Day 8--No Class

Sorry I canceled so late.  I was so sick I didn't remember that it was a teaching day.  

Before Monday, please pick one of the following quotes from the article on Psychoanalytical article and put it in your own words and try to explain why the quote is significant within the theory or why it is significant in understanding fear.  This is something we were going to do in class.


1). Whereas early ap- proaches, such as those of Tarratt, concentrated on the film text in relation to its hid- den or repressed meanings, 1970s theory, as formulated by Jean-Louis Baudry, Chris- tian Metz, and Laura Mulvey, emphasized the crucial importance of the cinema as an apparatus and as a signifying practice of ideology, the viewer-screen relationship, and the way in which the viewer was 'constructed' as transcendental during the spectato- rial process.

2). Similarly, the spectator in the cinema identifies with the larger-than-life, or ideal- ized, characters on the screen. Thus, as Mulvey (1975) later argued, the viewing expe- rience, in which the spectator identifies with the glamorous star, is not unlike a re-enactment of the moment when the child acquires its first sense of selfhood or subjectivity through identificaton with an ideal self. But, as Lacan pointed out, this is also a moment of misrecognition - the child is not really a fully formed subject. He will only see himself in this idealized way when his image is reflected back through the eyes of others. Thus, identity is always dependent on mediation. 

3). Nevertheless, Metz advocated the crucial importance of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory for the cinema and stressed the need to theorize the screen-spectator relation- ship-not just in the context of the Imaginary, but also in relation to the Symbolic. To address this issue, Metz introduced the notion of voyeurism. He argued that the viewing process is voyeuristic in that there is always a distance maintained, in the cinema, between the viewing subject and its object. The cinematic scene cannot return the spectator's gaze.

4). The Oedipal trajectory, Metz argued, is re-enacted in the cinema in relation not only to the Oedipal nature of narrative, but, most importantly, within the spectator- screen relationship. Narrative is characteristically Oedipal in that it almost always contains a male protagonist who, after resolving a crisis and overcoming a 'lack', then comes to identify with the law of the father, while successfully containing or control- ling the female figure, demystifying her threat, or achieving union with her.

5). The concept of 'lack' is crucial to narrative in another context. According to the Russian Formalist Tzvetan Todorov, the aim of all narratives is to solve a riddle, to find an answer to an enigma, to fill a lack. All stories begin with a situation in which the status quo is upset and the hero or heroine must - in general terms - solve a prob- lem in order for equilibrium to be restored. This approach sees the structures of nar- rative as being in the service of the subject's desire to overcome lack.

6). The narrative endings of films, which al- most always punished the threatening woman, reinforced Mulvey's argument about the voyeuristic gaze, while the deployment of the close-up shot, which almost always fragmented parts of the female form for erotic contemplation, reinforced Mulvey's ar- gument about the fetishistic look.

7) Cowie argued that the importance of fantasy as a setting, a scene, is crucial be- cause it enables film to be viewed as fantasy, as representing the mise-en-scene of de- sire. Similarly, the film spectator is free to assume mobile, shifting modes of identifi- cation-as Cowie demonstrated in her analysis of Now Voyager (USA, 1942) and The Reckless Moment (USA, 1949). Fantasy theory has also been used productively in rela- tion to science fiction and horror-genres in which evidence of the fantastic is particu- larly strong.

8). Cultural studies has developed partly in response to these problems. It sees cul- ture as a site of struggle. It places emphasis, not on unconscious processes, but on the history of the spectator (as shaped by class, colour, ethnicity, and so on) as well as on examining ways in which the viewer might struggle against the dominant ideology. Whereas the cognitivists have clearly rejected psychoanalysis, the latter's status within cultural studies is not so clear as cultural critics frequently utilize areas of psy- choanalytic theory.