head of the conference table. She stands. The rest of the participants of this war counsel-all men-stand with her. As prime minister and a woman appearing to be beyond childbearing years, Meir's presence references inadvertently the concept of matriarchy in all its multifaceted and pre-historical significance. And this we realize more fully in the accompanying scenes. Soon after, Avner is summoned to a special high-level meeting in Golda Meir's house. Prime Minister Meir presides but discreetly from the background as the men carry out what is understood are essentially her plans. On the way to the meeting, however, the first mention of Avner's father occurs when the high official accompanying him mentions his father with respect. This comment starts a patriarch-at-a-distance motif that consists of references to the father who, although not deceased, never appears in the movie. Although this is a theme recurring in many of Spielberg 's movies, in the case ofMunich, the absent father motifbolsters the prominence ofthe engulfing

(m)Other

Object,

and

consequently,

the

underlying

and

problematic theme of (m)Otherly love and its plurality. Once

Avner arrives

to

the seemingly infOlmal meeting

at the

unassuming home of Prime Minister Meir, he is greeted by the Israeli matriarch who introduces him to the generals in the room all seated below her as she moves from one to the other. She then turns her back on him to retreat to her seat in the background while politely inquiring about how he is and how his/ather is. 'When he answers fine, Prime Minister Meir drops

132

Chapter 8

the subj ect and offers Avner coffee .' This off-handed reference to Avner's father by the matriarchal image reinforces the absent patriarch motif that builds with each allusion to Avner's father along with his continuing absence throughout the film. Abruptly, at this point, Spielberg chooses to break a structural continuity convention of the commercial cinematic apparatus by crossing the invisible 'axis of action' whose purpose in conventional cinema is to maintain the sense of continuity for all the shots in a scene. As the official who brought Avner to the meeting directs him to sit and does so himself, Spielberg cuts to another camera position that crosses the

180 Degree

Line and in a split

second, Avner, who was on the left side of the general suddenly finds himself on the right side of the general and there has been a change in background. Thus, continuity, as classical films construct it, is interrupted like a forced skip in a vinyl record. But the story plods on as if nothing were amiss. Soon, however, Avner notices another

Ull- introduced

person in the

background-a person who remains un-introduced throughout the scene. This man silently and expressionlessly acknowledges Avner with his glance, then continues to make notes. We will ieam later that this man will become Avner's immediate supervisor. As Avner turns away from the man in the background and sits, the camera cranes dO\vn with him revealing Golda Meir's head and torso out-of-focus in the foreground covering a big part of the screen with her presence, that ofthe maternal authority, and, for the time being her body hides the silent man, the soon-to-be surrogate father in the background. The structure of the commercial cinematic apparatus has suffered a slight telltale interruption in this strategy-meeting sequence, which is the break in commercial film continuity structure. And along with this, the recurring emphasis on the absent father, these irregularities in convention acknowledge to

what

extent narratively and technically

Spielberg works in channeling the subversive maternal semiotic in his films. And his periodically abrupt and fragmented disregard for continuity continues with an added maternal nuance: at the end of this shot, Prime Minister Meir, out of focus in the foreground, starts to get up and Spielberg cuts once again to the 'incorrect side' of the axis of action, disrupting conventional continuity rules. This jump

cut is

disguised to an extent with

Ms. Meir's continuing motion in both successive shots as she rises to her feet to take a cup of coffee over to Avner who is no longer to the right of center screen. Now, in a split second after the edit, he finds himself very much on the left side of the screen when just before, he was on the right side of center screen. The emphasis of this jump cut reveals the image of Ms. Meir once again standing above all the men who are ranking officials in an historically patriarchal system, and she is matronly serving coffee this time.

(rn)Otber Love in Spielberg's Munich

133

This repeated matronly attention subtly underscores Spielberg 's theme of the film that investigates the (m)Otherly disposition, this time in the personification of Prime Minister Meir hovering over her male counterparts as if they were her problematically undifferentiated scion. This theme is reinforced throughout the film as Avner finds himself becoming another of the undifferentiated dyadic-ensnared offshoots of his Motherland as well as finally ofhis birth mother factoring in more and more as the film progresses. Spielberg 's foray into these nuanced political and psycho-libidinal themes at the scale of historical global dynamics in Munich is stunning as we will discuss. As this recruitment scene with Avner devolves into several awkward moments for Avner unaware of the specific mission it is implied he is being recruited for, Prime Minister Meir takes over the conversation diverting it to the reason why she did not attend the funeral of the slain Israeli athletes. The reason she gives is that "Family matters." So even though it would bother some people that she decided not to go to the wake of the Munich athletes, because family comes first, and she was fOlmally grieving for the recent death of her sister. This left the room with an awkward pause for all. Ms. Meir recovers from the moment by returning to a reference to maternal issues: she comments that Avner's wife is pregnant. He responds that his wife is seven months pregnant. It is little surprise by now, given the pre­ lingual theme infiltrating the fihn, that subj ects of women, family and pregnancy take over the conversation at any given moment and often randomly. However, in mercurial fashion, Prime Minister Meir turns the conversation to Avner as her former bodyguard. She states that she liked him as her bodyguard. That she "likes neat durable men." In this framing, Avner is out-of-focus on the left side of the frame with his back to the camera, while Ms. Meir is

% front in the background and a picture on a table

next to Meir is prominent in the frame and shows the real Golda Meir, not the actress, with a laughing United States President Nixon. This last sequence of shots with its fragmented conversations, its lapses of continuity editing and its imagery of laughing presidents juxtaposed to comments on death and pregnancy and ambiguity toward fathers demonstrates how Spielberg, and the commercial cinematic apparatus, are able to enunciate the display of the maternal semiotic and its extra-logical plurality while maintaining narrative cohesion, if reluctantly and irregularly, but with powerful effects. The commercial cinematic apparatus, as a system of signs, and an art form, thrives on the tension and the symbiosis between the pre­ lingual maternal semiotic and the phallogocentric. These telltale allusions to family continue as Avner mentions that Ms. Meir liked "having the son of a hero around." This causes a change in

134

Chapter 8

demeanor as Prime Minister Meir rises and comments that Avner doesn't look much like his father. Revealingly she proclaims: "Your mother is who you resemble." She crosses to him and touches his face with her open hand as the other members of the cabinet stand acknowledging that the end of the meeting is at hand. When she takes her hand away from his face and rubs his

ann, her expression suddenly changes from a loving maternal sentiment

to sharp poignancy as she looks away as if in prelingual (m)Otherly repugnance,

foreshadowing

Avner' s

decline

into

primal

objectivity,

primary narcissism and abjection as he carries out her tacitly proclaimed mission. We soon find out that this mission amounts to his potential demise in the throes of her dyadic political grip. After Ms. Meir leaves the room, and up the stairs in silence, the generals and cabinet members leave the house mostly in silence. Spielberg cuts to a dO\vn angle on AVIler that seems to indicate he is alone as he turns towards the chair where Prime Minister Meir had sat. Spielberg then cuts to a medium shot with Avner prominent in the background, and in the foreground sits the quiet, un-introduced man who was writing notes alone throughout the meeting. He catches Avner by surprise when he states "Her sister died. But I think she didn't go to the athletes ' funeral because some people are angry at her for not negotiating with the terrorists." Ephraim gets up and introduces himself as Avner's case officer, his 'handler.' Spielberg cuts short this scene between Avner and his case officers as if Ephraim were a necessary narrative element and, in addition, a patriarchal interloper in the themes he is exploring in his film. Ephraim, the poor excuse for a surrogate father, quickly disappears for the time being as Spielberg directs the film back to the main maternal theme.

(m)Otherly Coitus As if to more thoroughly disengage from Ephraim's new narrative thread at the end of the recruitment meeting, Spielberg cuts to a closeup shot of Daphna, Avner's wife, perspiring and breathing extremely heavily. With this tight framing and its limited pictorial infonnation, the audience has no context other than the knowledge that she was at least seven months pregnant earlier in the film, so the natural inclination is to assume that she might be giving birth. Giving birth is the primal moment in which abj ection is first realized materially by the soon-to-be subj ect, the baby. It is the moment of bodily abjection and expectation that shudders through the non­ differentiated entity that is about to be separated physically from the (m)Other. But as Daphna's breathing slows slightly, a face in silhouette comes into frame and they kiss passionately as the camera moves back

(rn)Otber Love in Spielberg's Munich

135

revealing Avner. He moves more into light before a cut to a medium long shot reveals that husband and wife are making love. Lovemaking is the scene of conception, the

material

start of the chora stage in some respects.

Plus, lovemaking is partially role-playing, as if the lovers were re-enacting the

unheimlich

mother and child reunion in a safe spasm of ardor and

' dreamworks' while bodily conjoining.

In

this sequence, Spielberg has

condensed the repressed primal desires and fears into imagery that reflects nOlmative behavior, if materially and maternally risque, and yet the images unequivocally further his exploration of the theme of (m)Other love and libidinal investments. How significant for Spielberg's tbeme is it to incorporate Daphna and Avner's passion at this stage ofDapbna's gestation? Reflecting on how few commercial films graphically display lovemaking with pregnant female characters, Spielberg's decision is revelatory at many levels in

incorporating

this heated carnal depiction. The composition in this scene, that is, the medium shot revealing their lovemaking emphasizes that Dapbna is very pregnant: her stomach is uncovered and protruding in the foreground as Avner lies sideways approaching her with coital intentions from behind. Later in a closeup two­ shot on their faces in tbe aftermath oftheir pleasure, Avner and Daphna joke about sex and pregnancy. 'When we return to the wider shot, Avner covers her nakedness with a sheet. But Dapbna rearranges it once again to reveal her naked belly plump witb pregnancy. Then, as the camera pushes in Dapbna talks about his accepting whatever the new mission might be, but the conversation turns unexpectedly as she states "Your mother knew what she was doing. She abandoned you on the Kibbutz." Avner refutes this stating that his fatber was in prison and his mother was overwhelmed. Ignoring his excuses, Dapbna responds pensively, "Now you think Israel is your mother." As she says this, she has full emphasis placed on her as she tums her head slightly towards the camera and gazes off just above the top frame line. These are perhaps the most important lines of dialog in the film. Daphna's intuitional, extra-logical remarks link all the previous and future maternal allusions to the nation as (m)Other(land) and now, directly linked to Avner as indifferentiated, dyadic citizen and offspring. Further, Dapbna's comment blurs the demarcation between

his

birth

mother,

Prime

Minister

Golda

Meir

and

the

(m)Otber(land). Israel becomes an extension of Avner' s birth (m)Other engulfing him in tbe jouissance and abj ection (re)presented by his blissful and vile mission of revenge. The mission and its semiotic connotations result in Avner' s regression to a foundering subject-in-process succumbing

136

Chapter 8

to the (m)Other/child dyad in sea of melancholy, primal narcissism and abjection.

The (m)Otherly Threshold In

a subsequent scene, and after Avner 's case officer explains his

mission but before the required assassinations begin, Avner is in a plane by himself looking off as if lost in thought as the pilot mentions that they are cruising at

30,000

feet. He looks over to the oval window of the plane that

is completely dark, and the camera pushes by him and into the window. As the camera gets closer and closer, a dark scene becomes more and more visible as if proj ected onto the window, like a reflection or an image in a crystal ball. The effect is caused by a sophisticated superimposition on the dark skyline outside the window that creates an extra-logical link between AVIler and this vision he seems to be having. The arrival of the Munich Games terrorists at the door of the Israeli athletes ' facilities is depicted in Avner's dark dream. One of the Israelis is seen trying to keep the terrorists from forcing their way in. As the camera keeps pushing forward into the window, the image becomes clearer but still a superimposition on the plane window. This vision for Avner is more than idle musings. It's as if it were an event of clairvoyance so attached to his soul it is almost a memory. The multilayered airplane window shot that signals Avner's extra-logical recall of the Munich Massacre demonstrates Spielberg 's daring and artistry in creating plurality of meaning(s)

in cinema while keeping the story

accessible to mainstream audiences. As the Israeli athlete pushing back the terrorists at the door cries out his warning Avner's vision changes from an animated reflection on a plane window to a full-bIO\vn, screen-wide montage of the violent subjugation of the hostages and the deaths of the first two athletes murdered. The audio in this scene, however, reinforces the sense of an altered state as the sounds seem distorted and soon the orchestral music swells with a reprise of the funerary lament that accompanied the opening titles. The incoherent dirge builds until the second athlete is riddled with bullets and the camera pans to his blood splattered on the wall. Spielberg composes a dissolve from this ghastly mural to the darker side of the sumise at

30,000

feet as the clouds

have remained dark, but a blood redness can be faintly discerned. The camera pulls back via the mechanics of Dreamworks, from this spatter of cloudlets back into the airplane window producing a bookend effect to Avner's vision before tilting down to a CD of a left hand featuring the ring finger with its ring. Avner, still in his plane seat, brings his hand with his wedding ring up to his mouth, kisses it then takes it off and places it in his

(rn)Otber Love in Spielberg's Munich

137

pocket. The wedding ring symbolizes his commitment to his wife i n the phallogocentric world, the world which Avner is leaving, in some respects, as he regresses from the Symbolic to the primary narcissism and abj ection of his dyadic relationship with the maternal Object, the (m)Otherland. This is the moment of no return figuratively for Avner and the next shot reinforces Avner's through-the-Iooking-glass transformation.

Spielberg

cuts to a street scene from a high angle that is very unexpectedly distorted: the trees that align the street are crooked and there are visual anomalies like looking through thick glass or into an imperfect mirror. A man that we almost recognize approaches from a distance and the camera pulls back to reveal that the shot is reflected in a highly polished mirror-like sign for a bank. The figure that we can almost recognize through the distortions is Avner. The camera then cranes up while pulling back and tilting down as we see Avner from nearly directly overhead walk in through the threshold of the bank. Figuratively, that is, symbolically speaking, in this scene Avner avoids (mis)recognizing his subjectivity in Lacan's Mirror Stage and has regressed from the Symbolic order back to the pre-lingual stage.

In

other

words, Spielberg has visualized Avner re-entering the liminal stage of human development. Avner's crossing through the dark entryway of the bank (re)presents a return through the figurative love canal, the threshold of (m)Other and the world of declining plentitude and rising abj ection.

(m)Otherly Moms and The Dyad After Avner 's team 's first murders, which follow closely after the bank scene, Avner returns to Israel incognito to attend the birth of his child. This is not disclosed at first. We see him entering the Israeli border and then depicted from the waist dO\vn pacing before an older woman with her hair up like Golda Meir's sitting in a large, clinically lit waiting room.

In

the

background over the right shoulder of the woman there is an image of what appears to be a stylized silhouette of a fetus with another, much smaller, white graphic of a fetal shape inside the former. Or the design might be the highly stylized graphic of a new mother holding a baby in her arms. It is hard to decipher. At any rate, it is an indistinct conceptual graphic, but the pre-lingual stage of human development appears to be irrefutably suggested by the poster. The first words of the matronly woman while the lower part of a man's body paces before her is "Are you going to see your father?" And a short discussion ensues of Avner's father "being elsewhere" when Avner was born. After the matron, who we now perceive as Avner's mom, states that she doesn't visit his father much, Avner sits dO\vn with her and from that moment on until the end of the scene their bodies are touching

138

Chapter 8

either shoulder to shoulder or with her ann around him. Once again throughout this scene the mother/child dyad as a theme is bolstered in several ways: in the maternity ward setting and its artwork, in the reference to the absent father, as well as in the intimate body language of the characters, a matronly woman and a young man. To go even further with the theme, Avner's mom pulls him close and looks him in the eye stating, "I look at you, and I know everything I need to know." This interaction is executed very slowly with great emphasis in a closeup shot giving it a power and depth that goes beyond the normal mother and son gestures of filial connection. It speaks at many semiotic levels communicating a plurality of knowledges that go beyond the Symbolic retroactively to the layered prelingual traces of the

chora.

Within the maternal authority context of the

film, Avner 's birth mother tacitly shores up his retum to the primal stage of jouissance and abj ection. The scene ends cutting from the dyadic two-shot to a closeup shot of a newborn in a man's anns before widening the shot and the start of a new scene with Avner and Daphna, his

other half, his wife

in bed in the near background. Once again, the emphasis of the film is on the pre-lingual stage as the newborn in Avner's arms gets all the compositional emphasis. Avner's voice is heard, but his head is cut off by the framing. He tells Daphna he wants her to move to New York, so he can see more of her. It is

uncanny that the composition remains during much of

this conversation centered on the baby in the man's anns in the foreground and Daphna in tight framing in the near background. After Avner shows the baby girl to his mother through the room's window, he retums with the baby to Daphna's bedside and sits. Daphna teases Avner and gently touches her daughter's head in his arms. This new (m)Other and child dyad between Daphna and her baby, while Daphna caresses her newborn's head in Avner's anns is reminiscent dyadically of the intimate shot of Avner and his birth (m)Other that ended the previous scene. Then the camera moves slightly upward toward Avner to give emphasis back to the protagonist of the film.

(m)Otherly Murder Avner' s decline into cathected maternal abj ection continues as the assassinations stack up. At one point, however, the hunters realize that they have become the hunted and a tangible sense of defilement takes hold of the group. Avner then finds the body of one of his team of assassins, Carl, the one who oversees cleaning up the messes and making sure clues are not left behind.

In their grief, the team decides to take revenge on the murderer who

is another assassin and a "gun for hire," who has no affiliations other than

(rn)Otber Love in Spielberg's Munich

139

paying clients. She i s Dutch and living on a houseboat where the team find her. They arrive riding inconspicuous bicycles. They bring in homemade firearms that are phallus-shaped like long bicycle pumps. They pump two shells into her disrobed chest-she had exposed her breasts with the intent to persuade them to let her live. Mortally wounded, she stumbles to a chair, her housecoat flung open, and the two who have shot her gaze transfixed at her gurgling death throes. Hans, the documents and identities specialist, brushes by them and pumps one last shell into her head ending the death spasms. Avner folds one side of her open robe over her to cover her exposed body. But then Hans impulsively tells him to leave her disrobed and he re­ opens her robe to reveal her nakedness. The blood flows from her chest in a stream down to her exposed pubic hair and between her legs. Spielberg keeps the tableau of Avner's team gazing at the dead woman in her bloody exposed state prominent in the frame for several seconds: unnervingly long; and even after the men take their leave, the telltale tableau remains on the screen. This shot of the revenge scene is disconcerting because the graphic tableau replicates one of the visceral connotations of the figurative primal murder ofthe maternal Object when the pre-lingual entity materially senses its own abjection and so separates physically from the Obj ect. This process is when the newborn starts on its path to becoming the subj ect-in-process, and leaving the (m)Other Object figuratively murdered and discarded as the rej ected, abj ected dyadic obj ect. The newborn knows this feeling as the (m)Other expulses the him!her as if s!he were no longer part of primal wholeness. The newborn must re-enact this expulsion figuratively before submission to the Symbolic ends his object relations. A tentative, necessary ending is the mother/child separation. A repressed tennination that returns like a psychic echo of melancholy in a spectrum of psychological effects. Murder and abjection trigger and/or aggravate the recurrence as we are beginning to realize is an underlying theme in Spielberg's dark film. Avner, in this scene of the assassination of the Dutch woman-assassin, has tried to cover the female assassin's nakedness because it strikes too close to his

0\Vll

murderous and moribund issues with the maternal Object.

The naked female corpse defiled and on display is like a sign of his own impending doom as the (m)Other(land) envelopes and suffocates him with her mission of revenge and murder. He begins to sense the material lethality of the (m)Other(land) 's unrelenting folds engulfing him, but he cannot yet fully apprehend the survival implication that requires him to detach from (m)Other in order to find a separate subj ectivity, a self in his own Symbolic identity. But instead, in the abj ect tableau at the end of the scene, Avner remains, stymied in the throes of repugnance and bliss caused by the

140

Chapter 8

(m)Other's demands and her embrace (re)presented in the figure of the assassinated, bloody corpse of a naked woman.

In the

subsequent scene, as if to get rid of the filth of defilement that

reverberates from the disrobed and blood female corpse in the prior scene, AVIler makes a feast, compulsively chopping vegetables and creating an excess of food. Nevertheless, the filth of the past scene contaminates the feast and Hans does not partake of the food. He mentions that he keeps seeing the Dutch woman "sprawled out like that." The camera cranes over Avner's shoulder to fill most of the frame with the feast sprawled out on the table as Avner in profile looks up to Hans standing above them all. Hans continues to state that he wished that he would have let Avner cover her with her housecoat. One of the team, Steve, in a closeup shot for emphasis, leans forward and responds almost childishly in verve and forgiveness: "Yes, but you weren't yourself." Spielberg's emphasis on this line seems to indicate that the team members are all not themselves in the face of the abjection in their mission of death that hearkens back to the primal Object, the (m)Other. Then the film cuts to a new scene in which a frosted window with horizontal bevels that allow a translucent view of Steve approaching although umecognizably distorted and fragmented by the parallel etchings of the window. The shot is beautiful in its variety and its disorienting marmer in which to start a new scene. Steve' s body appears splintered and multiplied by the series of beveled etchings. His mission seems to fragment his sense of self, which this shot graphically portrays as he comes to announce the foreboding disappearance of Hans to Avner. Curiously, this kind of shot photographed through the splintering effect of an interior window textured with a narrow and parallel reed pattern on the door is similar to the one found in another Spielberg movie,

A.

1., and described

above in the chapter in Chapter Six. The textured window in

A.

1. had

vertical lines that split the image of David, the artificial boy, into slices that repeated and fragmented his body like the way the above-mentioned shot in

Munich

did the same to Steve, one of Avner 's crew. We could argue that

this a rurimng motif and intertext across at least two of Spielberg 's films and that it (re)presents the depiction of the fragmented subj ect-in-process as she or he struggles for identity beyond the maternal Object 4

(m)Otherland Avner's moral and psychic decline accelerates now as two other team members, Hans, and Robert, the toy maker, are assassinated. Avner's paranoia has him sleeping in his closet rather than in his bed that he has

(rn)Otber Love in Spielberg's Munich

141

ripped apart searching for killing devices. He soon fails in his last assassination attempt and, as he escapes, he is depicted in the most defiled marmer running from the scene, dark camouflage paint smeared on his face as if filthy with excrement, his eyes wide with terror. As Avner runs away, the whole effect in the trucking closeup shot tracking him gives the audience the impression that Avner is at the end of his emotional rope. It makes sense then that the next scene shows him arriving back in Israel, out of the cold, but deeply disturbed and a shadow of his former self. Young, energetic military men pick him up at the airport, fawn all over him and shake his hand. But he is barely able to respond to them in his semi-catatonic condition. Later his case officer, Ephraim, tries to debrief him and get information from him. But Avner resists. They are interrupted, however, by Prime Minister Meir' s emissary, slovenly looking in his fatigues. The effect of the unimpressive appearance of this lower echelon patriarchal figure along with the unexpectedness of his arrival seems very slipshod. After being introduced as a general, he states that although the Prime Minister is proud of him and his men, and that she cannot acknowledge this herself because she never heard of him! After hugging him, the general chuckles as if everyone were in on the inside joke regarding Avner's off-the-grid situation and says "That's it! There's no medal or anything ! " He quickly tums and departs smiling ludicrously to himself as he exits the frame. This unexpectedly coded message from Prime Minister Meir serves as a dismissal from the (m)Other Obj ect and Avner seems to realize his abj ect repugnance to the (m)Other(land). He is filth to the (m)Other Object and the Obj ect is filth to him. A separation from the (m)Other(land) occurs at a material, imaginary level for Avner that will progress to the Symbolic register as the film reaches its climax. Later, after the hayseed emissary has left as abruptly as he arrived, Avner refuses to give Ephraim the infmmation he desires about his contacts in Europe. Ephraim threatens Avner with a court martial. Avner, however, with a crazed, sardonic half-grin ofhis 0\Vll on his skull-like visage, reminds him: "You cannot. I don't work for you. I don't exist." Immediately we cut to Avner's last visit to his mother who speaks of the (m)Other(land) in terms of its high priority for her generation. But when Avner offers her details of his mission, she does not want to hear them.

In the last two shots ofthis final

scene with his birth mother, Spielberg depicts the two in a very tight over­ the-shoulder shot-reverse-shot sequence as they talk. The effect is as if they were looking into a mirror that is made up of each other's separate and yet vaguely conj oined, dyadic existences. In this scene, unlike the first reference to the Mirror Stage at the Suisse bank and its polished metal sign, Avner sees and acknowledges his separateness from the (m)Other. He also

142

Chapter 8

recognizes that he is not out of danger from the (m)Other(land) 's engulfing primordial love, nor his birth-mother's

unheimlich

love, for that matter. He

must distance himself from the abj ect jouissance of the

chora,

the

(m)Other(land), or cease to exist. And this he does.

Avner Murders (m)Other(Jand) in Effigy Avner disengages from his clandestine mission and employment by returning full time to his wife and child in New York City. It is there where Spielberg depicts Avner's final ritualistic fe-enactment of the murder, the defilement of the (m)Other at the corporeal nexus of abj ection and jouissance. But this time it is as a subject-in-process disengaged at least partially from (m)Other. He is confused about (m)Other in all its abj ect, blissful manifestations. He acts out his confusion and fragmentated self. It is a remarkably visceral scene in which Spielberg juxtaposes brutal coitus with the final ferocious moments of the Munich Massacre in a sinister cross-cutting montage that functions like a purging agent for the narrative and for the audience. All the while, it is punctuated aurally by the woeful dirge that has surged in the film at all the Munich Massacre re-enactments like the gushing wail of mourners. The holy waters oflovemaking, of abject coitus, of bloodletting and of the repressed (m)Other ultimately purify this defilement in a brilliant display of the archetypically charged clashes of maternal desires and drives and murder. Later, with concern, Avner 's wife looks up at him crying above her after his violent climax at the intersection of their bodies. As her hands wipe the tears of horror and murder from his eyes, she extra-logically acknowledges his

symbolic

processing of the

escape from the (m)Other(land) ' s love. She whispers: "I love you." The subtext for these words signifies "I see you now." Dapbna unequivocally demonstrates that he exists in the mirror of her gaze. They both realize that he has fully broken free of the primal love dyad and has become a subj ect­ in-process with an identity beyond the dyad. Avner settles in but his surrogate father, Ephraim, reappears in his life to recruit him back to the fold, the enveloping fold or the (m)Other(land). When Avner meets Ephraim this time, the film has a blue cast to it and the background features surcharged symbols of America that include a subtly camouflaged Coca Cola billboard and the distant Twin Towers ofthe World Trade Center. The blue tint to the film makes the flesh tones ofthe surrogate father, Ephraim and of Avner, the ad hoc child, appear sickly. Ephraim, after mentioning that his birth-father will die, and his mother will be alone, asks his surrogate prodigal son to come home. The sentimental music swells slightly. Avner asks him to break bread with him as a wandering Jew who

(rn)Otber Love in Spielberg's Munich

143

needs hospitality from another Jew, who, "it is written somewhere" is obliged to offer hospitality.

In

a closeup shot, Ephraim sensing ultimate

rej ection ofthe regime, says no, turns and walks away. Avner then turns and walks in tbe opposite direction and at one point looks to the background towards the Twin Towers that are visible in the distant skyline. He then leaves the frame. Over the background of the Twin Towers, titles declare that

9 of tbe 11

of the Palestinians were assassinated including the last one

Avner failed to accomplish. Spielberg intimates in this last scene that, for Avner, the subj ect-in-process, life carries on, but so do the traces of (m)Other(land) love and her engulfing demands.

Conclusion In the film Munich we have

a protagonist and a film that lacks a fatber

image, and by extension, lacking the Law of the Father. The fihn draws attention to this many times. The protagonist and the film are stuck to a large extent in the stage prior to entry into language and so the film resonates the abject bliss ofthe (m)Otber. Or, put anotber way, the fihn depicts a cathexis involving the repressed stage of pre-lingual abjection and jouissance in the guise of a narrative about a series of historical events. Spielberg gravitates time and again to displays of the maternal semiotic in a type of reveal unveiling tbe pre-Oedipal dark side oftbe moon that is Freud's dream navel vis-a-vis the pre-lingual void. And the cinematic apparatus lends itself to this return to the repressed and uncarmy registers. This is not a negative thing. It gives mainstream audiences an accessible insight into an

uncanny

shade of primal FEMININITY and the plurality repressed in human culture, a plurality that remains disavowed in the Symbolic order. This is the film's accessible insight into a human culture that is stymied in many respects, and yet bolstered by the dominance of linear univocal linearity. However, the symbiotic relationship between tbe Symbolic and tbe underpininngs of

unheimlich

(m)Other love, as depicted by Avner and Daphna's symbiotic

plurality, also a theme of the film, proffers culture a more expansive, more nuanced glimpse of the human condition.

PART 4 : RIDLEY SCOTT AND JAMES CAMERON: FROMALIEN TO A vATAR

Ridley Scott has a long history of incorporating cultural significance into his films-including the

signifiance

of the maternal semiotic and its

FEMININITY. His films attach layers of cultural commentary and imagery that parallel and integrate with his stories to create mainstream-accessible polysemic content. The layers of cultural imagery and

signifiance

in his

films work subliminally and symbiotically within culture like the work of dreams within the psyche. For instance,

Black Rain

( 1 989), a film informed by the cultural

undercurrents reflecting the economic interdependence between Japan and the United States. This filin plays with the myths of the two nations' intertwined histories with story-motivated and parallel culturally-motivated imagery drawing attention to the tension and struggles of historical and cultural significance between the two nations-all in the guise of an international detective story. The title of the film and the opening red ball graphic with its posture of cultural dominance slowly dissolving from its position covering the 1964 World's Fair "unisphere" featuring the outline ofthe western United States and the Pacific Rim, create an immediate cross­ cultural statement. Then, a lone American man on his Harley rides directly at the sculpture of the same Western Hemisphere as if his mythological individualism were the cause of the disappearance of the 'Land of Rising Sun's' red globe with its overbearing influence. All ofthis occurs in the first few seconds of the film and coalesces in an overall image that reflects, in conjunction with the previous red ball graphic, a semblance of the multi­ level tensions between the two enmeshed world economies. The rest of the film, in the structure of a police thriller, continues and expands on this intercultural theme.

In

one of his more overtly stylistic neo-noir films, the quintessential

Phillip K. Dick adaptation,

Blade Runner

(1982), Scott also explores

culturally challenging themes. But this cultural exploration remained ambiguous, subtly lurking in the shadows while the narrative concerned

146

Part 4

itself with a future-noir storyline: a detective eliminates the replicant criminals and winds up with the woman. The richness of the film, however, apart from its sublime art direction, lies in its peripheral story of human and cyber differentiation expressed through its displays of dystopian deception, dominant posturing and dreams. A prime example of this ambiguous and deceptive shadow play occurs

35 minutes into the movie when Deckard, the

Blade Runner specialist, confronts the love interest, Rachel, about her implanted memories when she tries to show him a picture of her with her mother. His admonishment causes Rachel to leave in tears realizing for the first time that she is in fact a replicant. Deckard picks up her abandoned snapshot and while he looks at it, extra-logically it seems to come to life for

30 odd frames (approximately one and a half seconds) and the sounds of the depicted front porch location manifest in chirping birds and kids screams in the background. The surprising event is downplayed in the film: as if without

noticing,

SIGNIFIANCE:

Deckard

concerns

himself

with

other

pictures.

This scene marks the threshold ofthe traces of the maternal

semiotic leaking into the Symbolic and into the discourse of the film. Though a disruptive parenthesis in the univocal linearity of the narrative, Deckard will continue for the rest of the film to fantasize darkly about Rachel. Later on, his displays and acts of aggression and desire re-visit primary narcissism as he forces her into intimacy like a man-child's

unheimlich return of the repressed vis-it-vis the image of his lost (m)Other obj ect. He is attracted to Rachel the replicant as if she were human, or as if he were replicant himself in the throes of mimetic primally human posturing. The film does not reveal whether Deckard is a replicant or a human as it relishes depicting him in the throes ofthese extra-logical displays generated by his uncarmy relationship with Rachel. This instance of the return of the repressed matched with the abj ect elimination of the other cyborgs causes the film to delve into the prelingual morass of the human experience despite the question of Deckard's genealogy. The tension and the symbiosis between the extra-logical and the Symbolic interaction in the fihn adds to the depth of the extra-humanlhuman intercourse. Recently in his expansive career, and in a cryptic continuation of the

Alien franchise, Ridley Scott has started another series of story-related films using much ofthe same art work inspired by the Swiss artist Giger. The first movie of the new series is entitled Prometheus

(2012), the second is Alien: Covenant (2017), and another, as ofyet untitled sequel, has been armounced and is in the scripting stage. As with his quintessential gory space-parable

that is the original

Alien (1979),

in these recent oblique prequels Scott

explores womb imagery and the abject. Plus,

Scott reintroduces the

umbilical-penis-vagina alien-fetus originally called the 'Facehugger, ' as a

Ridley Scott and James Cameron

147

snake-like larva. The latter's manifestation in Prometheus occurs at one hour and four minutes into the film while two minor characters explore the dark cave-like pyramid they've discovered. The redesigned Facehugger fetus rises from the oily muck like an animated umbilical cord/penis, and from the visceral afterbirth it transforms into a phallic cobra that spreads its glandular wings stretching out from its fist-like ball head to reveal a primal slit-once again the blur between phallus and vagina-then wraps its serpentine body around tbe patronizing arm of tbe soon-to-be killed and co­ opted zoologist named Millburn. When Millburn's colleague, tbe panicking geologist Fifield, clumsily cuts tbe snake-alien's body in two, it sprays acid-like the original Facehugger's-onto the front of Fifield's bulbous helinet melting it and burning Fifield into submission as he falls out of tbe frame (only to show up later zombie-like to attack the rest of the crew). Meanwhile, the aggressive umbilical cord, the serpentine fOlTIl of the new Facehugger regenerates another balled head from its severed body and enters Millburn's helmet circling his head then penetrating his gasping mouth before the film cuts to a barren landscape. Ridley Scott's recursive archetype, the umbilical-penis-vagina, although fodder for Sci-Fi horror enthusiasts, nonetheless (re)presents the artist's intuitive daring and telltale dalliance witb the imaging of primal FEMININITY. Ridley Scott and James Cameron cross paths indirectly via tbe Alien franchise. Cameron directed tbe first sequel to tbe original Alien film and entitled itAliens in 1986. Cameron's contribution to tbeAlien franchise adds a "good (enough) mother" storyline to Scott's "bad mother," "phallic mother" alien horror theme that originally pioneered the dark side of tbe depiction ofthe maternal autbority and primal FEMININITY in commercial film. Cameron expanded more on Scott's stunted treatment of Ripley by designating her as a mother. And then, in Cameron's subsequent films, he features tbemes of (m)Otherhood, as we will discuss briefly here and then more in depth later in tbis chapter. In Aliens, Cameron exploits Ripley's abandonment issues regarding her biological daughter, who we find out along witb Ripley, has grown old and died while Ripley was lost in space for 57 years between the two first films ofthe franchise. Cameron later in the filin makes Ripley tbe adoptive motber of a little girl found as the lone survivor on the same moon first depicted in Alien, LV-426, on which the horrific alien creature was first encountered. Although a narrative trope in Aliens, motherhood as a motif in Cameron's later films expands ever outward until it encompasses (m)Other Gaia as (re)presented by the habitable moon called Pandora in Avatar, and the moon's inner spiritual network around which the Na'vi aboriginals build an extra-logical, spiritually founded culture.

148

Part 4

All along the path of his career, Cameron has fortuitously not been able to distance himself from the (re)production of prelingual, multilayered and polysemic signifiers whether in images or in narrative and discursive excesses. By narrative and discursive excesses, I refer to the series of extra­ logical and maternal images (re)produced prevalently in his fihns, as we will discuss below. These excesses generate semiotic story reverberations that polysemically resonate through the viewer's psyche creating box office success and an expansion on the scope of the human condition. Cameron is a kind of neo-Spielbergian, and younger than Spielberg by eight chronological years, yet he has been as commercially viable in his O\Vll right, as has been his fOlmidable predecessor. Plus, he seems not able, once again, fortuitously, to draw his muse away from the same pull of the horror and the substance of the maternal semiotic that Spielberg, and Ridley Scott for that matter, have intuitionally and artistically acceded to. This speaks to the quality and depth of Cameron's intuition as a visual artist.

CHAPTER 9 RIDLEY SCOTT'S ALIEN: THE PRE-OEDIPAL HORROR OF (M)OTHER

Yet it seems to me quite intelligible that the childish primal anxiety, in the COlise of its development, should cling more especially to the genitals just on account of their vaguely imagined (or remembered) actual biological relation to birth (and procreation). It is conceivable, indeed obvious, that precisely the female genitals, being the place of the birth tramna, should soon again become the chief object of the anxiety-affect originally arising there. Thus the importance of the castration fear is based C . . . ) on the primal castration at birth, that is, on the separation of the child from the mother. (Rank 1921, 20)

The unheimlich 1 horror germinating from the pre-Oedipal stage of human development, specifically birth trauma, is at the core of Ridley Scott's filmAlien (1979). Given Scott's innate artistic intuition and abilities, it is of little wonder that the film should tap so emphatically into this primal horror. And, in addition, that the maternal semiotic should manifest itself so directly within all the aspects of the filin's collaborative effort, from H.R. Giger's uncanny design to the casting ofan androgynous Sigourney Weaver as Ripley. Further, it is of little wonder that the film should resonate so strongly with mainstream audiences given the extra-logical, pictorial and sonic impact of the cinematic apparatus in the hands of such a quality, semiotic-channeling2 fihn director as Ridley Scott. Further still, it is easy to grasp that the film's maternal semiotic underpillllings have so readily attracted and influenced the young, up-and-coming directors who would go on to produce the remaining and increasingly erratic Alien sequels. Speaking to the level of influence that the film Alien and its traces of the maternal semiotic have engendered in mainstream movies, it is also little wonder that those who followed in Scott's footsteps in the Alien franchise are the same directors who have been and continue to be at the forefront of Hollywood box-office success. The following discussion examines how Scott's film draws from the experience of the human pre-lingual developmental stage and how the repressed maternal semiotic resonates

150

Chapter 9

while unveiling the gaps and fissures in the movie viewer's cultural dependency on discursive subjectivity. This extra-logical disclosure of the gaps and fissures that leak traces of the maternal semiotic throughout the hegemony of discourse is crucial to the horror in Scott's film. Further, be aware that the film does more than exploit the unspeakable horror: it also offers ineffable insights into the importance of the maternal semiotic permeating symbiotically through the porous structure that is the Symbolic. 3

(m)Other: The Pre-Oedipal Stage and the Fear of Annihilation The pre-Oedipal stage in human development consists of the period prior to language with its entry into sexuated subjectivity in the Symbolic order. The Symbolic with its lingual constraints coincide in psychological terms with the psyche's conflation of instinctual drives with constructs of sexuality and binary structuralism. According to Freudian tradition, the prelingual stage in human development can last well into infancy as the child develops. Because of Freud's proclivity for the more clinically­ manifest (i.e., talk-friendly) aspects of the speaking subject, the prior experience of the unspeakable pre-lingual stage, was less of a concern for him than it proved to be for Lacan. In some respects, Lacan sUlTIlounted Freud's aborted lead in attempting to survey the pre-verbal. Lacan didn't mind venturing into the repressed topography ofthe pre-lingual-at least as far as this word-less terrain avoided opening up major discrepancies in Freudian or Freudian adapted innovations. Both psychiatrist-philosophers, Freud (via the telltale navel of the dream analogy) and Lacan (via the objet petit a and the mirror stage), contributed in their 0\Vll ways to at least a partially opening up the pre-lingual stage for investigation as significant in human psychological experience. These (unspeakable) primal psychological reverberations emerge from the prenatal entity's material experience that includes its separation at birth, which always already concedes a dyadic and equally material inkling of the horrific phallic (m)Other. Slhe is the all-engulfing and oozing entity that bears the child at the cusp of primal existential survival. The maternal authority at this juncture generates Bion's 'alpha elements' (see endnote 28 in the Prologue above) and Kristeva's 'intensities' of annihilation related to object separation newly germinating extra-logically in the psyche of the vulnerable birthing entity. These excruciating pre-concepts initiate the horrific intimation of primal disarticulation, differentiation, and abject obliteration.

Ridley Scott'sAlien

151

The Law of the Father and the Tongue-in-Cheek Imaging of (m)Other Lacan's always already phallogocentric expansion on Freud includes a crucial pre-Oedipal event he refers to as the 'mirror stage' in which the pre­ lingual being recognizes he/rself in a mirror-like circumstance and so discovers a new cognizant level of selfhood and separation. SJhe also discovers the first inkling of heir subjectivity that requires a figuratively lethal separation from the dyadic relationship with the (m)Other, and the subsequent submission to the tertiary entity in the primal triad that is Father, which Lacan enunciates as the Law of the Father. The Law is constructed in culture (a verbal construct) as the binary opposite ofthe maternal semiotic (the pre-verbal). And this binary structure justifies the relegation of the (m)Other to a subjacent and problematic position in culture. Subversively to this phallogocentric order, a certain deconstructive play with verbal and written constructs that stretch the Symbolic envelope, are featured overtly in the enunciation of (m)Other in the film Alien. For instance, the proverbial "mothership," in the film, self-contained, and uterus-like, is controlled by a duplicitous seeming super computer, which, curiously enough, answers to the name "MOTHER." Only the highest­ ranking officer has direct access to this cryptically maternal nerve-center of the ship found in MOTHER'S own heavily secured womb-chamber. Since it is a cliche that flying and floating vessels are referred to as 'motherships,' it follows that calling the computer mainframe for the ship "MOTHER" has a certain logic. However, is this maternal moniker meant to be sarcastic and weighted in plurality? The screenwriters and Ridley Scott seem to have tapped into the symbiotic and subversive nature of the relationship between the maternal semiotic and the Symbolic because in this filin they have conflated the concept of the mothership with the super-computer in 'name' fOlTIl and this communicates a tongue-in-cheek misnomer that obliquely references the primal (m)Other and the prelingual stage. Plus, the 'maternalized' super-computer proves to be, as the film progresses, not just a computer, but also an extension of the Law of the Father in the fOlTIl of the earthbound paternal entity called the 'Company.' The 'Company' is the corporation that owns this "mothership" that is named cynically the Nostromo ("Our Man"). 'MOTHER,' the computer mainframe for the ship, is not so motherly we soon discover. Later in the film, we find out first-hand the extent of MOTHER's little secret when Ripley, as the highest-ranking officer after Dallas's death, accesses MOTHER's inner sanctum and finds out that MOTHER has been programmed to consider the crew expendable on this

152

Chapter 9

mission. The 'bad mother' myth manifests on the ship by means of the 'mother' references in the dialog, and the priorities of the MOTHER mainframe. As it turns out, the protection and transport to Earth of the alien creature killing the crew is the top priority for MOTHER and the Company. The concept of 'mother' in the naming of this super-computer by the 'Company,' suddenly reveals a hidden agenda that is always already the underlying dominance of the (Law of the) Father. The cynical naming of the mainframe: "MOTHER," matched with the inherent structural and oppositional nature of the computer programming language that governs MOTHER's priorities forms an innuendo, a kind of disparaging, binary­ signaling maternal quip. But this pun's underlying theme of (m)Otherness is precisely what the writers and Ridley Scott, if only intuitionally, are exploring in a broader, polysemic scope with this, their horrific Sci-Fi system of signs.

Imaging the Womb The telltale intrauterine traces depicted in the film are: the anmiotic spacesuits and sleep-pod containers, the Fallopian tube interior design of the space craft with its winding intestinal corridors, plus the cavernous areas of the ship dripping with water and other fluids-later on, drippuig with the blood from the dead crew-all this in conjunction with the overwhelming sense of armihilation outside in Real space, conjure the human pre-lingual boundaries of the chora. The film's allusions to the maternal viscera are heavy-handed, but, nevertheless motivated by the narrative and are appropriate and consistent with the filmmakers' designs referencing the womb and the maternal semiotic. Ridley Scott's film uses these overt examples of imaging the womb and its bodily environs as a backdrop upon which to (re)create cinematically the sliduig signifiers that extra-logically link to the abject, residual horror of the primal experience within in the womb and upon exiting the womb. In contrast to the cultural parameters (re)presented by the Company, that are lying outside the body imagery, or influencing from outside the construct of the mothership, there are three specific maternal sliding signifiers that (re)present traces of the pre-luigual birth trauma as much as the "answer of the Real4" in Alien We will discuss these three in detail: the Derelict Spaceship, the Facehugger and the Chestburster.

Ridley Scott'sAlien

153

The Derelict Spaceship The first of these "answers of the Real," the horrific womb-ere)presenting images that the crew of the Nostromo encounters is the Derelict Spaceship from which MOTHER has picked up a radio signal expressing a cryptic mayday circumstance. Motivated by this radio signal, MOTHER, in a birthing allusion, awakens the crew from their suspended animation, a sleep period contained in a pod that amounts to a figurative gestation. At first, the crew is in a quandary because they carmot decipher the encrypted message from the unknO\vn planet. The captain of the ship, Dallas, seems to waver in his decision to commit the ship to redirecting its course to the uninhabited planet where the Derelict Spaceship rests. However, his Chief Science Officer, Ash, coerces him into making that decision and investigating the source ofthe radio signal. Ash, it turns out, is also a principal representative of the interests of the Company. The crew arrives to the dark, stOlTIlY planet to investigate the transmission, and three of them, Dallas, Kane and Lambert, make their way on foot to find the source of the signal coming from deep inside the Derelict Spaceship. Upon exploring the exterior of the gigantic wreck and making their way between the two curved appendages of the craft towards their groin-like juncture, the three-member patrol discovers two vaginal shaped openings.5 They struggle into one of the telltale slots6 that leads them to one of the main features of their new interior surroundings: an ancient fossilized space voyager popularly called the "Space Jockey" whose gaping chest hole is visible as Dallas mumbles to himself the telltale words: "bones bent outwards. Like he exploded from the inside." Kane has wandered offby this time and discovers the second main feature of the vessel: a misty incubator­ like lower level of the craft. Dallas and Lambert lower Kane down through the opening of a wet cervix-tunnel complete with glistening organic-like surfaces. 'When asked if he sees anything, Kane utters "Cave. A cave of some sort but I . . . . I don't know, but it's like the goddsnm tropics in here." He goes on to describe "leathery objects. Like eggs or something." At one point, he stumbles into an even lower area of the giant womb, an area that is half-hidden under a blue mist. This is the first time the viewer sees the pod-like eggs stre\Vll there. Kane doesn't realize it, nor do the viewers, but the movie has brought us to the liminal threshold leading to the extra-logical prelingual experience in the guise of an extraterrestrial adventure. Before describing the next step in Kane's journey back to the primal womb of his mothership, it is fitting to examine further the relevance of the tropical, egg-filled hull of the abandoned ship that the three crewmembers explore. The Derelict Spaceship's incubating lower depths (re)create figuratively the dark registers of phallic (m)Otherness, a presence of marked

154

Chapter 9

differance7 to the plenitude of the womb before birthing starts, and yet now has become an unheimlich presence or spatiality that seems to lurk in waiting for the proto-offspring, Kane, newly arrived from outside the womb. Eerily, the hull of the Derelict Spaceship and the lower incubator area seem to be ready to suck Kane back into the place that once was welcoming but now means annihilation. The moment of motility that is the birth process when the fetal pre-entity has been awakening, at the molecular level, to a chilling pre-sense of the annihilation that would result if material separation fails. As Kane plumbs farther into the dark incubator of the Derelict Spaceship, further into the ad hoc womb, it is as if the filmmakers imagined for us that the Phallic (m)Other lies in wait for the estranged fetus, in this case, Kane, to come near enough so that separation can be revoked, so that (re-)absorption can occur. However, to survive, the fetus must not fall for the all-engulfing trap, s!he must separate. And keep separating as the return of the repressed cycles through life. But the [mal separation of the dyad into two subjects-in-process, the mother and the newborn, is both a murder and a suicide: the dyad that is 'we' must die in stages for the newborn 'pre-self' to survive. The impending matricide/suicide first passes through the phase of jarring molecular awareness like a shiver through the suddenly unheimlich uterus, a shiver of intensity for the birthing entity, not too long before separation from the womb.8 Kane is at that coalescing moment of motility and birthing before the womb and the maternal authority. Given the abundance of sliding signifiers and imagery that indicate the unheimlich aspects of the pre-lingual that are like vectors resonating from the maternal authority pervading the doomed expedition from the Nostromo, is it any wonder that Lambert, the only woman that accompanies the exploratory party, expresses trepidation several times along the journey? The men disavow the signs of the Phallic (m)Other, and, like the over­ zealous Kane, rush deeper and deeper into the archaic topography of the maternal-ized Derelict Spaceship and the abject horror it brings. The Facehugger: Scourge of the Vagiua-Umbilical 'While exploring the Derelict Ship's hull Kane soon discovers movement inside the translucent leathery egg-pods he has found on the floor there. And as one of the fluid-filled and leaking pods opens from a set of split lips at its top end, the horrendous happens. Ridley Scott sets up the audience for greater impact with suspenseful delays as the unspeakable takes place. By means of a handheld camera moving ever closer to the open-lipped pod, the viewer is brought deeper through the womb-like incubator to take on Kane's

Ridley Scott'sAlien

155

point of view as he approaches the pulsing organ at the center of the open egg-pod. Suddenly, a vulva-like, araclinid-Iegged, embryonic pod-creature leaps towards the camera, and, by means of a sudden cut to another angle, it lands on Kane's helmet, melting through his facemask to latch itself over Kane's face. Popularly referred to as the 'Facehugger, ' the creature's control ofKane is complete. Kane remains subdued and nonresponsive after the attack. By engulfing his face, the creature revokes Kane's separateness and (re)absorbs his identity, his life, into a dyadic relationship. Dallas, the Captain of the

Nostromos,

and Lambert, a female crew

member, struggle through the storm on this barren planet to take Kane back to the ship. The Facehugger still engulfs his face through the melted edges of the destroyed facemask. Once they are inside the ship 's decompression chamber, Ripley asserts that she is now the first in charge on the transport ship because Dallas is teclinically off the ship in the decompression chamber. She refuses to allow entry without the required 24-hour quarantine for contamination. Dallas and Lambert, locked in the decompression chamber with Kane, and, supported by Ash in the adjoining compartment, want to allow entry despite the quarantine regulations. During the ensuing argument conducted over the intercom, Dallas states that it is an order to open the ship for them. However, Ripley says no. But, defying Ripley's orders, Ash, the Chief Science Officer, rushes over and pushes the release button to allow entry. Once

on board, Dallas takes over

command and Ripley is not

reprimanded. She is ignored. She is thrown into a double bind situation: danmed if she does, danmed if she doesn't. She has played ball with the phallogocentric culture: her clothes reduce her female physical attributes to a minimum (the casting of the ultra-slim Sigourney Weaver plays into this costume design), and she has bought into the Company's designation of the hierarchy in the ship 's chain of command during emergencies, but still, she finds herself forced into an impotent position while legally acting as first in command. She is given responsibility, but the system fails her because she is a woman. Ash has overridden her orders and his insubordination remains unaddressed. But now that Dallas is on board and in charge, the incident is treated as ifit never happened. Ripley's moment of visibility in discourse is disavowed in many respects. So now, after the fact, any further action on her part would be considered insubordination. Her hands are tied, and a gender inequity theme insinuates itself into the film. Further, as the film progresses, Ripley will remain impotent for all the events surrounding the mission and the threat of the Alien. Invisible she will remain as long as-as we shall see by the end of the film-her bodily

dif.ferance keeps her gender

specificity reduced and hidden, deferred, as it were.

The film thus

156

Chapter 9

emphasizes 'woman' as a disavowed and sliding signifier, barely legitimate in the Symbolic order, even when she follows the umvritten rules. By the end of the film, once her body is foregrounded in a way neither she, nor the audience will have experienced before in this film, her status in terms of potency changes emphatically. This will be discussed more in depth furtber on in this chapter. After the other cIe'wmembers rationalize and dismiss Ash's insubordination, Dallas and Ash, botb dressed in surgery gear that includes breathing masks, examine Kane while the others look on safely through a glass wall. They have put Kane in a full-body scanner, an MRI type apparatus. At one point, Dallas, in a medium closeup shot notices something off-screen and exclaims "What's it got down his throat?" We then get to see what Dallas is looking at: a monitor that displays what might, or might not, be an umbilical-like organ that stretches horizontally across the screen continuing in both directions. However, it is impossible to recognize a throat or other points of reference on the monitor. We must rely only on words spoken by Ash and Dallas who quickly move on to suppositions that the creature must be furnishing Kane with oxygen. It is as if the uncanny significance of the Facehugger possessing an appendage that penetrates Kane's throat is always already disavowed, as if the unheimlich implications are too horrific to dwell upon for too long or even for the movie to render coherently on the MRI monitor. And, perhaps too horrific to even put into too many words. The Facehugger's deeply penetrating umbilical cord-like appendage exists only in words that suggest ratber than state what they see, but at the same time, the connotations of what the two officers cryptically describe are unspeakable-and un-showable: we never see this appendage even when the dead Facehugger is found. What has become of tbe serpentine object that tbey referred to and that was depicted ambiguously on the MRI monitor? Horrifically, and in the most abject manner, we do find out later in the film what has become of this missing umbilical-penis attached to tbe Facehugger-vagina. Dallas grows impatient after viewing the MRI scan and orders Ash to cut the creature offKane's face. Ash's attempt with a laser cutting-apparatus results in the discovery that the creature has acid for blood. The acid-blood eats through the ship causing the metal to ooze at the orifices that it creates in its wake. The crew goes from deck to deck following tbe descent of tbe acid until it miraculously stops before putting a hole in the exterior hull. Dallas takes a pen and holds a sample ofthe seepage close to examine it and mentions that it must be "molecular acid." Brett, the assistant engineer, exclaims "it must be using it for blood." Tying the molecular acid to the body functions of the creature seems to explain the paradox away, at least

Ridley Scott'sAlien

157

temporarily-and Parker, the head engineer, sheepishly mentions "It's got a wonderful defense system." Later, the Facehugger is discovered to be missing from Kane's face and is nowhere to be found. Ash calls Dallas to the infirmary to witness this. We then ascertain, along with the crew, that the Facehugger died in hiding after releasing Kane, but its throat-penetrating umbilical remains missing even after the creature's main body of the Facehugger is found and examined. Revealingly, the now missing umbilicus-penis is given no notice by Ash and the others during their minute examination ofthe main body. Ash pokes around the visceral organs on the underside of the spread-eagle vaginal arachnid. Finally, Dallas and Ash perch over the defunct Facehugger gazing intently at it as Ripley, fearful in the background, requests that the creature be ejected from the ship. She seems to intuit that the creature is an abject piece of waste, if not a terrifying sign of the Real indicating annihilationiimpossibilitylincomprehensibility. But Dallas defers to the interests of the Company and acquiesces to the arguments of its representative on board, the Chief Science Officer. Ash views the Facehugger's extra­ logical significance in terms of imagining it to be visible, and so attempts to co-opt its Otherness into the Symbolic order as a future weapon. He saves it for further study and to transport it back to Earth. It is revealing that the Facehugger-vagina keeps the attention of the ship's officers but that the umbilical appendage, noticed and mentioned by Dallas and Ash before, remains of no apparent interest. No attempt is made to re-examine Kane after the Facehugger disappeared from his face. This oversight is a telltale sign in and of itself: the uncanny appendage exists and yet it doesn't-it's essentially disavowed once it is out of sight and the less threatening vagina has been constrained. As audience members, we are more than happy to ignore the disappearance of the appendage that might bring to light that which should remain hidden-it might open too many doors. So, it slips from our radar, as well. And yet subliminally, the extra­ logical signifiance remains. But if we investigate this lapse within the sphere of awareness for the ship's crew, we shall see that if the film were to reveal the oversight and acknowledge the unspeakable, given the subversive potential of the phallic umbilical,9 it could not only disrupt the integrity of the narrative­ particularly the strategy of delaying the unspe akab Ie horror that ends Kane's life. But it could also subvert the phallocentric Symbolic order. And this is because the umbilical-penis is weighted with prelingual intensities and libidinal investments. Marcia Ian concisely speaks to the psychoanalytical significance of the umbilical cord during the pre-lingual stage in terms of

158

Chapter 9

its phallic, pre-symbolic implications related to the horrific Phallic (m)Other: If we psychoanalyze psychoanalysis, we begin to suspect that the phallus might be a screen image, a phobic substitute for something else. That something else would be the umbilical cord; for it is the umbilical cord after all, and not the penis, which constitutes the historic "locution and link of exchange" from which the subject must be "missing" if be is to be a subject andnot a permanent appendage ofthe mother. (Ian 1993, 2 1 -22)

This description of the importance of the uncanny phallic aspect of tbe umbilical, in combination with its sighting and surreptitious disappearance in Alien, might explain the selective amnesia and the sheepish pleasure in the faces of the crew as Kane seems to have returned to normal after his sudden release from the enveloping grasp ofthe Facehugger. And therefore, it seems, Kane is no longer a 'permanent appendage' of the (m)Other, the alien creature as s(m)othering Other. He is reborn. For all appearances to us, the viewers, the umbilical that is the primal 'locution and link of exchange' has disappeared from Kane, leaving him free of the Phallic (m)Otber's grasp botb figuratively and literally. The crew all sit around a meal glowing in his redemption from the grip of tbe Real. Curiously, tbe unassuming extra-logical and non-diegetic sound of a heartbeat starts to pervade tbe scene subtly putting a subliminal edge on the sweetness of tbeir reprieve from horror. The uncanny sonic presence, the audio heartbeats, signals that the movie is about to transgress a new subversive boundary in the symbiotic relationship between the maternal semiotic and tbe Symbolic order, and, in a way tbat will indelibly disturb the world of the film by unleashing a chain-reaction of force tbrough the libidinal linaginary from the Real to tbe Symbolic. The chain-reaction tbat will not stop until tbe unheimlich excess of the alien creature's presence is purged late in the film.

