Film, Lacan and the Subject of Religion: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Religious Film Analysis

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Film, Lacan and the Subject of Religion

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Film, Lacan and the Subject of Religion A Psychoanalytic Approach to Religious Film Analysis

Steve Nolan

Continuum International Publishing Group The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane 11 York Road Suite 704 London SE1 7NX New York NY 10038 www.continuumbooks.com © Steve Nolan 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN:

HB: 978-0-8264-2760-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nolan, Steve. Film, Lacan and the subject of religion: a psychoanalytic approach to religious film analysis/Steve Nolan. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and indexes. ISBN: 978-0-8264-2760-1 (hb) 1. Motion pictures--Religious aspects. 2. Motion pictures--Psychological aspects. 3. Motion pictures--Ethical and moral aspects. 4. Religion in motion pictures. 5. Lacan, Jacques, 1901–1981. I. Title. PN1995.5N65 2009 205'.65--dc22 2008048872

Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India Printed and bound in Great Britain by the MPG Books Group

to the man who came before and the men who come after thank you for giving and sharing my love of film to Jack, David and Daniel


Contents

List of Abbreviations

x

Introduction An Overview With Thanks

1 3 6

Part One: Current Approaches to Religious Film Analysis Introduction to Part One

9

1 Phenomenological Interpretations: Film as Sacrament André Bazin: The Parameters of Cinematic Protestantism Paul Schrader: ‘Protestant cinematic sacramentalism’ Other Cinematic Sacramentalists: Cunneen, Bird and Fraser Critique of Cinematic Style as Sacrament Two Other Phenomenological Interpretations: Martin and Thompson

11 11 12 14 15

2 Literary Interpretations: Film as Visual Story The Auteur in Theological Film Criticism: Kreitzer The Missed Point of the Emerging Orthodoxy: Deacy

20 22 25

3 Anthropological Interpretations: Film as Religion Lyden: ‘film itself functions as a religion’ Marsh: ‘the religion-like function of film’

28 28 32

16

Part Two: Representation in Liturgy and Film Introduction to Part Two 4 Liturgical Representation: ‘Others’, Narratives and Ideological ‘Realities’ The Liturgical ‘other’: Priestly Representation Sacramental Narrative of the Cross Participation in the Ideological ‘Reality’ of Episcopal/Ecclesial Authority

39 43 44 47 54

Contents

viii

5 Cinematic Representation: ‘Others’, Narratives and Ideological ‘realities’ The Cinematic ‘Other’: The Film Star/Hero ‘Ordinary guy/extraordinary situation’: The Overcoming-the-Other Narrative Soviet satellites Islamist militants

Participation in the Ideological ‘Reality’ of Hollywood Realism The Siege (1998)

58 59 62 63 64

66 72

Part Three: What Can Film Theory Offer Liturgy? Introduction to Part Three

79

6 Cinematic Identification: Suture and Narrative Space Cinematic Perspective and Narrative Space Jean-Pierre Oudart and Stephen Heath: Suturing the Subject in Cinematic Discourse Slavoj Žižek: When Suture Fails Critique of the Subject Sutured in Cinematic Discourse

80 80

7 Suturing Suture: Joining the Theory Together Cinematic Impression of Reality as Unconscious Effect

94 95

Symbolic reality, Imaginary reality and the Real of the subject’s truth Imagos and the representational nature of the complex Anamnesis: the subject’s participation in the impression of reality Mapping imaginary reality to cinema’s impression of reality

Cinematic Discourse and Lacan’s Linguistic Theory of Dreams The (overdetermined) ‘Thing’: ‘dumb reality’ and (forbidden) objet petit a Lacan’s linguistic theory of dreams The signifier as representative not significant The repeated Real, the Real as missed encounter Mapping unconscious desire to cinematic discourse

Suturing Identity with a Cinematic Other, Suturing Subjectivity Identification with represented desire: a ‘genetic theory of the ego’ Libidinal investment, narcissistic identification: ‘dialectic of identification’ The confusion of identity: jealousy, paranoiac knowledge and transitivism Procuring subjectivity: circulating the ‘rim’ and superimposing the lack Procuring subjectivity: the double operation of the ‘rim’ Representation and the fading of the subject Procuring subjectivity: the superimposition of the two lacks

83 87 90

96 97 100 102

104 104 106 108 110 112

114 114 115 117 119 119 120 121

Contents Modes of subject identification: the Ideal-I and the ego-ideal Symmetrical identifications: Imaginary projection and Symbolic introjection Mapping suture to identification with a cinematic other

8 Suturing Religious Identity in the Sacramental Narrative Identification with the Priest as a Liturgical Representation Constructing the priest as a liturgical representation Priestly representation (i): a fiction sustained by erotic attraction The Mission (1986) Priestly representation (ii): a fiction sustained by negation/disavowal Father John McNeill The worshipper’s solipsistic identification with priestly representation

Joining the Narrative and Participating in Its ‘Reality’ Signifying for: the reinscription of desire into the sacramental narrative The Exorcist (1973) On the Waterfront (1954) The Fugitive (1947) The worshipper’s participation as a subject of Episcopal/ecclesial ‘reality’

ix

123 124 126

131 132 132 136 136 139 139 141

144 144 144 146 148 150

By Way of Analysis Batman Begins (Christopher Nolan) Bewitched (Nora Ephron) Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Tim Burton) Conclusion: A Third Task – Moving beyond the ‘So what!’

155 156 159 162 165

Notes

167

Bibliography Bibliography of Religion and Film Select Bibliography

185 185 196

Indexes Author Index Film Index Subject Index

207 207 209 211


The following abbreviations are used throughout the text. See Select Bibliography for full bibliographical information:

Freud and Lacan PFL Sigmund Freud (1973–86), Penguin Freud Library, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 14 volumes. E Jacques Lacan (1977), Écrits: A Selection, tr. Alan Sheridan, London: Routledge. S1 Jacques Lacan (1991), The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book I. Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953–1954, tr. John Forrester, London: Norton. S2 Jacques Lacan (1991), The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book II. The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955, tr. Sylvana Tomaselli, London: Norton. S3 Jacques Lacan (1993), The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book III. The Psychoses, 1955–1956, tr. Russell Grigg, London: Routledge. S7 Jacques Lacan (1992), The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book VII. 1959–60. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, tr. Dennis Porter, New York: Norton.


xi

S11 Jacques Lacan (1979), Seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, tr. Alan Sheridan, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Second Vatican Council and other Episcopal and Ecumenical documents All references to conciliar and post-conciliar documents are from Austin Flannery (ed.) (1975), Vatican Council II: Volume I: The Conciliar and Post Conciliar Documents, Northport, NY: Costello Publishing Co; Dublin: Dominican Publications. CP EM EP ES IO IQ LG LI MS OE PO SC UR

Cenam paschalem (26 March 1970) Eucharisticum mysterium (25 May 1967) Eucharistiae participationem (27 April 1973) Eucharistiae sacramentum (21 June 1973) Inter oecumenici (26 September 1964) In quibus rerum circumstantiis (1 June 1972) Lumen gentium (21 November 1964) Liturgiae instaruationes (5 September 1970) Musicam sacram (5 March 1967) Orientalium ecclesiarum (21 November 1964) Presbyterorum ordinis (7 December 1965) Sacrosanctum concilium (4 December 1963) Unitatis redintegratio (21 November 1964)

ARCIC-ED Eucharistic Doctrine [1971], in Anglican/Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC) (1982), The Final Report, London: SPCK & Catholic Truth Society, 11–16. ARCIC-ED: E Eucharistic Doctrine: Elucidation [1979], in Anglican/Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC) (1982), The Final Report, London: SPCK & Catholic Truth Society, 17–25. CCC Catechism of the Catholic Church (1994), London: Geoffrey Chapman.

xii


OBOB Catholic Bishops’ Conferences of England & Wales, Ireland, Scotland (1998), One Bread One Body: A Teaching Document on the Eucharist in the Life of the Church, and the Establishment of General Norms of Sacramental Sharing, London: Catholic Truth Society; Dublin: Veritas Publications.

Introduction

n’avons-nous pas entendu un ecclésiastique plein de bonne volonté se prévaloir auprès de nous de son dessein d’appliquer les données de la psychanalyse à la symbolique chrétienne? Jacques Lacan (1966), ‘Introduction théorique aux fonctions de la psychanalyse en criminologie’, Écrits, Paris: Seuil, p 132

Two buildings dominated the Manchester landscape of my early childhood. The first was the Apollo Theatre on Ardwick Green. Standing sentinel over what, in its Edwardian heyday, had been one of the better-healed parts of the city, by the early 1960s the Apollo was a magnet for hundreds of children who, like me, crossed the busy Stockport Road each Saturday morning intent getting the best seats for the children’s matinee. Our anticipation grew, as we were entertained with a mix of songs, games and Woody Woodpecker cartoons. But these were only foolish diversions. The real focus of our interest was on what was about to happen in the next enthralment of the weekly adventure serial. Each week, hostage to our heroes’ cliff-hanging adventures, we were woven into the fabric of their unfolding B-movie narratives; and each week, in our school playgrounds and in the car-less streets of our corporation slums, we re-lived their escapist adventures. From the brief episodes, we absorbed enough of their struggles against adversity and assimilated sufficient of their values of right over wrong, to be able skilfully to play with the details as we participated in our own worlds of fantasy. In those periods of play we became Rocket Man, Tarzan, Batman; their ordeals were our ordeals, their triumphs were our triumphs, their life-threatening anxieties were our life-threatening anxieties – at least until we were called in for tea. The other building that dominated my early years was the Roman Catholic Church of the Holy Name of Jesus, a Victorian colossus confident in its position among the University buildings that lined the Oxford Road. As a child, I disliked attending Mass and was reluctant in passing most of the Sunday mornings of my first seven years in the half-light of its nether gloom. Wrenched from play with my Protestant friends, I was bored by the liturgy;

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I was alienated by the language; I was ignored by the priest; I was invisible to the worshippers; and, above all, I was terrorized by an over-life sized statue of the crucified Christ, tormented and bleeding as he hung dying for my sins. And yet, the narrative in which I so reluctantly involved myself nonetheless wove me profoundly into the fabric of its own reality. I believed that I needed to be good because my sins had caused his suffering, and any little lie, or childish swearword, or other such innocent wrongdoing would put a sin on my soul, which I would need to confess or risk eternal damnation. And because I passed the rest of my week in the primary school that bore the name of my parish church, this narrative informed the fun and games with my playground friends. We became each other’s conscience, censuring our childish misdoings with the rebuke, ‘Aw! That’s a sin on your soul!’ The contrast between these two buildings, their design and intention, is enormous. But the impact of what these buildings represent, in my life and doubtless the lives of millions of others across the world over the last century, is equally enormous. Cinemas and the temples of our worship have been those places where the world and our station within it have been represented to us in the images of the heroes we have been offered and the landscapes of their narratives. They have been the pre-eminent places in which we have learned who we are, and they have been the places in which we have been joined into the narratives that have governed our cultures. Almost from the beginning of cinema a diverse and ever growing body of film theory has pursued an interest in explaining both the institution of cinema and the art of film, including the ways in which both affect the lives of those who consume celluloid images. In this book, I want to apply ideas drawn from one particular area of film theory that developed during the 1970s in the British film journal Screen; a peculiarly challenging theoretical mix of ideology, semiotics and psychoanalysis that has been concerned to understand the ways in which cinema operates to construct the identity of spectators. I want to use what Easthope terms the ‘Screen problematic’ (1983, 122) to provide a theoretical resource towards understanding the operations of liturgy in constructing religious identity. This application clearly depends on regarding liturgy as a medium of representation, one that parallels, in its own very distinctive ways, the medium of cinematic representation. I want to argue the case for that parallel and I want to use the concepts of suture and narrative space, developed in the Screen problematic, to show how the representations offered to worshippers in liturgy contribute to constructing their religious sense of who they are and what their station in the world is and should be. Along the way, I want to develop a methodology that will enable religious film analysts to engage with film qua film: a way that treats film, on

Introduction

3

its own terms, as a medium of representation; a way that avoids reducing film to another type of literature or another type of going to church, but that enables engagement with film as it is experienced or consumed. Of necessity, this is a multidisciplinary project, and it takes its cue from suggestions put forward by Ostwalt (1995) concerning the possibility of synthesizing film criticism, religious studies and cultural studies. Ostwalt is looking for a new approach to the religious analysis of film and cinema, and although he stops short of actually articulating the methodological synthesis he desires, he nevertheless highlights the obvious weakness in so much religious film analysis: the failure of theological or religious studies to make use of the analytical tools of film theory. This failure has, largely, been reproduced by successive religious or theological film analysts because they have remained ignorant of both the extensive body of film theory, in virtually any of its forms, and the nature of the filmic medium itself. As a consequence, religious film analysts have tended to treat film as ‘visual story’ and to search for ‘the cinematic analogue of the religious or sectarian question’ (May 1982, 26). At its worst, this search has degenerated into a ‘Quest for the cinematic Christ’ and the pursuit of Christ-figures in film (Malone 1990). In fact, a basis for something like the synthesis at which Ostwalt hints already exists within film theory, in the Screen problematic, insofar as it combines elements of cultural studies with the analysis of film. To realize Ostwalt’s suggested methodology, it remains only to factor in the element of religious studies. Screen’s distinctive theoretical mix of ‘Marxism and psychoanalysis on the terrain of semiotics’ (Heath 1985, 511) has never been concerned with film as ‘visual story’ or with the discovery of the cinematic analogue to any question, religious or otherwise. Its focus has been on the unconscious operations of cinematic representation in constructing individuals as the subjects of ideology. Making the theoretical approach of the Screen problematic part of Ostwalt’s anticipated synthesis with religious studies will mean a radical and original shift of interest, which may not exactly satisfy Ostwalt’s search. But I suggest that an engagement with the Screen problematic could liberate religious and theological film analysis from the moribund pursuit of cinematic analogue to religious questions; an exercise whose findings have tended toward the predictable and unremarkable.

An Overview The approach that will be developed in this book makes use of the Screen problematic theoretical synthesis, and its concern with the operations and impact of cinema, to explore the operations and impact of religious practice,

4


specifically the operations of liturgy as a medium of representation. Central to what I am proposing is the idea that liturgy can be understood as a medium of representation that parallels the representational medium of cinema and that understanding liturgy in this way allows the film theory concepts of suture and narrative space to be applied to liturgical representation. The religious response to film has often been strained, but in the 1960s theologians and students of religion began to take film seriously, both as an art form and as a cultural phenomenon. Religion and film is now de rigueur, with classroom courses at undergraduate and postgraduate level and a corresponding increase in publications – in 2007, more than two dozen books were published in the area. In Part One, I examine current approaches to religious film analysis and I show how, adopting an interpretative approach that favours theological or textual or anthropological categories, existing religious film analysis has failed either to treat film as a representational medium or to engage seriously with any kind of film theory. Chapter 1 looks at what might be termed the sacramentalist approach, which regards film as a ‘door to the sacred’, while Chapter 2 explores the literary approach and the associated concern with authorial intent. Chapter 3 examines a more recent direction of religious film analysis that considers the ways in which spectators consume film as a form of religious practice. Having argued in Part One that religious studies can (and should) find more interesting analysis and interpretation, Part Two develops the idea of liturgy and film as parallel media of representation. The differences between these two areas are so obvious that the idea that they can be paralleled may seem absurd and counter to commonsense. However, rather than offer simplistic and unproblematic parallels, I want to make the case that film and liturgy are representational media on the basis that both involve identification with a represented ‘other’ through which spectators and worshippers are sutured into the cinematic or sacramental narrative, and so become participants in the narrative and in the respective (ideological) ‘reality’ the medium supports. So, in terms of liturgical representation, Chapter 4 discusses the identifications associated with the priest as the ‘other’ of Eucharistic liturgical representation. Here, in identifying with the priest in the Anamnesis, worshippers are sutured into the sacramental narrative, becoming participants in the narrative and, through submission of their volition and intellect, in Episcopal (ideological) ‘reality’ it supports. Similarly, with regard to cinematic representation, Chapter 5 uses the genre of post-Cold War ‘terrorist hi-jack’ films to examine spectators’ participation in the ideological ‘reality’ of Hollywood realism and the way in which this is contingent on identification with the star/hero as the ‘other’ of cinematic representation. My aim, in Part Two, is to demonstrate that the parallels between

Introduction

5

liturgy and film can be made around three heads, insofar as each of these media invites its constituency to: identify with an ‘other’; be ‘stitched’ (sutured) into a narrative; and ultimately to participate in a ‘reality’ that is always already ideological. Given that religious film analysis should regard film as film, and having demonstrated the terms on which liturgy and film can be paralleled, in Part Three I identify the concepts that psychoanalytic film theory can bring to the study of religion in general and liturgy in particular. Since my interest is in explaining something of the construction of religious identity in relation to the sacramental narrative and its liturgical representation, I consider the associated concepts of narrative space and suture. Chapter 6 presents the distinctive contribution of Screen’s psychoanalytical film theory: the development of the concepts of narrative space and suture insofar as they relate to cinematic techniques and the construction of the spectating subject’s fictional subjectivity (‘pseudo-identification’). However, the Screen problematic was developed under the influence of French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, and a number of misinterpretations distorted the understanding and application of Lacan’s ideas. For this reason, having identified three fundamental (mis)interpretations (their understanding of cinematic realism; their understanding of Lacan’s linguistic theory of dreams; and their understanding of suture in relation to the represented ‘other’), Chapter 7 makes a ‘return to Lacan’ in order to explore his theory of subject construction and so reinstate the value of suture. Here I offer three corrective suggestions. First, reconsidering Lacan’s theory of the complexes, I suggest that the cinematic impression of reality can be understood to be a performance of the subject’s own Imaginary ‘reality’ on which it is premised. Second, revisiting Lacan’s theory of dreams, I suggest that cinematic discourse can be understood as the performance of the subject’s discourse of unconscious desire, itself funded by the subject’s psychic strategy of negation/disavowal. Finally, re-examining the neo-Lacanian theory of suture, I suggest that identification with a cinematic ‘other’ can be mapped to the subject’s narcissistic predisposition to confuse identity with the imago of the specular ‘other’. From this, I argue that, operating by the same psychic processes of negation/disavowal by which subjects come to ‘believe’ and so participate in the Imaginary reality of their own unconscious refusal of the Real, cinematic subjects come to believe, and so participate in, the ideologically informed reality of cinema. Chapter 8 demonstrates how these insights can be applied to liturgical representation and the subjectivity it constructs. In the first place, I show that the worshipper’s identifications with the priest as a liturgical representation are sustained by a complex narcissistic attraction that is simultaneously a

6


negation/disavowal of being in which the priest institutionally negates/ disavows his sexual fulfilment and the worshipper, alienated from him or herself, denies the priest the humanity of being an actual person, negating/disavowing him in the ‘human weakness of his flesh’. Then, with regard to how identification sutures the worshipper into the sacramental narrative and so leads to the worshipper’s participation as a liturgical subject in the ideological ‘reality’ of Episcopal/ecclesial authority, I show that, signifying for each other from the place assigned in the signifying chain of their discourses of desire, worshippers re-member the salvific events as if present, and that during the Anamnesis their discourses of desire become reinscribed into the salvific/pastoral practice of the sacramental narrative. In this way, worshippers become participants in the sacramental ‘reality’. In the final chapter, I make explicit the analytic methodology developed through the book and offer this as a tool with which religious film analysts might engage with film qua film. I demonstrate how it can be used to get beneath the superficial signifiers of a film, to understand how a film might be experienced or consumed and to enable theology to address the unspoken values supported by the film.

With Thanks Unlike Spike Milligan, who claimed to have done it ‘all by myself!’ many people have, in some way, enabled me to complete this work. I owe an obvious debt to my supervisor, the late Prof. Grace Jantzen, who read and helpfully commented on anything I put in front of her and who taught me the importance of structure and that what counts depends on who does the counting. I am grateful to my teachers in the University of Manchester, in particular those who believed in me, Prof. George Brooke, the late Prof. Tony Dyson, Dr Kate Cooper and Dr David Law; and to the University itself for the generous research studentship that made the research possible. Various friends read and commented on my work, in particular Dr Barbie Underwood, Ms Beth Stockley, Prof. Aziz Sheikh, Ms Liz Hall. During my research, I welcomed interaction with others working in the area: Dr Christopher Deacy, Dr Larry Kreitzer, Dr Clive Marsh, Dr Jolyon Mitchell, Dr Gaye Ortiz, Dr David Torevell. I am grateful to Mr John Capon, Mr Brian Draper, editors who encouraged me to write about film, and to the anonymous reader who helped me see the wood for the trees. Finally, I want to thank my wife Marion, who has spent too many weekends as a laptop widow graciously allowing me time to work and supporting me with coffee and her belief that it mattered. Thank you.

Part One

Current Approaches to Religious Film Analysis


Introduction to Part One

Cinema’s relationship with religion dates from the earliest period of film history.1 Following the first commercial cinema screenings, by Auguste and Louis Lumière in December 1895, early cinematographers took Christ’s Passion as the subject for numerous short recordings. In France, the Lumières themselves produced The Passion as early as 1897 and fantasist Georges Méliès made Walking on the Water two years later, while in the United States the Thomas Edison Company released The Passion Play of Oberammergau in 1898, and by the turn of the new century Joseph Perry was collaborating with Herbert Booth (son of Salvation Army founder, General William Booth) to make the film Soldiers of the Cross (Butler 1969, 33–54; Kinnard and Davis 1992, 19–35). Despite the initial potential for symbiosis between religion and film, there has been a longstanding conflict of interests between the two institutions. The film industry’s fundamentally entertainment based, money-making agenda and the Church’s, particularly the Roman Catholic Church’s perception of its role as moral guardian have meant the relationship between cinema and religion has always been troubled (Skinner 1993; Walsh 1996; Johnston 2000, 31–9). Ironically, it was the sexual and sadistic excesses typified by the religious, but commercially cynical, Cecil B De Mille that most offended the Roman Catholics of North America and led to the creation of the Legion of Decency in 1933. However, Christian theologians and students of religion have subsequently developed more sympathetic positions towards film, and an international body of literature has been emerging since the early 1960s that might be traced to the new openness that followed from the Second Vatican Council (Lyden 2003, 22). Some have analysed theological and religious responses according to type. John May identifies five types of response: religious discrimination; religious visibility; religious dialogue; religious humanism; religious aesthetics (1997, 17–37). Borrowing heavily from May, Robert K Johnston (2000, 41–62) plots his typology of English language response as a shift along a continuum from the avoidance of ethical boycott (Miles 1947; McClain 1970) through dialogue to appropriation and film as divine

10


encounter. Arguing that Christian moviegoers, ‘should first view a movie on its own terms before entering into theological dialogue with it’, Johnston favours dialogue as his own methodological position (2000, 49). Both May and Johnston acknowledge their debt to H Richard Niebuhr (1951) for a typology of Christian theology and culture, as does John Lyden who, like May, also uses Paul Tillich to divide existing approaches to religion and film between the theological (Protestant-dialogical/Roman Catholic-synthetic) and the ideological approaches (2003, 11–35).2 But while Johnston creates difficulty by attempting to find a chronological development for his types of theological response, May’s more generic approach generates its own difficulty insofar as it is dependent on the paradigms of theology and literature. In their different ways Johnston, May and Lyden highlight three of the main approaches to the theological or religious interpretation of film. Thus, arguing that, ‘Movies have, at times, a sacramental capacity to provide the viewer an experience of transcendence’ (Johnston 2000, 57), Johnston emphasizes the sort of sacramentalist approach that is characteristic of phenomenological interpretations (although, because he privileges narrative above all other aspects of film, Johnston’s approach is actually closer to that of May). By comparison, contending that the religious film analyst ‘must be content with the literary analogues of religious or theological concepts; for example, mythic structures and archetypal images and symbols’ (May 1982, 25), May represents a literary approach to the theological interpretation of film. Finally, Lyden shares Johnston’s desire to understand film in its own terms, ‘even when we do not agree with its messages’ (Lyden 2003, 3), and argues strongly that because films have a ‘religious power’ and perform a religious function for their audiences, they can and should be regarded as a form of religion and interpreted through religious categories. My own typology is less subtle than that of Johnston or May, and in what follows I will simply explore the three approaches to religious film analysis identified here: phenomenological (or sacramental) approaches; literary (or ‘cinematic theology’) approaches and anthropological approaches that regard film as a form of religious practice (religion as film).

Chapter 1

Phenomenological Interpretations: Film as Sacrament

André Bazin: The Parameters of Cinematic Protestantism Serious comment on film, that is both constructive and religiously informed, can be traced to French Roman Catholic intellectual, film critic and theorist of cinematic realism, André Bazin. Developing theory as a working critic, Bazin discusses the nature of the religious film in a review of Jean Delannoy’s film, God Needs Men (1950). Bazin first locates, and then rejects, three categories of religious film (the ‘catechism-in-pictures’, hagiographies and priest/nun stories) in order to argue for ‘filmic Protestantism’ as ‘the best vehicle for a Catholic novelist in the cinema’ ([1951b]1997, 64). By ‘Protestantism’ Bazin means a simplicity or economy of cinematic style: Everything that is exterior, ornamental, liturgical, sacramental, hagiographic, and miraculous in the everyday observance, doctrine, and practice of Catholicism does indeed show specific affinities with the cinema considered as a formidable iconography, but these affinities, which have made for the success of countless films, are also the source of the religious insignificance of most of them. Almost everything that is good in this domain was created not by the exploitation of these patent affinities, but rather by working against them: by the psychological and moral deepening of the religious factor as well as by the renunciation of the physical representation of the supernatural and of grace. ([1951b]1997, 64–5) Bazin is perhaps the first to mark the potential parallels between cinematic and liturgical style, and to report the stylistic unsuitability of liturgy for religious filmmaking. He rejects Roman Catholic sacramental richness because he favours the stylistic economy instanced in the work of Robert Bresson, whose techniques of paring away dramatic dialogue, casting amateurs and beginners, and stripping bare his characters, achieved a ‘form of

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aesthetic abstraction while avoiding expressionism by way of an interplay of literature and realism’ ([1951c]1967, 132). Ironically, perhaps, the result of filmic Protestantism is itself a form of cinematic sacramentalism, the ‘transcendence of grace’, that offers ‘a new dramatic form, that is specifically religious – or better still, specifically theological; a phenomenology of salvation and grace’ ([1951b]1967, 134, 136).

Paul Schrader: ‘Protestant cinematic sacramentalism’ While Bazin writes as a Roman Catholic, film writer-director Paul Schrader is informed by his long abandoned Dutch Reformed belief. Schrader is Bazinian insofar as he contends that cinematic style affects the experience of transcendence, and Calvinistic insofar as he claims that his concept of the transcendental in film has been informed by Calvin’s notion of sensus divinitatus, the divine sense: strip away conventional emotional associations and then you’re left with this tiny little pinpoint that hits you at the end and freezes you into stasis. (Jackson 1990, 29) Schrader is convinced that ‘transcendental style’ is precisely a style. His point is that as with any style, artists from diverse cultures can use transcendental style ‘to express the Holy’ (1972, 3). Despite obvious problems with his definitions – on his own admission his best definition of ‘the Transcendent’ is a truism: ‘[the] Transcendent is beyond normal sense experience, and that which it transcends is, by definition, the immanent’ (1972, 5) – Schrader suggests that transcendental style is defined by the intellectual and formalistic work of directors Bresson and Yasujiro Ozu, and that despite cultural differences and volume of output, the work of both directors demonstrates three critical movements built around ‘abundant’ and ‘sparse’ means. The first movement is the meticulous representation of the dull, mundane commonplaces of the everyday. Closely akin to Bazinian ‘realism’, this presentation of reality prepares the way for the ‘intrusion of the Transcendent’, by celebrating bare existence (1972, 39). Next, directors Bresson and Ozu posit the disunity between humans and their environment, which Schrader argues culminates in a decisive action, ‘the disparity’ of the second movement (1972, 42). Here dull, everyday reality cracks, creating within the spectator an alternative psychological reality, the ‘schizoid reaction’. While the ‘everyday’ leads the spectator to feel that emotions are of no use,

Phenomenological Interpretations

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the ‘disparity’ invokes a sense that all is not right in the banality of the everyday. This prepares the spectator for the third movement, which Schrader terms ‘Stasis’, ‘a frozen view of life which does not resolve the disparity but transcends it’ (1972, 49). For Schrader, the cinematic technique most suited to representing the sacred is not the dialectic of resolution but that of transcendence, and he is clear that it is a technique. Step three may confront the ineffable, but its techniques are no more ‘mysterious’ than steps one and two. There is a definite before and after, a period of disparity and a period of stasis, and between them a final moment of disparity, decisive action, which triggers the expression of the Transcendent. The transcendental style itself is neither ineffable nor magical: every effect has a cause, and if the viewer experiences stasis it is with good reason. (1972, 49) For Schrader, the moment of stasis is common to religious art in every culture, establishing an image of a parallel reality, by which he means the ‘Wholly Other’. Schrader regards the religious film to be that which balances the abundant and the sparse so as to convey the sense of the Holy. Further, he attributes the failure of the overtly ‘religious’ biblical spectacular film to the fact that it suffers from overabundant means. While it may induce a form of belief, such belief should be ascribed not to the ‘Wholly Other’, but to ‘a congenial combination of cinematic corporeality and “holy” feelings’.1 The difficulty here is that the kind of sacramentalist approach typified by Schrader expects too much of film, making it a ‘door to the sacred’ (Martos 1981). Schrader borrows the term ‘Wholly Other’ from Rudolf Otto’s notion of the sense of the numinous, the mysterium tremendum (Otto 1958, 12–30). However, Otto would have rejected Schrader’s misappropriation of his term to describe the ‘intrusion of the Transcendent’ insofar as Schrader makes the experience contingent on cinematic style. For Otto, the mental state associated with the numinous is ‘sui generis and irreducible to any other’ (Otto 1958, 7), precisely because the numinous is ‘felt as objective and outside the self’ (1958, 11). The objectivity of the numinous aside, Schrader misappropriates Otto to the extent that his analysis becomes a sophisticated argument towards a cinematic canon formed according to the partialities of his own taste. Thus, he argues asymmetrically: the ‘religious’ film engenders a belief (in spiritual reality) that is contingent on (a previously acquired) ‘holy’ feeling, while the ‘intrusion of the Transcendent’ is contingent on cinematic style alone.

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Other Cinematic Sacramentalists: Cunneen, Bird and Fraser If Schrader effectively articulates the kind of Protestant cinematic sacramentalism at which Bazin hinted, others have worked with a sacramentalist approach. Joseph Cunneen locates the screened sacred in non-Hollywood (specifically European art cinema). Surveying the writings of Eric Rohmer, Andrey Tarkovsky and Krzysztof Kieslowski, Cunneen argues that the reality of the sacred is suggested on screen in moments of impossible ethical dilemma (Cunneen 1993). At such points the human experience portrayed resonates with that of the spectators, each being mutually informed by the memory of a religious tradition. Like Schrader, Cunneen argues that the religious may be encountered in the everyday, and at the point of decisive action. However, he is less clear about the way in which encountering the ethical is specifically religious, or about why this makes for a religious film. As a philosopher of religion, Michael Bird finds parallels between cinema and religion at the level of the perception of reality. Bird’s variant phenomenological approach finds a convergence between Tillich’s existentialist theology and the phenomenological aesthetics of Mikel Dufrenne, at the point where they speak of an implicit transcendence, ‘a Real that underlies the real ’, encountered in feeling (Bird 1982, 8). The convergence of Tillich and Dufrenne around questions of reality lays a foundation onto which Bird maps the concerns of realist film theory. For Bazin, and fellow cinematic realist Siegfried Kracaur, film’s physical relationship to reality makes it not a reinterpretation but a disclosure of reality. Bird argues that genuinely religious films are those that evoke in the spectator a sense of the ineffable mystery of reality. He concludes: In these realist statements, one finds something of a creed in which cinema’s technical properties become the vehicle of meditation. This creed requires a particular spiritual sensitivity in which the sacred is sought as the depth in reality itself. (1982, 15) In this, Bird proposes that the holy is discernible in the cinematic real. For Bird, the cinematic real offers what Mircea Eliade termed ‘heirophany’ (1982, 11). The most overtly sacramental interpretation of the effects of cinematic style is offered by Peter Fraser. Fraser regards the essential mode of religious films to be the introduction of the ‘incarnational gesture’ to disrupt and make holy the primary narrative. This disruption ‘typically transforms


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the narrative of the film into the most recognisable of all Christian narrative patterns, the Passion’ (Fraser 1988, 2). The audience is then invited to participate in the Passion in such a way that, for Fraser, an understanding of Western liturgical tradition is necessary in order to comprehend religious style in films. Fraser’s emphasis on the narrative pattern of the Passion may seem to be quite close to my own emphasis. For example, he discusses audience participation ‘in the Passion celebration that begins once the divine and the human merge in the film narrative’ (1988, 3); audience identification; and the existence of parallels between film and liturgy. However, my approach differs from Fraser’s in two significant ways. First, unlike Fraser I do not regard sacramental films to be a distinct cinematic genre discernible according to any particular cinematic technique. Fraser suggests that narrative shifts towards a formalism that ‘intends to describe an underlying concurrent narrative track – the spiritual – [setting] this film apart from the conventional Hollywood drama’ (1988, 1). Like Schrader, Fraser determines this distinct genre, ‘what might be called “the sacramental style”’ (1988, 7), according to an ‘objectivity’ founded on no more than the peculiarities of his own taste. Secondly, Fraser sees the parallels between cinema and liturgy as formal: The symbolic functions of space and time within the incarnational moment of the sacramental film make the complete performance of the work a type of liturgical ceremony. As such films often follow a stable ideological base, and urge moral and spiritual enlightenment through the embrace of a form of divine presence, they operate ritualistically. (1988, 8, 2 emphasis added) Against this, I will argue in Part Two that a parallel does exist, but only insofar as cinema and liturgy can be regarded as representational media. In addition, I will argue that the significance of this parallel is not that it can affect an encounter between the individual and the sacred, but that it can enable a deeper understanding of the operations of liturgical representation, in particular with regard to the construction of religious identity.

Critique of Cinematic Style as Sacrament Those who propose what amounts to a genre of cinematic sacramentalism ultimately expect too much from film. In his discussion of directors whose

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work affects for him the ‘intrusion of the Transcendent’, Schrader universalizes his experience and fails even to acknowledge the possibility that others may not be similarly affected. More significantly, while he takes his lead from Bazin, Schrader loses sight of Bazin’s realist emphasis on the representational character of film, what Bazin termed ‘The ontology of the photographic image’ (Bazin [1945]1967). Instead, Schrader pursues a moralist agenda that is effectively rooted in Bazin’s Personalist values.3 Bazin clearly locates his conception of realism as a given in the very objectivity of photography, and argues that mechanical reproduction represents the real in a way that has ontological connectedness with the object represented. In other words, film is a representational medium. To regard it as anything else is to impose upon it the demands of an alien agenda. (In Part Two, I will argue that Bazin’s ontological realism is itself the product of an aesthetic convention, a cinematic anti-style, in which the impression of reality is, ironically, an idealist effect founded on a materialist base. My point will be to indicate the limits of the parallel to be found between cinema and liturgy when regarded as representational media, and so to deepen understanding of the operations of liturgical representation.)

Two Other Phenomenological Interpretations: Martin and Thompson Two other phenomenological interpretations can be contrasted with those of Schrader and the ‘sacramentalists’. In different ways, both these interpretations have specific relevance to the thesis I am developing insofar as they more accurately understand film as a representational medium. In finding parallels between religion and visual art, Thomas Martin describes a parallel of participation in representation, while John O Thompson is concerned with how spectators consume cinematic representations of Christ. I will consider briefly how both these approaches relate to my argument. In proposing that a form of kinship exists between religious experience and the ‘participative experience’ of the visual arts, Martin premises his thinking on the idea that both share the same empirical grounds, which he locates in the operation of the image. Martin’s phenomenological approach poses epistemological questions about the way images operate in human consciousness. He argues that they are interpretative spatial arrangements developed in conscious response to acts of perception (Martin 1981, 13). In other words, images are the building blocks by which human consciousness makes sense of its world, and constructs its meanings. As he puts it, images


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are primarily ‘interpretative acts that through the unity of human thought influence all our mental activities’ (1981, 37). In order to cohere into a system of reference images need to be articulated within paradigms or models, which he terms ‘imaginative constructs’. However, these constructs themselves remain too abstract, and need in turn to be concretised in the form of stories that incorporate images and imaginative constructs into recognizable movements: ‘[humans] must have stories about what their life is and what should or could be. This is all part of the process by which persons identify and confront’ (1981, 20). Martin sees public stories as helping to create common order, and film as sharing in the power of story to create common reality. Martin’s particular question concerns the way in which public stories, including film, function in developing religious consciousness. He holds that because film is a visual or image medium, occupying large portions of the average person’s time, it has an impact on the images that govern the flow of awareness, which in turn impacts on religious awareness. The point pertinent to my thesis is how Martin parallels what he describes as the ‘kinship’ between religion and visual art in the area of a participation in representation. For Martin, the experience of watching a film, like the experience of worship, engages the spectator and acts to transform the individual’s perception of reality. In other words, Martin argues that the parallel between cinema and religion should be drawn in terms of shared participative experience, that both spectator and worshipper are embraced in a ‘total environment’, and that it is this environment that impacts on their perceptions of reality. As I indicated with Fraser, the notion of participative experience will be important in my own thesis. However, Martin’s interest is in the phenomenology of religious experience whereas I am concerned with understanding how film and liturgy, paralleled as a representational media, illuminate the construction of religious identity. For Schrader, the failure of the biblical spectacular lies in a false syllogism constructed around the relation between cinematic and spiritual reality: ‘The film is “real,” the spiritual is “on” film, ergo: the spiritual is real. Thus we have an entire history of cinematic magic’ (Schrader 1972, 163). In contrast, Thompson finds the failure in the gap between representing the determinacy of the real, and Representing the indeterminacy of the spiritual. Here, Thompson bases his analysis on distinctions made by Polish phenomenological aesthetician Roman Ingarden (1973)4: ‘between the “judgmental propositions” that we apply when dealing with the real world, and “quasijudgmental propositions” that appear in verbal fiction’ (Thompson 1997, 291). According to Thompson, Ingarden had argued that real objects,

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existing in real space-time, are unequivocally, universally determined, but that fictional objects, no matter how well described, have a finite determination. For his part, Thompson attends to Ingarden’s point that realist fiction is characterized by ‘spots of indeterminacy’ that ‘give the reader a particular mix of enough quasi-judgmental propositions to create the “reality effect”’ (1997, 292). Thompson phrases his question directly as, ‘How is a representation of Jesus to be effected when the Representative of Jesus is a filmed actor?’ (1997, 292, n. 6). He notes that while the criteria for filling in the gaps in a visual representation of Jesus are neither photographic nor painterly but the ‘extremely powerful tradition as to how Jesus looked’ (1997, 296), photography is both iconic and indexical, ‘presenting us with images which are causally linked to what they are images of’ (1997, 298). Thompson concludes: As man, Jesus existed, as fully and continuously as other men and women, in space-time. As divinity, Christ lies outside space and time – outside of the framework of the kind of proposition-advancing that Ingarden discusses, but equally outside of the realm of the photographable. An actor playing Jesus exists, of course, in space-time. A fictional character does not actually exist in space and time, because it does not exist; but concretizing that character bestows upon it the quasi-space-time of the fictional world. An actor playing a fictional character donates his or her own spatiotemporal integrity and plenitude to the character. (The non-fictionality of a character means that there are in Ingarden’s sense judgements rather than just quasi-judgements to be ‘equalled’ by the actor, but since the real character is being Represented rather than there-before-the-camera in his or her own space-time presence, the process of donation is fundamentally not different.) Insofar as Jesus was a man, [Max] von Sydow and [Robert] Powell donate their bodies to be his Representative. But what can they donate, space-and-time-bound as they actually are, that would correspond to the divine aspect of Jesus? (1997, 303) For Thompson, the failure of filmic representations of Jesus is due, not to the limitations of cinematic style, but to the gaps that open between the determinacy of the real actor and the indeterminacy of the spiritual the real actor Represents. Although Thompson avoids Schrader’s subjectivity by describing the spectator’s subjective processes, and although he achieves this by regarding film as a medium of representation, his interest in religion and film is in a different area from my own. As is clear from his conclusion, Thompson’s


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concern is directed at how the spectator consumes cinematic representations of Christ. I will touch on this, in Part Two, when I discuss the priest as a locus of liturgical Christic representation. But, whereas Thompson concludes that von Sydow and Powell fail to represent Christ because they donate their space-and-time-bound bodies to be his Representative, I will argue that the liturgical construction of priestly representation is such that he can support and reflect back the variety of representations that are projected onto him, at least during the Eucharist: Christic and ethnic, transcendent and mundane, merging into a complex representational Gestalt, a semiotic incarnation. Bazin was right to reject sacramental richness as stylistically unsuitable for filmmaking. But his notion of filmic Protestantism has set the wrong tone for other theological critics. Those adopting a sacramentist approach to cinematic style have done violence to the representational character of film, expecting too much of the medium. Schrader’s indulgent and selffulfilling search for Transcendental style in film is too selective and brackets out the vast majority of film product as unworthy for consideration. Although he begins with Bazinian realism in order to pursue a theological agenda, he ultimately loses sight of the representational character of film implied by Bazin’s realist emphasis. Taken together, Martin and Thompson point to how film might more accurately be understood in its own terms as a medium of representation: Martin emphasizing the parallels between religion and visual art in terms of a participation; Thompson stressing the mechanisms of representation. However, while I share a certain amount of common cause with Martin and Thompson, I want to take their interest in film as representational media in a different direction and understand the operation of liturgical representation on the construction of liturgical subjectivity. Having considered several phenomenological approaches to religious film analysis, I want now to consider what might be considered the emerging orthodoxy of religious film analysis. Arising from an interest in literary criticism, and exhibiting a preoccupation with authorial intent, May has characterized this orthodoxy as the search for ‘the cinematic analogue of the religious or sectarian question’ (May 1982, 26).

