Traumatic Knowing/Unknowing and the Return of the Disavowed in The Tale

ABSTRACT

This speculative essay focuses on the defensive disavowal of childhood sexual abuse that is effected through the recursive intrapsychic and interpersonal operations of identification with and introjection of the aggressor that act in tandem to prohibit traumatic knowing. In the film The Tale, these operate cinematically at diegetic and metadiegetic levels, and are present in both symbolized and enacted forms. The deconstruction and reconstruction of traumatic reality is examined through the film’s oneiric interpolations of past and present time, reality and fantasy, and use of semiologic elements. The traumatic injury is remembered, repeated, and worked through, undergirded by the operations of nachträglichkeit and repetition compulsion.

Notes

¹ Diegesis: the spatiotemporal universe of the film.

² The film, in a homologue of Jenny’s story, metadiegetically enacts Bill’s lie of never lying; though “true … as far as I know,” “authentic” (The Tale Movie, n.d.), and, as professed in an interview, “the whole goal of the film is to be honest, radically honest, in fact” (Democracy Now, 2018), the film blends truth and nontruth and is a “fictional memoir” (National Public Radio [NPR], 2018). Its several nonreal elements, e.g., the confrontation with Bill (ibid.) may be taken as both a reverberation of identification with the aggressor and an expression of wish-fulfilling fantasies.

³ In the first scene Jennifer interviews a student regarding unacknowledged depression, questions the student’s believability, and asks him if he believes himself regarding his report of his psychological state. The scene ends abruptly at the moment a student asks a question about “crossing the boundary.” In the second, she surprises a student with questions regarding her first sexual experience, jarringly persists in spite of the student’s nervous discomfort, and harshly admonishes her for her reluctance to disclose intimate sexual details.

⁴ It is she who holds the objectifying camera filming racial others; the defensive processes of subject–object inversion and turning passive into active here adumbrate the operation of these same processes in the two classroom scenes.

⁵ The scene appears to be shot in India: The crowd is shouting victory cries in Hindi commonly used during protests—Jai ho! Zindabad! Jitenge! (Victory is ours! We will prevail! We will win!) and they appear to be members of India’s large, impoverished, disenfranchised rural/tribal population.

⁶ It is an encounter with foreignness that takes place not only diegetically between Jennifer and the unidentified others but also metadiegetically (Marciniak & Bennett, 2018), between the film and audience. Moreover the scene serves to lull the audience along by the mistranslation of the “joyful” occasion as an echo of the distorted, “beautiful” love story, in a further metadiegetic enactment of the introjected aggressor’s story.

⁷ Given that these figures are uncredited, unidentified, and decontextualized, a more critical reading could mean engaging the notion of “the disposability and usability of foreignness,” per Marciniak’s (2018) theorization of cinematic representations of foreignness, wherein the figure of the foreigner is treated as without a stable identity and is therefore exchangeable. Recognizing the paradox of foreignness and asserting that foreignness is always overdetermined, she refers to Derrida’s (1981) concept of pharmakon, by which what is foreign is simultaneously remedy and poison, leading to both “embrace and disavowal” of that which is foreign.

⁸ She is, however, an actual figure from reality (Paromita Goswami, a lawyer, social activist, labor organizer, organizer of women against violence, and founder of several nonprofit organizations working with the poorest of India’s rural workers and tribal farmers [Yale University, n.d.], and recently an electoral politician [Deshpande, 2019]). She appeared in Fox’s previous documentary work, Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman (Fox, 2007), in which Fox investigated the intimate and sexual arrangements of women around the world and candidly explored her own romantic and familial struggles. Fox distinguished the time she spent with her: “Somehow Paromita was an Indian mirror to my life, yet she seemed surer than I.” “My days with Paromita soothed my soul … She had shaken my whole concept of love.” The actress playing Jennifer in The Tale, which was shot in the United States, and Paromita have been respectively cut, spliced, and edited into and out of real footage and this scripted film, cinematically representing the reality/fantasy blurring and spatiotemporal distortions of the traumatized psyche.

⁹ Though not made explicit by Ferenczi, the term Orpha likely has its etymological root in the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice in which Orpheus is fragmented into pieces while his head survives as a disembodied intelligence, which is later revered as an oracle of wisdom (Smith, 1998a; Haynal, 2014; Gurevich, 2015).

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Komal Choksi

Komal Choksi, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist in full-time private practice in New York City and an analytic candidate at NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy & Psychoanalysis. She writes and presents on the intersections of psychoanalysis, race, gender, culture, politics, and trauma.