The editors of this work provide an
introduction both to Lacan’s works and to film criticism.  Despite the
ideological boost, it is unlikely that readers who are unfamiliar with Lacan’s
body of work will be comfortable reading this selection of nine essays.  The
prose is often dense and some of the selections are less jargon free than
others.  Paul Einsenstein’s chapter is the least accessible but in all fairness
he is attempting to talk about a very slippery concept.  The analyses are of a
group of wonderful and memorable films:  Memento, Dark City,
Breaking the Waves, Cape Fear, The Sweet
Hereafter, Holy Smoke and Pi.  Rather than reviewing
each selection briefly I have chosen to focus in more detail on Mark Pizzato’s
"Beauty’s Eye:  Erotic Masques of the Death Drive in Eyes Wide
Shut."

Pizzato’s language is clear, sharp
and without pretense.  He says "here film itself becomes a manifestation
of the death drive in human culture." (p. 83).  He sees film, and
Kubrick’s last work in particular, as producing in us a state of alienation
from being.  And he says, "Kubrick’s final film exposes the lure of beauty
as bearing a death drive in the eye of the beholder, implicating the audience,
male and female, in its rite of sacrifice." (p. 87).   Pizzato sees
Kubrick as being consciously aware or at least instinctively aware of these
themes.  Kubrick skillfully draws the viewer into a voyeuristic spectacle
"with beauty’s ecstasy masking and revealing the death drive." (p.
90).  Both Lacan and Freud believed in the existence of this drive.  Pizzato
does not define it.  The closest he comes is "an apparently alien force,
reproducing through us and ‘feeding’ on us, by perversely replacing us with
dramatic fiction."(p. 83).  Thus destroying jouissance, replacing it
instead with hollow, meaningless frenzy.    Jean Laplanche in Life and Death
in Psychoanalysis (1970) spends twenty-two pages on this but a gross
simplification of what he says might be:  a self-destructive tendency fueled by
libido impelling one in a sado-masochistic direction.

Kubrick’s movie is an adaptation of 
Arthur Schnitzler’s Dream Story (Traumnovelle).   The two central
characters Bill and Alice, a married couple, as were then the actors who
portrayed them (Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman).  Bill stumbles on a secret
society which host erotic events.  His curiosity is aroused.  Bill’s voyeurism
parallels the voyeuristic attitude Kubrick is attempting to elicit in the film
viewer.  Pizzato says, "these meetings and fantasies prepare Bill to
desire a more perverse experience, in revenge against his wife’s Other
jouissance, when he is told about a mysterious orgy by this pianist friend,
Nick Nightingale." (p. 94).  Alice has rebelliously told Bill about a
fantasy she had about another man.   Pizzato sees her action as a desire to
refute Bill’s attempts to reduce her to an object belonging to him, wife and
mother, not capable of an independent existence.  He says,  "Bill and
Alice are already suffering a symbolic death, through their disintegrating
marriage." (p. 106).   Bill’s journey though on the surface an erotic one
is extremely self-destructive and lurking in the background is the idea that
the secret society whose gates he has crashed might well have killed him
perhaps his wife and child as well. 

Of the orgy scene Pizzato says
"the masked nudes of Kubrick’s film (and their masked spectators), the
anonymous force of life in each body is revealed.  Although their ritual is
highly formalized, indicating certain human structures of power, the base force
of Dionysian, orgiastic life is the ultimate attraction in the puppet theater
of the mansion.  The erotic energy of the masked nudes ignore individual
personality, using the human body as a shell to reproduce the species (and
recombine genetic codes), then discarding it. Even the beauty of
self-sacrificing maternal love (to which the oedipal subject longs to return),
while involving imaginary and symbolic structures of desire, is driven by the
Real erotics and deadly objective of reproduction." (p. 105).

Pizzato says, "Kubrick’s film,
unlike most cinema, eventually takes the viewer too far€”beyond voyeuristic
pleasure€”toward a more disturbing jouissance at the symbolic and imaginary
edges of the Real." (p. 96).  This is quite an achievement.  Pizzato
begins this chapter commenting on the alienating force of film which can
threaten to robs us of  jouissance.  But he shows us how Kubrick used that
negative to focus our eye in the direction of the Real.  And, the Real is a
region of wordless, terrifying, stark truth.  Pizzato does not address any
speculation as to why Kubrick chose to call his adaptation Eyes Wide Shut
but I think many of these issues just touched upon are relevant.  Even when
looking the desire to not see is overwhelming. Perhaps that is why some critics
just did not want to see this film.

Each of the nine chapters in this
book focuses around Lacanan theory to organize their film criticisms.   I
highly recommend this work for those who have some basic familiarity with
Lacan’s work 

© 2004 Marilyn Graves

Marilyn Graves, Ph.D. is a clinical
psychologist and sometime freelance writer.  

Categories: Psychoanalysis