Chapter 2

Literary Interpretations: Film as Visual Story

Setting his interpretative direction according to his professional research and teaching interests in theology and literature, John May’s view, that film is best regarded as visual story, set the direction for what characterizes the major approach to religious film analysis.1 Although he does warn against ‘a myopic concentration on one type of meaning’, May nonetheless argues that ‘The literary bases of film – treatment and dialogue – do as a matter of fact yield themes; and symbols are rooted more obviously in sight than in sound, the medium of the literary word’ (May and Bird 1982, viii). From this he discerns three theoretical approaches to the interrelation of literature and religion: heteronomy, or ‘Christian Discrimination’, an idea developed from T S Eliot’s view that Christian faith should be the standard for judging literary greatness; theonomy, or ‘Christian Amiability’, from Tillich’s idea of God as the ground of man’s being, ‘the root of religion’s purpose and literature’s meaning’ (May 1982, 25); and autonomy, May’s preferred approach and the perspective articulated in Johnston’s desire to ‘view a movie on its own terms’ (Johnston 2000, 49). In May’s view, with autonomy the standards by which the discipline is judged come from within the discipline: ‘thus, literature cannot be subjected to an alien norm any more than theology and religion can’ (May 1982, 25). May argues that, respecting the autonomy of literature, responsible critics would investigate the religious dimensions of literature without expecting to find religious or theological terms in the text. ‘Any discussion of the religious tone of a work would have to be done in the language of the text itself’ (1982, 25). Theological critics will preserve the autonomy of film when and if they view a film as a ‘visual story’. May’s interpretative approach demands that the theological critic examine the formal structures of a film, because these structures ‘represent the visual analogue of religious and sectarian questions’ (1982, 31). So it follows that the task of the theological critic ‘is to discover the cinematic analogue of the religious or sectarian question’ (1982, 26).

Literary Interpretations

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However, May seems to be more in the spirit of Eliot than he supposes when he recommends that: The inexperienced moviegoer must therefore develop the analytical skills for conscious reflection upon the seductiveness of film, or at least be guided by knowledgeable critics to the best films available, those that are faithful to the values of our religious tradition. (1992, 2–3) In any case, he was certainly in the spirit of the pro-moral value literary criticism of F R Leavis (against which Screen reacts so strongly).2 While May resists ‘the temptation to substitute “film” for “poem” and “director” for “poet”’ (1992, 5), the resonance between him and Leavis is strong. Just as Leavis identified literature on the basis of literary genius, so May’s desire ‘to discover the cinematic analogue of the religious or sectarian question’ leads him to consider films ‘concerned with the religious visions in American film classics’, films which offer ‘an image of the religious sensibility of an American filmmaker, and thus a likeness of the transcendent in his vision’ (1992, 5). Consequently, May betrays his expressed preference for autonomy insofar as a film’s suitability for theological criticism is determined by the director’s religious sensibility; in other words, the likelihood of finding something of the transcendent in his film. (As will become clear, Screen discards this approach to film as ‘subjective’ and ‘taste-ridden criticism’.) May’s commitment to ‘the literary bases of film’ highlights a number of issues that emerge directly from, and are typical of, this literary approach to the theological interpretation of film. Not the least of these is a moralizing concern to guide inexperienced moviegoers towards the canon of ‘best films’, films considered faithful to traditional religious values. But May also allots a privileged if not reverential place to the filmmaker as auteur : cinematic genius and possessor of a religious sensibility in whose directorial vision ‘the cinematic analogue of the religious or sectarian question’ can be found. May’s implicit cinematic canon is funded by the idea that such films can be objectively identified and commented on by knowledgeable critics to instruct inexperienced moviegoers, and his notion of the ‘knowledgeable critic’ compares directly with Leavis’ idea of ‘complete readers’. Finally, May uses a theological category, in this case, the ‘transcendent’, as the standard against which to judge the suitability of a film as candidate for theological criticism. Space does not allow me to discuss these three issues fully. I have already touched on some of the difficulties associated with the notion the ‘transcendent’. And I will have more to say about Screen’s opposition to the kind

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of anti-theoretical, pro-moral value, Leavisite subjectivity that could promote the possibility of a cinematic canon. More significant in terms of my criticism that May’s literary approach fails to understand film as a representational medium is his privileging of the filmmaker as auteur.

The Auteur in Theological Film Criticism: Kreitzer In its relation to cinema, the term auteur was coined in the 1950s by the French film journal, Cahiers du Cinéma. Originally it was used evaluatively to distinguish filmmakers by their creative ability. The term was commonly reserved for directors like Charlie Chaplin and Orson Welles, who typically wrote, acted in, produced and sometimes scored their own films. Later, Andrew Sarris developed the term, popularizing it into a theory in the 1960s (Sarris [1968]1996). The list of theological critics who depend on auteur theory is long (for examples, see May and Bird 1982; Marsh and Ortiz 1997), and they are typical of so much North American film criticism rooted in Sarris’ version of auteur theory. To expose the weakness of this argument, and demonstrate my contention that theologians and students of religion have failed to understand film as a medium of representation, I will briefly discuss Larry Kreitzer’s redaction critical approach to biblical studies and film. A biblical studies interest in film has been a relatively recent development in theological film criticism. Leaving aside historiographical work (e.g. Babington and Evans 1993), writers have either attempted an interpretative dialogue between biblical and filmic themes, or they have looked at filmic interpretations of Christ (Malone 1990; Baugh 1997; Telford 1997).3 Characteristic of the biblical studies approach is a concern with interpretative dialogue, summed-up in Robert Jewett’s commitment to treat film and biblical passage with ‘equal respect’ (Jewett 1993, 7). For his part, Kreitzer develops the truism that the Bible and biblical themes inform Western culture, and he extensively demonstrates his thesis that Western cultural interpretation reinforms biblical hermeneutics (Kreitzer 1993; 1994; 1999). This ‘reversal of the hermeneutical flow’ means that the interpretation of biblical texts is inevitably marked by the way in which art objects, culturally produced, are received. Kreitzer’s approach is an original, if somewhat unsatisfying attempt at genuine dialogue, an intertextuality that aims to provide flashes of interpretative insight between texts, biblical, literary and filmic, to create contemporary midrash (1993, 8). (For his part, Jewett’s attempts have been less successful in achieving their aim insofar as his


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concern with dialogue ‘in a prophetic mode’ continues to privilege the biblical text.) Kreitzer is not primarily interested in film, but in the processes of interpretation and the insights to be gained by interpreting biblical texts in the light of contemporary literature and film. For this reason, he starts from the premise that there can be a reversing ‘of the flow of influence within the hermeneutical process’, in such a way as to allow us to re-examine New Testament passages or themes ‘in the light of some of the enduring expressions of our own culture, namely great literary works and their film adaptation’ (1993, 19). Kreitzer proposes two elements to his method. First, he makes the general observation that the Bible and biblical themes have informed our culture and its art forms. These art forms have in turn reflected back interpretations of the biblical themes on which they have drawn, to such a degree that understanding of those themes has been reinformed. This new understanding has in turn reinformed culture, new art has been created, and so the cycle turns on. (Kreitzer’s specific example is Holman Hunt’s The Light of the World.) In terms of his own strategy, Kreitzer locates his chosen literary and cinematic art between New Testament texts and our contemporary setting. In this way, Janus-like, they lubricate the hermeneutical flow. The second element of Kreitzer’s method is to see cinematic interpretation as a kind of performance of the interpretative process, which he describes but does not go on to theorize. If Kreitzer’s strength is his impressive ability to detail the way fiction and film can inform the process of interpretation, his weakness is that his methodology is unproductive. For example, in his intertextual discussion of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Romans 7, Kreitzer gives an impressively detailed consideration of the dark side of human nature personified in Mr Hyde. However, acknowledging that this dark side is read by some as sexual immorality, he somewhat feebly concludes: Is it too much to suggest that the words in Romans 7, although they almost certainly will not bear the interpretative weight of sexuality sometimes thrown upon them, nonetheless do so speak to us of moral struggles that characterized not only the apostle’s life, but ours as well? (1993, 126) Kreitzer’s weakness lies in his analytical method. On the one hand, he appears to suggest a reader-response approach to the texts that moves from ‘facets of our cultural heritage, and then to apply it to our understanding of the [New Testament] materials’ (1993, 19). On the other hand, his

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meticulous investigation of sources and nuances of adaptation reveals a redaction critic’s preoccupation with authorial intent, rather than those of someone treating film qua film. Responding to my critique (Nolan 1998a, 7–8), Kreitzer asserts: ‘I take it for granted that a well-grounded understanding of the author’s intent in producing a piece of literature, however difficult that is to determine, can contribute significantly to our appreciation of his or her writing’ (Kreitzer 1999, 28). However, against this assertion, the experiments of Russian Formalist filmmaker and theorist Lev Kuleshov persuasively demonstrate that cinematic meaning emerges for the spectator in the juxtaposition of shots in a way that is beyond the control of the director/editor. From 1919, as an organizer and teacher in the State Film School, Kuleshov began experimenting with montage. Working under post-Revolutionary economic constraints,4 with such students as V I Pudovkin and (briefly) Sergei Eisenstein, Kuleshov discovered and theorised what became known as the ‘Kuleshov effect’: ‘an illusion achieved through time which demonstrated that the succession of one shot by another would alter the apparent meaning of the component shots’ (Kovacs 1976, 34). Kuleshov detailed a number of experiments, the most impressive being one he worked on with Pudovkin (Hill 1967, 8; Kuleshov 1971/72, 114–17). Taking existing footage of the Russian actor Mosjukhin they selected several close-ups that did not express any emotion. These ‘quiet close-ups’, which were all similar, were then joined with other clips of film in different combinations. A first close-up of Mosjukhin was followed by a shot of a plate of soup standing on a table; a second was linked with shots of a dead woman in a coffin; finally, a third close-up was followed by a shot of a little girl playing with a toy bear. What was surprising was the audience’s reaction to the experiment. Unaware that the shots of Mosjukhin were all the same, The public raved about the acting of the artist. They pointed out the heavy pensiveness of his mood over the forgotten soup, were touched by the deep sorrow with which he looked on the dead woman, and admired the light, happy smile with which he surveyed the girl at play. But we knew that in all three cases the face was exactly the same. (Pudovkin 1958, 168) These early cinematic experiments decisively demonstrate the vanity, typical of the assertion made by Kreitzer and others, that film could be considered in terms of authorial intent. They also expose the mistake of ignoring the insights of film criticism; a mistake shared by many theological critics, in particular those who insist on treating film as literature, and an approach


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that does violence to the integrity of the medium insofar as it fails to understand film as a medium of representation. It is likely that May is motivated by a concern to establish film as a serious, academic interlocutor for theology, paralleling literature as worthy of theological reflection. But if so, his conviction about a literary basis to film only distorts religious studies’ understanding of the nature of film, albeit in a different direction to Schrader’s sacramentalist discussion of cinematic style. If May’s choice of films for theological interpretation is less idiosyncratic than Schrader’s, selecting films that are considered to be faithful to religious values, this is because he, like Leavis, is concerned with moral guidance. In privileging the cinematic genius and religious sensibility of the auteur May, Kreitzer and others make apparent both their lack of engagement with film theory and the limitations of treating film in terms of literary categories. In short, they exemplify the almost universal failure of the orthodoxy emerging among religious film analysis to engage with any form of film theory, and in particular being entirely closed to the psychoanalytic film theory that I propose can enlighten religious studies’ understanding of how liturgy operates as a representational medium.

The Missed Point of the Emerging Orthodoxy: Deacy Christopher Deacy subscribes to what is emerging as established orthodoxy among religious film analysts. In Deacy, May’s insistence on searching for cinematic analogue finds form in his interest in the cinematic analogue of redemption. Deacy’s thesis, that film noir protagonists can be considered as redeemer-figures – in Deacy’s terms, a ‘functional equivalent of Christ’ (Deacy 2001, 69, 84, 92, passim) – is premised on his position that film offers one more secular site of religious activity. Consequently, he argues that, since the ‘overwhelming evidence’ suggests that film is displacing ‘some of the roles traditionally associated with religious discourse’ (2001, 3), there are strong grounds for reading films in terms of contemporary redemptive activity. I will not discuss here the many problems that are associated with Deacy’s rather confused approach, other than to point out that despite his assertion that noir justifies a religious reading (2001, 91) the real subject of Deacy’s discussion is the idiosyncrasy of his own reading, rather than the film text. Deacy suggests that to find religious significance in cinema, films should be read ‘against the grain’. By this he means that eschewing entertainment as cinema’s raison d’être, those films that challenge ‘the optimistic, life-affirming

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and “magical” spirit of traditional Hollywood cinema’ (2001, 36), such as film noir, are appropriate candidates for theological or religious reading. Here he is suggestive of where his analysis would benefit from an engagement with psychoanalytic film theory. Deacy’s point is that it is the resonance of these films in the lives and experiences of their audiences, of the inherently human experience of the protagonist, ‘that enables such films to be read in theological terms’ (2001, 10). Deacy loads his definition of film noir with theological significance, arguing that the genre is engaged ‘in a highly focused and theologically constructive fashion with the estranged, disaffected, despairing and fragmentary quality of human existence from which . . . redemption can ever be a possibility’ (2001, 37). From this, he describes the existential terrain of noir in terms of an Augustinian-Lutheran landscape (Augustine’s understanding of humanity as depraved and prone to sin and eternal damnation mapping film noir fatalism; Luther’s intrinsic mistrust of human moral decision making mapping the moral ambiguity of the noir universe). With the intention of redefining Christology to fit the unfolding landscape of noir, Deacy charts a theological trajectory from Augustine (and Pelagius), through Kant and Schleiermacher, to John Hick and Don Cupitt. Citing selectively he argues that the direction of post-Enlightenment theologians (Kant, Schleiermacher) is away from ‘high’ Alexandrian Christology and towards an Antiochene Christology fitted for Hick’s anthropocentric (and arguably post-Christian) realm of ‘person-making’ theodicy. Deacy’s submission, then, is that ‘Within the context of this more anthropological approach to redemption, there is a significant degree to which film noir may feasibly be construed as a fertile site of redemptive activity’ (2001, 75–6). Premising his discussion of ‘The [sic] Christian basis of the filmic redeemer/Christ-figure’ on a contemporary Antiochene Christology, Deacy argues that recent cinematic portrayals of Christ’s humanity make good the lack in Apollinarian Christology precisely because ‘the inherently human aspect of his personality is absolutely essential to the redemptive process’ (2001, 82). Consequently (and ironically), this makes Martin Scorsese’s Jesus (The Last Temptation of Christ, 1988) ‘theologically acceptable’ since he is far more Antiochene, ‘more realistic and introspective’, than that of George Stevens or Nicholas Ray. But his point is that there are ‘enough discernible, and judicious, parallels between the Christian understanding of the person of Christ and Scorsese’s noir-orientated protagonist to warrant an affiliation’ (2001, 88). And this is where he is most strongly suggestive of the benefits of engagement with psychoanalytic film theory. Arguing that Scorsese delineates his


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Christ as an authentically human character, ‘who undergoes a redemptive experience with his finite human condition’ (2001, 89), Deacy suggests that it is the audience’s identification with the figure of Jesus that constitutes a site of potential redemptive activity. His point is that ‘the film may be seen to “stage this same conflict and victory in the spectator”, wherein the figure of Jesus becomes, in effect, the paradigm, or model, of that experience’. In other words, ‘in the spirit of the Antiochene understanding’, Jesus is ‘one of us’ so we share the redemption he accomplishes. Although Deacy’s thesis is clear, a key question remains unanswered. As far as religious film analysis is concerned, his original point concerns audience identification, in this case, with the noir protagonist, as functional (and hence redemptive) equivalent, and that this identification constitutes the site of potential redemptive activity. He is absolutely right to say that ‘If the film audience was not in some sense a part of the film “text”, we would be unable to share the experiences of the film protagonist’ (2001, 91–2). However, Deacy crucially fails to explore the nature of this identification, taking recourse in the anodyne excuse that the processes by which movies affect spectators are ‘intellectually elusive’ (2001, 91). I have no doubt that Deacy is onto something. But choosing, like so many other religious film analysts, to ignore entirely the kind of film theory that attempts to understand cinema spectatorship, he misses the point of his own argument. Consequently, his approach is important only insofar as it is an example of what currently passes as ‘orthodox’ religious film analysis. Yet, to retain integrity, interdisciplinary studies like this need to be genuinely interdisciplinary, and religious film scholars must struggle to master both their disciplines equally: film and its theory as well as religion and its theology. Deacy, like so many others, has not. Against this, I want to argue that work on religion and film must begin to understand and work with the ways in which film operates on the spectator. It is not enough simply to hold the two things up for inspection and think that the comparison has been established. I will argue that it is precisely in the area of identification with an ‘other’, insofar as it is allied with narrative and participation in (ideological) ‘reality’, that the most interesting analysis and interpretations will be found. This is the area at which Deacy hints but does not venture.

Chapter 3

Anthropological Interpretations: Film as Religion

A certain kind of logic can be attributed (if not actually discerned) in the development of religious film analysis: where it once regarded film as sacramental invitation to participate (Fraser 1988) or as ‘cinematic theology’ (Hurley 1970), some religious film analysts are now arguing that film can, and indeed should, be seen as religion, as a form religious practice. These writers have noticed a simple, but obvious paradox, apparent in practically all writing on film, religious or otherwise, and described by Deacy as ‘the bizarre situation where it is implicitly recognized that audience interpretation matters, yet at the same time no serious attempt is made to find out what an audience is actually thinking vis-à-vis a given film’ (Deacy 2005, 6). Deacy’s observation signals that religious film analysis is beginning, somewhat belatedly, to catch up with what for most nonreligious film theorists has been a longstanding interest (Nolan 2003, 177), namely a concern with how spectators actually consume film. For Lyden and Marsh, the distinctive of this consumption is that it is religious, so Lyden speaks of ‘how film itself functions as a religion’ (Lyden 2003, 34), while Marsh writes about the ‘religion-like function of film’ (Marsh 2004, x).1

Lyden: ‘film itself functions as a religion’ In his book, Lyden ‘seeks . . . a method for understanding film as performing a religious function’ (Lyden 2003, 3). As such, he views popular films ‘as phenomena analogous to religions’ (2003, 12), he speaks about ‘the study of religion as film’ (2003, 12), considers ‘the religious voice of the film’ (2003, 34), and his reoccurring, question begging concern is ‘how film itself functions as a religion’ (2003, 34). This perspective allows Lyden to make what is an interesting and certainly original contribution to the ongoing

Anthropological Interpretations

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debate about how religion and film can be brought into dialogue. Based firmly on the principle of heteronomy, Lyden proposes interreligious dialogue as a model for dialogue between religion and film: ‘Interreligious dialogue and study have progressed to the point that scholars seek to understand the other religion as it understands itself, even though they know they cannot fully achieve this goal’ (2003, 35). While this is an original proposal, Lyden hangs a great deal on how he defines religion. To that end, Lyden finds the definition developed by anthropologist Clifford Geertz to be ‘the most helpful and comprehensive one for analyzing religious phenomena’ (2003, 41). According to Geertz’ 1966 definition, a religion is: (1) a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic. ([1966]1973, 90) Lyden examines these five aspects in turn and, unsurprisingly, locates each of them in what he terms ‘the religion of film’ (Lyden 2003, 44), although it is difficult to know whether by this phrase Lyden intends that individual films equate to individual religions; that film as a genre is a religion; that the institution of film (i.e. cinema) is a religion; or that film (like religion) is a cultural system. Lyden’s analysis becomes interesting when he considers the fourth and fifth aspects of Geertz’ definition. Noting that ‘there has been almost no examination of the rituals of filmgoing by which the worldview and ethos of films are religiously appropriated by the viewer’ (2003, 46), Lyden critiques Geertz’ failure to understand how Western popular cultural experience parallels the sort of rituals Geertz observed in Balinese religion. Against Geertz’ implied assertion that Balinese drama, insofar as it invites audience participation, is more high mass than theatrical presentation, Lyden argues that popular films do often invite audience participation: Had Geertz done an ethnographic study of a midnight showing of the film The Rocky Horror Picture Show, for example, he might have had some appreciation for the ways in which Western popular culture created the sort of ritual experience that the Balinese have in their religious drama. As the audience flick their lighters on, throw toast at the screen, or

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respond verbally to the cues in the film, they become part of the story. This no doubt explains also why people would go to the film over and over again, as if to a church service, for this ritual experience. (2003, 47) Lyden concludes that more ethnographic study is needed ‘on the ways films are experienced, as the tendency has been to treat the film as a “text” in need of interpretation rather than describing the event of film viewing as its attendant symbolisms’ (2003, 47). Clearly, because he is interested in ‘how films function for their audiences’ (2003, 6), ethnography is important to Lyden and, from this perspective, using Geertz, a semiotic or symbolic anthropologist engaged in ethnographic study, is wholly appropriate. The difficulty is that Lyden is not only confusing but confused. To begin with, Lyden correctly observes that the debate about how religion scholars should approach film, a modern example of the classic ‘“problem” of “religion and culture”’, suffers from the assumption that ‘we pretty much know what religion is, and what culture is, and [that] we can distinguish them without too much difficulty’ (2003, 2). Initially, Lyden signals he will follow a modified version of May’s approach of autonomy, contending that ‘there is no absolute distinction between religion and other aspects of culture’ (2003, 2). However, he immediately undermines his openhanded position by indicating that he will privilege the religious by applying categories drawn from religious studies – myth, morals, ritual – to his work with film: ‘certain aspects of popular culture have a “religious” side to them’ (2003, 3). As with May, Lyden’s struggle towards autonomy seems too exhausting and, even more quickly than May, he collapses into heteronomy, privileging the religious over the nonreligious. From his assumed premise, Lyden goes on to take religion and film watching as comparable cultural phenomenon, equally susceptible to ethnographic study. Wanting to know ‘how films function [religiously] for their audiences’, Lyden could variously be accused of begging the question, importing his conclusions, or assuming the very thing he is inquiring about, namely ‘how film itself functions as a religion’ (2003, 34, emphasis added). Yet, this approach is methodologically legitimate for Geertz, who proposes that ‘Cultural analysis is (or should be) guessing at meanings, assessing the guesses, and drawing explanatory conclusions from the better guesses’ (Geertz 1973b, 20). This is because the validity of the explanatory conclusions drawn depends on ‘the power of the scientific imagination to bring us into touch with the lives of strangers’ (1973b, 16). Lyden seems persuaded that his guesses are at least as good as, if not better than, those


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of others, but he seems to give hostage to fortune when, without irony, he observes that, Whether past approaches have applauded or critiqued particular films, they have often looked only for what they wanted to see, and so found only either what fits with their views or what can provide a convenient straw man to oppose. (2003, 34) To be fair, Lyden does acknowledge that he cannot claim his own approach is free of bias or error. Yet it seems to me that it is highly unlikely that any unbiased observer would, without prior intent, ever assume film to be a religion. Lyden, himself, fails to consider how his own particular bias – the bias of ‘attempting to find the religious voice of the film itself’ (2003, 34) – might – like the bias of imposing ‘our own theological or ideological framework on the film’ (2003, 34) – lead to misunderstanding about ‘how it [the film] conveys its message to its viewers and how it functions religiously or filmically’ (2003, 34). Lyden is right, and would certainly be supported by Geertz (1973b, 14), when he argues that, ‘Films are understood and interpreted only in the context of their actual viewing’ (Lyden 2003, 47). However, despite appealing to religious film analysts to understand ‘how the average viewer sees it’ (2003, 47), Lyden – besides taking note of box office success and utilizing a form of ‘the concept of the “implied reader”’ – refers only to ‘some studies of audiences done by others’ (which are difficult to follow up) and to his ‘own interpretive observations drawn from conversations with students and other viewers of films who are not professional film theorists’ (2003, 137–8).2 Moving to the fifth aspect of Geertz’ definition, Lyden acknowledges a certain ambivalence with regard to the value of his authority. While he proposes that Geertz reinforces ‘the idea that religious rituals create a sense of reality that points to a different way of viewing the world from that provided by ordinary experience’ (2003, 48), he also acknowledges that Geertz himself ‘seemed unwilling to admit the extent to which works of art can create this alternate sense of reality’ (2003, 48). In fact, Geertz makes a clear distinction between what he calls ‘the religious perspective’ and other major perspectives by which ‘men construe the world – the common-sensical, the scientific, and the aesthetic’ (Geertz [1966]1973, 111). Geertz adds that the religious perspective differs from art in that instead of effecting a disengagement from the whole question of factuality, deliberately manufacturing an air of semblance

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and illusion, it deepens the concern with fact and seeks to create an aura of utter actuality. ([1966]1973, 112) Consequently, for Geertz, the religious perspective differs from art – and by extension film – insofar as it is concerned with a ‘sense of the “really real” . . . [to] which the symbolic activities of religion as a cultural system are devoted to producing, intensifying, and, so far as possible, rendering inviolable by the discordant revelations of secular experience’ ([1966]1973, 112). Lyden rejects this view of the aesthetic perspective in the basis that in both religion and art (specifically film) ‘the participant enters into such ritual space in order to experience an alternate reality’ (Lyden 2003, 52). The difficulty for Lyden is that Geertz’ definition, as a whole, will not work for him. Lyden wants to understand how film performs a religious function and, for him, ‘Geertz’ defines religion by its function in human society, rather than by theological content (e.g., belief in a transcendent being), but he also avoids the reductionism of many social-scientific definitions’ (Lyden 2003, 41). However, while Geertz’ early interest addressed the cultural function of religion (Geertz [1966]1973, 123), his real interest, and his major contribution to anthropology, is semiotic anthropology (Geertz 1973a, ix). To the extent that Geertz’ definition retains value for him, as a semiotic anthropological ethnographer, it is in its ability to demonstrate a semiotic concept of culture (Geertz 1973b, 5). In other words, it would not so much be a question of how films function, religiously or otherwise, that would interest Geertz, as what might be the cultural meaning of films. Geertz is less the functionalist Lyden needs him to be and more the postmodern interpreter (McLoughlin 2001, 106) against whom Lyden distinguishes his approach.3

Marsh: The ‘religion-like function of film’ Like Lyden, Marsh assumes the ‘religion-like function of film’ (Marsh 2004, x) premised on his view that the practice of film-watching/cinema-going is functionally analogous to religious practice.4 From this he considers how film/film-watching functions in Western culture and discusses the theoretical and methodological tasks of the theology/religion-film dialogue – in particular, how films work and how they are received. To establish his conviction, Marsh uses, among others, J D Crichton’s definition of worship as, ‘a religious phenomenon, a reaching out through the fear that always accompanies the sacred to the mysterium conceived as


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tremendum but also fascinans, because behind it and in it there is an intuition of the Transcendent’ (Marsh 2004, 30). As such he finds analogy with the film-watching experience of being ‘taken out of oneself’ and turns to film theorists Tan and Frijda to explore the role of sentiment in film-watching. Unconcerned with worship or religious practice, Tan and Frijda aggregate sentiment to ‘helplessness and submissiveness in the face of the overwhelming’ (Marsh 2004, 31) and, of the filmic themes Tan and Frijda regard capable of arousing a sentimental response, Marsh finds the ‘aweinspiration’ theme closest to Crichton’s definition. He concludes that ‘Film fulfils a similar function to worship when it evokes emotions such as those Tan and Frijda identify’ (2004, 34). Re-evaluating emotion as part of audience response to film, Marsh links film-watching and the emotional component of worship to find that ‘The experience of film-watching . . . supports the importance of reader-response criticism’ (2004, 36). Finally, to secure his reader-response defence of theology/religion-film dialogue, Marsh draws on Martin Barker’s notion of ‘pro-filmic theory’, an ‘aggregate of concepts through which we can address films as constituting imaginative universes’ (2004, 38, citing Barker). Marsh is attracted by Barker’s pro-filmic emphasis on film’s ‘role in people’s lives’ (2004, 38) and moves from Barker’s observation about the need for ‘procedures for exploring how emotional responses to film might be structured’ (2004, 39, citing Barker) to assert that this is precisely what theology could supply to film. Marsh concludes: ‘Theology would then function as a cognitive world in relation to which emotional responses to film would be structured’ (2004, 39). Marsh is no doubt right on this point. Theology can indeed provide a cognitive structuring for emotional responses to film, as it clearly has done for the many writers who have offered theological/religious readings of film. However, Marsh himself admits that the present cultural context is such that organized religion is in decline. (A subtext of the book is Marsh’s missiological-apologetic use of the theology/religion-film dialogue to critique the Church’s failure to engage the cinema-going generation.) Consequently, the majority of cinema-goers ignore, if not actually ridicule, the cognitive structuring theology/religion might provide, while those who participate in the ‘theology/religion-film dialogue’ are those who are already persuaded. It is regrettable, then, that Marsh succeeds only in strengthening the case for the ‘theology/religion-film monologue’. In large part, this is because he has been unable to move beyond that most common failing among participants in the theology/religion-film debate, the very thing that he claims he wants to resist, ‘namely to imply

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that theological meaning is in a film [or in film-watching practice] simply awaiting the discovery of trained theological interpreters’ (2004, 110). Marsh has shifted his view since co-editing Explorations in Theology and Film with Gaye Ortiz (1997), where the quest for cinematic analogues to theological/religious questions was the cause of several contributors making this very implication. However, his interest in the ‘religion-like function of film’ leads him to discover religious analogues in cinematic practices. Like so many other religious film analysts, Marsh’s problem is methodological. In considering his analogies he makes one of the pair of possibly analogous terms the hermeneutic frame through which he interprets the other. For example, he selects a range of practices he regards as functionally typical of ‘religion-type’ behaviour (regular, rhythmic habit; rest and relaxation; shared experience; special architecture). He then finds functionally analogous practices among cinema-goers and interprets the cinemagoing practice through the frame of typical ‘religion-type’ behaviour. It is no surprise, then, that he can boldly conclude that ‘cinema-going functions as an alternative to, or a replacement for, traditional religious activity’ (2004, 6). However, such consistent, uncritical privileging of religion and religious experience as normative leads Marsh to absurdity, asserting that more people who watch films are theists of a kind than care to admit it. It is simply that they have not done enough thinking about God in relation to a living tradition of God-talk to bring their feelings, beliefs and thought into some sort of coherent shape. (2004, 10) But on this logic, it is not unreasonable to conclude that more people who practise religion are atheists of a kind, it simply that they have done too much thinking about God in relation to a living tradition of God-talk. Marsh is right to shift his attention to the film-watching experience, and in particular to attend to emotional (sentimental) or subjective responses to film. He is also right to give more attention to the role of film theory. However, his weakness is in not giving film theory enough attention. So, while he acknowledges my insistence that theologians attempt a more sustained interaction with film theory (Nolan 2003, 177), he chooses to dismiss the perspective of psychoanalytic film theory on the grounds that ‘such film theory is itself under severe challenge from within the world of film studies’ (Marsh 2004, 88). Rejecting ‘Screen theory’, Marsh relies on film critics and film analysts informed by ‘post-theory’ (Bordwell and Carroll 1996). Marsh appears to adopt this position on the basis that post-theory approaches are necessarily more empirical in that they look ‘at what films


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actually do, rather than what is in them and what it is assumed they should do’ (Marsh 2004, 119). Underwriting his position is his (in my view correct) intention to resist the ‘ever-present tendency in theology to gravitate towards “real art”, as if popular culture has little to offer theology’ (2004, 118–19). As he puts it, ‘There is a disturbing suspicion of the popular’ (2004, 83). To this end – with reference to Freidrich Schleiermacher, the ‘theologian of feeling’ – he emphasizes the affective and suggests a more positive role for sentimentality, both in film and theology. In fact, Marsh is in accord with early film-theologians like Neil Hurley who shared a similar missiological-apologetic intent to re-engage a cinemagoing generation alienated from the Church. For his part, Marsh is concerned about a generation which recognizes the importance of the affective aspect of life, and for whom ‘spirituality is seen as a good thing’, yet who decline the religion which might provide assistance ‘in the cognitive structuring of emotions’ (2004, 39). For Marsh, doing theology through film in part provides some of that cognitive structuring such that he asserts ‘The experience of film-watching is an exercise in spirituality’ (2004, 122). All this, however, comes very close to making assumptions about what films should do, rather than looking at what they actually do, and appears to belie the empiricism Marsh assumes for post-theory. Marsh’s disagrees with what he sees as my ‘preference for screen theory as theology’s conversation-partner’ on the basis that he thinks it leads me ‘to major on theology’s aesthetic dimension’ while his ‘interest in viewer response leads [him] to emphasize the emotional dimension’ (Marsh 2004, 131). He also objects that ‘participants in the theology/religion-film debate who highlight aesthetics will be more drawn to art-house films, whilst those who are interested in films’ emotional impact will work more with popular films’ (2004, 131). Yet Marsh has not understood the Screen theorists, or how their insights might be significant for theology/religious studies. The Screen theorists were deeply interested in the pleasures audiences derived from watching film. They used semiotics, ideology and psychoanalysis to explore how audiences consume and are shaped by popular Hollywood cinema. My own work has been entirely with popular Hollywood cinema, looking at the Alien cycle (Nolan 1998b) and the films of Robin Williams (Nolan 1998c), and I have used Screen theory to develop an interpretative frame with which to examine Hollywood representation and audience response (Nolan 2005), which I will develop in the final chapter of this book. The strength of Lyden and Marsh, and their attempts to lift the theology through film project out of the trap of seeking cinematic analogues into

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which much of it has fallen, is in their focus on how audiences consume film, a move echoed by Deacy (2005). The emphasis of these writers may appear quite close to my own emphasis on the consumption of representation (Nolan 2003). However, there are at least three important differences between us. First, these writers find the practices of church-going and film-watching functionally analogous and they are prepared to be categorical in their assertions about ‘film as religion’: ‘If popular films do function as religion, as this study claims . . .’ (Lyden 2003, 31); ‘The experience of film-watching is an exercise in spirituality’ (Marsh 2004, 122). On the other hand, my approach identifies functional parallels on the basis that I regard liturgy and film as representational media. Second, both Lyden and Marsh dismiss, almost without consideration, the theoretical insights of the Screen problematic (Lyden 2003, 27–35; Marsh 2004, 123–31). For my part, I want to work critically with these insights and use them to understand the operations of both liturgy and film. Third, most writers on religion and film resolutely privilege religion over film. Lyden is unexceptional. Whereas others, such as May and Johnston, argue that films should be treated in their own terms yet succumb to a version of Eliot’s ‘Christian Discrimination’ (aiming for autonomy they fall into heteronomy), Lyden wants to return to autonomy, arguing that religion is one cultural phenomenon among many the relationship of which is recognized as ‘religious’ and ‘nonreligious’ and between which ‘no absolute distinction’ (Lyden 2003, 2) can be made. Consequently, the ‘tendency to label certain sorts of activities as “religious” chiefly [arises] because they fall into the patterns that we recognize from religions with which we are familiar’ (2003, 2). However, Lyden proposes that engagement between religion and film, ‘will be most readily accomplished by granting that certain aspects of popular culture have a “religious” side to them’ (2003, 3). So, while for Lyden autonomy may mean that the ‘nonreligious’ can become ‘religious’, the traffic is non-reversible, the ‘religious’ does not become ‘nonreligious’; in other words, Lyden’s autonomy (like May’s) has all the characteristics of Eliot’s heteronomy. In contrast, my approach aims to regard both religion and film with equal suspicion (heteronomy). I will amplify these differences in what follows, demonstrating the parallels between liturgy and film on the basis that they are representational media and outlining in greater detail the theoretical insights of the Screen problematic.

Part Two

Representation in Liturgy and Film


Introduction to Part Two

There can be no doubt that liturgy and film are demonstrably different media. For example, whereas commonsense assumes a certain objectivity to the photographic image, largely because a photograph is understood to be ‘formed automatically, without the creative intervention of man’ (Bazin [1945]1967, 13), the iconography of religious images and statues, and the poetics of religious liturgies, are self-evidently works of creative human imagination. On this basis, liturgical representation cannot possibly be considered in any way realistic, and my assertion that liturgy and film can be paralleled as media of representation cannot, therefore, be sustained. However, it is not my intention to work from the commonsense assumption, which was given theoretical formulation by Bazin, but rather from a perspective developed in the cinesemiotics of Christian Metz. I will discuss Bazin and Metz in more detail in Chapter 5. It is enough here to note that Bazin was confronted by a paradox, namely the ontological relation of cinematic realism to its object via an artistic medium whose genius is the illusion of reality, and that this paradox was addressed, more or less successfully, by Metz’ distinction between the capacity of cinema to both denote and connote (to show and suggest). Metz’ contribution is important insofar as he shifts theoretical interest away from a preoccupation with surface realism and towards discussions about ‘signifying practice’.1 As will become clear, while Bazin articulates an unproblematic, referential theory of representation (concerned with what is signified), Metz’ interest in the nature of cinematic language offers a semiotic theory of representation (concerned with the operations of the signifier). Metz’ shift from denotation to connotation is a shift from reference towards signification, and had the effect of reorienting the field of film theory. The inability of liturgists and theologians to liturgically parallel Metz’ semiological distinction has, at times, had bloody consequences, for example, the great iconoclast controversy (eighth and ninth centuries CE). Although iconoclasts and iconophiles developed their diverging theoretical positions from a common view that an image is in some way related to or derived from a prototype, iconoclast emperor Constantine V (d. 775)

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extended this definition and asserted that a genuine image was ‘identical in essence with that which it portrays’, a reference to orthodox Trinitarian formula (Pelikan 1978, 109). In this sense Christ denotes ‘the image [eikon] of the invisible God’ (Colossians 1.15), and consequently any other image, insofar as it could not be ‘identical in essence’ was necessarily false. Understandably, then, the only authentic image allowed by iconoclasts was the Eucharist.2 Rejecting the notion of an identity of essence, iconophiles, like Theodore of Studios3 and John of Damascus,4 argued that ‘By nature Christ is one thing, and the image of Christ is another, and yet there is an identity because they are called the same’ and that an image was ‘a likeness that characterises the prototype in such a way that it also maintains some distinction from it’ (Pelikan 1978, 119). In arguing for a distinction between ‘likeness and identity’ against the definition of ‘identical in essence’ it is possible to see how Metz’ distinction would have helped the iconophiles to more effectively answer the iconoclasts’ referential approach with consideration of iconographic signification. Another difference between liturgy and film is in terms of the ‘realities’ each represents (signifies). There is recognition, even among realist film theorists like Bazin, that the genius of cinema is its ability to create an ‘impression of reality’ as a psychological effect of its images. Over against this, the reality described in and through liturgy can be taken as referring to a metaphysical ‘reality’. I am cautious here of becoming embroiled in a set of philosophical debates that would go far beyond the scope of this book. However, given the extent to which liturgical and cinematic discourse speak freely about ‘reality’, it is impossible to avoid the term altogether. For the purpose of my argument, I will take ‘reality’ to mean those (differing) realities signified by liturgy and film. (My use of ‘reality’ in this way will reflect Lacan’s use of the term to mean a form of socially constructed reality.)5 The point I want to argue from this is that, as signifying practices, these ‘realities’ are experienced by individuals in ways other than aesthetically. My argument is that individuals, as worshippers and spectators, in some way become participants in the realities represented by liturgy and film. Here again differences between the two media come in to focus. As will become clear, liturgical discourse is familiar with the concept of participation, specifically, participation in the Eucharist. By this it is understood that during the Anamnesis, the Eucharistic prayer of remembrance, worshippers participate in ‘the sacrifice of the cross’: a present participation by the faithful in Christ’s historic sacrifice, affected in relation to liturgical representation.

