Jacques Lacan: Giving All the Right Signs

Abstract

<p>Much of the work of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) focuseson modes of <i>looking</i>. Lacan dissects how one looks at potential romantic partners;how one understands visual impressions of one's own body; how one isplaced in the world as an "object" that is subject to the gaze of others. Arguablyhis most significant contribution to psychoanalysts is his theory that independentsubjectivity is founded partly via one's first experience of seeing oneself ina mirror, a moment that conveys the impression of a distinct and autonomous"self": in Lacan's hypothesis, the infant is thrilled and obsessed by a kind of"screened" image. Thus, it is hardly surprising that Lacan has been of particularinterest to scholars of cinema.</p><p>Lacan seems naturally to offer us a vocabulary of ideas for interpreting thebehavior and deep motives of filmic characters. His ideas have also proven usefulmore broadly in analyses of cinema's representations as manifestations ofprimal psychological conflict or fixation, and in discussions of how film imagesreinforce dominant gender roles. Drawing on the "Mirror Stage" of humandevelopment, Christian Metz has argued that cinema's representations providean image of oneself that repairs the disunity that afflicts one's most primalexperience of the body. Focusing more directly on gender relations, LauraMulvey influentially applied to cinema Lacan's notion of the "gaze," a mode ofspectatorship in which the viewer effectively looks for signs that confirm his orher position within a structure of "normative" sexual roles. The usefulness ofUI.Can's theories to filmic analysis has been demonstrated more recently in thework of Slavoj iek, whose work often emphasizes what remains outside aWorld of meaningful objects and associations, what cannot be definitively structuredby or understood through "reality" as we know it (see for instance hisdocumentary, <i>The Pervert's Guide to Cinema</i> [2006]). Taken as a whole, LacanianPsychoanalytic approaches often draw attention to the conflict between theprimal forces of one's earliest "self" and the requirements of "identity" in abroader social world.</p><p>Building explicitly on the work of Sigmund Freud, Lacan considered himselfa Freudian; yet whereas Freud's work was remarkably accessible (partly inan attempt to legitimize the controversial discipline of psychoanalysis), La.can'swriting style is notoriously obscure. Elizabeth Grosz refers to Lacan's writing as"stretching terms to the limits of coherence, creating a text that is difficult toenter and ultimately impossible to master". The difficulty of Lacan's conceptsand the complex network of ideas and traditions in which they areenmeshed lead me to focus on a few core ideas in necessarily brief but-Ihope-clear and useful detail. First I will address the Mirror Stage of humandevelopment; then three "orders" of experience-Symbolic, Imaginary, andReal-that dominate Lacanian psychoanalysis; and lastly Lacan's account ofheterosexual relations as governed by the "phallic signifier." I move on to demonstratehow some of these Lacanian tools might be applied practically to analyzetwo films, Otto Preminger's noir classic <i>Laura</i> (1944) and Darren Aronofsky'smore recent thriller <i>Black Swan</i> (2010), both of which deal with the desire, sexualidentity, and idealized representations that are at the center of much ofLacan's writing.</p>