The Chestburster: (Re)Possessiug the Phallus Well into the crew's celebratory repast in honor of Kane's new lease on life, the film (re)discovers Kane's lost umbilical, and this produces an uncanny excess, an oozing rift, not only in Kane's body, but also for the integrity ofthe Symbolic order. Once revealed this uncanny, horrific excess released into the mothership carmot be retrieved nor contained. In a lightning strike from Real armihilation, Kane's chest becomes a Pandora's box bursting open and releasing the excess energy of the libidinal force of the Phallic (m)Other's umbilical-penis tbat turns the structural dominion of the speaking subject on its head. The uncanny excess released in this

Ridley Scott'sAlien

159

Chestburster scene, described more in detail below, makes a sliding signifier of Pandora's box by conflating extra-sexual, intersexual, ambiguous-sexual allusions. Kane becomes a plurality of the culturally-constructed and maternally attributed chora-Pandora's box of primal abjection, an extra­ logical, extra-sexual plurality of the womb and tlie dyadic relationship, tlie concept of which the scriptwriters stumbled upon and were compelled intuitively to depict in their narrative. In a surge of creativejouissance,1 0 the filmmakers have unleashed a unique pictorial interpretation of the residual pre-lingual birtliing-singularity of horror and FEMININITY (re)animated and relentlessly insistent, into botli tlie world of the film and of the viewer: the forgotten umbilical cord appendage of the Facehugger's is not missing after all-and for Kane, the full separation from the Facehugger, the ad hoc objet petit a, is a fading illusion. The (re)emergence in this scene of tlie reconfigured phallic umbilical cord proves to be the harbinger of tlie Real" in the form of absolute libido and absolute virulence. The non-diegetic sonic heartbeats punctuating what becomes Kane's last meal in tlie Nostromo galley builds and builds as Kane starts to choke, seemingly on his food. However, he suddenly begins to seizure and Parker lays him across tlie dinner table in a desperate attempt to help him. They hold him down as he struggles and screams. Unexpectedly, his chest splatters with a small burst of blood through his white t-shirt. The crew recedes from him as this spray of blood explodes from his bulging and collapsing thorax. After an all-too-short reprieve from Kane's spasms, another attack begins, and the crewmembers must hold him dO\vn again. But shockingly, a dark phallic creature bursts suddenly up through Kane's chest, like a membrum virile tlirobbing witli intensity. Although appearing to lack eyes, it tums back and forth slowly, as if scrutinizing tlie potential for danger from tlie onlookers who are aghast and awash in Kane's blood. They start to back away. Except for a short exclamation from Ash warning Parker not to touch the creature, the crew remains speechless for the rest of the scene as the phallic creature bares its metallic teeth in its oral orifice that is more a vagina dentata than maw. Then it scurries away over the table towards the camera/viewer and out of frame to the right. We begin to sense something unheimlich, like a flush of blood rising up through our brains. This is tlie beginning of a sneaking-suspicion, an inkling of what might have become of tlie disavowed Facehugger's umbilical phallus, that unspeakable cord down Kane's throat. And the hairs stand up on tlie back of our necks. Stephen Scobie in his 1993 article keeps the analysis oftliis Chestburster scene succinct by describing it as a male fantasy of birth, specifically in terms of man's fear of the "mystery and unknO\vn of women's power." He goes on to mention, and perhaps rightfully so, that "it was the perverse

160

Chapter 9

fascination of this scene which, more than any other single factor, accounted for the popularity (or notoriety) of Alien, ..." (Scobie 1993, 84) I further argue that the reason for the huge viewer response to this scene goes deeper into the ineffable connotations of this perverse fascination. Deeper, that is, into the repressed and mysterious "unknO\vn"-a word often used as a catch-all and cliche to describe the obscure and threatening pre-lingual image of female lack. A lack of lack, really: an umbilical-penis linked to a vagina that suggests an unspeakable (unknowable) and disavowed phallic energy reverberating maternal libidinal investments and primal FEMININITY. In other words, the Chestburster scene fuses several different horrors together. These horrors relate to the sexualized subject on the one hand, but which, on the other hand, ultimately trigger, if subliminally, the always already residual traces of the primal trauma. The birth trauma is experienced prior to the sexualization, that is, the Oedipalizing of the subject-in-process. This trauma is the mate rial separation from the (m)Other. The Chestburster scene conflates all of the following: a version of the objet petit a's conception in the unconscious as a reaction to the trauma at childbirth and subsequent separations from the (m)Other (see endnote 49 in the Prologue); an erect umbilical-phallus with the vagina dentata as a distortion of the disavowal of the umbilical cord; and the primal murder/suicide of the maternal dyad with the Chestburster's murder/suicide of its dyadic host, Kane. Ultimately, at the far reaches of the topology of the unconscious, the Chestburster scene conflates the sudden surge of motility in the birthing (m)Other/child dyad with the motility in Kane's bloody seizures as his dyadic doppelganger, the Chestburster, materially separates from him. FEMININITY's primal plurality, as figured in these conflations, is what makes this scene a sight that the spectator carmot unsee, unrecognize nor unknow. In both the sequences that make up the Facehugger and the related Chestburster scenes, the filmmakers create a potentially devastating eruption in the viewer's psyche, an eruption that remains just barely subdued, barely non-destructive in its psychological implications. But only because it is distanced and sublimated by the conventions of the horror geme. And, further, in this movie's case, by another layer of geme movie distancing: by addition of the conventions of off-world science fiction. The effects of the abject horror in the Chestburster event in this movie cannot be totally dispelled by the viewer. And this amounts to a watershed moment for viewers. Of course, abject horror distanced through the guise and guile of the movies is what makes the horror geme so successful in the arts. However, the movie Alien, particularly in the Chestburster scene, goes further and comes closer than any other in its geme to revealing a glimpse of the absolute source of abject horror, the Real: annihilation-impossibility-

Ridley Scott'sAlien

161

incomprehensibility. That is, in Freudian vernacular, the pure unadulterated life force, the death drive, the libido encircling and engulfing the boundaries of the Imaginary and the Symbolic. The implications of the Chestburster scene, built on the Facehugger segments, and, in conjunction with the forthcoming scenes that depict the terrifying onslaught of the fully-molted alien, generate the filmic representation of Lacan's deceptively playful description of the pure life force, the 'hommelette,' the 'lamella. ' 12 Insightfully, Slavoj Zizek comments on this post-structuralist description, stating that it is as if Lacan were to have previewed Alien more than a decade before it's making.1 3

Ripley Murders (m)Other Ripley kills MOTHER, 14 the ship's monotone mainframe computer and drone of the Company. The mainframe's servitude is alluded to several times in the film and obliquely by the mother ship's name, Nostromo ('Our Man'). She kills MOTHER by enabling the self-destruct mechanism for the mothership just before abandoning her. Ripley comes to the realization that there is only one way to eliminate the abject horror of the elusive alien entity who has killed the rest ofthe crew, and that strategy is, to activate the ship's purge protocol and to excrete herself out of the MOTHER ship by means of the emergency shuttle. This will result in the alien creature being ripped apart in the mother ship's self-destruction. As Ripley accomplishes this activation, the word "PURGE" is visible on the computer monitor in the escape shuttle to indicate, revealingly and polysemically, the shuttle's process of departure by being ejected like a child at birth from the mother ship. Clearly, Ripley must excrete herself from the womb of the ship and murder MOTHER in the process, in order to 'purge' herself of the ultimate weapon, the malignant, libidinal alien beast. It is fitting that Ripley should separate permanently from the mother ship, conflated now with the relentless Otherness of the alien, because if she did not 'cut the cord' and egress, she would be annihilated either by MOTHER's self-destruction­ the self-destructiveness suggested in the fihn by the implication that MOTHER could have disenabled the self-destruct mechanism Ripley had tried to deactivate, but chose not to causing Ripley to shout: "You bitch! "­ or by the alien entity itself, the virulent presence in the ship/womb. Now, seemingly out of harm's way in the speeding emergency shuttle in the vacuum of space and pummeled by the supernova-like explosion of the mother ship behind her, Ripley gets away by the skin of her teeth. Not since before Kane, that unwilling human incubator, was allowed on ship against her orders, does Ripley finally feel safe, sequestered now on the small

162

Chapter 9

escape shuttle. She relaxes, and, for the first time in the film, she disrobes, displaying her bodily signs of womanhood, her signifiers of biological lack and excess. The lurking camera continues its inherently contrived and voyeuristic proclivity, emphasizing Ripley's body with its marks of differance, which had been until now ' deferred' in the film. Before this point in the filin, Ripley's body had been downplayed, ifnot overtly hidden within the Company's male-centered milieu and by her pragmatic imitation of phallogocentric postures-which brought her a modicum of professional success. Despite these postures and, arguably, despite her acquiescence to diminished overt female signs of difference via unisex industrial coveralls downplaying nonnative femininity and contributing to an androgynous look, she continually hits the glass ceiling of the cultural hegemony that seems to result in a certain impotence on several fronts: in leadership (the quarantine issue that was ignored), in saving her crew (all are dead), in saving the mother-ship (now destroyed), and even, as the film will soon disclose, in getting rid of the abject creature that has dominated their existence since it burst through Kane's chest. Now that Ripley is alone and finally rid of the alien menace, she is free to divulge her differance. The maternal semiotic implications that manifest in finally revealing the unabashed woman-ness of Ripley's body also signal the new surge of a potential force in woman and FEMININITY that heretofore was disregarded and disavowed at every tum in the discourse of the film-as it always already is in the cultural at large. Ripley's display of her body for the first time in the film seems to foreshadow a change and a potency that had been hidden for most of the filin. Some might refer to this display as gratuitous, but not if we consider the strength and success that she is to achieve after this unexpected disrobing and validating scene. All too soon, however, Ripley discovers that her alien nemesis is a stowaway with her on the emergency shuttle that she commandeered to escape in. The umelenting creature, the unabated primal phallic libido, insists on prevailing like an ersatz Phallic (m)Other. It has come to the fmal showdown. To avoid the armihilation implied by the primal dyad that the film narrative constructs for her with her alien invader, Ripley must defmitively kill the figurative (m)Other, that is, the libidinous alien, a coalesced plurality of (m)Other depictions and allusions, of the umbilical­ phallus and the 'answers ofthe Real.' Depicting Ripley scantily dressed just before this last battle, it is as if the filmmakers, in a burst of intuition, are implying that, given the magnitude of Ripley's one and only defmitive womanly physical display, she is no longer a male pawn or poseur, and no longer tied down exclusively by the Symbolic, and so she loses her impotence, her lack. In a telltale dramatic climax, Ripley purges herself and

Ridley Scott'sAlien

163

the emergency shuttle/womb of the creature, dispatching it once and for all into Real annihilating space.

Conclusion Ironically, despite Ripley' s escape from the phallic (m)Othemess and heir umbilical-penis in the imagery of the film, she is now pictured regressing to the pre-lingual, to the same plentiful pre-birth stage egg-like sleep pods in which at the beginning of the film she and all the crewmates had awakened from their suspended animation. The last image of the film shows her asleep in a glass covered, amnion-like pod in the womb of the emergency shuttle. Ripley, and by extension, we, the viewers within the enveloping shelter ofthe theater, bathe in the dyadic plenitude ofthe womb. But, nonetheless, an unease persists-barely an inkling, barely a speck of residue on the dark horizon ofthe psyche-that the struggle with the phallic (m)Other after all this might not be over. 15 And the bookends-like symmetry of the final image of Ripley in the sleep pod matching the opening scene of similar sleep pods suggests that the process has gone full circle and implies that the recurring return of the repressed has not ended. That is, as long as Slhe, the (m)Other, remains repressed and disavowed in the Symbolic. This is one of the reasons that the Alien sequels keep arriving on the movie scene decade after decade and the reason that the unconscious sliding signifiers, the pre-lingual traces of FEMININITY and the maternal semiotic, keep inspiring so emphatically the top commercial fihnmaker s of recent times. The filmmakers for the original film,Alien, started it all. Like intuitional savants retur ning to the cave wall of the simulacra, they have given us fleeting, telltale shadows on the theatrical screen that extra-logically reveal fissures in the phallogocentric culture. Telltale shadows that horrify at first; then inspire the search for other fOlTIlS outside the cave-polymorphous, philosophical

fOlTIls-and

gelTIlinating from Kristeva's

the

extra-logical

maternal

reverberations

chora. 1 6

Most image-makers and viewers, inculcated in the culturally mediated structural mire, settle for (re)producing reactionary illusions on the cave walls rather than aspiring to create polysemic signifiers that reach beyond the smoke and mirrors of the Symbolic. Alien, with its unveiling of the maternal semiotic, leads the way by extra-logically sliding off the screen to the top of the cave wall and along the ceiling, always already approaching the cave entrance/exit and the new forms on the verge of the antinomy that is the Real. Lacan's cryptic words inform this analogy: "The lack ofthe lack makes the real, which emerges only there, as a cork. This cork is supported by the term of the impossible-and the little we know about the real shows

1 64

Chapter 9

its antinomy to all verisimilitude." (Lacan 2004, 9) Perhaps the "antimony to all verisimilitude" as depicted in the Ridley Scott's film's theme, that of the maternal semiotic's extra-logical overlapping with the Real, serves the spectator as an inspiration to seek Plato's figurative cave's threshold; and the symbiotic, disavowed, subversive fOlTIlS that come with it. 'Antinomy to all verisimilitude' notwithstanding, Ridley Scott's Alien brings to light the horrific, pre-Oedipal libidinal intensities springing from the sticky separation from (m)Othemess, and (re)presents the virulence of the unconscious with its sliding forms ofthe maternal semiotic and the Real. And that's why the audience members chained before the artifacts of the cavernous commercial cinematic apparatus, (i.e., all the institutions, the intuitions, and the mechanics of the mirror-screen on the cave wall), find the film more than compelling. We find it unspeakably insightful.

CHAPTER 1 0 JAMES CAMERON' S 'ALPHA' TRILOGY: DOPPELGANGERS, THE DEPICTION OF WOMEN AND THE UMBILICAL PHALLUS

The "Alpha" (m)Other Muse: Ridley Scott's Alien James Cameron is a major sprocket in the artistic and the discursive machine that drives the commercial cinematic apparatus. Further, James Cameron is an intuitive channeler of the semiotic spirit and the plurality of the human condition. As such, he specializes in the synthesis and (re)packaging of popular culture cliches and semiotic undercurrents into motion pictures. One Sci-Fi movie's narrative success and popular fallout that he appropriated, and that coalesced in him, and inspired him is significant: Ridley Scott's Alien. Cameron charmeled the signifiance of this film, if only intuitionally-and it makes sense since Scott's Alien (re)presents quintessential ur-phantasie(n) translated into mainstream iconography of horror. As Cameron's sequel Aliens demonstrates, Cameron responded strongly to Scott's fihn on a personally revelatory level and on an artistic one. His primal connection to the original verve in Scott's film has followed him throughout his career-as it did, but to a lesser degree, for the two other Alien sequel directors: David Fincher (Aliens 3) and Jean­ Pierre Jeunet (Aliens: Resurrection). Both of these latter fihnmakers have gone on to achieve a considerable cutting-edge body of narrative work in many respects. 1 Cameron's body of narrative work surpasses theirs in maternal semiotic display, but it nonetheless remains oscillating to some degree between commercial-oriented science-fiction and science fiction that stands out for its traces of the Imaginary and the Real. I will return to this later in this essay. In a word, Ridley Scott's Alien was a turning point for Cameron in his semiotic, intuition-founded enunciation in the movies. Scott's Alien has turned out to be an 'Alpha' film in the sphere of the commercial cinematic apparatus, but the fihn's uncanny pre-lingual traces especially triggered Cameron's intuitional channeling of signifiance that has endured in his work.

166

Chapter 10

Cameron has gone on to make his own trilogy of ' Alpha' films rich with the uncanny maternal semiotic and primal FEMININITY. My research into Cameron's work is concerned primarily with his three "Alpha" films. I call them "Alpha" films because two of them are pinnacle accomplishments his career, and the third, The Abyss, because it begins with an 'Alpha,' the letter 'A' in Greek (as do Aliens and Avatar), and is consistent with the other two of Cameron's "Alpha" films in (re)presenting the spirit and the polysemy ofthe human condition that reverberate from the prelingual stage. The films that comprise this alliterative and telltale trilogy are Aliens (1986), The Abyss (1989), and Avatar (2013). These are Cameron's ' A' films, in my configuration of Cameron's oeuvre, as opposed to his "T" films which primarily feature Arnold Schwarzenegger as the alpha-male (small letter 'a' in 'alpha'). His "Alpha" films serve in some ways as Cameron's break away from alpha-male iconography to explore more in-depth his Alien-inspired, sensitized, and psychic connection to the maternal semiotic. And despite their commercial intent, his "Alpha" films offer multiple semiotic and less commercial-oriented perspectives. From another angle on my alphabetic conceit: since the letter 'A' in their titles is the alpha letter-the first of the alphabet-it implies, in a Delphic manner, the last letter, 'omega,' as in the biblical expression 'the Alpha and Omega' and suggests the arcane and oft coined phrase, 'the beginning and the end. ' And, if applied in polysemic vigor, would signify that Cameron's ' A' films amount to the 'be all, end all' of his wide body of work. In the spirit of Derrida, and his 'a ' spelling adjustment in differance with its alphabetic, homophonic pun-a figural-inspired thorn in the side of structuralism-I salute James Cameron and his trilogy of 'Alpha' narratives, which, in a marmer of speaking, also amount to three subversive, figural movie-thorns in the side of the Law. This chapter will address his three "Alpha" films in their deployment of the following: the unheimlich symmetry in their matching openings and endings-a reference to the maternal dyad and to symmetrically influenced human biology; plus each film's uncanny depiction of women-particularly in tenns of limiting the display of a woman's corporal specificity; the functioning of the specifically sparse sexual displays in these fihns; the imaging of (m)Otherly aspects embodied in the depictions of the Good (m)Other, the Phallic (m)Other, (m)Other Earth, and the primal maternal authority; and finally, the motif of the umbilical cord/phallus in terms of primal fantasies of the phallus and abjection.

James Cameron's 'Alpha' Trilogy

167

Openings and Endings: Bookends ofthe Maternal Semiotic The following several paragraphs address the uncanny use of the similarity between the beginnings and the endings of these three Cameron 'Alpha' fihns, which form a symmetrical set of bookends in each of the films. These bookends afford the cinematic enunciation an even more pre­ symbolic emphasis than more nOlmative cinematic discourse. The dependence on subjectivity as discourse in these films, although not eradicated, as can be seen in more experimental cinema, administers its sparse paternal prohibitions with an understood caveat: that the maternal semiotic has more bearing on the human condition than the Law avows. The openings and endings ofAliens, The Abyss and Avatar demonstrate the semiotic underpinnings of symmetry in these significant parts of narrative movie structure. The beginnings and endings of films naturally are given a certain importance in all constructs even when not implementing symmetry. Symmetry, however, adds emphasis by invoking the repressed traces of the originary dyad because it suggests an uncanny doubling as experienced in the primal plenitude and trauma between the (m)Other and fetus and subsequent pre-Symbolic baby. This is what makes for the ecstasy and the latent agony of recognizing the symmetrical trope: it (re)presents a return of the repressed. A prime example of this filmic symmetry, but in a different artistic context in film history, has imprinted itself for more than a half century on viewers who recognize the poignant influence of the 'No Trespassing' sign that opens and closes the quintessential Hollywood art film, Citizen Kane. A maternal semiotic analysis of this filmic sign as a bookends effect in the fihn would be: If Kane's mother hadn't sent him away from the family hearth at an early age, he would not have lived his life so vigorously suppressing and overcompensating for his o\Vll personal "Rosebud" triggered returns of the repressed. He had not effectively separated from the maternal dyad. He refused the trespass of others into his masochist tryst with (m)Other that even he had no tangible awareness of. He kept himself in his masochistic hideout until he died, and the camera shows us again that telltale 'No Trespassing' sign to end the fihn. Aliens: Opening VaginaJI, Ending Crotch Shot

and Matching Sleep Pods There are two back to back openings of note in the fihn Aliens. The first consists of the opening titles that offer an emphasis on semiotics as the traditional study of signs-and matched at the end pictorially, as well as a second opening that lends an emphasis on Kristeva's maternal semiotic via

168

Chapter 10

manifestations of prelingual resonances. Both of the openings in this film work together to point specifically to object relations as well as object origins. I will address the extraordinarily telltale title scene opening a little more in depth in the following paragraph. But for now, we will introduce the second beginning scene of the film that is specific to the narrative itself. This second opening introduces the protagonist, Ripley, who we recognize as the Ripley from Ridley Scott's Alien, played by Sigourney Weaver. She's asleep and, significantly, in the same sleep-pod situation as when we left her at the end of Scott's landmark and originary film. In correlation to its opening pod scene, the ending of Cameron's Aliens has a matching set of images that depict: firstly, maternal originary signs-more literal in nature than the figurative offering of the film's opeinng titles as I will explain below; and, secondly, Ripley's final sleep-pod positioning at the end-once again, not only mirroring its O\Vll opening scene, but intertextually also mirroring both the beginning and ending scenes of the film's progenitor, Ridley Scott's Alien. Each of the film Aliens' significant and symmetrical opening and ending pairs of images bear such import as to demand precise descriptions and semanalysis. 2 The following two paragraphs will attempt to elaborate on these demands. The opening title sequence of Cameron's Aliens offers up its signifiance in a cryptic yet revealing manner. The titles slowly present themselves in the form of a graphic in the middle ofthe screen that starts out as amorphous rows of metal strips one atop another. These metallic strips narrow into separate metallic columns then morph into letters that spell ALIENS. Then the 'I' transforms into a slit that swells into a vertical opening bulging at the middle from which white light appears and then the slit keeps on swelling taking over the entire screen. When the white dissolves away, we find ourselves in deep space. It is important to reiterate before we move on that the graphic letter 'I,' in all its Symbolic connotations-pronoun, subject/self, the oblique gaze of the Other and so on-transfigures into a telltale slit that widens into a glowing, rather suggestive aperture of white light, and yet this innocuous appearing letter 'I,' now suddenly indexing a subversively revealing 'vagina/I,' retains this primal shape until, at the last moment, the white vacuum ofthe Real fully pulsates and takes over the whole screen. So, the figural and semiotic emphases are clearly made evident to the viewer. In fact, the obliteration of the 'I' into the plausible sign of the originary opening, or as the painter Gustave Courbet might call it, "The Origin of the World," marks specifically the disruption of the Symbolic by qinckly subverting phallogocentric dominance in the film. Thus, the opening titles signal the film's heterogeneous core, and that the film will assume the position of a "film-on-trial" reflecting the spectators-in-process, the

James Cameron's 'Alpha' Trilogy

169

subjects-on-trial/subjects-in-process3 that fonn the audience. This graphic enunciation at the beginning of the film indexes the creative tension between the extra-logical and the Law, that is, between the maternal semiotic and language in the psyche. Let's move on to the ending of the film, which rhymes imagery-wise to the opening titles, and so creates a symmetry with the beginning of the film just described. At the end of the fihn, the female lack, that is (re)presented by the originary orifice, is specifically and yet briefly displayed. Doubly displayed, that is, twice in quick succession: first and foremost, depicted not as a motion graphic similar to the opening titles, but physically displayed­ not as explicitly as Courbet's explicit painting-but nonetheless in a telltale manner that I will address more at length in the paragraph below; and secondly, the bodily female lacuna and originary organ is depicted at the end more figuratively: the depiction of Ripley as woman inside a cavernous womb-like spacecraft re-entering an amniotic sleep-pod container that matches the one she had been fetally sequestered in at the end of Scott's Alien. In the opening scene of Cameron's Aliens, however, Ripley gets rebirthed in the womb of the shuttle, by Caesarean section no less. Further, the sleep-pod ovum/womb motif in general has been carried forward from go Ridley Scott's Alien to Cameron's Aliens in an inter-sequel doubling effect. Let's move on once more to the end ofAliens, in order to go deeper into Cameron's depiction of Ripley. She's in a tank top t-shirt sitting while making the final adjustments to a sleep pod in which the wounded Hicks is placed, already asleep-laid out alongside the android Bishop who is re­ assembled after his battle left him in pieces. Curiously enough, but consistent with the resonating maternal semiotic in the film, these two unconscious characters form a dyad since they are positioned side by side in the same amnion-like sleep pod. Then, Newt joins Ripley as she closes the pod and rises. Ripley acknowledges Newt and then leads her small charge around to another sleep pod. During this walk, the camera centers on Newt from near eye-level, a camera height that simultaneously reveals that Ripley is not only garbed in a braless tank top t-shirt accenting her breasts, but also revealing that she is wearing a pair of bikini-style panties­ emphasizing momentarily her mons veneris with its barely concealed "origin of the world," as Courbet might describe the suggestive lacunal center of this composition. Delving deeper into the fihn's ending display of Ripley in bikini briefs, let's go over the implications. There are ways to analyze this clinical appearing and deceivingly erotic, if not gratuitous composition that overtly features Ripley's finely veiled, lacunal, and etymologically "shameful,"

170

Chapter 10

pudenda. The shot could, for instance, be analyzed in telTIlS of a script­ motivated justification because Ripley is ready to enter the sleep pod and she would normally disrobe to do so. Or, more salaciously, the shot could have been inserted specifically with this costume choice for Ripley as an ignominious nod to the box office draw of the movies practice of sexual titillation. Yet, considering the movie as a whole, with its maternal semiotic reveals along the way starting with the 'vaginallI' graphics opening, it makes symmetrical sense that Ripley's lack be featured in this way at the end of the movie. I am keen for this latter analysis. In this way, Cameron seems to have intuitionally, if not purposely, created a bookends-effect that reflects the maternal semiotic traces and inferences thematically inserted abundantly in the body of the film. Further, Cameron has also emphasized the (m)Other!child dyadic theme in this last section of the film and surcharged it in maternal signifiance in two other ways: first, Newt has recently called Ripley 'mommy' for the first time right at the end of the great battle between Ripley and her phallic (m)Other counterpart, the alien Queen creature; secondly, in the last two shots of the fibn that dissolve slowly into each other causing a doubling by means of a superimposition depicting Ripley and Newt in medium shot and then in closeup, asleep next to each other in adjacent sleep pods that appear, given the camera's framing, as if they fonned one united unit. This last sequence in the movie not only symmetrically matches the beginning of the film by featuring the vagina first in both cases, and then Ripley in a womb­ like sleep pod in both the opening and the ending, but it also speaks to the to the pre-birth dyadic environment within the womb of the mother ship, and the amnion-like pod. The subtle set of symmetrical bookends that the fibn constructs speaks to Cameron's ability in many of his works to charmel the maternal semiotic, an intuitive awareness and sensitivity, which arguably was influenced by his appreciation and early participation in Ridley Scott's Alien franchise. Cameron's intuitive awareness and sensitivity to the maternal semiotic carries on specifically in terms of the symmetrical opening and closing sequences in his other two "Alpha" films.

The Abyss: Opening VaginaIY, Ending Answer of the (Real) Plenitnde Before we get specifically to the "vagina/Y" imagery, I'd like to discuss the revealing aural elements at the beginning ofthe film during the opening title sequence in The Abyss. The first diegetic aural elements belonging to the actual narrative of The Abyss are the undersea sonar pings resounding

James Cameron's 'Alpha' Trilogy

171

as the 20th Century Fox logo appears. These iconic undersea sonar pings continue as the logo fades out and a quote from Nietzsche fades in: "When you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you." (Aphorism 146 from Beyond Good and Evil) The pings create a kind of "foreshadowing" of the narrative undersea theme before the first shot of the film narrative. Diegetic sound isn't normally embedded in the industry logo segment at the front of a film. This opening sonar effect in The Abyss, as an aural foreshadowing element, can be read as an "answer from the Imaginary plenitude" of the maternal dyad stage as opposed to the much more dire "answer of the Real" (see Chapter 6). The pings forecast the undersea environment, an intrauterine index as we've discovered in other film discussions in this tome (see Chapter 1), but the unexpected sonic variance from convention at the front of the film also creates an early disruption, an incongruity at least in the seamless discourse of the film, just as the overt manifestation of the Imaginary in the form of the maternal semiotic in film does. We are confronted, not with the first shot of the film with the Absent Other's perspective (see Chapter 6), but this time in a sonic cue that is unsettling until the undersea images with the submarine offers a kind of context-although the first shot remains the startling perspective of the Absent One from outside the undersea submarine. On a related note pertaining to this early entry of the sonar pings at the beginning of The Abyss, there is another surprising sonic element that occurs during the opening titles: subtly suggestive non-diegetic music fades up just after the Nietzsche quote fades while the sonar pings also fade out. And this music that consists of women's voices singing an 'ah' sound that follows a rather vague progression fOlming not quite, but almost, a melody. This seemingly female-generated, musical, and pre-verbal referencing enunciation happens also at the beginning of Cameron's Avatar. But in Avatar's case the female vocals are accompanied by a more conventional albeit exotic musical accompaniment than in The Abyss. In the case of The Abyss, these female 'ahs' crescendo as musical instruments finally join in during the opening title shot of the fihn and both soinc cues end with a cymbal clash as the screen becomes sea blue. The choice of this somewhat proto-musical sound associated with women's voices resonates with the maternal semiotic introduced extra-linguistically and extra-conventionally in these first moments of this spectator's experience. The music foreshadows and designates a maternal semiotic thread that the filmmakers wish to enunciate right from the start in a more pronounced, thematic manner and the rest of the film bears this out. The actual first non-diegetic shot of The Abyss, title, occurs just after the fading to black ofthe Nietzsche quote described above. The name of the

172

Chapter 10

film fades up in the form of giant back-lit black letters growing larger in the frame. Then they formulate themselves into gradient blue light and this constitutes them graphically further into the lelters of the title of the film. The camera pushes in slowly closer and closer into the letter 'Y' and craning down to finally center on the boltom element of the lelter 'Y' which makes the 'yo lose its 'V-ness' to become more an 'I' configuration reminiscent and mimetic of the 'vaginaJI' in the title sequence of Cameron's previous film Aliens. This blue, ersatz 'I' becomes an ad hoc slit in the black screen background And, just as the "vaginaiI in Aliens, it widens and then opens fully to engulf the whole screen where we then find ourselves in the deep ocean ofthe same blue color viewing the approach of a submarine. Cameron then cuts into the control room of the submarine as the crew start detecting something out of the ordinary. As if yielding to the maternal sign that is the sea-as body of saline water, the bearer of flind life and fluid death, and metaphor for the maternal amniotic fluid-the ocean now provides the submarine an "answer of the Real" that exudes itself impossibly fast out from the abyss of the ocean, presenting itself to the doomed military submarine in the form of a light passing it by. The submarine has tracked the impossible Real from a distance as it approached and then as it terrifyingly sped by back into the abyss leaving the nuclear submarine disabled and ultimately leading to its catastrophic end: all hands are lost in this sudden contact with the Real that kick-starts the story. The opening graphic with its extra-logical, figural 'vagina!Y' seems to bring us right to the answer of the Real under the sea while ratifying its oblique link to the maternal semiotic graphically in the lower 'I' part of the 'y' and via intertextual associations across these two Cameron films' opening titles. Further, the opening title sequence of the film figurally invokes primal FEMININITY that underpins the emphasis on the sequence's graphic deconstruction of the alphabetic "Y" and presenting its dual sexual organ enunciation: the allusion to the male "Y" chromosome in the isolated lelter "Y," the top part of the "Y" suggests a "V" shape alluding to the mons veneris at the junction of the pubic bones, and finally, the originary vagina and/or dangling membrum virile just before the former wins out and the slit opens up to fill the screen and to occasion the first underwater shot of the fibn. The duality and the blur between the two graphic indexes in the 'Y' subliminally suggest repressed traces of primal FEMININITY, which connotes sexual plurality among other meanings, as well as invoking the maternal semiotic. This opening motion graphics title of the fibn designates the film as thematically concerned with the interruption and expansion of oppositional discourse into a polysemic enunciation rather than a univocal linearity.

James Cameron's 'Alpha' Trilogy

173

Although the opening title sequence of The Abyss creates a doubling effect and an intertextual link to the opening title sequence of Cameron's film Aliens, the opening titles do not form symmetry with the ending of this film. So, we don't see a repeat with the motion graphics influencing symmetrically the end of The Abyss like we did in Aliens. However, the subsequent shot sequence, which is the opening scene ofthe actual narrative, the catastrophic event occurring to the submarine does have a symmetrical bearing on the ending ofthe film The Abyss in an inverse, multi-dimensional mirror-like effect, which will be discussed in depth below. Before analyzing the ending of The Abyss, a brief description of some prior events is in order. First, a caveat: the film's denouement forgoes the modernist tendency to efficiently and organically tie the loose ends of the story together, but instead generates an extra-logical moment of emotional excess. And the ending of the filin does this by implementing a deus-ex­ machina intervention, along with a cringingly gender-reactionary reconciliation between the protagonist and his ex-wife. Just before the end ofthe film, the leading man, Bud, breathing oxygen through a special liquid filling his helmet- a liquid environment and containment that replicates the anmiotic fluid and the womb scenario-embarks on a mission to the bottom of the ocean to disann a nuclear warhead that a psychotic Navy Lieutenant has sent over the precipice into the depths of the ocean. The rest of the crew of the submerged submarine rescue ship including Bud had previously made brief contact with the alien creatures residing there. However the Navy officer reacting to his paranoia, has seemingly scared the aliens away and now wants to finish them off in their lair with the nuclear bomb on board. This is why Bud needs to descend and disarm the bomb. Bud succeeds in completing his disarmament of the warhead, but he has used up all his oxygen in the process and so bids farewell to his friends and colleagues via a texting device he carries with him. The colleagues commiserate with him, but they also are in trouble and have very few hours of oxygen left aboard their rig. Their 'umbilical cord' connection to the mother ship on the surface has been severed and reconnecting with the surface in a stOlm is impossible. In the meantime, the glowing angel-like aliens rescue Bud from dying at the bottom of the sea and take him to their city that turns out to serve as a giant amphibian craft for them as well as a city. They communicate with Bud extra-lingually via TV excerpts they have intercepted and screen for him. Bud realizes that they are about to unleash a world-wide tidal wave to kill humankind because of our continuous inability to stop wars and take care of the planet. But then the aliens stop their annihilating effort in mid-stride by holding back the giant tidal wave looming over Los Angeles as if it were in suspended animation. Bud suddenly realizes that because he knowingly

174

Chapter 10

sacrificed himself for the aliens, and since he sent a last message to his ex­ wife stating, "LOVE YOU WIFE," the aliens have changed their minds about eliminating humankind and have suspended the tidal way over Los Angeles. He deduces this from the TV broadcasts sho\Vll to him, as do we, the audience, at the same time. The angelic aliens, it turns out, are way beyond language. They have not spoken a word, nor have they sent him telepathic messages-they remain all the way through the film other than speaking subjects. During this time, however, his crewmates think that Bud has died from lack of oxygen. Suddenly, though, in the confines of the damaged underwater rig, Bud's ex-wife and his crew receive a new message from him saying he is "back on the air" and indicates that they will notice something strange happening very soon. Back on the surface, the crew's colleagues on the mother ship notice that something immense is taking place below them. The aliens' giant ship-city surfaces bringing the deep-sea lab to safety. The alien's ship is so enormous that the huge industrial mother ship is raised out of water as if it were a small toy. The deep-sea lab is there, too and the crew exits out onto the surface of the spaceship-city to acknowledge that they did not have the time to de-pressurize during their rise to the surface, and so should be suffering the lethal effects. One ofthem says: "They must have done something to us." Then Bud's ex-wife spots Bud coming out of a huge opening in the alien ship-city. He approaches his ex-wife who says "Hi, Brigman." He replies: "Hi, Mrs. Brigman." The camera pushes in and they kiss in extreme closeup and this ends the movie. Now we are prepared to discuss the symmetry between the opening and the ending of the film. In a curious mirror image of the opening, the end of The Abyss features both the 'answer of the Real' and the illusory register of the Imaginary. However, in contrast to the opening of the film, this time the circumstances are the inverse, like a mirror's reverse image: the Imaginary plenitude now exudes extra-logically from the vacuity ofthe Real that is the unavoidable death below the sea, which impossibly reverses itself via the machinations of the aliens. In the opening of the film, the Real annihilation of the submarine impossibly conjures itself from the "answer of the Real" consisting of one of the aliens' modes of transportation speeding past the submarine in the fOlTIl of a light causing the submarine to crash because of the alien ship's powerful wake. All this takes place in the Imaginary plentitude ofthe maternal sea. In other words, the plenitude ofthe sea at the beginning of the film presents itself just before the impossibility of the "answer of the Real" takes over catastrophically. Whereas, at the end of the film, the inverse is true: the Imaginary repels the Real under extremely pleasant circumstances demonstrating an Imaginary plenitude. The protagonist Bud lies dying at the bottom of the ocean when the 'answer of

James Cameron's 'Alpha' Trilogy

175

the Real' suffers topological interruption as the Imaginary plenitude of a "happy ending" takes place conjuring a deus ex machina, which extra­ logically and extra-lingually causes Bud's miraculous salvation. And, ifthat weren't enough, the Imaginary saves his deep-sea lab colleagues, as well. The resulting over-the-top happy ending splits the meta-narrative discourse into a flat dimension of narrative self-reflexivity that functions as a self­ conscious wink acknowledging tlie Imaginary plenitude. This trace of tlie maternal semiotic discloses itself within the thin veneer of the cinematic apparatus, all the while creating a cliche of discourse, a parody, that at its core amounts to exposing the limitations of the Symbolic order and its discursive subjectivity. This parody is a serious and disconcerting unveiling of objective polysemy, i.e. deconstruction, for the speaking subject. And given tlie rigid oppositions of the Law of tlie Fatlier and its disavowal of alterity, the ending explodes with connotations. In sunnnary, the opening of tlie film and tlie ending form a set of bookends that are mirror images of each other fOlming in effect an inverse reflection of each other. At the beginning we traverse the Imaginary plenitude of tlie sea quickly to encounter the xenomorph-triggered Real, which creates an abyss of the now impossible xenomorphic sea; while at the end of The Abyss, we travel from the abysmal Real of annihilation to the warm plenitude of the xenomorph-triggered Imaginary plenitude at tlie surface of the sea. Further, the topological exchange between the Real, the Imaginary and the Symbolic registers reciprocally interconnect via the plentiful and annihilating depictions of tlie maternal prelingual abyss as (re)presented by the ocean deptlis. Furtlier, the happy-ending excesses embedded in tlie imagery and the music give the Imaginary plenitude in tlie film's denouement an artificial sheen that both compliments and parodies the cinematic discourse. This is precisely why the ending scenes of The Abyss seem chintzy: the extra-logical signijiance ruptures the integrity of the narrative discourse but does not foreclose on it. These topological manifestations and tlieir contradictions at the end of the filin (re)present the veiled heterogeneity of the symbiosis between the Imaginary and tlie Symbolic registers. The ending becomes a pastiche, a parody "devoid of laughter.'''' All tlie characters suddenly become one-dimensional placeholders on the signifying chain of the fihn, stand-ins at their most one-dimensional level. They are animated glyphs from the Symbolic creating a self­ conscious mimesis of the Symbolic while gushing with the maternal semiotic. The incongruence makes the ending cringeworthy and simultaneously, paradoxically, rich in signifiance. The fihn spectator's subjective identification vis-a-vis the fihn discourse suddenly cringes at the self-conscious tum of events that artificially create

176

Chapter 10

a happy-ending semblance of a metanarrative: love overcomes all. And the xenoffiOlphic creatures remain speechless and strangely disavowed even as the aliens' extra-terrestrial (m)Other ship bears the glyph-characters to the surface that (re)presents their semblance of rebirth. Plus, the Real retains its invisibility dissimulated and distanced safely by the glaring glow of the Imaginary. The flat, peripheral structure of the Symbolic in the narrative discourse at this fractured and fragmentary, deus-ex-machina moment exudes the boundaryless maternal semiotic for all to see, if subliminally, as the music swells and discourse achieves flat, and yet incongruently polysemic, closure. As concluding comments for this analysis of the opening and ending of The Abyss, I must admit that each time I go back to the film and (re)view the flat, sunset-lit ending, the effects on me get warmer and more plentiful­ a veritable sign of the traces of the Imaginary plenitude stemming from the maternal dyad and the pre lingual stage of human development. An artistically executed display of the maternal semiotic that disrupts discourse while imitating and exaggerating the artificial structure of Symbolic discourse and the concept of metanarrative. Avatar: Jake's Eyes, and then Jakes's Xenomorph Eyes Open:

"I See Yon(Me)" The first (non)element to consider at the beginning of the film Avatar is that there is no opening title sequence. It is a relatively rare event in Hollywood to start a movie without any opening titles whatsoever. Once again, Cameron breaks with convention. After the 20th Century Fox logo fades to black, female voices chant as if far away and the scene fades up to show a forest over which the camera seems to fly creating a real birds-eye­ view of the lush selva. Jake Sully's voice-over starts and lets us know that he is a wounded veteran who dreams of flying. His last words in this narration occurs when the flying birds-eye-view fades to black, he states: "Sooner or later, though," as Cameron fades up on an extreme closeup of Sully's close eyes. His voice-over continues: 'you always have to wake up." Suddenly Jake's eyes spring open and he gazes right into the camera. We will discuss this iconoclastic eye-contact with the spectator more in depth below. Cameron cuts away from Jake's eyes as the prologue scenes ensue and we are introduced to Jake in a wheelchair suffering from paralysis and disillusionment. Soon, after a barroom fight that Jake instigates, the unidentified trench coat brigade consisting of two corporate looking thugs finds Jake and brings him to his brother's cardboard casket in a giant warehouse for the dead. "A guy with a knife took all that Tommy would

James Cameron's 'Alpha' Trilogy

177

ever be," Jake says to himself in a voice-over when he first sees his identical twin lying in his coffin. They cremate his brother as the camera moves in towards his brother's face in the coffin on fire. The camera keeps pushing in closer as the flames disappear and the screen takes on a blue cast finally reaching what seems to be an extreme closeup on his brother's eyes. Suddenly, the eyes flip open and look straight into the camera-we don't know they are Jake's eyes and not his twin brother's until Jake's voice-over continues and we see that we are no longer in a casket but in a casket-like sleep pod in which Jake awakens floating weightlessly within. In this curious, telltale doubling effect between Jake's twin and Jake, in the repeated extreme closeup of the eyes opening and looking into the camera, the body of the film begins. The prologue about Jake has been the actual beginning of the film and introduces the main theme in the film: the scopic drive (see endnote 13 in Chapter 6). In the prologue's case, this allusion to the scopic drive is punctuated by the depiction twice of Jake's eyes and the breaking of the fourth wall as he looks directly into the camera directly at the audience. Using the relatively rare film technique called 'direct address.' Jumping to the end of Avatar, striking similarities to the opening manifest: Jake has decided to let his human body die because he wants to permanently transfer to his hybrid Na'vi avatar's body-a transference that the tendril network of primal energy coursing through the interior of the planet is extra-logically capable of accomplishing. Revealingly, this intra­ planetary network of mystical energy and extra-lingual communication represents for the Na'vi people a female deity-an element of the film that helps formulate the (m)Other Earth goddess theme running throughout the narrative. The pelTIlanent transference of souls between bodies works for Jake's changing sense of self. Plus, his transferring from human entity to xenomorph body at the end of the film, reinforces the uncanny trope of doubles in film (see the section in the Prologue of this manuscript entitled DOUBLES, DOPPELGANGERS, SYMMETRY). Further, Jake has already 're-established' himself in a manner of speaking earlier in the film by taking his twin brother's place and this doubling and transference has been normalized by everyone in the film. Now at the end of the film, Jake is about to re-establish himself once more by shedding his human body and permanently inserting himself into his hybrid alien doppelganger, his Na'vi avatar. This brings us to the last shot in the film: Cameron establishes a camera angle and framing that duplicates the two-previous extreme closeup shots of Jake's eyes that we discussed occurring at the opening of the film. This framing is set up as an extreme closeup of Jake's avatar face centered on his eyes. Suddenly, in the last shot ofthe film and in the same way as the

178

Chapter 10

two times before during the opening of the film, Jake's eyes flip open looking straight at the audience. Then the film cuts to black. In this way, the ending ofthe film symmetrically re-images the opening, but this time signaling the transference from human to alien avatar. In sum, this last shot fOlTIlS a double doubling and cross-species transcendental ego transference that produces a plurality consistent with FEMINININTY and the maternal semiotic while fmalizing the bookends conceit reinforcing the same. What is Symbolically disruptive in Avatar about these three examples of the extreme closeup shots of eyes suddenly springing open is that these eyes look directly into the camera at us, the viewers-they "break the fourth wall" formed by the camera lens, and so Jake's eyes look directly into the spectator's eyes. In these three "direct address" instances we are confronted by the one who stands in for us, the protagonist who acts as our ideal-egoS in the now newly constituted, oblique mirror of the movie screen. But in these shots that break the fourth wall, the protagonist's eyes are seen in closeup, at first with closed eyelids as if Jake were dead. But they spring open gazing into our spectator eyes. Then the closed eyes are Tommy's, Jake's identical twin brother's eyes that are closed because he is dead, and he is lying in his burning coffin. However, the movie's sleight of hand switches almost seamlessly to Jake's eyes that then open suddenly. The impact on the viewer is shocking, although cut short-as if the image is too powerful to be continued longer than a second. Three times we seem to be presented with the 'answer of the Real: ' our stand-in, the protagonist dead and coming back to life looking right back into the viewer's eyes and disrupting the cinematic discourse. Suddenly the film's "I see you" signifiance resonates to our core: "I see you/me ." A self-reflexive coup de foudre of primal libido bursts onto this cryptic mirror scenario and the spectator experiences an eerily split-personality glimpse of self-love, self­ jouissance6 that momentarily shatters the film discourse and questions the Symbolic order. The sudden splitting effect returns us to the pre-lingual mirror stage-the stage that (re)presents acknowledgement of a separation from the (m)Other object and the sense of a perfect self, and ideal-ego, a self-image that goes way beyond the capabilities of the baby at that stage between 6 to 1 8 months going through the process of submitting to the Symbolic order. Just like our stand-in image of self, the actor and character up on the screen who displays far greater capabilities than we, the spectator, as we submit from our seats to the film discourse and identify with our filmic stand in. However, when the 'fourth wall' is breached, the spectator is stuck between a self in the movie theater seat and the stand in self in the discourse of the film. Discourse has been breached in both instances.

James Cameron's 'Alpha' Trilogy

179

These silent episodes of breaking the fourtb wall leaves tbe cinema discourse and suture compromised in three strategic moments along the signifying chain of the film: first, at the very beginning of Jake's introductory prologue; secondly, at the beginning of the body of tbe narrative, that is, as Jake arrives to Pandora in a sleep pod, and finally, like a symmetrical bookend, in tbe last shot oftbe narrative ofthe fihn. The three shots of eye-contact between the character and the spectator (re)present tbe kind of face-offbetween a prelingual entity and its ideal-ego reflection that positions the viewers outside of discourse, that is, outside of the subjective register in relation to the film and our stand-in mirror-ideal. In other words, suddenly and eerily we find ourselves outside subjectivity, outside of discourse. These events of direct address return the viewer temporarily and abruptly to tbe Imaginary stage-that objectified register of tbe maternal semiotic that languishes in the psychic residue of the Real and the maternal body7 as the entity detaches from primary narcissism to develop secondary narcissism and self. This is the power of direct address toward the camera/gaze/spectator's eye-especially when not motivated by or integrated into narrative tropes as we see in other parts of the film: such as when Jake makes his video log entries talking into the suggested computer screen positioned between him and the camera causing a faux direct address. The three non-narratively motivated shots, or better, delayed narratively integrated shots, of Jake's direct-address-especially his avatar's gaze at the end of the movie-reinstate the Mirror Stage experience for the spectator that occurs before the Oedipal scenario at a time when the subject­ to-be experiences a pleasurable split from heir dyad, the (m)Otber, and discovers secondary narcissism and the ideal-ego, both of which occur in the Imaginary before full Symbolic separation from tbe (m)Other and tbe submission to the Symbolic. Within this infantile self-reflective space in the very last direct address shot of the film, one re-experiences a retroactive jouissance while Avatar's repetition of its musical leitmotif (reoccurring symmetrically from its first occurrence at the opening of tbe film) engulfs us musically witb tbe traces of the plenitude and pulsations of the maternal semiotic. After tbe last shot when Jake's avatar flips his eyes open and tbe film cuts to black, the movie becomes finally named, finally, in an inscription. This is the first time we see the movie title "A VATAR " bursting onto the black screen in green letters. We, the spectators, are ensnared in a disorienting, if pleasurable, effect of revolving and merging glimpses of self, stand in, and ideal ego, if only for the split second that the extreme closeup of the open eyes directly stimulate in us directly from the silver screen before cutting to black at the end of the film.

1 80

Chapter 10

Doubling:

Originary Dyadic Relations

In keeping with the symmetry of the pair of doubling bookends framing all three of these Cameron's "Alpha" films' openings and endings, it is important to explore more broadly this theme of doubling as it manifests throughout the three films. Although the doubling effects occur to a greater or lesser degree depending on the individual film, the viewer is readily able to perceive just how pronounced doubling is in all three. Some of these doubling effects include allusions to the originary dyadic relations, the primal self-imaging in mirrors, and the imagining of the ideal-ego that all signal the repressed pre-lingual experiences. And this amounts to the return of the repressed. This is often referred to as the "compulsion to repeat:" "In the unconscious mind we can recognize the dominance of a compulsion to repeat, which proceeds from instinctual impulses. ( . ) anything that can remind us of this inner compulsion to repeat is perceived as uncanny." (Freud 2003, 145) Repressed experiences of the pre-lingual all lead back to the uncanny: "that species of the frightening that goes back to what was once well known and had long been familiar." (Ibid.) But what does Freud imply by his cryptic description regarding an eerie and familiar place of the archaic and arcane? Lucy Fischer draws a connection between Freud's 'uncarmy,' and women's closeness to the "lived sense of the double:" . .

... despite the lapses in Lenne's formulation, we might inquire if there is any way in which we can "redeem" his statement and see the female hlUllan being as having a privileged relation to the double? One speculative thought comes to mind, but it has nothing to do with the realm of the gothic. Rather (as Freud suggests in speaking of the "uncanny") it concerns something natural, and even farniliar--woman's special role in childbirth. (. . . ) For in the possibility of pregnancy (whether realized or not) of gmwth of a second self within the primary being every woman comes closer to a lived sense of the double than do most men." (Fischer 1983, 39)

The relation between the phenomena of the double and the compulsion of the return of the uncanny fOlTIlS a primal nexus at the maternal circumstance-the (m)Other might be considered the absolute precedence for the uncanny 'double-goer,' that is, the doppelganger, and so a harbinger in the movies of doubling's uncanny effects. [fwe conclude that the imaging of symmetry, a doubling in and of itself, as exemplified by the filmic 'bookends' described in the previous section and the doubling configurations to be further analyzed in this section all of which index the maternal two-for-one nodal experience and object relations, then it can be inferred that there is also a potential for an interruption of subjectivity accompanying this phenomena. Julia Kristeva suggests this

James Cameron's 'Alpha' Trilogy

181

when she speaks of the maternal experience in telTIlS of a challenge to identity and fOlTIling a natural narcissistic psychosis: Pregnancy seems to be experienced as the radical ordeal of the splitting of the subject: redoubling up of the body, separation and coexistence ofthe self and of an other, ofnature and consciousness, ofphysiology and speech. This fundamental challenge to identity is then accompanied by a fantasy of totality - narcissistic completeness - a sort of instituted, socialized, natural psychosis. (Kristeva 1986, 206)

The creative processes of image-making in the movies, a kind of replication of the maternal singularity that involves metaphorical gestation and birthing as well as "instituted, socialized, natural psychosis," can intuitively chance upon and incorporate the signs of the repressed traces of the unheimlich maternal, which, in this section we will address as consisting of the (re)presentation of psychic residue from the original bifurcated nodal experience, that is, the uncanny residue or recall that manifests in the (re)presentation ofthe doubling theme. Filmmakers often wax nostalgic and even idealistically on (re)producing allusions to the originary doppelganger effect and its triggering of the recall of the repressed-as does James Cameron in his 'Alpha' trilogy which we will explore presently. Aliens: The Doubliug of (m)Others aud Daughters

I have divided this section into two parts. The first provides an analysis of the depiction of the binary opposition that (re)presents (m)Other: the "good mother" versus its abject, bio-destabilizing, phallic double. Cameron does tinker with both in Aliens. Curiously, with the image of the "good mother," he (re)presents her paradoxically in telTIlS of possessing conventional phallicized power: strength, knowledge and active presence. The second part of this section on the doubling of (m)Others and Daughters concerns the narrative and uncanny innuendos in the development of the daughter motifinAliens. The basic doubling element in this analysis lies in the fact that the offspring image is female not male and so creates a certain oblique reference to maternal confluence and singularity that, in tum, indirectly alludes to an originary maternal authority. This again speaks to Cameron's intuitive pushing of the phallogocentric envelope. 1. (m)Others: Oue Dies so the (m)Other May Live

Ripley and the alien Queen inAliens are both 'mothers.' They both have produced offspring in Cameron's follow up sequel to Scott'sAlien-neither

1 82

Chapter 10

the alien being, nor Ripley in Scott's Alien were designated specifically as (m)Others, although, incriminating somewhat the alien creature, the eggs in the bowels of tbe ship from which the fetal 'Facehugger' sprang, imply that there was a queen, a gyne. For Cameron, Ripley and the alien Queen fOlTIl a dyad in Aliens consisting of both the oppositional aspects of (m)Other. This dyad also forms a parallel, a doubling of similarities. For example, both Ripley and the alien Queen in Cameron's Aliens are protective of their offspring and fight each otber to tbe deatb over them. However, tbeir territorial and motherly instincts tum against each other as the alien Queen and Ripley face off as opponents during the filin. During the final battle, Ripley puts on a robotic exoskeleton tbat affords her the general bulk and, not-so-coincidentally, the appearance, minus the phallic tail, of her doppelganger, tbe alien Queen. Typical to tbe sparse female doppelganger films in the past, female doubling in film and other literary artifacts (re)presents a chain ofsignifiers that works to construct and llOlmalize the phallogocentric imaging of women characters as aggressive polar-opposites. Lucy Fischer, referring to female doubling in melodramas of tbe 1940s, posits that " . . .when female alter-egos do appear, they are denied association with the specifically feminine possibilities of doubling, and, instead, are split falsely into warring tfmasculine t! and t!femininet! poles." (Fischer 1983, 40) This trope is not far removed from the Aliens ' more xenomorphic horror geme depiction. Aliens does fall into the polarizing, binary (re)presentation of motherhood in tbe Good Mother, Ripley, and the Bad Mother, tbe phallic alien Queen, leading to the surrogate mother, Ripley, vanquishing the xenomorph (m)Other. This does not, however, result in an entirely reductive picture of phallocentric motherhood in this film: Cameron's Ripley does retain, as she did in Scott' sAlien, a certain phallic preeminence, that amounts to an active­ oriented disposition alongside the depiction of more impotent and 'lacking' male crew characters later in tbe filin. She aggressively uses phallic substitutes: flame-throwers and robotic anns, in attempts to eliminate her always already phallicized xenomorph counterpart. Nonetheless, Cameron's depiction of the unheimlich, virulent and phallicized nature of motherhood, as represented by the alien Queen-gyne, remains disparaged as exemplified by Cameron's focus on the horrific and visceral depictions of her biological birtbing, the repetitive doubling with the output of assembly-line eggs that this birtbing entails, as well as the alien Queen's juxtaposition with the parallel depiction of a human woman and "good mother," as heir doppelganger, Ripley, in the film. Ultimately, tbe doubling strategy in the depictions of Ripley as socially acceptable with clearly defined boundaries, and the messy alien Queen work on parallel

James Cameron's 'Alpha' Trilogy

183

levels to enunciate the difference between the phallogocentric perspective on socialized woman/mother as opposed to the animalistic birthing and biologically more abject cliches of motberhood. In broad strokes, the alien Queen in Cameron's film references the irrepressible matemal libido that is the Real as it generates its way from tbe vast singularity tbat is annihilation onto the screen. S/he (re)presents tbe phallic (m)Otber who bares her vagina-dentata after birthing. Psychically, s/he (re)produces graphically on screen tbe experience of the trauma of material separation from the dyadic authority and its subsequent presence as a source of horror. Ripley, on the other hand, references the good (m)Otber and Imaginary plenitude as she protects and comforts little Newt. Tellingly, biological references to motherhood are limited in Ripley's depiction by the logic of the narrative. The only biological birtb connection that pertains to Ripley is tbat she had a biological daughter and that that daughter has already died older than her mother due to Ripley's long years lost in space. So, Ripley's actual biological link to motherhood is fabricated early in tbe film and safely off screen, then disposed of as well without 'tainting' the phallocentrically cleansed (m)Other, Ripley. And yet Ripley is attached to a less messy, surrogate motherhood depiction via her closeness to and informal adoption of another's orphaned child, which serves as a kind of revision of body-centered originary doubling: Ripley and little Newt are not a biological mother and daughter. The visceral realities of motherhood have been sanitized. So, Ripley remains virginal in a way in her role, whitewashed sexless, as the somewhat androgynous protagonist. In some ways Ripley speaks to linear order, as well as the boundaries and the structure of the Symbolic in contrast to the alien Queen's non-verbal display of tbe Real with its potentially lethal aspects tbat include tbe oppositional, vehement and murderous biological birthing process. Ripley is (re)presented in Aliens as all structure and presence witb short flickers of female sex display that are non-sexual-as we will discuss further below. Perhaps this is Ripley's validation as a multi-dimensional, sophisticated character: she is androgynous, and retains a certain phallic-active preeminence, plus, she displays the female form in very short non-sexual scenes as she survives the answer of the Real, the alien as the Real Reaper. Ripley vanquishes the alien Queen-gyne, tbe Bad Mother, and lives to nurture her surrogate daughter Newt. The virulent Phallic (m)Other must die for tbe "good mother," Ripley, to live.