Introduction to Part Two

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The actual nature of such mystical participation may be open to debate. However, I will argue that, as a signifying practice, Eucharistic liturgical representation operates to install worshippers as participants in the ‘reality’ of Episcopal/ecclesial authority. My point will be that, in relation to the signifying practice of liturgical representation (specifically, the priest in persona Christi and in nomine totius populi), worshippers participate in Episcopal/ ecclesial ‘reality’; in other words, they participate or ‘live as’ subjects of Episcopal/ecclesial ideology.6 In terms of my assertion about liturgy and film, I will argue that the ideological operations of liturgy are better understood in terms of the analytical categories developed by film theory. I will ague that, in ways paralleling cinematic representation, liturgy operates as a signifying practice to connote a context within which worshippers participate (‘live as’ subjects) in a particular ‘reality’. For Screen, the concept of ‘signifying practice’ has value insofar as it contributes to uncovering the strategies by which cinematic realism makes ‘what appears on the screen self-evident and natural, a “truth”’ (Screen 1972, 3): what Terry Eagleton terms ideological strategies of ‘universalising’ and ‘naturalising’ (Eagleton 1991, 45). I will use the term ‘liturgical subjectivity’ to parallel directly ‘cinematic subjectivity’, not because I regard the content of the subjectivities to be the same, but because I am arguing for a parallel between the operation of liturgical and cinematic representation as signifying practices that connote a context in which individuals participate as subjects in an ideological ‘reality’. I want, therefore, in Part Two, to argue that the parallels between liturgy and film can be made around three heads, insofar as each invites its constituency to: identify with an other; be ‘stitched’ (or sutured) into a narrative; and ultimately to participate in a ‘reality’ that is always already ideological.7 I will begin by considering aspects of liturgical representation that can be paralleled with film. In Chapter 4, I will argue that it is identification with priestly representation, the liturgical ‘other’, that stitches worshippers into the sacramental narrative of the Cross and that ultimately enables participation in the ideological ‘reality’ of Episcopal/ecclesial authority. I will discuss the sacramental narrative of the Cross as the narrative into which worshippers are ‘stitched’ and I will argue that this liturgical invitation to identify with an other and be ‘stitched’ into a salvific narrative results in worshippers becoming participants in the liturgical ‘reality’ of Episcopal/ ecclesial ideology/authority. In Chapter 5, I will parallel this movement of liturgical identification by considering the spectator’s identification

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with the film star/hero as the cinematic ‘other’. I will discuss the ‘regularguy-overcoming-the-extraordinary-situation’ narrative into which spectators are joined and show how this leads to the spectator’s participation in the ideological ‘reality’ of Hollywood realism.

Chapter 4

Liturgical Representation: ‘others’, Narratives and Ideological ‘realities’

The centrality of the Eucharist to Roman Catholic theology and spirituality is without question. The Second Vatican Council (Vatican II, 1962–65) and its subsequent post-conciliar commentaries reaffirmed the overriding importance attached to the ‘sacrifice of the Mass’. For example, spelling out the implications of the reforming council’s thinking on sacred liturgy, the commentary Eucharisticum Mysterium states: ‘The mystery of the Eucharist is the true centre of the sacred liturgy and indeed of the whole Christian life’ (EM, 1). This point is underlined in the Catechism of the Catholic Church: The Eucharist is the heart and summit of the Church’s life, for in it Christ associated his Church and all her members with his sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving offered once for all upon the cross to his Father. (CCC, 1407) This strong assertion of the centrality of the Eucharist arises from the belief that it represents a participation in ‘the sacrifice of the cross’, and that, As often as the sacrifice of the cross by which ‘Christ our Pasch is sacrificed’ (1 Cor. 5.7) is celebrated on the altar, the work of our redemption is carried out. (LG, 3) In underlining the singular importance of the liturgy and Eucharistic celebration, Roman Catholic catechesis stresses that the object of the Eucharist, ‘the sacrament of all sacraments’ (CP, 326), is union with Christ (ES, 25). As such, the Eucharist is viewed as a very present participation in the sacrifice of Christ, the sacramental narrative, in which the people, in and through the liturgical action, share in ‘the mystery of salvation, present and active . . . [and thereby] save themselves and their brethren’ (EP, 19). To this end, it is the priest’s representative action, especially during the prayer

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of remembrance, the Anamnesis, praying ‘in the person of Christ’ and ‘in the name of the entire holy people’ (SC, 33; LG, 10; EM, 12; MS, 14; CP 7), through which the laity participates in Christ. Immediately, the three heads – identification with an other; stitching (suturing) into a narrative; and participation in ideological ‘reality’ – become more or less apparent. The object of the Eucharist is union with Christ through the representative action of the priest (as the liturgical ‘other’), through identification with whom the laity participate in the sacramental narrative of Christ’s sacrifice, ‘the mystery of salvation, present and active’. Slightly less obvious here is the nature of the ideological ‘reality’ that is Episcopal/ecclesial authority. However, a fuller understanding of priestly representation and the priest’s catechetical and pastoral duties will clarify the ideological ‘reality’ into which liturgical subjects are led to participate.

The Liturgical ‘other’: Priestly Representation Within the Roman Catholic tradition, priestly duties are explicitly directed towards the ‘formation of the faithful’. I will draw out the implications of this when I consider worshipers’ participation in the ideological ‘reality’ of Episcopal/ecclesial authority below, but for now it is important to recognize that pastors of souls are intended to act as the primary reference against which lay identification is calibrated. Specifically, it is the priest’s duty to ‘promote the liturgical instruction of the faithful and also their active participation, both internal and external . . . and in this matter they must lead their flock not only by word but also by example’ (SC, 19, emphasis added). The priest is the one who, through the mix of liturgical, pastoral and catechetical duties, instructs the faithful in the dynamics of the liturgy: it is through his words and actions that they learn about his representative function – representing both Christ (in persona Christi) and the people (in nomine totius populi); and it is on the basis of his instruction that the faithful ‘associate . . . with [the priest] in offering the sacrifice to God the Father through Christ in the Holy Spirit’ (CP, 60). In other words, the priest encourages the people to identify themselves with him in order to participate through active remembering in the Anamnesis, the Eucharistic prayer of remembrance. And to facilitate this, it is incumbent on the priest to minimize the intrusion of the particularity of his person into the performance of his Eucharistic duties (CP, 313; EP, 11, 17). The set of identifications encouraged is complex. To begin with, the priest instructs the laity about Christ. Predicated on a high Christology,

Liturgical Representation

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drawn from the historic creeds, the instruction deals with Christ’s participation in the Being of the Father; his creation of all things; his incarnation and virgin-birth; his life and teaching, betrayal and sacrificial death; his resurrection; his ascension and reign in glory as Lord; his second advent and judgement; and his unending kingdom (CCC, 430–682). Having established the nature of Christ, the priest also instructs the laity concerning his own representative function, namely, that he is (signifies) for them in persona Christi. The representative function of the priest is based, primarily, in the celebration of the Eucharist. In that place the priest is not merely a stand-in for Christ, but by virtue of his Holy Orders, he has been ‘configured [configurantur] to Christ’ (PO, 2, 12; CCC, 1581).1 The language of ‘configuration’, and (elsewhere) of ‘indelible character’,2 confuses priestly representation with the issue of ontology. Commenting on Presbyterorum ordinis, Wulf, Cordes and Schmaus cautiously criticize the Council’s decree for stressing character over calling. Locating priestly consecration as rooted in the fundamental consecration of baptism, they prefer to steer clear of ontology, and argue instead the need to translate the ‘profound speculation of high scholasticism into personal categories’ (Vorgrimler 1969, 267–8). Despite this tentative criticism, the relationship between priest and Christ continues to be understood as a qualitative association or identification, be it in character or calling. The point is that, by virtue of his ordination, the priest enjoys a qualitative association by which he also ‘possesses the power to offer sacrifice in the person of Christ’ (CP, 60). Whether or not this represents ontological change, the idea that Holy Orders somehow re-defines (or re-configures) the priest as Christ’s representation remains strong. Through consecration to God in ordination, priests ‘are made the living instruments of Christ the eternal priest [in a way which, through the language of ontology, effectively surpasses mere instrumentality] . . . . Since every priest in his own way assumes the person of Christ he is endowed with a special grace’ (PO, 12). It appears, then, that, even if the charism associated with priesthood is extended to him structurally (by association with the priestly office) the priest’s association with Christ is such that he possesses the charism as a personal attribute. What is clearly significant is that this identification is not understood to obtain between laity and Christ. For, while they may be a priestly people sharing the ‘common priesthood’ in Christ’s priestly ministry (LG, 10; CP, 62; CCC, 901–3), the difference of calling between priest and laity is such that, even if the demands of perfection (the standard of identification with Christ) are bracketed out, the representative function of the ‘ministerial or

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hierarchical priesthood’ (LG, 10) is unidirectional: it is the priest, and only ever the priest, who acts in persona Christi as Christ’s representation. The incarnational hierarchy is such that, as Christ is understood to incarnate and mediate the divine and the human, so the priest is understood to incarnate and mediate the Christic and the human. In other words, as well as representing Christ, the priest represents the people: the sacrifice he offers and the prayers he prays (excepting those he prays silently for his own needs) are offered in nomine totius populi (SC, 33; MS, 14; LG, 10). His voice may be the voice of God, but it is spoken in the accent of the people (EP, 8). Priestly duty requires the pastors of souls to ‘associate the people with himself’ (CP, 60), by being good shepherds who are willing to give their life for the sheep (PO, 13). Priests must teach the faith, preach the Word, challenge the heretics; minister to the poor and the sick; and count themselves as ‘brothers among brothers as members of the same Body of Christ which all are commanded to build up’ (PO, 9). Priestly representation is, then, Janus-like. In persona Christi, the priest faces the people and represents Christ; in nomine totius populi, the priest faces Christ and represents all the people. Like a screen of smoke in a son et illuminaire, he supports and reflects back the various representations projected onto him in the Eucharist: Christic and ethnic, transcendent and mundane, merge into the representation of an incarnational, atemporal Gestalt; a semiotic incarnation. Understood in this way, priestly representation can be seen to have close association with Eucharistic sacramental theology of ‘real presence’, a concept that substantially shapes the worshipper’s Eucharistic participation in Episcopal/ecclesial (ideological) ‘reality’. Post-conciliar commentary makes explicit that Christ’s Eucharistic presence is multilayered (hierarchical), and the principal forms are manifested progressively: First, he is present in the assembly of the faithful gathered together in his name; then he is present in his word when the Scriptures are read in the church and explained; likewise he is present in the person of the priest; finally and above all he is present under the eucharistic species. (ES, 6, emphasis added; EM, 9; ARCIC-ED, 7)3 To be explicit, in persona Christi the priest represents (or signifies) Christ, and thereby makes him present. The concept of the ‘real presence of Christ our Lord under the Eucharistic species’ (CP, 3), makes the essentially hierarchical nature of liturgical representation acutely apparent. The point is that ‘real’ presence, brought


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about by a ‘conversion of the inner reality (or “substance”) of the bread and wine into the inner reality of the body and blood of Christ’ (OBOB, 50),4 embodied in and affected through priestly representation, evinces the fundamentally, explicitly and self-consciously hierarchical nature of the Church (LG, 18–29). Now the priest, signifier of Christ, is also signifier of Episcopal/ecclesial authority. All that the priest is, in function and charism, office and essence (EM, 11; LI, 4), is regarded as gifted by the Holy Spirit, via the Church (LG, 7). The Spirit bestowed charismata onto the apostles and their representatives, the bishops; then, successively, through the bishops onto the priests (LG, 20, 22). The mystical, hierarchical connections are such that the priest not only represents the bishop, but, as with Christ, he actually makes ‘him present in the assemblies of the faithful’ (PO, 5). In fact, the priest’s ability to make Christ present is derivative; since it is the bishops who most fully represent Christ to the people (LG, 21), it is their voice that intones most clearly in the accent of Christ (LG, 20). Again, it is Episcopal authority that legitimates Eucharistic celebration (LG, 26), and it is the bishops, functioning collegially, who are united with the Roman Pontiff, the Vicar of Christ, and are the supreme governors of the Church (LG, 22). For this reason, it is the priest’s duty to submit to that hierarchy, and to foster the ‘formation of the faithful’ who will also submit to the hierarchy. In Chapter 8, I will return to priestly representation insofar as it is implicated in the ‘stitching together’ of religious identity. For now it is enough to establish that as a key element of liturgical representation the priest is offered to the laity as the focus for their identification. As far as the parallel between liturgy and film is concerned, I will indicate below how liturgical identification with the priest can be compared with cinematic identification with film stars. I will argue that the priestly capacity to represent Christ in persona Christi is in fact connotative, that he makes Christ present insofar as he connotes Christ. Before that, I must consider the liturgical narrative into which worshippers are invited to ‘stitch’ (or suture) themselves, in particular the sacramental narrative of the Cross.

Sacramental Narrative of the Cross Although I am again cautious of entering a set of debates that would take me beyond the scope of this study, before I explore anamnesis, I need to comment on my working definition of sacrament. As I am not in this chapter primarily concerned with the nature of what may lie behind the sacramental symbol, it will be enough here for me to note that I am adopting

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Joseph Martos’ functional definition (which is in turn based on the work of Mircea Eliade) that, ‘sacraments . . . function as “doors to the sacred,” that is, as invitations to religious experiences’ (Martos 1981, 17). Behind Martos’ definition is an antipathy towards those forms of patristic and scholastic sacramental theology, influenced by Hellenistic categories, which he regards as responsible for ‘a purely metaphysical and even a magical understanding of the sacraments’ (Martos 1981, 40). Augustine’s definition of sacrament as the sign of something sacred5 distinguished between the sacrament as sign (sacramentum) and the reality of the sacrament (res sacramenti). This view held general assent until, in the eleventh century, Berengar of Tours (d. 1088) sparked a dispute by denying the real presence of the ‘body of Christ’ in the Eucharist.6 In effect, Berengar challenged the objectivity of the sign, adopting a position against the idea that a sign could be the same as the reality it signified. To this either/or Berengar’s opponents proposed a both/and (Leeming 1956, 253). Against Berengar, Hugh of St Victor (d. 1141) posited the ‘first significant presentation of a doctrine of the sacraments’ in a threefold view the sacrament as: the res, the facta, and the verba (Auer 1995, 28). In the thirteenth century, High Scholasticism brought a further development applying Aristotelian concepts to sacramental theology, thus while Alexander of Hales (d. 1245) continued to interpret the Augustinian formula elementum et verbum in the general sense of materia et forma, Hugh of St Cher (d. 1263) was the first to use the conceptual pair in the hylomorphic7 sense of Aristotelian philosophy: ‘The words, seen as form, are for the element and the action, seen as matter, not only a determinant but also the very cause of the reality of the sacrament’ (Auer 1995, 29). Martos concludes that, with Hugh, the subjectivity of New Testament personal and communal categories became objective and metaphysical; the sign and the reality it signifies, the sacramentum et res, were now one and the same: The fathers spoke about sacraments primarily in objective, metaphysical terms since that was the manner of speaking which their philosophical tradition demanded. So later generations came to understand sacramental practices primarily as signs of unseen metaphysical realities such as changes in one’s soul or in one’s spiritual relation to God and other Christians. (1981, 59) Significantly, the ‘image of his body’, the liturgical representation of Christ, was now understood to have taken on his reality. In the same way that iconoclastics like Constantine V implied a metaphysics of presence in regarding


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the Eucharist as the image of Christ, so there is a similar metaphysics of presence implied in the sacramental theology developed in High Scholasticism: the representation of Christ is at the same time his metaphysical reality made present. Metaphysical Scholastic sacramental theology represents authorized Roman teaching prior to Vatican II.8 However, since the reforming council the metaphysical tradition of sacramental theology has been reinterpreted, notably in relational terms. For example, Edward Schillebeeckx and Karl Rahner, both influential in the formulations of the Council, interpreted the sacraments through Thomist theological categories and phenomenological–existentialist paradigms.9 Thus, Rahner’s sacramental theology is intimately dependant on his Christology and ecclesiology, and his reinterpretation in terms of Heideggerian Thomism (McCool 1975, xx) is modelled on a conception of human existence as a symbolic activity. For Rahner, Christ is the historical incarnation of the grace of God, such that one can point to a ‘visible, historically manifest fact, located in space and time, and say, Because that is there, God is reconciled to the world. There the grace of God appears in our world of time and space’ (Rahner 1963, 15). Christ is the ‘spatio-temporal sign that effects what it points to . . . [the] reality and sign, sacramentum and res sacramenti, of the redemptive grace of God’ (1963, 15). For its part, the Church ‘socially and juridically organised’ (1963, 13), is the ‘continuance, the contemporary presence, of that real, eschatologically triumphant and irrevocably established presence in the world, in Christ, of God’s salvific will’ (1963, 18). In short, the Church is ‘the real symbol through which the Incarnate Word expresses himself in human history’ (McCool 1975, 278). As such, the Church is the fundamental sacrament ‘always and unchangeably the sign which brings with it always and inseparably what it signifies’ (Rahner 1963, 19), and so provides the theological substructure for the so-called seven visible sacraments. Thus, just as the hypostatic union of divine and human natures, the Christological sign and reality, is understood to be inseparable yet ‘without confusion’, so in the Church ‘manifest historical form and Holy Spirit, are not the same’ (1963, 19), and the sacramental duality of sign and signified, sacramentum and res sacramenti, is similarly understood (1963, 34). Rahner’s Heideggerian Thomist reinterpretation may not represent the return from metaphysics to metaphor that Martos would like. However, it is a move from a metaphysics of presence towards a type of metaphysics of relation. Martos rightly draws the boundaries of the debate about sacramental reality around contrasting positions regarding sacramental language. On the one side, sacramental language is regarded as a theological truth statement

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about an objective, if invisible, metaphysical effect caused by receiving the sacrament; while on the other side, sacramental language is understood as a metaphorical description for a particular subjective religious experience, the experience of sacramental reality. In essence, these distinctions represent a recasting of the iconoclast debates, which were concerned, on the one side, with representation of reference (preoccupied with the signified) and, on the other side, with a representation of signification (preoccupied with the signifier). In Metzian terms, this is the distinction between denotation and connotation, and Martos’ functional definition, in which the sacrament signfies something sacred, is clearly connotative and extends an invitation to the worshipper to participate in sacramental reality. Key to participation in the sacramental narrative is the notion of anamnesis. Rooted in Jewish faith and practice (Dix 1945; Jeremias 1966; Bouyer 1968; Gregg 1976), the idea was established very early in Christian theology, notably in the Pauline-Lucan tradition of Jesus’ command to repeat the Eucharistic ritual as a memorial: ‘Do this in remembrance [Greek anamnesis] of me’ (1 Cor. 11.23–6; Lk. 22.15–20).10 As I have indicated, Roman Catholic catechesis puts heavy emphasis on the singular importance of the liturgy, and in particular on Eucharistic celebration. This celebration is the action of the Church (EM, 3(c); SC, 47), and within it the laity have a clearly defined place that is intended to be substantial. While the priest is acting in persona Christi and in nomine totius populi, the faithful are not to be ‘silent spectators’ (SC, 48); their ‘perfect participation in the liturgy’ qualifies them to ‘receive the divine life abundantly’ (IO, 8; MS, 5; CP, 3, 14), and the laity’s minimum of active participation is constituted responsively in terms of acclamations and replies to the priest’s greetings and presidential prayers (CP, 14). However, and more substantially, while the priest acts to consecrate the bread and wine, the role of the faithful in the Eucharist is to recall the passion, resurrection and glorification of the Lord . . . to offer the immaculate victim not only through the hands of the priest, but also together with him; and . . . to perfect that communion with God and among themselves which should be the product of participation in the sacrifice of the mass. (EM, 12, emphasis added) Anamnesis, then can be understood in terms of active remembering.11 Protestant biblical scholar, Brevard Childs, in his study of the Semitic concept of memory, offers an account of active memory in terms of ‘actualization’, which he borrows from Heidegger.12 Childs argues that, while the


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experience recalled by later generations of Israelites was not that of their own psychological memory, the important point is that through the memorial (Hebrew: zkr) they nevertheless participated in the flow of a tradition, thereby making it theologically present and, in this theological sense, their own. Thus, The act of remembering serves to actualize the past for a generation removed in time from those former events in order that they themselves can have an intimate encounter with the great acts of redemption. Remembrance equals participation. (1962, 56) Childs defines this internalizing process of ‘actualization’ as ‘the process by which a past event is contemporized for a generation removed in time and space from the original event’ (1962, 85). Rejecting any association of ‘actualization’ with myth, as in the mythopoeic re-enactment of sacred drama, or history, as in the cultic recital of the historic acts of redemption, Childs interprets ‘actualization’ biblically as ‘a concept which shares features of both yet exhibits a unique character of its own’ (1962, 83). Childs argues that Israel’s liturgical conception of history is characterized theologically by what he terms ‘redemption time’: a time in which a redemptive event, for example the Exodus, continues to reverberate in the lives of successive generations. In ‘redemption time’ this event is seen as the action of a God standing outside time whose actions are, consequently, eternally present. Thus, when Israel remembers and participates in cultic activity, for example the Passover, the past event is actualized in the present moment. For Israel, this was no ‘mere subjective reflection, but in the biblical category, a real event occurred as the moment of redemptive time from the past initiated a genuine encounter in the present’ (1962, 84). This said, Childs equivocates on the subjective nature of ‘redemption time’, and argues it is only correct to speak of an actualization of a past event in terms of memory: ‘Only in relation to Israel’s memory is the problem to contemporize past tradition’ (1962, 75). Indeed, he is explicit that ‘actualization’ is contingent on the subjective psychological process of identification: ‘Actualization occurs when the worshipper experiences an identification with the original events’ (1962, 82). In short, Childs is suggesting that in the activity of cultic remembrance, the subjective psychological process of identification coincides with a theological perspective of time to affect the ‘actualization’ of religious experience.13 If anamnesis is the active remembering by which the faithful participate in the sacramental narrative, then their participation as subjects is, in every


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sense, subjective: subjectively recalling in such a way as to become (ideological) subjects of Episcopal/ecclesial authority. To facilitate this, the ‘pastors of souls’ have a duty ‘to ensure that the faithful take part fully aware of what they are doing, actively engaged in the rite and enriched by it’ (SC, 11). It is for this reason that the priest is charged with providing the kind of liturgical focus that will promote an active, anamnetic participation that is both ‘internal and external’ (IO, 19). The point is that by actively remembering in the Anamnesis the people become participants in the sacramental narrative that recalls Christ’s saving activity. Thus, the Mass begins with the priest’s penitential invitation and the people’s response: Celebrant: People:

Let us call to mind our sins I confess to almighty God, and to you, my brothers and sisters, that I have sinned through my own fault . . . (CTS 1998, 5, emphasis added)

With these words worshippers publicly and unambiguously situate themselves as being in need of personal forgiveness. After the Absolution the now cleansed community hears the Word of God before rehearsing the salvation narrative in the recitation of the Nicene Creed (the ‘I’ now become ‘We’). People:

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ. . . . For us men and for our salvation he came down from heaven. . . . For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried. (CTS 1998, 11, 13)

Later, in the Eucharistic Prayer (just prior to the Anamnesis) the congregation proclaims the mystery of faith: Celebrant and People:

Dying you destroyed our death rising you restored our life. Lord Jesus, come in glory. (CTS 1998, 23)


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By these and similar words, the worshipping community joins itself into the salvation narrative, not as a passive audience to a liturgical theatre, but as participants. Having identified as sinners in need of forgiveness; having identified as those in whose place Christ died; and having identified as the recipients of Christ’s resurrection life, the worshippers are now active players in the drama of the salvation narrative. Fundamental to their participation is the belief that Christ is present in the Eucharistic species (SC, 7). This is a presence conceived to be outside the limitations of time and space – an eternal presence, independent of the correct liturgical activity on whose efficacy it is predicated, since in liturgical celebration ‘something more is required than the laws governing valid and lawful celebration’ (SC, 11) – but which is palpably embodied and signified in and through priestly representation. The key theological notion here is that it is at the memorial meal that Christ himself, through the liturgical action of his representative, the priest, ‘perpetuates in an unbloody manner the sacrifice offered on the cross, offering himself to the Father for the world’s salvation’ (EM, 3(c); SC, 47). In other words, the sacrifice of the Cross, an event in an historic past, is continuously re-presented in an eternal now (CP, 48), in and through the priest’s representative action (embodying Christ’s ‘real’ presence), and consequently what is represented liturgically is a participation in that eternal now, in and by the worshipper’s active remembering (anamnesis). The sacrificial character of the Mass is not to be understood as the resacrificing of Christ, a quasi-magical summoning up of the victim for reimmolation in the historic present (ARCIC-ED, 3, 5), but as the present participation of the worshippers, priest and laity, in the eternally present Paschal event, by the anamnesis of his death and resurrection. As with priestly representation, I will return to sacramental narrative, in Chapter 8, when I will consider its implication in the ‘stitching together’ of religious identity. My point here is to show how, in and through the Anamnesis, worshippers are joined (or sutured) into a salvation story; more than spectators, they become players in the narrative. Again, as far as the parallel between liturgy and film is concerned, I will indicate below how being ‘stitched’ into the sacramental narrative parallels the way in which cinema spectators are joined into the cinematic narrative. Finally, in this chapter, I must consider the ideological ‘reality’ of Episcopal/ecclesial authority in which worshipping subjects participate.

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Participation in the Ideological ‘reality’ of Episcopal/Ecclesial Authority The Sacred Congregation of Rites has made explicit the catechetical aspect of the liturgy. The Congregation proposes that the intention behind the Vatican II document Sacrosanctum concilium is ‘to foster the formation of the faithful and that pastoral activity of which the liturgy is the summit and source. . . . [To that end it] is especially necessary that there be close links between liturgy, catechesis, religious instruction and preaching’ (IO, 5, 7). This formative function occasions the convergence of the liturgical, pastoral and catechetical priestly duties. As such, the liturgy is to be conceived as a medium of religious instruction, a part of which concerns the nature of the priestly role and the hierarchical nature of both liturgy and Church. As I indicated with reference to priestly representation above, priestly duties are legitimately considered to include shaping the desire of the faithful. Priests, through liturgical instruction, aim at the internal and external participation of the faithful. For the faithful, who desire both unity with Christ and salvation for their souls, participation in the sacrifice of the Cross, offered at the hands of the priest under Episcopal authority, necessarily entails the submission of both volition and intellect to the power of Christ as represented and embodied in the Church and its ministers. From this point, and for all practical considerations, it will be the priests and bishops who will exercise control; not only over external liturgical forms and participation, but over the internal desires and thoughts of the people; not simply on pain of physical violence or death, but of exclusion from the means of salvation grace. In short, the ministers of the Church exercise power over an individual’s eternal destiny. It is in this way that the power of liturgy mutates from being a medium that brings the worshipper into an experience of God to being a powerful technology of (in this case) the ideology of the Roman Catholic episcopate. Church dominion over volition and intellect (desires and thoughts) is, then, an explicitly intended effect of the liturgy. Such dominion is necessarily determinative of the individual’s psychological processes, in particular the construction of subjectivity and the calibration of identity. The import of this is made explicit by the British Bishops, for whom ‘It is of special concern . . . that when someone receives a sacrament he or she knows and desires what the Church means by that sacrament’ (OBOB, 9, emphasis added). The Bishops repeatedly accentuate ‘the inseparable bond between the mystery of the Eucharist and mystery of the Church’ (OBOB, 8), a relation of ‘intimate connection’ (OBOB, 9), ‘two essential dimensions of


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one and the same Mystery of Faith’ (OBOB, 10).14 This is because for the Bishops, a correct perception of the Eucharist is predicated on a correct ecclesiology. Salvation is ‘not as private or isolated individuals, but as a people, as a community, as a family’ (OBOB, 11 – compare 56). As the Bishops make clear: The Catholic Church claims, in all humility, to be endowed with all the gifts with which God wishes to endow his Church, all the invisible and visible elements needed by the Body of Christ for its life of discipleship and mission. (OBOB, 20) It follows then, of necessity, that the faithful should be in unity with the Universal Church, ‘rooted in sharing the same faith and in our common baptism, in the Eucharist, and also in communion with the bishops of the Church united with the Bishop of Rome’ (OBOB, 59). True believers must be able to say the ‘we believe’ of the Creed; indeed those who are only ‘able to say “I believe”, but not able fully to share the “we believe” of the Catholic community’, will be among those disqualified from Holy Communion (OBOB, 42; CCC, 185). The point here is, not that believers need to believe truly in the efficacy of the sacrament in order to participate in its benefits, since ‘His presence “does not depend on the individual’s faith in order to be the Lord’s real gift of himself to his Church”’ (OBOB, 53; ARCIC-ED, 8). Rather, the clear inference is that anamnetic participation is contingent on a shared conviction about the authenticity of Roman Catholic doctrine and the submission of individual volition and intent to the episcopacy. This interpretation is underlined by official instruction on the Roman Catholic stance towards other Christians. With regard to the Eastern (Orthodox) Churches, the Roman Church admits a high value to their institutions, because ‘their liturgical rites, ecclesiastical traditions and their ordering of Christian life’ is within the ‘tradition which has come from the apostles through the Fathers and which is part of the divinely revealed, undivided heritage of the Universal Church’ (OE, 1). The reason for the attitude of respect is because these churches, having equal claim with Rome to apostolic succession, ‘possess true sacraments, above all . . . the priesthood and the Eucharist [in other words, they share a similar ecclesiology and Eucharistic theology], whereby they are still joined to us in closest intimacy’ (UR, 15 – compare IQ, V). This contrasts with ‘those Christian communities rooted in the Reformation’ (OBOB, 41), which Rome considers not to have ‘preserved the proper reality of the eucharistic mystery in its

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fullness, especially because of the absence of the sacrament of Orders’ (UR, 22 – compare IQ, V). Thus, the Bishops do not hesitate to articulate the full implication of their position: It is therefore essential that the one who presides at the Eucharist be known to be established in a sure sacramental relationship with Christ, the High Priest, through the sacrament of Holy Orders conferred by a bishop in the recognised apostolic succession. The Catholic Church is unable to affirm this of those Christian communities rooted in the Reformation. Nor can we affirm that they have retained ‘the authentic and full reality of the Eucharistic mystery’. (OBOB, 41) In short, the right reception of the Eucharistic sacrament depends upon the right Eucharistic theology, which, in turn, is predicated on the right conception of and attitude towards the ecclesiastical hierarchy. It is for reasons of control over the authority to dispense Holy Orders, and with it the control of sacred power and the construction of sacred realities, that the Eucharist is so carefully bounded by legislation. The effect of this has been the politicization of the Eucharist, and its translation into a badge of membership.15 I will return to the worshipper’s participation in the ‘reality’ of Episcopal/ ecclesial ideology, in Chapter 8. My point, in this final sub-section, has been to show that the formation of the faithful, through identification with the priest, is directed towards the formation of their desires and thoughts to the extent that they participate in the ideological ‘reality’ of episcopacy and conform to the rule of the Church and its bishops. My aim in this chapter has been to consider those aspects of liturgical representation that can usefully be paralleled with aspects of film. My argument is that such parallels are possible insofar as each of these media of representation offers an ‘other’ for identification, a narrative to be joined and an (ideological) ‘reality’ in which its subjects participate. It should be clear, from this exploration of the operations of liturgical representation, that the key to worshippers becoming participants in the ideological ‘reality’ of episcopacy is their identification with priestly representation. Worshippers make a complex identification with the priest as the liturgical ‘other’ who represents them before God, but who also represents both Christ and the episcopacy to the people. By identification with the priest worshippers become participants in the salvation narrative – in the


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countless repetitions of the Mass, they reiterate their need of forgiveness; they situate themselves within the patronage of the Church, the ‘universal sacrament of salvation’ (LG, 48); and, in and through the Anamnesis, they re-member themselves into flow of the salvation narrative. In addition, by identification with the priest they most importantly submit their volition and intellect to the rule of the bishops. There should be little doubt then that, within the terms of Roman Catholic theology, the liturgy is properly understood as a representational medium, whose explicit and intended aim is (at least in part) the participation of its subjects in Episcopal ideology. In the next chapter I will show the extent to which cinema parallels these heads.

Chapter 5

Cinematic Representation: ‘others’, Narratives and Ideological ‘realities’

Throughout the early 1970s the issue of realist representation and the transmission of ideology dominates Screen’s theoretical interest. Formulated as a set of questions the journal’s preoccupation could be put like this: how does the cinematic impression of reality operate as a vehicle for transmitting and replicating the dominant ideology? how is the cinematic reality implicated in the construction of subjectivity? Screen’s clear assumption is that in the cinema subjects participate in an ideological ‘reality’. The main inspiration for Screen’s interest in representation as a vehicle for reproducing ideology was the political context in France during May–June 1968 (Harvey 1978; Roud 1983). Several French film journals mapped the impact of May 1968 (Turim 1973), in particular Cahiers du Cinéma broke from the idealist representational realism of Bazin, its apolitical founder, and inaugurated the search for a ‘materialist’ cinema. This is the fundamentally (Althusserian) Marxist agenda adopted by Screen, an agenda that regards realism as ‘simply the repetition of the forms of the ideological (“naturalised”) representation of reality dominant in a particular society’ (Heath 1973, 11). The main target of Screen’s search for a materialist cinema is mainstream Hollywood, the cinema of realist representation, insofar as its portrayal of ‘reality’ naturalizes the ideology it transmits. However, as will become clear, the heads of ‘other’, narrative and ideological ‘reality’ all fit within the agenda of the theories developed in Screen. My point is that the theoretical frame developed to address this agenda makes it possible to find and explore parallels between film and liturgy as media of representation. In order to explore the ability of cinematic realist representation to naturalize the ideology it transmits, in what follows I will refer to the genre of post-Cold War ‘terrorist hi-jack’ films, including films such as Die Hard (1988), True Lies (1994), Executive Decision (1996), Air Force One (1997), The Peacemaker (1997) and The Siege (1998). I have three reasons for choosing

Cinematic Representation

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this genre over another. First, these films present strong lead characters for audience identification; secondly, they make clear value statements about ‘our’ American way of life; finally, they feature an Other, the identity of whom is predominantly religious (Muslim), and who serves to aid both audience identification and participation in the ideological ‘reality’ of Hollywood realism. Using these films as reference, I will consider the film star/ hero as cinematic ‘other’; the narrative of ‘ordinary-guy-in-extraordinarysituation’ (with a subtext of overcoming chaos and restoring order) as the narrative into which spectators are sutured; and the ideology of ‘our’ American way of life as a cinematic ‘reality’ in which spectators participate (perceived to be threated by the Muslim ‘Other’).

The Cinematic ‘other’: The Film Star/Hero Translations of articles considered significant were central to Screen’s publishing strategy, and include a Cahiers collective piece in which the journal’s editors set out to ‘read’ actively John Ford’s 1939 film, Young Mr Lincoln (Cahiers du Cinéma [1970]1972). While not reckoned by any of the usual canons to be a classic film, the editors nevertheless consider Lincoln to be ‘classic’ in the sense that it is ‘based on analogical representation and linear narrative (“transparence” and “presence”)’ ([1970]1972, 6). For Cahiers’ editors reading actively means regarding the film as a text overdeterminedly related to the ideology that produced it, making films ‘say what they have to say within what they leave unsaid’ ([1970]1972, 8). This, they argue, is not a case of finding ‘secret meaning’, but rather of revealing the, always displaced, ‘structuring absences’.1 With respect to the character of Lincoln (Henry Fonda), the editors argue that, in order to function on the level of myth, the historical politician is depoliticized in order to be returned to the political project of preWar Republicanism. For example, Lincoln’s first political speech is emptied of the political dimension, allowing his character to trivialize politics and mask the ideological undertaking of the film. In this way, political meanings are repressed by a moralizing discourse that rewrites history. Significantly, the character of Lincoln is offered for identification in a way that makes the personal political. Yet filmic characters are more than that which appears on screen: they are inextricably bound up with, and freighted with their associations to the actors who portray them. In his definitive study of film stars and their social meaning, Richard Dyer defines stars as ‘images in media texts’ (Dyer 1998, 10).

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For Dyer, stars are representations of people, but unlike characters, they have an existence that endures beyond and is independent of their fictional screen appearances. This independence gives the star a greater reality than their screen characters, and serves to disguise the fact that stars are as much constructed personalities as any fictional character. As a consequence, ‘the value embodied by a star is . . . harder to reject as “impossible” or “false”, because the star’s existence guarantees the existence of the value s/he embodies’ (1998, 20). In other words, stars collapse the distinction between their authenticity as a person and the authentication of the narrative characters they play. This operation of stardom is in part due to a noticeable shift in audience perception of stars, a shift from stars as ‘embodiments of ideal ways of behaving’ to stars as identification figures, ‘embodiments of typical ways of behaving’ (1998, 22). Specifically, Dyer considers how Will Rogers and Shirley Temple embody, and so reinforce, the social values of the American Dream. His point is that the star’s image may be related to the contradictions in ideology by the processes of displacement or suppression. So, with reference to social realism, Dyer proposes that stars depoliticize spectator consciousness by individualizing it, ‘rendering the social personal’. By being ‘experienced . . . individuated . . . and having an existence in the real world’, stars displace the political on to the personal, so masking spectator awareness of class membership by reconstituting social differences in the audience. In this way, films and stars are ideologically significant, both in the general sense of cutting audiences off from politics, and in the narrower sense of reinforcing a given political standpoint: ‘The personal is always political’ (1998, 28). Dyer is clear that ‘stars are supremely figures of identification . . . and this identification is achieved principally through the star’s relation to social types’ (1998, 99). One example of this is the character of John McClane (Bruce Willis) in John McTiernan’s Die Hard (1988). Located by Steve Bradshaw as the film whose global success showed Hollywood that terrorism could replace Communism as the enemy of choice (Bradshaw 2002), Die Hard develops the ‘lone cop battling against overwhelming odds in an isolated situation’ formula (Walker 1996, 206). Regular guy McClane has his character flaws: besides being nervous of flying, this married man has a ‘roving eye’. Little wonder then that, like so many in the audience, his marriage is rocky. In fact, he and his wife Holly (Bonnie Bedelia) have become estranged, while he remains a humble NYPD cop, she has taken a job in Los Angeles as Nakatomi Director of Corporate Affairs. McClane is unable to handle Holly’s success, but instead


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of using their reunion at the Nakatomi Christmas party to work at their relationship, McClane picks up a conversation they had had at their last meeting six months earlier and challenges his wife about reverting to her maiden name, Gennero. Although superficially a simple action spectacular, replete with gratuitously violent explosions and gunfights, Die Hard is a subtly complex, multilayered film. The first of the of post-Cold War terrorist action genre, Die Hard is at heart an old fashioned cowboy film, whose central theme is the imposition of the rule of law on the wild and contumacious West (NYPD cop in LA). But, while McClane may be a flawed enforcer, he is enabled to transcend his defects, overcome the bad guys and recover his girl, because he has internalized an identification with a Hollywood cowboy. In one scene, terrorist leader, Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman) wants to know who McClane is: Is he another American brought up on too many movies? Does he think he is John Wayne, Rambo or Marshall Dillon? McClane masks his anonymity, by assuming an identity he – and many in his audience – may have assumed as a child: that of cinematic ‘other’ Roy Rogers. McClane’s choice of Rogers is appropriate. The ‘King of the Cowboys’, star of more than 90 feature-length Westerns, was one of the most beloved figures in show business, winning the Motion Picture Herald’s title ‘Most Popular Western Star’ every year from 1943–54 (Robertson 1991, 71). According to Maltin, by the late 1940s a new production team reinvigorated Rogers’ persona ‘with color photography, more adult plot lines, and an almost sadistic emphasis on violent action’.2 To this extent, McClane’s ‘social type’ performs the very identification that the film offers to the spectators in the cinema theatre. In effect, he plays out on screen the role of the thirty-something male, who as a child lost himself in identifying with his film star, rolemodel hero, and whose actions are now unconsciously directed by that hero as he performs his own heroics. He, in turn, is watched by thirty-something males, who as children lost themselves in identifications with film star heroes, and who identify now with the reflection of themselves performing the heroics of which they would like to believe themselves capable if, like anti-hero McClane – who is flawed as they are – they are thrust into an extreme situation. My point here is to demonstrate parallels between liturgy and film in terms of the way they each invite their constituent subjects to identify with an other: specifically, the ways in which identification with the priest maps identification with the film star. I want to argue that the film star represents in ways that parallel the priest’s representations in persona Christi and in nomine totius populi. Insofar as the priest represents in persona Christi he

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represents the universal, in him the people see embodied the Christ who is perfect in every way, the aspiration of the faithful; but insofar has he represents in nomine totius populi he represents the particular, and in him the people see embodied themselves – in him they see that which is weak and sinful caught up with and transformed into Christ; in him their humanity redeemed. In a parallel sense, this dynamic can be seen operating in film stars like Willis. As a film star, Willis represents the aspirations of his fans: the achievement of the glamour of celebrity with its wealth, fame and relative power. While as ‘social type’ McClane, Willis embodies the particularity of a certain type of film fan, specifically, those who identify with the reflection of themselves as they would like to be – like them, he may be flawed, but like him they can be other than they are. But, as will become clear, the most significant comparison between priest and film star is the fact that both serve as the key to their constituents becoming participants in the relative ideological ‘realities’. However, to develop this idea I need now to consider the cinematic narrative into which spectators are invited to ‘stitch’ themselves, in particular the ‘ordinary-guyin-extraordinary-situation’ narrative.

