Mainstream body‐character breach films and subjectivization

Abstract

The authors analyze a unique cinematic corpus – ‘body‐character breach films’ (one character, initially played by a certain actor, occupies the body of another character) – demonstrating Lacan's notion of traversing the fantasy, both on the level of the films’ diegesis and that of spectatorship. Breaching the alliance between actors and their characters perturbs the viewer's fantasy of wholeness enabled by this very alliance. Consequently, a change in subject/spectatorial position in relation to the lack in the Other is induced, enhanced through the visualization of various scenarios of unconscious fantasies (mostly incest). These are meant to unsettle the spectator into an awareness of how a conscious fantasy conceals another unconscious fundamental fantasy, thereby encouraging a change in spectatorial position (from ‘perverse’/fetishistic to ‘neurotic’). Conflating this change with Lacan's notion of traversing the fantasy, the authors contend that mainstream cinema has the capacity to induce a process of subjectivization (assuming responsibility for one's own desire). This process is contingent on four conditions: identification with the protagonist's fantasy to conceal the lack in the Other; dissolution of this fantasy, initiated by the body‐character breach; rhetorical strategies (the coding of unconscious scenarios cinematically); and an ethical dimension (encouraging the subject/spectator to follow her/his desire).

Key words:

• body‐character breach
• mainstream/counter cinema
• casting
• desire
• fantasy
• conscious/unconscious
• spectatorship
• subjectivization

Notes

1. On stardom and the importance of casting, see, for example, Dyer (1986); King (1991, p. 175, 177); Mayne (1993, pp. 123–4); Stacey (1994).

2. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, to the extent that desire originates from another, it is also the Other's desire, which is always enigmatic. Desire (which is whole and unconscious) emerges in the field of the Other as a longing, a relation to a lack (i.e. castration) that can never be filled. It is instilled in the subject through the unattainability of the (already) lost object, the m/Other (Lacan, 19591959–60, pp. 67–9) and through the fact that the subject is a speaking being (see, for example, Lacan, 1958, pp. 575–84). Hence desire encapsulates both the desire for recognition by another and the desire to be the object‐cause of another's desire.

3. In Lacanian psychoanalysis the subject of the symbolic order – the order of speech (the field of the Other, from which it emerges) and the unconscious – is split, divided, i.e. castrated. Castration is conflated with lack and ineluctably related to the lack in the Other, starting with the child's first perception that the m/Other is lacking. Castration is impossible to accept entirely. Lacan identifies three distinct yet non‐rigid clinical structures defining the subject's stance vis‐à‐vis castration: the neurotic (‘normal’) is characterized by repression of awareness of castration; the perverse by its disavowal; and the psychotic by its foreclosure. Fantasy is a mechanism by which the neurotic subject will never cease to seek a defense against castration (Evans, 2001, p. 23).

4. We relate here only to the film's visual trajectory, but in fact sound plays an important role in this formula. The actor's voice is no less important than her/his physique. This is magnificently exemplified in Singing in the Rain (Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, 1952) in Lina Lemont's character (Jean Hagen). The advent of sound (with which the film deals) ruins her career and stardom (as was the case with many actors and stars in Hollywood) because her voice is childishly squeaky and vulgar. This undermines the spectators’ (in the diegesis) fantasy created in relation to the romantic, aristocratic, greater than life characters that she embodied on (the silent) screen, as well as her (off‐screen) persona.

5. Although this film does not require that we do a cross‐comparison, we nevertheless have to imagine that teenager Bobby/Feldman is in fact the elderly Coleman/Robards who is striving to look and behave like (the real) Bobby/Feldman. These endeavors include an appropriation of some of Michael Jackson's persona characteristics (during the 1980s).

6. It is worth noting how Diaz's star persona was significantly altered for her role in this film.

7. For Freud (1919a) fantasy is a visual configuration, either unconscious or conscious (the latter also termed ‘daydream’); every conscious fantasy conceals an unconscious one (whose manifestation we find in dreams). Lacan accepts Freud's notion of fantasy as a visual configuration but emphasizes its protective function (against castration, the repression of the incest fantasy with the mother – see Lacan, 19591959–60, pp. 67–9), characterizing it by a fixed and immobile quality (see Evans, 1995, p. 61).