1 84

Chapter 10

2. Daughters: Due Dies so the Other May Live In Aliens, Ripley has two daughters: one who has died of older than Ripley herself (given the cryogenic suspension of 'hypersleep') and the other, Newt, informally adopted during the movie. Coincidently, Ripley's biological daughter, Amanda was about Newt's age when Ripley left for her first mission in Ridley Scott's Alien. Amanda died at 66, 57 years after Ripley left her for what she thought would be a short job in space and wound up lost in space in a small shuttle. Back on earth, and with very little time to grieve her daughter's loss, Ripley was decommissioned and lost her officer's position. This was due to the Company alleging that her story regarding the loss of the Nostromo and her survival was questionable. The powers that be did not believe that her drastic actions 57 years previously were justified because they resulted in the loss of her crew, and the disintegration of her "mothership." They especially questioned her story about the alien creature she encountered and destroyed because, while she was lost in space, a human colony was set up on the planet that she indicated is where the alien creature had been found. The colony on that world, LV426, have not experienced any encounters with any such murderous alien creatures as she has been describing. However, shortly after Ripley's disgrace, all commlUlications with that mining colony on the planet Ripley cited suddenly halted. Ripley was then coerced to return to the planet where she met and saved the sole survivor of the genocide, Newt a young girl who took to Ripley and Ripley to her. The doubling of the daughter via replacement, that is, the substituting the dead biological daughter for another adopted one for Ripley, creates a conventional emotional storyline. But Newt's storyline also sends a message of signijiance, that is, "a structuring and de-structuring practice, a passage to the outer boundaries of the subject and society." (Kristeva 1984, 17) This "passage to the outer boundaries of subject and society," manifests itself in the maternal doubling implied both by the newly formed Ripley/Newt dyad, and by confiating it and contrasting it with the other doubling, the alien Queen and her scions, a much more Real and boundary­ less depiction. In many ways, little Newt causes the theme of mother to revive when Ripley gets to the outpost planet, and this results in the last battle between Ripley and the alien Queen, the fight to the death between these two oppositional (m)Others over their offspring. In sum, the Ripley/Newt dyad forms after Ripley learns of her daughter's exceptional, but sci-fi scientifically explainable death at an age older than Ripley appears to be at the time of her return to Earth. Ripley then travels back to Acheron (LV-426), the moon where she had encountered the original alien creature, and there she fmds Newt in a

James Cameron's 'Alpha' Trilogy

185

terrified state, regressed psychologically to the pre-lingual stage-she is speechless from abject emotional trauma. In a sense, Ripley's daughter dying and Ripley discovering this has extra-logically generated her daughter's age-appropriate doppelganger thereby renewing Ripley's status as (m)Other. This series of narrative coincidences has ultimately allowed Newt to survive obliteration from the alien creatures. Ripley's agency as a surrogate 'good mother' builds and soon leads Newt back to the Symbolic and speech. It is now understood by the viewer that the biological daughter, a kind of ad hoc doppelganger for Newt, in hindsight, has died so that her double, Newt might survive in the logic of the narrative. This is a familiar life and death trope in one way or another, perhaps all too familiar and telltale, for doppelgangers in narrative discourse. Further, Cameron's suggestive filmmaking has emphasized well this trope's connection to the traces of the maternal semiotic.

The Abyss: Dyad Separation and the Return to the Dyad Ifwe accept that the relationship between couples is an attempt to recall and re-experience the repressed (m)Other/child dyad, 8 if only in a subliminal, obliquely metaphoric manner,9 then the emphasis in The Abyss on the lingering but stormy, dyadic husband/wife relationship between Virgil 'Bud' Brigman and his estranged wife, Lindsey Brigman points to the fact that they continue to be connected figuratively by an emotional umbilical cord. Although separated and not divorced, which is established at the beginning of the film, their apparent animosity at working close together builds to an expected, if contrived resolution at the end ofthe film. The flat, one-dimensional [mal scene of Cameron's film basks in the reverberating shine of a stilted, Symbolically constructed and clumsily co­ opted return to the pre-lingual Imaginary.!O The ending lines of the scene are these: Lindsey says, "Hello, Brigman," Bud answers, "Hello, Mrs. Brigman." These short telltale salutations to each other make of this trite verbal exchange a parodied display of dyadic signijiance, albeit tainted by using the named and binary honorific "Mrs." to demarcate Lindsey Brigman. But the primal doubling, or 'coupling' when they come together in the last scene, becomes reinforced by the closeup shot oftheir open-mouthed kiss­ a self-conscious display of the oral stage in human development. In the extra-logically heightened reality and dyadic warmth of the last scene, they both find themselves doubling as mother (breast) and child (penis) to each other-a primal conflation as per Melanie Klein,ll and a trace of libidinal investments of primal FEMININITY. They become the two halves of the dyad, intermittently (m)Other and offspring one to the other, flickering back

1 86

Chapter 10

and forth, as their glow of jouissance merges with the newly grasped radiance ofthe Imaginary fullness in their lives. After all, these gushing and Imaginary moments are reflective of their newly salvaged lives that have been extra-logically lifted from the (m)Otherly, oceanic Real at death's door at the bottom of the sea. The bright lighting of the last shots belies illusionism to mimic the manic cycling through of the unheimlich, the recursive return of the uncanny repressed The narrative itself falls flat but in doing so signals with even stronger emphasis an attempt at recovering the Imaginary plenitude of the originary doubling in the maternal dyad. Cameron's cinematic attempt serves as a valiant (re)presentation of Kristeva's signifiance with its "passage to the outer boundaries of the subject and society," however awkwardly (re)produced it might be. Cameron features the maternal dyad in the form of the husband and wife reunion at the end of The Abyss. Avatar: Becoming the Ego Ideal, the Inner Dyadic

Doppelganger At the beginning of Avatar, Jake mentions that a hole has been blown through the middle of his life-and that, as he lies in the VA hospital, he has dreams of flying. His voice-over tells us this as the camera flies over a primeval rain forest. We apprehend that he has recently been traumatized both physically and emotionally. We also get the idea that he has found freedom in his dreams that he cannot attain in life. With these first words from the protagonist of the filin, Cameron lays out the underlying theme for us: this movie is about a period of human development that precedes the Symbolic order and which is founded on originary trauma-all trauma and pleasure hearken back to birth trauma and the separation from the womb as well as to the Imaginary plenitude of the maternal dyad. 12 Further, the themes in the film include the proto-dream work of ur-phantasien, primal fantasies that invoke bliss. The insinuated, sublimated premise in Jake's opening voice-over and the accompanying visuals take us immediately to the level of signijiance, and the traces ofthe development ofthe scopic drive in relation to the ideal-ego while, at the same time, focusing on the wish­ fulfillment triggered by residual traces of primal Imaginary wholeness. Figuratively in the filin, Jake will soon get rid of his Ego-Ideal double, his successful twin brother Tommy and, in the end, he will kill off his own body-which we will discuss in a later paragraph. For the moment, we'll continue with the narrative as it swiftly eliminates Jake's twin, Tommy. At the beginning of the film, we fmd Jake at a very low moment in his life. He is a war veteran with a permanent paralysis below the waist-a cure

James Cameron's 'Alpha' Trilogy

187

for him is available in this future time but his VA benefits won't cover it. As we get to know Jake, he appears to be self-destructive and has no qualms in putting himself at risk as demonstrated when he attacks a much bigger man at a bar. At this point the bouncers at the bar throw Jake out on the street in the rain along with his wheelchair. Two men approach him lying there in the gutter. After Jake brashly tells them to 'step off because they are ruining his good mood, we learn that he has a twin brother and that the brother has been killed. Although a crucial aspect of Jake's salvation from self-destruction and a motivating factor for the narrative, Tommy as a narrative character is treated very limitedly. But in hindsight, the viewer gets the impression that Tommy's death had to occur for his twin and doppelganger Jake, the anti­ hero, to thrive in the world. This is a typical twin and doppelganger theme: the 'evil,' or expendable half of the doppelganger duo dies for the 'good' twin to go on and succeed. Cameron does a good job suggesting this trope but with a twist: the expendable appearing, self-destructive and seedy twin, Jake, survives as a now humble underdog filling the shoes of his over­ achieving scientist brother. The emphasis on Jake's DNA clinches the allusion to the doppelganger trope (both Tommy and Tommy's Na'vi avatar contain Jake's DNA) in a current and futuristic manner. This is another Cameron twist on the doppelganger cliche. Further, the twists in the doppelganger theme keep coming as Jake gains a new doppelganger: the body that is his Na'vi avatar. Before we go on to discuss Jake's Na'vi avatar, we need to address Avatar's intertextual, 'crossover' doppelganger effect: Ripley and Dr. Grace Augustine are both portrayed by the irrepressible Sigourney Weaver. The reason for considering these two characters as sustaining the effect of 'doubling' intertextually is because Ms. Weaver amounts to one of Cameron's go-to choices for depicting strong women characters in futuristic settings. Further, Ms. Weaver's characters in these movies are also featured revealingly as ambivalent mother figures. Both Ripley and Dr. Augustine, inadvertently or not, function as intertextual mirrors of each other, adding to the doubling themes in the two films. Further, both characters possess their own doubles in their respective films: Ripley has her evil counterpart in the alien Queen-gyne, and Dr. Augustine's doppelganger is her cross­ species Na'vi avatar which she inhabits to commune with the Na'vi. In mentioning Sigourney Weaver functioning as cinematic crossover double effect in these two films, I argue that Cameron demonstrates with this casting choice a much more elevated level of depicting the maternal allusion of doubling across filins than is commonly exercised in Hollywood. This signals his intuitive and artistic interest in the originary experience that also

1 88

Chapter 10

suggests a sublimated womb envy on the one hand and a compulsion to enunciate the return of the repressed on the other. Sigourney Weaver's character inAvatar, Dr. Grace Augustine, manages the interplanetary corporate-sponsored avatar program on the moon called Pandora in the film. She's the scientist in charge of the avatar project and has perfected the genetically constituted Na'viihuman hybrid bodies visible in their glass compartments complete with umbilical tubes. When Jake first sees his brother's avatar in its cylinder filled with a kind of anmiotic fluid, he comments: "He looks like him," referring to his brother, Tommy. One of the other scientists says, "He looks like you." This seemingly off-the-cuff conversation reinforces very succinctly the mirror stage and the dyadic doubling motif by specifically referencing Jake's identical twin Tommy­ his intrauterine doppelganger. Jake replaces Tommy on Pandora because his DNA matches Tommy's. It also draws attention to the facial similarities between all three: Jake, Tommy (Jake's Ego-Ideal) and now JakefTommy's Na'vi avatar, who possesses some of Tommy and Jake's DNA. These genome duplications result in similarities in facial appearance in the Na'vi avatars. Then Jake meets Dr. Augustine who disparages him as not being of the same caliber person as his brother. However, despite early challenges, the relationship between Jake and Dr. Augustine grows and becomes more and more dyadic as the film progresses. Grace becomes Jake's surrogate mother-to the extent that she must eventually die for the dyad to dissolve allowing Jake to survive as an individual hybrid Na'vi being. Further, Jake inadvertently kills his (m)Other figure: she dies late in the movie partially due to Jake's ties to the military machine on Pandora-they had tried to coerce him into cooperating with the military plans by promising to pay for healing his paralysis. Dr. Augustine dies from her wounds despite Jake's regrets and despite all the efforts of the Na'vi to transfer her 'soul' to her Na'vi avatar. In a sense, the maternal part ofthe dyad died so that Jake may live, an imitation of the human maternal dyad separation process. Jake's first doppelganger, his twin brother, Tommy, died so that Jake might live as we've discussed above. Tommy was a scientist who was successful in his career making cutting edge inter-galactic breakthroughs in intercultural communication and avatar "driving." As Jake's identical twin and living Ego Ideal, Tommy served as a threat to Jake's own always already lagging ideal-ego: Jake considered himself just a 'marine grunt' who was paralyzed and without recourse. He was becoming more and more self-destructive, while Tommy was becoming more and more successful. When Jake took over his twin's life, he also became successful, particularly in 'driving' his avatar and winning the attentions of the military and

James Cameron's 'Alpha' Trilogy

189

corporate administration. But Jake was not finished, catapulted by Tommy's coincidental death, he found a new ideal-ego and double in Tommy's Na'vi avatar. Further, Jake saw the light at the end of his tunnel of woes: a return to the linaginary plenitude by attaiinng a higher level of existence as his new ideal-ego in the fOlTIl of a super-powered avatar body and the extra­ logical intrauterine welcoming of tbe (m)Otbering moon goddess, tbe mystical environment of Pandora. The turning point in Jake's life with his newly acquired avatar was twofold: he found romance with Neytiri (a love interest and libidinous mother substitute), but even more significant, he found tbe primal universal (m)Other: Pandora, a maternal, planetary neural network. When he realized that his fellow humans were destroying tbe (m)Otber he made his commitment to the Na'vi and the linaginary wholeness they proffered. So, when it came time to leave his old ideal-ego behind figuratively, and thus his paralyzed body materially, he decided to take the leap and the (m)Otber planetary network converted him to Na'vi, a kind of non-human meta-Symbolic being in Pandora's culture of plenitude. This included the fact that, as speaking humanoid beings, the Na'vi were arguably and necessarily subject to tbe Symbolic-but in their own expanded, Imaginary marmer-something that humans resist. Despite this idyllic milieu on Pandora, the Na'vi must have been subject to an Oedipal-like sexualized syndrome of some kind-suggested by tbeir binary sexual structure and their umbilical scars, their navels, and their development of language. Since they have gone beyond their lingually determined binary limitations, tbey have also very likely superseded neurosis and Symbolic self-misrecognition to some degree. Their reverence to the maternal autbority and their sensitivity to the Eartb Goddess that their mystical planetary network approximates, indicates an expanded understanding ofthe Symbolic in relation to tbe linaginary and the maternal. In transferring himself forever to the N a'vi body, Jake shifts his limited human foundation in the Symbolic to an expanded, maternal semiotic and FEMININITY-inspired awareness that he (and we) witnesses in the Na'vi culture. One of Jake's last statements to his video log computer at the end oftbe movie sets the originary context for his uncanny transference into the body of his avatar forever: "It's my birtbday, after all," he states off-handedly. After referring to his armual day of birth, which indexes an indirect homage to maternity and the maternal semiotic, he signs off and the next time we see him his human body lies head to head and lifeless near his blue avatar body under the Tree of Souls. The camera moves past Neytiri, who leans over his body calling his name, and into an extreme closeup on Jake's Na'vi body's closed eyes. And tbese suddenly flip open looking right into the

190

Chapter 10

camera directly at the viewer; and suggesting love's tag line used in the fihn: "I see you." Tellingly, Cameron then cuts to black to end the film: after all, his (our) repressed return to the Imaginary and the originary maternal doubling is now complete.

The Uncanny Depiction of Women and (m)Others Cameron explores a consistent depiction ofwomen and (m)Others in his films that reveals a sophisticated twist on the Hollywood ingenue cliches. Generally, in telTIlS ofwomen, Cameron tends to cast women who are more androgynous than most of Hollywood's depictions, plus, as we mentioned before, he downplays their female physical attributes even more via costuming-even though he will make sparse and yet explicit emphasis on the female body at exacting points in the narrative. Plus, these strong women characters are often featured as mothers. This uncanny tendency in the depiction of women is particularly noticeable in Cameron's 'Alpha' fihns: Sigourney Weaver inAliens andA VA TAR, and, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, in Tlie Abyss (although Ms. Mastrantonio's character is not designated as a mother). Linda Hamilton in the Terminator franchise also falls into this proclivity of Cameron's. Although very much in the minority for Cameron, as if he shied away from sexploitation in his films, some of his female characters take on a more conventional portrayal, if only sparsely, in a slight sexual marmer. These include: Linda Hamilton's maternal role in The Terminator (only the first in the series), and combat pilot Trudy Chacon in Avatar played by Michelle Rodriguez, who walks the line of Hollywood conventionality by, on the one hand, exposing her cleavage to manipulate a security grunt and, on the other hand, she decidedly crosses over the line of conventionality into the strong woman role by piloting a fighter plane and going down with her ship in an act of fatal heroism. Then there is the rare yet patently "ingenue," type: Rose DeWit! Bukaler played by Kate Winslet in the period piece Titanic (1997). But even Rose accedes to the call of the unconventional in the selection as her love interest a young man from a lower echelon in society than hers. Cameron's 'against the Hollywood grain' tendency in the portrayal of women has become a motif that signals a rather consistent and gender-politically substantive, stylistic choice---even to the extent of his female xenomorph characters, as the portrayal of Neytiri played by Zoe Saldana in Avatar affirms. Although the outspoken and independent Neytiri is not portrayed as specifically maternal, her mother, Mo'at has similar reduced physical female characteristics as her daughter, but she is also very much featured as (m)Other and respected shaman.

James Cameron's 'Alpha' Trilogy

191

In summary, the portrayal o f women characters in the fOlTIl of an androgynous, maternal protagonist signals Cameron's intuitional inclination to charmel the maternal semiotic. This inclination of his converts conventional structural oppositions into an active/passive, differing/deferring plurality; a differance tliat challenges univocal and binary oppositional discourse. On another related note, and despite Cameron's predilection for androgyny in the portrayal of women, he has followed Ridley Scott's lead in sparingly implementing tlie explicit display of tlie female form of his Aliens character Ellen Ripley. When she displays her female form, she does it in a marmer indicating signifiance rather than titillation. Early in the film we see Ripley in her underwear when she leaves her sleep pod in the Company's ship when it arrives to the moon Acheron (LV-426). She walks through the ship to her locker to get dressed as the otliers waking up go about a similar routine. She is the only one in bikini panties and braless tank top. There is very little in terms of signifiance in this scene, but it is short and demonstrates her vulnerability in the company of male and female mercenaries. Perhaps, given the ending of the film, this scene does function to contrast tlie explicit female form witli downplayed more androgynous female fOlTIls of the other women in the crew. Plus, by now the film has informed us tliat Ripley is a biological motlier with a child who has died. However, at the end of tlie film as discussed in the 'OPENINGS AND ENDINGS: BOOKENDS OF THE MATERNAL SEMIOTIC' section of this chapter above, the maternal semiotic connotations are striking in the second short scene in which Cameron portrays Ripley in her underwear, this time with an adopted child tliat she mothers. Refer to tlie analysis in tlie OPENINGS AND ENDINGS section above for more in-depth discussion of this scene. It is interesting, tliough, that in the other two 'Alpha' films of Cameron's, The Abyss and Avatar, tlie explicit display of the female form does not present itself, and this is consistent with Cameron's distancing himself from conventional and nOlTIlative displays of the female fOlTIl. Further, tliere are more explicit displays of the naked male form in many of Cameron's films then there are of the female fOlTIl, and we can see this very pronounced in Aliens with the portrayals of the mercenaries. Cameron's film depictions of (m)Otliers, often as the strong androgynous protagonist, is consistent across his films and revelatory in terms of signifiance. We've already discussed Ripley in Aliens-see above in tlie 'DOUBliNG: PRE-LINGUAL NARCISSISM'-in which we discussed Ripley in terms of (m)Other and daughters, in the context of maternal singularity and doubling. But what about Dr. Grace Augustine in Avatar (also interpreted by Sigourney Weaver)? How does she factor maternally in

192

Chapter 10

her Jake's return to the Imaginary? Plenty: she takes him under her wing and plays a mother figure when Jake's avatar starts courting Neytiri. Plus, there is one salient instance of an allusion to Dr. Augustine as a mother in the dialog. This is the verbal exchange between Jake and Dr. Augustine when Jake found out about an incident that shut down her school for the Na'vi children: JAKE SULLY: I am sorry. DR. GRACE AUGUSTINE: A scientist stays objective. We can't be ruled by emotion. But I put 1 0 years of my life into that school. They called me sa 'nok. JAKE SULLY: "Mother." DR. GRACE AUGUSTINE:

"Mother. " Dr. Augustine touches Jake's chest. DR. GRACE AUGUSTINE: That kind of pain reaches back through the link.

What link does Dr. Augustine refer to? Is this just an oblique and coincidental segue to our next section on the originary link, the umbilical cord? Not necessarily. It does, however, go just as deep in telTIlS of an enunciation of the maternal semiotic and is wrapped in a telltale ur-fantasy of reuniting with the (m)Other. For the Na'vi, and for Grace, the link she refers to is the planet and the Na'vi's multiple connections to the deity Eywa, (m)Other Earth-like spiritual and neural network on Pandora, the moon the Na'vi people call home. These neural comections are depicted in the Tree of Souls, the floating seeds called "wood sprites," and the luminescent fibers of the earth that link the ground to the bodies that die: Grace's body first and then Jake's occurring late in the narrative when he transfers his ego to his new ideal-ego, his super-hybrid avatar. Dr. Augustine, Jake's surrogate (m)Other in the dialog above, is helping him, as a mother would, on his way

James Cameron's 'Alpha' Trilogy

193

to the pre-symbolic, Imaginary plenitude that his conversion to hybrid­ Na'vi and his adoption by the Na'vi people (re)presents.

The Umbilical Cord/Phallus Motif Related to the originary doubling motif is the appearance of recurring umbilical cord images coupled with the same images misrecognized as phallic symbols III mainstream mOVIeS (see the 'DOUBLES, DOPPELGANGERS, SYMMETRY' section in the Prologue). These kinds of images trigger the re-recurring reverberation of womb fear and womb envy always already latent in the Symbolic 13 Womb fear/envy is not a thought but a threatening unconscious pulsation, a rhythm, a compulsion in males 14 that leads to devaluing women 15 and over-compensating in producing self-aggrandizing achievements.!6 Umbilical cord/phallic imagery abounds in Cameron's 'Alpha' filins and I discuss these telltale, undulating lifelines in the following paragraphs. Aliens: The Facehugger's Umbilical Phallus and the Gyne's

Phallic Tail Let's review briefly Ridley Scott's Alien first. Although the umbilical phallus is referred to ever so briefly by Dallas asking: "What's it got down his throat?" This quote refers to the one uncanny object hidden from view in Ridley Scott's Alien film. And this object is the hidden penetrating protrusion of the Facehugger's. The Facehugger had engulfed Kane's face and deposited its seed/ovum/fetal material down Kane's throat while somehow keeping him alive-both operations facilitated via its sinewy appendage that Dallas has implicated in his question. Medical Officer Ash answers Dallas: "I suggest it's feeding him oxygen." This scene in the original filin of the Alien franchise puts the phallic umbilical cord in a multiplex context: oral penetration, umbilical dependence, leading to the impregnating, and the (re)presentation of gestating and birthing correlations and connotations springing from the object's interactions with Kane's body. However, its specific visual aspect is hidden from the viewer for the entire movie, which serves to increase its unheimlich resonance. Cameron, however, in a clinical manner in his sequel,Aliens, reveals the insidious insinuating member in a scientific context: inside the specimen display in a 'Med Lab' in the main colony headquarters on the alien planet LV-426. Two of the Facehugger specimens found there are still alive, and they suddenly wiggle in their reinforced glass tanks aggressively displaying their vagina openings from which a truncated umbilical cord/penis

194

Chapter 10

protrudes tongue-like. At one point, the android Bishop, one of Ripley's search and rescue party reconnoitering the lab, reads out loud a medical chart accompanying the specimen display of the Facehuggers: "Surgically removed before embryo implantation." No one makes any conjectures on what is signified by the telltale expression 'embryo implantation,' nor are there comments after Bishop's subsequent editorial clarification when finished reading an official statement that a subject died during the removal procedure: "They killed him taking it off." Before the implications can sink in, their attention gets diverted by the appearance of an unexplained moving blip on a radar type device that seems to be approaching them. They soon discover that the blip is a lone survivor at the colony: little Newt. And so, the subject of finding of the Facehugger specimens in the lab is dropped without further examination until Burke, the corporate minion in the party, sets a Facehugger loose on Ripley later in the film. Still, Cameron has pelTIlitted us to gaze upon the Facehugger's uncanny appendage albeit truncated in a closeup shot featuring the lips and folds of its vagina opening from which the telltale protrusion hangs like an overgrO\vn c1itoris-cum-umbilical-cord-cum-penis. The unspeakable, telltale reaction to the umbilical phallus, however, continues in the film franchise: Although daringly portrayed in a graphic marmer, the organ remains ignored-no words are used to address it. Still, the Facehugger' s appearance with its shortened appendage in Aliens continues the franchise's interest in the phallus as umbilical cord and maternal signifier misrecognized in classical psychoanalysis as the patemalized phallus. Another phallic image appears and receives emphasis in Cameron's film, just as it did in the Ridley Scott's original, Alien-although in Scott's film it received less screen time than in Cameron's. And yet, in Scott's Alien it suggests telltale signifiance17 The phallus image I am referring to is the adult alien creature's lengthy tail. InAliens, it is directly linked to the alien Queen-gyne whereas in Ridley Scott's movie, it was attributed to an alien creature of the same species that was not specifically designated as a gyne, that is, a procreator of that species. In Aliens, the alien Queen possesses a long tail that is particularly effective in that it is used as a weapon. It is revealing that this long undulating tail, used as an extraordinary whip, is also a phallic-cum-umbilical image. The alien Queen uses heir tail as a symbol and an actual physical source of power. With it, the alien Queen­ gyne impales Bishop penetrating his gut to rip him apart just before heir fight to the death with Ripley. Who, by the way, is outfitted in a special weaponized cyborg exoskeleton. There is a subliminal message here connecting physical power to the image of the maternal being, in this case the prolific birthing-gyne of the alien species. The alien Queen's phallic-

James Cameron's 'Alpha' Trilogy

195

cum-umbilical whip as a constructed image in this fihn attached to a maternal figure, ultimately conflates the phallic, the (m)Other and the umbilical imagery. This strategy in the fihn fonns an inadvertent, reactionary commentary on the visceral, reproductive potency of the originary maternal authority. The film clearly enunciates the primal fear of the Phallic (m)Other in the depiction of this virulent alien character. The Abyss: Cutting the Umbilical Cord and Accessing

the 'Oceanic Oneness' In The Abyss, Cameron features a deceivingly blase, though all­ important, example of an umbilical cord: the lifeline between the mother ship on the surface of the ocean and the underwater oil-rig on the bottom of the ocean. The oil-rig where most of the film takes place is nestled in its anmiotic sea perch like a pre-natal placenta containing a crew of fetuses. The first time we see Lindsey Brigman, she makes her first descent to the rig piloting a small craft and stating into the radio transmitter: "Explorer? This is Cab B starting our descent along the umbilical." Innocuous seeming, the reference is significant given the drive ofthe film to bring about a return of the repressed, the close, pre-lingual resonating encounter with the Real filtering through the Imaginary, when one is in the grasp of the "oceanic oneness,,18 of the pre-lingual stage with its primal narcissism. We see this in Lindsey, as the "leading lady" of the film, who starts out as the estranged wife but, by the end of the fihn, she becomes a complicit part of the growing atmosphere of the residual Imaginary plenitude. Ultimately, in the final two shots of the filin, she joins her rescued husband in a reconciliatory embrace that seals the maternal dyad they have now suddenly recovered: on the one level, they have found their way back to the re-enactment ofthe dyad that culture names husband and wife; while on the other level, at the level of primal FEMININITY, that is, within the Imaginary glow at the end ofthe film, as we discussed earlier, both of them become alternating traces of the originary objectified parts of the dyad radiating retroactively like prelingual nodes for the alternating currents of the dyadic libido arcing between them. Although their originary umbilical cords may be cut literally and figuratively, the dyadic libidinal investments of the prelingual stage remain and find purchase in their recovered union. As to the umbilical cord that Lindsey earlier refers to when she descends from the surface: at fifty-three minutes into the film, the stonn on the ocean surface causes the umbilical cord lifeline to the underwater oil rig to be ripped from the mother ship on the surface and, disarticulated, it falls to the bottom of the ocean. The mother ship must then leave for the safe waters

196

Chapter 10

outside the stOlm area. The umbilical cord has fallen with the remains of a crane. Figuratively, the cord has been cut too soon and so the offspring oil rig workers are in danger of becoming stillborn in their amniotic and oceanic resting place. In fact, several of the crew have already died and the rest wait helplessly for the air supply to run out. Still, the umbilical imagery dictates the underwater storyline as the accompanying crane, a kind of an ersatz afterbirth, falls over the nearby cliff and drags the oil rig by means of its sine\\!)' tube toward the abyss of the bottomless ocean trench. Fortunately, the rig stops at the precipice where the crew experience a reprieve-but not from the slow death from oxygen loss that will result from the effects of the cut umbilical cord to the surface. This 'waiting to die' situation, helpless as a newborn, is repeated a little later in the film when Bud descends to the bottom of the trench to disarm a nuclear warhead-the one that the paranoid Navy Seal leader sent over the precipice in his delusional state. The main reason Bud has descended into the abyss to dismantle the warhead is altruistic: previously in the film the Non-Terrestrial Intelligence (NT!), that is, the xenomorphs living at the bottom of the trench, had initiated contact with Bud and his crew. So, Bud and his crew wanted to avoid setting off a nuclear device in the xenomorph domain at the bottom of the ocean because their intergalactic interaction impressed upon the crew that the NT! are friendly, if speechless. This was proven when, earlier in the movie, in another umbilically-inspired image related to the NT!, a long cylindrical prosthesis of water meandered its way from the open launch area on the craft to the crew's makeshift sleeping quarters. Lindsey woke Bud to show him this strange phenomenon and the watery prosthesis imitated their faces like a sculpture in water, first Lindsey's, then Bud's. This interaction amounts to a non-verbal way by means of which the NTI are able to communicate intelligence and abilities, as well as delighting the crew to no end. This experience marks a kind of foreshadowing of the Imaginary plenitude to come that the film seems to be intuitively searching for and that the extra-logical, extra-lingual appearance of the NT! triggers. The salt-water umbilical appendage winds its way suddenly to another part of the craft taking them through the narrow hallways to the nuclear warhead that the paranoid Navy Seal officer had retrieved from the doomed submarine at the beginning of the film and surreptitiously stowed away in the rig. In yet another part of the craft, the paranoid officer discovers the watery appendage and closes a door on it causing it to fall apart-of course his fear-filled encounter with the NT! makes the paranoid officer more paranoid leading to actions that eventually precipitate Bud's descent to disatm the warhead, a suicide mission.

James Cameron's 'Alpha' Trilogy

197

(Re)presenting the umbilical cord/phallus theme in The Abyss leads to the deus ex machina ending described above in the section concerned with the beginning and ending of this film: the NT!, in a manifestation of Imaginary plenitude, create a circumstance of 'oceanic oneness' that saves all the remaining crew and Bud, and finally leads to Mr. and Mrs. Brigman's carnal, dyadic re-coupling in their own intimate dyad at the end Avatar: Na'vi Neural Queue: Umbilical Cord to the Pineal Eye

Descartes in his epoch, and Madam Helena Blavatsky, of the 19th Century Theosophical Society fame, shared an interest in a gland in the brain that the latter referred to as the atrophied trace of an organ of spiritual vision, and where the fOlmer, Descartes, centered the soul.19 Both cultural and philosophical icons shared a mis-reading ofthis anatomical curiosity of the brain that still holds anatomical as well as visionary interest today, the pineal gland. The pineal gland is also referred to as the Pineal Eye, an allusion to some religions' belief in a third spiritual eye somewhere in the brain. James Cameron seems to tap into this extra-Iogicaljouissance-related concept by adding an umbilical cord-like appendage to an unspecified, 'pineal-eye' type area of the brains of the Na'vi people who are indigenous to his fictional moon Pandora in Avatar. This pony-tail hair-enclosed appendage is referred to as a neural queue and is umbilical in nature because it consists of membranes in cord fOlTIl that transmit energy, as if pure meta­ nutritional wavelengths, as well as being able to actuate a pelTIlanent physical and spiritual connection between two beings joined to each other's neural queue. This special connection between beings includes those of animals and other living beings on Pandora: specifically, connections to the Weeping Willow-like, luminescent limbs ofthe Tree of Voices and the Tree of Souls. This cross-species ability seems a curious transgression of the umbilical cord single-species biological tradition, but nonetheless it follows Cameron's theme of inter-connectivity of all aspects of the planet (re)presented in this cinematic Sci-Fi narrative. As an historical reference, a similar inter-connectivity and spiritual synchronization, as ifvia a spiritual umbilical cord connection, is explored by Blavatsky and others in their theosophical writings, as well as serving as an integral element in Hinduism. This motif of the umbilical cord in its new incarnation as the neural ponytail queue in Cameron's Avatar helps raise the status of the cord to the level of primary signifiance in the Na'vi culture, as well as indirectly alluding to the disavowed maternal authority in our own culture. Early in the movie, Cameron makes a more direct visual 'quote' of the umbilical cord trope and its inherent signifiance. 'When Jake first sees his

198

Chapter 10

avatar in a glass incubator filled with a kind of amniotic fluid, Cameron depicts an umbilical cord attached to the hybrid body sustaining the avatar while it incubates. Once again, the primacy of the maternal is emphasized in the womb-like incubator and the phallic cord that attaches to the (m)Other, in this case an electronic anmiotic fluid-filled surrogate in the fOlTIl of a giant glass womb containing the avatar. Cameron did not need to include this device visually Of, in fact, narratively, but its inclusion helps avow the umbilical and its primal importance in reaffinning maternal authority in the spectator's subliminal registers.

Conclusion Cameron's 'Alpha' fibns, Aliens, The Abyss and Avatar resonate with the maternal semiotic specifically notable in the tropes of doubling/doppelgangers, the signtfiance-filled depictions of women/mothers, and the recurring umbilicaVphallus. It is a joy to follow the traces of the maternal semiotic through his box office blockbusters knowing that the polysemic expansion of the Symbolic order to include a certain recognition of the primal maternal authority that manifests in his films is of consequence as it reaches a wide demographic-of consequence, if only subliminally, in the mainstream psyche.

EPILOGUE FEMININITY, SCREEN MEMORY

AND ANIMALITY

As we have discussed earlier in this volume, FEMININITY attaches itself to the maternal and so to an ambiguity and plurality in sexuality experienced prior to binary oppositions and sexuation. Primal FEMININITY reverberates symbiotically and subversively tlirough the Symbolic order as nuances of the maternal semiotic that lend themselves to (re)presentation in the arts and specifically to the movies. Further, movies present the viewer with a series of Freudian 'screen memory'l experiences that syncretize into a kind of amalgam of film imaginings and viewer sublimations that can and do fabricate memory-like artifacts related to vague memory traces. These imaginings and sublimations meld and (re)produce both triggering memory events from the movies and the resulting oblique, often subliminal and camouflaged, memories related to the maternal semiotic and primal FEMININITY. The resulting filmic coalescence of screen memory triggering effects and reconstituted memory artifacts ultimately amounts to a defensive, consolidative and artistic machination that attempts to (re)present, filter (screen) and disginse the surge of unconscious drives and forbidden desires2 that Freud offhandedly links to animality, animalism and woman.} Via public screenings, both the triggering and reconstituted memory aspects of screen memory as film experience expand on the reflective, filtering and masking processes of the mind thereby creating movie originated "screen memories' for viewers that arouse latent drives and desires along with links to deeply rooted animality. These camouflage and screening strategies of the mind also signal a disavowed maternal authority that fmds itself filtered and masked in the Symbolic order with its oppositional limitations and paternal prohibitions on desires and libidinal investments. These filtered desires and drives screened in films have the potential to springboard the viewer into the disavowed reahn of the maternal authority with its accompanying sphere of animality. Specific examples of these filtering and triggering movie­ processes pertaining to animality factor into my analysis of the movies in

200

Epilogue

this epilogue. The originary prelingual concerns that these movie processes inadvertently generate create a maternal reverberation, both symbiotic and subversive to the Law of the Father, that winds its way through the unconscious, dreams and memories before coalescing artistically and camouflaged in the new memory fabrications that result. We have discussed these linkages and processes in depth throughout this tome, and we will continue by adding the related concept of screen memory. But we have just now started in this Epilogue to touch on a new arena ofresearch affected by our project on primal FEMININITY, the maternal semiotic and the Symbolic order in mainstream movies. And that is, the sphere of animality.4

Animality Animality is a word that attempts to describe the struggles and tensions that the genealogy and biology of the human animal (re)presents to the Symbolic order and consequently culture at large. There are just a few innovative works that are beginning to expand this topic into a variety of fields of study 5 But the subject has been avoided traditionally because it is hard to present animality as an evidence-based and palatable aspect of humanity. And this is due to the culture-wide disinclination to include animality in human genealogy and biology because it has been arbitrarily disavowed in relation to the construct ofthe human mind and soul distanced, if not disarticulated paradoxically from its phylum (Chordata, and Kingdom, Ainmalia).6 Manimality7 is a sore spot but also a tantalizing intrigue for culture and the movies and the arts (re)present the association repeatedly. In literature and the movies, overt displays of human animality and nonhuman animal kinship, specifically with human males, occasioned a burst of interest for audiences since Darwin's studies and subsequently Freud's integration of totemism into culture. The works of Brarn Stoker, H. G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, Edgar Rice Boroughs, and Kafka among others have led to movie adaptations of these novelists' enunciated interest in the collective fantasies concerning animality, including kinship and hybridity. Humanimality in the movies is a wide topic and reaches beyond the scope of this epilogue so we shall limit our discussion to recent cases in the movies that retain a maternal emphasis, if only to a latent or subliminal degree. By concentrating on these films and their maternal traces not only do we bring a new area of inquiry to this tome, but we also review some of the major discussions at the center of this project. Specifically, we'll be looking at films that contain kinship and/or hybridity between nonhuman animals and humanimals whether that be primarily physical or emotional manifestations or both.

FEMININITY, Screen Memory and Animality

201

The Feral Child Children show no trace ofthe arrogance which urges adult civilized men to draw a hard line between their 0\Vll nature and that of all other animals. Children have no scruples over allowing animals to rank as their full equals. Uninhibited as they are in the avowal of their bodily needs, they no doubt feel themselves more akin to animals than to their elders, who may well be a puzzle to them. (Freud 1950, 126-7)

Once again Freud demonstrates impressive insights, albeit tone-deaf and racially biased if you read further into this work that treats non-Western, , that is, less technologically advanced cultures, as 'living fossils. 8 And yet the quote above opens the door in some respects to a general plausibility for the depiction of the feral child as protagonist in literature and the movies. Kipling, at the turn of the 19th Century, was writing early on in Freud's career, and Burroughs, later during Freud's mid-to-Iate career, had no problem as popular authors in creating myths of the childbood dreams of animality. This was even before Freud's writings on human and nonhuman animal genealogy per se resonated across popular culture. The Jungle Book and Tarzan as texts, and particularly movie texts, have served as kind of interspecies screen memories with all their self-reflecting, filtering and masking of guilty animalistic pleasures. Their popularity occurred time after time over the generations since their fIrst dates of publication and then later catapulted into the broad mainstream when fIrst seen in the movies. Manimality does not seem overly subversive to the cultural status quo in these myths because they convey the superiority of man over animals (that is, men exclusive of women). For example, the Burroughs's inspired, and tone-deaf movie entitled: Greystoke: The Legend a/Tarzan, Lord a/the Apes (Hudson, 1984). These fantasy myths of human male grandeur with their animalistic themes come to us through generations of commercial appeal, and yet they can still be considered subversive. These stories and fIlms amount to a kind of flirtation with certain telltale ties and kinships between human and nonhuman animal species. Yet, in the end, self-proclaimed "human" attributes are foregrounded and so typically exhibit in the male protagonist a natural dominance, and a prevailing superiority over his nonhuman animal co-characters. Freud, a purveyor of male human exceptionalism and the phallogocentric (re)presentation that is typical for his time, weighed in quite influentially on the concept of primal men in hordes overcoming the original animalistic father and creating a path to the 'human' separation from nonhuman animals. And his theories argue for a more 'humanizing' and

202

Epilogue

defmitive break from animal ancestry through the 'discovery' of human­ specific kinship taboos and animal sacrifice.9 In contrast to our term manimality, the telTIl 'humanimality,' a moniker for human/nonhuman animal hybridity and kinship, might be better used to include women because it seems a little less phallocentric than manimality having added a syllable, hu-, to '-man' to soften the overt male centric , denotation of 'man. 10 Be aware that women have always been relegated in the Symbolic order to a special phenomenological kinship and hybridity status with animals,l1 which factors obliquely in the overall phallogocentric disparagement and disavowal of human animality and the originary maternal authority. It is just lately that a starring role for women thematically linked to animality in the movies has been more accepted. We can argue that recently the woman/nonhuman animal literary lexicon of imagery has gained in acceptability and visibility to a degree, especially in the movies. To illustrate this link between nonhuman animality and women in tlie movies, we will discuss the filins Maleficent (Stromberg, 2017), and The Zookeeper's Wife (Caro, 2017). But first we will briefly analyze 'manimality' in the movies via the depiction of the feral child in two exemplar movies The Jungle Book (Favreau, 2014) and The Legend of Tarzan (Yates, 2016).

The Feral Boy Early on tlie depiction of feral children in tlie movies focused exclusively on wild children that were boys. Perhaps this subliminally reflects Freud's emphasis on the primal 'company of brothers' 12 theory about (pre-)humanimal ancestors who destroyed and ate the original leader or 'father' ofthe horde, the original nonhuman ancestor and thus started the domino effect leading to becoming human. Men and boys have traditionally been at the forefront for culture in both reactionary and risque roles in the movies. There are reasons for this. One of these is that for Freud, following in age-old tropes of phallocentrism, women never really became fully human, or as human as men, at any rate. Despite his occasional brilliant insights into the primal maternal authority mentioned almost off­ handedly,B he seemed to have had little energy or inclination to explore the 'woman question' more fully. At best women became dark continents of humanimality for Freud and so, the dark continent metaphor factors for generations in the male dominant culture vis-a-vis woman. Woman, along with children-most likely because children are more dependent on and influenced by their mothers-have remained, in the phallogocentric world, the closest in kinship and cultural proximity to animals. In many regards,

FEMININITY, Screen Memory and Animality

203

though, women are much closer to animality in Freud's mind than children, neurotics and the deranged, if they are male. According to the male ethos, these latter can aspire to the Symbolic, whereas women inherently retain a distance that men do not, if we are to accept Freud's disposition. So why have boy and men exemplars of these hybrid appearing characters found a niche in the movies? \¥by have boys and men received such wide popularity in these roles to the exclusion of women? When we examine the two selected fihns that are focused on the feral boy in this chapter the answer will become clear and indicate that this is another example of phallogocentrism in literature and the movies. Despite their acceptance and popularity to mass audiences, and perhaps because of this popularity, two humanimalistic literary characters, Mowgli and Tarzan, enjoy an influential reach. This influence that extends well beyond species-bending entertainment into the realm of inadvertent subliminal subversion. And not only via filmic screen-memory type manipulations featuring human and nonhuman animal kinships and hybridity, but also via two other subversive means integral to this volume: the enunciation of sexually fluid FEMININITY, and the enunciation of the maternal semiotic. We shall discuss these in the following two subsections of this Epilogue: The Jungle Boy, and The Ape Man.

THE JUNGLE BOY Perhaps the most revealing fact about Jon Favreau's accomplished 2016 version of The Jungle Book, is that there is not one human woman depicted as a character in the film. In addition, the one human character other than Mowgli himself that does appear in the film is his father, who is seen in a flash back being killed by the tiger, Shere Khan. The significance of the exclusive appearances of these two male human animals, Mowgli and his father, comes into focus when compiled with a few of the other instances of imagery informed by human and nonhuman animality in Favreau's film. But before we break dO\vn those images, let's consider that since human women are not depicted as characters in the film and, given the express cameo presence of the human father as a character, listed in the credits as "Infant Mowgli's Father," Favreau seems to be indicating a heightened sense of status for males and human fathers over women and humanimal mothers. \¥bile at the same time, Favreau seems to be relegating nonhuman animals to a higher status than the adult male humanimals, as well. After all, the animals and the film disparage the human village and culture, and Mowgli's father is killed by an animal. However, by the end of the film, the

204

Epilogue

protagonist, Mowgli, the human animal pup, a boy, does rise to a dominant position in the nonhuman animal kingdom. He accomplished this by having conquered the antagonist, Shere Khan, and by establishing himself comfortably within the nonhuman animal social structure.

Phallogocentric Human Exceptionalism But let's return to the depiction and treatment of the paternal images in the film. Through the demise ofMowgli's father, shown only in flashback, the film seems to inadvertently disparage the concept of the Law of the Father, that is, the authority of the Father figure in culture. Plus, subversive along the same lines but carried over to the nonhuman animal sphere, Mowgli's wolf father, Akela, also meets an untimely end in the clutches of Shere Khan very early on in the fihn. Conventional father figures don't fare well so far in the film. Further, the adoption of the human animal cub Mowgli into the animal domain, despite the film acknowledging that humanimals live nearby, signals once again a disparagement of human culture based on the Law of the Father-although, it must be acceded that the creatures in the film speak English, and the speaking of any language carries the structure of the Law inherently. It can be argued that this use of speaking animals in the fihn is mostly for practical entertainment purposes. But, having the nonhuman animals speak language does in and of itself evoke a sense of hybridity between human and nonhuman animals especially since Mowgli acknowledges and fully participates in their use of language. This display of an overlap between human and nonhuman animals suggests hybridity and an implied kinship. This narrative conceit can be considered an animalistic plus for the filmmakers, if their intent is to communicate a more inclusive disposition towar d nonhuman animals. However, contrary to the avowal of animalism and contrary to the disparagement of the Law of the Father, it must be argued that the film follows convention. By centering the film on a male child adopted by nonhuman animals and the depiction of his rise to hierarchical heights that seem unfathomable to most of the other creatures, Favreau continues a long history of phallocentric human exceptionalism that constitutes a nOlm in these animalistic stories. Two specific tropes underpin these feral humanimal narratives in telTIlS of humanimal culture at large: first, the extremely limited level at which human animals interface with nonhuman animals-Mowgli is the only humanimal that interacts with nonhuman animals in this film; and second, the portrayal of the inability of humans at large to coexist equitably with nature and specifically with nonhuman animals. Further, these themes are

FEMININITY, Screen Memory and Animality

205

often deployed as if they were part of the natural order of things. These tropes factor into this geme's two-faced disposition toward nonhuman animals: on the one hand these films satisfy fantasies of kinship, hybridity and equitability with nonhuman animals while on the other hand, simultaneously upholding the sense of exceptionalism self-appropriated by humanimals. The paternal status quo does receive a challenge in these films in its exceptionalism especially in telTIlS of humanimal resistance to compatibility with nature. But, by the end of the fihn, the exceptionalism of the male humanimal still retains its mythological, univocal status. After all, the feral humanimal protagonist winds up superior to the nonhuman animal fray, and the feral boy phenomenon is only an exception to the rule of human culture entering the world of nonhuman animals. Plus, as an added benefit for human exceptionalism: the nonhuman animals are anthropomorphized.

Raksha and Womanimality Let's now consider the father figure's structural opposite, the mother image in Favreau's Jungle Book. We need to consider that although the human woman is made invisible by not including her in the fihn as a character, the inclusion of the wolf mother, Raksha, as primary maternal character, and her rise in stature ofleader after her mate Akela' s early death. These narrative elements related to Raksha and the maternal authority function to fiather diminish the paternal hegemony of the male humanimal by means of a subliminal association to the special hybridity and kinship of mother animals in most if not all species. This association strikes a subliminal cord in humanimals because woman is considered in the phallogocentric world more 'animal' than man. In other words, Favreau's inclusion in the narrative of the dominant leadership characteristics attributed to Raksha as well as the depiction of her significant nurturing and primal maternal status, creates an underpinning message that nonhuman maternal animality and womanimality carry much more substantiality, ifnot an intrinsically higher status, than male human animals in the grand earthly scale that includes all of nature.

HnmanlNonhnman Hybridity and Kinship Apart from the lack of specifically human woman references in the fihn and, given the presence of maternal themes in the narrative, The Jungle Book does (re)present nonhuman animality in several extra-human ways that amount to examples of animal pedagogy and cross-species connections that form a nexus at the maternal. Although masking its subversive

206

Epilogue

undercurrents in movie sleight of hand and traditional anthropomorphic storytelling, the film sustains a certain theme of the maternal that resonates human/non-human animal hybridity and kinship. This theme winds its way throughout the movie. The most overarching example of human/non-human animal hybridity and kinship in the film is the personification14 of most of the animals. All the animals, but for the smaller, llOlmal size temple primates curiously enough, speak in ways that communicate human nuances suggesting personality while, at the same time, all the animals are constructed in 3D animation that approaches great realism in portraying the nonhuman animal's appearance and species-specific range of movement. 15 So, what we note by this level of personification is that, on the one hand, the nonhuman animal aspect of the characters in terms of realistic physical appearance is retained while, on the other hand, their speech marks specifically their humanimallnonhuman animal hybridity because they are able to talk exactingly without hackneyed nonhuman animal affects. Plus, several of the nonhuman animal characters have individualized names that distinguish them in a culturally humanimal manner from each other fonning a kind of kinship familiarity with the viewer. And the humanimal-like playful exchanges between the nonhuman characters form a familiarity and kinship. For example, Baloo pleads with Bagheera the panther at one point to dissuade him from taking Mowgli back to the "Man Village" stating insightfully: "They'll ruin him. They'll make a man out of him." This sentiment could easily be said by a man to another man regarding Mowgli only substituting the word 'man' in Baloo's statement for the word 'animal.' Baloo and the director Favreau are making a kind of a pun and double entendre here while also pointing out that nonhuman animals can be extra­ human, better than 'man.' There is therefore a tension between the familiarity aspects ofthis display ofhybridity that throughout the fihn tends to win us over as an audience effectively promoting humanimality and nonhuman animal kinship while also critiquing 'man.' Most films with themes dealing with animality critique man, that is, the human animal's inept stewardship of the earth. Along with the personification of nonhuman animals, the viewer soon realizes that in featuring Mowgli's adoption (first by a wolf mother: "Rashka, the only mother he ever knew.") and adaptation to the animal world, this fihn highlights his nonhuman animality lending it an appearance of nonnality and projecting on him, after a kind of an apprenticeship, a sense of extra-human superiority to other human animals who, the film tacitly implies, tend to disdain their own animality by living apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. The hybrid humanimality attributed to the animals

FEMININITY, Screen Memory and Animality

207

helping him takes on a sense of heightened plausibility because of their familiar and kinship-like interactions with Mowgli. Experiencing this for the duration of the film, the viewers suspend their disbelief, and their culturally based aversion to kinship with nonhuman animals at large further diminishes. And this is despite the mixed message when the film suggests the reverse, that humans are different from nonhuman animals and naturally rise above them as Mowgli does to a certain extent by the end of the tale. In referring to non-humanihuman animal kinship, viewers will note that both a sibling and a maternal relation between Mowgli and the wolves exists and both are mentioned directly in the movie. Both times, the surrogate mother, Raksha, the matriarchal wolf, is present. In the first occurrence, Grey, the smallest of the wolf-pack cubs says to a disappointed Mowgli sitting beside Raksha, "Come on. You're my brother, you have to play with me!" Later in the film when Mowgli decides to leave the pack to return to people because of the danger his presence in the pack will bring to the nonhuman animal kingdom, Raksha reaffilTIls to him that, "You will always be my son." This is the first and only time that she refers to him as her 'son,' not her 'cub' as she has done previously. Both Grey and Rashka are not only suggesting a kinship with human animals but also a kinship that is normally thought of as distinctly a human animal phenomenon: the designated immediate familial ties as a cultural organizing trait, rather than the generalized pack hierarchy attributed to nonhuman animals. The hybridity implied in these intimate familial speeches in the fihn stand out and affect the nonhuman animal characters in the film deeply. Not only for those characters on the screen but the familial relationships implied also deeply affect the viewer who identifies with Mowgli as a humanimal connecting with his adoptive mother, and his adoptive sibling, Grey. The viewer also identifies with the maternal possessiveness and love from Raksha as surrogate mom. For both Grey and Raksha, as well as for Mowgli, the kinship is not by blood but nonetheless it is a kinship that is as strong; and one that transgresses the human/nonhuman animal divide in a marmer that implicitly supports the eclipsing of the exclusionary stigmas surrounding human/non-human animal kinship. As well as the promotion ofthe resulting expansion of humanimals' openness to animality and nonhumanihuman animal kinship.

FEMININITY and the Maternal Anthority In relation to primal FEMININITY and the enunciation of the maternal authority in Favreau's The Jungle Book, there are two specific thematic threads that can be addressed readily. They are the ambiguity and the

208

Epilogue

plurality in sexuality, along with the emphasis on the imaging of the maternal authority. First, we'll discuss the ambiguous state of sexuality featured in the fihn. It is important to view sexuality in two stages, one involving a pre-lingual connotation of plurality and fluidity, and the other, involving sexuation, the Symbolic construct of sexuality that traditionally is strictly oppositional.!6 The singled out human animal in the film, Mowgli, is portrayed at a prepubescent

stage

of

development

which

signals

the

prelingual

FEMININITY in which sexuation, a cultural construct based on the binary male/female, has not been committed to yet by Mowgli's body, and sexuality proper for him remains potentially fluid on the spectrum of libidinous intensities toward love obj ects. At the very least, physical desire appears latent at this stage.

In Mowgli's

specific case, sexuality in telTIlS of

active fluidity and/or binary expression rests unaddressed by the film. He is, however, depicted in the film as a speaking subj ect, and so, in theory, beyond the pre lingual stage of a plurality oflibidinal investments. He is also not yet in the throes of puberty. But, since sexuation also remains unaddressed in the film, the film leaves it up to speculation as to his sexuality, his libidinal enunciation. So, the absence of an actual depiction as to whether Mowgli is defiintively male or female is replaced with a telltale display of pre-pubescent sexual

ambiguity.

In

other words,

Mowgli's sex is visibly indiscernible and, other than few instances of others referring to Mowgli as a boy, neither the film nor Mowgli weigh in on the matter. At Mowgli's depicted age, most boys and girls in many traditional human animal cultures are dressed to display sexual difference. However, in this film, Mowgli's only clothing is a loin cloth. One could argue that this connotes a male costume, but at Mowgli 's prepubescent age, a female actor of similar height and weight could easily be depicted in a loin cloth and sexual difference would be visibly negligible-other than by deliberate and cliched acting displays. And these are extremely subdued, if not lacking entirely, in Mowgli's actions in this film. This indirect allusion to an undifferentiated sexual appearance and demeanor is consistent with the state of sexual ambiguity that reflects back to the prelingual stage and which often continues for the child until sexual awakening at pubescence. In addition, the paternal Oedipal factor in humanimal development in the film has been foreclosed since Mowgli has not had any association with his human parents since his prelingual stage at which time he was adopted by the wolf pack. So, Mowgli's prominence as the main character in this narrative, a main character who remains sexually undesignated other than via sparse verbal designation, sends a message of plurality and ambiguity that transgresses the Law of the Father 's traditional disposition and its

FEMININITY, Screen Memory and Animality

209

posturing, that is, the tendency in cultural milieus for binary displays of sexuation even at an early age: dresses vs pants, earrings, long hair vs short, and so on. And yet, it must be noted that in a subtle way, the subversive message of sexual plurality and FEMININITY in the depiction of Mowgli in the film undergoes an ersatz countering effect when Mowgli's gender is referred to-very few times-in the dialog of the film. Plus, the subversion continues because there are no references overall to sexuation and sexuality in the film, which can be argued contributes to the sense of sexual ambiguity and, perhaps, ambivalence. This ambiguity and ambivalence become integral to Mowgli as a character in Favreau's filmed version of The Jungle Book and indicates a subliminally unchecked pluralist theme running tInoughout the film in several socially inclusive ways: tInough human/nonhuman hybridity, via the traces of primal FEMININITY (Mowgli's ignored and potentially pan sexual libidinal investments) and the reinforcement of the maternal authority (Rashka), as well as by the suggestion of a symbiosis between an extra-logical maternal semiotic and the Symbolic order (a disavowed phenomenon that most films and art convey). All of this occurs despite the superficial suggestion of a phallocentric human exceptionalism that the fihn overlays awkwardly on the inherently subversive storyline. Second, the maternal authority theme, that is, the subtle yet overt imaging of the maternal authority figure in the film. Rashka, the female wolf who claims Mowgli as her 'son,' is acknowledged in the film earlier than anyone else as an important familial part ofMowgli's life. In fact, she is the female character most singled out and identified specifically as a mother, and as Mowgli's mother. And the film reinforces this often in the film. Another strong female character contrasts with the imaging of Rashka and appears in the form ofthe seductive and potentially lethal tree anaconda, Kaa. She tries to kill and eat Mowgli in her telltale enveloping embrace. So, on the one hand we have the good mother image in Rashka and, on the other hand, the suggestion of the bad, suffocating mother in Kaa, the sly hungry snake. Both of these images of (m)Other, both separate and combined, can be traced to the prelingual stage in the give-and-then-withhold aspect of the maternal presence, particularly the intermittent 'presenting and withholding' of the breast vis-a-vis the subject to be, the new born. Plus, Kaa (re)presents the lethality of the pre lingual mother especially pertaining to birth trauma and the early fatal attraction of the all-encompassing womb. Beyond that, the two (m)Others share another level of the maternal semiotic in that they (re)present, as mother images, irrepressible humanimality if not also the

210

Epilogue

innate nonhuman animal hybridity designation that the Symbolic tersely relegates to woman as we have discussed above. In continuing the maternal authority thread in this part of our discussion, I argue that the depiction of Raksha's final ascendency as matriarch, that is, her ascension to the leader of the pack in the movie, is designed to appear normal not only for the wolfpack, but also by association, for families in general. And this matriarchal ascendancy receives the tacit imprimatur of the main character, Mowgli, at the end ofthe film as well. The film 'nOlmalizes' this event by depicting it as a fait accompli and by aligning it witb thejump in status of the main character, Mowgli, when he returns to the animal domain after killing tbe antagonist, the tiger Shere Kan. In the last scene of the film, Mowgli finally wins tbe type of foot race pictured at the beginning of the fihn against his young wolf rivals and comes walking toward tbe mountain lair also depicted in the first scenes of the movie. This time, though, Mowgli sees Rashka atop the mount addressing her pack and displaying matriarchal authority. This is tbe first time we see her as tbe leader since her mate, Aleka, was killed by the tiger villain, Shere Kan. Mowgli and Rashka exchange glances and she calls out to her pack: "Look well, wolves!" Then, once again the nonhuman animal and surrogate mother, Rashka, and her human animal son exchange glances. Mowgli smiles with familial pride. Although just a minute before he had clarified there at the end ofthe race to his young wolf opponents tbat he is not a wolf, he seems to acknowledge to Rashka in his smile to her that he also is a wolf, a hybrid wolf, and human/nonhuman animal kin as tbey exchange glances. In sum, what we see here in this moment at the end of the film is the ascendancy of a female, a mother, who establishes a matriarchy with her offspring. The film in this scene signals the primal maternal autbority, not so unusual in a wolf pack, but still limited nowadays in a humanimal pack or political unit. The movie places an emphasis on Rashka as a non-human animal matriarch who retains a significant familial bond with a human child. Plus, the film features a protagonist, Mowgli, who remains acquiescent if not deeply content tbroughout in his role as a hybrid non-humanlhuman animal. At the end of tbis version of Kipling's The Jungle Book, Mowgli stays in the nonhuman animal kingdom, his new family home. In conclusion, the movie The Jungle Book, carries a message that is clear: humanimality, the avowal and nurturing of human animality, does not need to be avoided, and this avowal results in insights into FEMININITY and the primal maternal authority, as well as in an expansion of physical and emotional capabilities. We the audience can't help but grasp at some

FEMININITY, Screen Memory and Animality

211

level that Favreau's film acknowledges the beneficial plurality in the humanimal condition.17

THE APE MAN David Yates' The Legend o/Tarzan gives the audience most of the myth of Tarzan that most viewers should be well acquainted with from generations of books, films and television versions. Adapted from Edgar Rice Burroughs's take on the feral child tales, The Legend o/Tarzan depicts mostly the adult life of Burroughs's boy child raised by a troop of great apes. Despite the emphasis on his adult life, the film does center on Tarzan's nonhuman animal surrogate mother, if obliquely. We see this devotion to the nonhuman animal mother figure in many of the movie versions of the Tarzan stories as well as in the many The Jungle Book tales. The theme of kinship is always prominent in these films, and at many levels including surrogate father images like Kerchak in Tarzan and Akela and Bagheera in The Jungle Book; adoptive mother images: Kala in Tarzan and Raksha in The Jungle Book; as well as siblings, most often if not always brothers to the wild boy-child: Atuk in Tarzan and Grey in The Jungle Book. Further, the sense ofthe hybridity of human/nonhuman animal personality traits and personal liaisons is quite pronounced in these movies and suggests duo species and even multiple species-wide kinships. We've discussed human/nonhuman animal kinship in The Jungle Book. In The Legend 0/ Tarzan, the depiction of kinship goes well beyond the other more conventional and somewhat distanced depictions of familial kinship between human and nonhuman animals. Two lesser yet poignant examples of this in Yates's Tarzan include firstly the display between Tarzan and the lions he meets early in the film: he lowers himself all fours and rubs against them in a show of intercultural hybridity and kinship. And secondly, later in the film, Tarzan meets up with his brother Atuk and follows the cultural ritual of these great apes that leads to a dramatic fight and finally a display of surrender and appeasement. These examples go beyond The Jungle Book by portraying more intercultural human/nonhuman animal awarenesses and kinships across multiple species, specifically humans, apes and lions-as well as elephants in another scene in Tarzan demonstrating reverence and deference.