‘Ordinary guy/extraordinary situation’: The Overcoming-the-Other Narrative Politically, the Cahiers editors locate the Young Mr Lincoln in the historical, economic context of the late 1930s, in particular the support of 20th Century Fox for Hoover’s Republican and capitalist policies over Roosevelt’s New Deal. The editors argue that, in the context of this support, the depoliticized Lincoln functions as a myth pressed to serve the Republican agenda – after all, in the character of Lincoln the personal is political. It is not difficult to sustain an argument that contemporary post-Cold War ‘terrorist hi-jack’ films serve a similarly mythic function, in this case, not to oppose Democratic domestic policy, but to reinforce a particular manifestation of the fear of the Other,3 which Samuel Huntington calls the ‘Clash of Civilizations’ (Huntington 1998, 126). In which case, the heroic character personalizes the political. The basic plot of the post-Cold War ‘terrorist hi-jack’ film is simple enough. Even with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Western democracy, and particularly its capitalist base, remains under threat. The Soviets may now be allies, but a smorgasbord of radical


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heterogeneity is emerging as the new enemy of our Western lifestyle. Naturally, as leader of the ‘free’ world, the ferocious hostility of these seditious extremists is directed at the United States. Within this context, hi-jack movies track the emergence of one or other terrorist grudge, build the tension of imminent disaster, and successfully resolve the crisis, typically through the actions of one man. With the exception of Die Hard, which strictly predates the end of the Cold War, Hollywood terrorists have an ideological motivation.4 As the postCold War political landscape takes shape, the enemies of the new era are crystallising out as rogue Soviet satellites and Islamist militants.

Soviet satellites American leadership of the newly freed world is so established in Air Force One (1997) that the Russian President can introduce the US President, James Marshall (Harrison Ford), to the assembled Russian leaders as ‘my friend’. However, the acceptance of American support by the born-again capitalists now incumbent in the Kremlin is seen as betrayal by the Kazakhstani Nationalists whose activities Marshall helped to quell. If Gruber is a vaguely drawn Eurovillain, the ideology of Marshall’s nemesis Egor Korshunov (Gary Oldman) has the potential to be more clearly articulated. In the event, it remains oblique. The terrorist boss ostensibly comes from Kazakhstan and yet he warbles on tremulously about Mother Russia. As a nationalist, he ought to hate by rights the old Communist regime but a tear still comes to his eyes when he hears his imprisoned comrades singing ‘The Internationale’. (Macnab 1997, 43) What Air Force One does articulate through Korshunov is a terrorist who is motivated by fanatical belief, and it is this fanaticism, because of its unpredictability, that is the real terror, the real threat of post-Cold War terrorism. Hence the warning by Dr Julia Kelly (Nicole Kidman) to Colonel Thomas Devoe (George Clooney) in The Peacemaker (also released in 1997), that the real threat is not the man who wants ten nuclear weapons, but the man who wants only one: in this case, a Bosnian Serb ‘peacemaker’, Dusan Gavrich (Marcel Iures). In losing his wife and daughter in Sarajevo, Gavrich found his lust for revenge, which he targets at Western complicity in the Bosnian

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bloodshed by preparing to detonate a nuclear warhead at the peace conference he will attend in New York. The film offers something of an apologetic for the terrorist when it has Gavrich recording a videotape he intends to be found after his successful attack. However, because the attack lacks any ideology other than personal revenge, the video is more suicide note than coherent apologetic.

Islamist militants In the terrorist spoof film, True Lies (1994), Salim Abu Aziz (Art Malik) is, like Gruber, a generic figure. Leader of the fictional ‘Crimson Jihad’, Aziz threatens major US cities with nuclear destruction because he blames the United States for killing Muslim women and children and their cowardly bombing of Muslim cities. Only his demand that America ‘pulls all military forces out of the Persian Gulf area immediately and forever’ gives Crimson Jihad any ideological location. But, whether Aziz is Iranian, Iraqi or Saudi based Wahhabi, the point is he represents the emerging threat as it is beginning to be perceived: no longer Soviet Communism, but satellite factions around the known Western world, in particular the ‘threat’ posed by Islam. The Islamist threat is more clearly articulated in the character of ‘Al-Tar’ (David Suchet) in Stuart Baird’s 1996 film, Executive Decision (1996). Yet, while the threat posed by ‘Al-Tar’ is personal, the motivating ideology is again unclear. According to Dr David Grant (Kurt Russell), ‘Al-Tar’ is ancient Arabic for ‘revenge’, and Nagi Hassan, aka ‘Al-Tar’ sees himself and his co-religionists as the true warriors of Islam, who are destined to deliver Allah’s vengeance into the infidel’s belly. When his second-in-command objects that this is not their mission, ‘Al-Tar’ shoots and kills him. Some specific ideological connection is given to ‘Al-Tar’ through the terrorists’ bomb-maker, Jean-Paul Demou (Robert Apisa). This French Algerian, who had been an Iraqi nuclear engineer, lost his family in the 1991 Gulf War. Like Gavrich, Demou seems to be inspired by something like personal revenge; unlike Gavrich, ‘Al-Tar’ has a bigger picture in mind, the downfall of US cultural imperialism. As Bradshaw puts it, ‘Suchet’s character represented the new religious terrorist, a suicide bomber bent not on political concessions but on killing as many infidels as possible’ (Bradshaw 2002). In Edward Zwick’s The Siege (1998) the terrorists’ profile is self-consciously more nuanced. Zwick speaks of America at the time existing in a ‘kind of radical innocence’, and the film’s screenwriter, Lawrence Wright, observes that terrorists use terror as theatre, ‘to shock people out of their normal


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sensibilities and cause them to focus on the terrorist and what their grievances are’ (Bradshaw 2002). Whether their film is as effective is a moot point. Eventually it transpires that the terrorist cells operating in New York are acting out of a sense of betrayal. Having been trained as a covert network run and financed by the CIA through agent Elise Kraft, aka Sharon Bridger (Annette Bening), the followers of Sheik Achmed Bin Talal had fought against Saddam Hussein. Following a policy change the Arabs were abandoned by their former US ‘friends’ and as a result, Kraft admits to FBI Agent Anthony ‘Hub’ Hubbard (Denzel Washington), they were butchered. Because of her former involvement, and sense of responsibility, she helped to get student visas for those who remained, including her lover Samir Nazhde (Sami Bouajila). The precise identity of these shadowy assailants remains unclear, although the scene in which Kraft discusses with Hubbard her sympathy with the Palestinians, whose suffering is seductive, is clue to their identity. However, during the Gulf War PLO leader Yasser Arafat sided with Saddam in the mistaken belief ‘that America would not attack and that the crisis would be resolved through negotiation between the Arab countries’ (Dawoud 2001, 165). The fact is that the terrorists’ ideological identity is as much a mystery in The Siege as in all the other films of this genre. Despite the diegetic voices of reason and protests of loyalty, Zwick seems surprised at the response his film elicited. Many questioned whether it was legitimate or even inflammatory to talk about these things, because was I in fact vilifying Arab Americans by suggesting that there might be such a thing as militant Islam that might be radical enough to perpetuate terrorism here? (Bradshaw 2002) But, as Bradshaw observes, the fact is that ‘Many say Arabs and Muslims are Hollywood’s favourite scapegoat and that Islam is being depicted as a disease spreading throughout the West’ (Bradshaw 2002). Yet it matters little that the politics of this group of films is uncertain, confused, or even misleading. These films are not so much articulating an accurate portrayal of the international situation post-Communism, as narrativizing the perceived threat of the Other, and offering it to US cinema audiences and those political, economic and cultural allies who consume their cinematic product. That they are considered to be uncannily prescient has more to do with the fact that, in describing the possible, they focus the fear posed by the Other – former Soviet or Islamist militant terrorists as ciphers for that fear.

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As far as demonstrating parallels between liturgy and film, insofar as their constituent subjects are ‘stitched’ or sutured into the respective narratives, it is all too easy to argue that, because post-Cold War ‘terrorist hi-jack’ movies can be treated as a cinematic salvation narrative (complete with cinematic saviour figure), these films offer a parallel to the sacramental narrative of the Cross. And, even though I am not interested in finding overworked cinematic analogues to obvious theological trops, it remains the case that the ‘ordinary-guy-restoring-order’ narrative represents a modern, non-theological salvation myth,5 a hero story countlessly retold and reworked. However, as will become clear, the most significant comparison between liturgy and cinema is that, through identification with an ‘other’ (liturgical or cinematic), their constituent subjects become ‘stitched’ into a narrative, and so enabled to participate in ideological ‘reality’.

Participation in the Ideological ‘reality’ of Hollywood Realism Until the advent of digital technology the ‘commonsense’ assumption was that ‘the camera never lied’. This view was commonplace despite the fact that since the illusionary work of Méliès, a former stage magician (e.g. Voyage à travers l’impossible, 1904), and the remarkable Dziga Vertov, the Soviet cinematographer whose Man with a Movie Camera (1929) provocatively exploited the full capability of the camera, cinematic special effects units have routinely created images that could never have been photographed in the ‘real’ world. Bazin’s give this commonsense assumption theoretical formulation in his notion of the ‘ontology of the photographic image’. Foundational to Bazin’s understanding and privileging of cinematic realism is what he considers to be ‘the essentially objective character of photography’ that endows the photographic image with a ‘quality of credibility absent from all other picturemaking’ (Bazin [1945]1967, 13). His key point is that with photography, between the originating object and its reproduction there intervenes only the instrumentality of a nonliving agent. For the first time an image of the world is formed automatically, without the creative intervention of man. ([1945]1967, 13) The centrality of cinematic ontology to Bazin’s thinking is recognized in Eric Rohmer’s expression, ‘the objectivity axiom’ (Rohmer 1959, 38). Indeed, Bazin assumes photographic ontology to be self-evident, and


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attempts to extend it, through a series of metaphors, to account for the difference between photograph and object: so, the photograph is ‘the model of which it is the reproduction’ (Bazin [1945]1967, 14); a ‘luminous impression in light’, ‘a mould’ (Bazin [1951a]1967, 96); or dramatically, ‘like the veil of Veronica pressed to the face of human suffering’ (Bazin [1953]1967, 163). The main challenge confronting Bazin was the paradoxical relation of cinematic realism to cinematic art. Put as a question, this can be stated as: how is cinematic realism to be considered ontologically connected to its object given that the genius of cinema consists in creating the illusion of reality? Bazin is aware of this paradox and, in the context of discussing the aesthetics of reality, accepts that reality is in fact revealed through the vehicle of cinematic language. As he puts it, ‘realism in art can only be achieved . . . through artifice’ (Bazin [1948b]1971, 26). However, he resists yielding all to art and elsewhere states: ‘Reality is not art, but a truly “realistic” art can create an aesthetic that is incorporated in reality’ (Bazin [1948a]1997, 5–6). His argument is that the contradictory relation between cinematic realism and art is both necessary and unacceptable to an aesthetic of reality. Necessary, because of the trade-off between preserving and discarding narrative elements that serve either the illusion of reality or ‘authentic reality’; and unacceptable, because the choice is made ‘at the expense of that reality which the cinema proposes to restore integrally’ (Bazin [1948b]1971, 26). Consequently, Bazin defines realism as ‘all narrative means tending to bring an added measure of reality to the screen’ ([1948b]1971, 26). Given Screen’s preoccupation with the question of representation, Bazin’s notion of realist representation as ontology is the target of sustained attack by the journal. In part, this is a reaction against the traditions of mainstream British ‘Leavisite’ film criticism, which the Screen editors regard as ‘subjective taste-ridden criticism’ (Screen 1971, 5), the product of a ‘demand for a surface realism’ (Screen 1972, 2).6 Introducing a special number on semiotics, Stephen Heath rubbished the former tradition and restated the clarion call for a new direction in film study: ‘there is a crucial and urgent necessity to finish with the flow of (ideologically complicit) drivel that currently and massively passes as “film-criticism”’ (Heath 1973, 9). In expressly articulating its project as ‘locating film as a specific system of production and consumption’ (Screen 1971, 5), Screen is interpreting Althusser’s ideas about how capitalist ideology is reproduced in the labour force in terms of its unconscious effect on spectators as they consume the

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ideological product of the capitalist cinema industry. And if Althusser provides the premise, Screen looks to the cinesemiotics of Christian Metz and the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan for the theoretical resources to explain the processes by which capitalist ideology is replicated through cinema. In a series of articles published through the 1960s,7 Metz had taken up Roland Barthes’ programmatic for a semiotics of the cinema,8 and from these he sets out to inquire whether cinema is properly a language (langage) or a language system (langue). Somewhat surprisingly, he concludes that cinema might be considered ‘a language without a system’. Metz’ essays act as founding texts in the Screen’s search for ‘a precise description of the object of cinesemiotics’ (Willemen 1973, 2), in order to expose realist representation as construction. Writing about the impression of reality in the cinema, Metz develops Barthes’ thinking on photographic reality (Metz [1965]1974, 3–15).9 From this Metz questions why it is that the impression of reality is more vivid in film than in a photograph. His obvious, and immediate answer is that the illusion of movement ‘imparts corporality to objects and gives them an autonomy their still representations could not have’ ([1965]1974, 7). Considered phenomenologically, movement is insubstantial, it is seen but not touched, and the distinctions of ‘object’ and ‘copy’ dissolve on the threshold of motion. Because movement is never material but is always visual, to reproduce its appearance is to duplicate its reality. . . . In the cinema the impression of reality is also the reality of the impression, the real presence of motion. ([1965]1974, 9) The irony is that Metz’ materialist view of cinematic codes is based in a Bazinian idealist metaphysics of presence. However, allied to this metaphysics is a simultaneous and necessary absence of the actors’ bodily presence. Drawing, for example, on the work of Henri Wallon, Metz contrasts the way bodily presence in the theatre situates the spectator in relation to real actors, inevitably disrupting the impression of reality, while bodily absence in the cinema is necessary for the spectator to invest actors with a reality that is the product of identification. Metz concludes: It is because the world does not intrude upon the fiction and constantly deny its claim to reality – as happens in the theatre – that a film’s diegesis can yield the peculiar and well-known impression of reality. ([1965] 1974, 11)


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The result is that the spectator is disconnected from the real world, but makes a connection with the filmic diegesis, and accomplishes a ‘“transference” of reality’ ([1965]1974, 11). Addressing directly Bazin’s theories of cinematic realism, Metz’ argument is that the idea of cinema ‘as a mystical revelation, as “truth” or “reality” unfolded by full right, as the apparition of what is (l’ étant), as an epiphany’, derives from phenomenology (Metz 1975, 54). Metz’ objection to this is that, while it may be the case that ‘the topographical apparatus of the cinema resembles the conceptual apparatus of phenomenology’ and that the ‘“there is” of phenomenology proper (philosophical phenomenology) as an ontic revelation referring to a perceiving-subject (= “perceptual cogito”)’ has affinities with ‘the inauguration of the cinema signifier in the ego’ (1975, 55), this is only the case because the objective determination of the cinema makes it so. The ego’s position in the cinema does not derive from a miraculous resemblance between the cinema and the natural characteristics of all perception; on the contrary, it is foreseen and marked in advance by the institution (the equipment, the disposition of the auditorium, the mental arrangement that internalises the two), and also by more general characteristics of the psychical apparatus (such as projection, the mirror structure, etc.). (1975, 55) In other words, far from being a natural, to-be-expected phenomena, the representation of reality, the ‘well-known impression of reality’, is the product of the cinematic signifier, and as such it is a construct of the institution of the cinema. Althusser’s influence on Screen was pervasive, even if largely unacknowledged, a fact that has been extensively noted by the journal’s critics and supporters.10 Althusser’s notion of interpellation described the process of ideological replication, the transformation of infants into speaking subjects, according to which ideology is ‘the system of the ideas and representations which dominate the mind of a man or a social group’ (Althusser 1971, 149). In developing his thesis, Althusser located the operations of ideology within a psychoanalytic frame, informed by his particular understanding of Lacan’s concepts of the Real and the Imaginary (1971, 154), and argued that ideology represents not the real conditions of human existence but imaginary relations to the real world: What is represented in ideology is therefore not the system of the real relations which govern the existence of individuals, but the imaginary

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relation of those individuals to the real relation in which they live. (1971, 155) According to Antony Easthope, Screen drew an important implication from Lacan, namely the idea that ‘The subject does not exist outside or prior to discourse but is constituted as an effect within discourse in a specific relation of imaginary and symbolic’ (1983, 129). The idea that the subject could be constituted by the film text, lent power to ideas about cinema’s ability to position subjects who mistook its representations for reality. As Colin MacCabe puts it, The advantage of Lacan over other versions of psychoanalysis was that the text, whether literary or filmic, ceased to be the representation of the author’s psychic conflict but became the enactment of a series of conflicts shared by author and reader. (1976, 12) The point of the argument is that, being so constituted by the film text, spectators become participants in ideological ‘reality’, such as the ideology of Hollywood realism. I have already suggested that in the post-Cold War era contemporary ‘terrorist hi-jack’ films function mythically to reinforce the fear of the Other. Bradshaw’s documentary argues that writers of action movies had a problem following the collapse of Communism and the end of the Cold War: The commies were over, in other words, all of a sudden we woke up and we couldn’t use the commies for a villain, and peace and quiet is bad for, you know, action films. (2002) The solution, according to Bradshaw, was to find a new villain in the terrorist – specifically the Muslim or Islamist terrorist. The fact is that, Hollywood found a ready-made replacement for Communism in Islam, and for at least three reasons. First, the oil crisis of 1973 impacted not only Western economies and the West’s sense of its own security, it shifted Western perceptions about Muslims. According to Edward Said, it was the OPEC embargo, which so dramatically effected fuel bills and inflation, that for Western minds melded Arabs and Iranians, Pakistanis and Turks into a single group, defined now by their shared religion as Muslims. The significant point here is that Muslims became associated with American dependence on imported oil regularly referred to as “being at the mercy of foreign oil producers” (Said 1997, 36–7). Secondly, the


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Iranian revolution and hostage crisis of 1978–79 represented an ongoing humiliation to the United States. As Fawaz A Gerges comments: By holding 52 Americans hostage for 444 days, Khomeini’s Iran inflicted daily humiliation on the United States, eliciting an intense degree of hostility and a deep and unfamiliar sense of powerlessness. Eventually Iran became a national obsession. (1999, 42–3) Said argues that the trauma of the hostage experience continues to inform American demonology of Islam: ‘The preoccupation with Iran continues into the 1990s. With the end of the Cold War [Iran], and along with it “Islam”, has come to represent America’s major foreign devil’ (Said 1997, 7). Thirdly, the more recent development of actual ‘Islamist’ terrorism. Most significant here was the first terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre in February 1993 – the day ‘America lost its innocence’.11 The effect of this attack was to deepen Americans’ fears about the security threats associated with Islamists (Gerges 1999, 45), linking Muslims with domestic terrorism in many American minds. Consequently, Muslim extremists were immediately linked with the April 1995 bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City, with individual US Arabs becoming targets of harassment (Gerges 1999, 48). In this post-Cold War context, the ‘Green Peril’ replaced the ‘Red Menace’ (Gerges 1999, 51; Said 1997, xix) in the oversimplified lexicography of US media reportage, where ‘“Islam” denotes a simple thing to which one can refer immediately’ (Said 1997, 41). Although his book about the media determination of Western perceptions of Islam does touch on the influence of cinema, film features little in Said’s thinking, and he prefers to concentrate on the press and journalistic practice (Said 1997, ii–lii). However, Said does acknowledge that films play a role in ‘delivering Islam’ to the American public, ‘if only because to the extent that a visual sense of history and distant lands informs our own, it often comes by way of the cinema’ (1997, 47). Thus, ‘reflecting powerful interests in the society served by the media’ (1997, 47), the new wave of large-scale feature films have, as their main purpose, ‘to first demonize and dehumanize Muslims in order, second, to show an intrepid Western, usually American, hero killing them off’ (1997, xxvi–xxvii). While Said discusses media influence on public opinion, Gerges is interested in how perceptions of Islam inform and determine government policy. He argues that, while the press may not be part of the foreign-policy establishment, it has been a

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willing participant in foreign-policy making insofar as it helps ‘establish the boundaries within which policy can be made’. This is evident in the case of Islam and of Muslims, who are often portrayed in a negative light, thus placing them at a considerable disadvantage in US public opinion. (Gerges 1999, 51) Like Said, Gerges’ discussion of the media role in constructing American perceptions about Islam focuses largely on the press. But his conclusion, ‘that the media’s coverage of Islam and Muslims sheds much light on the making of US policy’, must recognize the significance of cinema’s contribution to the ‘climate in which policy is made’ (1999, 51). It is in this context, of demonising Islam and Muslims, that post-Cold War ‘terrorist hi-jack’ film texts offer spectators participation in the ideological ‘reality’ constructed by Hollywood realism. Said’s observations are particularly relevant at this point. Recognizing that, in general, the media does not act ‘out of base motives’ to pervert ‘a “real” Islam [that] exists somewhere out there’, Said describes “Islam” as both an objective and a subjective fact (Said 1997, 44–5). By subjective he means that people have their reasons for constructing their understanding of the Other, in this case Islam and, in particular, that non-Muslim outsiders have the impulse to ‘fix, personify, stamp the identity of that which they feel confronts them collectively or individually’. This is to say that the media’s Islam, the Western scholar’s Islam, the Western reporter’s Islam, and the Muslim’s Islam are all acts of will and interpretation that take place in history, and can only be dealt with in history as acts of will and interpretation. (1997, 44–5) Cinema’s significance was not lost on those Arab and Muslim American groups who protested against 20th Century Fox studio’s release of The Siege in August 1998. Their complaint was precisely because the film deals ‘with fanatical Muslim extremists who detonate bombs in New York’.12

The Siege (1998) The protest of American Arabs and Muslims against The Siege suggests that the found themselves represented as the minority ethnic Other for the majority ethnic identity. The obvious corollary is that the main characters offered for identification represent the normative ethnicity. In fact, The Siege,


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which of all the post-Cold War terrorist action genre films tries to be intelligent and politically adept, and which is certainly the most chillingly prescient of these terrorist films, is interesting in the identifications it does offer. According to Jeff Beatty, Military Advisor on The Siege, as Assistant Special Agent-in-charge of the FBI Counter-intelligence Task Force, Anthony Hubbard represents, from a Hollywood point of view, a pretty accurate portrayal of where our consciousness was about the reality of the threat. I think that law enforcement would react very close to that way in the late 90s. They just weren’t there. (Bradshaw 2002) In other words, Hubbard represents the sophisticated, hi-tech naiveté of end of the Millennium US law enforcement. But more than this, Hubbard is a man who has seen it all, and still believes in the system. With his FBI coffee mug and his natty monogrammed shirts, Hub’s an organisation man of heroic proportions: an ex-paratrooper who studied law, a Catholic liberal who believes in the system. Compared with [Major General William] Devereaux (Bruce Willis) and [Elise Kraft/Sharon] Bridger (Annette Bening ), he’s a total square. While the other characters tend to drift in and out from moral twilight zones as the plot requires, Hub remains front and centre. (Hollings 1999, 54) Hubbard’s lack of cynical realism in his law enforcing professionalism is established mid-picture in a conversation with Kraft. Suspicious of all true believers, including ‘Hub’, Kraft caricatures Hubbard’s Catholic background, and faces him with the moral challenge him that, while it is easy to tell right from wrong, the challenge of realpolitik is to choose between wrongs, to discern which wrong is more right. According to Beatty, Hubbard is in a form of denial, and when Islamist extremists hijack a New York bus he thinks in terms of ‘old style terrorists who’ll want to use the hostages as bargaining counters’ (Bradshaw 2002). In short, Hubbard represents those Americans in the cinema audience who will travel with the Agent from naivety to awareness. In suggesting that the film’s main character offered for identification represents the majority ethnicity, it should be noted that Hubbard himself is African American. This is a clear indication of how far Hollywood iconography has moved from the heady days when Sidney Poitier became the first

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Film, Lacan and the Subject of Religion ®

(and until 2002 the only) black male actor to win an Academy Award for Best Actor.13 But Hubbard’s team includes a Chinese, Tina Osu (Lianna Pai), and a Jew, Danny Sussman (David Proval), a white American of European origin, Mike Johanssen (Mark Valley) and even a Muslim, the Lebanese, Frank Haddad (Tony Shalhoub). The point is that Hubbard’s colleagues are as ethnically mixed as the American Dream would prescribe. The lack of subtlety in this coded statement about American society’s inclusivity narrativizes the ideology that Americans can successfully distinguish those Muslims who love America from Muslims who do not, and will embrace the former while punishing the latter. The fact that in the three days following the 1993 attack on the World Trade Centre ‘more than 200 violent attacks against Muslim Americans were recorded’ (Gerges 1999, 48) suggests otherwise. The fact that the film opens ‘with President Clinton on television in the wake of the Somalia bombing, warning that “America takes care of its own”, intercut with video footage of the devastated Federal Building in Oklahoma’ (Hollings 1999, 54) underscores the confusion. And a major part of the reason why this confusion exists, as Said observes, is the abstraction of ‘Islam’. Thus, in discussing the 26 January 1991 column by the Los Angeles Times’ Islam expert, Said notes that, while Robin Wright acknowledges the ‘danger of simplifying a “myriad of Countries” . . . the only picture in the five column piece was of Ayatollah Khomeini’. He, and Iran, embodied all that was objectionable about Islam, from terrorism and anti-Westernism to being ‘the only major monotheistic nation offering a set of rules by which to govern society as well as a set of spiritual beliefs.’ That even in Iran there was a major, on-going dispute about what those rules were, and even what ‘Islam’ was, plus a vociferous debate that contested Khomeini’s legacy, were not mentioned. It was enough to use the word ‘Islam’ to cover what ‘we’ were worried about on a world scale. (Said 1997, 7, emphasis added) As I noted above, the ambiguity surrounding the actual political allegiance of the Palestinians in The Siege matters little. What does matter is that the film narrativizes the perceived threat of the Other, and so reinforces the ideology of Hollywood realism. By the time that Zwick was making his film ‘Islam’, ‘Muslim’ and to some extent ‘Palestinian’ had become terms to cover what worried ‘us’.


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I have tried to show in this chapter the extent to which cinema parallels liturgy around the heads of identification with the cinematic ‘other’; the cinematic narrative into which spectators are stitched; and the cinematic ‘reality’ in which subjects participate. As with liturgy, it should be clear that the key to spectators’ participation in the ideological ‘reality’ of Hollywood realism is their identification with the film star/hero. At the level of the universal, this cinematic ‘other’ embodies (incarnates) the fans’ aspirations towards the ‘sainthood’ of celebrity status, while at the level of the particular the character embodies a certain ‘social type’ – ‘regular (if flawed) guys’ just like them, who overcome difficult situations. Again, as with liturgy, identification with an ‘other’ is in the context of a narrative, into which spectators are ‘stitched’ by the processes of identification with the film star/hero. Whereas liturgically, in the sacramental narrative of the Cross, worshippers are stitched into a salvation story, cinema spectators are stitched into a narrative in which the ordinary guy overcomes the Other in an extraordinary situation. In particular, I have been discussing those films that narrativize the perceived threat of the Muslim Other. These films represent only one genre that constructs the salvific narrative as redemption of the threat to ‘our’ American way of life – the ‘regular (if flawed) guy’ (just like us) overcomes the threat of the Other in order to restore the status quo of ‘our’ American social order. It should be clear that I am arguing that, in a way that can be paralleled to the operations of liturgical representation, by identification with the cinematic ‘other’, spectators are stitched into a narrative and so become participants in the (ideological) ‘reality’ that is the construction of Hollywood realism. In all this, I have sought to avoid forcing a parallel based on an assumption that the symbolic representation of liturgy can be simplistically and unproblematically paralleled with the realistic representational of cinema. Rather, I have, in effect, given a set of ‘co-ordinates’ that can act as reference points by which film and liturgy can be paralleled as representational media. These co-ordinates are the three heads: identify with an other; narrative suture; and ultimately participation in an (ideological) ‘reality’. Now I must address the question: what can film theory contribute to understanding liturgy as a representational media that affects the development of subject identity?


Part Three

What Can Film Theory Offer Liturgy?


Introduction to Part Three

I want here to explore psychoanalytic film theory in order to identify those concepts that I am proposing will be of use to religious studies to explain how religious identity is constructed in relation to the sacramental narrative of liturgical representation. Specifically, these will be the closely associated concepts of narrative space and suture. Screen adopted Lacanian psychoanalysis, and the journal’s interpretation of Lacan has been foundational for those British thinkers who appropriated his ideas for purposes other than psychoanalysis; in other words, those who have deployed Lacan in cultural criticism. However, the influence of Althusser has been formative on Screen’s theoretical development to the extent that it skewed the journal’s appropriation of Lacan and obscured some of the potential of psychoanalysis to contribute to film theory. This (mis)appropriation, which resulted from the politicization of Lacan by the Althusserian Left and in particular their abstraction of Lacan’s dream theory into a general theory of signification, is embedded in what is effectively Screen’s basic interpretation of Lacan as presented by Colin MacCabe (1975). Here, I will want to indicate the possibilities and limitations offered by psychoanalytic film theory, which I will do by looking at two concepts that emerged from the debates within and around Screen as attempts to explain the operations of representation. I believe these concepts can be applied with profit to liturgical representation. I will consider Slavoj Žižek’s return to suture, and I will end with a critique of the subject sutured in cinematic discourse. This critique will provide a framework with which, in Chapter 7, to ‘give Lacan himself a chance’ (Žižek 2001b, 2). Specifically, the framework will be concerned with the cinematic impression of reality as an unconscious effect, cinematic discourse understood in terms proper to Lacan’s linguistic theory of dreams; and the suturing of subjectivity in relation to the subject’s identification with a represented other.

Chapter 6

Cinematic Identification: Suture and Narrative Space

What emerged from the frequently acrimonious debates within and around Screen over the value of psychoanalysis for developing film theory is that the idea that psychoanalysis offers a theory of the ‘material history of the construction of the individual’ (Heath 1976/77, 60) articulated in the concept of suture or pseudo-identification. In terms of cinematic technique discussion has focused on the point-of-view shot and the ‘narrative organisation of look’, which I will discuss in this section. In terms of logical development, I will consider first the notion of narrative space before describing the neoLacanian concept of suture.

Cinematic Perspective and Narrative Space Because the cinema spectator is present in the theatre, he or she is by definition absent from the screen. Consequently, direct identification between the spectator and the actor is not possible. According to Metz, the spectator is in the cinema to look at an other, in other words, to be a perceiver, in fact to be ‘all-perceiving’: absent from the screen, but certainly present in the auditorium, a great eye and ear without which the perceived would have no one to perceive it, the constitutive instance, in other words, of the cinema signifier. . . . as a pure act of perception . . . as a kind of transcendental subject, anterior to every there is. (1975, 51) For Metz, film is an ambiguous mirror. On the one hand, it is like that of the mirror stage in that spectators are prey to the imaginary; on the other hand, insofar as it returns everything but the spectator, it is unlike that of the mirror stage: ‘the cinema is more involved on the flank of the symbolic, and

Cinematic Identification

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hence of secondariness, than is the mirror of childhood’ (1975, 52). In a move that locates the spectator as voyeur in front of the screen, Metz argues that spectators in fact identify with their own look (1975, 54). Metz is relying on Jean-Louis Baudry (1985), whose theorization of the techniques of cinematic representation relates to cinematic apparatus and the identification of the subject with the camera in the manifestation of the ‘transcendental subject’.1 For his part, Baudry is aware that in cinema both images and camera position move, and he argues that this movement threatens ‘the unifying and “substantializing” character of the single-perspective image [implying] a multiplicity of points of view which would neutralize the fixed position of the eye-subject’ (Baudry 1985, 535). However, he argues also that it is the very mobility of the camera that provides the conditions for the manifestation of the ‘transcendental subject’, a subject unfettered by the limitation of objective reality. In these terms, the world becomes for the subject ‘an intentional object’, implied by and in turn implying the action of the subject who sights it: ‘The multiplicity of aspects of the object in view refers to a synthesizing operation, to the unity of this constituting subject’ (1985, 537). Baudry’s argument is that, since subjects constitute meaning, and continuity is necessary for the constitution of meaning, the continuity of the images is attributable to the subject. His case is that continuity appears in cinema in the negation of difference and that it is apparent in the narrative continuity of the filmic space. If Baudry is correct, his substantial point concerns the combined effects on the spectator of the cinematic apparatus and the techniques of camera mobility. His point is that it is the techniques of camera mobility that give rise to the spectator’s identification with the ‘transcendental subject’: being held within the narrative by the camera’s movements, the spectator assumes the camera’s viewpoint and knowledge as his or her own. In this way, the spectator becomes the all-seeing and all-knowing one.2 In Baudry’s view the cinematographic apparatus occupies a position between ‘objective reality’ and the film as the finished product. As such the camera is a site of inscription between operations that mask the transformations of reality. (Baudry, and others, draw an analogy between the debt owed by the perspective of the camera’s monocular vision to Quattrocento, and the implication of this perspective with inherent ideology. Based as it is on the principle of a fixed point which organizes the visualized objects, Baudry argues that the ideology of this perspective specifies the position of the ‘subject’.) Barely acknowledging Baudry, Heath points to the corollary that, while in cinema Quattrocento perspective operates to create an impression of reality, it is a reality that is ‘neither absolutely two-dimensional nor absolutely

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three-dimensional, but something between’ (Arnheim 1958, 20, cited in 3 Heath 1976, 78). Heath argues that, as the product of camera mobility, this ‘between’ is the space of cinematic narrative, which he terms ‘narrative space’. Heath connects Baudry’s attribution of the continuity of the images to the subject with the observation that classical Hollywood narrative cinema made no attempt to hide out of frame space. On the contrary, Hollywood narrative works to contain out of frame space, recapturing it through narrativization, thereby giving movement coherence, and fixing metonymy as a ‘taking place’. Heath considers cinematic space to be both ‘in frame’ and ‘out of frame’. In frame, space is controlled by the demands of narrative, and is that space that holds ‘signifier on signified’, narration on narrated. On the other hand, out of frame, it is the transitions from shot to shot, which ‘pose acutely the problem of the filmic construction of space, of achieving a coherence of place and positioning the spectator as the unified and unifying subject of its vision’ (Heath 1976, 85). This is Baudry’s ‘transcendental subject’, the subject unfettered by the limitation of objective reality. For Heath, the cohesion and continuity of narrative rely on the ‘negation of space for place’ (1976, 86), the centring of the spectator in the flow of narrative. It is to this end that spatial cues – camera movements (establishing shots, tracks and pans) and editing (dissolves, fades) – are utilized. The result is ‘picturedness’, the simultaneous effect of actual event and picture, ‘a filmic construction’ (1976, 87); and it is at this point that the technique of shot/reverse-shot, or point-of-view shot, becomes crucial in ‘the joining of a film’s constructions, the stitching together of the overlaying metonymies’ (1976, 92). It is precisely because of the assumptions attendant on shot/ reverse-shot that the film is able to place its space. This is what Heath considers the operation of suture (Heath 1977/78). In terms of film theory, cinematic identification is closely bound up with cinematic signification and visual perception. In Lacanian psychoanalytical terms this maps onto the ‘neo-Lacanian’ concept of suture,4 introduced into film theory by Jean-Pierre Oudart ([1969]1977/78). Like Baudry, Oudart represents the post-1968 concern with exposing the technologies of ideology, specifically within cinema. As such, both are concerned with how the cinematic impression of reality operates as the instrument of the dominant bourgeois, capitalist ideology. Both writers are clearly influenced by Althusser’s notion of ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’ (Althusser 1971) and regard ‘cinematographic apparatus’ as another instance of culture’s implication in the apparatus of state ideology, interpellating, or addressing individuals as subjects of the dominant ideology. Specifically, Oudart explores the relationship of the spectating subject to ideologically inscribed representation.5


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Jean-Pierre Oudart and Stephen Heath: Suturing the Subject in Cinematic Discourse Oudart takes his lead from Jacques-Alain Miller (1977/78), who uses Lacan’s distinction between the subject (content) of the statement or utterance (énoncé), and the act of stating or uttering (énonciation); that is, between the subject designated in the statement and the subject making the statement (Oudart [1969]1977/78; E 298). For example, in the paradoxical statement ‘I am lying’, the subject ‘I’ who makes the statement is not fully represented by the subject ‘I’ (the signifier) of the statement; there is a lack in the signifier of the subject that means that the subject signified is not fully represented (there is an ‘I’ who is telling the truth about lying). Lacan’s point is that the speaking subject never can be fully represented in language, and the consequence of this lack is that the subject is compelled to procure a ‘fictional’ subjectivity through a ‘pseudo identification’ (S 11, 117). In short, the subject sutures an ego as an identification assigned or signified by an other. For Oudart, cinematic discourse performs the psychoanalytic process articulated in the concept of suture, insofar as the lack opened by the cinematic énonciation is sutured within an imaginary identification. Oudart orientates his thought within the flow of signification that closes the lack opened by the énonciation, and thereby positions cinema as cinematic discourse, best understood by considering what is at stake in the process of ‘reading’ film: Every filmic field is echoed by an absent field, the place of a character who is put there by the viewer’s imaginary, and which we shall call the Absent One. At a certain moment of the reading all the objects of the filmic field combine together to form the signifier of its absence. At this key-moment the image enters the order of the signifier, and the undefined strip of film the realm of the discontinuous, the ‘discrete’. ([1969] 1977/78, 36) Oudart has in mind here the shot/reverse-shot process, and he considers the pleasure experienced by the spectator in the initial shot, the cinematic image in the ‘filmic field’. This is a short-lived pleasure, disrupted the moment the spectator becomes aware of the frame, at the margin of which cinematic materiality threatens to disrupt the ideological positioning of the spectator. At this point, the spectator is ‘rescued’ when, through the shot/ reverse-shot sequence, the image ‘enters the order of the signifier’, and becomes a signifier of absence. Now, the filmic field becomes the problematic

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field of representation. The absence (lack) constructed by the shot is perceived in the spectator’s imaginary as the ‘Absent One’, located in the imaginary space of the ‘absent field’, leaving the spectator ‘aware’ that the filmic representation signifies for an absent field outside the image.6 Oudart’s contention is that in a cinematic statement constructed around a shot/reverse-shot framework, the lack is abolished when someone (or something) is placed within the filmic field, ‘the filmic space defined by the same take’ ([1969]1977/78, 37). The second shot annuls the threat by showing that the first was the point-of-view of a character within the fictional diegesis. The Absent One is thereby re-appropriated into the filmic field, the spectator’s initial relation to the film is sutured, and the cinematic discourse is embraced into the imaginary. It is by this process of shot/ reverse-shot that the field of absence and the field of presence are sutured to form the imaginary of the filmic space in which the signifier is echoed and retroactively anchors itself in the filmic field. The result is that the spectator is distanced from what had been an uncomplicated relation to the film, losing innocence as a viewer, and being implicated in the cinematic discourse. Arguing that art is a discourse constructed according to codes, themselves the product of ideology, Oudart holds that the discourse predetermines how the subject should read the ‘text’, while the text itself masks and naturalizes the presence of the figurative codes. Operating beneath perception, the codes create an impression of ‘reality’ or ‘truth’, which is threatened when the spectator becomes aware of the frame, but which is overcome by the shot/reverse-shot process, ‘the system of suture’.7 From his initial attempt to specify ‘the logic of the signifier in cinema’ (Heath 1977/78, 57), Oudart draws attention to a situation in which the subject is productive of cinematic discourse, while being at the same time the reason for its production. Citing Miller, Oudart states that suture primarily represents ‘the relationship of the subject to the chain of its discourse’ (Oudart [1969]1977/78, 38; Miller 1977/78, 24). We must hold together the definitions which make the subject the effect of the signifier and the signifier the representative of the subject; it is a circular, though non-reciprocal, relation. (1977/78, 34) As I indicated above in highlighting Althusser’s general importance for film theory and particular importance for the concept of suture, Oudart’s intention is to give a psychoanalytic account of cinematic interpellation, which he sees as the ‘establishment of an imaginary as real . . . by the persistence of the ideological effects of the representational system’ (Oudart


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[1971b]1990, 203). To this end, he develops Serge Daney’s analysis of ocularcentric epistemology, photology, ‘that obstinate will to confuse vision and cognition, making the latter the compensation of the former and the former the guarantee of the latter, seeing in directness of vision the model of cognition’, parodied as ‘I see, therefore I am aware’ (Daney and Oudart [1970]1990, 116, 117), alongside notions about the jouissance of reading. Daney had directly challenged Bazinian realism, arguing that ‘The visual is neither the double nor the outrageous, false or inaccurate misrepresentation of something else; the visual is something else’ ([1970]1990, 115–16). In consequence, the ‘real’ is not innocent and cinema is complicit in a ‘photological’ visibility, and guilty of transmuting profilmic material, neutralizing its signifiers. Daney also charged directors like Howard Hawks, ‘the filmmaker of an always total pleasure’ ([1970]1990, 121), with regarding the only important effect as that of pleasure: ‘ceaselessly investing signifieds in new signifiers and making themselves masters of a chain where nothing allows the end to be envisaged, masters of a frenetic transitivity which condemns them to say nothing real, never to come to a stop’ ([1970]1990, 121). In continuity, Oudart argues that the profilmic object is misrecognized ‘by a spectator who reduces his knowledge about the object to his vision of the object, who bases his knowledge on his vision, and does not want to know anything about it, lost as he is in his jouissance’ ([1970]1990, 123). It is this jouissance that is the ideology operating ‘where it could not be seen, in the place from which it was seen’ ([1970]1990, 123), namely in the ‘doubly imaginary place’ where it addresses ‘a spectator who was the metteur en scène of his own fantasy, installed by the apparatus of phantasmagoria’ ([1970]1990, 124). This leads Oudart to propose that cinema’s principal question concerns not the subject as cause and master of a knowledge obtained merely by seeing clearly, but rather with a radically decentred subject, ‘master of his misrecognition, or of a half-knowledge masking another truth’ (Daney and Oudart [1970]1990, 131); a misrecognition privileging the impression of reality in order to ‘conceal the materiality of projection’ and perfect its ‘écriture of verisimilitude’ ([1970]1990, 132): ‘The true referent of this cinema was almost never primarily the real, but the imaginary’ ([1970]1990, 133). In explicating the operations of the impression of reality, Oudart distinguishes the ‘reality effect’ [effet de réalité] from the effect of the real [effet de réel] (Oudart [1971a]1990, 190). In semiotic terms, the reality effect constitutes the pictorial codes standardized and codified within Quattrocento perspective. Referring specifically to Diego Velázquez’, The Maids of Honour

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(1656), Oudart generalizes the point that figures within the painting address an absent other and consequently this turns representation into a spectacle seen by a spectator excluded from its field of representation. Oudart considers that the excluded spectator is involved in representation in a phantasmic way, inscribed as a subject ‘in a figurative system which will present its effects of the real as effects of optical reality . . . which are the traces of the inscription of the subject in the form of a lack’ ([1971a]1990, 191). Oudart once again rejects the Bazinian notion of analogical realism, here in favour of a Lacanian, psycholinguistic interpretation, in which he considers the effet de réalité, the figurative structure produced by the specific pictorial codes of Western painting, to be the result of the processes of signification as described by Lacan. Oudart’s point is that because figures in post-Renaissance Quattrocento painting signify lack, which structures the representation and inscribes the spectating subject within that structure, the subject assumes the existence of the human figure represented. He sums up thus: the attribution of a real referent to the figures in the representation . . . is a function of the subject’s exclusion from the representation and his inscription in the discourse of the representation or the narrative. If the sign, like the figure, makes things present, that is because the signifying chain implies a subject who by virtue of his metonymic inscription in the chain, makes the meaning effect (the narrative, the figurative representation) as it were the predicate of a subject (in this case the subject of the enunciation, produced as an effect of the discursive structure). ([1971a] 1990, 192) Against this, Heath is critical of what he describes as ‘the muddled status of the concept’ (Heath 1977/78, 62).8 For Heath, the proposition of cinema as cinematic discourse raises a crucial problem about the precise understanding with which film theorists work. Returning to Metz, Heath draws attention to the correspondence that he finds exists between the linguistic sentence and the filmic image.9 Heath argues that Metz intends the single shot as an énoncé (a statement). For Metz, the shot is ‘there-for’, addressing an implied spectator, which it does with an ‘innocence’ whose énonciation (the act of stating or uttering) is unspecified. In this case, the spectator is confronted with an image that appears complete, but which is in itself limited by what it addresses, namely the subject. So, the image enters the signifying chain and completes (its meaning/signification) with the subject it entertains. In arguing that in order to understand cinema as discourse it is necessary ‘to understand the relation of that address in the movement of the image, in the movement of and between shots’ (1977/78, 63), Heath


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means that cinema as discourse may be taken to be the constant production of a subject address, through the play of incompleteness-completion that functions in representation. For Heath, suture is, ‘the effecting of the join of the subject in structures of meaning’ (1977/78, 74).10 Since ‘a film is a series of acts of meaning’ (1977/78, 74), it follows that it may be that chain of discourse in which the subject is joined to its signifier (a filmic character) that signifies the subject’s lack. Since in a film a spectator is offered multiple subject positions, the effects of ideology are to be measured across that multiplicity of positions. For Heath, cinema’s ideological mechanism is specified in the operation of the suture, the never-ending process of construction and reconstruction, of absence and presence, of flow and bind, closed in narrative; narrative closure is the moment which ‘shifts the spectator as subject in its terms . . . [It] is scene and movement, movement and scene, the reconstruction of the subject in the pleasure of that balance’ (1976, 99–100). I will have much more to say about suture in the following chapter. For now it is enough to note that Heath’s consideration of suture suggests a return of the concept to its psychoanalytic origins, now marked with a concern for the subject’s implication in ideology. Rightly understood, cinema as discourse may be taken to be the constant production of a subject address, through that play of incompleteness-completion that functions in representation.