8. The Crying Game (Neil Jordan, 1992) is somewhat different from other films featuring cross‐dressers or transvestites precisely because Fergus's (Stephen Rea) encounter with Dil's (Jaye Davidson) ‘real’ body is traumatic.

9. In the neurotic, ‘normal’ structure the function of fantasy is not only to defend the subject against castration but also to support desire (Lacan, 1964, p. 185).

10. Indeed, what is the secret charm of psychotic characters like Hannibal Lecter and Norman Bates, or of all the perverse characters in Almodóvar's films?

11. Although the function of fantasy is to sustain the subject at “just the right distance from the [Other's] dangerous desire, delicately balancing the attraction and the repulsion” (Fink, 1995, p. xii), this need for ‘balance,’ however, fixates the precarious subject in a position whereby s/he might become, or, indeed, becomes, a ‘false being,’ a ‘repetitive symptom.’ The function of analysis becomes thus the “overcoming of that fixation, the reconfiguring of traversing of fantasy … that is … subjectivization, a process of making ‘one's own’ something that was formerly alien” (Fink, 1995, p. xii, italics in the original). By subjectifying the Other's desire that brought the subject into the world (the cause of her/his existence), the subject assumes responsibility for her/his own fate. This is why, in analysis, according to Lacan, (1964) the subject's unconscious fundamental fantasy (every subject has one) must be ‘traversed’ (p. 273), a modification in the subject's position vis‐à‐vis the Other's desire has to occur.

12. This is how literally any body might become the object of one's (realized/literalized) fantasy, such as in real situations of incest.

13. Freud's definition of the uncanny (1919b, pp. 219–52) as a feeling or sensation instilled in the reader of fictional literature (aesthetics) centers on two opposites (unheimlich/heimlich) that contain each other's qualities, depending on the circumstances (in body‐character breach films the realistic dimension combined with the fantastic one enhances the feeling of uncanniness). Hence, ‘the uncanny’ derives its horrifying characteristic from its double nature, its strangeness and menacing force being an inherent aspect of the familiar (in body‐character breach films the uncanniness derives first from the fact that the character is displaced to another body). In E.T.A. Hoffmann's short story, ‘The Sandman,’ which Freud analyzes, there are many manifestations of the double (the splitting of one character into two, the one reflecting the other; reality/the fantastic; human/inhuman, robot‐puppet; life/death; normalcy/madness; science/mysticism). The crux of the uncanny as something repressed that resurfaces is the fear of castration, exemplified in ‘The Sandman’ by the face without eyes motif. What is repressed (especially of a sexual nature) and must be regulated through hiding it from consciousness as well as from the public eye, returns in a threatening form, ridden with oedipal guilt, fearing symbolic castration as punishment for deviating from societal norms. Certain images, objects or individuals onto which we project our own repressed impulses become thus uncanny.

14. Discussions of the uncanny or the double function of Madeleine/Judy in Vertigo are quite ample. See, for example, Barnett (2007); Bronfen (1993); Gabbard (1998); Huntjens (2003); and Modleski (1988). Of particular interest in relation to fantasy is Slavoj Žižek's (1991) discussion of how the sublime object loses its power of fascination for the subject.

15. See, for example, Pascal Bonitzer's (1992) discussion of the close‐up as a severed head in relation to desire and the gaze (p. 18).

16. According to Evans (1995), the hybrid Molina/Bouquet marks the difference between how Mathieu experiences Conchita (which in colloquial Spanish means ‘cunt’), namely as ‘an exchangeable sexual property,’ and how the viewers do. The latter, in Evan's view, become complicit with Conchita's refusal to be an object of Mathieu's unsatisfied desire and with her revengeful conduct as a reaction to his treatment of her (pp. 126–8). In our view, this kind of complicity depends on the viewer's ‘subjecthood’ and ideology. In this case, a full engagement with the film or with either character would be difficult, as Conchita is precisely the object (cause) of desire, similar to the Lady of ‘courtly love’: “The Lady is never characterized for any of her real, concrete virtues … On the contrary; she is as arbitrary as possible in the tests that she imposes on her servant” (Lacan, 19591959–60, p. 150). As to Mathieu, he is the epitome of man's demand “to be deprived of something real” (p. 150).

17. Worth mentioning is Pedro Almodóvar's engagement with this heritage, carrying it into more popular modes.