212

Epilogue

(m)Others' Cross Species Love Perhaps the most pronounced example of human/non-human animal kinship in Tarzan is as profound as it is subtle, and one which enunciates the maternal semiotic. The film repeats an emotional juxtaposition of specifically related images twice and these scenes make a connection that at once expresses deep humanimality and touching nonhuman animality between Kala who is Tarzan's adoptive mother, Tarzan and Jane. In the first flashback example of these similarly significant montages, Tarzan has just been beaten to a pulp saving Jane's life from Kerchak, Tarzan's estranged surrogate father, and has been taken to Jane's father's house and lies in a bed barely conscious. Kala knows that her surrogate son, Tarzan, is in trouble and approaches the edge of the jungle near the house. She moans out in grief and consolation for her adopted son lying in bed away from her domain and out of reach while inside the house Jane hears her and stops for a moment. Then Jane walks toward the camera in the long hallway in the house to go to Tarzan. Both Jane and Tarzan's images are distorted during this sequence: Tarzan's body is out of focus mostly with only certain parts of his body in focus, particularly his hand; Jane's wide shot coming down the hall is also out of focus and seems to be as if it were from Tarzan's delirious point of view with the bright light from the window in the background behind her giving her an ethereal angelic appearance. These camera techniques give the scene great emphasis in line with the emotions that Kala and Jane feel toward Tarzan. The montage creates a cross cutting pattern between these three shots of these three characters giving us a powerful suggestion that they are and will be related together in a profoundly emotional and intimate way. This montage also acknowledges their connection in and across time and space after Tarzan's brutal and traumatic experience. Just below the surface in this montage, in a subliminal river of suggestion, there flows a strong nonhumanihuman animal kinship of budding familial relations across species. The montage enunciates this kinship without submitting it through the lingual channels of the Symbolic order. Nevertheless, the relationship between the three remains from then on unspoken and yet authenticated, if subliminally, in the eyes ofthe viewer. This is the budding relationship between a cross species mother, son and soon to be daughter-in-law. The cross-species moment of intimacy occurs just after Tarzan and Jane met each other and started fOlming a strong physical and emotional attraction for each other that will lead to life-long togetherness and eventually to offspring. Let's fast forward to the second time we see a montage that links these three characters. It happens at the very end of the film, perhaps the most

FEMININITY, Screen Memory and Animality

213

emphatic moment i n any film because it i s the last opportunity for the film to communicate to its audience. Tarzan is presented with his new born baby and as he stands there alone in shock and pride with his small baby in his alms while Jane's voice over starts up repeating some of the content of the song that the native peoples were singing about Tarzan. The film cuts away to a forest scene and then to the back of Tarzan alone in the middle of the forest near a tree as he bows dO\vn to place something there. As his hand moves away, we notice that the object is a polished egg-shaped stone and we instantly realize that this represents Kala because this is the same stone that she had in her hand when she died earlier in Tarzan's arms. This ovary­ shaped stone has been guarded by Tarzan for years and was foreshadowed at the beginning of the film in a flashback to Tarzan as a small child. It is associated with both Kala and his human mother because the first time we see the stone is when Kerchack chases young Tarzan out of his dead European parents' abandoned treehouse with a show of dominance. Afterwards, Kala, who was with Tarzan in the treehouse, presents him with the polished stone for the first time. There is not a direct indication where Kala got the stone but since they were just in the treehouse and the stone appears tooled into its shape and machine polished, it seems that it might be from Europe and so his biological mother's. There is a certain hybridity to the stone, however, because although it might have been his birth mother's and from Europe, Tarzan associates it with his adoptive mother, Kala. This double significance, albeit subtle and downplayed, signals a relationship between both Kala and the human mother, Alice, as a kind of a hybrid image (re)presenting a plurality of maternal connections that strikes a chord deep in Tarzan's psyche. The next shot in this montage after we see Tarzan place the polished stone at the bottom of the tree, is a closeup on Tarzan's eyes. He seems to be thinking of this plurality of his maternal upbringing shared with a birth mother he never really knew and his adoptive nonhuman animal mother, Kala, who died in his anns . This possibility is only hinted at in this short montage that suggests a signijiance germinating from the images that signal the maternal semiotic. The end of this short sequence of shots is a return to the shot of Tarzan and his newborn basking in the walTI1 sunset light. But this time, significantly, he is joined by the new mother, Jane, who is now a new addition to the other two mothers in Tarzan's life. She stands with her mate Tarzan in the frame full ofthe sunset and the glow of her new family. Now the voice-over from Jane continues in this shot and alludes to Tarzan's nonlhuman animal family and other such kinships ending with " . . . his spirit came from them. He understood them. And learned to be as one with them." This last speech in the film sums up the human/nonhuman animal kinship theme in Yates's film.

214

Epilogue

The human/nonhuman animal, kinship revealing itself in this last quick montage at the end of the film borrows on the budding familial relations mentioned before when Tarzan first met Jane. And it establishes the connection and the plurality in their lives by reminding us ofthe importance and signifiance of Kala, Tarzan's surrogate nonhuman animal mother. This kinship also draws meaning from the distant role of Tarzan's birth mother through the traces of her presence and death in the treehouse depicted in a flashback, and her association with the shiny egg-shaped talisman. The film syncretizes the two mothers and coalesces them with the new mother, Jane, who carries on their emotional and familial intimacy. The glow of the sunset and the new born infant with his parents, Jane and Tarzan in the last shot, and its juxtaposition to the previous shot when Tarzan placed the polished stone at the foot of the tree resonates with Tarzan, the new father as he basks in the glow of humanimality that now encompasses all three: Tarzan, his mate, Jane, and the new addition to their family. In the end, Tarzan remains with his family in Africa and the film took the time to reiterate that he consciously cherishes and retains his ties to his nonhuman animality. The figurative glow of human animality in the presence of Tarzan and Jane's newborn bleeds over to the next shot that cuts to an African jungle through which fOlmer Lord of Greystoke, Tarzan, is now seen swinging through the trees with his adopted family of great apes accompanying him.

Summary and Segue What we have traced in these last several paragraphs has been the manimality expressed through the eyes of human male animals who dominate the literature for the depiction in the movies of the feral child and their grownup counterparts. However, primal FEMININITY and the maternal authority contribute a resonating thread of the maternal semiotic interwoven like music throughout these fihns adding an underpinning message of plurality to the exotically extra-logical, extra-human and extra­ Symbolic (re)presentations. Nevertheless, male protagonists and themes dominate in these manimality films. However, in contrast to this, women­ centered depictions of humanimality appear to be enunciated in quite different contexts that speak in some respects to the degree of animality relegated a priori to women as opposed to men. With the advent of women contributing to the literature of animalism including film texts, a broader scope and nuance can be expected in telTIlS of the age-old mythologies and lacunas relegated to womanimality from the traditional phallogocentric perspective and the reactionary status quo in the industry. After a short introduction on the feral (m)Other, let's move on to two of these

FEMININITY, Screen Memory and Animality

215

womanimality film texts: Maleficent (Stromberg 2014) and The Zookeeper's Wife (Caro, 2017)

The Feral (m)Other In the literary realm, including the movies, human ferality 'starring' women could be considered non-existent given the male dominance in the mainstream film industry until most recently.18 Starring roles enunciating woman and animality in mainstream movies has risen in acceptability in popular movies as increasingly a more pluralist-leaning culture establishes itself-more on plurality related to sexuality in our Coda below. The following discussion explores literary examples of human animal ferality involving women in starring roles in the movies. We pursue this inquiry in order to contribute to the sparse literature addressing the new visibility of women in these lead roles expressing humanimality, and by association, other areas ofplurality and the traces of the maternal semiotic.

Woman as Horny Hybrid: Maleficent From a script written by a woman, though the movie that was directed by a man, and produced under the auspices of a heretofore sexist Disney Studios,19 Maleficent, the 2014 feminist retelling of the Sleeping Beauty legend, breaks ground not only in gender politics in mainstream film, but also in the (re)presentation ofhum animality and hybridity starring a woman. Humanimality in broad strokes for this project pertains to the imaginative reconstructions, whether in popular fantasy or textualized versions of this fantasy, that (re)present our latent desires for recovering humarunonhuman animal kinship. Humanimality also includes the desire for the extra-human benefits suggested by human/non-human animal hybridity; as well as the unambivalent, unambiguous embrace of human animality that those imaginations might afford us. We see these latent desires enunciated in Stromberg's, and crucially, Linda Woolverton's20 Maleficent. Perhaps the most significant display of human/nonhuman ainmal hybridity in the movie is not Maleficent's horns that might be considered the most visually startling, and perhaps the most devilish aspect of her hybrid body. No, the most significant hybridity display is the fact that Maleficent has large extremely realistic bro\Vll feathered wings. Realistic in the sense that they give the illusion of a bird's wings, not a fairytale adaptation of bird wings for fairies as often portrayed in fantasy. They could be a condor's or an eagle's appendages of flight. They have no hint of

216

Epilogue

fantasy wings. But before we get to Maleficent's striking bird wings, let's briefly discuss lead character's horny display. The movie starts with the voice of a matronly narrator reminiscing about her life in an unusual land. She tells us about tbe two kingdoms in the world of this film and differentiates very specifically between them: the one is populated with "folks like you and r" who have human problems and kings; while the other realm is the one of magic and is populated with "every marmer of strange and wonderful creature." In this latter realm we are introduced to the one of a kind 'creature' that our narrator, although not specifically mentioning animality, describes her in this very exacting extra­ human hybrid manner: "You might take her for a girl, but she was not just any girl. She was a fairy. And her name was Maleficent." Curiously, however, the more we see this beautiful child, the less we think of her as a fairy and the more we see her as a cross-species mix between a human girl and an antelope-horn cfO\vned, condor-winged nonhumanihuman animal composite. A truly resplendent figure. Her horns are not the renaissance era adapted headgear tbat is exaggerated to look like horns as were previously designed for the evil witch character's headgear in Disney's original 1959 animated film Sleeping Beauty. The evil character in tbat Disney classic animated movie is also called Maleficent altbough she is not labeled a fairy but is referred to as a witch. No, there is no comparison between the two: in the 2014 rendition of the Sleeping Beauty fairytale, the half girlihalf chimera's head carries two long actual horns that grow majestically out of her beautiful and rich hair in a brilliant nonhuman animal display. Later in the film, however, when Maleficent has grO\vn up and finds herself wading through an emotionally dark period recovering from betrayal and abject mutilation, Maleficent's horns are covered in leather and take on the appearance of a renaissance headdress thereby alluding obliquely to tbe wicked green witch of the original Disney animated movie (derived from Perrault's sinister tale). Once Maleficent fully recovers from her traumatic experience and her lapse into darkness, then her beautiful antelope horns return uncovered in full splendor along witb her rich head of hair. Her horns were disguised and diminished while she coped with her damaged spirit and yet in the final analysis after her joy returned, her glorious animal horns were back on display to reflect unabashedly her hybridity with nonhuman animals. Now to Maleficent's condor assets. Maleficent's wondrous avian wings are tbe true and trusted signs ofher animal hybridity, despite her exceptionally image-worthy, magnificent horns. Like her horns, Maleficent's wings also disappear during her dark times. But their disappearance is the major factor in Maleficent's darkness and post traumatic syndrome. Their disappearance

FEMININITY, Screen Memory and Animality

217

is the outward sign o fher body and her spirit's victimization. Her wondrous wings have been stolen from her by means of a love's betrayal and her body's mutilation by the same false suitor. His insidious deed involved surreptitiously administering sleep inducing drugs in the style and wickedness of the trickery that the poison apple (re)presents in the original Disney movie. Also, in the style and vileness ofdate-rape drugs, which does not elude the perception of discerning viewers watching this parable on the victimization of women. Her physical and emotional trauma was the result of the premeditated betrayal of her young love with a faux "True Love's Kiss." Stefan, her sole human childhood companion, had offered her as a teenager his "True Love's Kiss," but then came back years later and demonstrated his intentions to kill her after drugging her. But instead of stabbing her as he intended, Stefan cuts her wings from her body. And, metaphorically, from her soul. He then steals them away to the castle that stands on a mount like a shrine to greed. This trickery on his part is how he gains favor with the King. His betrayal causes Maleficent and her realm in the Moors to succumb to the deepest darkness of true love's betrayal. No other creature in either of this story's realms has wings like Maleficent, except for, on a much smaller scale, the wings of her raven Diaval, an actual nonhuman animal raven when first spotted. Maleficent changes him into a human/raven hybrid and conscripts him as her spy in her folly during these dark times. Her wings are natural like Diaval's, and, despite his devilish name, his wings are part ofthe nonhuman animal world, not the Underworld. A similar exemplar of animality as Maleficent's former set of wings. Most of Maleficent's nonhuman animal spirit and much of her humanimal soul rests in her trusted wings. And so, having them stolen and seemingly gone forever, her nonhuman animality becomes suspended in trauma while her inner love for the world loses its glow. She, in turn, loses herself in the humanimal foibles of cold heartedness and revenge. As it turns out, Maleficent does have something extra beyond the human/nonhuman ainmal hybridity: the fairytale conjured ability to do magic, which she deploys to express her inner darkness. 'When she hears that Stefan, now king, has a child, she is beside herself. In a rich scene of revenge, impulsivity, and a show of magical power, she puts an irreversible curse on Stefan's infant to take place on her sixteenth birthday: a spinning wheel's needle will prick her finger putting her in a deep sleep that will last forever. As a part of the curse, she ruefully adds a caveat to the curse proclaiming that a "True Love's Kiss" will be baby Aurora's sole remedy after her sixteenth birthday. With the inclusion of "True Love's Kiss," Maleficent's addendum to the irrevocable curse sardonically revisits Stefan's betrayal and his dreadful ruse and assault on her body.

218

Epilogue

(m)Other's Regret and the Dyad's Rebirth As it turns out, and as Maleficent will soon realize ironically, one must take care for what one wishes. Even in her moments of darkness Maleficent's heart fmds itself warming and becoming enthralled with little Aurora, Stefan's daughter, who comes to know Maleficent as her fairy godmother as time progresses. Further, in a humorous set of circumstances, Maleficent becomes the one who actually looks after and nurtures Aurora over the years, thereby becoming Aurora's mother replacement when her birth mother died-curiously, with minimal narrative ado. The years pass as the two grow closer. However, much to Maleficent's remorse and not without her attempts to counter the curse, Aurora does prick her finger and falls into a coma on her sixteenth birthday. Maleficent had tried everytliing to end the curse, even to help the haphazardly introduced Prince Philip to reach her sleeping in the castle in case he might be the one to give Aurora "True Love's Kiss." His subsequent awkward, chauvinistic kiss, spurred on by the desperate Maleficent, fails to be "True Love's Kiss" and Aurora does not awaken from her pelTIlanent sleep. Maleficent is beside herself with regret, shame and abject fatalism. She bends over and, in a gesture of fatalism, kisses Aurora's forehead goodbye and starts to walk away. However, in a wry twist that reflects an appropriate cynicism toward the patriarchal baggage of past Sleeping Beauty tropes, Aurora awakens. Maleficent's maternal kiss, a "fairy godmother's kiss," the absolute "True Love's Kiss" saves the day and reinforces the element of kinship between the two women who now form a lasting relationship. And, by subtle association, given Maleficent's original hybridity, a kinship between humanimals and nonhuman animals. Arguably, the depiction of maternal love between a hybrid human/nonhuman animal surrogate-mother and her adopted humanimal daughter, all packaged in the guise of this splendid movie fable, encourages a positive image of interspecies kinship and its deeper sense of equitable coexistence across species in the animal kingdom.

Maleficent's Wings of Hnmanimality Now, let's make our way back to Maleficent's magnificent wings, the eventual key to vanquishing humanimal misogyny and its resulting failings. The solution to Maleficent's spiritual decline and the achievement of her spiritual and physical redemption revolves around her sparkling surrogate daughter Aurora's life. After the maternal "true love's kiss," and after awaking from her curse, Aurora unexpectedly saves not only her 'fairy godmother's' life, but also her soul.

FEMININITY, Screen Memory and Animality

219

But not before all hell breaks out when Stefan discovers Maleficent in the castle after Aurora awakes. Escaping from the raging bedlam in the castle as Stefan tries to kill Maleficent, Aurora finds the wings in an armoire and sets them free. Meanwhile, Maleficent fights for her life. Stefan admonishes her and steps forward to kill her with his sword. All is lost. But before Stefan can run her through with his sword-a sardonic play on the phallic "Sword of Truth" found in other versions of the legend­ Maleficent's wings fly to her and rejoin themselves to her body. Now she is able to physically rise up and conquer Stephan by causing him, when he attacks her from behind, to accidently fall to his death from the heights of the monolithic castle. With the patriarch dead, the Kingdom enters a time of peace. Now that her wings are joined once again to her body and soul, and to her spirit of human/nonhuman animal hybridity, Maleficent rids herself of her emotional darkness and the darkness subduing the magical Moors, her magical realm. She then armounces the union of the two realms and the cro\VllS of Aurora as the queen of the hybrid kingdom. After this happy ending, Maleficent gushes: in her nonhuman animality, in her maternal true love of Aurora, and in her wondrous wings by flying off into the sunset with her raven sidekick. This last scene verifies that Maleficent's wings truly mark her hlUTIanimalistic hybridity, her extra-human body and soul. Plus, within the dreamworks of the movie, human and nonhlUTIan animality are provided the means, if subliminally, to heighten their sense of an avowal of kinship normally and normatively disavowed in humanimal culture.

Screen Memories, "True Love's Kiss," and Pluralities In Maleficent, screemvriter Woolverton and director Stromberg's subtle and dynamic maternal theme appears late in the film and spontaneously like an undertone of music joining and flowing through the narrative. This happened when infant Aurora started seeing Maleficent as her fairy godmother and the relationship grew for both Aurora and Maleficent. In telTIlS ofthe potential for creating spectator screen memories, the film is full of unconscious and preconscious triggers surging dream-like from this maternal theme dominating in the flow of the rest of the film. One such subliminal reference occurs in the play on "True Love's Kiss," nOlTIlally reserved in the movies for a post pubescent love that factors in sexual intensities and physical satisfactions that subliminally underpin chivalry. "True Love's Kiss" in this film, however, seems conventionally and unconditionally platonic: a kiss given by the maternal figure and received by her surrogate daughter. The curiously conjoined filial and romantic

220

Epilogue

allusions embedded in the expression "True Love's Kiss" and its use in this film fonn a certain underpinning tension and richness generated by its connotations of nonsexual true love melded with the bodily centered prelingual object relations and, it is further merged with the normative and veiled sexual implications of "True Love's Kiss." A love the consists of the chivalric duality with its veneer of gallantry toward a fair maiden and its hidden, culturally condoned sex-as exemplified by the brief clumsy interlude with Prince Phillip. Further, the platonic, maternally incestual and romantic conflation suggested in the expression "True Love's Kiss" as enunciated in the unexpected kiss that awoke Aurora, speaks indirectly to sexual fluidity and plurality that falls under primal FEMININITY in the manner we demarcate in this book. And this plurality oflibidinal investments triggers subliminal screen memories that punctuate the spectators' pleasure within the womb of the cinematic apparatus. Another subtle sampling of screen memory occurs in the film. We mentioned above that the sword Stefan uses to try to kill Maleficent in the last scene functions as a parody of the "Sword of Truth." The sword that Prince Philip in the 1959 Disney animated movie uses to kill the evil witch. In this 21 ,( Century version of the story, Stefan has two different phallic swords, one a small one that he uses to cut off Maleficent's wings, an obvious sexual reference, and the final one he wields in an attempt to kill Maleficent. Both times, the grandiose phallus symbol fails to achieve its principle true, chivalric task, that is, to kill evil and save the damsel, in this case, from Maleficent's nonhuman hybrid influence. However, the phallic symbol of chivalric truth is used by Stefan for evil and ultimately fails miserably. We can argue that the film portrays the phallus, that is, in the Symbolic connotation of the phallus, as yielding to the maternal authority in the figure of Maleficent, Aurora's surrogate mother. We can see that the pluralities and play involving the authority of the phallus, as paternal in convention and maternal in origins, signal ample opportunity to (re)construct screen memories dealing with the Oedipal and the pre-Oedipal, if only in the preconscious dreamwork ofthe spectator.

Summary aud Segue Maleficent is a movie that covers discourses on animality, primal FEMININITY and the maternal semiotic in sophisticated and overt ways not often taken up in a mainstream film based on fantasy and fable. And based on fables and legends that traditionally are phallogocentric motivated. It is a joy to experience this novel integration of animality and the maternal authority in films that contribute to the expansion of the human animal

FEMININITY, Screen Memory and Animality

221

condition. From here we move away from fantasy and iconoclastic fairy tales to a more realist approach to the feral (m)Other and womanimality in the movie The Zookeeper's Wife.

Animal Wifery: The Zookeeper's Wife Based on a book by Diane Ackerman, scripted by Angela Workman and directed by Niki Caro, The Zookeeper's Wife (2017), treats two specific themes regarding animality: one, the large scale humanimal inhumanity to human and nonhuman animals; and two, womanimality in the maternal sphere. We will explore these two themes in Caro's as they thread their way and merge at times in this wonderful film. Figuring at the center ofthe womanimality in the maternal sphere theme, the protagonist of the film, Antonina Zabinska, is quickly established as a mother, and secondly---equally soon in the film-she is depicted as empathetic to animals to the point of rejecting many constructed boundaries of separation between human and nonhuman animals. Factoring directly into the large scale humanimal inhumanity theme mentioned above, the setting of the fihn coincides with the start of World War II and the invasion of Poland. Specifically, the film depicts the Nazi occupation ofthe city and location where most ofthe movie takes place, the Warsaw Zoological Gardens in Poland's capital. The opening shot of the film sets the stage for the theme of maternal human animality. We see our protagonist, Antonina, from behind near a bed with two lion cubs and a small boy lying there sleeping in soft focus. She moves around the bed and, like a surrogate mother, she leans over to kiss one of the lion cubs who awakens and purrs like a kitten. Antonina then exits the room to the balcony through a windowed door into the wann morning. The scene is peaceful, ahnost pastoral and, in a nonchalant marmer, lends emphasis to Antonina's qualities of animal enthusiast and mother while indicating in passing a trace of human and nonhuman animal kinship. These attributes build throughout the movie. A few scenes later, for example, Antonina saves a bloody newborn baby elephant's life by clearing its blocked air passages while the baby's mother paces very near her as if ready to protect her baby from this humanimal interloper. The baby elephant lives. A crowd of people that had gathered outside the elephant's confines applauds her final success. She joins her husband, the sympathetic zookeeper, at the gate and kisses him still bloody from the affair. There is more proof of Antonina's affinity for nonhuman animals that indicates a certain kinship. Later, when her husband plans a way station for Jewish refugees escaping Nazi persecution in their house, she exclaims

222

Epilogue

poignantly, "A human zoo," thereby coalescing succinctly and tellingly the intimacy in her eyes between human and nonhuman animals and her nurturing love. Antonina's impromptu exclamation carries on the theme that runs imbricated with Antonina's story throughout the movie: human/animal kinship. Still later, as if to be true to the real story of the real-life Antonina, as well as to reinforce the maternal animality theme in a parallel to the elephant birth scene at the beginning ofthe movie, the film depicts Antonina ready to give birth. And subsequently she does: to a baby girl.

Herr Heck Returning to the beginning of the film, we need to mention another integral, albeit antagonistic, character who is a zoologist colleague from Berlin and soon to be a Nazi officer. His name is Herr Heck. He is infatuated with Antonina almost as much as he's head over heels about breeding an extinct bison from Antonina's rare line of bison at the Warsaw Zoo. It is consistent to the themes of the film and yet ironic that Heck's tribal nation under the moniker of the Third Reich is busy at this time attempting to accomplish the extinction ofthe Jews while Heck is so emotionally wrapped up in retrieving from oblivion what he considers to be a nonhuman animal species that has gone extinct. This clinically animalistic storyline with zoologist Heck parallels and reinforces the negative humanimal theme of this film, that oflarge scale humanimal inhumanity to human and nonhuman animals. This is demonstrated in many ways. Related to Heck's pet project and the overarching animalistic themes, near the end of the film, Antonina rescues from the Nazi aerial attack the calf born of Heck's breeding endeavors and takes it along with her as she joins the Warsaw refugees on foot. She releases the calf to freedom in the wild woods. Her act, one of the film's ironic details that takes place in a short digression at the end of the film, amounts to a grand geste in a small package on the part of the filmmakers. Easily overlooked, but nonetheless poignant, the scene melds the two most important themes of the film eloquently in just a few images related to Herr Heck and Antonina: maternal and humanimal kinship with a nonhuman animal juxtaposed to the Nazi's large-scale inhumanity to human and nonhuman animals.

The Rape of Urszula During another important storyline in the film, the one chronicling Antonina's husband Jan's war effort as a courier of Jewish refugees escaping from the Warsaw ghetto, he brings home an assaulted young

FEMININITY, Screen Memory and Animality

223

woman. She looks more like a girl, she is so small and ravaged. She has been gang-raped and is suffering from extreme shock. Antonina meets with her in one of the hidden underground animal cages at the zoo where the young woman has sequestered herself. Through her the motif of the zoo and human/nonhuman animality grows in poignancy and symbolism. After several days and some coaxing, the traumatized young woman finally reveals her name: Urszula, and Antonina recognizes with delight that her name means 'she-bear,' as if this named link to nonhuman animals were a good omen. The fact that the film takes time to have Antonina remark on this nonhuman animal-related name suggests that there is an implied inter­ species kinship if not hybridity for all who are named Urszula and, by association, all human animals. At first as Urszula attempts to deal with her trauma and vulnerability, she is reduced to connnunicating only in grunts and fear, then slowly she speaks again. In this way, Urszula displays her underlying kinship to her non-speaking nonhuman animal ancestry and then she reclaims her ability to speak, which might be considered one of her humanimal distinguishing characteristics, that of spoken language. As mentioned above, the only other overt distinguishing characteristic for humans other than language could be their inhumanity to other human and nonhuman animals. Urszula and many other individual and collective human and nonhuman animals are victims of that distinguishing, devastating and inhumane human trait. In some ways, Urszula (re)presents a microcosm for the dark zeitgeist of the 1940s in Europe and the exploration of human animality underpinning this film. Soon, Urszula is provided her 0\Vll recurring motif based on human animality: the film depicts her drawing on the walls of Antonina's basement hideaway for Jewish refugees at the Warsaw Zoo. Her drawings on the wall of the basement are child-like and display simple figures walking upright with nonhuman animal heads: elephant, rabbit, horse, mice. Gradually the walls get filled up to about shoulder height with these figures that feature one sitting at a piano with a mouse head and human body playing music like Antonina does often. Antonina has established that when she plays her piano at night that things are safe and when she plays during the day, there is immediate danger. In the film's first special emphasis on her drawings, Urszula sings the Passover song upstairs at the dinner table while the camera in the basement moves over her upright figures with nonhuman animal heads revealing also that the Jewish star in yellow is now dra\Vll in several places there. As we can see, these drawings and their thematic connotations of human animality, kinship and hybridity continue to be underscored repeatedly in the film. At the end of the film, another crucial scene of

224

Epilogue

emphasis on the drawings brings the motif to a head. We will discuss that below in conjunction with the following new storyline.

Humanimal Sex Play: Forced Manipulations There is a storyline of off-kilter subterfuge in sexuality between humanimal and beast-of-prey Herr Heck and the vulnerable feral (m)Other, Antonina. The storyline enters the sphere of human animal sexual manipulations three times, one of which involves a simultaneously occurring depiction of bison copulation. The third and last time, the sexually driven scene ushers in Herr Heck's discovery of the "human zoo" that Antonina and her husband have created below the Warsaw Zoo. We will trace each one of these episodes and discuss how each of these scenes not only drives the narrative forward but also reinforces the theme of human/nonhuman animal kinship and hybridity. The ruse aspect of humanimal sexuality can be designated as a cultmal construct that references the traditional human disposition toward sex, that is, designated as a base, nonhuman animalistic act of physical pleasure, and one that is often depicted as being combined with humanimal subterfuge as part ofthe package. The first of such transgressions into sexual guile occurs in a subtle way and relates directly to Antonina protecting her 'human zoo' refuge. Antonina fears Heck and his apparent interest in her, and yet must stay in his good graces because he represents the dominant occupational force and, indirectly, the survival of her parallel zoos: the one for nonhuman animals and the human underground zoo for persecuted Jews. After one of Herr Heck's dangerous but politically advantageous visits to Antonina, she is seeing him off at her front door when he gets very close to her and seems to desire even more closeness. Her dilemma with him is that she picks up on his sexual interest in her and has come to realize that she must play into that to a small degree in order to uphold her mission to save Jewish refugees from persecution. However, she hopes that she can keep this 'walking-the­ tightrope' situation with him in check. Suddenly a clandestine Jewish child in the basement starts to whimper and it is heard upstairs. Before Herr Heck can react Antonina impulsively kisses him passionately to distract him from questioning her or investigating. It seems to work and, flustered, Heck leaves. However, Antonina knows, as do we the viewers, that the fme line between flirting and the invitation to something more has been transgressed. That 'something more' could be an invitation to the telltale nexus between human and non-human animal kinship and hybridity, that animalistic body process that naturally occurs in human and non-human animals: sex and reproduction or at least the much maligned pleasure aspects thereof, which,

FEMININITY, Screen Memory and Animality

225

for the human species, is more often associated with complex sexual drives than those attributed to nonhuman animal instinct. Not too much later in the film, the second more transgressive episode occurs. This time, the act traditionally connected to nonhuman animals is overpoweringly enunciated and associated with Antonina, whose presence and participation in the act is both transgressive as well as clinical. Further, the act becomes unnervingly zoological and a reflection of politically forced acquiescence on Antonina's part. Herr Heck arrives at Antonina's door to surprise her. He is excited because the time has finally arrived to impregnate a female bison as the first concrete step in his breeding plans. He wants Antonina to help since she is a natural zoologist and has expressed interest. He asks her to hold on to the rope attached to the female and help calm her as his men lead the bull toward the female bison from behind up a narrow gateway. Antonina does as he says but then he grabs the rope also positioning himselfbehind her to help hold the female bison in place. Their positions mirror in general the positions ofthe two bison that are copulating, and as this happens, Herr Heck presses himself up against Antonina using the female bison's jostling as pretext. All the while, his men are in the background joking and making thrusting movements obviously thrilled by the bison copulating and Herr Heck's suggestive position up against Antonina. The camera angles depict the two humans in profile, Herr Heck grasping Antonina from behind and the rope as the bison jostles them in what appears to be their modified nonhuman animal position of copulation-a position from behind that was of so much interest to Freud especially in his WolfMan studies. Although, in this case, Antonina is not bent over in what Freud considered to be reflective of the animal position attributed to female nonhuman animals and occasionally to women. Strangely, though, there is a certain sterility in Herr Heck's grasp on Antonina and what appears to be her innocent and not so innocent acceptance of the suddenly salacious situation she finds herself in. Perhaps this is due to Herr Heck's clinical admiration for animal husbandry. Later in the scene, after the successful copulation, though, he washes his 0\Vll hands and her hands in a nearby trough. His hand washing of them both seems improper and is executed in a duality of cleanliness and suggestiveness. It is as ifhe were caught between the aloof 'human' and the human animalistic behavior toward sex and this is not surprising given his Nazi tribe's contributions to human eugenics and his personal superiority complex as suggested by his commitment to the fascist military. Nonetheless the humanimal sexual connotation is driven home in this scene in which the humanirnal sex display, although fully clothed, parallels the nonhuman animal copulation that occurs side by side within the same

226

Epilogue

clinical zoological atmosphere. Director Niki Caro seems to not only want to underline tlie parallel between the fully-c1otlied innuendo of human animalistic sex and the nonhuman animal copulation, but she also demonstrates a contrapuntal subtext in her direction of the scene reflecting a certain anti-animalistic nuance in the apparent rigidity and neurotic superiority of Herr Heck's. This is very sophisticated filmmaking and an example of storytelling nuance. As such, Caro (re)presents a finesse that suggests that Herr Heck just might find himself in a faint moral quandary between his attraction to Antonina, his good intentions and his tribal superiority complex tliat tlie war effort has forced upon him. In other films ofthis ilk, the Nazi officer antagonist at the height of Nazi occupation would not be depicted as reserved sexually as Herr Heck up to this point. Finally, near the end of the film, the final episode of forced-sex ploys takes place and functions as the build up to Herr Heck's discovery of Antonina's 'human zoo.' This is the hideaway that Antonina and her husband have run like an underground railroad for Jewish refugees from tlie Warsaw Ghetto. Spurred by the news tliat her husband has been shot and taken away to a concentration camp, Antonina looks in a mirror and prepares herself to go see Herr Heck to ask for his help in finding her husband Jan. She puts on lipstick-the first time we see her putting on makeup. Still gazing at herself in the mirror, she puts a white ribbon in her hair-the first time she has had any head gear let alone an emblem of maidenhood that a ribbon in the hair, especially a white one, might traditionally communicate. Just a few scenes before she had given birth to her daughter in a display of gentle glowing matemaljouissance. Yet it has been almost a year since the birth. Now, with her husband missing and in Nazi hands, she must try to obtain news of his whereabouts. Her worry for him is without bounds. However, now facing her suddenly duplicitous self that is signaled by her reflection in the mirror, she finds the need to once again call on her humanimal resource of exchange: sex appeal. The short mirror scene is all the more poignant because her methods reflect the human animal whose sex appeal includes subterfuge that exceeds the nonhuman animal sexual repertoire in most cases. She is aware of this aspect of the human condition, but she has never felt the necessity to employ this human sexual ruse that could possibly lead to complete sexual submission to Herr Heck. All she can do at tliis moment is to look straight into her own self­ aware eyes. The director holds on this and pushes in slightly ever so slowly for emphasis. Antonina closes her eyes to steel her resolve against what she might need to do to find her husband. When she arrives at Heck's office, he is packing up and returning to Berlin because "the war is turning," he says without emotion. She asks him to help her find her husband as a gift of tlieir

FEMININITY, Screen Memory and Animality

227

friendship and he approaches her seated before him. He asks her what he will receive in return as a gift. He towers over her as she then unbuttons her coat. He stops her by pulling her up before him and then he himself takes her coat off of her brusquely. Then he strips the ribbon slowly from her hair and drops it curling to the floor. He drags her to a bed in his office all the while saying that she's lying to him, stating that

"I

can see it in your eyes."

As he starts to manhandle her, she resists and cries no. He finally stops and forces her to look at him. She tells him that he disgusts her. He backs away from her saying "You hide it well.

I wonder what else you have been hiding

from me. What else have you been up to in your little zoo." He picks up his phone. Antonina darts from his office and runs all the way to her zoo to warn the refugees hiding there. She is able to get them all on a truck and away before Heck arrives with his troops. He searches her house and finds Urszula's animal-headed human figures on the wall of the basement and the film spends time rediscovering all the drawings just as he also discovers them in disbelief. And the yellow Jewish stars, as well. It now fully dawns on him the extent of Antonina's rescue attempts over the years.

The Wall of Humanimality and Hope The repeated and significantly integrated filin coverage of the drawings on the basement wall that in this last part of the film includes names and dates that cover the entire war functions to consolidate several storylines and themes: Urszula's trauma and recovery as well as her experiences of victimization and human/non-human animal hybridity and kinship; the situation

of the

victimized

refugees

in

their

Nazi

guarded

ghetto

confinement and then hiding in their 'human zoo' that resulted also in their discovery of a kinship with the zoo animals; as well as the instances of humanimal inhumanity to others that the atrocities of war and the ghetto (re)presents.

In

addition, the repetition and emphasis on the drawings

connotes the escape of the refugees that is in part a result of their embrace of humanimality that their survival in the face of victimization symbolized. The filin's theme of humanimality expanded to signify kinship inclusive of the entire animal Kingdom as alluded to throughout and specifically by the drawings on the basement walls, promotes a much broader, more inclusive scope of awareness and acknowledgement of the humanimal and nonhuman animal condition than culture normally accepts.

228

Epilogue

Conclusion Manimality, hLUllanimality, human animal, non-human animal, hybridity, kinship, Freud' s horde, Kristeva's maternal body, feral child, feral wifery, horns and wings. Plus, inhumanity as a trait for humanity; childhood kinship dispositions with non-human animals, all finding their way into popular literature, psychiatry and the movies. In addition to the appeal to wide audiences of these exemplar film texts we have explored. All this rich vocabulary and interspecies insights, indicate that we never tire of stories and movies regarding humanimality and human/non-human animal kinship. It makes for great fantasy and triggers our most fundamental fears and desires for subversion and mitigation in the face of Symbolic prohibitions. And, if we agree that the phallogocentric culture positions men in opposition to women on every front, then on the front lines of 'human' versus 'animal, ' women suffer, or benefit depending on your perspective, from faulty logic on animality. This is why women are relegated to a beingness and disposition more nonhuman animal than man. Animality in the movies brings out this flaw in culture and the Law. So, given the subversive quality of the depictions of animality in movies, and the appeal of the imaging of animality and human/non-human animal kinship

in popular culture,

animality in the movies functions to indict the phallogocentric status quo in a subtle marmer. Plus, since these stories are linked to the pre-lingual stage and its maternal authority, these mainstream culture artifacts become another diverse level in signaling the maternal semiotic.

In

addition, as we've

argued above, the themes of primal FEMININITY in the areas of ambiguity and plurality in sexuality embedded in the psyche during the prelingual stage before constructed sexuation, find themselves subtly interwoven in the context, subtext and imagery of these films. Our discussions of "Love' s True Kiss," in

Maleficent,

a s well a s the implications o f the maternal

libidinal investments suggested and visualized in the bison copulation scene in

The Zookeeper's Wife,

among other discussions, explore just these

aspects of primal FEMININITY and plurality in humanimality. Although much more exploration of this line of inquiry is needed, animality and human/nonhuman kinship and hybridity between species (re)presented on the movie screen opens a rich vein of material for the expansion of the understanding of the humanimal condition, specifically in areas beyond the confines of the Law of the Father and into the vestiges of the maternal semiotic and primal FEMININITY manifest in the movies.

CODA PRIMAL FEMININITY: THE QUEERING OF MAINSTREAM MOVIES

Queer Theory in film pertains in general to the research and analysis that traces the enunciation of plurality and fluidity in sexuality depicted or alluded to in the movies. As such, this enunciation encompasses the pre­ lingual dispositions of primal FEMININITY that resonate extra-logically throughout life. We have discussed earlier in this tome aspects of the prelingual pansexual phase and its 'libidinal investments ' (see endnotes and

13

7

in the Prologue referring to Kristeva and Klein) that create what W.

R. Bion considers to be a "matrix of ideographs" and "alpha elements" that recur in the pre-conscious and the unconscious eventually influencing consciousness via dreams, fantasies and the arts (see endnote

28,

also in the

Prologue). We can argue then that these pre-lingual pluri-sexual and libidinal intensities course through our psyche as 'alpha elements' of broadly diverse sexual dispositions.

The movies have recently been

gravitating more than ever toward (re)presentations of these particular traces of the maternal semiotic and primal FEMININITY. Queer "alpha elements" in the movies have many times included a broad gamut of spoofs like in the Austin Powers movies and their minor bisexual character Frau Farbissina. This strategy ofparody helped progress the queer presence in media despite its disparaging of queer identification. On an extreme side of the diverse assemblage of queer spoofs we could place Ivan

1994 curious reversal of gender roles in his iconoclastic movie Junior in which the main character is portrayed by conventional alpha-male Reitman's

stereotype Arnold Schwarzenegger who gets pregnant to promote a pharmaceutical drug designed for counteracting embryo rej ection in a woman's body. Although a cisgender, heterosexual character, the pregnant male finds a maternal aspect in his self-identification as his pregnancy advances and decides to keep the test fetus to term. This gag film attempts to blur the line between oppositional conventions and plurality in sexuality and reproduction. Another more recent direction in queer (re)presentations in film focuses on movies with more sophisticated queer portrayals than in

230

Coda

Junior,

or the cliches of the

Austin Powers

series. We will explore these

multifaceted portrayals in the films below. Further, the depiction of transsexual/transgender issues has finally become one ofthe important more recent queer themes in mainstream movies including, for one particular film, the subj ect of gender reassignment is the central theme for the fihn. Queer theory in the movies as an inquiry is an immense subj ect with innumerable aspects and nuances each of which could easily fill a chapter. My project, though, treats queerness in film in telTIlS of the maternal semiotic and primal FEMININITY. This focus streamlines this topic to a slightly more manageable undertaking. Even so, queerness in mainstream movies that relates directly to my project could fill a book easily. Given that realization and given the importance of queer theory related to my project, I feel the need to address the subject briefly at least as a separate unit in this coda for this book in hopes of stimulating further studies in this area. Hopefully this Coda will help spur more research and analysis of this important line of inquiry within the context of the maternal semiotic and primal FEMININITY.

In sum, the enormity ofthis subject area goes beyond

the scope of this volume and so this Coda must be seen as a starting point for further research. To best organize our discussion, I would like to consolidate queer themes in the movies into two areas achieving success most recently in films: first, homosexuality and bisexuality, and second, transsexuality often referred to as transgender identification. The fOlmer themes speak to queer identification with same sex sexuality in two ways: exclusively same sex, and non-exclusively same sex. The latter designation, transsexuality, is thought of in most cases as the definitive or less than complete process of physically transforming body characteristics from one sex to the other because of a more absolute transgender self-identification. The extensive nomenclature and use of queer lexicon and concepts of sexual identification and choices speaks to the plurality of the human condition and I hope to not offend as I learn and possibly misuse these terms. My apologies for any offenses. Our focus will be on how the portrayal of queer identifications and primal FEMININITY intersect in sexual plurality and fluidity stemming from primal sexual intensities, orientations and libidinal investments. These traces of queer identifications and primal FEMININITY manifest in mainstream movies in many intriguing ways as we will discuss below.

In

our analysis, we will concentrate on the following critically acclaimed and commercially successful films: Moonlight, Brokeback Mountain, The Kids Are All Right, and Carol, as well as, in the 'trans' arena, Dallas Buyers Club and The Danish Girl. The following discussions ofthese films would benefit

Primal FEMININITY

23 1

from the readers having viewed the films recently as well as the accessing of basic character infOlmation from a movie infOlmation site online. "imdb.com" is a good site for basic character info related to these films.

Homosexuality and Bisexuality: Fluid Enunciations and Blue Moonlight Mothers We will be concerned with the following fihns in this section:

Moonlight Brokeback Mountain, The Kids Are All Right,

and

Carol.

We

will 'crosscut' briefly between each one and each 'crosscut' will apply the theme of that specific subsection to the pertinent film.

Moonlight: Chiron and Kevin The most significant sign of the manifestation of the maternal semiotic and FEMININITY in the movies is the depiction or referencing of(m)Other, that is, the maternal Other that gelTIlinates and preoccupies the prelingual body and incipient psychic experience. The Oscar winning film Moonlight (Jenkins, 2016) struggles to subdue the powerful role ofthe main character' s mother but to no avail, which i s much to the director 's credit. At one point, teenager Chiron's mother, Paula, in one phrase emotionally obliterates him and inspires obliquely in him his lifelong love for Kevin. Paula tells Chiron in a drug state that "You my only. And I your only." She is telling him he is not himself without her and vice versa, returning him to the time when the child is not yet separated from the prelingual duality that is mother and child. Plus, indirectly she reminds him of his primal sexual intensities and libidinal investments that are polysemic and fluid. These intensities and investments find their eventual cathexis in his childhood friend Kevin. This storyline, moonlit blue at times and featuring Kevin as the love interest is the principle one in the film while the mother's storyline runs parallel and maintains the model and the

originary

impetus for the all-encompassing

duality oflove that is the primary, extra-logical focus in the main character 's life. A focus that exceeds culture's paternally founded restrictions and binaries.

Carol: Carol and Therese The other films that we are concerned with in this section follow suit in integrating overt references to the prelingual stage and the maternal "alpha elements" that persist and manifest in object relations. At one point, for example, in Todd Haynes 's

Carol (2015), co-protagonist Carol exclaims to

232

Coda

her la\V)'er "Jesus Christ, I'm a mother." Thus, appropriating for herself the moonlight we are alluding to in this section as prelingual sexual fluidity and plurality revolving around tlie (m)Otlier. Her exclamation re-emphasizes her maternal authority as birtli motlier of her child tliat her estranged husband holds hostage in legal battles tliat focus on "moral issues" surrounding Carol's predilection for same sex relationships. This is where Therese crosses over from her O\Vll storyline that revolves totally around Carol. These two sub storylines, tlie legal battles witli her husband over their child and Carol's romantic preference for women are integrated and underscore and interfere with the main storyline chronicling Carol and Therese's growing love. The integration of these storylines brings forward traces of the pre lingual libidinal investments that regenerate the 'matrix of ideographs ' germinating from the maternal dyadic experience. As we have pointed out many times in this tome, the maternal semiotic subversively and symbiotically indicts and paradoxically enhances tlie Symbolic order. The Symbolic that attempts and fails to categorically disavow tlie sexual plurality and fluidity of primal FEMININITY in tlie human condition. Despite the Law's prohibitions, Carol and Therese find it impossible to avoid stretching the fOlTIler's univocal parameters and getting romantically involved, as tlie filin astutely and lovingly reveals. There are several aspects of Carol and Therese's love affair that demonstrate an ongoing imbrication of the maternal and the prelingual libidinal investments. Haynes's film substantiates the artistic vision, the aesthetics of these investments on the one hand and the erotic aspects of this love story on the other.

In

terms of tlie latter, the wonderfully lit and

choreographed love scene between Carol and Therese late in the film emphasizes the passivity of the infant experiencing libidinal intensities that make up Therese's disposition, integrated with the mother image, Carol, who also experiences jouissance. All the while the choreography of the scene manages to underscore the telltale maternal authority and dominance guiding their lovemaking. Plus, the mother image, in the embodiment of Carol, is framed mostly in tight shots reminiscent of the primal mother filling the visual world like a screen for the preverbal infant figure, Therese, emphasizing the newborn's intense, dyadic focus.

The photography

resonates painstakingly and vividly while the enunciation

ofjouissance,

a

remnant of the maternal dyad and its plenitude, carries the scene.

In telTIlS of the

artistic vision of the movie, that is the aesthetic, and its

substantiation for the film as both art and enunciation of the prelingual stage, the mise-en-scene in several parts of the film creates what I liken to an inadvertent "caul" effect. The lighting, figure expression and movement, and the setting as well as the camera positioning, create of Therese a

Primal FEMININITY

233

character that has regressed to the prelingual stage just after birth that seems to include at times an afterbirth caul-like membrane for her through which she finds herself gazing at the world and, conversely, through which she is being gazed at. Frequently the camera captures Therese and her POV through a wet window in the rain causing this birthing caul effect. In addition, we see Therese's POV of Carol through the lens of her camera as she stumbles naively from circumstance to circumstance like an infant taking her first steps toward and away from mother. Inadvertently perhaps, but nonetheless creatively, the director and his crew have created a visual motif in the film that signals the prelingual stage of human development with its inherent maternal sub-theme of sexual plurality and fluidity that forever influences unconsciously, pre-consciously, the human condition.

Brokeback Mountain: Ennis and Jack The blue moonlight mother theme in Brokeback Mountain (Lee,

2014)

is more cliche in some ways than the other films, and yet well integrated, if a bit overtly, into the film. First, both main characters discover their growing love for one another as same sex lovers while working together in the outdoors plenitude of mother nature in the mountains of Montana. The telTIl 'mother earth' also comes to mind as their love begins to prosper when they are away from the binary-oriented culture of an urban setting and into the wilds, which is traditionally associated with the universal (m)Other image. Ang Lee does well to integrate mother earth into Ennis and Jack's love affair in an organic marmer. Lee goes one further in poetic expression to insert cutaways of the full moon, also attached traditionally to (m)Other, if more surreptitiously and "presentationally" so compared to the earth, as Suzanne 1 Langer might warrant. In the case of the moon, its presence signals Ennis and Jack's romantic, polysexual and maternally influenced prelingual eroticism

that inadvertently

creates

an intertextual rhyme with the

deployment of the more pronounced blue light (re)presenting the moon in the film Moonlight. Ang Lee features the wholesome mother earth during the day and the

pregnant full

moon in the secretive, subliminal world of

night and libidinal investments. It is almost as if Lee would like to subtly reference a dichotomy of "good mother and bad mother," with the wilds of the Montana landscape in daylight associated with the plenitude of the former, and the isolated shots of the full moon at night with its connotation of matemal love in all its blissful and yet blissfully sinister aspects of birth trauma and castration associated with the latent "bad, phallic mother." Both

234

Coda

of these figurative (m)Others allude and attest to the prelingual precedence and the influence of the maternal semiotic and primal FEMININITY.

The Kids Are All Right: Jules and Nic

The Kids Are All Right 2010) does not deploy real moonlight as a maternal metaphor

Moonlight mothers as a theme in the film (Cholodenko,

from nature. However, if we associate the moon with a connotation of eroticism and plurality via its maternal allusions, then we can argue that a figural moonlight does exist. Both Nic and Jules as birth mothers, artificially inseminated-a narrative "hook" for this screwball-like comedy. They are further depicted

as

enjoying certain rituals of eroticism; though we must

concede that these episodes exist primarily

as

tongue in cheek narrative

conceits. I'm referring to the instances of Nic and Jules 's bedroom play accompanied by male pornography on video, and later, Jules 's sexual affair with Paul, the sperm donor for the same-sex couple. Given these wide parameters for depicting moonlight mothers, the film does enunciate, if obliquely, the connection bet\veen a maternal polysemic eroticism and motherhood, albeit in a quaint and narratively sensationalist, less poetic marmer than in the other films. The viewer doesn't need to see the moon in the movie to detect its recurring traces of polysexual erotic blue light. These maternal moon resonances of eroticism also reach back by means of the maternal narrative thread in this comic movie to retrieve, if in an offhand marmer, traces of the prelingual maternal authority and vestiges of the diverse primal libidinal investments. We will discuss these below in the next

The Kids Are All Right subsection.

Doubling: "You My Only, and I Your Only!" Integral to the (m)Other a s primal body and primal authority, is the mother/child dyad and, by induction, the pronounced instances of doubling and repetition portrayed in a filin. And given that these doublings and repetitions imply a connection to the primal dyad, they also signal the traces of the maternal semiotic and primal FEMININITY that imprint in the unconscious and pre-conscious registers, and those attributed to the speaking subject-in-process. As this proj ect attests, these vestiges of primal concerns go on to manifest in life and in the movies.

Primal FEMININITY

235

Moonlight: Parallelisms We mentioned above that in the movie, Moonlight, Chiron's mother, in a drug induced epiphany and outpouring of maternal love exclaims to him, "You my only, and I your only! " Then falls back to sleep on the couch. Chiron is quite moved. His mom's pre-conscious drug-induced state along with her description of their dyadic relationship signals more than usual that all the other doubling and repetitions in the film are linked to the maternal and therefore the prelingual FEMININITY. One such instance of doubling and repetition is parallelism, which occurs in the film specifically in the fonn of two principle figures in Chiron' s life: Juan, Chiron's ad hoc father image who replaces an absent father in the first part of the film, and Kevin, Chiron's longest held childhood friend and same-sex lover. Both Juan and Kevin are linked to the telltale blue moonlight motif of the film: Juan introduces the concept to Chiron by telling a story of an experience he had in Cuba, and Kevin tenderly kisses Chiron for the first time and provides him with sexual stimulation in the blue moonlight of the beach. These associations fonn a parallel between the characters Juan and Kevin that progresses well into the film. Although Juan's character disappears by half way through the film, Kevin's special connection with Chiron survives the rest of the movie, albeit unconsummated and at a distance until the very end of the fihn. At the end of the movie another most important doubling occurs related to both Kevin and Chiron that is associated with his mother and her words of primal duality. After many years, Chiron visits Kevin in Miami and tells him in a moment of extreme vulnerability, "You're the only man who ever touched me. You're the only one." Chiron seems to be telling him 'You my only, ' in a paraphrased repetition of his mother's dyad-signaling words to him. We seem to come full circle here, transferring the maternal dyad and its primal libidinal investments to an adult relationship that, in some respects, has stood the test of time. It is worth mentioning another instance of doubling in

Moonlight.

Chiron's surrogate father image Juan has a significant other, Teresa, who becomes a substitute mother for Chiron as he grows from a child to a young man. She becomes Paula's doppelganger in the form of the 'Good Mother' to Paula's 'Bad Mother,' as drug addict. Although not developed past the first part ofthe film, this example of parallelism and doubling reinforces the running motif of doubling springing up regularly in the film.

Moonlight,

a wonderfully poetic film, stays true to its theme of primal

FEMININITY in various ways but in the category of doubling and repetition in parallelism, the director's acute intuition does not fail him.

236

Coda

Carol' The Mirror Stage and the Cliche Moving on to Director Todd Hayne's

Carol, the most overt example of

doubling in this fihn, is the 'mirror stage' scene late in the film in which Therese struggles with herself before a

mirror at the point of deciding

whether to return to her sexually awkward, ambiguous previous life in the Symbolic binary order or make up with Carol and return to the world of plurality and maternal libidinal investments. We see parts of the scene between Carol and Therese at a restaurant table leading up to her self­ confrontation in the mirror twice in the fihn, at the very beginning and then near the end, which helps to underline the importance of the short mirror scene and its resolution at the end ofthe film. In the mirror scene, the camera pans right from Therese's real profile to her mirror inverse, doppelganger­ like, profile to emphasize the moment of Therese's return to the prelingual self-identification stage. This mirror scene doubles conceptually as a self­ confrontation and reconsideration scene after what appears to be her rej ection of Carol. As it turns out, at tbe very end of the fihn just shortly after this scene, the last shot leaves Therese at the point of no return across the hall from Carol as tbeir eyes meet. The expectation is that they will remain a couple, although the director, Haynes, leaves this open and so fOlTIlS a poetic open ending. The mirror scene alludes to the prelingual if we consider Lacan's designation of the mirror stage in human development as that expanse in time when the infant starts to realize she is a separate entity from the mother thereby, figuratively speaking, setting fortb like a fledgling into tbe realm oftbe Symbolic order and the binary-oriented Law of the Fatber. Therese's return to the "mirror stage" and her subsequent return to Carol signals the influence of the maternal autbority along with its primal FEMININITY tbat also leaves the audience at the same revisited threshold of the maternal dyad at the end the film. Therese, as stand in for the viewer, takes us there in a movie-screen moment triggering retrogressive screen memories. Just short of midway through Haynes's fihn, anotber doubling has occurred in a deceivingly innocuous, albeit cliche, marmer. Therese enters a record store to find a gift for Carol. She stands at tbe counter paying for a vinyl record when suddenly she looks over her shoulder and notices two women near the storefront window staring back at her. The impression in this reverse shot is that the two women are a couple and each one seems to take on a cliche role for lesbians: one is more masculine in appearance and the other is more nonnatively feminine appearing but with a slight edge. They stare at Therese unabashedly as if from a sphere that is foreign to her and yet replicating subtly and obliquely the stereotypical relationship Carol

Primal FEMININITY

237

and Therese could possibly fall into if their incipient attraction establishes itself. Even though the scene is very brief, the doubling and

signijiance

is

palpable, if askew, and indexes subliminally another more polarizing cultural stereotype of sexual plurality and fluidity from this depicted time period. There arises from this short scene a certain portrayal of a dichotomy of different nuanced spheres of identification between the two women in the record shop and Therese's relationship with Carol. Viewers can see that Therese and Carol (re)present a homOllOlmative romantic approach in lesbian portrayals while the brief depiction of the former couple seems to suggest a subculture that the film and Therese steer clear of. On the one hand, we apprehend a parallel between the record store lesbian couple and Carol and Therese's same-sex romance, while on the other hand the film seems to signal that there is a cultural milieu involving lesbians that it wants to acknowledge briefly but from which it takes pains to create a separation. Despite the political implications, the film uses the doubling in this scene, as well

as

the scene's nod to cultural differences, to reinforce its themes of

sexual plurality and fluidity derived originally from primal FEMININITY. As a side note, the word 'FEMININITY' itself, as mentioned previously in this tome, is a manifestation of doubling and repetition that reflects in a graphical manner in English the plurality and fluidity in prelingual libidinal investments generated by the primal dyad during the prelingual developmental stage.

Brokeback Mountain: The Uncanny Dyad

In a discussion of Brokeback Mountain pertaining to the telltale quality of doubling and repetition, the two main characters, Ennis and Jack not only fonn a dyad that rediscovers prelingual libidinal investments, but they also create an example of parallelism, a pronounced instance of doubling, in the film. They both are lone cowboys, same sex, both have wives and children, and they both leave their wives: Ennis by means of divorce, and Jack by means of his death. This parallelism not only draws the characters closer together and contributes to their love story, it forms a doubling and an

uncanny

connection between the two that signals the prelingual sense of

being one combined entity, similar to that originary experience which the preverbal infant fantasizes vis-a-vis the maternal dyad.