Slavoj Žižek: When Suture Fails Slavoj Žižek has, at various points, attempted to read ‘the most sublime theoretical motifs of Jacques Lacan together with and through the exemplary cases of contemporary mass culture’ (Žižek 1991, vii), in particular the mass culture of Hollywood. Yet, despite producing several book-length treatments of this type of ‘looking awry’ he came late to directing his interest to the concept of suture. However, in his attempts to revitalize film theory by reinstating Lacanian psychoanalysis within its discourse (Žižek 2001b), Žižek confronts the crisis for intellectual ascendancy between Theory and Post-Theory. (His questions are political, and concern whether cultural studies informed by ‘PostTheory’ can counteract global capitalism. His answer is negative, insofar as such an approach ‘accepts the inherited notion of “humanity”’ (2001b, 4).) To counter what he sees as the reductive reading developed by Screen, Žižek argues for the existence of ‘another Lacan’ and finds the theory of suture to be that aspect of psychoanalytic theory capable of both reinstating Lacan within cinema theory and of revitalizing film theory – and for that matter

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critical thought itself. Here, I will indicate, briefly, how Žižek attempts to reinstitute suture as a concept central to Lacan’s thought and integral to film theory. Žižek defines suture as the mapping of external difference onto the inside: ‘the difference between image and its absence/void is mapped onto the intra-pictural difference between the two shots’ (2001b, 33). Žižek notes William Rothman’s objection that in the ‘Oudart/Dayan scenario’, the viewer is ‘authorised to see what happens to be in the axis of the glance of another spectator, who is ghostly or absent’ (Rothman 1975, 48).11 Žižek observes that for Rothman the ultimate threat of the point-of-view shot is that it will ‘evoke the spectre of a free-floating Gaze without a determinate subject to whom it belongs’ (Žižek 2001b, 33).12 Notwithstanding Žižek’s unattributed observation that ‘Post-Theorists speak of the “missing Gaze”’ (2001b, 34), he rightly follows Joan Copjec in arguing that it is crucial for Lacan’s notion of Gaze ‘that it involves the reversal of the relationship between subject and object’ (2001b, 34; Copjec 1994, 15–38). And he extends this to argue that, since the Gaze is on the side of the object, and stands for the blind spot in the field of the visible, the Gaze is intimately connected to Lacan’s objet petit a, ‘the blind spot without which nothing would be really visible’ (Žižek 2001b, 34). Žižek explicates this connection with reference to Alfred Hitchcock’s ability to render the Gaze. Typically, in the subject’s approach to an uncanny, threatening object, often a house, ‘we encounter the antinomy between the eye and the Gaze at its purest: the subject’s eye sees the house, but the house – the object – seems somehow to return the Gaze’ (2001b, 34–5). But what is elementary in Hitchcock is seen to be an inversion of the suture procedure, a ‘“suturing” of the gap opened up by the point-of-view shot which fails’ (2001b, 35, emphasis added).13 For Žižek, the important question arising from Hitchcock’s techniques concerns what happens when ‘the exchange of subjective and objective shots fails to produce the suturing effect?’ And his solution is to propose the ‘function of interface’ (2001b, 39). As a primary example of interface, Žižek refers to an image from Orson Welles’ 1941 debut film, Citizen Kane, in which, during an election campaign, the eponymous Kane stands in front of a gigantic poster of his photograph. The effect of this image is that ‘the “real” Kane is redoubled by his spectral shadow’ (2001b, 39). Žižek’s point is that, when the ‘standard suture’ fails, when the gap can no longer be filled by an additional signifier, it is filled by a spectral object, in a shot which, in the guise of the spectral screen,


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includes its own counter-shot. In other words, when, in the exchange of shots and counter-shots, a shot occurs to which there is no counter-shot, the only way to fill this gap is by producing a shot which contains its own counter-shot. (2001b, 54) In such cases, the suture is achieved, not by the second shot, but by the spectral counter, ‘the fantasmiatic supplement that fills its hole’ (2001b, 54). For Žižek, the most significant mistake made with regard to conceptualizing suture is to see it is an articulation of the inscription of the exterior in the interior in such a way as to efface the trace of its own production, thereby naturalizing the product as a consistent whole. Žižek argues that interface has this effect when an external reality is sutured ‘by a subjective element, an artificial supplement that has to be added to it in order to generate the effect of reality’ (2001b, 55); for Žižek, this artificial supplement is the objet petit a, ‘the subjective element constitutive of objective-external reality’. However, he rejects the idea, which he finds in ‘standard (cinematic) suture theory’, of the subject as ‘the illusory stand-in . . . for its absent cause’ (2001b, 55), and argues instead that the kind of self-enclosure that can successfully erase the decentred traces of its production is a priori impossible. Returning to his critique of Post-Theory, Žižek argues that Post-Theory has no room for the notion of suture precisely because Post-Theory ‘insists on multiple relatively independent levels’ (2001b, 56). As Bordwell and Carroll put it: ‘What is coming after Theory is not another Theory, but theories and the activity of theorizing’ (Bordwell and Carroll 1996, xiv). In contrast, Žižek proposes a definition of suture as ‘the structurally necessary shortcircuit between different levels (style, narrative, the economic conditions of the studio system of production, etc.)’ (2001b, 56). Žižek’s point is that because in suture external difference is always internal, ‘the external limitation of a field of phenomena always reflects itself within this field, as its inherent impossibility to fully become itself’ (2001b, 57). In other words, no amount of ‘theories’ or ‘theorizing’ about film aesthetics or history can be subversive precisely because ‘These external conditions leave the internal logic intact’ (2001b, 57). And for Žižek, psychoanalysis in general, and suture, as the mapping of external difference onto the inside, in particular, are ultimately subversive theories. We can see how, in this precise sense, suture is the exact opposite of the illusory, self-enclosed totality that successfully erases the decentred traces of its production process: suture means that, precisely, such self-enclosure

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is a priori impossible, that the excluded externality always leaves its traces within – or, to put it in standard Freudian terms, that there is no repression . . . without the return of the repressed. (2001b, 58) Žižek admits that the ‘time of suture seems to have irrevocably passed: in the present-day cultural studies version of Theory, the term barely occurs’ (2001b, 31). So it remains to be seen just how much Žižek’s work on suture will revitalize film theory. But his suggestion that the concept has a future as well as a past within film theory, and that suture is in effect a concept central to Lacan’s thought, prepares the way for me to re-read Lacan’s theory of subject construction in terms of suture. My intention here is to relate this return to Lacan back to my thesis that the film theory concepts of suture and narrative space can contribute to understanding the operation of liturgy on the construction of religious identity. It is clear that Žižek’s Lacan is the Lacan of the real as impossible, and his constant references are to the Thing, the embodiment of jouissance, ‘the impossible/real foreign kernel, [which is] irreducible to the symbolic order [and which] can only be approached in a suicidal heroic act of transgression, of excluding oneself from the symbolic community’ (Žižek 2001a, 19); to objet petit a. This much noted, Žižek himself points out that there are many Lacans currently on offer. Taking a lead from Miller (2000), Žižek lists four: the structuralist Lacan who emphasizes the determining form of the ‘big Other’, the symbolic order; the Lacan of the ‘Ethics’, who emphasizes jouissance as the impossible Real; the post-1968 Lacan of the four discourses; and the Lacan of Seminar XX (Žižek 2001a, 29–31). Žižek’s Lacan (the ‘another Lacan’ who can revitalize cinema theory), is that of the Ethics, this is the Lacan who can supply what Marx overlooked by ‘focusing on the ambiguous overlapping between surplus-value and surplus-enjoyment’ (2001a, 19). However, it is worth observing that, to the extent to which he emerges fully formed in Seminar VII, Žižek’s ‘another Lacan’ effaces the trace of its own production.

Critique of the Subject Sutured in Cinematic Discourse The weakness with the way film theory has appropriated the concept of suture is precisely in terms of the way it has been informed by the agenda of post-1968 Althusserian-Marxism. I have already indicated the relative merits of Althusserian contribution to film theory, both negative (a hardening of psychoanalysis into a linguistic theory of culture) and positive (an account


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of the ideological processes of interpellation), but I now want to argue that embracing his Marxist-structuralism has caused some important difficulties for film theory. Oudart clearly intends a psychoanalytic account of the processes of interpellation, which he sees in classically Althusserian terms as the ‘establishment of an imaginary as real . . . by the persistence of the ideological effects of the representational system’ (Oudart [1971b]1990, 203). Developing Daney’s analysis of ocularcentric epistemology, as the confusion of vision and cognition, Oudart argues that in cinema, the profilmic object is misrecognized when the spectator reduces his knowledge about the object to his vision of it, a misrecognition that privileges the impression of reality in order to ‘conceal the materiality of projection’ (Daney and Oudart [1970]1990, 132). Thus, Oudart’s claim that the ‘true referent of this cinema was almost never primarily the real, but the imaginary’ ([1970]1990, 133), is in effect an Althusserian rejection of Bazinian realism, which regards ideology as the representation not of the real conditions of human existence but the imaginary relation to the real world. This interpretation poses the first difficulty for film theory insofar as it reduces the cinematic impression of reality to an Althusserian caricature of the very theoretical frame within which the interpretation is supposedly founded: Lacanian psychoanalysis. The second difficulty is posed when Oudart explicates the operations of the impression of reality, ‘the reality effect’ (effet de réalité), by focusing on the codes standardized and codified within Quattrocento perspective. So, on the basis that cinema’s true referent is not the real of Bazinian realism but the imaginary of Lacanian psycholinguistics, Oudart considers how the effet de réalité is the result of the processes of signification, how it is produced semiotically by the codes of representation, described by Lacan. In other words, because Quattrocento painting typically signifies lack, spectating subjects become inscribed within the structures of the representation. Oudart’s point, that in cinematic discourse the lack opened by cinematic statements is abolished when someone is placed within the filmic field, the filmic space, is an argument that cinematic discourse performs the psychoanalytic process of suture: the lack is sutured by the subject’s imaginary identification. And in terms of its ideological effect, the spectator loses innocence as a viewer and becomes implicated in the cinematic discourse. Heath’s comment, that suture effects the join of the subject in the structures of meaning, make this explicit. Specifically, then, the second difficulty with Oudart’s interpretation of suture, informed as it is by the structuralism of this Althusserian Marxist

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agenda, is in terms of his application of Lacanian psycholinguistics. The point is that Oudart and others effectively attempt to psychoanalyse Quattrocento perspective and the effects of its codes in the mistaken belief that, if ideology represents the imaginary, and if the codes (the shot/reverse-shot process) construct the imaginary of the filmic space, then exposing the codes will lay bare the ideology itself. I want to argue that this interpretation is problematic in three important ways. First, with regard to the cinematic impression of reality, notwithstanding the obvious problems with Althusser’s understanding of the Lacanian categories of the imaginary and the real, Oudart fails to realize the potential of Lacan’s analysis precisely because he fails to understand that the relationship between the impression of reality and narrative space is one of unconscious effect. Secondly, Oudart is over dependent on a structural linguistics that does violence to Lacanian psycholinguistics, and to that extent he fails to understand the subtleties of Lacan’s linguistic theory of dreams. Finally, commitment to Althusserian Marxist-structuralism leads Oudart and Heath to make the mistaken proposition that subjects are sutured when they are joined to the structures of meaning. I will argue in fact that subjectivity is sutured in the identification with an other.14 What emerges from this discussion is that psychoanalytic film theory developed its concepts of narrative space and suture in relation to the cinematic techniques of narrative and the point-of-view shot, and that these theories are focused in terms of the spectating subject’s construction of fictional subjectivity, a pseudo-identification. Equally, it is apparent that the term suture is used in two related ways. In the first case, the term suture is used to describe the technique of shot/ reverse-shot. What Heath describes as the stitching together of a film’s overlaying metonymies has its theoretical roots in Baudry’s notion of the ‘transcendental subject’. For Baudry, the effect of narrative cohesion and continuity is attributable to the subject, who identifies with the ‘transcended subject’ constructed by the very mobility of the camera, and assumes the camera’s knowledge as their own. But the term is used in a second way to describe the subject’s pseudoidentification. In this sense, Oudart argues that as a cinematic statement the shot/reverse-shot technique opens a lack that is retroactively anchored in the cinematic statement, when the subject sutures an identification with the cinematic signifier in the imaginary. As Heath puts it, the apparently complete image enters the signifying chain of cinematic discourse and is


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completed, given cinematic meaning/signification, by the spectating subject. For Heath, the concept of suture is the concept of the subject’s pseudoidentification in (cinematic) structures of meaning. However, these film theorists are too influenced by Althusser. I have argued that their interpretation is problematic and has led to a failure of understanding in three areas. First, it has failed to understand cinematic impression of reality as an unconscious effect; secondly, it has failed to understand cinematic discourse in terms proper to Lacan’s linguistic theory of dreams; and thirdly, it has failed to understand the suturing of subjectivity correctly in relation to the subject’s identification with a specular image, a represented other. My purpose in identifying the associated concepts of narrative space and suture is to use them to explain the construction of religious identity in relation to the sacramental narrative of liturgical representation. I intend to attempt this in Chapter 8. However, as I have demonstrated in this chapter, psychoanalytic film theorists have (mis)appropriated Lacan and, consequently, it will be necessary for me to make a ‘return to Lacan’ in order to explore his theory of subject construction.

Chapter 7

Suturing Suture: Joining theTheory Together

Many regard Lacan’s Saussurean reading of Freud as his enduring legacy to psychoanalysis. However, Lacan himself sees his ‘return to the work of Freud’ as his distinctive contribution, a re-emphasis of the Freudian unconscious (E, 57, 114, 116).1 During his early psychiatric work on psychosis, Lacan criticizes the positivism and anthropological implications of ‘institutional psychology’. But, beginning in the early 1950s, he begins to advocate the radical nature of Freud’s ‘discovery’, attacking the obsession with resistance analysis that was preoccupying the then analytic orthodoxy of ego psychology in general and Anna Freud in particular, and characterized by Lacan as ‘the ego is structured exactly like a symptom’ (S 1, 6). Lacan regards the prevailing ‘theoretical cacophony’ and ‘crisis of analytic technique’ as the result of misreading Freud’s metapsychological work, effectively in a humanist direction (S 2, 13–14) and the subsequent abandonment of the genius of analysis. Regarding himself as herald of the return, Lacan calls the analytic community back to Freud: It is in relation to him that I ask you whether we will allow ourselves to be fascinated by his fabrication or whether, by rethinking the work of Freud, we cannot retrieve the authentic meaning of his initiative and the way to maintain its beneficial value. ([1951]1982, 64) Lacan is convinced that, ‘The meaning of a return to Freud is a return to the meaning of Freud’ (E, 117), and by definition a return to the meaning of Freud’s subject: the ‘I is an other’, the ‘ex-centric’ subject, ‘decentred in relation to the individual’ (S1, 43). In returning to Lacan, I intend to move between the early and later Lacans in order to allow the middle, Structuralist theories of the unconscious structured as a language, to be informed by the earlier theories, in particular his ideas about the complexes. I consider this to be as legitimate a way to re-read Lacan as any other. In addition, I suggest that reading

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Lacan in this way, will enable a more accurate understanding of his theory of subject identity, and will demonstrate that, although the concept can rightly be described as neo-Lacanian, suture is in fact central to Lacan’s theory of subjectivity. My assumption here is that informing the concepts of suture and narrative space with a more Lacanian interpretation of Lacan will strengthen the contribution film theory is able to make to understanding the operation of liturgy on the construction of religious identity. In this chapter, I will argue that giving ‘Lacan himself a chance’ (Žižek 2001b, 2) can constructively re-inform psychoanalytic film theory in three related ways. First, I will suggest that Lacan’s theory of the complexes reveals the operation of cinema’s impression of reality to be premised upon, and a performance of, the subject’s own Imaginary ‘reality’, the subject’s predisposition to construct a subjective impression of reality. Secondly, while film theorists may have correctly understood cinematic discourse in terms of Lacan’s signifying chain, I will suggest that Lacan’s dream theory reinterprets the cinematic discourse as a performance of the unconscious discourse of the subject’s desire, funded by the psychic strategy of negation/disavowal. Finally, I will suggest that the neo-Lacanian theory of suture – the stitching together of subjectivity by the subject in relation to representation – reveals the subject’s predisposition to construct an ego that is narcissistically confused with the imago of the cinematic One-Like, the specular film star other. In the next chapter, I will apply the theoretical insights of this chapter to liturgical representation, and attempt to learn something about the construction of liturgical subjects.

Cinematic Impression of Reality as Unconscious Effect In this section, I will discuss Lacan’s understanding of the subject’s truth insofar as it relates to the Symbolic and Imaginary realities,2 in order to map analytic discourse to the cinematic impression of reality. I will show that real (actual) events, like weaning, cause psychic trauma and leave a permanent trace on the subject’s psyche. So great is the trauma that the subject operates a strategy of negation/disavowal, which simultaneously refuses the real and reinstalls the Real of the lost imago. I will show that, for Lacan, the imago is a foundational element of the complex, and that the nature of the complex is representational. My point here will be to indicate that, for

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Lacan, complexes transmit an appearance, or impression of reality. From this, I will show that, while the complexes operate in the Imaginary, the analytic process is an attempt to articulate the Real as the subject’s history narrated in the Symbolic. Having established that the complexes represent the subject’s Imaginary reality and that the subject’s truth emerges as a Symbolic reality in the language of analysis, I will argue the cinematic impression of reality maps to Lacan’s Imaginary reality and can be regarded as premised upon, and a performance of, the subject’s own Imaginary ‘reality’, the subject’s predisposition to construct a subjective impression of reality.

Symbolic reality, Imaginary reality and the real of the subject’s truth The place from which to begin developing a Lacanian understanding about the impression of reality is Lacan’s concern with the subject’s truth: the subject’s truth as an un(yet-to-be-)spoken narrative. Lacan is acutely concerned with the idea of truth. However, as Malcolm Bowie correctly observes, Lacan’s conception of truth does not pertain ‘to the world as it is for the scientist, but to the world as it was, is and shall be for the speaking subject’ (Bowie 1991, 112). For Lacan, the subject’s truth emerges within the context of analysis as the analysand integrates a repressed history to arrive at the revelation of truth, coming to know, by bringing into speech, by narrating that which has been for them unknown: ‘In the discourse of analysis, the subject develops what is his truth, his integration, his history’ (S1, 283). The clear inference here is that history is truth, or, put another way, that the subject’s personal (subjective) history is the subject’s personal (subjective) truth. This personal truth might also be termed analytical truth, or the truth found through analysis, since the aim of analysis is somehow ‘to assist the subject in the revelation of himself to himself’ (S2, 206). To that end, Lacan came to regard analysis as a praxis that treats the Real by the Symbolic, along the way encountering the Imaginary (S11, 6). In other words, analysis is conducted in the medium of language (the Symbolic), it deals with the stuff of the unconscious (the Imaginary), and ultimately aims to reveal the content of the subject’s truth (the Real). As Lacan puts it: ‘The whole progress of the analysis is to show [the analysand] the distinction between these two planes, to unstick the imaginary and the real’ (S1, 241). It is important here to note that Lacan draws a distinction between the ‘Real’ and ‘reality’. Lacan’s translator commentator and Lacanian analyst Bruce Fink suggests Lacan’s distinction should be understood in terms of

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‘the Real’ equating to the psychic trauma, while ‘reality’ is that which is symbolically constructed: ‘the symbolic creates “reality”, reality as that which is named by language and can thus be thought and talked about: the “social construction of reality”’ (Fink 1995, 25). However, Lacan also holds that the complexes transmit an appearance of reality. The point here is that, while the Symbolic articulates or constructs a symbolic reality, the complexes represent an imaginary reality: and in both cases, the reality effected is funded by the Real – effecting a doubly-determined, overdetermined subjective impression of reality.

Imagos and the representational nature of the complex Foundational in the early Lacan is his notion of the imago,3 the concept is embedded in his theory of Mirror Stage identification and denotes archaic, unconscious ‘prototypical images’ that arise from the infant’s primordial experience. These images remain ‘the subject’s more or less fixed projection on the world and others’ (Benvenuto and Kennedy 1986, 73) and their effects on the subject, and the subject’s relation to the environment can be regarded as both formative and informative (Julien 1994, 32). Lacan’s conception of the imago emphasizes both the ‘subjective determination of the image’ and its strong association with people, notably in the paternal, maternal and fraternal imagos (Evans 1996, 84). However, Lacan does not regard the imago as an isolated phenomenon, but as a ‘fundamental element of the complex’ (Lacan [1938]1988, 13–14). The key point here is that, while the Imaginary stereotype of the imago may relate to an individual, ‘the complex is a whole constellation of interacting imagos’ (Evans 1996, 27). In this way, regarding the imago as unconscious prototype, Lacan makes explicit the representational nature of the complex to which the imago is allied. According to Lacan, Freud defined the complex in terms of an unconscious agency that reveals itself through slips, dreams and symptoms (Lacan [1938]1988, 13).4 But, in Lacan’s view, complexes transmit an appearance of reality by reproducing what he describes as a ‘certain aura of reality’ ([1938]1988, 13) in their form and function: in form, the complex represents reality ‘in what is objectively specific to a given stage in psychic development’; in function, it is ‘an existential illustration of a reality fixed into an unalterable form each time that certain experiences occur which might demand an objectification transcending that reality’ ([1938]1988, 13). If it is the case that, in both Symbolic construction and Imaginary complex,

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reality is in fact funded by the Real, this poses the question: What are the realities that the complexes represent? Lacan holds the family to be the pre-eminent incubator of stable complexes. Further defining complexes as ‘playing the role of “organizers” in psychic development’ ([1938]1988, 14), Lacan details the weaning, intrusion and Oedipus complexes. Beginning with weaning, he follows Melanie Klein in arguing that from the beginning human children lack any awareness of separation between their own body and that of their mother. Out of its experience of unbroken, primordial continuity of being, the child creates an ‘imago of the nurturing relationship’ between itself and the breast ([1938]1988, 14). As with all imagos, the contents of the nurturing relationship imago are the product of feelings specific to the evolution of the individual and take their form as they are mentally organized by the individual. However, the consequence of the evolution of this primary imago, produced prior to any awareness of object-form, is that its contents are not directly represented within consciousness. Instead, their trace is felt in the mental structures that shape subsequent psychic experiences. (The reason that the contents of the primary imago are represented only indirectly will become clear below when I outline Lacan’s account of ‘the laws of condensation and displacement’ (S7, 61)5 by which the psychic representation – Vorstellungen, imagos, dreams – operate.) Weaning, then, disrupts the primordial, Imaginary idyll; it is an experience of violence that causes ‘psychic trauma’ and leaves a ‘permanent trace in the human psyche’ (Lacan [1938]1988, 14). Little wonder, then, that the threat of loss creates in the child a desire for an Imaginary reality, which it (re)constitutes by a strategy of refusal – negation/disavowal – of the real (actual) experience of weaning.6 Lacan is here making an important connection between the representative nature of the complex (its ability to communicate knowledge and configure affective organization), the operation of the imago, and ‘the ordeal caused by the shock of the real ’ ([1938]1988, 13, emphasis added). His argument is that although weaning implies the tension of acceptance or refusal it is a tension that is only resolved through ‘an intellectual intention’ ([1938]1988, 14).7 And, because the infant as yet lacks the (still to be constructed) ego that could affirm or deny the ‘intention’, the contrary poles continue to co-exist unconsciously in a relationship of essential ambivalence. Lacan’s point is that, in the absence of an ego that intends, there is no contradiction in the child’s strategy of negation/disavowal, which is simultaneously a refusal of the real (actual) and reinstallation of the Real

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(subject’s truth) (Lacan [1938]1988, 14). In other words, the child refuses the real (the intrusion of the sibling) and, in its desire to sustain the imago of the nurturing relationship, constitutes an Imaginary reality on the basis of its desire for the Real (breast), the (forgotten/lost) remainder in the Imaginary. The point here, as I anticipated above, is that complexes represent Imaginary reality based on the desire for a lost Real. My argument is that what I am calling a predisposition to construct an Imaginary reality is the subjective impression of reality upon which the cinema’s impression of reality will be premised and upon which it will operate. The important point to note here is that the psychic trauma, the shock of the Real leads to the refusal of the real, and sets a pattern for the resolutions of all future intersubjective traumas within the parameters of a dialectical structure that will foreground the psychic strategy of negation/disavowal.8 Given that Lacan is concerned with the subject’s truth, it is appropriate here to inquire about the connection between the subject’s truth and the Real. And the first point to make is that, for Lacan, the Real is exterior to the Symbolic: ‘The real . . . does not exist, since it precedes language . . . it “ex-ists”’ (Fink 1995, 25), and because the Real is exterior Lacan asserts that ‘the real, or what is perceived as such, is what resists symbolisation absolutely’ (S1, 66). This has led some commentators to posit the radical incomprehensibility of the Real. For example, in her feminist introduction to Lacan, Elizabeth Grosz takes an extreme position for what she describes as the ‘anatomical, “natural” order’ of the Real in which, ‘The Real cannot be experienced as such: it is capable of representation or conceptualization only through the reconstructive or inferential work of the imaginary and symbolic orders’ (Grosz 1990, 34). For Grosz, our very experience of the Real is mediated.9 However, it is in the very nature of the analytic process that the analysand be enabled to ‘verbalize experiences which may have occurred before the analysand was able to think about them, speak of them, or formulate them in any way at all’ (Fink 1995, 25). It is not so much that the Real cannot be symbolized, but that the Real is ‘that which has not yet been symbolized, remains to be symbolized’ (1995, 25). Lacan should not be taken to be asserting anything more than that the Real resists articulation. To put it differently, the Real funds the subject’s truth, as a subjective impression of reality, as a narrative that resists narration. The point is that the process of analysis is the struggle to narrativize what is Real for the subject as the subject’s truth. Thus, to reiterate a point I made above, while the subject’s truth emerges in language during analysis, constructing a Symbolic reality, the complexes,

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which underlie the subject’s truth, represent an Imaginary reality: in both cases the reality effected is funded by the Real – the subjective impression of reality.

Anamnesis: the subject’s participation in the impression of reality Lacan’s analytical focus, then, is on the discourse of the unconscious. However, as an unconscious discourse, the subject’s truth eludes ‘that circle of certainties by which man recognizes himself as ego’ (S1, 8) precisely because there is something unknown, something outside the field of the ego, which speaks as I, and turns the speaking subject into the subject qua deceiver: Freud shows us that in the human subject there is something which speaks, which speaks in the full sense of the word, that is to say something which knowingly lies, and without the contribution of consciousness. That restores . . . the dimension of the subject. (S1, 194) The problem posed to analysis is to hear the truth in spite of what the analysand says and, ‘because [the subject] always says more than he means to, always more than he thinks he says’ (S1, 226), Lacan remains confident that the truth will be heard. Despite the fact that the analysand does not know the meaning of what he or she says (S2, 244–5), dreams, slips of the tongue, jokes all name that place, ‘somewhere between an error and a lie’, where the truth irrupts, grabbing ‘error by the scruff of the neck in the mistake’, to unfold the subject’s discourse (S1, 265). Lacan’s claim is that this is because speech is polysemic: Speech never has one single meaning, nor the word one single use. All speech always possesses a beyond, sustains various functions, encompasses several meanings. Behind what a discourse says, there is what it means [veut dire], and behind what it means, there is again another intended meaning [vouloir-dire], and nothing will ever be exhausted by that – except that it comes down to this, that speech has a creative function, and that it brings into being the very thing, which is none other than the concept. (S1, 242) The fact that the subject’s truth lies behind what the subject says indicates to Lacan that the unconscious is, and remains, unknown, ‘misrecognized’ by the subject of the ego (S2, 43), a subjective impression of reality that

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informs the narrative of the subject’s historicized present, what Žižek terms ‘the “effect of truth”’ (Žižek 1992, 33). To this point, the only originality in Lacan is his stress on returning to Freud’s unconscious. However, from 1954 Lacan begins to employ Saussure’s linguistic categories (albeit with a distinctive and distorting twist),10 and the result is that analytic communication comes to be understood as a concern, not with the significant (the signified), but with signifying (the signifier).11 Lacan warns his training analysts against ‘falling back upon meanings that can only mask from you the original mainspring of the signifier insofar as it carries out its true function’ (S3, 188). Lacan insists that any notion of referential meaning must now be understood in terms of the signifier of unconscious meaning (the unconscious signified). This can be seen to reflect a situation in which the subject’s narrative of the historicized present is profoundly informed by his subjective impression of reality. Consequently, when the subject speaks, meaning will not be found in the words used, because ‘The truth is outside of the signs, elsewhere’ (S1, 262). Instead, meaning, truth, the subject’s truth, the Real, is to be found in ‘that chapter of my history which is marked by a blank or occupied by a falsehood . . . the censored chapter’ (E, 21). For Lacan’s subject, the truth is written in the hysterical symptom, ‘deciphered like an inscription’, in childhood memories, in a subject’s own particular vocabulary, and ‘the traces which are inevitably preserved by the distortions necessitated by the linking of the adulterated chapter [of my history] to the chapters surrounding it, and whose meaning will be re-established by my exegesis’ (E, 259). As such, the subject’s truth will not be found at the surface of the analysand’s words, but beyond and behind discourse, in a way that is contingent upon the individual subject’s impression of reality, which is in turn funded by the Real. In other words, the analysand’s personal (subjective) truth is located somewhere in the analysand’s personal (subjective) history, the anamnesis as recalled by the analysand.12 (Anamnesis will be important when I come to apply psychoanalytic film theory to liturgical representation.) For Lacan, as for Freud, anamnesis is not a question of memory but of rememoration of the subject’s history (history as it is in the subject’s memory).13 And for Lacan’s subject, life events are charged with psychic significance in non-proportional relation to their historicity,14 but nonetheless characterized by their own temporality: ‘History is not the past. History is the past in so far as it is historicized in the present – historicized in the present because it was lived in the past’ (S1, 12).15 In these terms, the contours of the subject’s history can be plotted by the features of life events such as weaning,

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which will be seen to be the cause of ‘psychic trauma’. Lacan’s point is that, wherever else it might be found, the subject’s truth, as the narrative informed by the subjective impression of reality, can be located anamnetically, in the subject’s memory.

Mapping imaginary reality to cinema’s impression of reality To this point, I have shown that, for Lacan, complexes represent the subject’s imaginary reality, which analysis seeks to bring into symbolic reality as the subject’s truth emerges in language. I want now to map the cinematic impression of reality to the subject’s imaginary reality, and show how it can be considered as a performance of the subject’s predisposition to construct a subjective impression of reality. In shaping their understanding of narrative space, film theorists have described the cinematic techniques that constitute spectators in a solipsistic identification with their own look. In Baudry’s terms, the cinematic apparatus and the techniques of cinematic representation relate the subject with the camera in a way that manifests a transcendental subjectivity, a subject unfettered by the limitations of objective reality. Baudry’s argument, that the continuity of the image is attributable to the subject, represents a form of the subject’s truth insofar as it is predicated on the belief that meaning is constituted by subjects. For Baudry, transcendental subjects constitute meaning as they identify with the perspective offered by the representational techniques of the cinematic apparatus. While superficially it may seem that Baudry resonates with Lacan’s conception of truth as it is for the subject, at a perceptual level it is not the same. For Lacan, the subject’s truth is necessarily concerned with the subject’s history, albeit a repressed history – analysis is directed towards the revelation of the subject’s truth, the bringing into speech, the narration of what has been. However, Baudry does connect with Lacan in terms of the subject’s relation to narrative. As I have shown, the subject’s truth, what is real for the subject, is the product of psychic trauma (the Real), a loss that unconsciously informs every aspect of the subject’s consciousness. This trauma informs the unconscious historical narrative that resists conscious narration by the subject in the anamnesis. However, as Lacan makes clear, this history is not past but historicized in the present: it is a narrative informed by the subjective impression of reality. If Lacan is correct in his theory of the subject’s truth, he is in fact describing the extent to which subjects are always already situated within a narrative.

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That this is an un(yet-to-be-)spoken narrative that resists symbolization should not obscure the recognition that it forms an unconscious (psychoanalytic) narrative space within the Imaginary in which the subject is constituted. I will show in the next sections how the operation of cinematic narrative space is predicated on the subject’s identification with cinematic representation. My point here is that the cinematic impression of reality, constructed through narrative, is predicated on the Imaginary narrative space that constitutes the subject, that the cinematic impression of reality re-positions the cinematic subject within its own narrative and so performs the unconscious (psychoanalytic) process. In other words, subjects believe the fiction of their own impression of reality and are ready to believe other fictions – in this case, the fiction of cinema’s impression of reality, the illusory product of the techniques of cinema perspective: a reality that is ‘neither absolutely two-dimensional nor absolutely three-dimensional, but something between’ (Heath 1976, 78) – which, as I will show, acts as a kind of anamnesis of their own desire. In part, I am necessarily anticipating what I have yet to discuss, namely that the subject’s prehistoric psychic trauma is productive of a loss that the subject desires to recover. However, as I will show, for Lacan, what is lost can only be found in its pleasurable association, and consequently the subject is caught in a play of representation: instinctively representing the ‘lost’ desires as displaced onto representational substitutes, subjects suture a fictional, pseudo-identification with the representation of their desire. In the main, the focus for Baudry and the Cahiers and Screen theorists has been Hollywood narrative cinema. More than any other, this cinema has provided subjects with desirable representations, film stars as objects of identification, substitutes onto which the ‘lost’ desire can be displaced. I will have more to say about this below. Lacan’s argument is that subjects are directed by the powerful, if unconscious, narrative of the Imaginary, which determines conscious behaviour. In other words, the unconscious narrative constructs the subject within its flow. My point is that cinematic narrative, as a type of anamnesis, performs the unconscious (psychoanalytic) process. In the next chapter, I will highlight the connection between this performance and the operation of liturgical anamnesis. However, since I have already anticipated some of what I want to say about how subject’s are constituted in and through the pseudo-identification with representation, I must now discuss in more detail how Lacan’s theory of subject construction (the relationship of identification with representation within which subjects are constituted) maps with film theory’s description of cinematic representation and the subject’s

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pseudo-identification with cinematic representation in terms of suture. Specifically, I want to explore Lacan’s linguistic theory of dreams, as the representation of the Real of desire, in relation to cinematic discourse.

Cinematic Discourse and Lacan’s Linguistic Theory of Dreams In this section, I will discuss Lacan’s dream theory, insofar as it accounts for the subject’s repetition of displaced desire, in order to map the analytic discourse to cinematic discourse, to the subject’s suturing into the signifying chain of unconscious, displaced desire. I will show that in Lacan’s mind the Thing and the objet petit a are associated insofar as they represent the lost object, which can only be found (or represented) in their pleasurable associations. I will show Lacan’s subject circles, but never attains, the object of desire because of its displacement on to the pleasurable association. This is because the unconscious representations of desire are organized psycholinguistically by ‘the laws of condensation and displacement’ (S7, 61). In other words, the dream-image is only a signifier, and for Lacan signifiers are representative not significant. Consequently, the subject’s desires are not directly represented within consciousness and they resist narration in the subject’s anamnesis. I will argue that, for Lacan, the dream-image and the signifier have a signifying interchangability insofar as the unconscious mechanisms operative within the dream and the signifier display a common structure, and that it follows that if ‘the dream is a metaphor of desire’, then the signifier is similarly a metaphor of desire. For this reason, by repeating the dream, and by extension other specular images, subjects repeat the representation in order to find again the pleasure associated with the lost object of desire. From this, I will argue that cinematic discourse maps the unconscious discourse of the signifying chain, the discourse of unconscious, displaced desire.