238

Coda

The Kids Are All Right The two protagonists in

The Kids Are All Right, form a similar parallel

as Ennis and Jack form. Nic and Jules also form a dyad of libidinal investments as any couple would fOlTIl, and they are same sex partners. In contrast to Ennis and Jack, both become birth mothers, and remain together as a family. Further, and in a manifestation of sexual plurality, Jules has a sexual affair with Paul, the sperm donor for both Nic and Jules's two children, thereby fOlming a fluidity in sexual desire that creates an unexpected doubling effect for Jules. It's as if Jules has a doubling of her libidinal investments manifest in adult life to include both sexes, a bisexuality. A bisexuality that curiously she disavows verbally late in the film when Paul calls her proposnig that they should formalize their relationship. She forcefully exclaims to him: "Paul, I'm gay!" and hangs up on him. Despite this disavowal, her words sound more like a dismissal of Paul to protect her marriage with Nic than a rej ection of bisexuality. We will discuss further below this last example of doubling that pertains specifically to bisexuality.

Summary and Segue As we have seen in these examples, doubling, repetition and parallelism featured in the movies draw attention to the return of the mother/child dyad and the traces of the prelingual pansexual libidnial nivestments, both of which fonn residual psychological manifestations that artists investigate in their work. Further, audiences seem to support the manifestations as supported by the box office viability of these movies. The depiction of the traces of prelingual libidinal investments, because they connote sexual fluidity and plurality, signal primal vestiges ni the psyche of what this project identifies as primal FEMININITY and the maternal semiotic. The movies in this tome, and specifically in this Coda, that center on non-binary, pluralist libidinal investments in adult relations are particularly noteworthy in this regard.

Tensions and Taboo: The Imaging of Bisexuality The imaging of bisexuality in mainstream films, particularly apparent in the movies we are exploring in this Coda, enunciates a certain sense of tension and taboo viewers can readily observe. From these depictions arise disparaging connotations as if bisexuality carried more subversive weight than the more accepted imaging of same sex relations in the movies. We

239

Primal FEMININITY

could argue that the subj ect of bisexuality in the movies communicates a sexual fluidity that is either too radical a notion in telTIlS of revealing a more expansive and more threatening perspective of the human condition, or that the subj ect of bisexuality is too complex and confusing a storyline to develop in mainstream narrative film. Both may hold some truth, but I would argue for the fOlmer as more influential in determining sexual narrative storylines in the movies. After all, the safe boundary separating sexual

inclinations,

the boundary

that

fOlTIlS

a rigid

line

between

heterosexual and same sex relations in movie depictions and society would be considered compromised in the positive depiction of bisexuality in the movies. The overt sanction of the depiction of bisexuality would concede that human sexuality is more fluid than the binary oriented cultural, or at least its gatekeepers, might find itself comfortable with. Perhaps that will change as mainstream films start depicting more polysexual variations on the binary-centric sexual restrictions in the movies. Before we move on to Trans themes in the movies, let's delve into the ambivalent case of bisexuality in the movies.

The Imaging of Bisexnality In each of our exemplar movies

in this Coda one or more of the main

characters has relations that go beyond the same-sex romance that presents itself as the main theme in the film.

In Moonlight,

Kevin, Chiton's love

interest, speaks of a child he has with a woman and, although he seems dedicated to Chiron in the end, Kevin never categorically rejects the implication that he might be bisexual and neither does the film imply that. In the movie

Brokeback Mountain,

both Ennis and Jack have wives and

children even though they seem to subscribe to an undying love for each other. Plus, their implied bisexuality is never dealt with as an issue. The viewer can argue that the marriages were of convenience, but this is not

In the film Carol, Carol has had a child with her estranged husband and, following the

communicated specifically in any concrete manner in the fihn.

pattern in these other movies, she does not reject the possibility of bisexuality out right. Her difficulty with her husband was in terms of issues related to drinking and abuse.

In The Kids Are All Right,

Jules has an extra­

marital relationship with Paul that seems to be sexually gratifying for her. And yet she rejects any link to bisexuality when she tells Paul that they can't go on in their relationship because she is "gay." A mixed message.

In all these films there is a tension between the main theme of the fihns, that centers on same-sex romance, and the integration of bisexual relations overtly and clandestinely into at least one ofthe main character 's life in each

240

Coda

film. At the same time, because bisexuality is reduced to a minor theme, and the fact that romance for all the main characters remains in the sphere of same-sex relations, these films express a certain ambivalence toward bisexuality. The suggestion of bisexuality io these fihns becomes a kiod of an ambiguous, unpleasant or even derogatory connotation attributed to this boundary-blurriog aspect of sexual plurality io the human condition. The portrayal of homosexuality as a strict opposition to heterosexuality seems to be much more acceptable than depicting bisexuality in mainstream movies because the oppositional sense of boundaries in culture seems more secure tbat way than witb the portrayal of tbe blurred or elimioated boundaries of overt bisexuality. The portrayal of bisexuality in any light other than disparaging has become the new sexual taboo, the line in the sand that mainstream movies seem not ready to transgress. One might argue figuratively that the imaging of bisexuality is knockiog at tbe door in Hollywood and the movies seem willing to open the door a little, but tben the equitable depiction of bisexuality is kept waiting on the doorstep out in the cold. The imagiog of bisexuality is the new bugaboo. On tbe one hand, bisexuality is acknowledged, on the other hand, it remains problematized. This situation, albeit narratively emichening to a small degree, sends a mixed message that promotes reactionary politics and restrictions instead of expanding the scope of the human condition. Drawing attention to the politics in mainstream depictions of bisexuality, as the movies inadvertently do, does succeed in indirectly shining some light on plurality. It is a step in the right direction to fintber elucidate the influence of primal FEMININITY and the maternal semiotic on culture. But it is still at an inchoate stage. We will continue to observe the tension between same-sex relations and bisexuality as well as the implicit disparagement of bisexuality io storylines in our next section of this Coda. Viewers of the films in the subsequent paragraphs will have little trouble in identifyiog tbat tbe imagiog of bisexuality retains its problematic status. *

Trans-Body Pluralities: Imaging Sexuality and Gender The Danish Girl and Dallas Buyers Club Sexual plurality also includes self-identifying with a body sex contrary to what is on a birth certificate that indicates sexuality in tenns of what is physically visible. Often times trans identification results in cosmetic or actual body displays tbat correct the physical manifestation that is io breach

Primal FEMININITY

of the

self-identification of the

individual.

241

However,

a transsexual

identification, generates a cultural stigma similar to, or more detrimental than bisexual plurality because it creates not just a psychological disruption in conventional boundaries, but also in many cases, a physical disruption. As designated throughout this tome, the disruption of boundaries is an integral effect of the display of the disavowed maternal semiotic and so factors

in our concept of FEMININITY.

Plus, the

Symbolic order

institutionalizes structure based on boundaries of binary oppositions and so the disruption of boundaries, even when deployed as a means to understand and expand on nuances of the human condition, remains disparaged, if not explicitly prohibited in culture. Our last explored topic involving the disruption of boundaries briefly discussed the taboo of bisexuality in film. We now move on to the arena involving

transsexual

identification

depicted

in

mainstream

movies.

However, instead of just marginalizing and disparaging a movie character as we see in the imaging of bisexuality, the trans character not only suffers these onslaughts, but also often dies by the end of the film-perhaps this is what pelTIlits the trans character to be (re)presented in mainstream film these days. This treatment in the imaging of transsexuals in the movies certainly isn't coincidental. Despite this inequity, the imaging ofthe trans community in mainstream movies, sparse as it is, affords a new opportunity in the research and analysis of human sexuality in mainstream movies. This area of research, however, expands rapidly in detail well beyond the purview of this Coda, and invites further research. For this brief exploration of the imaging of transsexual pluralities in film, we need to streamline our efforts to broad strokes of transsexual analysis pertaining to two recent and successful mainstream movies that feature trans characters: (Hooper,

2014),

and Dallas Buyers ' Club (Vallee,

The Danish Girl

2014).

The Danish Girl: Doubling with Libidinal Effects The most telltale line in the film

The Danish Girl

pertaining to

FEMININITY and particularly to the maternal semiotic, occurs at the very end of the film. Einar, with the last words s/he will ever say, weakly exclaims "Last night I had the most beautiful dream. I dreamed that I was a baby in my mother's arms. She looked down on me and called me Lili. "2 This melancholy wish-fulfilling experience enunciated with wondelTIlent and total submission to the maternal authority and Thanatos, puts the film in perspective as the story of a life influenced by primal FEMININITY with its libidinal investments and sexual plurality that transgresses binary culture and biological appearances.

242

Coda

There are other reveals that recur periodically throughout the film that signal the prelingual nexus of sexual fluidity and the maternal authority. For example, the emphasis on the doubling effect associated with painting and Gerda (Einar's wife): Einar's painting of the five trees featured at the beginning of the film in painting and the depiction of these trees in real life when Gerda at the very end of the film visits the very same location of the trees from Einar's youth; plus, Gerda's painting of Einar as "Lili" that creates a doubling effect and seems to trigger a turning point response in Einar. More examples unrelated to paintings occur in the film as well. Progressively, Gerda becomes the doppelganger of Einar's alter ego, 'Lili,' and she states at one point "We went for coffee and I kissed him. And the strangest thing, it was like kissing myself." After one of Einar's operations, when Einar becomes Lili full time, Gerda and Lili sleep in the same bed with mesh see-through sheers dividing the bed through which they talk about having been married. Gerda replies mysteriously to Lily regarding their marriage when Einar was not yet openly identifying as Lily: "I know it was Einar. But really it was you." At that very same moment of blurring identities, Lili puts her hand on the sheer screen between them and Gerda also puts her hand up against Lili's as if they were mirror images of each other. Speaking of mirror images, there are several revealing mirror scenes: Einar tucks his penis between his legs in front of a mirror in the theater costume storage area to conjure up two sets of doubles in one, his reflection in the mirror and his doubling as man and woman; later in Paris Einar goes to a peep show and imitates the movements of the woman stripper whose reflection on the window between them is depicted superimposed on Einar; 3 late in the film, just before his final operation, Einar looks in a mirror at the hospital as if saying good bye to his reflection for the last time just before his sexual reassignment surgery to become Lili, his female double, his true self. This doubling motif in The Danish Girl signals the maternal semiotic specifically in the suggestion of dyadic recurrence and sexual fluidity tracing back to the (m)Other!child dyad and primal libidinal investments.

Bisexuality As far as the question of bisexuality in the film, that is, its exclusion, once Einar identifies completely with Lili, Einar and Gerda's conjugal situation expires as signaled by the sheer mesh drape they put up that divides their bed. Although Gerda plays with a bisexual impulse in the form of an EinarlLili duality that she could perhaps fancy, Lili insists on men as sexual interests for her by insisting that she wants to marry again, then she

Primal FEMININITY

243

forecloses on Gerda's subtle innuendos. Plus, Lili, was attracted to a friend of theirs to whom Gerda has expressed jealousy. But, after meeting with him, Lili says that nothing goes on between them because he is 'gay.' And this is another indication of Lili's heterosexual bent that has transferred from Einar's predilection for women, to Lili as his transsexual identity who turns solely to men. Late in the film, Lili flirts with her surgeon expressing her desire to marry someone like him. So, the film seems to once again favor hetero-relations and even same-sex relations over bisexuality. Nevertheless, the film's themes further the concept of sexual plurality as a factor in the human condition and so reinforces the viewer's awareness of the influence of the prelingual maternal semiotic and its traces of FEMININITY in the mOVies.

Dallas Buyers Club:

Bisexuality Eschewed

Dallas Buyers Club also eschews the imaging of bisexuality in the film. It falls into the discriminatory pattern. Plus, the film starts out as expressing homophobic tendencies in the dialogue and in the actions of the principle character. Then the film reverses itself and uses the issue of AIDS in the 1980s to eventually turn the protagonist's homophobia around and rally his support for sexual inc1usivity in culture. The learning curve in this area of social and sexual awareness and plurality is well portrayed in this fihn, if also limiting when it comes to bisexuality. In addition, in line with the mainstream movies' inclination to hesitate in portraying bisexuality and trans sexuality in an equitable marmer, the trans character, Rayon, dies in a kind of cryptic atonement for being trans. She contracts AIDS as if in retribution for not acceding to the cultural construct of binary oppositions that supersedes plurality in nOlmative sexuality. Oscar-Worthy Plurality However, despite the flaws, it carmot be denied that the film also provides the mainstream audiences with a character who is trans and portraying her as a character with sufficient quality and multidimensionality, as well as a strong enough contribution to the narrative to garner the performance of the actor, Jay Leto, in a stunning perfOlmance, an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. In addition, the lead character, a homophobic rodeo cowboy who has contracted AIDS learns to love this trans character. In a show of character growth and dismissal of homophobia, the protagonist cowboy's cries at her death in a most poignant closeup perfOlmance at the end of his dissolute and misguided attempts at expressing grief over

244

Coda

Rayon's death. He languishes in the presence of a prostitute but waves her away in a drunken stupor while crying his eyes out. Matthew McConaughey, the actor who plays the protagonist, also won an Academy Award for Best Actor in this film. Given these quality narrative characters, the caliber of actors and the critical and box office success, Director Jean-Marc Vallee and his Dallas Buyers Club transfers to the viewer an acute awareness of the scope of sexual plurality in the human condition, and, by association I would argue, an awareness of primal FEMININITY that traces its foundation to the prelingual stage of human development and the maternal semiotic.

EXTENDED CODA THE CARCINOGENIC (M)OTHER:

ANNIHILATION

Without the counterbalancing implications ofthe maternal authority that generates plurality and inc1usivity, culture succumbs to a binary authoritarianism ushering in the potential for atmihilation. This cultural tyranny and dystopian annihilation are found in fihns like The Handmaid's Tale (Schlondorf, 1990) and 1984 (Radford, 1984) and other foreboding literary and fihnic texts. On the other hand, the unabated maternal authority devoid ofthe structural framework ofthe Symbolic order, would generate a potential for a different kind of annihilation, a pluralist and (post)structuralist, carcinogenic (m)Other love. This type of obliteration viewers apprehend and respond strongly to in the fihn Annihilation (Garland, 2018), which is a rare, possibly singular, example of unfettered, self-genninating maternal authority in mainstream film. In contrast to Garland's (m)Otherly film, there are many examples of movies that portray the systematic extermination of the plurality radiating from the maternal authority with its traces and resonances, as we discussed above. These films result in an attempt at the prohibition, if not the extermination of (m)Otherness that also leaves the Law of the Father unchecked. But most of these fihns promote a dystopian theme depicting the surging empowennent of paternal, totalitarian phallogocentrism. At least until the very end of the film and then, unlike Radford's adaptation of Orwell's 1984, tend to reverse their dystopian course to reincorporate the maternal semiotic and FEMININITY into a semblance of a symbiotic balance with the Symbolic. These movie reversals result in generating relative happy endings, if not reactionary ones: Children ofMen (Cuaron, 2006), The Matrix (The Wachowski Brothers/Sisters, 1999), and The Road (Hillcoat, 2009). Annihilation, which varies drastically from these phallogocentric films, is a fihn written and directed by Alex Garland whose interest in the depiction of the maternal semiotic and FEMININITY led to his exploration of the depiction of women in a startlingly novel mallller in his fihn Ex

246

Extended Coda

Machina (2014). This film features a vulnerable and sinister female automaton, Ava. In Annihilation, Garland expands his investigation of woman and explores unbridled primal FEMININITY. All his main characters, except for one man, Kane, are women who in different ways demonstrate primal plurality and motherhood and fatalism. He also explores in this film a maternal dynamism in the portrayal of an unfettered and creative, evolutionary force that generates an erratic DNA-tampering and carcinogenic mitosis. This unbridled force seems to radiate from a small impact zone created by a meteorite that crashed to Earth. A glowing and growing perimeter around the location of impact creates what the film refers to as the Shimmer, an area of gene "refraction" or mutation marked by a glimmering anomaly in the atmosphere. In centering his fihn on this alien phenomenon related to (m)Other in the form of unchecked germination, Garland delivers to the viewer the illusion of separating the reverberations of the maternal semiotic from its symbiosis with the Symbolic order 1 thereby creating a kind of absolute binary opposition, a nod in and of itself to structuralism and the Law of the Father. And this results in a last stand between the two registers, the Imaginary plenitude and the Symbolic order, as the Shimmer starts to obliterate the transcendental ego, a constructed misrecognition of self in human condition. Just one of many interesting premises in a most original and originary movie.

The Maternal Shimmer If we accept the argument that this film's imagery produces broad maternal connotations: cell division, mutation via DNA manipulation, in conjunction with the depiction of the concepts of 'making something new' and masochistic self-destruction, then it follows that Garland's interstellar conceit in the film, alludes to a universal aninhilating (m)Otherness. The director's imaging and narrative revelations lead to a conglomerate depiction that implicates and imitates the body of woman as originary source of human reproductive cell division. In thus concluding that the film's focus is on the maternal, most aspects of the film start to fall into place to sustain this narrative conceit and this analysis. For instance, as an indication of the director's interest in exploring (m)Other in this film, Garland features women as the center ofthis film's universe. Although most of the main characters are not designated as actual mothers, one woman in the five-women reconnaissance patrol that enters the alien periphery, the Shimmer, does mention having given birth to a child who has died young of leukemia. Leukemia is a cancer possibly passed on by the mother in her own DNA or the DNA of the father's when she conceives and gives birth.

The Carcinogenic (rn)Otber

247

And this implicates subliminally that the character, Tuva, is indeed a mother connected directly to her daughter's disease and death via primal, erratic mitosis. Further, even though other members of the patrol are not technically mothers, these women are exemplars of maternal reproductive potential and this works indirectly to reinforce the director's maternal themes. Plus, the film's main conceit of runaway cell division helps weight the film from the start far more toward the prelingual that consists of the pluralist effects of (m)Otherhood, the maternal semiotic and FEMININITY,' as opposed to the more univocal, oppositional Symbolic order. This is what this film is about: the out of balance, re-negotiated dialectic consisting metaphorically of the impotent lighthouse phallus versus the originary phallus of the gory hole of the unbridled contagion of universal nature. A humanistically off-kilter dialectic that that leads to a scenario of armihilation for transcendental subjectivity as humans experience it. This armihilation in the film seems to correspond to absolute ego loss at the end. In other words, the dominance ofthe register ofthe Real, the non-sequitur of the human condition usually kept in check topologically by the Imaginary and the Symbolic registers, will soon obliterate humanity by means of a purely objective universal malignancy. The last scene in the movie enunciates the armihilation of the speaking subject, the transcendental ego that generally delineates human identity. Lena faces what looks to be her husband Kane in quarantine and states: "You aren't Kane, are you." Kane's doppelganger answers: "I don't think so. Are you Lena?" Lena just stares at him. He gets up. He hugs her, and she hugs him back. His eyes shimmer slightly in the extreme closeup shot. Then after a cut to Lena's eyes, they start glowing, too, reminiscent of the alien shimmer effect deep in Area X. The movie then ends abruptly. This ending suggests that humanity will be effectively annihilated by the universally maternal, alien mitosis as it grows, shimmers and mutates from within both their bodies: Kane's doppelganger and Lena's infected hybrid body. Both of them are liable to continue mutating as indicated by the unbridled maternal mitosis ofthe Shimmer that remains lodged within them.

Henrietta Lacks, (m)Otherhood and Ambivalence Let's parse some of the implications of the film that are mentioned and alluded to in the above paragraphs. Specifically, the film imagery and dialogue that generate maternal connotations: cell division, womb images, dyadic references, self-destructive themes (refraction, mutation, suicide missions), gellllination, and primal authority. In addition, the concept of bringing 'something new' to the universe as implied by the film's emphasis

248

Extended Coda

on erratic and extremely rapid cell division and mutation in contrast to the relatively stable eartbly evolution. This rapid cell division and its maternal reference vis-a-vis evolution also requires analysis in relation to this film. The first mention of motherhood comes about a quarter of the way into the film and is associated with cancer, a major theme in the film. This scene takes place within tbe Shimmer periphery, tbe Area X from which only Kane's doppelganger has returned. As mentioned before, the Shimmer demarcates a periphery tbat keeps getting larger around a lighthouse center point that was hit by a meteorite. This object from space created a hole in the ground leading to an uncanny cavern. Early in the film, Lena, the main character, fmds herself paddling in a boat on a marsh within tbe boundary of the Shimmer. She shares tbe boat with Tuva who tells Lena tbat she lost a young daughter to leukemia. As mentioned previously, Tuva, now carries the mother designation. After baring her soul, Tuva carries now an implied stigma linked subliminally to the cancer that she could have passed on to her daughter. This short conversation marks a general connection between motherhood and cancer as well as to the film's alien presence that carries a cancer-like, mutating influence over everything contained in the ominous Area X. The maternal, carcinogenic, and alien force in Area X forms a conceptual link to the subject of Lena's lecture presented to her biology class earlier in the film. It is a lecture about erratic cell division in which she shows a film strip of cervical cancer that is multiplying exponentially. Later in the film, in a subtle effort to reintroduce the signifiance of this cancer from the film strip and to reinforce the association between motherhood and cancer, Lena is portrayed reading a paperback book that the spectator notices is a real book entitled The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Although presented offhandedly, tbis prop (re)presents a trace of tbe maternal semiotic. This book is about the real woman whose extremely long lasting, if not perpetually splitting cells are still being produced and copied for scientific study ever since a sample was first removed from her in a morally questionable procedure occurring in 1951. These cancer cells are referred to as the HeLa line of cells named after the 31-year-old woman, Hemietta Lacks, who became a mother of five children before her death in 195 1 . It is quite possible that tbe earlier black and white fihn strip that Lena shows her class is a recording of Hemietta's original cervical cancer cells. This reference to Ms. Lack and her prolific cancer cells further invests quite an emphasis on the film's motherhood theme, especially considering all the other direct and indirect allusions to (m)Otherness and erratic cell division. In addition, alluding obliquely to Ms. Lacks' early demise related to this type of cell division, the film makes certain that Tuva, a mother, is the first to die because of the Shimmer effect in a mutant bear, the first woman to

The Carcinogenic (rn)Otber

249

die of all the women in the troop. The film's motif of focusing on and then terminating women and mothers, along with referencing an extra-filmic mother and her death, that of Henrietta Lacks, seems to create a kind of ambivalence toward mothers that coalesces in the depiction of the cryptically maternal alien force as center piece of the film.

Deconstructed Maternal Displays Garland's Annihilation contains imagery that contributes to a latent maternal presence in the environment as well as in the narrative, an underpinning maternal portrayal that at times gets deconstructed verbally in the dialog before it gets displayed. While at other times, and in symbiosis, the maternal is depicted in arguably strictly universal contexts that center on widespread mutation via rapid cell mitosis and DNA alterations large and small. The deconstructed and mitotic aspects of the maternal in the film are enunciated in self-destructive references, dyadic themes and womb images. Let's start with the aspects of the film that deconstruct the human maternal image before we move on in the following section to the portrayals of (m)Otherness that the director paints in broader, more universal brushstrokes. "We're all damaged goods here," Tuva, the designated mother who lost her child to leukemia, tells Lena early in the film. This verbally introduces the theme of self-destructiveness as a prevalent condition in life and this serves as one motive for joining this all female patrol on what later Lena refers to as a "suicide mission." Self-destructiveness amounts to a marmer of deconstructing self that often leads to death. Later still, Dr. Ventress continues this theme by confronting Lena about the psychological processes of self-destruction that is a normal aspect of the human condition. For emphasis, she then relates it to cells in our bodies programmed from inception to self-destruct. By this time Lena has learned that Dr. Ventress has cancer and does not have long to live. Further, Tuva's experience in life supports Dr. Ventress claims. She had mentioned earlier to Lena that she has experienced two losses: the death of her child and the person she once was. The implication here is that she is "damaged goods" and that this might have influenced her choice to join the expedition. "Damaged goods," "suicide mission" and "programmed self-destructiveness" are references in the film that deconstruct the maternal threads of the narrative. And these references along with their deconstructive effects on the maternal theme in the film underpin the allusion to a potential of a virulent (m)Otherness as exemplified by the cell division prompted by the alien force in the Shimmer. Further, the imagery of the suicide mission with its female volunteers

250

Extended Coda

present and act out the film's themes of matemal deconstruction and self­ destructiveness. In a subliminal marmer Tuva, as the only mother featured in the film, along with her self-destructive tendencies form a microcosm of mother earth, the newly skewed and destabilized maternal image latent in the background throughout the movie. In addition, Tuva seems to (re)present and foreshadow the universal maternal aspects linked to the erratic interplanetary mitosis that we will discuss below. Other elements of the (m)Other depicted in the narrative on the screen include references to the maternal dyad. Once again, Tuva's telltale dialog comes into play in situating the maternal dyad directly into the film's ambivalent themes. Once Tuva establishes mothemess in the human carcinogenic capacity, then the broader imaging of motherness in the film that includes instances of doubling, as well as allusions to the womb and primal abjection start to appear and fonn a consistent pattern. To begin with, the film depicts a parallelism, a doubling and a dyadic relationship established between Lena and her estranged husband, Kane, that courses through the entire film and forms a subtle twist at the very end. The viewer becomes aware late in the film that their separate trajectories fonn a parallel throughout the film because the film specifically confirms that they both have entered the Shimmer and are in one way or another the only ones to return alive from Area X. In addition, the couple fonns a skewed semblance of the maternal dyad in tenns of their marriage, their love, and dedication to each other, albeit in the shadow of an extramarital affair. Further, each of the them experiences the appearance of a double, a doppelganger constituted during their time in the Shimmer. Kane's double survives the Shimmer (while Kane himself does not), whereas Lena obliterates her Shimmer-generated doppelganger instead. We will discuss the twist in the Kane and Lena relationship that the end of the fihn surprises us with in the next section. In tenns of maternal abjection, the visceral effect of the deconstruction of breached bodily boundaries, Tuva again spearheads the way. This time, introducing the messy and borderless, body-centered displays alluding obliquely to the maternal. As mentioned before, she is the first woman and mother killed in the patrol of women around which the featured expedition into the Shimmer revolves. When Lena finds Tuva's mauled body after she was snatched by a mutated animal that graphically ripped out her throat, she lies face up with her clear blue eyes open, lifeless. From this overt abject moment in the film, most of the other boundary-less blood, guts and body parts in the movie form a link in spirit back to her abject body forming a kind of parallel to birthing with its abject placenta, blood and newborn connected materially back to the birthing (m)Other. One further indication

The Carcinogenic (rn)Otber

251

of this abject connection to Tuva is that the mutant killer bear that stalks the patrol after killing Tuva possesses an extra-logical, unheimlich ability to mimic the voice of Tuva screaming horrifically as she was dying in the bear's lethal clutches. We will explore further in depth the imagery of the womb in the film below. But for now, a discussion specifically about the hole that the meteor caused in the floor of the light house, is in order. The meteor blasted a crater there that fOlTIlS an ad hoc, deconstructed vagina with its deep uterus and its pubic hair of mold and other growths emanating outward from the circular entrance. This cavernous crater functions to depict the film's uncarmy chora, the place of origination for the Shimmer. It also serves to deconstruct the chora, the location of reproductive plenitude. 'When we are sho\Vll the interior of this hole, it is designed with a tunnel and a cavern made up of what appears to be a biological construct with gleaming walls that give the impression of the love canal and the womb. This is the original, originary receptacle, the chara, but in effigy. The events and actions that take place in there add to the location's unheimlich impact in the film.

The Universality of (m)Other's Egg Cell splitting is a universal process in the creation of multicellular life fOlTIlS, at least as far as humans are generally aware. In the film Annihilation we are shown several times the microscopic views of cells dividing and multiplying, but all these scenes of mitosis depict the process as either aberrant and splitting wildly or having been mutated by the Shimmer, or both. In addition, in Area X we see the colorful and florid result of these aberrant cells everywhere: unusual flowers, the doubling in a pair of fairytale mutated deer along with horrific mutant crocodiles and bears. Plus, in one instance the mention of leukemia, an example of cell splitting out of control, is associated with a human mother in a relatively offhand, yet telltale marmer via a statement by one of the characters, Tuva, as we discussed above. In addition, Director Garland depicts two exceptional examples of erratic mitosis resembling obliquely human gestation and birth, that, at times, start with a single ovum-like cell and multiplies. The first example is a fragmented sequence showing a quick shot of Kane in the meteorite's crater/womb filming himself and the floating abstract clump of cell division that will soon be his doppelganger. At one point, after showing the mitotic clump, the camera gets pointed back out the hole in the lighthouse floor to a figure in silhouette looking back in. This is all we see of this birth-like episode that Kane filmed inside the telltale impact zone of the meteorite.

252

Extended Coda

However, later we see a doubling, a reenactment, of this event when Lena herself enters the vagina-like meteor hole to find herself in a tunnel, the ad hoc love canal leading to a womb cavern where she finds Dr. Ventress ranting about being possessed and experiencing her O\Vll armihilation. Dr. Ventress indeed disintegrates into beads of light that coalesce into an abstract egg, a giant ovum, animated and dividing into itself while emitting light. This free-form egg object folding and turning into itself [mally aims its inner light at Lena. It draws like a magnet a few mercurial drops of Lena's blood from the skin near her mesmerized eyes, sucking them like tailless sperm into its bright interior. It is then that Lena's doppelganger forms right before her in a colorful frenzy of splitting cells. When Lena sees the startling human shape fmming, she picks up her automatic weapon and tries shooting the developing doppelganger, but to no effect. She then flees up the 'love canal' out into to the lighthouse only to find her double already outside that deconstructed chora waiting for her. In these two examples, the film gives us two births of twins of which only one twin from each set survives: previously we saw a distraught Kane kill himself with a phosphorus grenade and later, Lena sets her doppelganger on fire with another such grenade. Once again, with these two deconstructed birth allusions embedded in the film's cryptic images, the film conflates aberrant cell division with the (m)Other, both human and then something beyond human, an extraterrestrially influenced mitosis. In doing so, Garland subliminally pays tribute to the primal authority ofthe originary (m)Other, the one who, as Lena proclaims of the alien presence at the end of the film, is " . . . making something new." And in so doing, in making something new, this extraterrestrial maternal presence retains ultimate authority over the human project in a direct adversarial relationship with the human symptom, the Symbolic order and its artificial, paternal authority. Further, the universal creation mechanism from the stars invokes the impossible, boundary-less Real beyond language and ego which Garland and his film intuitively tap into accomplishing two effects: first, a commercial film implementing the form of an original and suspenseful, sci­ fi horror narrative, and secondly, inadvertently enunciating the (m)Other mostly isolated within the registers of the human Imaginary and the anti­ human Real while marginalizing the third register, the Symbolic order. The last two shots of the filin depict the Shimmer embedded in the eyes of Kane's doppelganger, and in Lena's eyes in her mutant state now seemingly converted into a doppelganger of herself. These final shots confilTIl the making of 'something new' that appears to be the universal (m)Other's mission despite its anti-humanist result: the unfettered

The Carcinogenic (rn)Otber

253

annihilation of transcendental human seWego. This is the underlying connotation and the rare novelty of the film.

Concluding Comments Two radically different paths to absolute annihilation that is the Real, have been incorporated intuitively into the two vastly different mainstream movies analyzed in this manuscript, Annihilation and A.!, Artificial Intelligence (See Chapter 6). It is as if these two movies figure metaphorically as a pair of esoteric serpents that entwine once and bite each other's tails to form a twisted pair of attached circles. The metaphor of these fihns as intersecting and tail-biting snakes that form a continuum signals the nullifying of human coherence and indexes eternity that is the annihilatory Real. They don't cancel each other out. They combine in a plurality and their cryptic union resonates across the gamut of popular culture. Outside the serpentine metaphor and given their box office successes, these films demonstrate the sophistication of the public's viewing indulgences on the one hand, and, on the other, the industry's artistic and philosophical achievements in the face of cultural inertia and the typical mesmerizing of the masses that Hollywood movies tend to cultivate. Annihilation, in its depiction of the unencumbered creativity of (m)Other obliterating human identity, is a particularly new, mutant direction in societal self-investigation. A.!, Artificial Intelligence, as Annihilation's fun­ house mirror reflection, eschews Hollywood's mesmerizing fOlTIlUla in its own right by drawing from anti-humanism and the Real. Spielberg's film accomplishes this specifically by tacking on a faux "happy ending" in which the artificial boy, the last sentient artifact of an extinct humanity, becomes an ersatz "real" boy. Further, A.!, enunciates the dire consequences of the unbridled Law of the Father that has severed itself from the symbiotic plurality of (m)Other only to self-destruct. These two movies have brought convention's two polarizing extremes, the (m)Other and the Father, to the public's attention as separate agents of transcendental annihilation. But together in symbiosis, these two polarizations fOlTIl an intersecting and ouroborosian oneness, and a topology. A human topology that struggles to evolve into its next expanded and pluralist transfiguration, and which lies in clandestine disavowal of paternal dominance postures and in affirmation of primal FEMININITY. For now, the arts have given us these two inversely reflective films as an enunciation of the ineffable. And to the spirit of these concluding comments in this Extended Coda, these films have provided an arcane metaphor, the

254

Extended Coda

ouroboros, symbol of plurality and eternity; as well as an "answer of the Real." Further, these two mainstream films within our analytical embrace thereby rising to new heights of deconstruction, seem to connect image-wise and esoterically to a rather subdued symbol in the film Annihilation: the curious tattoo on Lena's arm that images an ouroboros with one twist forming a figure eight. An infinity symbol. This tattoo appears as if by biological processes on the alms of a few of those who penetrate the Shimmer in the film. Then, the appearance of Lena's tattoo in Annihilation, however brief, seems to reinforce cryptically these movies' extra-lingual signs at the boundaries ofthe human experience in the topological registers of the lmaginary, the Symbolic and the impossible Real. How intuitionally significant has this unexplained tattoo of Lena's become as suddenly through our analysis it has revealed its signifiance in extimacy,3 the anti­ humanist reality lying beyond the outer limits the Symbolic and, extra­ logically, resting also at the intimate, irrational core of the human condition. In sum, director Garland, by enunciating the maternal semiotic, primal FEMININITY and the Real in his images, has created a most striking mainstream film in Annihilation. A film that bolsters the significance and signifiance of the prelingual developmental stage, the subsequent lingual stage, and their ouroboric, symbiotic contribution to the human condition legitimized and deconstructed via topological interactions with the impossible Real.

NOTES

The Prolegomenon 1 The pre-lingual experience remains repressed, albeit recmsive and disavowed by the Symbolic order (as political infrastructure) just as pre-history suffers from disavowal and revisionism based on ClllTent cultural politics (i.e., neo-Darwinism vs neo-Creationism). In the 21 st Century, we pride oillselves in sophistication as far as pre-historical discoveries are concerned, -wrapped safely in the relative smokescreen of science. However, the accepted disavowal and ignorance directed towards the pre-lingual influence on the psyche and the arts results in pre-Oedipal avowal and discovery languishing under \VTaps in the cloak of invisibility. There are no Symbolic landmarks, such as, for instance, verbal artifacts much less the "WTitten word attributed to this primal stage. Nevertheless, there has been observation­ based psychological and linguistic data produced, and, as well, psychoanalytic effects developed that open the door to the pre-lingual (Freud and Lacan, for instance who then shy back into the patriarchal shibboleth of the 'talking cille,') as well as iconoclastically and meticulously recorded explorations into the pre­ verbal realm (Klein, Horney, and Kristeva). The latter discoveries conveniently suffer from neglect because of the disavowal of the prelingual that is systemically nilltured in culture always already rife with phallocentric structure. In sum, it is easy to disavow pre-verbal signifiance: because the latter brings back the maternal repressed and, besides, there is no history there. 2 Kristeva frequently refers to rhythm and its primal influence: " . . . the first organizer that is rhythm." (Kristeva 2002, 70) Shuli Barzilia comments on Kristeva's prioritization of rhythm(s) in language: "As Kristeva observes in an earlier revisionist essay, "[A] text cannot be grasped through linguistics alone" ("Word" 69). The rhythms and musicality of a literary work, like the colors of a painting, may inscribe "instinctual 'residues' that the understanding subject has not symbolized" ("Giotto's Joy" 221)." (Barzilia 296) My project, in terms of meaning(s) and articulations attempt to evoke traces that display observational alignments with rhythmic (non)senses. 3 In using thisterm throughout this tome, I allude to the differentiating, semanalyzing andfiguring oflanguage and text that are attributed, in part, to Derrida and Lyotard's play with identity, differance and the figural as well as to the ecritures maternelles etfeminines introduced in the -writings of Kristeva, Cixious and Irigaray. As Francois Lyotard, in his critique ofDerrida, states concisely: "It must be seen that the arche­ -writing invoked [by Derrida in Writing and Difference] is not Miting in the strict sense but is on the contrary the constitution of a thick space, where the play of hiding/revealing may take place." (Reading 1991, 6) I re-adapt the semiotic and polysemic potential of this thick space and play, this differing and deferring, to

256

Notes

ecriture and interruptions of discourse that might elucidate or subvert the a priori opacity of the Symbolic. 4 Kristeva: "What we call signijiance, then, is precisely this lUllirnited and unbounded generating process, this lUlceasing operation ofthe drives toward, in, and through language; toward, in, and through the exchange system of its protagonists-­ the subject and his institutions. This heterogeneous process, neither anarchic, fragmented fOlmdation nor schizophrenic blockage, is a structuring and de­ structuring practice, a passage to the outer boundaries of the subject and society." (Kristeva 1984, 17) 5 'Word-figme' for my project describes an assault on the hegemony ofthe Symbolic order as exemplified by stylistic convention in language. The hegemonic use of convention works to render invisible the symbiotic relationship between the maternal semiotic and the Law of the Father. The 'word-figure' attempts to break that rendering process. Some of the word-figmes used in this project include: FEMININITY and (m)Other, among others. 6 I tend to italicize the word uncanny to broaden its quotidian meaning to include traces of Freud's unheimlich in reference to all levels of the unusual and the arcane that signal the pre-lingual and phylogenetic maternal influence in the registers of hlUllan experience. See endnote 64 below in the Prologue for more on unheimlich.

Prologue 1 Freud's thoughts on bisexuality, and consequently primal FEMININITY: "even in boys the Oedipus complex has a double orientation, active and passive, in accordance with their bisexual constitution; a boy also wants to take his mother's place as the love-object of his father a fact which we describe as the feminine attitude." (Freud 1925, 249) Kristeva citing Guignard referring to Klein: "The "primary feminine" reahn, on the other hand, organizes the earliest female identifications in boys as well as girls, as Klein llllderstood it, arolllld greed toward the naked breast and the early genital desire for the penis that is included in that breast. The union between the breast and the penis is what makes the primary feminine realm "a specific space for organizing the psychic realm." (Kristeva, 2001, 120) Kristeva: " .. .if the feminine exists, it only exists in the order of signifiance or signifying process, and it is only in relation to meaning and signification, positioned as their excessive or transgressive other that it exists, speaks, thinks (itself) and writes (itself) for both sexes." (Kristeva 1979, 1 34-5) 2 My use of masochism in this text is informed by the work of Gaylin Studlar and her application of De leuze in analyzing film focusing on an aesthetic ofmasochism as a mother-centered disposition. 3 Extimacy is embedded with the Thing, the (m)Other, and the navel, as Pavon­ Cuellar succinctly explains Lacan's concept: "The notion of "extimacy" was coined by Lacan (1959-1 960), on February 10th, 1 960, to designate "this central place, this intimate exteriority, this extimacy, which is the Thing" (p. 167). Lacan identifies

Hollywood's (rn)Otber Aperture

257

extirnacy with the Thing after enigmatically describing this "Thing" as the "excluded interior" (p. 122), the "subject's inside" that becomes "the [lIst outside", the "first exteriority arOlUld which the subject orients his way" (p. 65), the "first landmark" (p. 68) that "returns always to the same place" (p. 92). Since the Thing is always there, it becomes a sort oflandmark for our journey through life. It is the fixed center of om movements. This point ofreference is extimate, which means that it is intimate to us while being exterior at the same time. In reality, this extirnacy does not simply reside in om outside world, but is the navel, the SOillce ofthis world, as it is for us. The Thing becomes our first outside because it has been excluded from om inside. Indeed, its exclusion is what creates om exteriority. We may see, then, that in the Lacanian perspective, all things considered, the extimacy of the Thing is temporally speaking at the origin of the subject's exteriority and spatially speaking at the fixed center of the subject's life. The Thing is extimate since it constitutes the subject's intimate experience that gives meaning and existence to the external things; the "personal" interior, origin and horizon of the "impersonal" exterior, the "subjective" beginning and the end of the "objective" environment. Lacan explains this by conceiving the Thing, on the one hand, as the "mythical mother's body" that is "always searched for" (Lacan, 19591 960, pp. 82-85, 127), and, on the other, as the "first thing that separates from that which is named and articulated" (p. 100), "the primordial real which suffers the signifier" (p. 142), but also "the signifier" itself and "the emptiness" inherent in the signifier (pp. 144-145), "the emptiness in the center of the real" (p. 146), the central cavity of "the vacuole" (p. 179). This vacuole is that around which everything revolves. Though everything is organized by the signifying structure of language, there is still something real in the heart of everything." (pavon-Cuellar, D. (2014). 'Extimacy', in Thomas Teo (Ed.), Encyclopedia ofCritical Psychology. New York: Springer.) (pavon-Cuellar quotes from: Lacan, J. (1959-1 960). Le seminaire. Livre VII. L'ethique de la psychanalyse. Paris: Seuil, 1986. 4 Kristeva uses Melanie Klein's observations on early childhood sexuality to reaffirm her analysis of a feminine 'phase' in early fantasy: "Although Klein's conception of the early fantasy accords a central role to the breast, it includes a penis inside that breast. Even more important, by recognizing that oral drives are combined with genital ones, the dynamic ofthe fantasy encourages the ego to desire intercomse as an oral act of sucking at a breast that includes the penis, and then the penis in the image ofthe breast. This perspective, which applies to both sexes, means that both sexes experience a primary feminine phase--which is among the more striking of Klein's analytic observations." (Kristeva 2001, 1 1 8) 5 Lacan, in typical tongue-in-cheek, yet revelatory jargon, and in this case "With a wink and nod to photo-play, speaks to visibility as an effect of subjectivity vis-a-vis of the gaze from the Other: "I must, to begin with, insist on the following: in the scopic field, the gaze is outside, I am looked at, that is to say, I am a picture. This is the flUlction that is found at the heart of the institution of the subject in the visible. What determines me, at the most profolUld level, in the visible, is the gaze

258

Notes

that is outside. It is through the gaze that I enter light and it is from the gaze that I receive its effects. Hence it comes about that the gaze is the instnunent through which light is embodied and through which if you will allow me to use a word, as I often do, in a fragmented fonn I am photo-graphed." (Lacan 2004, 1 06) Joan Copjec also weighs in on the Symbolic parameters of the visible: "For the very condition and substance of the subject's subjectivity is his or her subjectivization by the law of the society which produces that subject. One only becomes visible not only to others, but also to oneself through (by seeing through) the categories constructed by a specific, historically defined society." (Copjec 1989, 55) 6 Freud's often quoted obscure object in dream analysis: "There is often a passage in even the most thoroughly interpreted dream which has to be left obscme; this is because we become aware during the work of interpretation that at that point there is a tangle of dream-thoughts which cannot be muaveled and which moreover adds nothing to om knowledge of the content of the dream. This is the dream's navel, the spot where it reaches do"Wll into the unkno"Wll." (Freud 2010, Kindle Location 494) 7 On page 259 of Kristeva' s Melanie Klein, specifically in endnote 1 1, she describes and quotes Freud's reductionist observations on the 'fact' of being castrated and the 'threat' of the same: "The "fact of being castrated" (in the girl) and the "threat of castration" (in the boy) mandate, in Freud's view, two different fates of the Oedipus complex. In the boy, the castration complex "destroy[s]" the Oedipus complex, and by inciting the abandonment of libidinal investments, ushers in a firm masculine superego, which is the true inheritor of the Oedipus complex. The girl, on the other hand, who does not have to be "threatened" by castration (because hers is a "fact") is introduced to the Oedipus complex by the very castration that she discovers when she assumes the feminine position of an object of love for the man, and she can abandon the Oedipus complex only very gradually, and perhaps not at all. As a result, "[women's] super-ego is never so inexorable, so impersonal, so independent of its emotional origins as we require it to be in men." See Freud, "Some Psychical Consequences ofthe Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes," in Freud, Standard Edition, 19:241-58. This reduction by Freud along with Kristeva's reproduction of it in her tome, offer further support, albeit facile, of originary FEMININITY if only by its suggestion, if not designation, of a universal 'libidinal investment' prior to the Oedipal complex, from which, given the anatomical 'facts' and the Law ofthe Father (masculine superego), hetero-males take a divergent disposition. S Derrida fashioned this word-play, graphical in nature as an observation on the oppositional disposition inherent in language while perhaps making an oblique allusion to the splitting and/or dissolution ofthe constructed opposition of active (for Freud, a male oriented attribute) and passive (for Freud, female). His word-play, differance, also plays linguistically on discrepancies between the immediacy of speaking versus the deferring aspects of -writing. Derrida's translator, Alan Bass explains: " ...the noun differance suspends itself between two senses of differant deferring, differing." (Derrida 1982, 8. Note 10.) Derrida continues fmther revealing his expansion ofthe noun ' difference' to "differance": "We must consider that in the

Hollywood's (m)Other Aperture

259

usage of om language the ending -ance remains lUldecided between the active and the passive. And we will see why that which lets itself be designated differance is neither simply active nor simply passive, announcing or rather recalling something like the middle voice, (. .. )" (Derrida 1982, 9) 9 Constance Penley speaks to the question of a non-fluid reactionary essentialism in the feminist analysis of classical film: "A further problem posed for feminists -writing about classical film, and one that had already suggested itself in the earlier work, was how to argue that there was a contradiction between the "feminine" and the classical system, without falling back on an essentialist notion for "femininity" or "Woman" as an eternal and naturally subversive element. There would be no feminist advantage to positing either a historically unchanging feminine essence or a monolithic patriarchal repression of that essence. The idea of an essence is ahistorical and asocial and suggests a set of traits not amenable to change, while the "repression" thesis (visible in Cook and Johnston's work) fosters the beliefthat, once liberated from patriarchal constraints, femininity would finally assmne its uncontaminated and naturally given forms." (penley 44) However, my concentration on FEMININITY precludes a woman's fixed essence in favor of a fluid continumn ofhmnan essence(s) that speakes) to the repressed maternal in all its psycho-sexual­ social and extra-logical repercussions intrinsic to both sexes and their biological and non-biological phrralities. 10 Laplanche and de Pontalis discuss Freud's evolving thoughts on seduction and 'urphantasien ' which they reformulate in order to better define and to re-establish Freud's implied body-oriented and phylogenetic meaning: "Freud's so-called abandonment of the reality of infantile tramnatic memories, in favour of fantasies which would be based only on a biological, quasi-endogenous evolution of sexuality, is only a transitional stage in the search for the foundation ofnemosis. On the one hand seduction will continue to appear as one ofthe data of the relationship between child and adult (Freud, Ferenczi); on the other hand, the notion ofprimal (or original) fantasies (Urphantasien), of "inherited memory traces" of prehistoric events, will in turn provide support for individual fantasies." (Laplanche and de Pontalis, 1968, 17) 11 Kristeva relates poetic aspects of language and \Vfiting to the semiotic and the body-oriented, which go beyond the mind indexing operations of heterogeny, jouissance and the psychosomatic: "The flUlctioning of \Vfiting [ecriture], the trace, and the gramme, introduced by Derrida in his critique of phenomenology and its linguistic substitutes, points to an essential aspect ofthe semiotic: OfGrammatology specifies that which escapes Bedeutung. We shall nevertheless keep the term semiotic to designate the operation that logically and chronologically precedes the establishment of the symbolic and its subject: the term will in fact allow us to envisage a heterogeneous flUlctioning, which Freud called 'psychosomatic.'" (Kristeva 1984, 40-41) 12 Toril Moi explains: "Kristeva's 0"Wll position on the question of femininity: as different or other in relation to language and meaning, but nevertheless only

260

Notes

thinkable within the symbolic, and therefore also necessarily subject to the Law. Maintaining such a finely balanced position is far from easy, and Kristeva herself has from time to time -written about FEMININITY in terms which would seem to equate the feminine with the 'semiotic' or the pre-Oedipal." (Moi 1986, 1 1) 1 3Kristeva talks about a pre lingual sense of order in the chara (associated with the primal mother and her prelingual body-centered arena) dependent indirectly on the effects of the Symbolic order, 'not the law,' mediated during the prelingual stage by the "vocal and gestural organization" associated with the chara: "We emphasize the regulated aspect of the chora: its vocal and gestural organization is subject to what we shall call an objective ordering (ordonnancernent), which is dictated by natural or socio-historical constraints such as the biological difference between the sexes or family structure. We may therefore posit that social organization, always already symbolic, imprints its constraint in a mediated form which organizes the chora not according to a law (a term we reserve for the symbolic) but through an ordering." (Kristeva 1984, 26-27) Also, see the following endnote (14). 1 4 Kristeva, citing Guignard (Epitre a l 'abjet, p. 152) referring to Melanie Klein's theories on the prelingual conflation of breast and penis, helps to shed light on mother-infant mutual stimulation, and the influence on psychic organization of the primary dyadic experience: "The "primary feminine" realm ( . . . ) organizes the earliest female identifications in boys as well as girls, as Klein lUlderstood it, around greed toward the naked breast and the early genital desire for the penis that is included in that breast. The union between the breast and the penis is what makes the primary feminine realm "a specific space for organizing the psychic realm." (Kristeva 2001, 120-1) The "libidinal mutual stimulation" that takes place between mother and baby thus lays the foundation for the birth of psychic life as well as the reality principle. Put another way, the child's capacity for psychic activity and thought depends on his or her primary identification with the maternal semiotic and FEMININITY. 1 5 Bowie concisely describes the topology inherent in the three Lacanian registers that "cover the entire hurnan field" and influence cryptically the psyche: "Lacan's triadic style resembles Freud's but not Hegel's, then, in that it seeks to cover the entire hurnan field without promising the individual mind any final consolidation of its powers or removal of its deficiencies. The Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real pressmize each other continuously and have their short-term truces, but they do not allow any embracing programme for synthesis to emerge inside or outside the analytic encolUlter. The three orders together comprise a complex topological space in which the characteristic disorderly motions of the human mind can be plotted." (Bowie 98-9) 1 6 Kristeva: " . . .the semiotic chara is no more than the place where the subject is both generated and negated, the place where his unity succurnbs before the process of charges and stases that produce him. We shall call this process of charges and stases a negativity to distinguish from negation, which is the act of a judging subject"(Kristeva 1984, 28)

Hollywood's (rn)Otber Aperture

261

17 See endnote 4 in the Prolegomenon endnotes above. Also, for a glimpse at signifiance in relation to and in conjunction with the chara: "For Kristeva, signifiance is a question of positioning. The semiotic continulUll must be split if signification is to be produced. This splitting (coupure) of the semiotic chara is the thetic phase (from thesis), enabling the subject to attribute differences and thus signification to what was the ceaseless heterogeneity of the chara. Following Lacan, Kristeva posits the mirror phase as the first step that permits 'the constitution of objects detached from the semiotic chora' C. . . ), and the Oedipal phase with its threat of castration as the moment in which the process of separation or splitting is fully achieved. Once the subject has entered into the symbolic order, the chara will be more or less successfully repressed and can be perceived only as pulsional pressure on or within symbolic language: as contradictions, meaninglessness, disruption, silences and absences. The chara, then, is a rhythmic pulsion rather than a new language. It constitutes the heterogeneous, disruptive dimension of language, that which can never be caught up in the closille of traditional linguistic theory." (Moi 1986, 13) 18 Kristeva's ambivalence vis-a-vis Plato's term chara and her 0"Wll self-reflection on the term is apparent in this quote in an endnote in a later volume: "Is the receptacle a "thing" or a mode oflanguage? Plato's hesitation between the two gives the receptacle an even more lUlcertain status." (Kristeva 1984, 239 Note 12) I argue that this ambivalence is built into the concept of the chara and speaks to the unspeakable and the maternal biological influence. 19 Kristeva's ideas on the mother's body as an enclosille that the newborn entity inadvertently separates from: "Without "believing" or "desiring" any "object" whatsoever, the subject is in the process of constituting himself vis-a-vis a non­ object. He is in the process of separating from this non-object so as to make that non-object "one" and posit himself as "other": the mother's body is the not-yet-one that the believing and the desiring subject will imagine as a "receptacle." (Kristeva 1 984, 241 Note 2 1 ) 20 Further reference for the navel and its telltale signifiance can b e found in the following Wiki excerpt: Delphi (I'd£1fml or /'d£1fi/; Greek: "£Npo� [5el 'fi])[I] is both an archaeological site and a modem to"Wll in Greece on the south-western Spill of Mount Parnassus in the valley ofPhocis. In myths dating to the classical period of Ancient Greece (510-323 Be), the site of Delphi was believed to be determined by Zeus when he sought to find the centre of his "Grandmother Earth" (Ge, Gaea, or Gaia). He sent two eagles flying from the eastern and western extremities, and the path of the eagles crossed over Delphi where the omphalos, or navel of Gaia was found.[2] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wikilDelphi) 2 1 Margaret Waller explains the 'subject-on-process/on-trial in a note in her translation of Kristeva's Revalutian inPaeticLanguage. " . . . the Kristevan subject is nonetheless always implicated in a heterogeneous signifying process: his identity, never become, ever becoming, questioned and questionable, is always on trial (en praces)." (Kristeva 1984, ix)

262

Notes

22 Charles Shepherdson has put together a concise analysis of Lacan's borrowing and adapting Merleau-Ponty's platonic concept of the visible and the invisible in relation to the human condition. It is called A Pound a/Flesh: Lacan 's reading of the Visible and the Invisible (See the Bibliography). Lacan relates invisibility to the Object's laClma in the realm of subjectivity that the subject accepts as a starting point in submitting to the Symbolic order. There is an oblique connection here between woman's lack, the chora, and phallogocentrisrn in which the woman (re)presents the lacuna that the Law of the Father doesn't consider visible. In the case ofthis scene from Minority Report, John Anderton has been grasped by the extra-logical Other forcing him to 'see' the invisible beyond the Symbolic, the lacuna that is woman and her Symbolic invisibility and mmder. Joan Copjec, in Lacanian, Foucauldian fashion, also relates visibility to blind subjectivity and invisibility to the woman: "The panoptic gaze defines, then, the perfect, i.e., the total, visibility of the woman under patriarchy, of any subject under any social order, which is to say, of any subject at all. For the very condition and substance of the subject's subjectivity is his or her subjectivization by the law of the society which produces that subject. One only becomes visible not only to others, but also to oneself through (by seeing through) the categories constructed by a specific, historically defined society. These categories of visibility are categories of knowledge. The perfection of vision and knowledge can only be procmed at the expense of invisibility and nonknowledge. According to the logic of the panoptic apparatus, these last do not and (in an important sense) cannot exist. One might summarize this logic - thereby revealing it to be more questionable than it is normally taken to be - by stating it thus: since all knowledge (or visibility) is produced by society (that is, all that it is possible to know comes not from reality, but from socially constructed categories of implementable thought), since all knowledge is produced, only knowledge (or visibility) is produced, or all that is produced is knowledge (visible)." (Copjec 1989, 55) 23 Shuli Barzilia's concise explanation: "Le semiotique, in the sense given it by Kristeva, differs from la semiotique, which is semiotics as a general, traditional science of signs. Her semiotic is a drive-affected dimension of human experience that disrupts (even as it interfuses with) the symbolic" (Barzilia 1999, 233) 24It must be mentioned that Julia Kristeva rarely if at all uses her expression semiotic with 'maternal' attached to make a compOlUld word. However, other scholars do, including Kelly Oliver, eminent Kristeva scholar, as attested to in this quote: "Like sacrifice, the violence of the semiotic returns within the very ritual that attempts to repress it. The maternal semiotic is focused in the symbol of the Virgin and its threat to the Symbolic order is thereby controlled." (Oliver 1993, 5 1 ) (my emphasis) And Barbara Creed uses the expression 'semiotic chora' instead of the 'maternal semiotic: "Kristeva's concept ofthe semiotic chora. Kristeva argues that the maternal body becomes the site of conflicting desires (the semiotic chora)." Creed 1990, 137) 25 See endnote l O in the Prologue above. 26 Drawing from Joan Copjec's application of Lacan to the movies, I am linking Lacan's mirror/screen/gaze concepts to the maternal, and the prelingual maternal to

Hollywood's (rn)Otber Aperture

263

the cinematic apparatus. As a pre-lingual hallmark in development, the mirror stage automatically carries the maternal influence and psychic residue albeit with an incipient objectifying element. In terms of Lacanian insights, Copjec speaks to film theory and Lacan's concept of the mirror as screen and the Other's gaze: "Let me first, in a kind of establishing shot, smnrnarize what I take to be the central misconception of film theory: believing itselfto be following Lacan, it conceives the screen as mirror, in doing so, however, it operates in ignorance of, and at the expense of, Lacan's more radical insight, whereby the mirror is conceived as screen." (Copjec 1989, 53-4) Later she adds: "Where the film theoretical position has tended to trap the subject in representation (an idealist failing), to conceive of language as constructing the prison walls of the subject's being, Lacan argues that the subject sees these walls as trompe l'oeil and is thus constructed by something beyond them. ( . . . ) The image, the visual field, then takes on a terrifying alterity that prohibits the subject from seeing itself in the representation. That "belong to me aspect" is suddenly drained from representation, as the mirror assumes the flUlction of a screen." (Copjec 1989, 69) This corresponds to the chora, the womb and the (m)Other as something 'beyond' language and forming a screen and gaze, a cinematic apparatus, of Otherness of which the mirror stage is a landmark moment. We will take up these concepts later with Freud's memory screen and Lewin's dream screen. 27 Stephen Heath gives us a direct quote from Freud regarding the comparison between the psychogenic processes and the editing aspects of the cinematic apparatus: '''The whole spatially extended mass of psychogenic material is in this way dra\Vll through a narrow cleft and thus arrives in consciousness cut up, as it were, into pieces or strips. It is the psychotherapist's business to put these together once more into the organization which he presumes to have existed.' [Freud, SE. II, London: Hogarth Press, 1955, pp. 291, 296.] It is as though, at the very moment of its birth. Freud is describing the cinematic apparatus, with the difference that that apparatus is constructed to ensme the constancy of the flow of images, a unity of presentation, a stable memory." (Heath 1997, 109) Further, Kristeva comments on cinema as a vehicle for fantasies, remarking on the drive-related operations (synthesis) inherent to the visible of which the cinema is a culminating apparatus: " . . . we can start by positing that a certain kind of cinema knO\Vll as realist projects fantasies. Since the visible is the port of registry of drives, their synthesis beneath language, cinema as an apotheosis of the visible offers itself to the plethoric deployment of fantasies." (Kristeva 2001, 69) Kristeva, in another prior work, cites Melanie Klein's work, via a somewhat loose use of the psychoanalytical term 'projection', and makes an oblique allusion to the cinematic-like operations of the pre-Oedipal, mentioning that the semiotic and the "pre-Oedipal processes [are] organized through the projection onto the mother's body" as if the mother's body were a kind of three-dimensional movie screen: "Throughout her \Vfitings, Melanie Klein emphasizes the "pre-Oedipal" phase, i.e., a period of the subject's development that precedes the "discovery" of castration and the positing of the

264

Notes

superego, which itself is subject to (paternal) Law. The processes she describes for this phase correspond, but on a genetic level, to what we call the semiotic, C . . . ). Significantly, these pre-Oedipal processes are organized through projection onto the mother's body, for girls as well as for boys . . . The Psycho-analysis a/Children. Alix Strachey, tr. [London: Hogarth Press, 1932]. p. 269." (Kristeva 1984, 241 Note 2 1 ) 2 8 Kristeva on the work of the followers of Melanie Klein regarding pre-lingual thought, fantasy and sensory stimuli including the visual: "Following Hanna Segal, for example. W. R. Bion returned to the evolution of the symbolic capacity in the young child, but he worked his way back before the depressive position and described the primitive thought that marks the paranoid-schizoid phase: in his view, projective identification is the first form of "thinking." He considers it to be a preverbal thought that is strictly private and that is made up oflinks among various sensory impressions, of "ideographs pertinent to the sense of vision," "a primitive matrix of ideographs." The ego and the object transform these sensory occmrences into "alpha elements" that are rendered "suitable for employment in dream thoughts, unconscious waking thinking, dreams, contact-barrier, memory." (Kristeva 2001, 173) In my opinion, these first forms of thinking and their 'suitability' for dreams and other lUlconscious-related workings of the psyche, create a kind of precursor in many ways and model to the processes and effects of the movies. The observations of Julia Kristeva as well as the post-Kleinians, that inform Kristeva, indirectly support this conclusion. 29 Freud and Rank talk of this compulsion in terms of the originary uncanny and the (m)Other: "In the lUlconscious mind we can recognize the dominance of a compulsion to repeat, which proceeds from instinctual impulses. This compulsion probably depends on the essential nature ofthe drives themselves. It is strong enough to override the pleasure principle and lend a demonic character to certain aspects of mental life; it is still clearly manifest in the impulses of small children and dominates part of the course taken by the psychoanalysis of victims ofnemosis. The foregoing discussions have all prepared us for the fact that anything that can remind us of this inner compulsion to repeat is perceived as uncanny." (Freud 1919, 145) And Otto Rank adds to this: " . . .it became clear to me that the strongest resistance to the severance of the libido transference at the end of the analysis is expressed in the form of the earliest infantile fixation on the mother. In nmnerous dreams belonging to this end-phase the finally undeniable fact forced itself upon us again and again that the fixation on the mother, which seems to be at the bottom of the analytic fixation (transference), includes the earliest physiological relation to the mother's womb. This rendered the regularity of the rebirth-phantasy intelligible and its underlying reality analytically comprehensible. The patient's "rebirth-phantasy" is simply a repetition in the analysis of his own birth. The freeing of the libido from its object, the analyst, seems to correspond to an exact reproduction of the first separation from the first libido object, namely of the newborn child from the mother." (Rank, 1929,4)

Hollywood's (rn)Otber Aperture

265

30 Studlar, in referencing the masochist's goal ofreturning to andrernerging with the Imaginary plenitude of the maternal dyad: "The masochistic infantile fantasy cannot, by its very nature, fulfill the satisfaction of desire except in the imagination, for the fantasy goal of masochism is, as Gustav Bychowski explains, the "dual lUlity and complete symbiosis between child and mother." (Bychowski, p. 260) Because symbiotic rernerger is a physical impossibility, death becomes the fantasy fulfilhnent to desire. It does not signal the defeat of desire or the end of the masochist's anticipated final trimnph; rather, it is the promise of a fantasrnical parthenogenetic rebirth from the mother, which is the final mystical solution to the expiation of the father and the symbiotic reunion with the idealized maternal rille." (StudJar 1988, 26) This compillsion for remerger with the Imaginary plenitude ofthe maternal authority finds a parallel in the movies that the popillarity of the chora-like cinematic apparatus instantiates. 31 See Chapter 6 on Spielberg'sA.I: Artificial Intelligence. 32 Cinematic suture, in basic terms, refers to sealing the rough, fragmented edges of illusionistic filmmaking in order to attempt to convert the viewer into a subject within the discoillse of the film. In other words, to create an atmosphere of identification for the spectator within the world ofthe film. Film schools teach suture primarily in the form of sustaining continuity and the illusion of the world of the film by means of narrative and film editing strategies that create a flow similar to what we experience in 'real' life. For a more expansive discussion of suture read Stephen Heath's book, Questions a/Cinema, specifically Chapter 3 On Suture. 33 "Lacan ( . . . ) asserts a fundamental alienation of the hmnan subject, an alienation which is constitutive ofbeing-hmnan, the alienation in the symbolic order: a human subject is not only a speaking being but, more radically, a being spoken, traversed by language, its truth lies outside itself, in the decentered symbolic order which forever eludes hmnan control; every dream of "appropriating" this alienated symbolic substance, of subordinating it to hmnan subjectivity is a hmnanist illusion . . . " (Zizek 2017, 447) The maternal semiotic works in the movies to reveal safely and therapeutically the ineffable aspects of the human condition that incorporate the topology of Lacan's triadic registers that (re)present subjectivity, Otherness and alienation. Kristeva's semiotic infiltrates, subverts and integrates symbiotically with these registers. 34 See Margret Gmmarsdottir Champion for more on the inherent therapeutic value of narrative and character in the literary sphere a sphere that incorporates the cinema. 35 Kristeva, in describing the abjection in the separation ofthe dyad before (m)Other becomes object: "Abjection preserves what existed in the archaism of pre-objectal relationship, in the immemorial violence with which a body becomes separated from another body in order to be." (Kristeva 1982, 10) See endnote 37 below in this chapter. 3 6 Kristeva, in referring to Freud's 'death drive(s),' often referred to as Thanatos, in relation to the maternal semiotic and the chora: "The mother's body is therefore what

266

Notes

mediates the symbolic law organizing social relations and becomes the ordering principle of the semiotic chora, which is on the path of destruction, aggressivity, and death. For although drives have been described as disunited or contradictory structures, simultaneously "positive" and "negative," this doubling is said to generate a dominant "destructive wave" that is (a) drive's most characteristic trait: Freud notes that the most instinctual drive is the death drive." (Kristeva 1 984, 28-9) 37 Kristeva on abjection's disregard for boundaries: "It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. "What does not respect borders, positions, rilles. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite. C .. ) . . . because it draws attention to the fragility of law . . . " (Kristeva 1982, 4) 38 Here are a few significant quotes regarding the 'phallic mother' from women who have strongly influenced my thoughts on this subject. Elizabeth A. Grosz comments on the 'suffocating dialectic of identification with the (phallic) mother. Kristeva follows with "Phallic" Mother at the threshold ofthe void like a filter where "nature" confronts "culture." Martha Reineke then talks of the Symbolic order naming the mother in terms of her 'phallic scar' and in relation to Kristeva 's StabbatMater. And finally, Barbara Creed speaks to the image of the phallic mother as perpetually attempting to "reincorporate and destroy all life." Elizabeth Grosz: ""Where the fetishist has one foot in the symbolic, representational order and the other in the pre-oedipal maternal realm, he can operate in accordance with the symbolic (Freud claimed that fetishism is the most satisfying of the sexual perversions; see Freud 1927) The psychotic, however, remains rooted in the imaginary, maternal space, a space based on the confusion of self and other, bound to the suffocating dialectic of identification with the (phallic) mother who is his imaginary double. (Grosz 58) Julia Kristeva: "Through a body, destined to insme reproduction of the species, the woman-subject, although under the sway of the paternal flUlction (as symbolizing, speaking subject and like all others), more of a filter than anyone else a thoroughfare, a threshold where "nature" confronts "culture." To imagine that there is someone in that filter such is the somce of religious mystifications, the font that nourishes them: the fantasy of the so-called "Phallic" Mother. Because if, on the contrary, there were no one on this threshold, if the mother were not, that is, if she were not phallic, then every speaker would be led to conceive of its Being in relation to some void, a nothingness asymmetrically opposed to this Being, a permanent threat against, first, its mastery, and ultimately, its stability." (Kristeva 1980, 238) Martha Reineke: "For Kristeva believes that preceding the pain of the phallic prohibition, in the death-work of emerging subjectivity, the would-be subject encolUlters another loss: a rupture within the maternal body that presages the sign. This splitting causes a child to lose its mother and a mother to lose her child in order that both can be. Of comse, the Symbolic order will summon every resource to ensme that those who read the text of a mother's body observe only a phallic scar. In a sacrificial economy, a mother's tears to which the Latin hynm on Mary's suffering attests must always be tears of a phallic mother confronted by her 0\Vll

Hollywood's (rn)Otber Aperture

267

castration before the Law (1976, 175-77: The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi)." (Reineke 1997, 173) Barbara Creed: "As phallic mother, woman is again represented as monstrous. "What is horrific is her desire to cling to her offspring in order to continue to 'have the phallus.' Her monstrous desire is concretized in the figure of the alien; the creature whose deadly mission is represented as the same as that of the archaic rnother--to reincorporate and destroy all life." (Creed 1 990, 139) 39 Alain Sheridan, Lacan's translator, explains the Real for Lacan as "the impossible" and goes on to create a telltale maternal metaphor: "the mnbilical cord of the symbolic." The attachment of the Real to the maternal does corne forward in Lacan quite often as Sheridan lets slip here" "Hence the formula: 'the real is the impossible.' It is in this sense that the term begins to appear regularly, as an adjective, to describe that which is lacking in the symbolic order, the ineliminable residue of all articulation, the foreclosed element, which may be approached, but never grasped: the umbilical cord of the symbolic." (Sheridan, tr, Lacan 2004, 280) 40 Kristeva: "Obviously, I am only like someone else: mimetic logic of the advent of the ego, objects, and signs. But when I seek (myself), lose (myself), or experience jouissance--then "I" is heterogeneous." 4 1 Lacan: "And what is herjouissance, her coming from? It is clear that the essential testimony of the mystics is that they are experiencing it but know nothing about it." (Lacan in Mitchell and Rose 1975, 1982, 147) 42 Lacan speaks to jouissance and what this literal coup de foudre sometimes gets sexually attributed to in popular discussion: "What was tried at the end of the last century, at the time of Freud, by all kinds of worthy people in the circle of Charcot and the rest, was an attempt to reduce the mystical to questions of fucking. If you look carefully, that is not what it is all about. Might not thisjouissance which one experiences and knows nothing of, be that which puts us on the path of existence? And why not interpret one face ofthe Other, the God face, as supported by feminine jouissance?" (Lacan 1982, 147) 43 See the above note 42 for Lacan's mystical reinforced and carnally tainted indictment of the phallocentric appropriation ofjouissance. 44Lacan: " . . . the real which creates [fait] desire by reproducing in it the relationship between the subject and the lost object. ( . . . ) This drama is not as accidental as it is believed to be. It is essential: for desire comes from the Other, and jouissance is located on the side of the Thing." (Lacan 2006, 724) The 'lost object' here is, arguably, the primal love object whose loss is sublimated in the speaking subject's "absorbing" by the love object as Kristeva seems to suggest: "As I "Wrote in Tales of Love, the love object absorbs my narcissistic needs, erotic desires, and most phantasmatic ideals, like the ideal of eternity." (Kristeva 2010, 162) Thus preventing the Real, the 'ideal of eternity' from 'absorbing,' that is, annihilating the subject as such. 45 Bruce Fink adapts several levels of Lacan's object a in a manner that directly incorporates the (m)Other: "This second formulation of Lacan's dictum, involving

268

Notes

man's desire to be desired by the Other, exposes the Other's desire as object a. The child would like to be the sole object of its mother's affections, but her desire almost always goes beyond the child: there is something about her desire which escapes the child, which is beyond its control. A strict identity between the child's desire and hers call1lot be maintained; her desire's independence from her child's creates a rift between them, a gap in which her desire, lUlfathornable to the child, flUlctions in a unique way. The approximate gloss on separation posits that a rift is induced in the hypothetical mother-child unity due to the very nature of the desire and that this rift leads to the advent of the object a. Object a can be understood here as the remainder produced when the hypothetical lUlity breaks do"Wll, as a last trace of that lUlity, a last reminder thereof. By cleaving to that rem(a)inder, the split subject, though expulsed from the Other, can sustain the illusion of wholeness; by clinging to the object a, the subject is able to ignore his or her division. That is precisely what Lacan means by fantasy, ( . . ). It is in the subject's complex relation to object a (Lacan describes this relation as one of "envelopment-development-conjlUlction-disjlUlction" [Ecrits, p. 280] that he or she achieves a phantasmatic sense of wholeness, completeness, fulfillment, and well-being." (Fink 1995, 59-60) 46 Grosz's description: " . . the fetishist has one foot in the symbolic, representational order andthe other in the pre-oedipal maternal reahn, he can operate in accordance with the symbolic (Freud claimed that fetishism is the most satisfying of the sexual perversions)." (Grosz 1989, 58) Despite describing here a more pathological arena, Grosz does describe a situation that resembles the socially normative, and so the sublimated state of a sexually gratifying relationship with an accepted partner however, the fetish object in a reciprocal love relationship is not an inanimate object, but a stand-in nonetheless for the (m)Other, and the sublimated objet petit a (the fantasized presence of the unobtainable desire of the (m)Other's) in the eyes of the lovers. "Ferenczi (1938), in his article Thalass: A Theory of Genitality, argues that coitus reflects men's desire to return to the mother's womb, a state of bliss and secmity. For Otto Rank (1924), birth involves the tramnatic separation me/not me from intrauterine ecstasy, followed by a lifelong desire to return to paradise and primal pleasure." (Silver 2007, 415) 47 In explaining Freud's interest in phylogeny influencing his new field ofpsychiatry based on the lUlconscious and the Oedipal father image to the exclusion of the maternal authority, Emanuel E. Garcia explains: "Freud grows even more bold and more daring with his consideration of the narcissistic nemoses and the phylogenetic epochs they represent. The dispositions to dementia praecox, paranoia and melancholia-mania, Freud asserts, must have been acquired by a second generation, sons of the primal father, heralding a new phase in civilization. Revising and extending ideas introduced in the notorious Totem and Taboo (1913), Freud claims that the primal father did not merely drive his sons out of the horde when they reached puberty; he actually castrated them, after which he allowed their return as drones." (Garcia 1988, 92) Fmther, Freud's Oedipal, phylogenetic bolstering of the .

Hollywood's (rn)Otber Aperture

269

importance of the primal father bleeds over into the post-Freudian Lacan's cryptic, perhaps post-structural emphasis of the primordial Father as the Law and the Signifier, as Bruce Fink elucidates: " . . . language protects the child from a potentially dangerous [maternal] dyadic situation, and the way this comes about is through the substitution of a name for the mother's desire. Name-of-the-Father Mother's Desire Read quite literally, this kind of fonnulation C . . . ) suggests the mother's desire is for the father (or whatever may be standing in for him in the family), and that it is thus his name which serves this protective paternal function by naming the mOther's desire." (Fink 1995, 57) 48 Fink concurs: "The paternal flUlction leads to the assimilation or instating of a name (which, as we shall see, is not yet a "full-fledged signifier," as it is not displaceable) that neutralizes the Other's desire, viewed by Lacan as potentially very dangerous to the child, threatening to engulf it or swallow it up. In a striking passage in Seminar XVII, Lacan SlUllS up in very schematic terms what he had been saying for years: "The mother's role is her desire. That is of capital importance. Her desire is not something you can bear easily, as if it were a matter of indifference to you. It always leads to problems. The mother is a big crocodile, and you find yourself in her mouth. You never know what may set her off suddenly, making those jaws clamp down. That is the mother's desire. So I tried to explain that there was something reassuring. I am telling you simple things indeed, I am improvising. There is a roller, made of stone, of COlise, which is potentially there at the level of the trap and which holds and jams it open. That is what we call the phallus. It is a roller which protects you, should the jaws suddenly close." (Fink 1995, 56) 49 "(objet petit a) namely, the ephemeral, unlocalizable property of an object that makes it especially desirable. It is therefore a fantasy, which Lacan (1972 1973) spoke of as the cause of desire. ( . . . ) It is what a subject seeks in love or passion beyond the possible gratification of instinctual wishes." (Kirchner 2005, 84) And Charles Shepherdson adds to Kirchner by exploring Lacan a little deeper on the 'objetpetit a : Lacan returns to this point, claiming that it is precisely in the encOlUlter with its 0\Vll lack, its 0\Vll radical division, and as a unique attempt to circlUllvent that division, that "the subject makes himself the object of another will" [SXI 168/185, emphasis added] . "It is the subject who determines himself as object, in his encounter with the division of subjectivity" [SXI 1681185]. We thus see more clearly the fimction of the "objet petit a" in Lacan, as a paradoxical "object oflack," a localization oflack, a "particularization" which allows the lack in the Other to be veiled at the very moment of its manifestation--and veiled in a quite precise way, namely, in a peculiar instance of substitution (metaphor), which Lacan regards as sacrificial, since the subject offers himselfup as the object that '

270

Notes

shows itself to be missing in the Other, identifying hirnselfwith the primordially lost "Thing" which makes the symbolic order incomplete. This is why Lacan claims that the experience of the gaze has to do with the lack that constitutes "castration anxiety": "the eye and the gaze--this is for us the split in which the drive is manifested at the level of the scopic field" [SXI 69-70172-73]. "At this level," Lacan says, "we are not even forced to take into aCcOlUlt any subjectification of the subject. The subject is an apparatus. This apparatus is something lacunary, and it is in the lacuna that the subject establishes the function of a certain object, qua lost object" [SXI 1681185]. In short, in the experience of the gaze, it is the subject who identifies with the object that would make the Other complete, fading or vanishing in a sacrificial movement of identification. (Shepherdson 1998, 84) 50 Elizabeth A. Grosz in referencing the psychotic patient, addresses the originary maternal aspect of the concept of the double: "The psychotic, [ . . . ] remains rooted in the imaginary, maternal space, a space based on the confusion of self and other, bound to the suffocating dialectic of identification with the (phallic) mother who is his imaginary double."CGrosz, 1989, 58) And Lucy Fischer, promoting the concept ofthe birth flUlction as "natural sphere ofthe doppelganger drama" weighs in: " . . . the double figme in literature may ultimately be based on a primal suppression of woman's birth flUlction-perhaps the only natural sphere ofthe doppelganger drama." (Fischer 1983, 40) 51 On a doppelganger associated side note: How cinematically and language appropriate, albeit coincidental, that the spritely genius Charlie Chaplin makes one of his first dialogue films spoofing Hitler dming the build up to WWII by creating a doppelganger classic that also spoofs the goodibad tendency for the 'double' trope in narratives. 52 Otto Rank: "The most prominent symptom ofthe forms which the double takes is a powerful consciousness of guilt which forces the hero no longer to accept the responsibility for certain actions of his ego, but to place it upon another ego, a double, . . . C . . . ) The frequent slaying ofthe double, through which the hero seeks to protect himself permanently from the pursuits of his self, is really a suicidal act." (Rank [ 1 914] 1971, 76-77) 53 Freud in this same paper in which he cites Rank, appears to posit a psychological precedence for the phenomena of doubling by referencing for the first time in print the concepts of ' self-observation ' and the separateness of the 'ideal ego ': "This ideal ego is now the target of the self-love which was enjoyed in childhood by the actual ego. The subject's narcissism makes its appearance displaced on to this new ideal ego, which, like the infantile ego, finds itself possessed of every perfection that is of value. As always where the libido is concerned, man has here again shO\vn himself incapable of giving up a satisfaction he had once enjoyed. He is not willing to forgo the narcissistic perfection of his childhood; and when, as he grows up, he is disturbed by the admonitions of others and by the awakening of his own critical judgement, so that he can no longer retain that perfection, he seeks to recover it in the new form

Hollywood's (rn)Otber Aperture

271

of an ego ideal. What he projects before him as his ideal is the substitute for the lost narcissism of his childhood in which he was his own ideal." (Freud 1957 (1914), 93) 54 In describing E. T. A. Hoffman as the 'lUuivalled master of the uncalllly in literature,' Freud gives us a concise cross-section of the Doppelganger trope: "One must content oneself with selecting the most prominent of those motifs that produce an uncanny effect and see whether they too can reasonably be traced back to infantile SOlices. They involve the idea of the 'double' (the Doppelganger), in all its nuances and manifestations that is to say, the appearance of persons who have to be regarded as identical because they look alike. This relationship is intensified by the spontaneous transmission of mental processes from one of these persons to the other what we would call telepathy so that the one becomes CO-O"Wller of the other's knowledge, emotions and experience. Moreover, a person may identify himself with another and so become unsme of his true self; or he may substitute the other's self for his 0"Wll. The self may thus be duplicated, divided and interchanged. Finally there is the constant recurrence of the same thing, the repetition of the same facial features, the same characters, the same destinies, the same misdeeds, even the same names, through successive generations." (Freud [ 1 9 1 9] 2003, 141) 55 Although conflated with an analogy of 'primitive man' and their cults, Freud nevertheless uses language that seems to index the pre-lingual connotations of the double, dming a 'single phase in the evolution of the self:' "Its uncanny quality can surely derive only from the fact that the double is a creation that belongs to a primitive phase in our mental development, a phase that we have smmOlUlted, in which it admittedly had a more benign significance. The double has become an object of terror, just as the gods become demons after the collapse of their cult . . (. . ) The other disturbances of the ego that Hoffmann exploits in his \Vfitings are easy to judge in accordance with the pattern set by the motif of the double. They involve a harking back to single phases in the evolution of the sense of self, a regression to times when the ego had not yet clearly set itself off against the world outside and from others." (Freud 2003, 143) Freud's references to regression and the ego not yet setting itself off from others, demonstrate Freud's intuitionally innovative spirit. His observations demonstrate an early opening oftheoretical space for investigating the prelingual. 56 See Lucy Fischer on the female doppelganger, or doppelganger in, that she finds clustered in Hollywood women's melodramas of the 1 940s. (Fischer 1983) Fmther, Susan Yi Sencindiver posits: "As a rule, the literary motif of the doppelganger constitutes a male phenomenon and its lUliverse is characterized by the striking absence of women. This absence may be traced to the affinity found between the doppelganger and the gestating and parturient woman. Arguably pregnant with the fantasies of male self-procreation and childbirth, the classic male doppelganger narrative thus renders women and the maternal body obsolete." (Sencindiver 201 1, 32) .

272

Notes

57 See Susan Yi Sencindiver's remarkable work on the double. (Sencindiver 2010, 201 1 ) 58 As Sencindiver states: "Female personas prove a scarcity among the pages of doppelganger fiction, but most notable is the absence of the mother." (Sencindiver 201 1, 73) And as she suggests, earlier in the essay, in admonition of classical psychoanalysis and motherhood: "Both Kristeva and Irigaray redress the Freudian and Lacanian system in which the formative nature of maternal relations in early infantile experience is obscmed or displaced." (Sencindiver 201 1, 66) 59 Some other researchers who advance the study of doppelgangers in their work include Rosalind Minsky, Milica Zikovic, and Slavoj Zizek. 60 I recommend Melanie Klein and Karen Homey's research and -writing on the subject of womb envy and I will refer to their research in later chapters. However in the meantime, Eva Feder Kittay, although appearing to claim the term 'womb envy' as her own invention, does give a succinct, albeit slightly superficial, description of what such condition might entail: "Although the notion of a parallel envy is suggested by the Freudian concept [penis envy], we can independently raise the question of whether men, generally, might not envy women's distinctive sexual apparatus and functions and whether such envy might constitute a significant element in their personality development having explanatory force with regard to both individual actions and cultural institutions. Such envy I designate "womb envy," meaning by the term not merely envy of the specifically named organ but of the complex of a woman's organs and capacities, particularly as it relates to her distinctive childbearing functions." (Kittay 1983, 95) 61 Otto Rank: " . . . it became clear to me that the strongest resistance to the severance of the libido transference at the end of the analysis is expressed in the form of the earliest infantile fixation on the mother. In nmnerous dreams belonging to this end­ phase the finally lllldeniable fact forced itself upon us again and again that the fixation on the mother, which seems to be at the bottom of the analytic fixation (transference), includes the earliest physiological relation to the mother's womb." (Rank, 1929, 4) 62 Otto Rank's telltale observation: "In dreams at the end of the analytic cure I found the phallus often used as "symbol" of the umbilical cord." (Rank 1929, 20 note 2) 63 Freud: "A jocular saying has it that 'love is a longing for horne', and if someone dreams of a certain place or a certain landscape and, while dreaming, thinks to himself, 'I know this place, I've been here before,' this place can be interpreted as representing his mother's genitals or her womb. Here too, then, the uncanny [the 'llllhomely' is what was once familiar ['homely,' 'homey']. The negative prefix un­ is the indicator of repression." (Freud 2003, 1 5 1 ) 64 Jacques-Alain Miller indicates that Lacan's perspective on 'intimacy' signifies subjectivity, not the Real 'moi,' that is, the Other: " . . . where the circle ofthe subject contains as the most intimate (intime) of its intimacy the extimacy of the Other. In a certain way, this is what Lacan is commenting on when he speaks of the unconscious as discourse of the Other, of this Other who, more intimate than my intimacy, stirs

Hollywood's (rn)Otber Aperture

273

me. And this intimate which is radically Other, Lacan expressed with a single word: extirnacy." (Miller, 2008) http://www.lacan.com/syrnptorn/extirnity.htm 65 Freud elucidates the recmsive uncannyilmheirnliche: " . . . ifpsychoanalytic theory is right in asserting that every affect arising from an emotional impulse of whatever kind is converted into fear by being repressed, it follows that among those things that are felt to be frightening there must be one group in which it can be shown that the frightening element is something that has been repressed and now returns. This species of the frightening would then constitute the lUlcanny, and it would be immaterial whether it was itself originally frightening or arose from another affect. In the second place, ifthis really is the secret nature of the lUlcanny, we can lUlderstand why German usage allows the familiar (das Heimliche, the 'homely') to switch to its opposite, the uncalllly (des Unheimliche, the 'lUlhomely'), for this uncanny element is actually nothing new or strange, but something that was long familiar to the psyche and was estranged from it only through being repressed. The link with repression now ilhuninates Schelling's definition of the lUlcanny as 'something that should have remained hidden and has corne into the open'." (Freud 2003, 146-7) Freud becomes more specific and more intuitionally pre-lingual oriented when he continues a few pages later: "It often happens that neurotic men state that to them there is something uncanny about the female genitals. But what they find lUlcanny 'lUlhomely' is actually the entrance to man's old 'horne', the place where everyone once lived. Ajocular saying has it that 'love is a longing for horne', and ifsomeone dreams of a certain place or a certain landscape and, while dreaming, thinks to himself, 'I know this place, I've been here before', this place can be interpreted as representing his mother's genitals or her womb. Here too, then, the uncanny [the 'lUlhomely'] is what was once familiar ['homely', 'homey']. The negative prefix un- is the indicator of repression." (Freud 2003, 1 5 1 )

Chapter 1 1 See the writings of Annette Kuhn, Laura Mulvey, Teresa de Lametis and Kaja Silverman. 2 Focusing in on FEMININITY and the patriarchal economy, Toril Moi states: "Why should feminism remain faithful to the patriarchal project of gendering the world? ( ... ) My 0\Vll vision offeminism--not of 'femininity' is for a politics which would abandon every attempt to set up restrictive ideals for female practice, be it textual or sexual. Or to put it radically and polemically: femininity is a patriarchal problem. Feminists must therefore be able to analyze the phenomenon more persuasively than any patriarch could ever do. In their different ways, Cixous, Irigaray, Kristeva and Beauvoir all help us to do so. But let us make no bones about it: in the end, femininity is not and ought never to become a feminist question." Moi, Toril. "Femininity Revisited." Journal of Gender Studies 1 (1992): 324. As Dr. Moi implies, the polemic over femininity and FEMININITY is far more comprehensive than a

274

Notes

political stance within the patriarchal hegemony and therefore difficult to institutionalize in a politically tangible manner other than in the patriarchal hegenorny. This is the bane and the promise of a discoillse ofIon femininity, if not primal FEMININITY, in mainstream movies. 3 Refer to David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson. The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode a/Production to 1960. New York City: Cohunbia University Press, 1985. 4 Elizabeth Cowie, Representing Woman: Cinema and Psychoanalysis. (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 166. 5Irigaray's description of women mimicking the desires of the patriarchal subject speaks to the quality of the female voice that constructs a mimesis of the phallogocentric address in film. "And when she also openly displays their power fantasies, this serves as a re-creation to them in their struggle for power. By setting before them, keeping in reserve for them, in her infancy, what they must of comse keep clear of in their pursuit of mastery, but which they yet cannot wholly renounce for fear of going off course. So she will be the Pythia who apes induced desires and suggestions foreign to her still hazy consciousness, suggestions that proclaim their credibility all the louder as they carry her ever fmther from her interests. By resubmitting herself to the established order, in this role of delirious double, she abandons, even denies, the prerogative historically granted for her: lUlconsciousness. She prostitutes the unconscious itself to the ever-present projects and projections of the masculine consciousness." (Irigaray 1 984, 141) Fmthermore, Kristeva speaks to a devotion some women have to the Symbolic order as a defense/assault against the (m)Other. She links feminism with this defensive strategy. In Reading Kristeva, Oliver states: "As a defense, some women devote themselves to the Symbolic order. Kristeva identifies feminism as one such defense." (Kelly Oliver 1993, 62) 6 Exemplar films include Awakenings (Marshall, 1990), Valley Girl (Coolidge, 1983), Fast Times at Ridgemont High (Heckerling, 1982) and others produced and/or directed by women within the commercial film industry. Many of these women producers and directors continue for the most part with the same mimetic strategies resulting in similar productions to their male counterparts. 7 Harvey Greenberg in his article on The Piano makes note of Ada's youthful trill in her narration. "The camera peers at the emerging world through the lattice of a child's fingers, while Ada's six-year-old voice tells us she ceased speaking at that age, and does not remember why." (Greenberg 1994, 46) 8 "Ada is not so much unable as unwilling to speak. She suffers, or, depending upon one's vie-wpoint, practices elective mutism. This rare, puzzling condition usually develops in early childhood and occurs rather more frequently in girls than boys." (Greenberg, 1994, 46) 9 Ada's exclusive use of sign language seems to take what Reineke interprets of Kristeva's semiotic within the gaps of words, much further into a 'wordless motherland:' "The semiotic for Kristeva is not that which falls outside of language: a state of nature, and eternal feminine. ( . . . ) The semiotic, a modality of language, is

Hollywood's (rn)Otber Aperture

275

shaped necessarily by the Symbolic. Consequently, the lUlconscious, whose legacy the semiotic preserves, is not presented topographically by Kristeva as a wordless mother-land; for the lUlconscious emerges only in the space of words, in the gaps and fissmes of language that mark the speech of the "I," belying its coherent, seamless self-representation as a subject fully in possession of itself." (Reineke 1997, 39-40) 10 For more on masquerade and the masking of FEMININITY with the material of phallogocentric machinations of femininity, see Jane Ussher's Fantasies of Femininity: Reframmg the Boundaries a/Sex. Specifically see the pages describing "Doing Girl." (Ussber 1997, 359) Two articles also worth seeing are Outperforming Femininity: Public Conduct and Private Enterprise in Louisa May Alcott's Behind a Mask by Mary Elliot in ATQ, Dec. 1994, Vol. 8 Issue 4, page 299; andPretending In "Penelope": Masquerade, Mimicry, and Molly Bloom by K. Devlin published in Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Fall, 1991, Vol. 25, Issue 1, page 7 1 . I also recommend Mary Ann Doane's article Film andMasquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator. In Screen, Number 23 (September-October, 1982). 1 1 See Mulvey for a nuanced study on scopophilia and the male gaze. 1 2 " . . . the systematic play of differences, of traces of differences, of the spacing [espacements] by which elements relate to one another. This spacing is the production, simultaneously active and passive (the "a" of differance indicates this indecision as regards activity and passivity, that which cannot yet be governed and organized by that opposition), of intervals without which the "full" terms could not signify, could not fimction." (Derrida 1 9 8 1 , 27) Derrida's word-play defending the post-structuralist freedom of the signifier is very much manifest in Campion's work and in this scene but in the form of image-play and the difference and deference it causes. This is accomplished via the "middle voice" of the (active) deconstruction of and the (passive) adherence to mainstream production practices while featuring the image-play between the profilmic camera (the depicted photographer's still camera), the depiction of an eye's gaze, the unfulfilled eyeline match (a lapse in film grammar), and the filmic camera (the camera which sets up and records what we see on the screen). Campion effectively demonstrates an aspect of semiotic, post­ structuralist differance. And this amounts to dissolution of immediacy a sign configuration that disrupts the opacity of discoillse, creating a plurality, i.e., the effects of differance. 1 3This note-\Vfiting motif in The Piano is an example of intertextuality and lends itself strongly to Ada's literate and extra-lingual exceptionalism. Ada is creating a disposable literary corpus via her \Vfitten word on sheets from a notepad that she carries periodically around her neck on a chain. Although her \Vfitten word is used to commlUlicate with non-signing persons such as Stewart, within the context of Campion's movie, Ada's oeuvre is slightly anterior to its display, and therefore an intertext that is 'self-quoted' while depicted once removed by the filmmaker on the screen. Furthermore, the self-quote is deconstructed because although the definition of Ada's 'text' is literally valid and emphasized by inclusion in the film text, it is

276

Notes

invalid as a text if we determine that a text should not be readily disposable. Once again, a nod to Derrida's active/passive, difference/deference, his difference, a phrrality in the end. Kristeva, who coined the term "inter-textuality" (although preferring "transposition"), addresses the meaning of the term intertextuality in the following phrralist way: "The term inter-textualify denotes this transposition of one (or several) sign systern(s) into another; but since this term has often been understood in the banal sense of "study of sOillces," we prefer the term transposition because it specifies that the passage from one signifying system to another demands a new articulation of the thetic of enunciative and denotative positionality. If one grants that every signifying practice is a field of transpositions of various signifying systems (an inter-textuality), one then understands that its "place" of emmciation and its denoted "object" are never single, complete, and identical to themselves, but always plural, shattered, capable of being tabulated. In this way polysemy can also be seen as the result of a semiotic polyvalence an adherence to different sign systems." (Kristeva 1984, 59-60) The female gaze, that is in part, dispositions of primal FEMININITY, manifests in the arts, highlights intertextuality's multi-textual exchange both as a stylistic choice and as an (appropriately) oblique reference to the intertextual relationship between the semiotic and the symbolic. In this scene, Campion is featuring the written (disposable) text linked to the (m)Other within a motion picture text (linked to narrative structure, which in turn is linked to the Symbolic order). In addition, Campion uses filmic technique as a text used to reproduce and so render indisposable Ada's 'disposable' -written text while referencing music as a ([ml0ther's) text/discourse via Ada's attachrnent to her piano and her 0\Vll music. 14 This barter for sexual favors has caused controversy. Is the exchange a manifestation of Eros or soft porn? bell hooks in her ideologically charged manner suggests that Campion is promoting misogynistic imagery in her depiction of the relationship between Baines and Ada. She writes that Baines " . . . is Norman Mailer's "white negro," seducing Ada by promising to return the piano that Stewart has exchanged with him for land." (hooks 1 994, 1 1 9-1 20) In another less disparaging vein, Richard Allen, -writes: " ... the exchange between Ada and Baines involves a certain reciprocity. However, it is a reciprocity conditioned by the terms of a contract. Ada does indeed begin to take pleasure in Baines' attention as her piano playing seems increasingly to become a solicitation, but it is a pleasme that does seem to be conditioned by her willingness to be objectified within a perverse scenario of control and submission. Of course, whether or not the relationship between Ada and Baines is accurately described as perverse isjust what is at stake in interpreting these scenes. ( . . . ) It is certainly possible to view the "perversity" staged in the film as an hyperbolisation of romance, as a way of portraying the frisson, the electricity of erotic fantasy." (Allen 2000, 59) Cyndy Hendershot also reads less perversity and more Eros into Baines and Ada's contract: "Baines has seen the piano from Ada's perspective and hence has corne to see it as an object of desire. What he desperately tries to do after this is to place

Hollywood's (rn)Otber Aperture

277

himself in the structural position occupied by the piano vis-a-vis Ada: he tries to make hirnselfthe object ofAda's desire. By recognizing Ada's desire and placing his desire within her context, Baines has recognized a fundamental tenet of Lacanian subjectivity: my desire is the desire of the other. Baines is hence decentered, forced to fmd his desire through Ada's." (Hendershot 1998, 1 0 1 ) 1 5 Mark A . Reid comments on the male gaze in terms o f strategic camera angles dming this sequence in the fihn: "The audience is cornplicit in Baines' voyeurism since they view Ada through the perspective of Baines' upskirt low-angle shot." (Reid 2000, 108) Campion successfully mimics the male gaze in this strategic scene that elicits complicity from the spectator. As well as simultaneously eliciting from the spectator the troubling, soothing and enveloping memory of the Imaginary Wholeness. 1 6 Stephen Heath in translating Barthes, proposes this definition of the untranslatable jouissance: " .. jouissance is specifically contrasted to plaisir by Barthes in his Le Plaisir du texte: on the one hand a pleasure (plaisir) linked to cultural enjoyment and identity, to the cultural enjoyment of identity, to a homogenizing movement of the ego; on the other a radically violent pleasme (jouissance) which shatters-­ dissipates, loses that cultural identity, that ego." (Barthes 1977, 9). Kristeva goes fmther with this violent pleasure that shatters. She associates it with the transgression and euphoria of the maternal semiotic. Martha Reineke explains: "By jouissance, Kristeva refers to an excess and surplus of being inassimilable alterity that establishes for hmnans the possibility of creation, communion, ne"Wlless, pleasure, and transgression." (Reineke 1997, 24) The "inassimilable alterity" in Reineke's explanation refers to the alterity that originates in the space of the maternal other, the (m)Other. 1 7Jacques Lacan is exacting when it comes to defining the precarious and extra­ logical, psychic space oflove, a liminal space equally (not) shared by the Law of the Father and the (m)Other: "( . . . ) at the junction of the symbolic and imaginary, this fault line, if you will, this ridge line called love-- . . . " (Lacan 1988, 271) 1 8 Kelly Oliver explains Kristeva's departure from Lacan in this prelingual, transitional stage in human development: "The discomse of psychoanalysis postulates the fundamentally split subject, both conscious and unconscious, a subject-in-processlon trial. Her notion of subject-in-process, however, challenges Lacanian psychoanalysis, with its emphasis on the mirror stage and the Name ofthe Father as the initiation into subjectivity. For her, subjectivity is a process that begins with the material body before the mirror stage. It is a process that has its begillllings in the maternal function rather than the paternal flUlction. The maternal body itself is a primary model of the subject-in-process." (Oliver 1993, 13) 1 9 Alison Weber in her wonderful study of femininity and rhetoric as represented by the -writing of Saint Teresa of Avila, suggests that the double bind is conducive to a form of meta-discomse which she calls meta-cornrnlUlication: "Although the double bind was originally formulated as part of the etiology of schizogenic family structures, subsequent research has explored the salutary and creative responses to

278

Notes

the bind. Double bind dilemmas can be handled without despair ifthe subject is able, in some way, to distinguish and acknowledge the interwoven components of the message. This may be done by giving a manifestly dual message in reply: instead of being paralyzed by the attempt to reconcile conflicting demands, the subject can reply illogically, with paradoxes of his or her O"Wll. A sufficiently resoillceful subject can also break off or redefine the emotional dependency of the binding relationship. Finally, the subject can learn to meta-communicate to appreciate and articulate the logical paradox in the bind . . . " (Weber 1990, 48) There is a parallel in Campion's post-structuralist feminist discoillse in film vis-a-vis the double bind established in the mainstream cinematic apparatus and Saint Teresa of Avila's "meta­ commlUlicative" -writings vis-a-vis the double-bind institutionalized by the mainstream Catholic religious practices during the 16th century. 2°In the spirit of infinite semiosis, and the uncanny polysemy of the maternal semiotic, we are driven to consider several possibilities from the signs that Campion displays here. Given that previously Ada told Flora that she has communicated telepathically with Flora's father, it is conceivable that Ada communicated telepathically with Baines during this interlude and he is asking for a whisper to verify her thoughts reaching his mind. If this is the case, it speaks for Baines as he is the only male who does not express fear of her extrasensory abilities. This scene lends itself to multiple readings and is consistent with Campion's deconstruction of the Law ofthe Father. 2 1 In contrast, Richard Allen argues that Ada enters the Symbolic order like an awakening to her "lack" of Imaginary Wholeness which is essentially what transpires for a child dming the Mirror Phase. Allen states: "Insofar as Ada's subjectivity in the film is defined by a bodily narcissism, her awakening to the world of sexual desire comes at a great cost, for she is also awakened to the fact of her own lack of self-sufficiency." (Allen 2000, 60) Campion, however, in her film indicates that Ada has most likely already experienced sexual desire in the past resulting in her child Flora and nevertheless she retains her "bodily narcissism." She therefore shares extra-logically in the speaking subject's adult desire as well as the pre-lingual wholeness. Effectively, she both has and has not entered the Symbolic order. 22 Emma Parker references an etymological polysemy in Freud's use of the word uncanny. "In his essay "The Uncanny" ( 1 9 1 9), Freud explains that the lUlcanny or unhomely (the literal translation of the German unheimlich) is related to what is frightening, to what arouses dread and horror and gives rise to feelings of repulsion and distress, and he gives death, dead bodies, the return of the dead, spirits and ghosts as prime examples (17:219; 241). However, he expands that definition by adding that, rather than deriving from the unfamiliar (as the term itself might suggest), the uncanny "is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is knmvn of old and long familiar" (17:220). It is the return of the repressed, as Freud explains: "[T]his uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it through the process of repression . . . .the uncanny is something which ought to have

Hollywood's (rn)Otber Aperture

279

remained hidden but has corne to light. ("The Uncanny" 241)" (parker 2000, 153) In a manner of speaking, Ada's connection to the chara and her outlaw affair with Baines are emmciations ofthe maternal authority that oughtto have remained hidden but has corne to light. Stewart tries to hide her away within the phallogocentric construct (re)presented by his barricaded cabin. 23Kaja Silverman expands on Kracauer to convey this special connection between the spectator and filmic (re)presentation: "The life for which this spectator yearns is, of COlise, his or her mVli. Kracauer makes that clear not only through his emphasis upon the cinephile's self-alienation, but through the natal metaphor by means of which he articulates the ideal relationship between the cinematic apparatus and the profilmic event Films, he -writes, conform most rigorously to om dreams when the camera seems as ifit has "just now extricated [its objects] from the womb ofphysical existence as if the umbilical cord between image and actuality [has] not yet been severed." (Theory o/Film, Kracauer, p. 164). Kracauer's viewer longs not only for the restoration of this "actuality," but for the return of a presubjective condition, as well. Significantly, the life line leading back to fusion and nondifferentiation is the indexical relation of the camera to its object." (Silverman 1988, 8) Silverman compares the disavowed connection between the camera and the profilmic object to the umbilical cord connecting the subject with the (m)Other and nondifferentiation. And this in turn affords the viewer an oblique link to the maternal semiotic in the Imaginary. We receive pleasure from many levels of awareness while experiencing the filmic event, one of which coincides with the vicarious uncanny fusion of om subjectivity and objectivity as experienced prior to language, prior to the Symbolic order, prior to the mirror phase. 24 In juxtaposing a male subject's poem interpreted vocally by the mute female protagonist in a voice-over accompanying the undersea visuals (re)presenting the maternal semiotic, Campion signals a non-essentialist FEMININITY in the semiotic underpinnings of the Symbolic order. The implied continuum in the signifiance of FEMININITY is substantiated by the pre-lingual, pre-oedipal stage in human development indelibly marked by the maternal economy. In this montage, Campion engages in intertextual practice along with the free exchange of masculine and feminine enunciation, as well as man and woman enunciating (inscribed and vocalized), within the sphere of primal FEMININITY vis-a-vis the maternal abyss. 25 Thomas Hood (1799-1 845): "Sonnet: Silence." (CarnpionI993, 123)

Chapter 2 1 See Ernest Alfred Vizeltelly's Bluebeard: AnAccount o/Comorre the Cursed and Gilles De Rais. 2 "The animus is the deposit, as it were, of all woman's ancestral experiences ofman - and not only that, he is also a creative and procreative being, not in the sense of masculine creativity, but in the sense that he brings forth something we might call ..

280

Notes

the spermatic word." (Jung 1966, par. 336.) The term 'spermatic word' certainly conjmes a telltale phallogocentric implication, if not covertly Bluebeardian, in its utterance.

Chapter 3 1 Follow this link to Ovid's verse on Salrnacis and Herrnaphroditus. http://www.lilithgallery.comllibrary!hennaphroditus! 2 See M. Robinson's article, Salmacis and Hermaphroditus: When Two Become One: (Ovid, Met. 4.285-388) in The Classical Quarterly, VoL 49, No. I (1999) pp. 2 1 2-223. 3 The maternal authority includes not only the maternal primacy but also her influence on the infant's desires to return to the primal dyad and to physically resemble the (rn)Otber as Studlar reflects: "Socarides regards the phallic fetish, the mother's fantasy penis, as the child's attempt to create the mother as the hermaphrodite parent, the fantasy projection of the child's drive to become both sexes. The original motive for this is the male child's mvn "wish for female genitalia, the wish for a child and the wish to lUldo separation from the mother by being like mother in every way." (Studlar 1985, 19) This desire for and identification with the (m)Other plays into the extreme subversive threat that masochism appears to project vis-a-vis the Law of the Father. 4 Freud's discovery of the fortlda game and his explanation demonstrates the dire and plentiful aspects of the mother's absence and presence for the preverbal child. "The child was not at all precocious in his intellectual development. At the age of one and a half he could say only a few comprehensible words; he could also make use of a nmnber of sounds which expressed a meaning intelligible to those around him. He was, however, on good terms with his parents and their one servant-girl, and tributes were paid to his being a 'good boy'. He did not disturb his parents at night, he conscientiously obeyed orders not to touch certain things or go into certain rooms, and above all he never cried when his mother left him for a few hours. At the same time, he was greatly attached this mother, who had not only fed him herself but had also looked after him without any outside help. This good little boy, however, had an occasional disturbing habit oftaking any small objects he could get hold of and throwing them away from him into a corner, lUlder the bed, and so on, so that hlUlting for his toys and picking them up was often quite a business. As he did this he gave vent to a loud, 10ng-dra\Vll-out "0-0-0-0", accompanied by an expression of interest and satisfaction. His mother and the -writer of the present account were agreed in thinking that this was not a mere interjection but represented the German word "forf' [gone]. I eventually realized that it was a game and that the only use he made of any of his toys was to play "gone" with them. One day I made an observation which confirmed my view. The child had a wooden reel with a piece of string tied rOlUld it. It never occmred to him to pull it along the floor behind him,

Hollywood's (rn)Otber Aperture

281

for instance, and play at its being a carriage. What he did was to hold the reel by the string and very skillfully throw it over the edge of his cmtained cot, so that it disappeared into it, at the same time uttering his expressive "0-0-0-0." He then pulled the reel out of the cot again by the string and hailed its reappearance with a joyful "rid" [there]. This, then, was the complete game disappearance and return. As a rille one onlywitnessed its first act, which was repeated lUltiringly as a game in itself; though there is no doubt that the greater pleasure was attached to the second act. The interpretation of the game then became obvious. It was related to the child's great cultural achievement the instinctual renunciation (that is, the remmciation of instinctual satisfaction) which he had made in allowing his mother to go away without protesting. He compensated himself for this, as it were, by himself staging the disappearance and return of the objects within his reach." (Freud, The Standard Edition, Vol. XVIII, 15-16) 5 The reason I refer to Ada and Baines's relationship as an 'oblique disavowal ofthe Law of the Father,' is because Ada seems to have relinquished her selective mutism and is depicted as learning to speak, an artifact and engine of the Symbolic. However, the ending is a montage that can be read as simply a fantasy rather than a veritable series of events. Therefore, the Law of the Father is not necessarily validated in this tongue-in-cheek "happy ending." In some ways, this quirky ending mirrors the phantasmagoric ending of In the Cut as described later in this chapter. 6 "We have to remember that the castration complex has also a positive side, the content of which is that a penis is imagined in a part of the body where it does not exist. We have therefore to look for an infantile situation of universal occurrence in which a penis-like part of the body is taken from another person, given to the child as his 0"Wll (a situation with which are associated pleasurable sensations), and then taken away from the child causing "pain" (Unlust). This situation can be none other than that of the child at the breast. Before proceeding further I should like to mention some facts from the analysis of dreams which have given me the idea that the content of the castration thoughts is the withdrawal of the nipple." (Starcke, 1 82) And Franz Alexander follows up on this concept: "The loss of a pleasure-giving part of the body as a result of a previous pleasurable sensation produced by it (stimulation of the mucous membrane). As he grows, every human being learns that every pleasure ends in "pain"; he learns it through the primal castration experiences the loss of the pleasure-giving nipple after the pleasure of sucking (oral primal castration according to Starcke (1 1)) and later the loss of the pleasure-giving stool after the anal pleasure of retention (anal primal castration according to Freud) An effective basis is therefore well prepared on which the fear or expectation of castration may arise. As the earliest affective basis of all for the expectation of castration we may regard the act of birth, which entails the loss of the mother's body, actually a part of the child's 0"Wll body, and also the loss of the fetal membranes. (12) At the moment of birth a pleasurable condition (the pleasure of absence of stimuli) and a pleasure-giving organ (the

282

Notes

uterus) are lost for the first time in life, and are replaced by a painful condition." (Alexander, 158-9) 7 McPhee posits that there is " . . . a new masochistic aesthetic that is based around the juxtaposition of the obscene and the beautiful, the abject and the sensual, the explicit and the hidden. From a spectatorial perspective, such an aesthetic is simultaneously tramnatic and pleasurable, situating the viewer in a position that echoes the masochistic themes of the narratives through the evocation of transgression, extremity and eroticism." (McPhee, 99-100) 8 There are several excellent books and papers dealing with film andthe masochistic aesthetic and these include Gaylyn Studlar's work, Kathleen McHugh, Ruth Mcphee, and Frances L. Restuccia. All of these can be found in my bibliography below. 9 In speaking of Von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich films and the femme fatal image, Studlar describes the power of the "oral mother:" "She is fatal because she represents masochism's fantasy of the powerful oral mother, the site of rebirth, and the child's symbiotic merger into nonidentity. She represents the dialectical unity created in masochism's fusion of pain and pleasme, liberation and death. Death and desire become mirror reflections as their mysteries dialectically lUlite in a disavowal of identity that is also a trimnph of masochism's promise of liberation through death." (Studlar, 83) 10 "The cinematic screen, the ultimate prosthesis in the history ofhmnan invention, serves as a smrogate, deriving from infancy, for the physiological and psychic lUlion we enjoyed with the mother: the screen is both breast and infant, the mother and self. Our sense of reality as we watch a film arises from a revival of the dreamlike state of infancy when om ego \Vas absorbed in the chara of the mother." (Eberwein, 34) 1 1 "Lacan stresses the enigmatic character ofthe repetition-compulsion. He remarks, "Nothing has been more enigmatic than this Wiederholen, which is very close, so the most prudent etymologists tell us, to the verb 'to haul' (haler)-hauling as on a tmvpath-very close to a hauling ofthe subject, who drags his thing into a certain path that he cannot get out of' (1 977:50-5 1). Lacan chooses to elevate this enigma-this ruttedness-to the status of being one of the four flUldarnental concepts of psychoanalysis, saying, "The very constitution of the field of the lUlconscious is based on the Wiederkehr [repetition]." (1977:4) (Rogers 1987, 579-80) 1 2 As Gaylyn Studlar posits: " . . .the pre-Oedipal beginnings of masochism in the oral, that is, pregenital, stage, may mean that sexual difference is lUlimportant to the perversion's basic dynamics." (Studlar, 16) 1 3David Sigler explains Freud's findings regarding the masochistic aesthetics and literature: "( . . . ) one could easily forget the remarkable extent to which Freud's clinical observations on masochism are already well embroiled in "the literary approach." In Three Essays an Sexuality (1905), Freud supplies evidence from Goethe's Fm/sf to clinch his argmnent against "medical men." His analysis of Tasso's "moving poetic picture" of repetition compulsion leads Freud to recognize repetition as a key to masochism. And he identifies Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle

Hollywood's (rn)Otber Aperture

283

Tom 's Cabin (1 889) as a particular cause of masochism in its readers. For Freud, masochism does not stern from firsthand experience ("The individuals from whom the data for these analyses were derived were very seldom beaten in their childhood"), nor primarily from having watched children being beaten the act of literary reading is a more significant contributing factor, he claims, having "replaced and more than replaced" spectacles of actual violence." (Sigler 201 1, 190) Although Freud doesn't consider the prelingual maternal experiences oftramnas and of bliss as the basis for masochism, he does make a connection with how the manifestation of masochism in aesthetics extends and recreates the primal masochism in a compulsive manner. 1 4 "Ernerging as a distinct artistic discourse, the masochistic aesthetic structures unconscious infantile sexual conflicts, conscious fantasies, and adult experience into a form that is not only a meaSille of the influence of early developmental stages but also a register of the transformative power of the creative process." (Studlar 1988, 14) 1 5"Initially, the pervasive association of masochism with perversity may appear an obstacle that must be contextualized historically and socioculturally in order to be dismissed as irrelevant to twenty-first century understandings. However, studying the significance of perversity opens up many fascinating and valuable avenues of enquiry that augment the positioning of masochism as ethically and aesthetically radical." (McPhee, 8-9) "The representation of masochism and the implications of this for the development of an ethical relationship with the other is neither celebratory nor framed in condemnation in these films, but rather open to various constructions of meaning as well as deeply concerned with the aesthetic qualities that may be used to evoke this form of eroticism." (McPhee, 1 16) 1 6 "In the masochistic aesthetic, the interplay of wishes from the past and a clllTent, creative mode of consciousness produce something more than a wish-fulfilling expression of an lUlmediated infantile fantasy. Instead, a complex dialectic between the conscious and the unconscious, the present and the past is formalized. Like dreams, the artistic solution may also point to new avenues for the progressive exploration of adult life." (Studlar, 14) 1 7 See Freud SE vohune XVIII pages 18 "Unlike a neillosis, the perversion cannot be cilled by acting out to release the individual from repression because masochism does not have its source in repression. Theatricality does not cure masochism; on the contrary, it is essential to its expression. Masochism, like tragedy, convinces the audience to love the characters' misfortune." (Studlar 1988, 60) 1 9 "The DSM-V docmnentation uses the more modem term 'paraphilia' in place of 'perversion', a linguistic shift cornmon to recent writing on the subject of non­ normative sexualities and an attempt to avoid the connotations of moral judgment that have historically been entrenched in the word perversion." (McPhee, 9) 2° Studlar describes the "punishing (m)Other" as "the powerful oral mother" in analyzing many of Marlene Dietrich's femme fatale appearing characters in von

284

Notes

Sternberg films: "In the von Stemberg/Dietrich films, the femme fatale's danger supersedes her portrayal as an amoral, sexualized female who threatens male control. She is fatal because she represents masochism's fantasy of the powerful oral mother, the site of rebirth, and the child's symbiotic merger into nonidentity. (78) She represents the dialectical lUlity created in masochism's fusion of pain and pleasure, liberation and death. Death and desire become mirror reflections as their mysteries dialectically Mite in a disavowal of identity that is also a trimnph of masochism's promise ofliberation through death." (Studlar 1988, 83) 21 "( ) Lewin contends that this field can be conceived ofas a "dream screen": "the surface on to which a dream appears to be projected. It is the blank backgrOlUld, present in the dream though not necessarily seen, and the visually perceived action in ordinary manifest dream contents takes place on it or before it." His crucial assumption is that the background represents the breast, the last substance seen by the now satiated infant as it drops off to sleep ( )" (Eberwein 1 984, 35) 22 "For psychoanalysis, topology the study of the transformation of objects in space that change shape while still retaining the same properties is not a metaphor, but confirms the presence of the real in the base scopic field that shows the subject its place in the Other: Topology is an active showing of the real of (BoITomean) structure. The representation ofthe space ofthe real promotes the notion of a picture which presents sites or points one might (or must) occupy in a social signifying chain. These are real places, not metaphorical constructs to be dOlllled or cast aside at will or whim. And they appear whether spoken about or not. That is, what cannot be said or seen is tacitly shmvn." (Ragland, 101 ) 23 "Freud used the term "screen memory" to denote any memory which functions to hide (and to derivatively express) another, typically lUlconscious, mental content." (Smith 2000, 7) We'll elaborate more on this cmious manipulation of memory similar in processes to movies in our epilogue of this manuscript. 24 See Ellie Ragland's article in (Re)-turn: A Journal ofLacanian Studies, Volume 3 & 4, Spring 2008 entitled "The Topological Dimension of Lacanian Optics" for a succinct breakdown of Lacan regarding Lacan's use of the Moebius Strip and the BOITomean Knot in his discussions of the gaze, the real and representation. . . .

. . .

Part 2 Introduction 1 "A truly adequate discussion of the role of phylogeny in Freud's scientific work would require a substantial treatise. Suffice it to say that phylogeny is implicated in Freud's consideration of drives and defense mechanisms; sexuality, the latency period, and the Oedipus complex; id, ego and superego development; memory and fantasy formation; religion and culture; symbolism, dreaming and the etiology ofthe neuroses and psychoses ( ). Obviously so prominent a topic deserves careful evaluation." (Garcia 1988, 94) See also note 47 in the Prologue above. . . .