The (overdetermined) ‘Thing’: ‘dumb reality’ and (forbidden) objet petit a That imaginary reality is constituted through the psychic strategy of negation/disavowal should not obscure Lacan’s conviction that the child’s desire remains attached to the Imaginary ‘object of desire’: objet petit a[utre],16 the lost (only ever to be found in ‘its pleasurable associations’) object (S7, 52), at once Imaginary and intimately bound to the Real; the remainder, ‘the remnant left behind by the introduction of the symbolic in the real’ (Evans

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1996, 125). For Lacan, objet petit a is the breast of the primordial, Imaginary idyll (S11, 168), the object of desire long since lost in weaning. Lacan’s notion of objet petit a is indebted to, and clarified by, his thinking on the Thing, which emerges early in Seminar VII, the seminar on ethics.17 Effectively, Lacan regards the Thing as an overdetermined concept. Serving as both the subject’s truth and the object of desire, the Thing is, in one sense, the object of language (S7, 54) – ‘dumb reality’ (S7, 55), the Thing in the Real that is ‘the beyond-of-the-signified’, that which resists symbolization absolutely, the narrative that resists narration – and in another sense, jouissance – the Thing as the (forbidden) object of (incestuous) desire around which the subject circles but never arrives (Evans 1996, 205). Locating the Thing in terms of his thinking on the development of the moral law, specifically as it relates to Freud’s incest taboo, Lacan’s articulation positions his concept in terms of the mother. The significance of incest is stressed by Freud, both in its prohibitive function, as providing the ‘underlying principle of the primordial law’,18 and in its alluring operation, as ‘the fundamental desire’ (S7, 67). Since the law operates only ‘in the realm of culture’, Lacan notes that, ‘the result of the law is always to exclude incest in its fundamental form, son/mother incest, which is the kind Freud emphasises’ (S7, 67). With Freud, Lacan finds the incest law operative in the unconscious in relation to the Thing, specifically in terms of its insatiability: desire for the mother cannot be satisfied because it is the end, the terminal point, the abolition of the whole world of demand, which is the one that at its deepest level structures man’s unconscious. (S7, 68) In Lacan’s mind, objet petit a – the breast lost in weaning – and the Thing – as the mother – have obvious association. The fact that either can be found only in their ‘pleasurable associations’ is not contradicted by the subject’s continued search for its ‘prehistoric Other that it is impossible to forget’ (S7, 71). Lacan’s position is that it is more the case that objet petit a has been misplaced, or forgotten, than actually lost. In effect, Lacan identifies the Thing with Freud’s impulse ‘to find again’, which establishes the impulse as the orientation of the human subject to the object (S7, 58). In other words, the unconscious, operating according to the pleasure principle, searches for the never-again-to-be-attained lost object: the step taken by Freud at the level of the pleasure principle is to show us that there is no Sovereign Good – that the Sovereign Good, which is das

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Ding, which is the mother, is also the object of incest, is a forbidden good, and that there is no other good. Such is the foundation of the moral law as turned on its head by Freud. (S7, 70) For Lacan, the Thing is characterized by absence and strangeness (S7, 63). Excluded, posited as exterior, ex-isting, the Thing is alien, and as such, ‘on the level of the unconscious only a representation can represent’ (S7, 71). As Lacan expresses it, It is a matter of that which in the unconscious represents, in the form of a sign, representation as a function of apprehending – of the way in which every representation is represented insofar as it evokes the good that das Ding brings with it. (S7, 71–2) These unconscious representations are, in Freud’s terms, Vorstellungen, representations19 organized according to the laws of memory, and related to the operations of the pleasure principle (S7, 58).20 Locating representation ‘between perception and consciousness’, at the site of Freud’s ‘other scene’, Lacan insists that the ‘small curds of representation’ are structured like the signifier (S7, 61), which he finds implicit in Freud’s reference to Vorstellungsrepräsentanz. Consequently, Vorstellung becomes ‘an associative and combinatory element’ (S7, 61), and Lacan’s view is that, at the level of the unconscious, representations are organized by the possibilities of the signifier, by which he means organized, not by the laws of grammar, but by ‘the laws of condensation and displacement, those that I call the laws of metaphor and metonymy’ (S7, 61). Although not explicit, this language of representation and unconscious organization is dependent on his pre-1953 language of imago and complex, now firmly installed into a linguistic frame and charged with the energy of desire.

Lacan’s linguistic theory of dreams Lacan’s subject, constituted with reference to the subjective impression of reality, circles (but never arrives at) the object of desire. This is because the unconscious representations, the ‘pleasurable associations’ of the desired Thing, are organized by ‘the laws of condensation and displacement’; consequently, desire is always displaced. It is these ‘laws’ of condensation and displacement that form the basis of the psycho linguistics that Lacan develops in relation to his theory of dream representation, and which I will argue will enable film theory to understand cinematic discourse in terms of

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subjects caught in representation. Ultimately, I will suggest that film theory’s corrected understanding of cinematic discourse (of subjects caught in representation) can be applied to liturgical representation. Lacan’s linguistic theory of dreams, specifically his thinking about condensation and displacement, metaphor and metonymy,21 is related to the analyst’s attempts to interpret the analysand’s language. Foundational to his work on dream language is Freud’s characterization of a dream as a rebus or ‘picture puzzle’ (PFL4, 382; S1, 266). In taking up Freud’s comparison, Lacan argues that ‘the dream has the structure of a sentence’ (E, 57). However, despite advising trainee analysts to take the dream literally (E, 159), the comparison should not imply that dream meanings are communicated term for term, ‘the value of the image as signifier has nothing whatever to do with its signification’ (E, 159). Rather, in the same way that the representational nature of the complex is allied to the imago, insofar as ‘the complex is a whole constellation of interacting imagos’, so the representational importance of the dream is that it is an interlacing network of signifiers: ‘Each signifying element of the dream, each image, includes a reference to a whole set of things to be signified, and inversely, each thing to be signified is represented in several signifiers’ (S1, 266). Lacan’s point is that the analysand’s speech is related ‘not only verbally, but through all his other means of expression’ (S1, 266), and, although this is offered pictorially as a rebus, it nevertheless has the structure of a sentence, in other words, a form of rhetoric: ‘syntacti cal displacements’ and ‘semantic condensations’ (E, 58).22 In making good Freud’s lack of linguistic categories, Lacan characteristically gives Saussure his own distorting twist, inverting the Swiss linguist’s revolutionary ideas about linguistic signs.23 Freud’s demonstration of dream distortion as the general precondition on which dreams function was worked out at the point of comprehending how distressing- and anxietydreams can at the same time be wish-fulfilments. Locating distortion, or transposition, within the Saussurean frame, Lacan designates it ‘as the sliding of the signified under the signifier, which is always active in discourse (its action, let us note is unconscious)’ (E, 160). In this move, Lacan inverts Saussure’s arrangement, which places the signified above signifier, so giving priority to the signifier as the determinant element. And in a second, related move, Lacan inserts a bar between the two elements (S/s) radically separating the signifier, and all but liberating it entirely from the signified. The point is that Lacan’s inversion of Saussure emancipates the signifier, privileging it to the extent that the signifier’s primacy transforms it into ‘a meaningless material element in a closed differential system’ (Evans 1996, 186). As a result, the signification of this ‘pure’ unanchored signifier

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is dependent on the way in which it is condensed or the place to which it is displaced within the structure. Lacan extends his application of linguistics into Freud’s observation that the dream work manifests two major strategies: condensation and displacement – ‘what we call the two “sides” of the effect of the signifier on the signified are also found here’ (E, 160).24 Acutely aware that ‘Dreams are brief, meagre and laconic in comparison with the range and wealth of the dream thoughts’ (PFL4, 383), Freud found it impossible either to determine the amount of condensation in a dream, or to be certain about whether a dream’s interpretation had been, or could be, exhausted. His observation was that large numbers of dream thoughts are capable of being represented in a single element (PFL4, 387). Thus, in condensation, two or more ideas become compressed into a composite figure (Grosz 1990, 87), the dreamimage being overdetermined. Lacan describes this as ‘the superimposition of the signifiers’ and links condensation closely with metaphor (E, 160). Mapping this to his inversion of Saussure’s linguistic sign, the overdetermined condensation acts as a nodal point of primary signification related to an associative signifying chain. The point is that ‘in dreams and other unconscious formations, the chains of associations are repressed or foreclosed and only the primary signifiers are manifest’ (Samuels 1993, 37). Freud’s second major strategy of the dream work, displacement, can be observed insofar as the dream is ‘differently centred from the dream-thoughts – its content has different elements as its central point’ (PFL4, 414). In displacement, the unconscious, deviant wish transfers its transgressive intensity onto a more innocent delegate and so avoids exceeding the bounds of censorship (Grosz 1990, 87). For Lacan, the German term Verschiebung is close to the idea of ‘veering off of signification’ found in metonymy (E, 160). Lacan’s contention that the dream has the structure of the sentence is then not that of term-for-term analogue, but that both follow the ‘laws’ of condensation and displacement. Having established that dreams display a linguistic character, Lacan is clear that the dream-image should be understood as signifier, and he credits Freud with showing ‘in every possible way that the value of the image as signifier has nothing whatever to do with its signification’ (E, 159). In other words, the dream-image is a signifier, and nothing else; it has no intrinsic, archetypal or symbolic meaning.

The signifier as representative not significant So far, I have shown that Lacan’s subject, constituted with reference to a subjective impression of reality, circles but never arrives at the object of

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desire: the unanchored signifier, liberated and privileged by Lacan, condensing and displacing the representation of desire along the signifying chain; the object of desire being represented by pleasurable association. In all this, the dream-image, as unconscious representation, has the value of a signifier. The point I want to underline here is that Lacan’s signifiers are representative not significant. In other words, the meaning of dreams, as signifiers, is connotative and, for this reason, the subject’s desires are not directly represented within consciousness: the shock of the Real, the psychic trauma, resists conscious narration in the subject’s anamnesis. Discussing the suggestion that signifiers are representative in relation to the subject’s desires may appear to lead away from understanding cinematic discourse in terms of subjects caught in representation. However, in Lacan’s discourse of the unconscious the subject’s desire is always ‘the desire of the Other’. And insofar as the dream can be considered a specular image that parallels the Mirror Stage image in representing the subject’s ‘desire in the other’, the subject will be seen to be caught (captivated) in representation (E, 18).25 Although his use of linguistic categories dates from 1954, Lacan is slow to define his understanding of the term ‘signifier’. When he does, it is in typically idiosyncratic and conceited style: ‘My definition of a signifier (there is no other) is as follows: a signifier is that which represents the subject for another signifier’ (E, 316). His point is that, when it produces itself in the field of the Other, the sign represents something for someone (S11, 31) in the sense that a lawyer might represent a client for another lawyer (Hill 1997, 31). In other words, the primary function of the signifier is representative not significant (Fink 1995, 26). The association here with Vorstellungen is important, insofar as it links imagos and complexes together with the representational language of dreams, the laws of condensation and displacement and the lost objet petit a structured within an economy of desire. Crucially, these psychic mechanisms intimately relate the Symbolic representations with the Imaginary desire for a lost Real and the subject’s truth. Lacan’s definition of the signifier (that which represents the subject for another signifier) locates the signifier within a structure composed of other signifiers, ‘the signifying chain’ (E, 153). It is within this chain that the signifier operates ‘according to the laws of a closed order’ (E, 153), paradigmatically and syntagmatically substituting and combining, to produce the effects of metaphor and metonymy (E, 258–9). Both dream and signifier proceed by the same means, metaphor and metonymy, opening the royal way to the unconscious (E, 258–9). However, if the signifier and the dream

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are representative rather than significant, then the question arises, how does the signifying chain carry meaning? Lacan’s answer is that meaning does not so much ‘consist’ in the elements of the signifying chain as ‘insist’ along them (E, 153): by which he means that, meaning is connoted rather than denoted. This mode of insistence, or connotation, can be examined at the level of the sentence, where the signifier is seen always to anticipate meaning (E, 153–4). For Freud it was axiomatic that dreams represent the fulfilment of a wish (PFL4, 200–13), and Lacan situates dreams within the economy of desire, specifically, ‘the desire of the Other’ (E, 264; Evans 1996, 37–8). If it is the case that the signifier is understood in relation to the dream-image as signifier, then Lacan’s question is obvious: ‘to whom does the dream reveal its meaning before the arrival on the scene of the analyst?’ In posing this question Lacan assumes ‘that the dream is made for the recognition’, specifically, the recognition of desire (E, 260). For Lacan, desire for the lost object is to be grasped – can only be grasped – in interpretation. Lacan makes explicit the signifying interchangability between the signifier and the dream, and the compatibility of their linguistic mechanisms insofar as they relate to desire. Thus, while some may claim that ‘a dream is just a dream’, Lacan returns to Freud’s recognition of the workings of desire in the dream (E, 256). From this a parallel can be drawn between the functioning of the Mirror Stage image, as the intermediary offering the subject both ‘the semblance of his own mastery’ and awareness ‘of his desire in the other’ (S1, 155), and the function of the dream-image: in both cases the specular image is a signifier, operating according to the ‘laws of the signifier’ (E, 161), that is, of condensation and displacement. For Lacan, the whole of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams explains the unconscious mechanisms operative in the dream and in the signifier (condensation, substitution, sliding, etc.), on the basis of their common structure: ‘that is, the relation of desire to that mark of language that specifies the Freudian unconscious and decentres our conception of the subject’ (E, 258). In short, ‘the dream is a metaphor of desire’ (E, 258), and it follows that the signifier is similarly a metaphor of desire.

The repeated real, the real as missed encounter In this section, I am arguing that, properly understood, Lacan’s dream theory reinterprets film theory’s conception of cinematic discourse as a performance of the unconscious discourse of the subject’s desire.26 My argument

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is that this is particularly the case with regard to Lacan’s thinking about how subjects are caught or captivated in representation, in other words, how subjects are signified by representation. In Lacan’s terms, subjects are constituted in relation to representation the content of which is not directly represented within consciousness but is articulated according to the laws of condensation and displacement, the content of the unconscious discourse operating according to the laws of the unanchored signifier. My point is that Lacan’s discourse of the unconscious maps with cinematic discourse. I am arguing that, constituted with reference to a subjective impression of reality, the subject circles the object of desire, ‘the desire of the Other’, which is represented by the pleasurable associations that connote the subject’s desires, which is the effect of the shock of the Real, the psychic trauma resisting conscious narration in the subject’s anamnesis, and which is signified in the specular image, the representation that captivates. By 1964, Lacan is discussing the dream in relation to the subject’s desire specifically as it repeats the psychic trauma (S11, 55). Borrowing terms from Aristotle, Lacan translates tuché as ‘the encounter with the real’, and argues that the Real is beyond the automaton, ‘the return, the coming-back, the insistence of the signs, by which we see ourselves governed by the pleasure principle’ (S11, 53–4). In these terms, the Real is ‘that which always lies behind the automaton’ (S11, 54), the repetition. Lacan makes it clear that, in analytical terms, the encounter with the Real, the Real as encounter, the encounter as missed encounter, is nothing other than the psychic trauma (S11, 55). It is this psychic trauma that is repeated in the dynamics of the pleasure principle. In effect, the trauma reappears, frequently unveiled, insofar as the dream bears the subject’s desire to repeat the trauma (S11, 55). Lacan understands this apparently perverse irony as an urge towards homeostasis, ‘the restitutive function of the psychic organisation’, the mechanism that ‘absorbs, moderates the irruption of quantities of energy coming from the external world’, and returns the traumatized subject to a state of equilibrium (S2, 60), regulated by the dynamics of the pleasure principle (S2, 62). Freud illustrated this dynamic through his observation of the little boy and the wooden reel (PFL4, 283–4). Glossing Freud’s observation, Lacan argues that the activity ‘symbolizes repetition. . . . aimed at what, essentially, is not there, qua represented – for it is the game itself that is the Repräsentanz of the Vorstellung’ (S11, 62–3). The counterpart of the representation is the dream, which Freud spoke of as the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz, and which Lacan translates as ‘the place of the representation’ (S11, 60). This is, then,

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[T]he place of the real, which stretches from the trauma to the phantasy – in so far as the phantasy is never anything more than the screen that conceals something quite primary, something determinant in the function of repetition. . . . This, indeed, is what, for us, explains both the ambiguity of the function of awakening and of the function of the real in this awakening (S11, 60).27 The trauma as the encounter with the Real, like the Real itself, is resistant to signification. For this reason it is ‘specifically held responsible for the limits of remembering’ (S11, 129). The point here is that subjects repeat, or return to, the representation most obviously by repeating the dream. And behind the repetition is the desire to re-encounter that which has been missed, to find in the pleasurable association the lost object of desire, the Real of the psychic trauma. In other words, the repetition, in the dream, but also in other Vorstellungen, other specular images, provides ‘the place of the representation’, the discourse of the unconscious. It is here, that the content of the unconscious discourse is articulated according to the laws of condensation and displacement. And, I submit, it is for this reason that the discourse of the unconscious, understood in terms of Lacan’s linguistic theory of dreams, maps to the cinematic discourse.

Mapping unconscious desire to cinematic discourse The key point in Lacan’s dream theory is essentially quite simple: the dreamimage, and by association the specular image, operates according to the ‘laws of the signifier’. The complexity of his theory is in the nature of the signifier’s operation. As I have tried to make clear, because the specular image operates as a signifier according to the complex ‘laws of the signifier’, what you see is not what you get. Just as ‘the dream is a metaphor of desire’, so too is the specular image, the Mirror Stage image, and potentially, all specular images, including those of the cinema. In the next section, I will deal with the mechanisms of identification, but in terms of the cinematic discourse and the techniques of cinematic representation, Oudart’s Althusserian discussion of the Absent One is too simplistic. His argument, that the spectator’s perception of absence signifies for an absence that in the second shot is sutured into the fictional diegesis, situates the spectator as passive. Likewise, Heath’s structuralist claim that cinema offers the spectator multiple

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positions of ideological subjectivity. Both film theorists completely disregard the subject’s own active unconscious discourse: the subject’s desire for representation, the content of which is not directly represented within consciousness, which, by the processes of condensation and displacement along the signifying chain, finds those pleasurable associations that connote desire – the subject’s lack that will suture the subject into the discourse; the subject’s circling of ‘the desire of the Other’ that finds representation in the specular image that captivates; the subjective impression of reality grounding the subject’s personal history, personal truth as the desire to repeat the psychic trauma that resists conscious narration in the subject’s anamnesis. From this I want to suggest that cinematic discourse can be mapped to the discourse of the unconscious insofar as subjects are sutured into the signifying chain of the unconscious discourse, by the ‘laws of the signifier’, precisely because it is the discourse of their unconscious, displaced desire. Here again, I am necessarily anticipating what I have yet to explore about the suturing of subjectivity in relation to the specular image, the represented other. However, it is enough here to recognize that while Oudart understands suture to concern the subject’s relationship to the signifying chain of discourse, his concentration on Lacan’s structural linguistics fails to explore the operations of the signifying chain adequately. Misunderstanding the signifying chain, Oudart fails to give full consideration to the operation of the signifier, the specular image. My point here is that, in the techniques of representational cinema, what the subject perceives is not so much the solipsistic identification with their own look, as Baudry suggests, but the solipsistic identification with the unconscious contents of their own desire. In other words, the lack that the subject perceives in the shot/reverse shot is the lack in their own being. Oudart is right to say that suture is the joining of the field of absence with the field of presence. But to the extent that suture is an ‘effecting of the join of the subject in the structures of [cinematic] meaning’ (Heath 1977/78, 74), it is the joining of absence (or lack) in the subject with the field of presence in the specular image, the cinematic signifier. This is the point at which the cinematic discourse is situated, the imaginary of the filmic space. In this way, the subject is sutured into the signifying chain, the diegesis of the cinematic discourse, by identifying with the specular image, which itself condenses or displaces the subject’s desire to repeat the Real. And, in this way, as I suggested above, the suturing of the spectating subject into the diegesis of narrative space maps the analytic experience to the cinematic impression of reality.

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In Chapter 8, I will suggest that as Symbolic constructions of reality (cinematic/liturgical representation) map with subjective Imaginary reality (the subject’s doubly-determined, overdetermined subjective impression of reality), then subjects are sutured into the narrative of the ideological representation. However, before I can make this case I must consider in detail the mechanisms of identification: how subjects suture identity with an other, in particular with the cinematic specular other.

Suturing Identity with a Cinematic Other, Suturing Subjectivity Having suggested a Lacanian foundation for the cinematic impression of reality – as an impression funded by the subject’s (un(yet-to-be)spoken narrative) truth – and the cinematic discourse – as rooted in the subject’s captation in and by representation (in the signifying chain where the specular image condenses or displaces the subject’s desire to repeat the Real) – in this section, I will discuss the neo-Lacanian concept of suture: the joining or stitching together of identity (subjectivity) by the subject in relation to a (mis)recognized representation, itself located within a narrative flow that creates an impression of reality. My aim here will be to map analytic discourse to the spectating subject’s narcissistic identification with the cinematic other.

Identification with represented desire: a ‘genetic theory of the ego’ Once again, Lacan’s early work on the complexes provides the context to begin tracing his thought on subject identification. Specifically, it is in the context of his thinking on weaning, intrusion and the Oedipus that Lacan first published his ideas on the Mirror Stage, in which he discusses the power of the specular image and the narcissistic structure of the ego (Lacan [1938]1988, 17–18). Although he locates ‘captation by the imago of the human form’ at between six months and two and a half years (E, 19), Lacan never regards the Mirror Stage as a single moment in the child’s development. Rather, because it ‘reveals some of the subject’s relations to his image’ (S1, 74), it has a determining influence on the child’s behaviour (E, 19). For this reason, Lacan describes the Mirror Stage as a drama whose momentum is from ‘insufficiency’ – the lack of motor co-ordination of neo-natality, and the fragmented body-image (Lacan 1953, 15) – to ‘anticipation’ – the satisfaction

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offered by the prospects of integration and the image of its own totality (E, 4; 21). Lacan terms this his ‘genetic theory of the ego’, in which the subject’s relation to his body is in terms of an identification with an imago, ‘the psychic relationship par excellence’ (Lacan 1953, 12). Describing this identification as the ‘jubilant assumption of his specular image’, Lacan observes that it occurs in the pre-linguistic infans stage. In other words, identification with the specular other takes place in the Imaginary at a point before the subject enters the Symbolic register, specifically, ‘before it [the subject] is objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other, and before language restores to it, in the universal, its function as subject’ (E, 2). Lacan’s point is that, at the Mirror Stage, ‘The body in pieces [the imago of the fragmented body] finds its unity in the image of the other . . . its own anticipated image’ (S2, 54). The unity of the Mirror image is that of ideal unity, a Gestalt of the subject’s own body (E, 18–19). For Lacan, the Gestalt is an exteriority, its form more constituting than constituted, and its appearance to the subject ‘in a contrasting size that fixes it and in a symmetry that inverts it’: the Gestalt both ‘symbolizes the mental permanence of the I ’, and ‘prefigures its alienating destination’ (E, 2). In other words, because the unified Gestalt inaugurates the ego from a point external to the subject, the ego is both a fiction, the ‘Ideal-I’ that situates ‘the agency of the ego, before its social determination, in a fictional direction’ (E, 2), and a factor for the subject’s own alienation. The point to underscore here is that the subject’s relation to the image occurs in the Imaginary register. In Lacan’s terms the Imaginary refers, first, ‘to the subject’s relation to its formative identifications, which is the true meaning of the term “image” in analysis’, and secondly, ‘to the relation of the subject to the real whose characteristic is that of being illusory, which is the facet of the imaginary most often highlighted’ (S1, 116). As such, it is an event that is narcissistically charged, and related by the libidinal drives to the sexual instinct, which is similarly located in the Imaginary register (S1, 122). For Lacan, narcissistic and Imaginary become interchangeable terms: ‘the different phases of imaginary, narcissistic, specular identification – the three adjectives are equivalent when it comes to representing these matters in theory’ (S1, 188).

Libidinal investment, narcissistic identification: ‘dialectic of identification’ In his discussion of the libidinal economy, Freud posited a primitive autoerotic phase in which the child’s thumb sucking can be interpreted as a

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‘search for some pleasure’, and the child’s lips ‘behave like an erotogenic zone’ (PFL7, 97, 98). From his study of ‘sensual sucking’ Freud observed ‘three essential characteristics of an infantile sexual manifestation’: At its origin it attaches itself to one of the vital somatic functions; it has as yet no sexual object, and is thus auto-erotic; and its sexual aim is dominated by an erotogenic zone. (PFL7, 99) Lacan regards this primitive auto-eroticism as libidinal (S1, 113–14), constituting objects of interest. He argues that, through the libidinal investments, the subject’s instinctual development unfolds its world as a bipolar construction, ‘on one side the libidinal subject, on the other the world’ (S1, 113). Freud understood narcissism as an investment of libido in the ego – an ego-libido distinct from object-libido (PFL11, 68) – brought about by ‘a new psychical action’ (PFL11, 69). For Lacan, the Mirror Stage, with its erotic attraction to the specular image, supplies that ‘new psychical action’. However, the situation is made more complex in that, at this early point of development, in the Imaginary there is little to distinguish the ‘embryonic’ ego and object. Since both are sites of libidinal investment, the two become confused: ‘It is because they are strictly correlative and because their appearance is truly contemporaneous that the problem of narcissism arises’ (S1, 165). Lacan notes Freud’s postulation that with primitive narcissism, ‘it is impossible to distinguish the two fundamental propensities, the Sexuallibido and the Ichtriebe. They are inextricably mixed together’, and analytically indistinguishable (S1, 119). Lacan’s point is that the Libidotriebe [sex-drive] and the Ichtriebe [ego-drive] must be articulated within the framework of Imaginary relation: ‘The libidinal drive is centred on the function of the imaginary’ (S1, 122). Articulating the two drives leads Lacan to posit two narcissisms: one associated with the ‘real image’ the other with the ‘specular image’. The initial narcissism is associated with the corporeal image ‘on the level of the real image’, where it ‘makes possible the organisation of the totality of reality into a limited number of preformed frameworks’ (S1, 125). However, it is not easy to give a precise definition of what Lacan means here, although he seems to understand the initial narcissism to be attached to an unmediated primitive self-image. Much clearer is his thinking that the secondary narcissism is related to ‘the reflection in the mirror’ (S1, 125), the specular image. It is this secondary narcissism that has the captivating effect on the subject, which both holds the subject’s fascination and literally captures, imprisons, the subject in a ‘disabling fixation’ (Evans 1996, 20). Secondary narcissism

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constitutes the subject’s narcissistic identification: ‘This is what the theory calls secondary narcissism, which it does not distinguish from narcissistic identification’ (Lacan [1938]1988, 21). In this ‘first captation by the image’ Lacan discerns ‘the first stage of the dialectic of identification’ (E, 18), which he consistently explicates in terms of his idiosyncratic, Kojèvean, psychoanalytic (subject/subject) interpretation of Hegel’s Master-Slave dialectic (Hegel [1807]1977).28 Lacan observes the dialectic of identification in the alienating operations of the weaning, intrusion and Oedipus complexes, as well as in puberty and adolescence – the succession of subjective crises each of which produces its new synthesis in the ego’s mechanisms, ‘in a form that is always more alienating for the drives that are frustrated in the synthesis, and always less ideal for those that are normalized in the process’ (Lacan [1950]1997, 21). The alienation produced in these crises is the result of the fundamental psychic phenomenon of identification. Referring to the Mirror Stage, Lacan comments: the identification of the preverbal subject with the specular image is the most significant model, and also the most original moment, of the fundamentally alienating relation in which the being of humans constitutes itself dialectically. . . . each of these identifications develops an aggressivity that cannot be adequately explained by drive frustration. . . . this aggressivity expresses the discordance that is produced in the alienating realization. ([1950]1997, 21) Lacan’s point here is that human being is not self-generating but constituted dialectically (Lacan 1963, 84–5). Lacan argues that the dialectic of identification is responsible for producing consciousness from unconsciousness, being from ‘a certain non-being on which he raises his being’ (S3, 189). For Lacan, the conscious subject is the product of an intersubjectivity, which he argues is founded on the mechanisms of jealousy and paranoia, mechanisms that in his view accurately perform the master-slave dialectic.

The confusion of identity: jealousy, paranoiac knowledge and transitivism Freud’s conviction that jealousy is not rational but rooted in the unconscious, ‘a continuation of the earliest stirrings of the child’s affective life, and it originates in the Oedipus or brother-and-sister complex of the first sexual period’ (PFL10, 197), led him to distinguish normal, projected and delusional jealousies. Freud considered normal jealousy to be a compound of

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the grief caused by the loss of the loved object, and of the ‘narcissistic wound’, and that in addition, it is linked to ‘feelings of enmity against the successful rival’, a self-criticism that holds the subject’s ego accountable for the loss (PFL10, 197). By contrast, Freud regarded projected and delusional jealousies as pathological forms of jealousy, which have their origins in ‘unfaithfulness in real life or from impulses towards it which have succumbed to repression’ (PFL10, 198). The idea of projected jealousy became an important element in Lacan’s theory of paranoia29 and specifically in his notion of paranoiac knowledge.30 As Sandra Carroll observes: ‘In projection an internal perception is suppressed, and its content, after undergoing a certain kind of distortion, enters consciousness in the form of an external perception instead’ (Carroll 1995, 111). Lacan’s doctoral work on psychosis (1932), together with his research on the Papin sisters (1933b) and his reading of Freud on Schreber (S3; PFL9, 129–223), leads him to argue that the subject’s confusion of identity with the partner is because ‘the human ego is the other’ (S3, 39). Lacan’s point is that, originally an ‘inchoate collection of desires’, the subject, in the beginning, ‘is closer to the form of the other than to the emergence of his own tendency’ (S3, 39). Consequently, ‘the initial synthesis of the ego is essentially that of an alter ego’ (S3, 39). Lacan terms this ‘the imago of the One-Like’, and, on the basis that it is ‘linked by a certain objective similarity to the subject’s own body’, he describes the structure of this imago as ‘tantamount to a demand for similarity between subjects’ (Lacan [1938]1988, 16–17). Paranoiac knowledge, then, is knowledge founded on jealousy and the rivalries it sparks. Reflecting later on his work on paranoia, Lacan highlights the fact that it is ‘the earliest jealousy that sets the stage on which the triangular relationship between the ego, the object and “someone else” comes into being’, and that this jealousy circulates around the object of desire, the ‘object desired by someone else’ (Lacan 1953, 12). For Lacan, the critical point is that jealousy represents ‘not so much a deep-seated rivalry as a mental identification’ (Lacan [1938]1988, 16). He argues that, when brought together in pairs, children aged between six months and two years, an age coinciding with weaning and the onset of the Mirror Stage, become aware of ‘a rival, ie of an “other” as an object’ ([1938]1988, 16). Typically, the observable reactions between the children include showing off, seduction and tyranny, in each case their communication reveals not interpersonal but intrapersonal conflict in which ‘each partner confuses the part of the other with his own and identifies with it’ ([1938]1988, 16). The picture is complex in that the children are not only structured as rivals, they are caught in the processes of identification. Lacan observes, with Freud, the fact that a

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child who has hit another can say ‘The other beat me’. The child is not lying, ‘he is the other, literally’ (S3, 39; PFL10, 159–93). For Lacan, this demonstrates that there is ‘an unstable mirror between the child and his fellow being’, a see-saw, a confusion of identity (S1, 169). The point at which the see-sawing occurs is the point where the Mirror Stage vanishes. Borrowing from the work of Charlotte Bühler and the Chicago School, Lacan describes this phenomenon as transitivism, ‘the identification with the imago of the counterpart and the drama of primordial jealousy’ (E, 5; 1953, 16). This is the point when the subject’s knowledge becomes decisively mediated through the ‘desire of the other’; from here on the subject’s objects will be constituted in an ‘abstract equivalence by the co-operation of others’ (E, 5). This is what Lacan means when he comments that, ‘All human knowledge stems from the dialectic of jealousy’ (S3, 39). For Lacan, this becomes possible, precisely because ‘the human ego is the other’. Lacan argues that the construction of the desiring subject takes place around a centre ‘which is the other insofar as he gives the subject his unity, and the first encounter with the object is with the object as object of the other’s desire’ (S3, 39).

Procuring subjectivity: circulating the ‘rim’ and superimposing the lack In his discussion of the Mirror Stage, Lacan argues that identification effects alienation. His argument is that, in finding representation in the Gestalt, the subject is alienated by the fictional Ideal-I. His thinking is clarified in his 1964 discussion of the splitting of the subject, where Lacan again makes recourse to the structure of the sign: S/s. By now, the bar has become the cut, or put topographically, the rim, around which the subject circulates in ‘the operation of the realisation of the subject in his signifying dependence in the locus of the Other’ (S11, 206). When Lacan says that, ‘Everything emerges from the structure of the signifier’ (S11, 206), he is in continuity with his claim that ‘Jealousy is the archetype of all social feeling’ (Lacan [1938]1988, 18). In other words, he is on the intersubjective terrain of transitivism, in which the subject’s self-awareness comes from the other. His point is that, ‘The relation of the subject to the Other is entirely produced in a process of gap’ (S11, 206).

Procuring subjectivity: the double operation of the ‘rim’ In the relation between the subject and the Other, Lacan distinguishes two operations of a circular ‘rim process’. The first operation is constituted in

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terms of alienation, what Lacan terms the ‘vel’ of alienation (S11, 210). This vel involves an either/or choice, which amounts to ‘an exclusive choice between two parties, to be decided by their struggle to the death’ (Fink 1995, 51). His point is that the subject must choose whether or not to join itself with the signifier. His classic illustration is the threat of the highwayman: ‘Your money or your life! If I choose the money, I lose both. If I choose life, I have life without the money, namely, a life deprived of something’ (S11, 212). In these terms, the subject is caught between choosing ‘being’ or ‘meaning’. It is not possible to have both; it is a matter of either/or. If we choose being, the subject disappears, it eludes us, it falls into nonmeaning. If we choose meaning, the meaning survives only deprived of that part of non-meaning that is, strictly speaking, that which constitutes in the realisation of the subject, the unconscious. In other words it is of the nature of this meaning, as it emerges in the field of the Other, to be in a large part of its field, eclipsed by the disappearance of being, induced by the very function of the signifier. (S11, 211) The echoes of the master-slave dialectic are obvious (S11, 212–13) insofar as what is at stake in the vel of alienation is ‘the subject being assigned the losing position’ (Fink 1995, 51). Fink points out that the sides of the vel are not even, that in confronting the Other the subject makes a ‘forced’ choice and immediately drops out. Fink draws attention to Lacan’s concept of the subject as lack (manque-à-être; literally, lack-of-being). In failing to come forth as a someone, the subject lacks being: ‘The subject exists – insofar as the word has wrought him or her from nothingness, and he or she can be spoken of, talked about, and discoursed upon – yet remains beingless’ (1995, 51–2). If the first operation constitutes alienation, in the second operation, ‘the subject finds the return way of the vel of alienation’ (S11, 218). Lacan terms the return, separation, and the circuit is completed, but with ‘an essential twist’. Lacan uses the term separation playfully, in ‘all the fluctuating meanings it has in French’, including the meaning ‘to be engendered’. The question he is addressing is: ‘How . . . has the subject to procure himself?’ (S11, 214). His answer is found in the operations of desire and ‘the superimposition of two lacks’ (S11, 214).

Representation and the fading of the subject The context for the double operation of the rim process is the Mirror Stage, and Lacan makes explicit how the representation is implicated in the

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alienation. Lacan’s earlier discussion of Freud’s notion of representations (Vorstellungen) takes place at the level of the unconscious, where representations operate according to the laws of condensation and displacement (metaphor and metonymy) as associative and combinatory elements (S7, 61). Now he maps the representative of the representation (Vorstellungsrepräsentanz) onto the mechanisms of alienation, and, in this way, argues that, ‘the first signifier, the unary signifier, emerges in the field of the Other and represents the subject for another signifier’ (S11, 218). It is not entirely clear what Lacan intends by ‘the unary signifier’, but if he is taken to mean the specular image of the Mirror Stage, the effect of the unary signifier is to inaugurate the aphanisis, the disappearance of the subject.31 [W]hen the subject appears somewhere as meaning, he is manifested elsewhere as ‘fading’, as disappearance. There is, then, one might say, a matter of life and death between the unary signifier and the subject, qua binary signifier, cause of his disappearance. The Vorstellungsrepräsentanz is the binary signifier. (S11, 218) In these terms, the binary signifier is the cut, the double edged operation of the alienating specular image and the separating (castrating) phallus. And Lacan argues that, in the ‘interval between these two signifiers’, the desire of the Other circulates, a movement he describes as the disappearance, ‘the fading of the subject’ (S11, 208). It is in so far as his desire is beyond what she brings out as meaning, it is in so far as his desire is unknown, it is in this point of lack, that the desire of the subject is constituted. (S11, 218–19) For Lacan, ‘There is no subject without . . . aphanisis’. Alienation establishes the dialectic of the subject (S11, 221), the moment of a ‘fading’ being closely bound with the subject’s Spaltung or splitting suffered from subordination to the signifier (E, 313).