Hollywood's (rn)Otber Aperture

285

Chapter 4 1 There are rumors that Crichton wanted to prove he could take the tale ofBemvulf and make a commercially successful novel from it. He succeeded in this, as well as in linking 6th or 7th Century Scandinavian legends assembled in Old English poetry to modern day tropes of misogyny and phallocentrisrn with age-old traces of the maternal semiotic and the fear of the primal maternal authority. 2 "The phallic mother is a (if not the) case in point. She is, according to psychoanalysis, at once the object of every psyche's secret fear and its deep desire. She represents the absolute power of the female as autonomous and self-sufficient; at the same time she is woman reduced to the function of giving suck. She is neither hermaphrodite nor androgyne, human nor monster, because she is emphatically Mother. And yet she hardly resembles anyone's actual mother except in one's own fervid imagination, and that is precisely the problem. She is a fantasmatic caricature, and a caricature of the fantasmatic. Neither fully object nor fully subject, she is, to use Freud's term for the symbolic-and-therefore-real contents of the lUlconscious, om most fiercely guarded "psychical object," as well as our role model and the very "type" of the autonomous self. By having a penis, she defies the psychoanalytic "fact" of woman's castration, at the same time she attests to the "fact" of every other woman's castration but hers; she is the girl who has everything and the one "we" for that reason desire and wish "we" could be. In short, she has, she bears, she is, the fetish--but whose?" (Ian 1993, 8-9) Also, see endnote 38 above in the Prologue. 3 Plato's Timaeus which Kristeva quotes for her development of the chara concept in her works. 4 "The figural designates the gesture that breaks through language and reveals its pmely visual forms. This aspect of signification, argues Lyotard, cannot be reduced to the logic of discourse, to its cornrnlUlicability and transparency, because language requires regularity, and desire is a priori irregular and labile." (Ionescu 2013, 146) It is interesting here how Lyotard's "figmal" parallels Kristeva's "maternal semiotic" in terms ofplmality ofmeanings in excess of the Symbolic order and the Law of the Father. S Particularly significant is pop culture's intrigue with the navel notable in recent times in TV's Star Trek with its pioneering navel displays. And, in current pop culture, it is notable because of navel piercing and the pictorial prominence of the navel in music videos. 6 James Joyce in his poetic intuition presciently coalesces Freud and Ian in an umbilically sacrilegious reverse-genealogy as quoted and described by Jackson I. Cope: "It is in this context of despair that Stephen envisions history as a throttling universal umbilical which he would escape could he return to origins, to "naked Eve" whose "Belly without blemish" stood from "everlasting to everlasting" because "She had no navel" (386). The umbilical cords suggest telephonic cords, and Stephen's ironic joke is to call across the cords of modem cornrnlUlication a plea

286

Notes

of primitivism. "Hello. Kinch here. Put me on to Edenville. Aleph, alpha: nought, nought one". It is the world of Eve without a navel, of that mythic unity before history began, the state of God before the emrrage of creation, of the artist as existential coward, of man retreating into the myth of the Unnother's womb." (Cope, 236) 7In describing Lacan's ideas on the significance of the (rn)Otber's absent desire, Fink elucidates: "This second formulation of Lacan's dictum, involving man's desire to be desired by the Other, exposes the Other's desire as object a. The child would like to be the sole object of its mother's affections, but her desire almost always goes beyond the child: there is something about her desire which escapes the child, which is beyond its control. A strict identity between the child's desire and hers cannot be maintained; her desire's independence from her child's creates a rift between them, a gap in which her desire, unfathomable to the child, flUlctions in a unique way." (Fink, 59)

Chapter 5 1 Kristeva speaks to this graphic and written word plurality that forms an intertextuality: "If one grants that every signifying practice is a field of transpositions of various signifying systems (an inter-textuality), one then understands that its "place" of enlUlciation and its denoted "objecf' are never single, complete, and identical to themselves, but always phrral, shattered, capable of being tabulated. In this way polysemy can also be seen as the result of a semiotic polyvalence an adherence to different sign systems." (Kristeva 1984, 60) 2 "She ... had no peer Either in ourfirst mother or in all women Who were to come. But alone ofall her sex She pleased the Lord. Caelius Sedulius (Warner 1976, xvii) 3 See for example Gerard David's Virgin and Child in a Landscape circa 1520. https:llcornrnons.wikimedia.org/wikilFile:Virgin_and_Child_in_a_landscape,_by_ Gerard_Davidjpg 4 See Helen Hackett's article on Elizabeth I and the TIrree Goddesses. https:/lhlq.pennpress.org/rnedia/34088Ihlq-773y225_hacketl.pdf 5 "The old world view had perceived the Earth as a living body, a living being, who since the beginning of time had been acknowledged as the Earth Mother. The power of life did not originate from a transcendent outside force, but was rather an immanent power contained within the field of Nature." (Getty 1990, 28) 6Getty speaks to the binary opposition that developed in categorically separating God the Father from Mother Nature, the Earth Mother and Goddess: "God the creator had to be firmly established as existing outside the field of Nature and the body of the Goddess. He and his heavenly realm had to be presented as the only refuge from the tempting dangerous and sinful world of Nature. This reductionist perspective denied the oneness of all creation and offered in its place a dualistic view

Hollywood's (rn)Otber Aperture

287

that split the oneness of all creation and offered in its place a dualistic view that split matter and spirit, feminine and masculine, life and death, good and evil." (Getty 1990,28) 7 Osborne speaks to the language ofChristians referencing the trinity and the Virgin Mary in relation to what should or should not be considered "trinitarian." In this short quote we get a sense that when referring to the Virgin Mary and the trinity, the allusion to family status gets congested and extra-logical quite quickly. "\¥hen one considers the theology of Trinity, one realizes that it is not adequate to call a marian work or a marian title trinitarian simply because Mary is named as the daughter of God the Father, the mother of God the Son and the spouse of the Holy Spirit." (Osborne 1989, 13) 8 Declarations [om and five ofPope Pius the XII's Dogma a/the Assumption (1 950) offers insight into the confusion that might be caused and the extra-logical discerned by the Virgin Mary's Church sanctioned historical event of the Assmnption of the Virgin Mary. "4. That privilege has shone forth in new radiance since om predecessor of immortal memory, Pius IX, solemnly proclaimed the dogma of the loving Mother of God's Immaculate Conception. These two privileges are most closely bound to one another. Christ overcame sin and death by his own death, and one who through Baptism has been born again in a supernatural way has conquered sin and death through the same Christ. Yet, according to the general rule, God does not will to grant to the just the full effect of the victory over death lUltil the end of time has corne. And so it is that the bodies of even the just are corrupted after death, and only on the last day will they be joined, each to its own glorious soul. 5. Now God has willed that the Blessed Virgin Mary should be exempted from this general rule. She, by an entirely lUlique privilege, completely overcame sin by her Immaculate Conception, and as a result she was not subject to the law of remaining in the corruption of the grave, and she did not have to wait until the end of time for the redemption of her body." http://w2.vatican.valcontentlpius-xii/enlapost_ constitutions/docurnentslhfy-xii_apc_19501 101_mlUlificentissimus-deus.htrnl 9 " The Virgin especially agrees with the repudiation of the other woman (which doubtless amounts basically to a repudiation of the woman's mother) by suggesting the image of a woman as Unique: alone among women, alone among mothers, alone among hmnans since she is without sin. But the acknowledgement of a longing for uniqueness is immediately checked by the postulate according to which lUliqueness is attained only through an exacerbated masochism: a concrete woman, worthy of the feminine ideal embodied by the Virgin as an inaccessible goal, could only be a nlUl, a martyr, or, if she is married, one who leads a life that would remove her from that "earthly" condition and dedicate her to the highest sublimation alien to her body. A bonus, however: the promise ofjouissance." (Kristeva 1987, 258 right COhUllil) 10 "When I received this [coronation] ring I solemnly bOlUld myself in marriage to the realm; and it will be quite sufficient for the memorial of my name and for my glory, if, when I die, an inscription be engraved on a marble tomb, saying, "Here

288

Notes

lieth Elizabeth, which reigned a virgin, and died a virgin."" Quote from The Sayings a/Queen Elizabeth, ch. 7, by Frederick Chamberlin (1923). l l Shlain explains the alphabetic attack on the goddess and women by referencing three historical and monotheistic "protestant" reformations and their -..vritten Word: the Jewish Bible, the Christian New Testament, and the Muslim Qman. "All three of these reformations abrogated women's previously established rights to conduct religious ceremonies or pray to a goddess, and all three eroded women's property rights. Men justified this usurpation of power by citing chapter and verse from their respective sacred books." (Shlain, 324)

Part 3 Introduction 1 "And Spielberg has his dark side. Spielberg's obsessive topic has been lost children, especially lost boys in peril, seeking to relUlite with mother, from Sugerland Express through Close Encounters, Poltergeist, E.T., The Color Purple, Empire a/the Sun, Hook, Saving Private Ryan, and Catch Me ljYou Can. Think of the little boy hiding in the latrine from the Nazis in Schindler's List, up to his neck in feces. It is an image of total abjection." (Gordon 2008, 230)

Chapter 6 1 If we accept that the Einstein-Rosen Bridge, which John Archibald's Wheeler coined the "wormhole," is a passage between folds in space/time via an orifice, suddenly the popular expression and Sci-Fi trope reveals its uncanny signifiance in pre-lingual traces of the Imaginary and the Real. Further, Kafka, Lacan, Sheridan, with very little explanation, return us to the impossible, and the impossibly warmish slippage, a sliding parapraxis, that reveals the maternal semiotic and the umbilical. Lacan: "The effect of language is to introduce the cause into the subject. Through this effect, he is not the cause of himself; he bears within himself the worm of the cause that splits him." (Lacan 2006, 708) Lacan translator Alan Sheridan explains: "the real is that which always returns to the same place. It then became that before which the imaginary faltered, that over which the symbolic stumbles, that which is refractory, resistant. Hence the formula: 'the real is the impossible'. It is in this sense that the term begins to appear regularly, as an adjective, to describe that which is lacking in the symbolic order, the ineliminable residue of all articulation, the foreclosed element, which may be approached, but never grasped: the umbilical cord of the symbolic." (Lacan, 2004, 280) Kafka joins the umbilical worm-ridden discussion: "Here I had in fact gained a little independent distance from you, even if in doing so I slightly resembled a worm, its tail pinned to the ground lUlder somebody's foot, tearing loose from the front and \Vfiggling away to the side." (Kafka 2008, 62) Kafka's wormy self-comparison is the most insightful of the "slippages of tongue" indexing the slimy materiality of the impossible by which his

Hollywood's (rn)Other Aperture

289

body ofwork attempted to create a type of proto-poststructuralist literary zone ofthe impossible Real. 2 " . . .Kristeva coins the term "Ie vree!" in order to account for the modernist revolution in Western thought and art, which she sees as the effort to fOlTImlate a truth that would be the real in the Lacanian sense of the term, or in other words: a "true-real" or vreel (from Ie vrai [the true] and Ie reel [the real]. The speaking subject in search ofthe "true-real" no longer distinguishes between the sign and its referent in the usual Saussmian way, but takes the signifier for the real (treats the signifier as the real) in a move which leaves no space for the signified. This "concretization" of the signifier is not only typical ofrnodernist art, it is also a striking feature of the discourse of psychotic patients (such as, among others, the famous French modernist -writer Antonin Artaud)." (Moi, 214) 3 The Real is often linked to psychosis since it is considered outside the Symbolic order completely. Although a tricky concept because of its foreclosed status as well as being a psychological register along with the Symbolic and the Imaginary, the Real is a concern of Kristeva's as well as anyone influenced by Lacan. Here Toril Moi describes a few of Kristeva's thoughts on the Real: "denegation ( . . . ) denotes the absolute refusal to perceive a fact imposed by the external world. Kristeva's argument then is that, as the true-real falls outside the framework of what is considered intelligible or plausible in the socialized space of the symbolic order, it is necessary at once to consider why this is so and what it means when the true-real actually occms in language. The first question is answered by linking the true-real to the psychotic foreclosme ofthe phallus signifier representing the Law of the Father." (Moi, 2 1 6) 4 "Well it's psychological, that's why. But I didn't think it works as a movie; sadly, I have to say. However, I'm also not above boasting that I'm the only guy who sold material both to Kubrick and to Spielberg! There has to be some comfort in old age." (Brian Aldiss quote from Jeremy Keith interview https:lladactio.comiarticles/5740/) 5 This is more a movie about an apocalyptic-laden, proto-Oedipal, Imaginary scenario with David as the dyadically trapped automaton than the conventional Oedipal vision telling the story of a Pinocchio style artificial boy becoming a real boy much to his paternal 'maker,' Geppetto's, delight. 6 As Margret Gunnarsdottir Champion explains in terms of spectator agency vis-a­ vis narrative character: "Readers mobilize characters, make them exist as substantial agents, within the self-divisive drive of identification: character exists as an effect of the reader's desire for self in the place of the other. It is especially Freud's observations on narcissism which clarify this complex libidinal dynamic." (Gmmarsdottir Champion 2013, 43) This libidinal dynamic between the narrative character and the viewer that Champion describes also applies to the implications of movie screen and the camera at several levels including the gaze, misrecognition, and suture which will be addressed as this chapter progresses. 7 Two quotes from Laplanche and Pontalis give us insight into this German expression developed by Freud, which, in the final analysis, implies a much broader

290

Notes

and polysernic understanding of original fantasies: " . . . just at the moment when Freud appears to lose hope of support from the ground ofreality ground so shifting on further enquiry he introduces a new concept, that of the Urphantasien, primal (or original) fantasy." (Laplancbe and Pontalis 1968, 9) "Original fantasies are limited in their thematic scope. They relate to problems of origin which present themselves to all hlUllan beings (Menschenkinder): the origin of the individual (primal scene), the origin of sexuality (seduction), and the origin of the difference between the sexes (castration)." (Laplancbe and Pontalis 1968, 17) 8 Optical manipulations that, because ofom primal dependence on visual exchange serving as the originating apparatus of the ego, if we consider the mirror stage, predispose humans to misrecognition and systemic manipulations. However, as acknowledged by Kaja Silverman in her surnmation of several theoreticians (Oudart, Dayan, Heath, Mulvey and Rose), other manipulations than the ocular in the cinematic apparatus also create suture, particularly of interest is the suturing effect of off-screen sOlmd as noted in her example of voice-over in Hitchcock's Psycho. In this case, the voice over "reinforces the "viewing subject's consciousness of an Other whose transcendent and castrating gaze can never be returned. . . . " (Silverman 1996, 210) The absent presence of the Other, the Absent One (Oudart's term), is an integral part of the suturing system. In this voice over's case in Psycho, the Absent One is linked with Norman Bates' mother. See Silverman's Chapter 5, on suture in The Subject o/Semiotics (1996). 9 Somewhat profOlmdly explained by Stephen Heath: "The major emphasis in all this is that the articulation of the signifying chain of images, of the chain of images as signifying works not from image to image but from image to image through the absence that the subject constitutes. Cinema as discourse is the production of a subject and the subject is the point of that production, constantly missing in and moving along the flow, with suture, as it were, the culmination of that assmance . . (Heath 1974, 88) 10 Art and film's inherent expansivity as Symbolic-resistant systems of signs with all their discmsive and extra-logical processes are "schizoanalytic," in the etymologically more expansive sense of splitting and illlifying while also challenging systemic manipulations. This use of "schizoanalytic" I adapt from Janell Watson who, in turn, has liberally adapted from Felix Guattari. Further, unlike phallogocentric language, suture in film functions in a broader manner than the limited concept of "stitching over," by "meta-modeling" in Guattari's "schizoanalytic" manner to allow for subversion and extra-logical input ("creative processuality") rather than self-limiting rigid "modeling" that language and commercial film normally aspire to. Watson explains the provocative concept from Guatrari: "Guattari declares that 'Schizoanalysis, I repeat, is not an alternative modeling. It is metamodeling' (Guattari, 1996: 133). It is "a discipline of reading other systems of modeling, not as a general model, but as instrument for deciphering modeling systems in various domains, or in other words, as a meta-model.' (Guattari, 1989: 27). Further into her essay, Watson continues: "Schizoanalytic metamodeling,

Hollywood's (rn)Otber Aperture

291

then, can be distinguished from standard psychoanalytic and capitalist models in several ways. Guattari's rnetamodeling promotes a radical, liberatory politics. It creates a singularizing map of the psyche. It allows one to construct one's mvn rnetamodels. It recognizes, and even borrows from, existing models. It can transform an existence by showing paths out of models in which one may have inadvertently become stuck. Rather than looking to the past, it looks to future possibilities. '"What distinguishes rnetarnodeling from modeling is the way it uses terms to develop possible openings onto the virtual and onto creative processuality' (Guattari, 1995: 31 )." ('Watson 2008). http://twelve.fibreculturejournal.orglfcj-077-schizoanalysis­ as-rnetamodelingl l lKristeva seems to be describing the cinematic apparatus in these words albeit siding with the extra-Symbolic maternal semiotic as dominant aspect, much the way I see in the case of the Symbolic 'ordering' of the cinematic discourse: " . . . what we call a chora: a nonexpressive totality formed by the drives and their stases in a motility that is as full of movement as it is regulated. ( . . . ) We emphasize the regulated aspect of the chora: its vocal and gestural organization is subject to what we shall call an objective ordering (ordonnancement), which is dictated by natural or socio-historical constraints such as the biological difference between the sexes or family structure. We may therefore posit that social organization, always already symbolic, imprints its constraint in a mediated form which organizes the chora not according to a law (a term we reserve for the symbolic) but through an ordering." (Kristeva 1984, 25-6) 12 This is a play on the word 'lure' with a nod to Lacan and a few of his typically versatile aphorisms about the gaze (ofthe Absent One) and its attraction: "Generally speaking, the relation between the gaze and what one wishes to see involves a lure. The subject is presented as other than he is, and what one shows him is not what he wishes to see. It is in this way that the eye may function as objet a, that is to say, at the level of the lack. . . " (Lacan 2004, 1 04) Further, the 'lille' word-play in Lacan is succinctly presented as the hour or time of delusion and entrapment by Margret Gmmarsdottir Champion in her break-through study on literary character, Dwelling in Language: "The specific nature of Hamlet's fantasy is that he is trapped "in the hour of the Other (/'heure de l'Autre, leurre: lure, trap delusion)" (Lacan, 1977, 1 8), ceaselessly repeating the trauma of his division, unable to arrest it, to control it in a state of separation." (Champion, 80) Both of these references to Lacan as well as the synthesis from Champion reflect on the cinematic apparatus in terms of the allure of the gaze, narcissistic fantasy and the processes constituting the subject in discoillse. 13 Lacan posits, through his re-reading of Freud, that the scopic drive has the potential to circumvent castration thereby opening up a capacity for the interruption of the gaze, however briefly, and so serve as a kind of agency for the spectator between film's Absent One, that is the gaze, and the speaking subject: "The split between gaze and vision will enable us, you will see, to add the scopic drive to the list of the drives. If we know how to read it, we shall see that Freud already places this drive to the fore in Triebe und Triebschicksale (,Instincts and their

292

Notes

Vicissitudes'), and shows that it is not homologous with the others. Indeed, it is this drive that most completely eludes the term castration." (Lacan 2004, 78) The movies, in my opinion, offer the conditions that provide this syncopated uncanniness of specular exhilaration and alienation, this flux ofjouissance and rnisrecognition that flUlction to support and subvert the processes of suture. 14 From French, the word 'jouissance' signifies an experience much more powerful and recherche than 'bliss' or 'sexual enjoyment' and is seldom translated solely that way in critical analysis. The following quotes from Kristeva and Lacan can give us an idea of the scope of the word and its cryptic mystical relation to woman and the maternal body. " . . . motherhood is nothing more than such a luminous spatialization, the ultimate language of a jouissance at the far limits of repression, whence bodies, identities, and signs are begotten." (Kristeva, 1980, 269) " . . . Saint Theresa you only have to go and look at Bernini's statue in Rome to lUlderstand immediately that she's corning, there is no doubt about it. And what is her jouissance, her coming from? It is clear that the essential testimony of the mystics is that they are experiencing it but know nothing about it. ( . . . ) . . . I believe in thejouissance of the woman in so far as it is something more, . . . " (Lacan 1982, 147) The Since A.I features a mother-child reunion that ends in a charged semiotic moment ofwhat one could refer to aSjouissance, these citations help formulate an idea of its definition as it relates to that part of the fihn as well as to its definition(s) in general. 15 "Nothing can be said about the relationship between the subject and the filmic field itself, since nothing is said in its process, although this syncopatedjouissance - nullifying any reading and cut off from what is excluded from the field by perception of the frame - can only be referred to in erotic terms . . . " (Oudart, 1977, 38) Once again, the expression, jouissance, is attached to the body which itself always already refers back to the maternal. Via the telltale reference to 'erotic' in connection with the experience that Oudart suggests the spectator has when first seeing the film projected before 'reading' takes place as the spectator dwells on the first level of (mis)recognition prior to suddenly perceiving the film's actual frame when she recognizes that there is an unknown someone else's vie-..vpoint also in the scopic field. This external gaze of the unkno"Wll someone else (re)presents what Oudart refers to as the Absent One's positioning(s) that are hidden from the subject, the spectator. 16 This is a significant coup ofjouissance vis-a-vis the projected image, which, sets a precedent as we will discuss later regarding the repetitive re-experiencing of this primal effect of the immediate short-lived exhilaration dming the cinema-spectator processes. 17 Offering insight into a principle aspect of suture, Oudart explains the gaze of the camera when there is not a systemically designated perspective yet, when the spectator is not yet coerced into the flow of the signifiers, and when the elements of the constructed frame confront the spectator: " . . . a vacillating image re-appears, its elements (framing, space, and object) mutually eclipsing one another in a chaos out of which rise the fourth side and the phantom which the spectator's imagination casts

Hollywood's (rn)Otber Aperture

293

in its place: the Absent One. The revelation ofthis absence is the key moment in the fate of the image, since it introduces the image into the order of the signifier, and the cinema into the order of discolise." (Oudart 1977, 42) The "order of the discourse" arnOlUlts to the flow of the movie's signifiers from shot to shot and from other semiotic aspects flowing in the system of the film, upon which the spectator slides as ad hoc subject of that discomse. 18 "The spectator is doubly decentred in the cinema. First what is emmciated, initially, is not the viewer's own discourse, nor anyone else's: it is thus that he comes to posit the signifying object as the signifier of the absence of anyone. Secondly the unreal space of the enunciation leads to the necessary quasi-disappearance of the subject as it enters its 0"Wll field and thus submerges, in a sort of hypnotic continmUll in which all possibility of discourse is abolished, the relation of alternating eclipse which the subject has to its 0"Wll discomse; and this relation then demands to be represented within the process of reading the film, which it duplicates." (Oudart 1977, 38) 19 Daniel Dayan explains that suture in film creates a system in order to attract and snare the spectator soon to submit herself as subject in the ideological discourse of the film: "What happens in systemic terms is this: the absent-one of shot one is an element of the code that is attracted into the message by means of shot two. When shot two replaces shot one, the absent-one is transferred from the level of enunciation to the level of fiction. As a result of this, the code effectively disappears and the ideological effect of the film is thereby secmed. The code, which produces an imaginary, ideological effect, is hidden by the message. Unable to see the workings of the code, the spectator is at its mercy. His imaginary is sealed into the film; the spectator thus absorbs an ideological effect without being aware of it, as in the very different system of classical painting." (Dayan 1 974, 30) Magrini, borrowing on Oudart and Heath, takes a similar but linguistic perspective on cinema enticing into and producing a subject of the spectator in the discourse of the film: "Suture refers to the "logic of the signifier" in cinema that closes the announced system of meaning and at once fixes the subject, that is, creates the illusion of a unified, legitimate "subject-ego" within the system of the film's formal structure. Suture is also employed as a term identifying the overarching syntactical structure that determines all instances of "cinematic" meaning. In order for suture to fulfill its flUlction, that of producing a subject via the film's discomse, the spectator must first experience a sense of absence or loss, which is then "sutured," or reconciled by way of the structural and stylistic elements of the film." (Magrini 2006, pages 3-4 of downloaded from http://othercinema. corn!otherzinelarchiveslindex.php?issueid= 15 &article_id=3 3 ) 20 Although it must be noted that Kristeva varies from Lacan in terms of the timeline for order and prohibitions suggesting that prior to the entry into the Symbolic order, the infant experiences structuring by means ofthe motility and stases as well as other bodily and external processes in the pre-Oedipal stage influenced by the chara.

294

Notes

21 As Joan Copjec so aptly describes Lacanian concepts of signifying visibility in ideological tenus: "For the very condition and substance of the subject's subjectivity is his or her subjectivization by the law of the society which produces that subject. One only becomes visible - not only to others, but also to oneself- through (by seeing through) the categories constructed by a specific, historically defined society. These categories of visibility are categories of knowledge. The perfection of vision and knowledge can only be procmed at the expense of invisibility and nonknowledge." (Copjec 1989, 55) And, in Lacan's typically mystical utterance: "I must, to begin with, insist on the following: in the scopic field, the gaze is outside, I am looked at, that is to say, I am a picture. This is the flUlction that is found at the heart of the institution of the subject in the visible. What determines me, at the most profolUld level, in the visible, is the gaze that is outside. It is through the gaze that I enter light and it is from the gaze that I receive its effects. Hence it comes about that the gaze is the instnunent through which light is embodied and through which if you will allow me to use a word, as I often do, in a fragmented form I am photo-graphed." (Lac an, 2004, 1 06) 22 Of special note is that beyond the confines of the cinematic discomse rlUlS the topology of the maternal semiotic within the cinematic apparatus. The manifestation of this semiotic specifically in mainstream films is the basis for this book and for advocating for the expansion of the limitations of discomse and the hmnan condition. 23 In Kaja Silverman's concise observations incorporating castration and the paternalized Absent One in terms of Oudart's cinematic suture: "For Oudart, cinematic signification depends entirely upon the moment of unpleasme in which the viewing subject perceives that it is lacking something, i.e. that there is an absent field. Only then, with the disruption of imaginary plenitude, does the shot become a signifier, speaking first and foremost ofthat thing about which the Lacanian signifier never stops speaking: castration. A complex signifying chain is introduced in place of the lack which can never be made good, suturing over the wOlUld of castration with narrative. However, it is only by inflicting the wound to begin with that the viewing subject can be made to want the restorative of meaning and narrative." (Silverman 1983, 204) 24 Oudart speaks to this flux in identification in the signifying chain ofthe movies in terms of a kind of flickering effect: " . . .the role played by the Absent One in this process, since the structure of the subject is articulated in a 'flickering in eclipses, like the movement which opens and closes the nmnber, which delivers up the lack in the form of the 1 in order to abolish it in the successor' - a comparison between the subject and zero, alternately a lack and a nmnber, 'taking the suturing place of the Absence (of the absolute zero) which moves below the chain (ofnurnbers) in an alternating movement of representation and exclusion'." (Oudart 1977, 40) 25 These include the "shot-reverse-shot" sequence that Oudart speaks to directly as well as other techniques: the eyeline match, the 180 degree rule that helps delineate the space, and continuity in mise-en-scene.

Hollywood's (rn)Otber Aperture

295

26 "Cinema as discourse is the production of a subject and the subject is the point of that production, constantly missing in and moving along the flow, with suture, as it were, the culmination of that assmance . . . " (Heath 1 9 8 1 , 88) 27 Kingsley's voice over stops here on the phrase: " . . . chain mail of society" an instant before one of the principal characters of the film, Professor Hobby, is introduced. Interesting choice of cliche since the spectator is about to and expecting to join the chain mail of cause and effect signifiers (re)presenting the cinematic discourse prefaced and primed verbally by the Absent One, Kingsley's The Specialist. 28 "The Name-of-the-Father is the 'Paternal metaphor' that inheres in symbolization and thereby potentiates the metaphorical process as a whole; and it is an essential point of anchorage for the subject. Without it, metaphor, in the for of 'voices' and visual hallucinations, comes at the subject from without, from a 'Real' that is perfectly delusional yet cruelly concrete in its impact. The missing Narne-of-the­ Father leaves a hole in the symbolic lUliverse -- Lacan's accolUlt is haunted by this image -- and the effort to fill the hole provokes, dming periods of psychotic crisis, an escalating series of misfortunes." (Bowie 1991, 109) 29 In speaking of Lacan's triadic registers, Bowie remarks on their adversarial dispositions: "The Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real pressurize each other continuously and have their short-term truces, but they do not allow any embracing programme for synthesis to emerge inside or outside the analytic encounter. The three orders together comprise a complex topological space in which the characteristic disorderly motions of the human mind can be plotted." (Ibid, 98-99) Slavoj Zizek explains Lacan's elusive Real in terms of a kernel of an external void that is intimately interior: "\¥by must the symbolic mechanism be hooked onto a "thing," a piece of the real? Lacanian answer is, of comse: because the symbolic field is in itself always already barred, crippled, porous, structured arolUld some extimate kernel, some impossibility. the function of the "little piece of the real" is precisely to fill out the place ofthis void that gapes in the very heart of the symbolic." (Zizek 1991, 33) 30 For more on Lacan's Borromean Rings model for the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary, see Macolm Bowie's Lacan-particularly chapter 4, Symbolic, Imaginary, Real ... and Trne. 3 1 A nod to Bahktin whose time/space social-ideological signifiers in literary artifacts, which he calls 'chronotopes,' seem to be particularly traceable in this sequence of the film. The social-ideological instance of the chronotopes in this sequence conflate time and space related to Disney, Spielberg, nostalgia and melancholia. The chronotopic signs in this sequence, and others in the film, also point out certain parallels between David and Pinocchio including their 'makers.' But also, these chronotopic motifs form a plmality and intertext related to time and space coalescence, a kind of spatial/temporal fusion, between Disney artifacts and Spielberg referencing Disney by way of Kubrick.

296

Notes

32 The Absent One, that is attached to Ben Kingsley's voice, becomes the '� Narrator,' the 'barred' Absent Narrator, after Spielberg depicted the Alien or Future­ rnecha leader, The Specialist, with Kingsley's voice in the Epilogue ofthe film. This configuration is a nod to Lacan's barred or 'split subject, graphically marked with: '.g'. The Absent One has now become split: visually constituted as non-human as well as (re)presenting ambiguously and extra-logically the subject's desire for lack, otherness, (rn)Othemess, and paradoxically, in Kingsley's implied voice of the Father. A lot coalesces in this minor, all powerful character. 33 In a two-shot of David with Monica combing his hair against a split background of narrow mirror sections, The Absem Narrator soliloquys in a telltale chain of chronotopic, yet ideologically vacant, Anti-Oedipal (anti-subject) signifiers: "There was no Henry, no Martin. There was no grief. There was only David." We recall that Henry (Oedipus) is the father of Martin (a real boy) and husband to Monica. 34 Kristeva from her article Women 's Time: --are women not already participating in the rapid dismantling that our age is experiencing at various levels (from wars to drugs to artificial insemination) . . . " (Kristeva 1986, 2 1 6) I plead for the reader's indulgence as I take these words out of context. Although this quote is meant as a discussion of linear vocal ethics and feminisms, I can't help but notice the prescient mention of 'dismantling that om age is experiencing' and the suggestiveness of 'artificial insemination' as they relate obliquely to the dismantling and artificiality inA.! Spielberg's movie speaks to these themes and fears with an underpinning determination suggesting that the dismantling and artificiality of late capitalist linearity that involves women as much as men will result in a nullification of women and so all mankind, returning us to the Real. 35 As Heath so aptly quotes Lacan: "The unconscious is the fact ofthe constitution­ division of the subject in language; an emphasis which can even lead Lacan to propose replacing the notion of the unconscious with that of the subject in language; "it is a vicious circle to say that we are speaking beings; we are "speakings", a word that can be advantageously substituted for the lUlconscious." (Heath 1 9 8 1 , 79) Therefore, we must conclude that it is problematic that the Absem Narrator/The Specialist should be considered a 'speaking' subject or a "speaking, " and so not a possessor of an 'lUlconscious.'

Chapter 7 1 See endnote 4 in Chapter 4. 2 In referring to monotheistic religions and their texts, specifically the Jewish, Christian and Arabic instances, Shlain explains the influence of the phallogocentric disposition: "All three of these reformations abrogated women's previously established rights to conduct religious ceremonies or pray to a goddess, and all three eroded women's property rights. Men justified this usmpation of power by citing chapter and verse from their respective sacred books." (Shlain 1998, 324) 3 See Shlain (1998) and his chapter: Right Brain/Left Brain.

Hollywood's (rn)Otber Aperture

297

Chapter 8 1 See endnote 65 above in the Prologue. 2 Kristeva's sense of the speaking subject is that it is a process not a state of existence: "If it is true that there would lUlavoidably be a speaking subject since the signifying set exists, it is nonetheless evident that this subject, in order to tally with its heterogeneity, must be, let us say, a questionable subject-in-process. (. . .)for heterogeneity, which, knO"Wll as the unconscious, shapes the signifying function." (Kristeva 1980, 134) 3 It is cmious that Spielberg goes on to show Prime Minister circling the room serving coffee to all the men in the house dming their conversation with Avner. She is being a wonderful hostless and yet she also displays nonnative servile female attributes. On the one hand, she is the Commander in Chief and on the other hand she depicts the signs of motherly, if not housekeeping, servitude. This either amplifies Ms. Meir's image as a matriarch in its pluralities, or it might be interpreted as the men are allowing a woman to lead them if she reinforces their hawkish tendencies while never giving up the servile posturing of a conventional woman and mother. One could argue that this a dilemma for women leaders in the phallogocentric world. This latter observation would make a good study apart from films. There are certainly some great examples in what might be considered the wide Anglo-Saxon sphere of political forays in the world with Elisabeth I and Margaret Thatcher as well as Angela Merkel leading the way. But outside this sphere there are other examples as Prime Minister Meir's role in Israeli politics suggests. 4 Lacan mentions the subject's primal and recurring fragmentation vis-a-vis heir ideal-I, or "orthopedic," imaginary I that shle first sees and recognizes during the prelingual mirror stage: " . . . the mirror stage is a drama whose internal pressme pushes precipitously from insufficiency to anticipation--and, for the subject caught up in the lure of spatial identification, turns out fantasies that proceed from a fragmented image of the body to what I will call an "orthopedic" fonn of its totality and to the finally donned annor of an alienating identity that will mark his entire mental development with its rigid structure. Thus, the shattering of the innenwelt to Umwelt circle gives rise to an inexhaustible squaring ofthe ego's audits. This fragmented body another expression I have gotten accepted into the French school's system of theoretical references is regularly manifested in dreams when the movement of an analysis reaches a certain level of aggressive disintegration of the individual." (Lacan 2002, 6) Spielberg seems to be fascinated with the fragmented psyche image envisioned through the splintered effect of narrow reed textured windows at significant, aggressive moments in the analytical, therapeutic processes of the cinematic narrative. Plus, there is a plurality in this distorted filtering and fragmenting image in both movies: allusion to the return of the repressed, doubling, the unheimlich, and the gaze of the omnipotent Other.

298

Notes

Chapter 9 lSee endnote 64 above in the Prologue.

2 Mainstream directors of Scott's caliber, the likes of Spielberg, Jane Campion and others, function as rnedimns as much as they are skilled commercial cinematic draftspersons and, as such, they channel the pre-lingual's rich, disavowed and repressed resonances. 3 Kristeva addresses the Symbolic and its reactionary tendency to repress the primal maternal authority. "Before recognizing itself as identical in a mirror and, consequently, as signifying, this body is dependent vis-a-vis the mother. At the same time instinctual and maternal, semiotic processes prepare the future speaker for entrance into meaning and signification (the symbolic). But the symbolic (i.e., language as nomination, sign, and syntax) constitutes itself only by breaking with this anteriority, which is retrieved as "signifier," "primary processes," displacement and condensation, metaphor and metonomy, rhetorical figmes--but which always remains subordinate--subjacent to the principal fimction of naming-predicating. Language as symbolic function constitutes itself at the cost of repressing instinctual drive and continuous relation to the mother." (Kristeva 1980, 136) 4 See Zizek's quote about the "answer of the real" above in Chapter 6 and found in his 1991 book Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture, page 32. 5 This image's emphasis on doubling signals the enactment of doubling that is involved in the primal experience in the womb, and later, dming separation from the dyad. This repetition in the groin of the Derelict Spaceship creates a more startling display of lUllikely augmentation: the lUlcanny and extra-logical doubling of the (m)Other's genitalia. As a side note in reference to Ridley Scott's 2012 movie, Prometheus, which teasingly expands theAlien franchise as a kind of a faux-prequel, the extra-terrestrial ships in this new film, found on yet another lUlexplored planet, are similarly designed as the one on the Derelict Spaceship, but possess a tripling of vulva-like portals: the space ships now possess not two, but three vagina-like openings at the crotch ofthe horseshoe-shaped ship. 6 " collectively imaged as three clumsy spermlike figures entering the vaginal opening . . . " (Kavanaugh 1980, 93) Kavanaugh compares the cre"Wlllembers to sperm entering the vagina and they do resemble spermatozoa with their bulbous helmets and monochrome outfits. This bolsters the argmnent that the revealing shapes of the portals and their location at the jlUlcture of the appendages amolUlt to a continuing build-up of compelling traces of the maternal semiotic. 7 A nod to Derrida's famous French homophonous word-play, difforenceldifferance, that speaks to the differing and deferring nature of (m)Other (a "middle voice" of phallic presence [active] and Imaginary plenitude [passive]) as a sliding signifier slipping over the analysis of the pre-lingual experience even as the differance between the entities of the primal dyad also slide, differ, and defer before a separation from the maternal dyad is fully consummated in the Symbolic.

Hollywood's (rn)Other Aperture

299

8 Julia Kristeva is clear about the psychological and material influence of the 'maternal entity' in the separating process started even before birth: "The abject confronts us, C . . . ) with our earliest attempts to release the hold of the maternal entity even before ex-isting outside of her, C . . . ) with the constant risk of falling back lUlder the sway ofa power as securing as it is stifling." (Kristeva 1982, 13) 9 Otto Rank never ceases to amaze with his insights that go deeper than Freud in some instances as with his concepts of birth trauma and the importance of the umbilical cord: "In dreams at the end of the analytic elITe I fmmd the phallus often used as "symbol" of the umbilical cord." (Rank 1921, 20 [fu. 2]) 10 The filmmakers, as with all artists, transgress the "I" when they create, thereby generating, experiencing and disseminating extra-logical, polysemic bliss. Kristeva speaks to this bliss when she expands the signification of the French word 'jouissance' into the semiotic register that de-stabilizes the Symbolic and its semblance of a transcendental ego: "Obviously, I am only like someone else: mimetic logic of the advent ofthe ego, objects, and signs. But when I seek (myself), lose (myself), or experience jouissance--then "I" is heterogeneous. " (Kristeva 1982,10) 11 Lacan' s Real as described by Zizek: "( ... ) for Lacan, the Real, at its most radical, has to be totally de-substantialized. It is not an external thing that resists being caught in the symbolic network, but the fissure within the symbolic network itself." (Zizek 2006, 72) 12 ""Whenever the membranes of the egg in which the foetus emerges on its way to becoming a new-born are broken, imagine for a moment that something flies off, and that one can do it with an egg as easily as with a man, namely the hommelette, or the lamella. The lamella is something extra-flat, which moves like the amoeba. It is just a little more complicated. But it goes everywhere. And as it is something - I will tell you shortly why - that is related to what the sexed being loses in sexuality, it is, like the amoeba in relation to sexed beings, immortal - because it smvives any division, and scissiparous intervention. And it can turn around. Well! This is not very reassuring. But suppose it comes and envelops yom face while you are quietly asleep .. I can't see how we would not join battle with a being capable of these properties. But it would not be a very convenient battle. This lamella, this organ, whose characteristic is not to exist, but which is nevertheless an organ - I can give you more details as to its zoological place - is the libido. It is the libido, qua pure life instinct, that is to say, irnrnortal life, irrepressible life, life that has need of no organ, simplified, indestructible life. It is precisely what is subtracted from the living being by virtue of the fact that it is subject to the cycle of sexed reproduction. And it is of this that all the forms of the objet a that can be enumerated are the representatives, the equivalents." (Lacan, 2004, 197-8) 13 "Lacan's description not only reminds one of the nightmare creatures in horror movies; more specifically, it can be read, point by point, as describing a movie shot more than a decade after he "Wrote those words, Ridley Scott'sAlien. The monstrous "alien" in the film so closely resembles Lacan's lamella that it cannot but evoke the

300

Notes

impression that Lacan somehow saw the film before it was even made. Everything Lacan talks about is there: the monster appears indestructible; if one cuts it into pieces, it merely multiplies; it is something extra-flat that all of a sudden flies up and envelops yom face; with infinite plasticity, it can rnorph itself into a multitude of shapes; in it, pure evil animality overlaps with rnachinic blind insistence. The "alien" is effectively libido as pille life, indestructible and immortal." (Zizek 2006, 63) 14 The naming of the mainframe "MOTHER" is sardonic and cynical on two levels of naming: on the one hand, the naming is done on the part ofthe filmmakers in their -writing and, on the other band, the naming is executed on the part of the fictional "Company," within the text. The naming of the super-computer MOTHER by the Company via the creative prerogative of the writers, also seems to take on a demeaning quality within the arena of artificial intelligence because the gendered super mainframe does not seem to possess autonomy in its intelligence, not even the paranoid artificial intelligence that lapses into psychosis that Kubrick's HAL mainframe boasts of. MOTHER remains throughout the fihn a Company­ programmed stooge. As far as the -writers' are concerned, the naming goes beyond the sardonic and cynical to include insight into extending the phrrality of the relationship between the characters, the audience, and the concept of prelingual maternal authority that is related and consistent to the themes the director is exploring. 15 Barbara Creed, in describing the last image of the film and its symmetry with the opening scene, feels that "the nightmare is over": "Finally, Ripley enters her sleep pod, assmning a virginal repose. The nightmare is over, and we are returned to the opening sequence of the film where birth was a pristine affair. The final sequence works, not only to dispose of the alien, but also to repress the nightmare image of the monstrous-feminine within the text's patriarchal discomses." (Creed 1 990, 140) However, I tend to disagree that the nightmare is over. The symmetrical ending of the film suggests to me that the nightmare has gone full circle to the beginning point and so suggests, if subliminally, that it will start over. Because of the phallogocentric limitations and the occasion of the return of the repressed embedded in the misrecognition and disavowal initiated by the LawlName of the Father, i.e., language, this suggestion of maternal recmsion as a cathexis is borne out in the sequels. 16 As quoted earlier in this tome: "Plato's Timaeus speaks of a chora (Greek spelling), receptacle, mmamable, improbable, hybrid, anterior to naming, to the One, to the father, and consequently, maternally connoted to such an extent that it merits "not even the rank of syllable." (Kristeva 1980, 133)

Chapter 10 1 For example, David Fincher's abject series Se7en (1995) The Fight Club (1999) and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (20 1 1 ) certainly exemplify an umbilical connection to the semiotic verve. Jean-Pierre JelUlet, on the other hand, pursued the

Hollywood's (rn)Otber Aperture

301

semiotic with a less visceral hand in (re)producing his beautiful films ofjouissance inAmelie (2001) and The Very Long Engagement (2004). 2 An analysis of signs, including the Symbolic, that rehabilitates 'what is heterogenous,' and 'calls in question the transcendental subject.' Kristeva explains: "We can now grasp all the ambiguities ofsemanalysis: on the one hand it dernystifies the logic at work in the elaboration of every transcendental reduction and, for this pmpose, requires the study of each signifying system as a practice. C . . . ) To rediscover practice by way of the system, by rehabilitating what is heterogeneous to the system of meaning and what calls in question the transcendental subject: these, it seems to me, are the stakes for which semiotics is now playing." (Moi, 1986, 3 1 [from Kristeva's The System and the Speaking Subject, 1973.]) 3 Kristeva: "If it is true that there would lUlavoidably be a speaking subject since the signifying set exists, it is nonetheless evident that this subject, in order to tally with its heterogeneity, must be, let us say, a questionable subject-in-process. (. . . )for heterogeneity, which, knO"Wll as the unconscious, shapes the signifying function." (Kristeva 1980, 134) And as Margaret Waller, translator for Kristeva'sR evolution in Poetic Language states: " . . . the Kristevan subject is nonetheless always implicated in a heterogeneous signifying process: his identity, never become, ever becoming, questioned and questionable, is always on trial (en proces)." (Kristeva 1984, ix) Waller clarifies that 'in process' also holds a connotation of litigation in terms of a summons to court, thus referencing the prohibitions of the Law of the Father indirectly and polysemically. 4 See Fredric Jameson 1991, page 17 for more on his postrnodern pastiche and its flatness. 5 Slavoj Zizek explains Lacan's version ofFreuds ideal ego, Ego-Ideal and superego which situates the ideal ego as an effect of the Mirror Stage when we see oillselves as "the way I would like to be." This ideal effect is easily transferred to Oill narrative stand-in within the world of the cinematic discourse. Given this phenomenon, we can see how breaking the fourth wall could situate the viewer as well back at that defining moment of self-imaging. Zizek: "Lacan introduces a precise distinction between these three terms: "ideal ego" stands for the idealized self-image of the subject (the way I would like to be, the way I would like others to see me); Ego­ Ideal is the agency whose gaze I try to impress with my ego image, the big Other who watches over me and impels me to give my best, the ideal I try to follow and actualize; and superego is this same agency in its vengeful, sadistic, plUlishing aspect. The underlying structuring principle of these three terms is clearly Lacan's triad Irnaginary-Symbolic-Real: ideal ego is imaginary, what Lacan calls the "small other", the idealized mirror-image of my ego; Ego-Ideal is symbolic, the point of my symbolic identification, the point in the big Other from which I observe (and judge) myself; superego is real, the cruel and insatiable agency that bombards me with impossible demands and then mocks my botched attempts to meet them, the agency in whose eyes I am all the more guilty, the more I try to suppress my "sinful" strivings and meet its demands." (Zizek 2006, 80)

302

Notes

6 "Althoughjouissance can be translated as 'enjoyment', translators of Lacan often leave it in French in order to render palpable its excessive, properly tramnatic character: we are not dealing with simple pleasmes, but with a violent intrusion that brings more pain than pleasme." (Ibid, 79) 7 Quote from a Julia Kristeva interview: "As far as Lacan's ideas go--the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic--I think it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to translate one theory into another theory, because if one does, one ends in confusion and loses the specificity of each author and each approach. So I would not like to perform this reduction. But it does seem to me that the serniotic--if one really wants to find correspondences with Lacanian ideas corresponds to phenomena that for Lacan are in both the real and the imaginary." (Guberman 1996, 22-3) 8 Otto Rank sheds some light on this position: "Sexual love, then, which reaches its climax in the mating of two beings, proves to be the most sublime attempt partially to re-establish the primal situation between mother and child, which only finds its complete realization in a new embryo. And when Plato explains the essence of love as the yearning of two parts which, formerly lUlited, have become severed, he gives poetical utterance to the supreme biological attempt to overcome the birth trauma, by the genuine "platonic love," that of the child for the mother." (Rank 1929,43) 9 Via an interpretation of Oedipus, Otto rank reinforces this concept of the subliminal manifestation of the compulsion to experience the return of the repressed: "At the back of the Oedipus saga there really stands the mysterious question of the origin and destiny of man, which Oedipus desires to solve, not intellectually, but by actually returning into the mother's womb. This happens entirely in a symbolic form, for his blindness in the deepest sense represents a return into the darkness of the mother's womb, and his final disappearance through a cleft rock into the Underworld expresses once again the same wish tendency to return into the mother earth." (Ibid.) 10 A similarly flat ending is attached like an epilogue to Steven Spielberg'sMinoriry Report, which shows the liberated 'pre-cogs' in a far off chora-like heimlich horne, all by themselves, the three looking warm and toasty while reading books (as if the ending were a tribute to the -written word and the Symbolic order) as the final helicopter shot floats off from their lone house in the country at the edge of a large body of water showing just how isolated they are. The depiction of their warm existence in a womb like abode comes at the very end of the movie after we see the detective protagonist for the last time embracing his late-term pregnant wife. Spielberg's film, like Cameron's, leaves us in the warm embrace of the Imaginary plenitude, in all its radiance, totality and inevitable artificiality as a happy ending inevitable due to the incapacity of the Symbolic order, even in the movies, to consciously express the Imaginary without falling into cliche. Nevertheless, the plenitude is there in the movies when the Symbolic does not get in the way, does not co-opt it in a reactionary metanarrative. A prime example of a more maternal semiotic conclusion to a film would be the nuanced ending to Jane Campion's The Piano. 11 See endnote 4 above in the Prologue.

Hollywood's (rn)Otber Aperture

303

12 Rank is exceptionally perceptive on the implications of the birth tramna and its influences not only during childhood but also for the return of the repressed as a life­ long compulsion, including the return of the plenitude of the womb: "If one ventures to accept literally and seriously the origin of the anxiety-affect which Freud recognized as arising in the process ofbirth and one is forced to do so by a nmnber of experiences then it is easy to realize how every infantile utterance ofanxiety or fear is really a partial disposal of the birth anxiety. We will approach later, in the discussion of the pleasure-pain-mechanism, the pressing question as to how the tendency to repeat so strong an effect of pain arises. But we wish to dwell for the moment on the equally indubitable analytic fact that, just as the anxiety of birth forms the basis of every anxiety or fear, so every pleasure has as itsfinal aim the re-estahlishment of the intrmtterine primal pleasure. (Rank 1929, 17) 13 The filmmaker Joss Whedon in a flippant albeit discerning attempt at gender insight states the case efficiently if in a reductionist manner claiming erroneously that he came up with the name and concept: "Everybody makes flUl of Uncle Joss when he brings up womb envy! But I still believe in it. It's a very simple theory and I gave it a silly name, but basically it just seemed to be a fimdarnental thing that women have something men don't, the obvious being an ability to bear children, and the resilience to hang in as parents. I don't understand why or how anyone ever pulled off the whole idea of "women are inferior." Men not only don't get what's important about what women are capable of, but in fact they fear it, and envy it, and want to throw stones at it, because it's the thing they can't have." (Sheerly Avni interview of Josh "Whedon, https:IIW\VW.motherjones.comimediaJ200811 11mojo­ interview-joss-whedon/, 2008) 14 Karen Homey concms " . . . from the biological point of view woman has in motherhood, or in the capacity for motherhood, a quite indisputable and by no means negligible psychological superiority. This is most clearly reflected in the unconscious of the male psyche in the boy's intense envy of motherhood. (... ) When one begins, as I did, to analyze men only after a fairly long experience of analyzing women, one receives a most smprising impression of the intensity of this envy of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood, as well as of the breasts and of the act of suckling." (Homey 1 967, 60) 15 "The concept of womb-envy suggests, at its starkest, that for some, perhaps many, men, as a result of very early experiences of envy of the mother's physical and emotional riclmess and power, which remains emotionally unresolved, the subordination of women in some form or other is the only means of maintaining psychical survival." (Minsky 1998, 107) 16 "Is not the tremendous strength in men of the impulse to creative work in every field precisely due to their feeling of playing a relatively small part in the creation of living beings, which constantly impels them to an overcompensation in achievement?" (Homey 1967, 61)

304

Notes

17 See the Chapter 9 on Alien for more on the signifiance of the alien's tail in this film. 18 A nod to Freud's thoughts on epiphanies of 'oneness with the lUliverse' often attributed to religious experiences in his Civilization and its Discontents. Although he denies experiencing this phenomena himself, according to his -..vriting in this book, he does concede that some people might experience this as a return to primal narcissism: "Our present ego-feeling is, therefore, only a shnmken residue of a much more inclusive indeed, an all-embracing feeling which corresponded to a more intimate bond between the ego and the world about it. If we may assume that there are many people in whose rnental life this primary ego-feeling has persisted to a greater or less degree, it would exist in them side by side with the narrower and more sharply demarcated ego feeling of maturity, like a kind of counterpart to it. In that case, the ideational contents appropriate to it would be precisely those of limitlessness and of a bond with the universe the same ideas with which my friend elucidated the 'oceanic' feeling." (Freud 1962b, 15) 19 See Lokhorst, Gert-Jan, (The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) in the bibliography.

Epilogue 1 "In an essay titled "Screen Memories" (1 899), [Freud] makes the startling claim that memories from childhood vividly recalled in adult life bear no specific relationship to what happened in the past. Rather, they are composite fonnations elements of childhood experience as represented through the distorting lens of adult wishes, fantasies, and desires." (Sprengnether 215) 2 Freud speaks to the difference between screen memories and memories from childhood by making " . . . the distinction (. . . ) between screen memories and other memories from om childhood. It may indeed be questioned whether we have any memories at all from om childhood: memories relating to om childhood may be all that we possess. Om childhood memories show us om earliest years not as they were but as they appeared at the later periods when the memories were aroused. In these periods of arousal, the childhood memories did not, as people are accustomed to say, emerge; they were fonned at that time. And a nmnber of motives, with no concern for historical accmacy, had a part in fonning them, as well as in the selection ofthe memories themselves." (Freud, 1 962a, 321) Madelon Sprengnether goes further into hmnan memory reconstitution: "For both Freud and Schacter (who translates the neuroscience of memory into lay terms), om memory systems are comprised of past and present elements, which interact in complex and unpredictable ways. Schacter's engram corresponds to Freud's memory trace, while his retrieval cue offers a rough parallel to Freud's charged stimulus, which prompts the fonnation of a screen memory. Missing from Schacter's account is the meddling interference of the unconscious, which defonns childhood memory so as to forestall the expression of forbidden wishes or desires. Yet the two agree on a key point; one cannot access a

Hollywood's (rn)Otber Aperture

305

childhood memory (or any memory for that matter) in its original fonn. Each conceives of memory as a work in progress in effect a moving target. Freud, the subjective theorizer of memory, represents memory as a \VTiter of complex fictions. Schacter does not go quite so far, but he does demonstrate the inherently unstable and malleable nature of memory construction and retrieval. The only memory that we can experience is one that is inevitably enmeshed with the present moment. Because memory literally only 'happens' in the present, it is subtly altered by each instance of recall. There is no more room in Schacter's theory for the concept of a pille or accmate memory than there is in Freud's." (Sprengnether 229-30) 3 Elissa Marder explains the crucial point in childhood at which Freud has centered his concept of the origination, if cryptic and incomplete, of human sexuality in the infant; and she reveals the implications his theory produces on the nonhuman animality of woman. "Throughout the case history, Freud not only insists that the sexual act was performed (three times) from behind, but he also places great emphasis on the difference between the posture adopted by the woman and that assumed by the man. He specifies that the man is upright, but the woman is "bent down like an animal." Although both figmes are engaged in animal-style sex, they are "animal-like" to different degrees: The man is erect and upright like a human figure, whereas the woman is explicitly compared to an animal in the language of the text. Thus it would seem that the woman is more of an animal than the figme of the man. The animal sexual act in which they are both engaged erases all traces of her "hmnan" status whereas there is some confusion concerning the species status of the upright man. It would appear that these images not only convey information about sexual difference, but also information about species difference at the same time. In other words, the picture in the scene seems to show that to be a woman is to be more like an animal than a man. (Marder 66-67) 4 Kelly Oliver, certainly an advocate for hmnan animal and non-human animal kinship, argues the case for animality in pedagogy: " . . .they [particularly Freud, Lacan and Kristeva] use animals to add rhetorical force to their descriptions of the distinctive qualities of the human. We see logic familiar from the history of philosophy, in which animals are used to shore up the borders of man. In other words, animals are called as witnesses to man's superiority. According to this logic, animals are more than what is excluded from the category lniman. They also teach man." (Oliver 2009, p. 1 0 Loc. 327 Kindle) The featuring of animal hybridity and kinship in the movies certainly carries a trace at the very least of inclusion and animal pedagogy. This reflects the spirit of my research in this area attached to primal FEMININITY and the maternal semiotic. S See works in the bibliography by Kelly Oliver, Elissa Marder, C.P. Freeman, Consuelo Rivera-Fuentes, and Dr. Stephen J. Smith. Other texts that go beyond the scope of this epilogue include works by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatari \VTiting together, Giorgio Agamben, and Donna J. Hathaway. 6 "Philosopher Giorgio Agamben notes that hmnanity is currently based on how much hmnans control the animal within themselves, as Western metaphysics defines

306

Notes

humanity in opposition to animality. This relates to a politics of excluding someone who must still simultaneously be included. The animal is held in an ambiguous space that is both external and internal, where he/she is subject to exile and death without remorse." (Freeman, 25) 7 The use of variations on and combinations of the terms 'animal' and 'man' and 'human' used in this text is a strategy to breakdown the artificial bmmdary between human animal and nonhlUllan animal. Plus, there exists in this practice a nod to deconstruction and plurality that fits into the discussion of human animal and nonhuman animal constructed dichotomies. 8 "Much like the mythical power of the totemic animals of primitive men, Freud's mythical contemporary ancestor gives us insight into the contemporary psyche and haunts the imaginary of the sciences of man. Moreover, this mythic ancestor who represents a kind of living fossil through which we see omselves "proves" both that we are civilized because we are not primitives and that this animalistic and animistic past lingers at om most vulnerable spots, namely, children and nemotics. This analysis raises the specter of our animal past while reassuring us that we have evolved beyond it. It also implicitly posits om civilization as the telos of those primitives (and animals), even if they are om contemporaries. To see other contemporary (or past), but less technologically advanced, cultures as examples of om 0\Vll past, contemporary ancestors, or living fossils is extremely problematic in that it assmnes that all cultures should be measured in terms of Western culture, that all cultures have Western culture as their telos, and that our notions of progress and futurity should be shared by all." (Oliver 2009, p. 252, Loc. 5238 Kindle) 9 "If early kinship is defined as identification with a totem animal, as Freud maintains, then that is more evidence that the so-called primal father must have been an animal (symbolically or literally, which may amOlmt to the same thing). ( ) Only the names or designations "father," "mother," "brother," "sister" can make sense of the incest taboo with which Freud concludes his text. The incest prohibition is meaningless without some such kinship relations, on the one hand, and the incest taboo institutes a particular form of kinship, on the other. In Freud's analysis, patriarchal kinship is the result of the primal horde and the subsequent substitution of an animal for the father in rituals designed to both renOlmce and repeat his murder." (Oliver 250, Loc 5 1 9 8 Kindle) 10 Although etymologically, 'hmnan' traces back to the concept 'of or belonging to a man,' and so intrinsically the term is phallocentric. Womanimality might be a way to go in the future when referencing women and animality. However, 'woman' is also phallocentric given its dependence as a locution on the word 'man.' As this area of inquiry expands, new vocabulary is certain to arise. 11 See Endnote 3 above. 12 "If we call the celebration of the totem meal to om help, we shall be able to find an answer. One day the brothers who had been driven out came together, killed and devoured their father and so made an end of the patriarchal horde. United, they had the comage to do and succeeded in doing what would have been impossible for them . . .

Hollywood's (rn)Otber Aperture

307

individually. (Some cultural advance, perhaps, command over some new weapon, had given them a sense of superior strength.) Cannibal savages as they were, it goes without saying that they devoured their victim as well as killing him. The violent primal father had doubtless been the feared and envied model of each one of the company of brothers: and in the act of devommg him they accomplished their identification with him, and each one ofthern acquired a portion of his strength. The totem meal, which is perhaps mankind's earliest festival, would thus be a repetition and a commemoration of this memorable and criminal deed, which was the beginning of so many things of social organization, of moral restrictions and of religion." (Freud 1950, 141-2) 13 For example, Freud's revealing off-the-cuff link of the 'lUlcanny' to the mother's womb. This link opens the pre-lingual stage to analysis despite continuing to be neglected by male theorists including Freud. "To conclude this collection of examples, which is certainly not exhaustive, I will mention an experience culled from psychoanalytic work, which, lUlless it rests on pure coincidence, supplies the most pleasing confrrmation of our conception of the uncanny. It often happens that neurotic men state that to them there is something uncanny about the female genitals. But what they find lUlcanny 'unhomely' is actually the entrance to man's old 'horne,' the place where everyone once lived. A jocular saying has it that 'love is a longing for horne,' and if someone dreams of a certain place or a certain landscape and, while dreaming, thinks to himself, 'I know this place, I've been here before', this place can be interpreted as representing his mother's genitals or her womb. Here too, then, the uncanny [the 'unhomely' is what was once familiar ['homely', 'homey']. The negative prefix un- is the indicator of repression." (Freud 2003, 1 5 1 ) 14 Favreau sneaks in a bit o f dialogue from Bagheera th e panther that underscores in a tongue-in-cheek manner the personification of the nonhuman animals: "You can find all people, side by side." (At approximately moment 00:06:44 in the film.) Bagheera says this of all the nonhuman animals gathered at the dried-up river together interacting without malice dming the drought times. 15 As a related side note to this discussion, it would seem that as the movies gain more and more expertise in realistically (re)presenting non-human animals specifically via 3D animation, in contrast to past versions of these portrayals in the movies, the aversion to the sense of direct kinship with animals, if once removed by the impossibility of inter-species breeding, cannot help but be diminished. 16 The use of the term 'sexuation' should not be confused with Lacan's restructuring of Freud's castration designation, instrumental in defining sexuality, in which he retains a certain split or division between the sexes but does so by setting woman outside of the castration complex and so outside the confines of the Symbolic order. This results in his statement that 'Woman does not exist,' that he substantiates with equations. See Marie-Helene Brousse's wonderful article Feminism with Lacan in the Newsletter ofthe Freudian Field. 17 As a cmious and perhaps telltale note, a more recent version of the JlUlgle Book called simply, Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle (Serkis, 2018) is directed, excitingly

308

Notes

enough, by the actor, Andy Serkis, who portrays Caesar, the leader of the apes in three of the 21 s1 Century installments of the Planet a/the Apes. Many more from both franchises are to corne ifhistory is any indication. 18 With the possibly rare exception of Cat People from a story by Dewitt Bodeen who -wrote the original 1 942 script. Later adapted in 1982 and directed by the scholar and film \VTiter/director Paul Schrader. 19 Benjamin Justice's Maleficent Reborn: Disney 's Fairytale View of Gender Reaches Puberty is a concise observance and discussion of a radical change occurring at Disney in terms of the reorienting the image of girls and women in Stromberg's Maleficent. Hopefully this radical re-orientation is not just a one-off. 20 I don't believe that this wonderful adaptation of the Sleeping Beauty tale with its maternal semiotic approach to humanimality, hmnanlnon-hmnan animal hybridity and women, would have ever been -written ifnot by the exceptional scriptwriter that we see in Linda Woolverton. She truly -writes from her experience as a woman and a -writer to bring to the screen the neglected woman's voice and intuition particularly in the fairytale and fantasy gemes. Hat's off to Stromberg, as well, for not getting in the way of the revealing narrative's innovations in this adaptation and for contributing as director to fmther illustrating the heightened traces of the maternal semiotic in the music and plurality of the writing.

Coda 1

Using Suzanne Langer's philosophy of symbolism from her exemplar text Philosophy in a New Key, Robert E. Innis implements her words on the symbolizing of the moon as the (re)presentation of womanlmother in a manner that supports om discussion: "The connection between woman and the moon exemplifies this structure for Langer. Woman, she thinks, is for the primitive mind "one of the basic mysteries ofnature" (PNK 1 9 1 ) . The deep and intimate connection with life's origins and its mysterious connection with sexual lUlion turns woman into a potential "Great Mother, the symbol as well as the instrmnent of life" (PNK 1 9 1 ). But because of the slO\vness of the waxing and waning of the female body, it is itself hard to use as a symbol. In fact, we need something to symbolize it and all it could symbolize. As Langer puts it, "the actual process of human conception and gestation is to slow to exhibit a pattern for easy apprehension" (PNK 1 9 1 ) . How does one, then, facilitate or even effect such an apprehension? One finds an appropriate symbol in order to think "coherently" about it. Such an appropriate symbol is the moon, a "natural symbol" ofwaxing and waning, these processes themselves being primary forms of manifestation of fertility, birth, and death. The moon in its phenomenal course telescopes and manifests a criterial feature ofwomanhood. Dream-symbolism, with its semiotic mechanism of condensation, does the same sort of thing. Presentational symbolism, no matter how "articulate" and structured, is able to also condense a meaning-content in thick form. The moon becomes, on this reckoning, a presentational symbol not only of woman, but of the phases of life itself. "But just

Hollywood's (rn)Otber Aperture

309

as life grows to completeness with every waxing phase, so in the waning period one can see the old moon take possession, gradually of the brilliant parts: life is swallowed by death in a graphic process and the swallowing monster was ancestor to the life that dies. The significance of the moon is irresistible." (Innis 2016, 74-5) 2 Applauding and yet ultimately asserting a "flamboyant" culturally-inculcated caveat for Hooper's depiction of Einar's proactive stance to the belief that he is a woman trapped in a man's body, Annalena Lorenz posits: "This positivistic reading, however, holds true only to the extent that Einar challenges the prescriptive notion of male sexed body equals masculine gender identification. By saying that, I do not mean to lUldennine the importance of any such act. Yet it would be -wrong to equate transgender with the escape from the established system of power and normative regulations, gender and otherwise, when such an escape is simply impossible. What is more, the defiant attitude is lUldercut by Lili herself and the pathos of her ultimate line: 'Last night I had the most beautiful dream. I dreamed that I was a baby in my mother's arms. She looked do"Wll at me, and she called me Lili.' (. . . ) Einar exceeds the limits imposed on him by his male body only to then subscribe to the performative acts which, in his eyes, will make of him an abiding female self. That is to say, Einar discards his role as male performer only to fully conform to a different set of gendered acts. (. . . ) To that end, Einar, in his "coming out," is so self­ aware ofpossessing the object ofmasculinity, i.e. his penis, that he overcompensates for it with a mask of almost flamboyant womanliness. This act, of COlise, then becomes the epitome of the invented, normative nature of gender. If there were no such norms, Einar would not need to learn to behave like a woman or, indeed, wear the mask of womanhood. He could simply be. (Lorenz 2016, 2) 3 Annalena Lorenz again offers insight and a wonderful description of this telltale peep show scene: "This possible attainability - the malleability of Einar's body to make it become exactly how he wants it to be is expressed by the fluidity ofbodies throughout the scene. The prostitute's smooth, flowing movements, mimicked by the camera's repeated change in position and the constant bringing in and out of focus of the two bodies, evoke an impression of perfect pliability. Further, Einar's and the prostitute's body virtually flow together in the ensuing synchronised caressing. When their two hands overlap, they do not merely touch; they melt into one another. At the same time, the prostitute's face, now framed by utter blackness, seems to emerge from the shadows and with her longing eyes fixedly set on Einar it is as if she wanted to reach him, be one with him. We still see two bodies, but the fluid zooming in and out, imperceptibly exchanging one for the other, the mirroring of the rolUld movements of hands gliding softly, tentatively, longingly, now performed in perfect simultaneity, create such a sense of harmony that the two bodies might indeed be just one. What is more, when the prostitute becomes aware of Einar's non-compliance with his role as spectator, she is taken aback for a moment, covering her body as if overcome by shyness. Quickly re-evaluating the situation, the prostitute grows sympathetic, appreciative even, and engages fully in the joint performance. This, in turn, liberates the prostitute

310

Notes

from her customary object status and further obliterates the bmmdary between the two. Einar, then, has achieved what Lacan and, to a certain extent, Butler perceive as lUlattainable: he has turned into his ideal self-image. By synchronising his body with the woman's body in front ofhirn, he is able to transform into the woman inside him, thus seemingly completing what he has started in the first mirror scene." (Lorenz 2016, 1)

Extended Coda 1 Following Kristeva, I argue that both the maternal semiotic and the Symbolic fonn a struggling, symbiotic plurality, that is specific and necessary to the human condition. Dissolving the Symbolic order would be impossible -..v:ithout eliminating language. Annihilating the maternal semiotic would be impossible without eliminating woman and her role as the nexus and cathexis of human culture and nature. So, the two registers coexist. Spielberg's film, A.I Artificial Intelligence, however, accomplishes both annihilations, the eradication of (m)Other and the Law of the Father. These occm as a result of disparaging the maternal authority with extreme prejudice (female reproduction is legally restricted, and Mother Earth is repudiated) in favor of the Name of the Father as (re)presented by Professor Hobby and the Symbolic-driven culture. The Law of the Father contributes directly to the extinction ofhumanity by occasioning and ignoring climate change with its endgame of human extinction. The Law's final annihilation ammmts to a side effect of the (m)Other's obliteration, particularly in its Mother Earth connotations. In Annihilation the culturally separated and lUlfettered (m)Other effect obliterates the transcendental human condition, that is, the a priori sense of self and the symbiosis between human Law and nature/nurture of (m)Other. 2 In terms of sexual plmality that speaks directly to prelingual FEMININITY, the film executes a very short dalliance with lesbianism or, because the reference is so short, some aspect ofthe queer spectnun of identification. When Anya flirtingly says to Lena that she had imagined that Lena was single, Tuva states "Jesus, do you have to hit on everyone, like all the time?" Anya counters with "Under the circumstances I think I have the right to roll the dice a few more times." This is the sole verbal interaction referring to sexual plmality, but it nonetheless enlUlciates primal FEMININITY, and because this 'outing' was instigated in a way by the only one in the conversation who is a mother, Tuva, the connection is reinforced. 3 See David Pavon-Cuellar's explanation of the extimacy of the Real. Endnote 3 in the Prologue.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abbott, Mathew. "The Animal for Which Animality Is an Issue: Nietzsche, Agamben, and the Anthropological Machine." Angelaki 16, no. 4 (December 2011): S7-99. https:/Idoi.org/10.10S010969725X.2011 .641347. Abele, Elizabeth. "The Feminine Gaze in Notorious and The Paradine Case." Images Journal 09 (n.d.). Abramowitz, Rachel. "Regarding Stanley." Los Angeles Times, May 6, 200 l . Alexander, Franz. "The Castration Complex in the FOlmation of Character." In Psychoanalysis and Male Sexuality. Rowan & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1966. Allen, Richard. "Female Sexuality, Creativity, and Desire in The Piano." In Piano Lessons: Approaches to The Piano, edited by Felicity Coombs and Suzanne Gemmell, 44-63. Sidney, Australia: John Libbey & Company, 2000. Anderson, Kay. '''The Beast within': Race, Humanity, and Animality." Environment and Planning D: Society and Space IS, no. 3 (June 2000): 301-20. https:lldoi.orgIl0.106S/d229. Arnold, Sarah. Maternal Horror Film: Melodrama and Motherhood. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Arthur, Paul. "A. I. Artificial Intelligence: Primal Screen." Film Comment 37 no. 4 (August 2001): 22-25. Atwood, Margaret. The Lady Oracle. New York: Simon and Shuster, 1976. Avni, Sheerly. "The MoJo Interview: Josh Whedon." Mother Jones 1 1 (200S). Barcan, Ruth, and Madeline Fogarty. "Performing the Piano." In Piano Lessons: Approaches to The Piano, edited by Felicity Coombs and Suzanne Gemmell, 3-1S. Sidney, Australia: John Libbey & Company, 2000. Barthes, Roland. Elements o/Semiology. Hill and Wang, 1964. -. Image, Music, Text. Translated by Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. Bartok, Bela. Duke Bluebeard's Castle, n.d. Barzilai, Shuli. "Borders of Language: Kristeva's Critique of Lacan." PLMA 106 No. 2 (March 1991): 294-305.

312

Bibliography

-. Lacan and the Matter of Origins. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1999. Baxter, Jolin. Stanley Kubrick: A Biography. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 1997. Beardsworth, Sara. Julia Kristeva: Psychoanalysis andModernity. SUNY Series in Gender Theory. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. Beaulieu, Alain. "The Status of Animality in Deleuze's Thought." Journal for Critical Animal Studies rx, no. 112 (201 1): 69-88. Bentley, Nancy. '''Conscious Observation of a Lovely Woman': Jane Campion's Portrait in Film." The Henry James Review 18.2 (1007): 174-79. Bion, Wilfred R. Learning from Experience. London New York: Karnac, 1962. Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson. The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode ofProduction to 1960. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Bowie, Malcolin. Lacan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991. Breen, Dana. The Gender Conundrum: Contemporary Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Femininity and Masculinity. London and New York: New Library of Psychoanalysis, 1993. Brennan, Teresa. The Interpretation of the Flesh: Freud and Femininity. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. Brodribb, Somer. Nothing Mat(t)Ers: A Feminist Critique of Poslmodernism. North Melbourne, Australia: Spinifex Press Ltd, 1992. Brousse, Marie-Hel/me. "A Difficulty in the Analysis of Women: The Ravage Effected by the Relation to the Mother." The Sinthome 15, Summer 2013. -. "Femininism with Lacan." Newsletter of the Freudian Field 5, no. 1 & 2 (Spring/Fall 1991): 1 1 3-29. Brown, Callum G. Poslmodernism for Historians. 1st ed. New York: Routledge, 2004. Brunsdon, Charlotte. Filmsfor Women. London: British Film Institute, 1986. Bruzzi, Stella, and Mary Colbert. "Bodyscape." Sight and Sound 3 (1993): 6-10. Bryant, Levi. The Democracy of Objects. Open Humanities Press, 201 1 . Buchanan, Ian and Colebrook, Claire, ed. Deleuze and Feminist Theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000. Butler, Judith P. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subersion ofIdentity. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 1999.

Hollywood's (rn)Otber Aperture

313

-. "The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva." In Revaluing French Feminism: Critical Essays on Difference, Agency, and Culture, edited by Nancy Fraser and Sandra Lee Bartky. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992. Butte, George. "Suture and the Narration of Subjectivity in Film." Poetics Today 29:2 (Summer 2008). https:/Idoi.orgll0.1213/03335372-2007026. Campion, Jane. The Piano. New York: Miramax Books, 1993. Carson, Diane, Linda Dittmar, and Linda Welsch. Multiple Voices in Feminist Film Criticism. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Champion, Margret Gunnarsdottir. Dwelling in Language: Character, Psychoanalysis andLiterary Consolations. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2013. Chanter, Tina. Ethics of Eros: Irigaray 's Rewriting of the Philosophers. New York and London: Routledge, 1995. -. The Picture of Abjection: Film, Fetish, and the Nature of Difference. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2008. Chanter, Tina, and Ziarek, Ewa Plonowska. Revolt, Affect Collectivity: The Unstable Boundaries ofKristeva 's Polis. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005. Chion, Michel. Kubrick's Cinema Odyssey. Translated by Claudia Gorbman. London: BFI Publishing, 2001. Chodorow, Nancy I. Femininities, Masculinities, Sexualities: Freud and Beyond. The Blazer Lectures. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky, 1994. Chrichton, Michael. Eaters ofthe Dead. New York: Ballantine Books, 1976. Cixous, Helene, and Susan Sellers. The Helene Cixous Reader. New York: Routledge, 1994. Clarke, Arthur C. 2001: Space Odyssey. New York, New York: The New American Library, 1968. Coates, Paul. The Double and the Other: Identity as Ideology in Post­ Romantic Fiction. New York: S1. Martins Press, 1988. Conley, Verena. Helene Cixous: Writing the Feminine. Expanded Edition. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1991. Cope, Jackson I. James Joyce Ulysses: Critical Essays. Edited by Hart, Clive and Hayman, David. University of California Press, 1977. -. "Sirens." In James Joyce 's Ulysses: Critical Essays. California: University of California Press, 1977. Copjec, Joan. Imagine There 's No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation. Cambridge, MA London: MIT Press, 2002.

3 14

Bibliography

-. ReadMy Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995. -. "The Orthopsychic Subject: Film Theory and the Reception of Lacan." October 49 (Summer 1989): 53-7 1 . Corbett, Mary J . Representing Femininity: Middle-Class Subjectivity in Victorian and Edwardian Women 's Autobiographies. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Cowie, Elizabeth. Representing Woman: Cinema and Psychoanalysis. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Creed, Barbara. "Alien and the Monstrous-Feminine." In Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema, edited by Annette Kulio, 128-4 1 . London, New York: Verso, 1990. -. The Monstrous Feminine: Film, jeminisms, psychoanalysis. New York, London: Routledge, 1993. Crownfield, David. BodylText in Julia Kristeva: Religion, Women and Psychoanalysis. Albany, NY: State University ofNew York Press, 1992. Davis, Michael. "Tied to That Maternal 'Thing' : Death and Desire in Jane Campion's The Piano." Edited by Michael. Gothic Studies 4, 1 (May 1, 2002): 63-79. Dayan, Daniel. "The Tutor-Code of Classical Cinema." Film Quarterly 28 (Autumn 1974): 22-3 1 . Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1 : The Moviement-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. London: The Athlone Press, 1986. -. Masochism: An Interpretation of Coldness and Cruelty. Translated by Jean McNeil. New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1971. DeNooy, Juliana. Derrida, Kristeva, and the Dividing Line: An Articulation of Two Theories ofDifference. Vol. 2078, 1998. Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Translated by Johnson, Barbara. The University of Chicago Press, 198 1 . Margins of Philosophy. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982. -. Positions. Chicago: University of California Press, 1981. -. Resistances ofPsychonanalysis, Trans. . Stanford: Stanford University Press. Translated by Peggy Kamuf, Pascale-Anne Brault, and Michael Naas. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Devlin, K. "Pretending in 'Penelope': Masquerade, Mimicry and Molly Bloom." Novel: A Forum on Fiction 25 (1991). DiCenso, James. The Other Freud: Religion, Culture, and Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge, 1999. Disch, Estelle. Reconstructing Gender: A Multicultural Anthology. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing Co., 1999. _.

Hollywood's (rn)Other Aperture

315

Doane, Janice, and Devon Hodges. From Klein to Kristeva: Psychoanalytic Feminism and the Search for the "Good Enough " Mother. Critical Perspectives on Women and Gender. The University of Michigan Press, 1993. Doane, Mary Ann. Desire to Desire: The Woman 's Film of the 1940s. Theories of Representation and Difference. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987. -. Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis. New York and London: Routledge, 1991. -. "Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator." London: Routledge, 1992. -. "Woman's Stake: Filming the Female Body." October 17 (Sunnner 1981): 22-36. Driscoll, Catherine. "The Woman in Process: Deleuze, Kristeva and Feminism." In Deleuze and Feminist Theory, edited by Ian Buchanan and Claire Colebrook. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000. Eberwein, Robert T. Film and the Dream Screen: A Sleep and a Forgetting. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. Elliott, Anthony. "The Constitution of Identity: Primary Repression After Kristeva and Laplanche." In Identity in Question, edited by Anthony Elliott and Paul Du Gray, 120-38. Los Angeles, New York: Sage, 2009. Elliott, Mary. "Outperforming Femininity: Public Conduct and Private Enterprise in Louisa May Alcott's Behind a Mask." ATQ 8 (1994): 299. Ernest Alfred Vizetelly. Bluebeard: An Account ofComorre the Cursed and Gilles De Rais. Nabu Press, 2013. Eyers, Tom. Lacan and the Concept of the 'Real. ' Palgrave MacMillan, 2012. Feldstein, Richard, Bruce Fink, and Maire Jaanus. Reading Seminar XI : Lacan 's Four Fundamental Concepts ofPsychoanalysis: Including the First English Translation of "Position of the Unconscious" by Jacques Lacan. Psychoanalysis and Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995. Felski, Rita. Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. Fink, Bruce. The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. Fischer, Lucy. Cinematemity: Film, Motherhood, Geme. Princeton University Press, 1996. -. ShotlCountershot: Film Tradition and Women 's Cinema. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989.

316

Bibliography

-. "Two-Faced Women: The 'Double' in Women's Melodrama of the 1940s." The Cinema Journal 23, 1 (Autumn 1983): 24-43. Fox, Allstair. Jane Campion: Authorship and Personal Cinema. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 201 1 . Frankland, Graham. Freud's Literary Culture. Cambridge Studies in German. Cambridge, UK: Columbia University Press, 2000. Fraser, Nancy. "The Uses and Abuses of French Discourse Theories for Feminist Politics." In Revaluing French Feminism: Critical Essays on Difference, Agency, and Culture, edited by Nancy Fraser and Sandra Lee Bartky. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992. Free, George. "Language, Speech and Writing: Merleau-Ponty and Derrida on Saussure." Human Studies 13, no. 4 (1990): 293-307. Freeman, C.P. "Embracing Humanimality: Deconstructing the Human!Animal Dichotomy." In Arguments about Animal Ethics, edited by G. Goodale and J. E. Black, 1 1-30. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010. French, Lisa. "Through an Australian Lens: Explorations of India in Jane Campion's Holy Smoke /" In Wandering 's in India: Australian Perceptions, edited by Rick Hoskins and Amit Sawal, 149-64. Clayton, Australia: Monash University Publishing, 2012. Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. Translated by James Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1962b. -. "On Narcissism." In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV (1914-1916): On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works, edited by Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, and Alan Tyson, translated by James Strachey and James Strachey, 67-102. London: Hogarth Press, 1957. -. Sexuality and the Psychology of Love. New York: Collier Books, Macmillan Publishing Co., 1990. -. "Some Psychological Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes." In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works ofSigmund Freud, 248-58. Vol. 19. London, 1925. -. The Interpretation ofDreams: The Complete and Definitive Text. New York: Perseus Books Group Kindle Edition, 2010. The Standard Edition ofthe Complete Psychological Works ofSigmund Freud. Translated by Strachey, James. Vol. XVIII. London: The Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1920. The Standard Edition ofthe Complete Psychological Works ofSigmund Freud. Translated by James Strachey. Vol. 7, 13. London: The Hogarth Press, 1955. _.

_.

Hollywood's (rn)Otber Aperture

317

"The Uncanny." In The Unccmny, translated by David McClintock, 12160. London: Penguin Classics, 2003. -. Totem and Taboo. Translated by Strachey, James. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1950. The Standard Edition ofthe Complete Psychological Works ofSigmund Freud. Vol. VII. The Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psycho­ Analysis, 1953. Friedman, Lester D. Citizen Spielberg. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006. Frojmovic, Eva. "Feasting at the Lord's Table." IMAGES 7, no. 1 (December 2, 2013): 5-2 1 . https:lldoi.orgIl 0 . 1 1631 l 8718000-12340038. Frow, John. "Spectacle Binding: On Character." Poetics Today, Vol. 7, No. 2 (1986), Pp. 227-250 7, No. 2 (1986): 227-50. Gabbard, Krin, and Glen O. Gabbard. Psychiatry and the Cinema. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1987. Gallardo C., Ximena, and C. Jason Smith. Alien Woman: The Making ofLt. Ellen Ripley. New York London: The Continuum International Publishing Group, Inc., 2004. Gallop, Jane. The Daughter's Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1982. Garcia, Emanuel E. "In the Beginning ... Phylogeny in Freud's Overview of the Transference Neuroses: A Review-Essay." Jefferson Journal of Psychiatry 6, no. 2 (January 1988). Getty, Adele. Goddess: Mother ofLiving Nature. Thames and Hudson, 1990. Gillett, Sue. "Engaging Medusa: Competing Myths and Fairytales in 'In the Cut.'" Senses ofCinema, no. 3 1 (April 2004). Goodnow, Katherine. Kristeva in Focus: From Theory to Film Analysis. New York & Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2010. Gordon, Andrew M. Empire ofDreams: The Science Fiction and Fantasy Films of Steven Spielberg. Vol. 18(4). Plymouth and Devon, UK: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2008. Gordon, Rebecca. "Portraits Perversely Framed: Jane Campion and Henry James." Film Quarterly 56 No. 2 (Winter 2002): 14-24. Gordon, Rebecca M. "Portraits Perversely Framed: Jane Campion and Henry James." Film Quarterly 56, no. No. 2 (Winter 2002): 14-24. Grace, Sherrill E. "Courting Bluebeard with Bartok, Atwood and Fowles: Modem Treatment of the Bluebeard Theme." Journal of Modern Language 1 1 : 2 (1984): 245-62. Green, Andre. Green, Andre, n.d. Greenberg, Harvey. "The Piano." Film Quarterly 47 (1994): 48-50.

_.

_.

318

Bibliography

Greven, David. Representations ofFemininity in American Genre Cinema: The Woman 's Film, Film Nair, and Modern Horror. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 201 1 . Grigg, Russell. "The Concept of Semblant in Lacan's Teachings." LacanCom, 2007. Grosz, Elizabeth. "Sexual Difference and the Problem of Essentialism." In The Essential Difference, edited by Naomi Schor and Elizabeth Weed. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994. -. Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists. Sydney, Wellington, London, Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1989. Guberman, Ross Mitchell. JULIA KRlSTEVA Interviews. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Hackett, Helen. "A New Image of Elizabeth I: The TInee Goddesses Theme in Art and Literature." Huntington Library Quarterly 77, no. 3 (2014): 225-56. Halpern, Richard. "Creation: Lacan in Kansas." Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 2.1 (2000). Hansen, Sarah. "Infancy, Animality and the Limits of Language in the Work of Giorgio Agamben." Journalfor Critical Animal Studies IX, no. 112 (201 1): 167-8 1 . Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virlual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Heath, Stephen. "Difference." In The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in Sexuality, 47-106. London, New York: Routledge, 1992. -. "Narrative Space." Screen 17,3 (1976): 68-1 12. -. "Notes on Suture." Symptom 8 (Winter 2007): 1-13. -. "On Suture." The Symptom, 2006. -. Questions of Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 198 1 . Hendershot, Cyndy. "(Re)Visioning the Gothic: Jane Campion's The Piano." Literature Film Quarterly 26 (1998): 97. Herzogenrath, Bernd. "On the Lost Highway: Lynch and Lacan, Cinema and Cultural Pathology." Other Voices 1, n. 3 (1999). Hoeveler, Diane L. Gothic Feminism: The ProJessionalization from Charlotte Smith to the Brontes. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998. -. "Silence, Sex, and Feminism: An Examination of The Piano's Unacknowledged Sources." Literature Film Quarterly 26 (1998): 109. hooks, bell. "Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations." New York and London: Routledge, 1994.

Hollywood's (rn)Otber Aperture

319

Horney, Karen. Feminine Psychology. New York, London: W. W . Norton & Company, 1967. -. "The Dread of Women." The International Journal ofPsychoanalysis 13 (1932): 348-60. Humm, Maggie. Feminism and Film. Edinburgh, Scotland Bloomington Indianapolis: Edinburgh University Press Indiana University Press, 1997. -. "Postmodernism and Orlando." In Feminism and Film, 143-78. Edinburgh, Scotland Bloomington Indianapolis: Edinburgh University Press Indiana University Press, 1997. Hurwitz, Sigmund, and Robert Hinshaw. Lilith, The First Eve: Historical and Psychological Aspects of the Dark Feminine. 1992. Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Daimon Verlag, 1992. Hyde, Sarah. Exhibiting Gender. New York: Manchester University Press, 1998. Iampolski, Mikhail. The Memory of Tiresias: Intertextualily and Film. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Ian, Marcia. Remembering the Phallic Mother: Psychoanalysis, Modernism, and the Fetish. Ithaca London: Cornell University Press, 1993. Inness, Sherrie A. Tough Girls: Women Warriors and Wonder Women in Popular Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. Innis, Robert E. Suzanne Langer in Focus: The Symbolic Mind. American Philosophy. Indiana University Press, 2009. Ionescu, Vlad. "Figural Aesthetics: Lyotard, Valery, Deleuze." Cultural Politics 9, no. 2 (July 2013): 144-57. Irigaray, Luce. Speculum of the Other Woman. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985. -. The Irigaray Reader. Oxford, England Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell Ltd., 1991. Isaacs, Susan. "The Nature and Function of Phantasy." International Journal ofPsycho-Analysis 29 (1948): 73-97. Jackson, Rosemary. "Narcissism and Beyond: A Psychoanalytic Reading of Frankenstein and Fantasies of the Double." In Aspects of Fantasy: Selected Essays from the Second International Conference on the Fantastic in Literature and Film, edited by William Coyle, 45-53. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986. Jacobus, Mary. First Things: The Maternal Imagery in Literature, Art, and Psychoanalysis. New York and London: Routledge, 1995. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic ofLate Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.

320

Bibliography

Jardine, Alice A. GYNESIS: Configurations of Woman and Modernity. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985. Jonte-Pace, Diane. Speaking the Unspeakable: Religion, Misogyny, and the Uncanny Mother in Freud's Cultural Texts. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 200 1 . Jung, Carl G. Man and His Symbols. New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1964. -. "ANIMA AND ANIMUS." Collected Works orCG. JunK, Volume 7: Two Essays in Analytical Psychology, edited by GERHARD ADLER and R. F. C. HULL, Princeton University Press, PRINCETON, N.J., 1966, pp. 188-211. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.cttShIn7s.21. Justice, Benjamin. "Maleficent Reborn: Disney's Fairytale View of Gender Reaches Puberty." Social Education 78, no. 4 (2014): 194-98. Kafka, Franz. Dearest Father. Translated by Hannah Stokes and Richard Stokes. Richmond, UK: One World Classics LTD, 2008. Kaplan, E. Ann Mother and Representation: The Motber in Popular Culture and Melodramas. Routledge, 1992. Kavanaugh, James H. "'Son ofa Bitch': Feminism, Humanism, and Science in 'Alien.'" October 13 (Summer 1980): 90-100. https:!!doi.org/1 0 .230713 3 97704. Kawash, Samira. "Terrorists and Vampires: Fanon's Spectral Violence of Decolonization." edited by Anthony Alessandrini, 23S-S7. Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives. New York: Routledge, 1999. Keitb, Jeremy. Brighton SF with Brian Aldiss, Lauren Beukes, and Jeff Noon, September IS, 2012. https:lladactio.com/articlesIS7401. Keltner, S. K. Kristeva: Thresholds. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 201 1 . Kibbey, Ann Theory of the Image: Capitalism, Contemporary Film, and Women. Bloomington Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, n.d. King, John N. "Queen Elizabetb I: Representations of the Virgin Queen." Renaissance Quarterly 43, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 30-74. Kirshner, Lewis A. "Rethinking Desire: The Objet Petit A in Lacanian Theory." Journal of the American Psychoanalytical Association S3 (Winter 200S): 83-102. Kittay, Eva Feder. "Womb Envy: An Explanatory Concept." In Mothering: Essays in Feminist Theory, edited by Joyce Trebilcot, 94-128. Savage, Maryland, USA: Rowan & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1983. Kofinan, Sarah. The Enigma of Woman: Woman in Freud's Writings. Translated by Katberine Porter. Itbaca: Cornell University Press, n.d. Kolker, Robert. Film, Form, and Culture. Boston: McGraw-Hill College, 1999. .

.

Hollywood's (rn)Otber Aperture

321

Kracauer, Siegfried. Theory ofFilm: The Redemption ofPhysical Reality. Oxford University Press, 1960. Kristeva, Julia. "A Father Is Being Beaten to Death," 2006. -. Black Sun. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989. -. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Translated by Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980. -. Hatred and Forgiveness. In European Perspectives. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. -. "'Il n'y a Pas de Maitre a Langage.'" Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse 20 (Autumn 1979): 1 1 9-40. -. Interview with Julia Kristeva. Women Analyze Women. New York: New York University Press, 1988. -. Intimate Revolt: The Powers and Limits ofPsychoanalysis. Translated by Jeanine Herman. Vol. 2. The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. -. Language: The Unknown. An Initiation into Linguistics. Translated by Anne M. Menke. Columbia University Press, 1989. -. Melanie Klein. Translated by Ross Buberman. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001 . -. New Maladies of the Soul. Translated by Ross Guberman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. -. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. -. Revolt She Said. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2000. -. Revolution in Poetic Language. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. -. Tales of Love. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987. -. Teresa, My Love: An Imagined Life of the Saint ofAvila. Translated by Lorna Scott Fox. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. -. "The Impenetrable Power of the Phallic Matron." Liberation, September 25, 2008. -. "The System and the Speaking Subject." In The KristevaReader, edited by Toril Moi. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. -. "Women's Time." In Kristeva Reader, edited by Toril Moi, translated by Alice Jardine, 187-212. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. Kubie, Lawrence S. Symbol and Neurosis: Selected Papers ofLawrence S. Kubie. Psychological Issues. New York: International Universities Press, 1978.

322

Bibliography

Kuhn, AImette. Women 's Pictures: Feminism and Cinema. Second. London, New York: Verso, 1994. Labbie, Erin Felicia. Lacan 's Medievalism. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Lacan, Jacques. "Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet." Edited by Jacques-Alaio Miller. Yale French Studies 55/56 (1977): 1 1-52. -. "Ecrits: A Selection," Translated by Bruce Fink. New York (London): W. W. Noron and Company, 2002. -. Ecrits: The First Complete Edition Published in English. Translated by Bruce Fiok, Heloise Fink, and Russell Grigg. New York London: W. W. Norton and Company, 2006. -. Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the ecolefreudienne. Translated by Jacqueline Rose. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1982. -. Le Triomphe de La Religion, Precede Du Discours Aux Catholiques. Paris: Seuil, 2005. -. On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits o/Love andKnowledge, 1972-1973. Translated by Bruce Fink. Seminar XX: Encore 1972-1973. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999. -. SeminarX: L 'angoisse. Unpublished, 1963. -. The Seminar, BookXl, The FourFundamental Concepts o/Psychoanalysis. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York (London): W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. (also Kamac), 2004. -. The Seminar 0/Jacques Lacan, BookXX: Encore 1972-3, On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits o/Love andKnowledge. Translated by Bruce Fink. New York: Norton, 1998. -. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book xx- Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits o/Love and Knowledge. Translated by Bruce Fiok. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1999. Laplanche, Jean, and I-B. Pontalis. "Fantasy and the Origios of Sexuality." The InternationalJournal o/Psycho-Analysis 49 Part 1 (1968): 1-17. -. The Language 0/ Psycho-Analysis. Translated by Donald Nicholson­ Smitb. New York City: Norton, 1973. -. The Language 0/ Psychoanalysis. Translated by Donald Nicholson­ Smitb. W. W. Norton, 1973. Lauretis, Teresa de. Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives. Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives. New York: Routledge, 1999. -. Freud's Drive: Psychoanalysis, Literature and Film. New York: Plagrave Macmillan, 2008. -. Technologies 0/ Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1987.

Hollywood's (rn)Otber Aperture

323

Lechte, John. Julia Kristeva. London New York: Routledge, 1990. -. "Julia Kristeva and the Trajectory of the Image." In Psychoanalysis, Aesthetics and Politics in the Work of Julia Kristeva, edited by Kelly Oliver and S. K. Keltner, 79-9S. Albany, NY : SUNY Press, 2009. Lewin, Bertram D. The Image and the Past. New York: International Universities Press, Inc., 1968. Lewis, Michael. Derrida and Lacan: Another Writing. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008. Lipkowitz, Ina, and Andrea Loselle. "An Interview with Julia Kristeva." Critical Texts 3, No. 3 (1986): 7. Lokhorst, Gert-Jan. "Decartes and the Pineal Gland." Edited by Zalta, Edward N. Stanford Encyclopedia ofPhilosophy, Spring 2014. http://plato.stanford.edu!archives/spr20 14/entries/pineal-glandl. Loren, Scott. "Mechanical Humanity, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Android: The Posthuman Subject in 2001: A Space Odyssey and Artificial Intelligence: A.!," In Stanley Kubrick: Essays on His Films and Legacy, edited by Gary D. Rhodes. Jefferson, North Carolina London: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2008. Lorenz, Annalena. "The Danish Girl (201S) and the De/Construction of Gender Identity." Inquiries Journal 8, no. 06 (2016): 1-2. http://www.inquiriesjoumal.com/artic1es/1423/the-danish-girl-20IS­ and-the-deconstruction-of-identity. Low, Barbara. Psycho-Analysis: A BriefAccount of the Freudian Theory. London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd, 1920. Lundquist, Sara. "Reverence and Resistance: Barbara Guest, Ekphrasis, and the Female Gaze." Contemporary Literature 38 (1997): 260. Lyon, Elisabeth. "The Cinema of Lol V. Stein." In Feminism and Film Theory, edited by Constance Penley, 244-. Ney York City: Routledge, 1988. Magrini, J. M. "On the System of the 'Suture' in Cinema." Otherzine 10 (February 1 1 , 2006). http://othercinema.com/otherzine/archives/index.php?issueid� IS&artic Ie id�33. Marder, Elissa. The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Psychoanalysis, Photography, Deconstruction. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012. McGowan, Kate. "Oedipal Androids: Desire and the Human in the Third Millennium." Technoetic Arts 4 nol (2006): 39-S4. McHugh, Kathleen. Jane Campion. Contemporary Film Directors. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007.

324

Bibliography

McKee, Alison L. "She Had Eyes a Man Could Drown In: Narrative, Desire and the Female Gaze in The French Lieutenant's Woman." Literature Film Quarterly 20 (1992): 146. McPhee, Ruth. Female Masochism in Film: Sexuality, Ethics andAesthetics. Film Philosophy at the Margins. Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2014. Meissner, W. W. The Ethical Dimension of Psychoanalysis: A Dialogue. SUNY Series in Psychoanalysis and Culture. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2003. Menninghaus, Winfried. Disgust: The Theory and History of a Strong Sensation. Intersections: Philosophy and Critical Theory. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2003. -. In Praise of Nonsense: Kant and Bluebeard. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. Metz, Christian. The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. Translated by Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetti. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982. Miller, Elaine P. "Primal Phenomena and Photography." The Oxford Literary Review 32.2 (2010): 203-30. Miller, Jacques-Alain. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book 1. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by John Forrester. W. W. Norton & Company, 1988. -. "To Interpret the Cause: From Freud to Lacan." Edited by Ellie Ragland­ Sullivan. Newsletter ofthe Freudian Field 3 Numbers 1 & 2 (Spring/Fall 1989). -. "Suture: Elements of the Logic of the Signifier." Tlie Symptom, 2006. http://www . lacan.com/symptom8_articles/miller8 .html -. "Extimity." Translated by Francoise Massardier-Kenney. The Symptom 9, June 20, 2008. http://www.lacan.com/symptom/extimity.html. Minsky, Rosalind. Psychoanalysis and Culture: Contemporary States of Mind. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1998. Moi, Toril. The Kristeva Reader. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. -. "Femininity Revisited." Journal of Gender Studies 1 (1992): 324. Montleray, Michele. "The Story of Louise." In Retuming to Freud: Clinical Psychoanalysis in the School ofLacan, edited by Stuart Schneiderman, 75-93. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1980. Morris, Nigel. Tlie Cinema of Steven Spielberg: Empire of Light. London and New York: Wall Flower Press, 2007. Morrissey, Thomas. "Going Nowhere: Pinocchio Subverted in Spielberg's A.!, Artificial Intelligence." Extrapolation 45, No. 3 (2004): 249-62.

Hollywood's (rn)Other Aperture

325

Moshtagh, Nahaleh. "The Repression of the Bad Oedipal Mother in Psychoanalysis." Psychanalytic Discourse, no. 2 (2016). http://psychoanalyticdiscourse.com/index.php/psadlarticle/view/3 3/67. Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Screen, 1973, 1426. Murphy, Kathleen. "Jane Campion's Passage to India." Film Comment, January 2000, 29-36. Naomi Schor, and Elizabeth Weed. The Essential Difference. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994. Naremore, James. "Love and Death in A.I. Artificial Intelligence." Michigan Quarterly Review XLN, 2 (2005). -. On Kubrick. London: British Film Institute, 2007. Neroni, Hillary. "Following the Impossible Road to Female Passion: Psychoanalysis, the Mundane and the Films of Jane Campion." Discourse 34 (Springl f Spring/Fa1l 2012): 290-3 10. -. "Jane Campion's Jouissance: Holy Smoke and Feminist Filin Theory." In Lacan and Contemporary Film, edited by Todd McGowan and Sheila Kunkle, 209-32. Contemporary Theory Series. New York: Other Press, 2004. Oliver, Kelly. Animal Lessons: How They Teach Us to Be Human. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. -. "Julia Kristeva's Maternal Passions. " Journal ofFrench andFrancophone Philosophy Vol XVIII, No 1 (2010): 1-8. -. "Kristeva's Sadomasochistic Subject and the Sublimation of Violence." Journal ofFrench and Francophone Philosophy XXI, 1 (2013). -. "Little Hans's Little Sister." PhiloSOPHIA 1, no. 1 (201 1): 9-28. -. Psychoanalysis, Aesthetics, and Politics in the Work of Kristeva. Insinuations. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2009. -. Reading Kristeva: Unraveling the Double-Bind. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993. Osborne, Kenan B. "Mary and the Holy Trinity, As Reflected in the Liturgical Year." Marian Studies 40, no. 1 (1989): 58-76. Oudart, Jean-Pierre. "Cinema and Suture." Screen 18, no. 4 (December 1977): 35-47. Park, Douglas, and Dawn Dietrich. "In The Cut." University of California Press, Sunnner 2005. Parker, Emma. "From House to Home: A Kristevan Reading of Michele Robert's Daughters of the House." Critique 41 (2000): 153. Pavon-Cuellar, D. "Extimacy." Edited by Thomas Teo. Encyclopedia of Critical Psychology. New York: Springer, 2014.

326

Bibliography

Penley, Constance. "Femininism, Film Theory, and the Bachelor Machines." In The Future of an Illusion: Film, Feminisim, and Psychoanalysis. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. -, ed. Feminism and Film Theory. New York: Routledge, 1988. -. The Future of an Illusion: Film, Feminisim, and Psychoanalysis. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Pinko1a Estes, Clarissa. Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype. New York: Ballantine Books, 1995. Pollock, Griselda. "Mother Trouble: The Maternal-Feminine in Phallic and Feminist Theory in Relation to Bracha Ettinger's Elaboration of Matrixial Ethics/Aesthetics." Studies in the Maternal 1 (2009): 1-3 1 . Quart, Barbara. "The Piano." Cineaste 20 (1994): 55. Ragland, Ellie. "The Topological Dimension of Lacanian Optics." (Re)­ tum: A Journal ofLacanian Studies 3&4 (2008): 99-115. Rainford, Lydia. She Changes by Intrigue: Irony, Femininity andFeminism. Amsterdam, New York City: Radopi, 2005. Rank, Otto. The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study. Translated by Jr Tucker. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1971. -. The Trauma ofBirth. New York: Harper and Row, 1973. Readings, Bill. Introducing Lyotard: Art and Politics. London and New York: Routledge, 1991. Reid, Mark A. "A Few Black Keys and Maori Tattoos: Re-Reading Jane Campion's The Piano in PostNegritude Time." Quarterly Review of Film and Video 17 (2000): 107-16. Reik, Theodor. Masochism in Modem Man. New York: Farrar, Straus and Company, 1941. Reinhard, Kenneth. "Toward a Political Theology of Neighbor." In The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology, edited by Slavoj Zizek, Eric L. Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard. Religion and Postmodernism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Reineke, Martha. Sacred Lives: Kristeva on Women and Violence. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997. Restuccia, Frances L. "Black and Blue: Kieslowski's Melancholia." In Revolt, Affect Collectivity: The Unstable Boundaries in Kristeva 's Polis, edited by Tina Chanter and Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, 193-207. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005. -. "Kristeva's Intimate Revolt and the Thought Specular: Encountering the (Mulholland) Drive." In Psychoanalysis, Aesthetics, and Politics in the Work of Kristeva, edited by Kelly Oliver and S. K. Keltner, 65-78. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2009.

Hollywood's (rn)Otber Aperture

327

-. The Blue Box: KristevanlLacanian Readings a/Contemporary Cinema. London and New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2012. Rivera-Fuentes, Consuelo. "Gender and Hybridity: The Significance of Human/Animal Characters in Magic Realist Fiction" 4, no. 1 (2000): 16. Robinson, M. "Salmacis and Hemmphroditus: 'When Two Become One: (Ovid, Met. 4.285-388)." The Classical Quarterly 49, no. 1 (1999): 21223. http://www.jstor.org/stable/639498. Robinson, Neil. "With Choices Like These Who Needs Enemies: The Piano, Women's Articulations, Melodrama, and the Woman's Film." In Piano Lessons: Approaches to The Piano, edited by Felicity Coombs and Suzarme Gemmell. Sidney, Australia London: J. L. Libbey and Company, 1999. Rogers, Robert. "Freud and the Semiotics of Repetition." Poetics Today 8, no. 3/4 (1987): 579. https:lldoi.orgIl 0.23071l772570. Rose, Jacqueline. Sexuality in the Field of Vision. London: Verso, 2005. Roudinesco, Elizabeth. Jacques Lacan & Co. : A History ofPsychoanalysis in France, 1925-1985 Bataille de Cent Ans. 2. 1925-1985. English Roudinesco, Elisabeth, 1944- Chicago: University of Chicago Press, C1990. Jacques Lacan & Co. : A History ofPsychonalalysis in France, 1925 - 1985. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Schneider, Steven Jay. "Manifestations of the Literary Double in Modem Horror Cinema." In Horror Film and Psychoanalysis: Freud's Worst Nightmare, edited by Steven Jay Schneider, 106-21. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Scobie, Stephen. "What's the Story, Mother: The Mourning of the Alien." Science Fiction Studies 20, No. 1 (1993): 80-93. Scott, A. O. "Do Androids Long for Mom?" New York Times, June 29, 2001. Scott, Maria. "Lacan's 'Of the Gaze as Object Petit a' As Anamorphic Discourse." Paragraph 3 1 (November 2008): 327-43. Sedgwick, E. K. "Melanie Klein and the Difference Affect Makes." South Atlantic Quarterly 106, no. 3 (July 1, 2007): 625-42. https:lldoi.org/l0.1215/00382876-2007-020. Segal, Hanna. Introduction to Melanie Klein. Karnac Classics. London: Karnac Books, 1988. Sencindiver, Susan Yi. "Pregnant Doppelgangers: Lived and Literary." In Otherness: A Multilateral Perspective, edited by Marie Lauritzen, Maria Beville, and Susan Yi; Sencindiver, 61-88. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 201 1 . -. "Sexing or Specularizing the Doppelganger: A Recourse to Poe's 'Ligeia. '" At the InterfacelProbing the Boundaries 61 (March 2010): 63.

328

Bibliography

-. "Shared Secrets: Motherhood and Male Homosexuality in Doppelganger Narratives." Konlur 21 (2011): 32-48. Sergio Benvenuto. "Against Lacanism I: A Conversation with Andre Green." Journal of European Psychoanalysis, no. No. 2 (Fall -Winter 1996 1995). Seshadri, Kalpana Rahita. Human Animal: Race, Law, Language. University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Shaffer, Kay. "Women and the Bush: Australian National Identity and Representations of the Feminine." Working Papers in Australian Studies, n.d. Shell, Marc. Elizabeth 's Glass. Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 1993. Shepherdson, Charles. "A Pound of Flesh: Lacan's Reading of The Visible and the Invisible." Diacritics 24.7 (1998): 70-86. -. Vital Signs: Nature, Culture, Psychoanalysis. New York and London: Routledge, 2000. Shlain, Leonard. The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image. New York: Viking Penguin, 1998. Sigler, David. "'Read Mr. Sacher-Masoch': The Literariness of Masochism in the Philosophy of Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze." Criticism 53, no. 2 (Spring 2011): 1 89-212. -. "The Navel of the Dream: Freud, Derrida and Lacan on the Gap Wbere , 'Something Happens. SubStance 39, no. 2 (2010): 17-38. Silver, Catherine B. "Womb Envy: Loss and Grief of the Maternal Body." The Psychoanalytic Review 94, no. 3 (June 2007): 409-30. SilvelTIlan, Kaja. The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema. Bloomington & Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988. -. The Subject ofSemiotics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983. -. The Threshold of the Visible. New York City: Routledge, 1996. Sklar, Robert. "A Novel Approach to Movie Making: Reinventing 'The , Portrait of a Lady. The Chronicle ofHigher Education, February 14, 1997. Slade, Carole. St. Teresa of Avila: Author of a Heroic Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1995 1995. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ftSb69p02d1 Smith, Daniel W. "The Inverse Side of the Structure: Zizek on Deleuze on Lacan*." Criticism 46 (Fall 2004): 635-50. Smith, David L. "The Mirror Image of the Present: Freud's Theory of Retrogressive Screen Memories." Psychoanalytische Perspectieven, no. 39 (2000): 7-29. ,,

,,

Hollywood's (rn)Other Aperture

329

Smith, Dr Stephen J. "The Vitality of Humanimality: From the Perspective of Life Phenomenology," n.d., 17. Sprengnether, Madelon. "Freud as Memoirist: A Reading of 'Screen Memories.'" American Imago 69, no. Number 2 (Summer 2012): 21S39. Stam, Robert, Robert Burgoyne, and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis. New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics: Strncturalism, Post-Structuralism and Beyond. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. Starcke, August. "The Castration Complex." International Journal of Psychoanalysis 2 (1921): 179-201 . Strick, Philip. "A.!, Artificial Intelligence." Sight and Sound, n.d. Studlar, Gaylyn. In the Realm ofPleasure: Von Sternberg, Dietrich, and the Masochistic Aesthetic. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. -. "Visual Pleasure and the Masochistic Aesthetic." Journal ofFilm and Video 37, no. 2 (Spring 1985): S-26. j stor.orglstable120686S 8. Tatar, Maria. The Hard Facts of the Grimm 's Fairy Tales. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987. Thompson, Kirsten Moana. "The Sickness Unto Death: Dislocated Gothic in a Minor Key." In Piano Lessons: Approaches to The Piano, 64-80. Sidney, Australia London: J. L. Libbey and Company, 1999. Tyler, Carol-Anne. Female Impersonation. New York: Routledge, 2003. Tyndale, William, Translator. Tyndale 's New Testament New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989. Uhner, Gregory. Teletheory: Grammatology in the Age of Vide. New York London: Routledge, 1989. Ussher, Jane. Fantasies of Femininity: Reframing the Boundaries of Sex. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997. Vizeltelly, Ernest Alfred. Bluebeard: An Account of Comorre the Cursed and Gilles De Rais. London: Chatto & Windus, 1902. Warner, Marina. Alone ofAll Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary. New York: Vintage Books, 1976. Watson, Janell. "Schitzoanalysis as Metamodelling." The Fiberculture Journal 12 (December 2, 2008): FCJ-077. Weber, Alison. Teresa ofAvila and the Rhetoric ofFemininity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990. Wexman, Virginia Wright. Jane Campion Interviews. Jackson, MI: University Press of Mississippi, 1999. White, P. "Sketchy Lesbians: Carol as History and Fantasy." Film Quarterly 69, no. 2 (December 1, 201S): 8-18. https:/Idoi.org/ l 0 .lS2S/fq.201S.69.2.8.

330

Bibliography

Whiting, Stephen. "Lapanche Seduces Kristeva: [RelLocating the [MlOther in 'Semiotic' Discourse." Academia.Edu, n.d. William I. Grossman. "Notes on Masochism: A Discussion of the History and Development of a Psychoanalytic Concept." Psychoanalytic Quarterly, no. 55 (1986): 379-413. Wilson, Mitchell. "Maternal Reliance: Commentary on Julia Kristeva." Journal of the American Psychoanalytical Association 62:101 (2014): 62- 1 1 1 . Wood, Robin. Sexual Politics and Narrative Film: Hollywood and Beyond. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Ziarek, Ewa Plonowska. "Kristeva and Fanon: Revolutionary Violence and Ironic Articulation." In Revolt, Affect, Collectivity: The Unstable Boundaries of Kristeva 's Polis, edited by Tina Chanter and Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, 57-75. Albany, NY: State University of New York, 2005. Zivkovic, Milica. "The Double as the 'Unseen' of Culture: Toward a Definition of Doppelganger." Edited by Nedeljko Bogdanovic. Facta Universitatis 2, No. 7 (2000): 121-28. Zizek, Slavoj . How to ReadLacan. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006. -. "A Letter Which Did Not Arrive at Its Destination." Lacanian Ink 28 The Symptom 12 (August 22, 2011). -. Enjoy Your Symptom: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. New York City and London: Routledge, 2001. -. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. Tenth printing 2002. Cambridge, Massachuzetts London, England: The MIT Press, 1991. -. "The Politics of Alienation and Separation: From Hegel to Marx.... and Back." Crisis and Critique 4, no. 1 (March 2017): 447-78. Zupancic, Alenka. Ethics ofthe Real: Kant Lacan. London: Verso, 2000.

INDEX

(m)Other . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxiv xxvi abject . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1 8 2 1 abjection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 Abjection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xx xxi affirmative negativity . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 23 Agamben, Giorgio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 305 Aldiss, Brian . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 289 Alexander, Franz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 282 Allen, Richard . . . . . . . 7, 1 1 3, 276, 278 Assumption . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77 Atwood, Margaret . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 1 Bahktin, Mikhai1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 295 Bakhtin, Mikhail . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 1 Barthes, Roland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 277 Beginnings and Endings of Films . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxx xxxi B1uebeard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 32 Bowie, Malcolm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 260, 295 Brousse, Marie-Helene . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 307 Chamberlin, Frederick . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 288 Champion, Margret Gmmarsdottir . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 289, 291 chara xv xvii, 105, 107 compulsion to repeat return ofthe repressed . . . . . . . . . . 180 Cope, Jackson 1. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 285 Copjec, Joan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 294 Cowie, Elizabeth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Creed, Barbara . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 300 Dayan, Daniel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 293 Deleuze, Gilles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 differance xiv, 7 doppelganger . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxvi xxx double bind . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10, 20, 27 28 dream screen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 Eberwein, Robert T. . . . . . . . . . . . 282, 284 ecriture feminine xi extimacy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii ....................

...............................

..........................

female gaze . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 FEMININITY. xiii xv, 23, 73, 1 2 1 23, 279 figura1 285 Fischer, Lucy . . . . . . . . . xxviii, 180, 182 fortldo 102 4, 280 Freeman, C.P . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 306 Freud, Sigrnund . . . . . 29, 65, 150, 1 80, 201, 202, 273, 280, 282, 284, 304, 307 Garcia, Emanuel E . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 284 Getty, Adele . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 286 Gordon, Andrew . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 1 Grace, Sherrill . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 1 Greenberg, Harvey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 274 Guattari, Felix . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 290 Hackett, Helen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 286 Heath, Stephen .... 99, 277, 290, 295, 296 Hendershot, Cyndy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 276 hooks, bell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 276 Homey, Karen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 303 Ian285 Ian, Marcia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxviii, 65, 157 Imaginary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179 Innis, Robert E . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 309 intertextuality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 1 Ionescu, Vlad . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 285 Irigaray, Luce . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 274 Jameson, Fredric . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 301 jouissance 292 Jauissance xxii xxiv Joyce, James . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 285 Jung, Carl . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 280 Justice, Benjamin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 308 Kafka, Franz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 288 Kavanaugh, James H. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 298 Kirclmer, Lewis A. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 269 .......................................

...........................

.................................

........................

332 Klein, Melanie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185 Kracauer, Siegfried . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279 Kristeva . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 Kristeva, Julia ... xv xxiv, 62, 70, 77, 79, 86, 104, 1 14, 128, 129, 1 8 1 , 1 84, 260, 287, 289, 291, 292, 296, 297, 298, 299, 300, 301, 302 Lacan, Jacques . . . . 67, 104, 150, 161, 163, 277, 282, 288, 291, 294, 296, 297, 299, 301 Langer, Suzanne . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 308 Laplancbe and de Pontalis . . . . . . . . . 259 Laplancbe and Pontalis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 289 Lokhorst, Gert-Jan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 304 Lorenz, Annalena . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 309 Lyotard, Jean-Francois . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 male gaze . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 Marder, Elissa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 305 masochism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 36 masochistic aesthetic . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 3 8 Maternal Ordonnancement . . . . . . . . . xv maternal semiotic . . . . . xvii xx, 22, 72 Maternal Semiotic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 12 1 7 McPhee, Ruth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 282, 283 Menninghaus, Winfried . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 Minsky, Rosalind . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .303 mirror . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 16 1 7 Moi, Tori1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 289, 301 Mulvey, Laura . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Oliver, Kelly . . . . . . . . 27, 274, 305, 306 Osborne, Kenan B. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 287 Oudart, Jean-Pierre . . . . . 98, 292, 293, 294 Parker, Emma . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 278 Pavon-Cuellar, David . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 0 Penley, Constance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 259 Phallic (m)Other . . . . . . xx, 57, 66, 266 Pinkola Estes, Clarissa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Ragland, Ellie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 284 Rank, Otto . xxvi, 149, 299, 302, 303 Real . . xiii, xviii, xx, xxiv, 49, 1 04 8 answers from the Real . . . . . . . . . . . 1 06

Index Reik, Theodor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 Reineke, Martha . . . . . . . . . . 78, 274, 277 repetition compulsion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 282 Rogers, Robert . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 282 Schrader, Paul . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 308 Scobie, Stephen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 59 scopic drive . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 291 Sencindiver, Susan Yi . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxvii Shell, Marc . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83 Shepherdson, Charles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 269 Sheridan, Alan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 288 Sh1ain, Leonard ... 61, 1 2 1 , 288, 296 Sigler, David . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 282 signifiance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi, xvi, 184 Silverman, Kaja . 1 00, 279, 290, 294 Smith, David L . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 284 Sprengnether, Madelon . . . . . . . . . . . . . 304 Starcke, August . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 8 1 Stud1ar, Gay1yn . . . 39, 280, 282, 283, 283 Suture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96 104 the Symbolic Name of the Father xiii, xiv, 62, 99, 1 00, 277, 296, 300 topo1ogy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 284 umbilical cord navel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65 uanbi1ica1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 285, 288 umbilical cord/penis . . . . . . . . . . . . 147 umbilicus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65 umbilical cord as phallus ....... xxviii uncanny . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxvii, 180 unheimlich . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxxi, 14 Virgin Mary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 von Sacher-Masoch, Leopold . . . . . 37 Warner, Marina . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 Watson, Janell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 291 Weber, Alison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 277 Whedon, Josh . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 303 Woolverton, Linda. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 308 Zizek, Slavoj . . . . . . 161, 295, 299, 300, 301