Procuring subjectivity: the superimposition of the two lacks Lacan completes the circular process between subject and other by way of superimposing the lack (of being) in the subject and the lack (of the phallus) in the (m)Other. From the mid-1950s, Lacan explicitly notes that ‘the fundamental Hegelian theme [is that] man’s desire is the desire of the other’ (S1, 146). From

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1958, in relation to the phallus as signifier, this becomes ‘the desire of the Other’, where the Other is the mother – the (m)Other – and the phallus has become a veiled signifier, the ‘ratio of the Other’s desire’.32 Here, desire is ‘essentially “desire of the Other’s desire”, which means both desire to be the object of another’s desire, and desire for recognition by another’ (Evans 1996, 37–8). As such, the subject must come to recognize this desire of the Other: the mother’s desire for the phallus is a desire for what she lacks from the father (the fulfilment of her demand to be desired by a desiring other).33 Lacan clarifies the meaning of his concept of ‘the desire of the Other’ by explaining that the context for the formula is the relation of rivalry, a relation belonging to the order of alienation since it is initially in the rival that the subject grasps himself as ego. . . . the initial outburst of appetite and desire comes about in the human subject via the mediation of a form which he at first sees projected, external to himself, and at first, in his own reflection. (S1, 176) If the (m)Other’s desire is the phallus, the veiled ratio of the Other’s desire, the child wishes to satisfy her desire by being the phallus (the child’s desire having become the desire of the (m)Other). In other words, the child desires to fill the lack in the (m)Other. In so desiring, the child questions what it is that the (m)Other is saying to it. Lacan observes that, in the intervals of her discourse is the locus of metonymy (displacement), the place where ‘desire crawls, slips, escapes, like the ferret’ (S11, 214–15). In reply to its question ‘He is saying this to me, but what does he want?’ the subject finds an answer in the previous lack, its own disappearance: ‘The first object he proposes for this parental desire whose object is unknown is his own loss – Can he lose me?’(S11, 214) The result is that, One lack is superimposed upon the other. The dialectic of the objects of desire . . . now passes through the fact that the desire is not replied to directly. It is a lack engendered from the previous time that serves to reply to the lack raised by the following time. (S11, 215) With this, the circular process between subject and (m)Other is completed. In completing the circular process, the second operation is what Lacan earlier terms ‘the second moment, the specular moment, the moment when the subject has integrated the form of the ego’ (S1, 177). Lacan’s answer to his question about how subjects procure the ego is in terms of the subject’s suture of a pseudo-identification, which he holds to

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occur during ‘the moment of seeing’, as a conjunction of the Imaginary, ‘scopic register’, and the Symbolic, ‘invocatory, vocatory, vocational field’ (S11, 117–18).34 For Lacan, the sutured ego is nothing other than the fictional Gestalt, the ideal-ego (Ideal-I) fixed, at the point where the subject stops as ego-ideal, a paradigm of all the forms of resemblance that will bring over on to the world of objects a tinge of hostility. . . . From this point on, the ego is a function of mastery, a play of presence, of bearing (prestance), and of constituted rivalry. (E, 307)

Modes of subject identification: the Ideal-I and the ego-ideal Mention of the rivalrous object poses again the problem of the Real in terms of the infant’s identification with an imago. Lacan’s configuration of the emerging ego imbricates his notion of the Mirror Stage onto the intrusion complex, the two events, manifesting in the pre-linguistic infans stage from the end of the first six months, being coincident on the ‘the tapering off of weaning’ (Lacan [1938]1988, 17). Hence he asserts that the ego becomes aware of itself through ‘the one like me’ ([1938]1988, 19), and observes that the Mirror Stage, ‘clearly reveals tendencies which constitute the subject’s reality’ ([1938]1988, 17). This constitution is precisely because the one like me ‘presents a good symbol of that reality’ ([1938]1988, 17), and the imbrication is such that Lacan regards the Mirror Stage as ‘a particular case of the function of the imago, which is to establish a relation between the organism and its reality’ (E, 4). Lacan is speaking here in general terms, but the imago’s function in identification and the formation of the ego is unmistakable. The infant, already set on a strategy of negation/disavowal by the psychic trauma of weaning, misconstrues his objective similarity to ‘the imago of the One-Like’ ([1938] 1988, 16) and, assumes that imago, making an Imaginary, transitivist identification with it such that the ego is inaugurated in the direction of a fiction (E, 2). Lacan’s description is less prosaic: Unable as yet to walk, or even to stand up, and held tightly as he is by some support, human or artificial . . . he nevertheless overcomes, in a flutter of jubilant activity, the obstructions of his support and, fixing his attitude in a slightly leaning-forward position, in order to hold it in his gaze, brings back an instantaneous aspect of the image. (E, 1–2)

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Nevertheless, his point is direct: in analytical terms the Mirror Stage is ‘an identification’ (E, 2). Prior to the subject’s entry into the ‘master-slave’ dialectic of the intrusion complex, Lacan locates a moment in which ‘the I is precipitated in a primordial form, before it is objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other’ (E, 2). Lacan terms this primordial I the ‘Ideal-I’ (je-idéal), and regards it both as ‘the source of secondary identifications’ and as that which situates the ‘agency of the ego’ in its fictional direction (E, 2).35 The fictionality is underscored by the fact that the agency of the ego is understood to be characterized ‘by the phenomenological essence that [Freud] recognizes as being in experience the most constant attribute of the ego, namely, Verneinung [negation]’ (E, 15). This means that the association already seen to exist between the imago and the Real, and which is understood to imply negation/disavowal as an important psychic strategy (the aim of which is to re-establish the unity of the lost dyad), is now to be regarded as constitutional within the Ideal-I and integral to the formation of the ego. In other words, the Ideal-I, which is synthesized between the imago and the Real as a unified Gestalt, is in fact founded upon the negation/disavowal of that Real. In short, the ego is formed in identification with a representation of desire, an imago, and, regardless of the later subject’s success in synthesizing a dialectical resolution of his discordance as I with his own reality, the fictional direction of the agency of the ego ‘will only rejoin the coming-into-being (le devenir) of the subject asymptotically’ (E, 2). Clearly, for Lacan, the ego is an Imaginary function, ‘a discovery yielded by experience, and not a category which I might almost qualify as a priori, like that of the symbolic’ (S2, 36–7). Consequently, he argues that it should not be confused with the subject (S1, 193–4).

Symmetrical identifications: imaginary projection and symbolic introjection Lacan’s use of the term ‘Ideal-I’, characteristic of his post-war writings, picks up Freud’s distinction between the Ichideal and the ‘precisely symmetrical’ and oppositional Idealich (PFL11, 88). Dylan Evans notes that, although ‘it is difficult to discern any systematic distinction between the three related terms “ego-ideal” (Ich-ideal), “ideal ego” (Ideal Ich), and superego (Über-Ich)’, the distinction is nonetheless significant, and I suggest it will help to clarify the precise modes of identification the subject is making. In this case, Ideal-I ‘is the source of an imaginary projection. . . . a promise of future synthesis

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towards which the ego tends’ (Evans 1996, 52). Evans makes the point that the Ideal-I is an ever-present companion of the ego. As I have shown, Lacan’s point is that even before the ego is able to affirm its identity, identity and image have become confused. Lacan terms the intrusion of image into identity ‘the narcissistic intrusion’, and regards ‘The world to which this [mirror] phase belongs is the narcissistic world’ (Lacan [1938]1988, 18). In other words, the structure of the ego is narcissistic and, as with the processes of repression, the libidinal energy for ego identification derives from ‘narcissistic passion’ (E, 21), motivated, at least in part, by the ‘scoptophilic (the desire to see and be seen) drives’ (Lacan [1938]1988, 18). The pleasure in seeing is derived from seeing the One-Like, and since that other is another of the same, the pleasure of the look is narcissistic. The infant’s fundamental narcissism is further underscored by Lacan’s assertion that aggressivity is narcissistic, being ‘the correlative tendency of a mode of identification’ (E, 16). The structure of intrusion provides a foundation for the Oedipus complex. According to Lacan, psychoanalysis locates a ‘psychological puberty’ (Lacan [1938]1988, 19) in about the fourth year. Language about the drama of jealousy and ‘the introduction of a third’ clearly resonates with the Oedipus complex, a parallel Lacan makes explicit: ‘The Oedipus is set in motion by a triangular conflict in the subject; we have already seen that the play of forces arising from weaning produces a similar formation’ ([1938]1988, 20). The sexual drives that accompany this ‘puberty’ lie at the heart of the Oedipus complex and focus the child’s gaze on its near object. Significantly, Lacan claims the parent of the opposite sex as the near object,36 but, given the prematurity of the drives, the child’s sexual desires for that parent are frustrated. The frustration of these drives ‘ties the knot of the complex’, and the child attributes frustration to ‘a third object whose proximity and interest make him the normal obstacle to satisfaction, ie the parent of the same sex [namely, the father]’ ([1938]1988, 19). The tension that results from frustration is only resolved when the infant succeeds in repressing his sexual tendency and sublimating the parental (i.e. paternal) image. This is a move of profound, if problematic, importance. Preserving ‘a symbolic ideal in consciousness’, the parental image is permanently and doubly inscribed in the psyche: in the superego, as the agent of repression, and in the ego-ideal, as the agent of sublimation ([1938]1988, 19).37 In other words, the imago of the father is translated into superego and egoideal. Taken together, they represent the accomplishment of the Oedipal crisis, the achievement of Oedipal identification. According to Evans, while the superego can be regarded as ‘an unconscious agency whose function is

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to repress sexual desire for the mother’, the ego-ideal ‘exerts a conscious pressure towards sublimation’, providing the co-ordinates by which the subject can adopt a gendered position (Evans 1996, 52). As the symmetrical opposition to the Imaginary projection of the Ideal-I, the ego-ideal is a Symbolic introjection, ‘an internalised plan of the law, the guide governing the subject’s position in the symbolic order’ (Evans 1996, 52). For Lacan, the normal state of the Oedipus complex is sublimation, by which he means ‘an identificatory reshaping of the subject’ (E, 22). In other words, the sublimation that concludes the Oedipus complex is in fact a secondary identification (ego-ideal), the result of the introjection of the imago of the parent of the same sex (Lacan [1938]1988, 22), and the parallel to the narcissistic identification with the imago of the One-Like (Ideal-I). Because of the subject’s identification with the imago of the same-sex parent, the superego and the ego ideal can reveal traits similar to individual characteristics of that imago in the subject’s experience.This is what the theory calls secondary narcissism, which it does not distinguish from narcissistic identification. ([1938]1988, 21) The parasitic nature of sublimation is underscored in relation to the structural rivalry of Oedipal identification. Lacan admits this is not self-evident. Indeed, it can only be conceived ‘if the way is prepared for it by a primary identification that structures the subject as a rival with himself’ (E, 22).

Mapping suture to identification with a cinematic other I want here to argue that Lacan’s theory of the suturing mechanisms of narcissistic, specular identification with the One-Like offers to explain the suturing of cinematic subjectivity with the specular, film star other. The point to underscore is that the subject’s relation to representation, and by definition therefore to the sutured identity itself, occurs in the Imaginary register. This is the psychic location where the complexes transmit an impression of reality and where signifiers operate by the laws of condensation and displacement. According to Lacan the relation of subject to image is narcissistic precisely because it is founded on the mental identifications of jealousy, the subject’s identity becoming confused with ‘the imago of the One-Like’ (Lacan [1938]1988, 16): consequently, Lacanian subjectivity is constituted in the splitting of the subject. This reinterprets – or interprets correctly – Lacan against psychoanalytic film theory, which proposes that subjects are sutured by being joined into

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the structures of meaning. Against this, I am arguing that subjects are sutured when they identify with an other, and that (when it comes to cinema) this identification stitches the subject into the narrative space of the filmic diegesis, to become a participant in the ideological ‘reality’ of Hollywood realism. I have already dealt with film theory’s work on suture, where I noted in particular that, due to their commitment to Althusser, Oudart and Heath wrongly propose that subjects are sutured when they are joined to the structures of meaning. As a result of giving preference to the subject’s Imaginary relation to reality, Screen downplayed the place of character-actor/star as a focus for a psychoanalytic interpretation of spectator identification and so became theoretically confused with reference to the way female spectatorship in particular, and identification in general, have been theorized. However, despite the cul-de-sac into which this theoretical confusion led, attempts to abandon Lacanian theory have ended in a return to analytic categories, either explicitly or implicitly. In either case, the spectator can be understood to forge an identification with the screen character-actor/ star in a way which profoundly informs their own identity in the direction of the ideology. Laura Mulvey’s theory of female spectatorship and the male gaze is typical of Screen’s Althusserian appropriation of Lacan, and although she dominated feminist film theory in the 1980s, she nonetheless typifies the theoretical confusion.38 For Mulvey (1975), the issues of spectatorship and identification are closely bound together. Mulvey theorizes female spectatorship around the voyeuristic male gaze and regards cinema as the mimetic analogue of voyeurism that situates woman as the cinematic sexual subject within an economy of male desire and privileged (phallic) power. Consequently, when the spectating woman sees the woman within the filmic diegesis as icon for the male gaze, Mulvey argues that she is actually denied the possibility of spectating as a woman; that she has ceased merely to view the diegetic woman and has begun to identify with perspective of the male gaze. The difficulty with Mulvey’s thesis is that, positioning women in a relationship of ambiguity to their own gender, she leaves their identification oscillating between poles on the feminine/masculine binary.39 At best female spectators identify as spectators from a position assigned by men,40 but even more significantly, Mulvey is unable to account for the pleasure women derive from viewing film in their own terms. In contrast to Mulvey, Jackie Stacey (1994) aims to account for the complexity of women’s identification with female film stars by adopting a cultural studies perspective that mediates between the woman as ‘effect of

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discourse’ and the ‘real’ woman in the audience. Stacey argues that, despite the foreclosure of female spectatorship by feminist psychoanalytic film theory, real women find pleasure in, and make identification with, cinematic images of women. Stacey proposes that to explore ‘the ways in which female identification contains forms of desire which include, though not exclusively, homoerotic pleasure’ requires an understanding of what she terms ‘eroticising identification’ (1994, 29). This is borne out by Stacey’s qualitative inquiry. When she questions ‘real’ women about the nature of their identification with female Hollywood stars of the 1940s and 1950s (Stacey 1994, 138–70), her respondents signal a recurring theme of homoerotic pleasure, speaking freely of their love and devotion to their favoured star.41 Like Stacey, Richard Dyer (1998) distances himself from psychoanalysis. In his definitive study of film stars and their social meaning, Dyer investigates the circulation of what he terms ‘star images’, questioning how these images influence the ways spectators understand both their own identity and that of others. Dyer frames his study in terms of the operations of ideology, which he regards as the mediating context in which stars are created by the forces of capitalist production and audience consumption. (In effect the production-consumption dialectic could be taken to represent the different perspectives of Mulvey – ideological production – and Stacey – audience consumption.) Dyer’s concern is not so much with the ideological content of the star phenomenon, but with ‘what specific kind(s) of ideological work it does, or tries to do, the nature of its “ideological effect”’ (1998, 20).42 I have already noted Dyer’s observation that stars are ‘representations of people’ whose independence of their fictional screen appearances gives them greater reality than their screen characters, but also disguises the fact that stars are as much a construction as any fictional character. To reiterate Dyer’s point, stars collapse the distinction between their authenticity as a person and the authentication of the characters they play. Again, as I noted above, Dyer considers that stars like Will Rogers and Shirley Temple embody, and so reinforce, the social values of the American Dream, values which at times can seem under threat. But, in addition to this embodiment, Dyer proposes that stars also have the ability to compensate people for qualities lacking in their lives (1998, 28). For Dyer, this compensation shifts spectator attention from the threatened value to a lesser, ‘compensatory’ value. Citing Robert K Merton’s study of Kate Smith’s US war-bond drive, Dyer highlights how Smith’s success was dependent on the image of the 1930s popular singer: ‘there was a congruence between Smith’s image and the themes used to sell the bonds

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(eg patriotism, self-sacrifice, etc.) but above all . . . Smith’s sincerity’ (1998, 29). Smith’s radio broadcasts corroborated her image of sincerity insofar as she worked tirelessly and without pay. In other words, ‘Smith’s image is a condensation of various traditional values “guaranteed” by the actual existence of Smith as a person, producing her as an incarnation of sincerity’ (1998, 29). Having said this, a question remains concerning the relation of the imago, the representation, Vorstellung, the specular other, to the subject’s Real. Put in cinematic terms, the question concerns the relation of the cinematic One-Like, the specular film star other, to the spectator’s solipsistic identification with the unconscious content of their own desire. In effect, imagos and the complexes into which they coalesce re-present the Imaginary reality that is based on the desire to recover a lost Real. Lacan is quite clear that the psychic trauma (of weaning) orientates the infant according to a strategy of negation/disavowal, a strategy that refuses real (actual) experience in favour of Imaginary reality (re)constituted by the representational power of the complex and its allied imago. For Lacan, the Imaginary reality, constituted in terms of the child’s desire, is the breast, the Imaginary objet petit a. But, because signification of objet petit a is always according to ‘the laws of condensation and displacement’ (S7, 61), the subject ‘finds’ again the lost object only in ‘its pleasurable associations’ (S7, 52) with another signifier. It is for this reason that the specular other can be interpreted as the condensed or displaced signifier of the spectator’s unconscious desire. This is why, in cinematic terms, the specular film star other can be interpreted in terms of the spectator’s solipsistic identification with the ‘Ideal-I’, the unconscious content of their own desire, an identification that facilitates the suturing of cinematic subjectivity with the specular, film star other. Giving ‘Lacan himself a chance’ (Žižek 2001b, 2) has enabled me to reconsider three areas associated with film theory’s failure to understand, and therefore correctly apply, psychoanalytic film theory’s conception of suture. Specifically, these areas are: the cinematic impression of reality; cinematic discourse; and the suturing of cinematic subjectivity. My assumption has been that a more Lacanian interpretation of suture and narrative space is necessary, particularly if film theory is to contribute to understanding the liturgical construction of religious identity; and my conclusion from this ‘return to Lacan’ is that the cinematic experience maps with analytic (unconscious) experience. So, I am suggesting several related things. First, I am suggesting that the subject’s powerful, if unconscious narrative, funded by the subject’s Real, which constructs a subjective impression

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of reality, predisposes the spectating subject to interact with cinematic impressions of reality as a performance of the Imaginary ‘reality’. Secondly, I am suggesting that the operations of Imaginary reality, the discourse of the unconscious funded by the psychic strategy of negation/ disavowal, predisposes the spectating subject to interpret the narrative diegesis of the cinematic discourse, as a performance of the unconscious discourse of the Imaginary reality. Thirdly, I am suggesting that the mechanisms of the desire of the Other, the Imaginary, narcissistic, specular identification with the imago of the One-Like (Ideal-I), which operate to suture subjects into the signifying narrative chain, predispose the spectating subject narcissistically to confuse themselves with the imago of the cinematic One-Like, the specular film star other. My argument here is that, operating according to the same psychic processes of negation/disavowal by which the subject comes to ‘believe’, and so participate in, the Imaginary reality of the refusal of the Real, the cinematic subject comes to ‘believe’, and so participate in, the cinematic reality that is always already ideologically informed.43 By extension, I want to suggest that the liturgical subject similarly comes to ‘believe’ and so participate in the ideologically informed Episcopal/ecclesial reality. In the final chapter, I will apply these insights to a consideration of liturgical subject construction.

Chapter 8

Suturing Religious Identity in the Sacramental Narrative

The argument I am developing is that psychoanalytic film theory can illuminate the operation of liturgical representation insofar as it is implicated in the construction of religious identity or liturgical subjectivity. Having seen the ways in which existing religious film analysis has failed to treat film qua film as a representational medium, I established how film and liturgy can be regarded as parallel media of representation. I then identified concepts within psychoanalytic film theory that religious studies can use to explain the construction of religious identity in relation to the sacramental narrative, and I ‘returned to Lacan’ in order to clarify further the psychoanalytic film theory concept of suture. What has emerged from is an understanding of suture as a mapping of the subject’s own predispositions and psychic strategies. The subject, is already psychically predisposed towards a subjective impression of reality. In this subjective the realm, where the unconscious discourse of the desire is funded by the psychic strategy of negation/disavowal, the subject narcissistically confuses him/herself with the imago of the other, and constructs a pseudoidentification. What is important is that, because it articulates the unconscious desire of the subject’s internal discourse, this pseudo-identification reinforces the subjective impression of reality towards which the subject has a prior predisposition. This account may suggest that the subject reaches a point of completion, a stasis point from which no further development is either necessary or possible. However, because of the alienation inherent in the construction of subjectivity, sooner or later the subject will find him/herself no longer signified by the signifier with which s/he is narcissistically confused; the desire for representation will be revived and the process will turn another cycle. I want to suggest, then, that what might be called ‘the process of suture’ be thought, not as a linear process leading to stasis, but as a cycle, repetitive and self-reinforcing. Having explained in depth the first half of this cycle, I want, in this final chapter, to concentrate on the second half of

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the process: identification, narrative suture and participation. This will enable me to demonstrate how the insights gained from theorizing representational cinema in terms of psychoanalysis can illuminate understanding of liturgical subject construction. First, I will consider the worshipper’s identification with the priest as a liturgical representation. I will argue that the narcissistic (mis)recognition of the worshipper with the priest is an identification sustained, on the one hand, by an erotic attraction, and on the other, by a negation/disavowal (the worshipper negating/disavowing the priest’s personality, the priest negating/disavowing his own sexual being/fulfilment). In short, I will argue that liturgical subjectivity is a pseudo-identification sustained by a mutual negation/disavowal, the effect of which alienates worshippers from themselves and leaves the priest bearing the worshipper’s weaknesses. Secondly, I will consider the operation of narrative suture. I will argue that, in the collusion that surrounds the identification between the priest and the worshipper, each party signifies for the other, and that the content of the signification is dependent on the place assigned by the Other within the signifying chain. I will show that, by their identification with the priest, the liturgical subject’s unconscious discourse of desire is reinscribed into the salvific/pastoral practice of the sacramental narrative. Finally, I will consider the worshipper’s participation in the ideological ‘reality’ of Episcopal/ecclesial authority. Taking the liturgical moment of reinscription as the Eucharistic Anamnesis, I will argue that in the moment of identification with the priest and reinscription in the sacramental narrative, the worshipper first of all becomes a participant in the sacramental ‘reality’. However, identification with liturgical representation alienates worshippers from their own desire to the extent that participation is in an ‘empty Word/speech’. From this, I will argue that the initial participation is made in the context of a ‘full Word/speech’, the authoritative, Episcopal interpretation that imposes a truth about the subject’s desire upon the worshipper, and that, consequently, worshippers become participants in the ideological ‘reality’ of Episcopal/ecclesial authority. For the sake of developing my arguments, in the following sub-sections I will make reference to case studies drawn from film and autobiography.

Identification with the Priest as a Liturgical Representation Constructing the priest as a liturgical representation In Leo McCarey’s heart warming, but implausible, The Bells of St. Mary’s (1945), the formulaic follow-up to his previous runaway success, Going My

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Way (1944),1 a new Roman Catholic priest assumes parochial duties in a large US city parish. His duties include managing the church’s somewhat dilapidated junior high school, and on arrival, Father Chuck O’Malley (Bing Crosby) finds the buildings neglected and the school on the verge of closure. In fact, the institution is only being kept afloat by the dedicated commitment of the sisters, led by the erstwhile Sister Benedict (Ingrid Bergman), who run the school. Between them, Fr O’Malley and Sr Benedict set about securing the school’s future, eventually persuading an irascible local entrepreneur, Horace P. Bogardus (Henry Travers), to donate to the school his newly constructed office block (built on land he had previously bought from the school to pay for repairs to the old building). In the space of a school year, Fr O’Malley’s folksy, home-spun wisdom not only brings Bogardus back to the Church, but also succeeds in reuniting a long estranged couple and their daughter – and for good measure the singing priest cheers the sisters with a charming rendition of ‘The Bells of St. Mary’s’. No doubt some of the success of McCarey’s sequel2 can be attributed to its ‘feel good’ qualities, particularly as it was a wartime release. Indeed, both films are relentlessly reassuring, if not downright romantic, in their unerring belief in the goodness of human nature, the values of honest hard work, and the efficacy of simply ‘being nice’. But, this aside, I am interested in the casting of Bing Crosby as Fr O’Malley and the nature of the spectator’s identification with him. At the time, Crosby was at the height of his powers. Emerging as a singer in the late 1920s and early 1930s, his ‘baritone was virile and passionate, yet warm, relaxed and subtle, his style seemingly effortless and . . . at the time, ground-breaking’.3 After radio had made him a household name, with songs about ‘not needing a bundle of money to make life happy [the] right message for the decade of the Great Depression’,4 Crosby made the crossover into acting, initially via Mack Sennett ‘two-reelers’. In 1940 he began his long running partnership with comedian and off screen friend Bob Hope in The Road to Singapore, a minimally plotted burlesque of comedy, adventure, music and romance that franchized into a succession of Road to . . . movies. By 1946, following his work with McCarey, Crosby had become the highest Hollywood earner, grossing $325,000, and for five consecutive years, between 1944–48, he topped the Quigley Poll, an annual poll of exhibitors that determined the top box-office draws (Robertson 1991, 75, 94). Crosby was a natural talent, whose strength lay in his relaxed, easy-going, intimate style, and spectators identified with him. I suggest that, more than identify with, they felt that they could be Crosby, that what he represented was actually attainable by them. As David Thomson expresses it, Crosby’s singing ‘had all the charming naturalness that every amateur crooner

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believed lay within his grasp’ (Thomson 1995, 159). From the position I developed in the previous chapter, I suggest that this can be accounted for as follows. The spectators’ relation to Crosby, as the specular image, is typically narcissistic, they are literally captivated (imprisoned) out of jealousy by his screen image – the projected jealousy that constitutes ‘paranoiac knowledge’, the confusion of identity in which ‘the human ego is the other’ (S3, 39): the spectator’s desire to be Crosby. The ‘desire of the Other’ – the ‘desire of Crosby’ – being a narcissistic identification, first alienates the spectator, who, by associating with his chosen icon (adopting a style of singing or a way of tilting his hat to a jaunty angle), assumes the Other’s ‘being’ over against his own ‘meaning’. But the ‘desire of Crosby’ is an ambiguous desire: it is both the desire to be the object of Crosby’s (the Other’s) desire, and the desire for recognition by Crosby (the Other). Having been alienated from himself, the spectator must now return, in other words procure an identity, more accurately a pseudo-identity with the ‘desire of the Other’. The obvious question here is: what might Crosby’s desire be? I suggest that it must at least be the desire for recognition by an Other, that is the desire for fans or followers, the desire for an audience, which is a form of power, an association with the phallus. Thus, the spectator having first of all ‘disappeared’, in the sense of lacking being, superimposes his own lack (desire for being) onto what he perceives to be the desire of the Other (the desire for recognition, the desire for the phallus) and procures the pseudo-identity that is the assumption of the desire of the (m)Other. The suggestion that in procuring a pseudo-identity with Crosby the male spectator is simultaneously assuming the desire of the (m)Other may seem tendentious. However, the point so often missed by Lacan’s commentators is that the signifier of desire (the specular image) is precisely a signifier that operates according to the ‘laws’ of the signifier, the ‘laws’ of condensation and displacement. Thus, as an element in the unconscious discourse of desire, the desire for the (m)Other is condensed and displaced from the Real into an Imaginary, in accordance with the learned strategy of negation/disavowal, which is allied to the narcissistic confusion and which effects the fictional identification of the subject’s ego. The corollary of this is that Crosby is a single cinematic representation that, for certain spectators at least, signifies an unconscious desire, the precise contents of which would be the subject of innumerable discussions as each spectator assumes the position of analysand to develop ‘his truth, his integration, his history’ on the analyst’s couch. The point is that the spectator, in relation to the specular image, has constituted an ego by the (mis)recognition of himself in relation to a representation of desire – Crosby as an Ideal-I. And because the pleasure of


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the look is narcissistic, and because there is an erotic attraction to the specular image, one should not rule out the suggestion that the pleasures associated with seeing Crosby on screen include an erotic attraction, either hetero- or homoerotic. (Although Crosby was principally a comedic rather than romantic lead, nevertheless, even as Fr O’Malley he is able to generate a subtle but compelling sexual ‘chemistry’ with Sr Benedict.5) There should be no doubt that, in the off screen world, the priest who says daily mass in his Roman Catholic parish is to be considered an Ideal-I. This is clear from the Vatican II Decree on the Ministry and Life of Priests (PO), when it details the ‘Priests’ call to perfection’ (PO, 12–14). While it is the case that all baptized Christians are to consider themselves ‘obliged even in the midst of human weakness to seek perfection’ (PO, 12), the priest, who by the sacrament of Holy Orders is configured to Christ the priest, is ‘bound by a special reason to acquire this perfection’ – he is, in effect, to be both Ideal-I and ego-ideal. I have already noted the complexity of identifications associated with priestly representation. In Chapter 4, I drew attention to the instruction that, in his representative function as both Christ (in persona Christi) and the people (in nomine totius populi), the priest should encourage the faithful to ‘associate . . . with himself in offering the sacrifice to God the Father through Christ in the Holy Spirit’ (CP, 60); in other words, to identify with the priest and so participate in the Eucharist. Consequently, it is the priest’s duty to lead his flock ‘not only by word but also by example’ (SC, 19), and so to promote an active participation in the liturgy that is both internal and external. And, while it might be the case that the priest is obliged to limit the intrusion of his personality in the performance of his Eucharistic duties (CP, 313; EP, 11, 17), the fact remains that he is the source of the laity’s instruction about both the nature of Christ and his own representative function as in persona Christi, configured, as he explains, to Christ. As such, he is the primary reference for the calibration of lay identity. In Chapter 5, I noted Dyer’s definition of film stars as people who represent people but who have an existence that endures beyond, and is independent of, the fictional screen characters they play. The implication is that stars are themselves complex identities. For example: Bing Crosby is a man; Bing Crosby is Fr O’Malley; Bing Crosby is a fictional film star persona. Spectators, of course, make their initial identification with the diegetic character performed by Bing Crosby, in this case, Fr O’Malley. But they also

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make a more sustained identification with the fiction that is Bing Crosby the star. As I discussed with reference to Bruce Willis, Crosby’s character, Fr O’Malley, represents a social type, in this case, a second generation Irish Catholic, whose family has presumably made good in America, having fulfilled their ambition to escape the poverty that drove them to leave Ireland. And as a star, Crosby will represent the aspirations of his fans who want to identify with the reflection of themselves as they would like to be. The point is that Crosby is able to represent the universal and the particular insofar as his fans negate/disavow his integrity as a real (actual) man. I suggested, in Chapter 4, that there is a case to be made that the star’s representation parallels the priest’s dual representation: in persona Christi and in nomine totius populi – both represent a universalized aspiration; both represent an embodied particular. But I want to suggest here that this parallel can be developed further. Insofar as both are obliged to limit the intrusion of their personality in the performance of their representative duties, the star and the priest are both fictional representations: both are constructs and both are sustained by an erotic attraction and a negation/disavowal.

Priestly representation (i): a fiction sustained by erotic attraction All priests are charged with the duty to ‘promote the liturgical instruction of the faithful and also their active participation, both internal and external. . . . and in this matter they must lead their flock not only by word but also by example’ (SC, 19, emphasis added). And because priests lead by example, they deserve to be loved: ‘The faithful for their part ought to realize that they have obligations to their priests. They should treat them with filial love as being their fathers and pastors’ (PO, 9). The point is that, as good shepherds, priests should evoke an emotional response in their flock, if not an emotional attachment. Whatever else it may be, the worshipper’s relation to the priest, like the spectator’s relation to Crosby, is a relation to a specular image, an Ideal-I. As such, this relation is typically narcissistic. My argument is that, motivated by jealousy, the worshipper is captivated by the image of the priest as a specular other and desires to be what the priest signifies. Something of this is evident in the diegesis of Roland Joffé’s film, The Mission (1986).

The Mission (1986) Joffé’s film relates the historical events surrounding a Jesuit mission to the Guarani Indians and its leader, Father Gabriel (Jeremy Irons), who is


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inspired by the Christian message of love and moved by the martyrdom of a priest he had previously sent to the Guarani. The commitment of Fr Gabriel to the spiritual and material wellbeing of his people and his mission is absolute, and he is an exemplary embodiment of the call to be a good shepherd. So, when Papal Emissary Cardinal Altamirano (Ray McAnally) arrives to inspect the mission, Fr Gabriel introduces the Cardinal to the Indians, whose work on the plantations returns them a share in the community’s profits. Learning that the plantation’s income for the previous year was 120,000 escudos, Altamirano inquires how it was distributed. When he is told that the profits are shared equally among the community, the Cardinal recalls, with an air of privileged dismissal, that he has heard this is a doctrine taught by a radical French group; he is made visibly uncomfortable by the priest’s unselfconscious reminder that the doctrine was that of the Christ’s early followers. Fr Gabriel’s shepherding extends beyond the Guarani to the mercenary cum slave trader, Rodrigo Mendoza (Robert De Niro). After killing his brother in a dual over Carlotta (Cherie Lunghi), Mendoza is ‘rescued’ by Fr Gabriel who challenges him to do penance by joining the mission and serving the Guarani Indians. Mendoza not only accepts Fr Gabriel’s provocation, he eventually becomes a Jesuit priest himself. What completes his conversion is the inspiration of Fr Gabriel. In other words, Mendoza desires to be a Jesuit because he wants to be what Fr Gabriel signifies. However, the mission is caught up in Rome’s struggle to retain its temporal authority in Europe and its power politicking with the Spanish and Portuguese trading empires, and ultimately the intention behind the Altamirano’s visit is revealed when the mission is handed over to the slave trading Portuguese. Faced with the choice of waging a hopeless and pitiful fight against the combined might of Spain and Portugal, the convert, Mendoza, appeals for Fr Gabriel’s support. Fr Gabriel’s response, that he lacks the strength to live in a world in which might is right, indicates that his deep commitment to pacifism is an expression of the way of love. The film’s ‘Foreword’ indicates the ‘truth’ of the historical events represented, even if the film itself is revisionary and polemical, not to say ‘woefully pretentious’ (Thomson 1995, 366). Joffé portrays the Guarani Indians as noble savages, living carefree in a paradise playground. But, acknowledging that the South America Indians continue the struggle for their land and culture, Joffé’s ‘Afterword’ makes clear that his film is inspired by, and dedicated to, the many priests whose faith and love have motivated them to support justice for the Indians, even at the cost of their lives. The point I want to underline here is, as I have shown with Crosby, that the desire of the Other is an ambiguous desire. Mendoza desires to be what

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Fr Gabriel wants – a follower; but he also desires recognition from Fr Gabriel: in which case, Mendoza is first alienated from his own being and then procures his pseudo-identity in relation to the ‘desire of the Other’. This assertion might be thought undermined by the fact that, when threatened by the approaching Portuguese and Spanish mercenaries, Mendoza reverts to type and takes up his sword to defend the Guarani. However, Mendoza is only following the example of Fr Gabriel, who, uncharacteristically for a Jesuit, rather too easily discards a lifetime of obedience to his superiors, and refuses to abandon the mission and the Indians. In taking up the sword Mendoza seeks Fr Gabriel’s blessing.6 In wanting to be what the priest signifies, Mendoza is clearly attracted to Fr Gabriel. Jeremy Irons, the gaunt faced British actor who plays Fr Gabriel, has been described as ‘the thinking woman’s pin up’.7 Whereas Crosby was typically a comedic lead, Irons is associated with the romantic lead, and the narcissistic confusion that enables identification with Irons as Fr Gabriel can be seen to be charged with an erotic attraction. What is true in the film theatre seems equally the case in the filmic diegesis where Mendoza appears to be caught up in the homoeroticism circulating within the all male Jesuit community. Desiring to be what Fr Gabriel wants, Mendoza is alienated from his own being but procures a pseudo-identity in relation to what Fr Gabriel signifies. In other words, Mendoza negates/disavows the real (actual) separation from his (br)Other, the cause of which was the intrusion of his own passion and sword, with his narcissistic identification with Fr Gabriel. He seems at times to be captivated by Fr Gabriel’s very image. In this way, The Mission articulates something of the erotic attraction that circulates between the priest and his congregation. My point here is that, in relation to the priest as a specular image, the worshipper constitutes a pseudo-identity, looking at the priest and narcissistically (mis)recognizing himself in relation to the liturgical representation of his own desire – the priest as an Ideal-I. And because the pleasure of the look is narcissistic, because there is an erotic attraction to the specular image, the pleasures associated with seeing the priest – on screen or on the presbyterium – include an erotic attraction, be that hetero- or homoerotic. In consequence, the priest can be regarded as one who evokes an erotic attraction, but, as I will show, must himself negate/disavow his own sexual being/fulfilment, his ‘human weakness’ (PO, 12), in order to procure his identification with Christ, the Ideal-I, and so be identified as an Ideal-I, a liturgical representation of Christ.


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Priestly representation (ii): a fiction sustained by negation/disavowal The extent of the negation/disavowal surrounding Crosby’s star image is evidenced by the ‘revelation’ that behind the apparently unaffected image of natural charm ‘he was, in fact, a rather bitter man, a fierce parent, and a cold companion’ (Thomson 1995, 160). Such was the inconsistency between Crosby the star and Crosby the man that in 1983, six years after his death, Gary Crosby, the eldest of his four sons from his first marriage, published an autobiography, Going My Own Way (1983), in which he details the physical and 8 emotional abuse he and his brothers suffered at the hands of their father. For the priest, the negation/disavowal, the limitation of personality, is institutionalized to the extent that Presbyterorum ordinis unambiguously states that the priest’s configuration to Christ through Holy Orders remedies his human weakness by the holiness of Christ. [When] every priest in his own way assumes the person of Christ he is endowed with a special grace. By this grace the priest, through his service of the people committed to his care and all the People of God, is able the better to pursue the perfection of Christ, whose place he takes. The human weakness of his flesh is remedied by the holiness of him who became for us a high priest ‘holy, innocent, undefiled, separated from sinners’ (Heb. 7.26). (PO, 12, emphasis added) While some may indeed find strength in ordination to overcome the weakness of their ‘flesh’, this is manifestly not the case for all.

Father John McNeill 9 In his spiritual and psychological autobiography, Roman Catholic scholar and former Jesuit priest Father John McNeill relates his very personal struggle to reconcile his homosexuality with his strong religious faith. Fr McNeill frankly admits his ambivalence about his vocation, which was still ‘based primarily in my fear that as a gay man the only way I could get to heaven was by denying and suppressing my sexuality and my desire for human love’ (McNeill 1998, 42). In his own mind the only way to accomplish that denial was to enter a religious order in the hope that there he would find the environment and the support for a life of celibacy. The youngest of five children, the death of his mother when he was only four was the irrevocable intrusion that precipitated Fr McNeill’s ‘psychic

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trauma’ and initiated his personal strategy of negation/disavowal. The profound impact of this death was cruelly compounded during her wake on Christmas Day 1929, as he watched a cat stalk its prey, he suddenly felt the whole universe, including God, was hostile. ‘I concluded that God had taken my mother from me because I was a bad child; God was punishing me for my wickedness’ (1998, 2). Fr McNeill’s subsequent spiritual development was troubled by an image of God as the God of fear,10 an image that was fed by home – where, months after his mother’s death his father married his deceased wife’s sister, she sacrificing her job and boyfriend, he abandoning any possibility of a sexual life, in order to bring up the children who were aware of ‘the burden of our responsibility for our parents’ frustration and unhappiness’ (1998, 10) – and school, St Joseph’s Collegiate Institute, run by the Christian Brothers, where education was secondary to the emphasis on discipline. My fear of God and of Jesus was based in part on the distorted image I grew up with concerning Jesus’ role as judge. During high school, I was exposed to many a retreat master’s traditional talk on sin, death, judgement, and eternal hellfire . . . designed to scare us into being good. (1998, 18) And the ‘scare’ tactics included a particular and predictable attitude to sexual pleasure. The young men from Irish, Italian, and Polish blue-collar families who attended St Joseph’s in 1938 were taught that all sexual pleasure outside marriage was serious sin, and that taking the slightest pleasure in any sexual thought or fantasy would be mortal sin. Despite this, Fr McNeill candidly admits: ‘Once I experienced the sexual pleasure of masturbation, I became compulsively involved with it. For the next twenty years, I was in a constant struggle to try to suppress my sexual desires’ (1998, 17, 18).11 Although, after ordination, Fr McNeill was effective as a counsellor to gay men, his compulsive acting out of sexual needs in casual encounters in Parisian toilets filled him with shame, guilt and self-hatred, almost to the point of suicide; the pain intensified due to the failure of prayer and penance. Yet, the experience of finding first a short term, then a life partner led Fr McNeill to realize that his compulsions were motivated by a ‘drive toward intimacy’, and actually to accept ‘gayness as God’s gift and a special blessing’ (1998, 61). However, having negated/disavowed the intrusion of his mother’s real (actual) death with the threat of punishment by the God of fear, having sought to repress his sexuality because he had been scared ‘into being good’, Fr McNeill’s reintegration as a man able to experience ‘sexual intimacy in the context of human love’ (1998, 61) was simultaneously his


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disqualification as an Ideal-I. Fr McNeill had compromised his commitment to celibacy, integral to his commitment as a Jesuit – a commitment to limit the intrusion of his personality into the performance of his representative duties; literally, in Lacanian terms, a call to the impossible (since for Lacan the Real is impossible).12 So, just as Bing Crosby is simultaneously a man, Fr O’Malley, and a fictional film star persona, in the same way: Fr McNeill is a man; Fr McNeill is a priest; Fr McNeill is a fictional liturgical persona. In other words, in accepting ordination, Fr McNeill made his identification with a liturgical representation (with Christ as the Ideal-I) – choosing alienation from his own ‘being’ in order to accept ‘meaning’ as a priest – and became himself a liturgical representation (of the Ideal-I) available to others for their identification. (The complexity of these identifications is such that the liturgical representation with whom Fr McNeill identifies (Christ, the Ideal-I) is itself informed by the many priests with whom Fr McNeill has previously identified – The Christian Brothers, fellow Jesuits, etc.) The point here is that, far from the ‘human weakness of his flesh’ (PO, 12) being remedied by configuration to Christ, the priest’s psychic strategy is institutionalized as he negates/disavows his human weakness in order to identify with the liturgical representation (of the Ideal-I) and in order to identify as a liturgical representation (of the Ideal-I).

The worshipper’s solipsistic identification with priestly representation In the process of identification, subjects identify with a liturgical representation, which they assume to be a Gestalt, but which is in fact itself a fractured subject, institutionally self-alienated by the Church’s demand to negate/disavow the ‘human weakness of his flesh’: the priest is a man; the priest is a priest; the priest is a fictional liturgical persona. For the priest himself, identification with his calling is one stage removed from his real (actual) self, in all its ‘human weakness’, whereas the worshipper’s identification, with the fictional persona, is removed a stage further,

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the effect of which is a double negation/disavowal of the priest as a man. This is because the fictional persona with which worshippers identify is related to the priestly function and not his ontology – effectively worshippers negate/disavow, they limit the intrusion of, the priest’s personality. Consequently, the man himself is occluded, mistaken for the function. As far as the construction of liturgical identity is concerned, the corollary is important. In constructing his own identity, the worshipper relates the fiction (that to which he aspires) directly to his own ontology, and the disjunction between what the worshipper is told and believes he should be (perfect) as compared with what he knows to be the case about himself is unbridgeable. Like all Christians they have already received in the consecration of baptism the sign and gift of their great calling and grace. So they are enabled and obliged even in the midst of human weakness to seek perfection, according to the Lord’s word: ‘You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect [τελειος]’ (Mt. 5.48). (PO, 12) Dyer may be right to suggest that the star’s image condenses various traditional values which are ‘“guaranteed” by the actual existence of [the star] as a person’ (Dyer 1998, 29). However, for the priest there is no such guarantee, because there is no recognition of the priest as an actual person. What can be said, then, about the worshipper’s relation to the priest as fictional persona, the priest as star? In my discussion of the cinematic OneLike, I argued that this was the relation of the spectator’s solipsistic identification to the unconscious content of their own desire. To return to Lacan, the roots of this content are buried in the subject’s Imaginary, in the psychic trauma that initiates the strategy of refusing – negating/disavowing – the real (actual) experience in order to pursue an Imaginary reality, the pursuit of objet petit a found only in its ‘pleasurable associations’. As is apparent in the pathos of Fr McNeill’s casual Parisian encounters, what is consciously sought is not what is unconsciously desired. As Fr McNeill puts it: I realize now that, throughout my life, my intense longing for intimacy with God had as a source my childhood longing for a closer relationship with my father, a longing made more intense by my gay longing for male intimacy. My father’s emotional distance and his discomfort with me, because I was so different from my brothers, fed my fear that God, too, would take distance from me and dislike who I was as a gay man. (McNeill 1998, 5)


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The point here is that, in identifying with Christ as the liturgical representation, the Ideal-I, the worshipper identifies solipsistically with the unconscious content of his own desire, condensed or displaced onto a (mis)recognized specular other (signifier of unconscious desire), which has the effect of alienating him from himself. The consequence of this is that, the priest literally bears the weaknesses (sins) of his people before God, a high calling approximated to by some, a heavy cross of guilty failure shouldered by others. If he fails, overcome by the human weakness of his own flesh, his failure is the failure of the worshipper’s unconscious desire, the ‘Ideal-I’ – an injury inflicted against the worshipper’s psychic health. But, if he is successful, he has the potential to inspire a community with hope. The stakes are indeed high. The representational parallels that I have identified between the star and the priest can be seen to be sustained by a simultaneous erotic attraction and a negation/disavowal. Worshippers constitute their pseudo-identity when they narcissistically (mis)recognize themselves in relation to the liturgical representation, the priest as an Ideal-I, the specular representation of his own displaced desire. Because the (mis)recognition is narcissistic, the attraction to the specular image is erotic (hetero- or homoerotic), and as such, the priest evokes an erotic attraction. However, in order to procure his identification with Christ, the Ideal-I, and be identified as the liturgical representation of Christ, the priest is compelled himself to negate/disavow his own sexual being/fulfilment, in other words, the priest’s negation/ disavowal is institutionalized. In this section, I have argued that, identifying with Christ as the Ideal-I through the priest as his liturgical representation, the worshipper is identifying solipsistically with the unconscious content of his own condensed or displaced desire and that the effect of this is the alienation of the worshipper from himself. However, my observation is that, in this alienation, the priest bears the worshipper’s weaknesses before God in such a way that his failure fails the worshipper’s unconscious desire, injuring the worshipper’s psychic health, but his success inspires the worshipping community with hope. Having accounted for the liturgical subject’s narcissistic confusion with the liturgical representation (the imago of the other), I want now to consider how the articulation of the worshipper’s unconscious desire, through this identification, stitches, or sutures, the worshipper into the sacramental narrative, leading to participation in the ideological ‘reality’ of Episcopal/ ecclesial authority as a liturgical subject.


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Joining the Narrative and Participating in Its ‘reality’ Signifying for: the reinscription of desire into the sacramental narrative In my discussion about mapping unconscious desire to cinematic discourse, I outlined how, for Lacan, the subject’s desire for representation slides along the chain of signification, being condensed and displaced, as the subject finds pleasurable associations that connote desire. The reason for this condensation and displacement is that the content of the subject’s desire is not directly represented within consciousness precisely because it is unconscious desire: the subject, lacking meaning and desiring representation, sutures a pseudo-identification with a specular other as the pleasurable association signifying or connoting that desire. As with the worshipper, the priest’s meaning is given according to the signifying position he assumes within a chain of signification, in this case, the signifying chain of Eucharistic liturgy. And although that signification necessarily fails fully to denote the priest, meaning is nevertheless connoted to him to the extent to which he is associated with the worshipper’s unconscious desire.13 My point is that in the sacramental narrative of the Cross, the priest bears the identifications of his people before God and they identify with him as he performs his liturgical functions. There, in the place where he limits the intrusion of his own personality, where his own identification with the liturgical representation fails or succeeds, he is in nomine totius populi.

The Exorcist (1973) Agnostic Jewish director, William Friedkin, has understood something like this structuralist positioning. Friedkin’s The Exorcist relates the desperation felt by a mother, Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn), over the increasingly bizarre behaviour manifest by her 12-year-old daughter, Regan (Linda Blair). Exhausted by the failure of doctors and psychiatrists to cure or even begin to explain her daughter’s condition, MacNeil is advised that the only, if unlikely, hope she has left is an exorcism. According to the Director of the Barringer Clinic who suggests it, is a ‘stylized ritual’ that works by the force of suggestion: the victim believed in possession and that belief can be used to help find relief. The narrative structure of Friedkin’s film is instructive with respect to the role of the priest, interpreting him as the focus of an identification the meaning of which is connoted by his position within the chain of liturgical signification.


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The thematics of The Exorcist are constructed around a number of related binary oppositions: good versus the reality of evil; religion versus science; spirituality versus psychiatry. Much of the tension in these oppositions is embodied within the character of Father Damien Karras, SJ (Jason Miller). As a consultant psychiatrist Fr Karras may be among the best, but as a Jesuit priest he is losing faith, if not in God, then in the efficacy of his priestly ministry. Sent by his Order to study psychiatry, he has come to trust in the effectiveness of science over traditional pastoralia. But Friedkin is interested in the power of religion in situations where science has little to offer. Thus, when Fr Karras admits to MacNeil that, since learning about mental illness, paranoia, schizophrenia and the other psychopathologies he studied at Harvard, exorcisms no longer happen, the atheist mother explodes that her daughter doesn’t need a psychiatrist, she needs a priest. By the inclusion of two reverse parallel sequences, Friedkin’s film is divided into three more or less equal parts.14 Each sequence of three scenes has a central scene detailing Fr Karras celebrating the Eucharist. The first sequence, comes at a point before MacNeil and Fr Karras have met, when MacNeil still holds faith in science and Fr Karras, whose mother has just died, is confronting his doubts about his priestly calling.15 In this sequence, when he says Mass, Fr Karras is seen, first (in close-up) offering prayers for the repose of his mother’s soul, and then (in long shot), during the Communion Rite, where he prays aloud words adapted from the prayer of the Centurion (Mt. 8.8), which he follows with, ‘May the body of Christ bring me to everlasting life.’ This scene is preceded by one in which Regan fights against Doctor Klein’s (Barton Heyman) injection prior to examination, and followed by a scene in which the doctor discusses with MacNeil his diagnosis of lesions in the temporal lobe. In the second sequence Fr Karras is seen (in close-ups of head and hands) saying the words of consecration. This liturgical scene, almost twice the length of the first, is preceded by Fr Karras discussing the situation with MacNeil, and followed by his ‘examination’ of Regan. In his original script, William Peter Blatty suggests that Fr Karras’ fingers, ‘holding the host, tremble with a hope he dares not hope: that the words he has just spoken might be literally true’ (Blatty 1998, 111). However, another reading is equally possible. The chiastic parallelism of these sequences is clearly intended, and the point of interest is the way Friedkin edits the shots of Fr Karras saying Mass: A: Medical examination of Regan B: Mass (26 seconds) C: Discussion with doctor

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C1: Discussion with priest B1: Mass (48 seconds) A1: Priest’s ‘examination’ of Regan As Kuleshov observed, the succession of one shot by another alters ‘the apparent meaning of the component shots’ (Kovacs 1976, 34), and the resulting metaphor that sparks between the shots changes according to the sequence. In the first, Friedkin cleverly describes Fr Karras’ interiority: the priest’s pastoral practice has become intimidated by his psychiatric expertise and Friedkin articulates Fr Karras’ sense of impotence by juxtaposing the ancient Communion Rite within the sophistication of modern scientific knowledge. However, in the second sequence, having discovered that psychiatry itself is impotent, the words of Institution seem no longer obsolete, but are returned to the heart of Fr Karras’ pastoral ministry.16 In dealing with the broken body of Christ, Fr Karras is in nomine totius populi; and when, in the coming exorcism, he deals with the broken body of Regan, he will take the ultimate step of limiting the intrusion of his personality in order to take the child’s place and bear her weakness in a final, fatal identification. Here, Fr Karras’ meaning, his signification as a priest is given (or returned) by his position within the contrasting chains of signification. Within the first narrative sequence, the liturgy is incongruous, situated, as is Fr Karras himself, within the signifying chain that is scientific discourse. However, within the second narrative sequence, the liturgy, sutured into a different signifying chain, the discourse of pastoral practice, where it makes renewed sense. The knowledge that validated the first narrative is found by experience to be deficient, while in the second narrative, the desperation of mother and priest re-validates a prior knowledge and in so doing re-validates an existing practice. The idea that the significance of the liturgical representation is determined by its place within a signifying chain is important beyond discussions of the ‘Kuleshov effect’ and cinematic editing. This is because the signification of the liturgical representation is radically affected by the other signifiers in the chain – and particularly so if the liturgical representation is relocated into an alternative signifying chain. This importance is again illustrated filmically.

On the Waterfront (1954) Elia Kazan’s film, On the Waterfront was inspired by a series of Malcolm Johnson articles written in the New York Sun about a wildcat strike on the


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New York docks in 1951. The exploited longshoremen protested against the mob-controlled union abuse of workers by loan-sharking, ‘shape-ups’ and ‘kick-backs’, and the contract murders and beatings of dissidents. According to Jesuit film scholar, Neil Hurley, screenwriter Budd Schulberg was attracted to the story and wrote the character of Father ‘Pete’ Barry (Karl Malden) into his script (Hurley 1991, 96). Basing his character on the Jesuit, Father John Corridan, featured in Johnson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning series,17 Malden’s Fr Barry is converted to his zeal ‘for justice and the welfare of the men in his non-territorial parish’ (1991, 98) by what he witnesses on the quayside. After the death of Joey Doyle, a dissident stevedore who had been about to expose the mob, Fr Barry comforts the man’s grieving sister Edie (Eva Marie Saint) with old the cliché about time and faith being great healers. However, the priest finds his ineffectual response confronted by Edie’s indignation. When Fr Barry tells her that he will be in the church if she needs him, Edie fiercely rejects his expression of impotent pastoral concern, rebuking him that no saint was ever heard of hiding in church and demanding to know who killed her brother. This outburst weighs on Fr Barry, who, like many other off screen priests and ministers converted to the social gospel, realizes what his priestly formation had not prepared him for, and he concedes, with Edie, that docks are his parish. The incongruity of a priest regarding the dock as his parish, of an ecclesiastic engaging the economic, becomes clear when a group of dock workers explain to Fr Barry how the corrupt system works. Complaining that there is no place safe enough to talk without the risk of violence, the priest offers the church as a safe place. ‘Kayo’ Dugan’s (Pat Henning) expletive reply sums up the dockers’ incredulity. The commonsense understanding that, just as it is implausible to situate the Church (or the liturgy) within a scientific discourse, it is equally implausible to situate the Church within an economic discourse (because it has no meaning, it lacks credibility, within the signifying chain). However, Fr Barry does precisely what his Jesuit college Fr Karras does, insofar as he restores credibility by situating his priestly action (liturgical representation) within the discourse of pastoral practice. And from that place of traditional identification, in nomine totius populi, he becomes available to bear the dockers’ identification into the unfamiliar terrain of social and economic justice. So, when Dugan is ‘accidentally’ killed while working in a ship’s hold, Fr Barry preaches an impromptu sermon, telling his congregation that the crucifixion didn’t only take place on Calvary, but that the killing Joey Doyle, the maiming of ‘Kayo’ Dugan and the pressurizing of any good man to keep

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silent are all crucifixions. Told to get back to his church, Fr Barry retorts that the docks is his church and that Christ is to be found on the waterfront.18 By standing with them, and interpreting their sufferings as a crucifixion, the priest stitches the identifications of his people into the discourse (the signifying chain) of social and economic justice reinscribed as the sacramental narrative of the Cross.19 In my earlier discussion about mapping cinematic discourse to the discourse of the unconscious, I argued that subjects are sutured into the signifying chain of the unconscious discourse of displaced desire by the ‘laws of the signifier’ (E, 161). It is important at this point to note that, because it is unconscious, the nature of identification with priests like Frs Karras and Barry cannot be assumed to be a purely ‘religious’ identification: the atheist mother and the New York dockers may now associate with the Church, but their motivations are necessarily mixed. The point is that identification with the priest is always a condensed/displaced identification, which is equally always unable fully to represent the subject. In other words, it is a ‘best fit’, and those who identify with him are sutured into the signifying chain of the sacramental narrative because their desire for representation, which operates by the ‘laws of the signifier’, identifies with the priest (as the signifier of their desire) as the signifier slides along the signifying chain of their own unconscious discourse.

The Fugitive (1947) An example of this slippage can be seen in John Ford’s The Fugitive. Based on the Graham Greene novel, The Power and the Glory (1940), Ford relates a ‘true’ story set in a small fictional state somewhere north or south of the equator. On the run, following ‘the revolution’, a nameless fugitive priest (Henry Fonda) is hunted by an idealist revolutionary, Police Lieutenant Rafael (Pedro Armendáriz). Rafael’s commitment to the cause is made apparent when we learn that he sacrificed the girl he loved, Maria Dolores (Dolores del Rio) to fight for a better world. But, the abandoned pregnant Maria, rejected by her father, compelled to make her living from ‘loose living’, is the human face of the suffering the revolution has brought. When charged with finding and eliminating the last known priest in the new republic, Rafael explains that his simple strategy is to take hostages, shoot them if the priest is not surrendered, and then take more hostages. For Rafael, the cost in lives will be worthwhile, because religion and religious people must be driven out of the country.


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Ford’s film explores questions about hope and human identity, and frames the signifying of unconscious desire within the drama of a manhunt. Rafael, sanguine with revolutionary zeal, fails to understand that the revolution has merely exchanged one corrupt system for another. He also fails to comprehend that the battle is not for minds but hearts. So, when pursuit of his quarry unwittingly takes him to the village where the fugitive is hiding, the Lieutenant in turn cajoles, threatens and ridicules the villagers to betray their priest. Yet, if his tactic is to contrast the superstitions of priestcraft with the material advance promised by the revolution, his intention is ideological. The success of the revolution demands the elimination of all competing ideologies: especially one that can control hearts and minds – that intends to control hearts and minds, volition and intellect, what the worshiper ‘knows and desires’ (OBOB, 9, emphasis added). And finally, having captured the fugitive, Rafael sees his chance. Seizing on the priest’s weakness in the face of execution, he tempts him with remission if only the priest will publicly repudiate his faith and admit to the people that he has been lying to them. Rafael’s real ignorance is about the depth at which identity is constructed within the human psyche. But the fugitive priest would be wrong if he thought the villagers’ desire to protect him was motivated solely from religious ardour. As I noted, Ford’s film is a framing of the signifying of unconscious desire: the unconscious desires of Rafael, of the fugitive priest and of the villagers. And, importantly, the ways in which each signifies for the other. Most explicit here is the way in which the villagers signify for the priest. Managing a short-lived escape to the safety of a neighbouring state, the fugitive recuperates in a clinic where he makes his ‘confession’ to a doctor, uncomfortable at the priest’s candour. Although he had endured the revolution for five years, the early period was relatively easy, if not actually exciting; but as other priests fled the terror, this cleric began to regard himself as a brave man, possibly a martyr. However, while as a public figure he may be able to deceive others, the priest admits he was unable to deceive himself and, because he realizes that his behaviour was inspired only by pride, he concludes it was not, and could not be, courageous. It is of course questionable whether the quality of an action is undermined by its motivation, but the point here is that, for the first time, this priest recognizes his own unconscious desires: that his service was motivated and that he wanted something from the people – and wanted it so badly that he risked his life pursuing it, literally a confrontation of meaning over being, a matter of either/or (S11, 211). In his identification with the people, he is, in effect, identifying solipsistically with the contents of his own unconscious desire.

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But if, in identifying with the signifier Martyr, the priest desires recognition (unconsciously desiring representation as an Ideal-I), the villagers’ protection is equally motivated. In a brief moment, following Rafael’s decision to take hostages and his arrival in the village, Ford shows us how the priest’s presence has changed the people. Whereas, when the priest arrived the streets had been empty, now the happy village folk joyfully process to market, singing and celebrating with traditional folk songs. The implausibility of this rapid spiritual transformation only highlights the point that the people have invested their hopes for a counter-revolution, a return to life as it had been, in this troubled priest. For the villagers, the revolution was an intrusion into what they now remember as the ‘good life’. In that life, while individuals may or may not have been particularly religious, the Church was at the centre. Now their aspirations for a return have become displaced onto the priest, the only tangible relic of that lost idyll – and their pleasurable association. In effect, there is a collusion in the identifications made between priest and people, each signifies for the other, according to the place assigned by the Other within the signifying chain of their respective discourses of desire. While the villagers signify for him his unconscious desire for recognition, veneration as a martyr, the priest signifies for them their conscious political desire for a return to the life stolen from them, lost by the trauma of the intrusive revolution, which is itself predicated on a displaced unconscious desire within each individual for a return to their personal Real. The priest’s failure here is not actual but potential. It is not the impurity of his motives but the possibility that he may betray the identification of the villagers and recant his faith. But, by remaining true to their identification, he sutures them into the sacramental narrative of the Cross, not on this occasion through saying the Mass,20 but because his very life has become an embodiment of its sacrifice. As with the other cases discussed (MacNeil, the longshoremen), the villagers illustrate the way in which identification with the priest sutures worshippers into the sacramental narrative of the Cross, reinscribing their own particular motivations according to its salvific/ pastoral practice.

The worshipper’s participation as a subject of Episcopal/ecclesial ‘reality’ My aim, in this chapter, is to demonstrate that insights gained from theorising representational cinema in terms of psychoanalysis can be applied to the theorizing of liturgical subjectivity. My argument, in this final section, is


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that, just as in the cinema spectators participate in an impression of reality, which maps to, and can be regarded as premised upon, the subject’s predisposition to construct a subjective impression of reality, so too in liturgy: worshippers participate in an impression of reality that maps on to, and is premised upon, their predisposition to construct a subjective reality. In Chapter 6, I noted that Baudry’s theory of the ‘transcendental subject’ was at odds with Lacan’s conception of the subject’s ‘truth’ as necessarily concerned with the subject’s (repressed/forgotten) history. However, Baudry nevertheless connects with Lacan’s understanding of the subject’s relation to narrative. In articulating his theory of the subject’s ‘truth’ as the unconscious historical narrative that resists conscious narration, Lacan stresses the extent to which subjects are always already situated within an un(yetto-be-)spoken narrative. In his psychoanalytic practice, Lacan insists on the value of taking an anamnesis, or history, from the subject, as the first step towards bringing this as un(yet-to-be-)spoken narrative into speech. In other words, to bring into the Symbolic that which is (lost) in the Imaginary. However, Lacan’s anamnesis is a narration of the subject’s history informed by the subjective impression of reality. For Lacan, the object of analysis is effectively to bring the subject’s anamnesis from being an ‘empty Word’ into a ‘full Word’; from false speech to true speech.21 As David Macey puts it: ‘If language and speech are the medium of psychoanalysis, the liberation of full speech is its objective’ (Macey 1988, 147). My point here is that, in the same way that subjects participate in the subjective impression of ‘reality’ that is constructed by their own ‘empty Words’, spectators, by identifying with the star and being stitched into the cinematic narrative, accept the ‘empty Word’ of Hollywood and participate in its cinematic impression of reality constructed, as it is, towards the ideology of ‘our’ American way. As such, the cinematic narrative acts as a type of anamnesis, mapping cinema’s impression of reality to Lacanian Imaginary reality and thereby performing the subject’s Imaginary ‘reality’. Given that I am arguing that what is the case with theorizing representational cinema finds parallel with theorising liturgy, the implication to be drawn from this should be obvious. In the same way that spectators participate in the ‘reality’ constructed by the ‘empty Words’ of Hollywood, worshippers, by identifying with the priest and being stitched into the sacramental narrative of the Cross, accept the ‘empty Word’ of the Church and so participate in the ideological ‘reality’ of Episcopal/ecclesial authority. It is important to keep in mind what Lacan intends by the terms ‘full Word/speech’ and ‘empty Word/speech’. As he expresses it: ‘Full speech is

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a speech full of meaning [sens]. Empty speech is a speech which has only signification’ (Evans 1996, 191). The value of the terms is in their ability to express the extent to which subjects are able to articulate their desire: the one form of speech being ‘closer to the enigmatic truth of the subject’s desire’, while in the other ‘the subject is alienated from his desire’ (Evans 1996, 191). However, Lacan remains confusing here. Does he equate the ‘full Word/speech’ with the Symbolic? If he does, and in my view this is the way to understand him, then he should be understood to mean that the objective of psychoanalysis is liberation into the Symbolic. But in that case, in which Order does the ‘empty Word/speech’ operate? Is it also in the Symbolic, or is it better placed in the Imaginary? I suggest that Lacan understands ‘empty Word/speech’ as the subject’s own ineffectual attempts at liberation into the Symbolic. However, the attempt is doomed and results only in alienating the subject from his desire. These distinctions, although somewhat ill-defined, nevertheless can be helpful in mapping liturgical anamnesis to Lacan’s notion of the anamnesis and its strategic and tactical value for the analysand’s liberation into the Symbolic. There is a very clear and immediate parallel between liturgical and psychoanalytic anamnesis in Lacan’s definition of the anamnesis as a rememoration of the subject’s history, particularly when ‘history’ is understood not as ‘the past’, but as ‘the past in so far as it is historicised in the present – historicised in the present because it was lived in the past’ (S1, 12). Lacan’s point is that the anamnesis is an ‘empty Word/speech’ insofar as it alienates the subject from his desire. From my accounts of liturgical representation and the sacramental narrative of the Cross, it should be clear that liturgical anamnesis can equally be considered an ‘empty Word/speech’ insofar as it too alienates the worshipper from his desire. To be specific, in the Anamnesis, worshippers engage in a rememoration, a re-membering of the salvific events as if present at Christ’s sacrifice. In this rememoration, worshippers recall the sacrifice of the Cross (narrative) in the context of their desire for unity (identification) with Christ through the priest, and participate in the ‘reality’ that they are sinners in need of forgiveness. However, these identifications are sustained by erotic attractions and negations/disavowals within the worshipper (who desires to be what the priest signifies yet simultaneously negates/disavows the ‘human weakness of his flesh’), so installing the priest as a fiction. As participants in the sacramental ‘reality’, worshippers are fictionalized by the collusions made in order to identify. The effect of this is that worshippers are alienated from


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their desire (for freedom, liberation, justice), as it is condensed/displaced and reinscribed within the sacramental narrative of the Cross. However, if it is the case that liturgical anamnesis is indeed an ‘empty Word/speech’, the fact that it is set in the context of the Eucharistic liturgy, the liturgy, makes it an ‘empty Word/speech’ set in the context of a ‘full Word/speech’, which imposes on the worshipper ‘the enigmatic truth of the subject’s desire’. In other words, the context of the Anamnesis is the authoritative interpretation of the human condition (sinners need forgiveness), articulated and passed on by the Episcopacy, which regards its interpretations as an exposition of ‘the enigmatic truth of the subject’s desire’. In this way, the Anamnesis, which alienates from the worshipper’s desire, is rehabilitated within the ‘full Word/speech’ of the ideological (Symbolic) ‘reality’ of Episcopal/ecclesial authority. According to the Vatican II document Presbyterorum ordinis, priests have a threefold function, they are: ‘Ministers of God’s Word’ (PO, 4), ‘Ministers of the Sacraments and the Eucharist’ (PO, 5), and ‘Rulers of God’s People’ (PO, 6). Consequent upon these functions there should be ‘close links between liturgy, catechizes, religious instruction and preaching’ (IO, 7) in order ‘to foster the formation of the faithful’ (IO, 5). The point here is that the liturgy is accurately understood as a medium of religious instruction, of which a part is necessarily concerned with the hierarchical nature of the priesthood, the liturgy and the Church. As I indicated above with reference to priestly representation, the intention behind the formation of the faithful through liturgical instruction is internal and external participation. Effectively this entails the submission – by those who desire unity with Christ – of volition and intellect to the power of Christ as represented in the Church’s ministers. In other words, through its officers, the Church’s determination, if not control, of the internal desires and thoughts of the people, shifts the power of liturgy from being a vehicle for spirituality to being a powerful technology of the ideological ‘reality’ of Episcopal/ecclesial authority. And if liturgy has become the technology of such authority, the priest as liturgical representation has become the signifier of that authority. The point is that in identifying with the priest, as the signifier of their unconscious desire, worshippers de facto participate as subjects of Episcopal/ecclesial authority. In this section, I have tried to account for the way in which worshippers’ identification with the priest sutures them into the sacramental narrative of the Cross. I have argued that, when the priest and people identify with each other, there is a collusion between them, to the extent that each signifies for the other depending on the place assigned to them by the Other within the

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signifying chain of their respective discourses of desire. I have tried to show how their discourse of desire is reinscribed according to the salvific/pastoral practice of the sacramental narrative. The liturgical moment of reinscription takes place in the Anamnesis, the moment of the worshippers re-membering of the salvific events as if present. Thus, in the context of their desire for identification with Christ, worshippers identify with the priest as he offers the sacrifice of the Mass, re-membering the sacrificial narrative, and so become participants in the sacramental ‘reality’. These identifications are, of course, a fiction, sustained by the worshipper’s attractions and negations/disavowals. The identifications install the priest as a fiction, but also fictionalize the worshippers, alienating them from their own desire. Consequently, the liturgical Anamnesis is an ‘empty Word/speech’. As participants in the sacramental ‘reality’, worshippers are defined as sinners needing forgiveness. Because the ‘empty Word/speech’ is set in the context of an authoritative interpretation, the ‘full Word/speech’ that imposes ‘the enigmatic truth of the subject’s desire’, the definition is accepted and the worshipper becomes a participating subject in the ideological ‘reality’ of Episcopal/ecclesial authority.

By Way of Analysis

My aim, in this book, has been to demonstrate that insights drawn from psychoanalytical film theory, the so-called Screen problematic, can be used to understand how liturgical representation is implicated in the construction of liturgical identity. In this chapter, I want to make explicit the methodology that has emerged, particularly in Part 2, and that I am suggesting can be used by religious film analysts to engage more effectively and more systematically with film. It is based on the observation that a film offers the spectator a character-actor/ star with whom to identify (a pseudo-identification). Motivated by their narcissistic desire to (mis)identify with the other, the spectator is then stitched (sutured) into the narrative space of the film, which is always already ideologically constructed. It may, of course, be a feature of the ‘postmodern condition’, at least in the consumerist West, that people participate in multiple realities, resisting some, embracing others. However, the extent to which the spectator does participate in the ideological ‘reality’ constructed by cinema is the extent to which they become a subject of that reality. The first task, then, in analysing a film, is to consider the character-actor/ star offered for (mis)identification. As became clear in considering The Bells of St. Mary’s, this person is a composite of the on screen character and the off screen actor-star: having seen a particular actor-star in other films, the spectator brings a set of expectations into the cinema, which are usually confirmed, but which can often be challenged to cinematic effect. The operation of the relationship between character-actor/star facilitates the spectator’s identification, without which the film will not be effective – the spectator needs to sympathize with the character-actor/star in order to be joined into his story.1 The second task is to consider the narrative, what happens to the character-actor/star: to read, through a hermeneutic of suspicion, the values that are signified, on the one hand, by what happens and, on the other hand, by what does not happen; by what is said and by what not said. These unconscious values constitute the ‘reality’ is constructed by the film, a ‘reality’ that is always already ideologically loaded and in which the spectator will become a participant.

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For the purpose of demonstration, I will apply this method to three films. The criteria used for choosing these films are far from scientific, although they are no more or less arbitrary than most of the selection criteria chosen by religious film analysts. I selected films found from my local, south London library on the basis that they represented different genres and that they were all from the same year (as it happens, a blockbuster, a romantic comedy and a children’s film all released during 2005). And, because of unwarranted criticism that ‘participants in the theology/religion-film debate who highlight aesthetics will be more drawn to art-house films, whilst those who are interested in films’ emotional impact will work more with popular films’ (Marsh 2004, 131), I selected films that most people would consider to be ‘popular films’ – Batman Begins (Christopher Nolan), Bewitched (Nora Ephron) and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Tim Burton).

Batman Begins (Christopher Nolan) To identify with Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) in Batman Begins is to identify with a character who embarks on a classic example of what comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell terms ‘the hero’s journey’. For Campbell, this the journey is the universal ‘monomyth’, in which the hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man. (1993, 30) The structure of the monomyth is familiar to cinema goes because, according to script reader and story analyst Christopher Vogler, Campbell had ‘found that all storytelling, consciously or not, follows the ancient patterns of myth and that all stories . . . can be understood in terms of the Hero’s Journey’ (Vogler 1998, 10). While Vogler’s claim that the monomyth interprets ‘crudest jokes to the highest flights of literature’ (1998, 10) may seem exaggerated, Campbell’s impact has been openly acknowledged by Star Wars director George Lucas, and Campbell’s ‘principles’ seem particularly evident in Batman Begins. Adapting Campbell, Vogler maps the hero’s travels through 12 stages across three Acts. Act One finds the hero (1) in his ordinary world, where he receives (2) his call to adventure ; a reluctant and fearful hero, he initially (3) refuses the call before (4) meeting a mentor and (5) crossing the first threshold. In Act Two, the hero (6) encounters tests, allies, enemies as he ‘begins to learn

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the rules of the Special World’ and as his character develops under stress in preparation for (7) his approach to the inmost cave, the most dangerous place where he must (8) face his fear, complete his ordeal and so receive (9) the reward of his quest. In the final Act, the hero (10) finds the road back and is (11) purified in one last ordeal of death and resurrection before, finally, he (12) returns with the elixir, which he shares for the good of others (Vogler 1998, 15–26). The ordinary world of Bruce Wayne is the privileged world of a billionaire’s son where he lives with his parents and faithful butler, Alfred (Michael Caine). In the first scene, the young Wayne develops a fear of bats when, chasing his friend Rachel Dawes (Katie Holmes), he falls down a shaft and disturbs a crevice of the creatures. After descending the shaft to rescue the boy, his father paraphrases a Confucian proverb that provides an important theme throughout the narrative: ‘Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.’ Wayne’s ordinary world idyll is more profoundly shattered when, attending a performance of Boito’s opera, Mefistofele, the boy becomes distressed by bat-like devils and the family leave the theatre. Outside in an ally, an armed robber, Joe Chill (Richard Brake), leaves Wayne an orphan in exchange for his father’s wallet and his mother’s pearls. Fourteen years on, with Chill up for parole, Wayne receives his call to adventure. Rachel, by now a lawyer, challenges his idea of justice and tells his him that Carmine Falcone (Tom Wilkinson) is the gangster corrupting everything his father stood for. Demanding he look beyond his own pain, Rachel paraphrases Irish philosopher, Edmund Burke’s axiom that evil triumphs when ‘good men [like Wayne] do nothing’. Initially, Wayne refuses the call, until he confronts Falcone who restates the call in terms of the privileged Wayne’s ignorance of real suffering and, more importantly, his fear. Wayne’s quest to understand Falcone’s world, and so conquer his fears, leads to meeting a mentor, Henri Ducard (Liam Neeson), who introduces him to Ra’s Al Ghul, a man feared by criminals, but a man who can offer Wayne a path. Stepping on to the path and crossing the first threshold, Wayne ‘finally commits to the adventure and fully enters the Special World of the story for the first time’ (Vogler 1998, 18). At least to this point, director/co-writer Nolan keeps to Vogler’s timings of quarter-half-quarter and, after 30 minutes of his 134-minutes film, he begins Act Two on cue – although he lifts the narrative above the pedestrian, disorientating the spectator by fracturing the chronology. Told by his mentor that he is ‘ready’, Wayne’s journey now turns inwards and Ducard tells him that to overcome fear he must become fear. Wayne is consummate in accomplishing his first test, single combat with his mentor,

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but his refusal to execute a criminal without trial precipitates a fight to the death with Ducard, now turned ‘Threshold Guardian’ (Vogler 1998, 57–60), and the League of Shadows. Yet, despite his former mentor’s warning, that his compassion will not be shared by his enemies, and for this reason it will be his weakness, Wayne further demonstrates compassion, risking his life to save Ducard from certain death. Returning to Gotham, Wayne discovers new allies – Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman), head of Applied Sciences at Wayne Enterprises, and Sgt Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman) – and new enemies – in particular, Dr Jonathan Crane (Cillian Murphy), a corrupt psychopharmacologist at Arkham Asylum. Located on the Narrows, a place where even cops only go in force, Arkham is Wayne’s inmost cave, where he faces his fear and completes his ordeal, battling Crane and his weaponized hallucinogenic drug. In Vogler’s plan, having survived death the hero ‘takes possession of the treasure she has come seeking’ (1998, 22). In this case, Wayne seizes Rachel, the treasure he has come to save, and her emergence as the reward of his quest betrays the film as essentially a love story. According to Vogler, some of the best chase scenes spring up at the point where the hero is pursued on the road back (1998, 23). In Batman Begins, the chase scene opens the Final Act in which powerful (Jungian) archetypes now become clear. First, the symbol that Wayne desired to be in order to shake people out of their apathy is seen to be his ‘Shadow’ archetype (Vogler 1998, 71–5), a dark monster that Alfred warns threatens to consume him in actions that will turn him into a vigilante and destroy the Name of the Father.2 Equally shocking, Ducard is revealed for the ‘Shapeshifter’ (Vogler 1998, 65–70) archetype he in fact is. As Wayne’s one time mentor, Ducard shifted constantly between advisor and attacker – now offering guidance, now meting out gruelling punishment. Here he reveals his true identity as Ra’s Al Ghul, returned to be the purging fire needed to ‘purify’ Gotham. Ducard/Ra’s Al Ghul leaves Wayne for dead in the inferno he has made of Wayne Manor. But the fire is the final ordeal of death: injured and almost broken in spirit, Wayne’s resurrection comes when Alfred restates the dead father’s Confucian proverb and evidences that this loyal retainer has retained faith in the young Wayne. Now purged, Wayne as Batman rises to defeat his nemesis and return with the elixir, which he shares for the good of others (Vogler 1998, 15–26). Batman Begins is a near perfect example of ‘the hero’s journey’ in cinematic practice. What is interesting about Vogler’s interpretation and application of Campbell’s monomyth is that he notices its implication as a vehicle for ideology. Whether the monomyth is as culturally ubiquitous as Campbell

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claimed, Vogler notes the cultural imperialism of American values and assumptions communicated by Hollywood in general, and films that exploit the hero’s journey in particular (Vogler 1998, xv–xvi). Answering his own question, ‘Is the Hero’s Journey an instrument of cultural imperialism?’ he writes: While it is universal and timeless, and its workings can be found in every culture on earth, a Western or American reading of it may carry subtle biases. One instance is the Hollywood preference for happy endings and tidy resolutions, the tendency to show admirable, virtuous heroes overcoming evil by individual effort. My Australian teachers . . . made me aware of what assumptions were being carried by Hollywood-style films, and of what was not being expressed. (1998, xvi) Batman Begins, like so many Westerns in which the lone good-guy, by force of (at times flawed) character, imposes the law on the wayward frontier – and into the bargain wins the girl – naturalizes as universal values that are very definitely culturally specific. Identifying with Wayne/Batman, spectators are stitched into the lone good-guy, law-enforcing, girl-getting narrative and, because it seems so natural, they become willing participants in its culturally specific, ideologically constructed reality.

Bewitched (Nora Ephron) Synopsis Isabel Bigelow (Nicole Kidman), a ‘real life’ witch, leaves home in search of ‘normal’ life in the Valley. By chance, she meets Jack Wyatt (Will Ferrell), who, in order to revive his acting career, has agreed to play Darrin in a remake of the TV sitcom series Bewitched. Jack wants to play opposite an unknown female actor, someone who will not upstage him, and he thinks Isabel’s nose twitch is perfect for the part of Samantha. On set, Isabel, desperate to fall in love like ‘normal’ people, confuses what Jack says in character (as Darrin to Samantha) for Jack speaking directly to her (as Isabel). But, when she later overhears him speaking candidly with his agent/manager, Isabel realizes that she is being used and takes her magical revenge. After several twists of plot, which includes the couple falling in love, Isabel confessing her real nature, further misunderstandings and a final happy reunion, the actors settle down to their fairy-tale, happy ever after.

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The process of spectator identification is made problematic in Bewitched because, with some craft, writers Nora and Della Ephron offer a multilayered doubling of character. To begin with, although Kidman has top billing, Ferrell has an equal presence in the romantic comedy. Then the Ephron sisters layer Kidman (as Isabel) and Ferrel (as Jack) with nostalgic connotation by associating them to the characters in the 1960s/70s TV series, Samantha (Elizabeth Montgomery) and Darrin Stephens (Dick YorkDick Sargent). On one level, then, the actor Kidman denotes the character Isabel, but as the spectator identifies with the character, Isabel makes connotative reference back to Kidman – this is the usual extent of what might be called a loop of denotation/connotation. However, at another level, in Bewitched the character Isabel makes an additional connotative reference to Samantha, who in the original series was denoted by Montgomery. The result is that, identifying with the character Isabel, the spectator’s identification is informed not only by connotation with Kidman, but also by connotation with Samantha and further with Montgomery. (A parallel set of connotations applies to Ferrell/Jack/Darrin/York-Sargent.) While Bewitched may hold some appeal to younger audiences, it is for those baby-boomers who fondly remember the original TV series that these complex identifications work best. However, the multi-layered identification may also have worked against the film’s success precisely because it disrupts the spectator’s expectation. My memories of Samantha are that she was a confident woman; in control of her magical talents and sure of her own mind – she withstood eight seasons (1964–72) of her family’s attempts to sabotage her marriage to Darrin. Casting Kidman as female lead, particularly following her lead role in Frank Oz’ remake of The Stepford Wives of the previous year, spectators may have been forgiven for being surprised by the casting against type. Bewitched has within it the seeds of social critique, which its writers might have cultivated along the lines of addressing and perhaps overcoming issues of cultural difference. This would have placed the film in some degree of continuity with the original TV series, which occasionally challenged racist attitudes, as when Tabitha (Erin Murphy), Samantha and Darrin’s daughter, makes black polka-dots appear on her skin and co-ordinating white polka-dots on the skin of her black friend because she wanted people to treat them both alike. (Montgomery was herself politically liberal, criticizing the Vietnam War in the 1960s and standing in support of her co-star Sargent at a Gay-Pride rally in the 1990s.) That the Ephrons choose not to cultivate this critique of difference may be down to a lack of courage; but it

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is more likely that this critique was simply too obvious. Instead, they develop the narrative around Isabel’s search for identity and explore the construction of identity in relation to representation. It is into a narrative of identity as performance that identifying with Isabel stitches the spectator. Arriving with broomstick and Mary Poppins-like carpetbag, the opening shots of Isabel suggest a confident, competent, young woman-about-town. But the illusion is dispelled in her first dialogue, which she has when her father, Nigel (Michael Caine), materializes while she is shopping to furnish her new home. Isabel is revealed as privileged but naïve; an immature woman who feels she needs to break from her family because she wants to be ‘normal’; she wants to argue about paint with someone who is completely hopeless – someone she loves. In identifying with Isabel, the spectator identifies with an adolescent desire to define her identity by rejecting the family she sees as abnormal and adopting a persona that she thinks will normalize her. (If the intended audience is indeed the baby-boomer generation, the fact that their own recollections of, what was in all probability, a difficult adolescence are likely to be, by now, fading reminiscences glossed with the fondness of selective amnesia, means that the pleasures of identification will be in being re-membered into their sepia-tinted past.) To begin with, Isabel is unsure of herself; her self-esteem is very low until she is persuaded by a Public Service Announcement that the remedy is to find herself a job. A sequence of serendipities leads to her working with Jack and to the on-set confusions and her infatuation – the direct result of her naivety. When, eventually, Isabel comes to understand that all Jack really wanted from her was a foil to make him look and sound good, she wonders aloud what Samantha would do. Having watched the TV series, and having completely absorbed her character, Isabel now begins to think and act like Samantha; with assured confidence, she turns her magical talents on Jack with humiliating and comic effect – having found her identity as Samantha, Isabel becomes more of what might have been anticipated from Kidman in the role. In the final scene, against her protest that she can’t be normal and be with Jack because she’s a witch and she can’t be a witch because what she really wants is to be normal, Jack persuades her to stay with him by invoking the identity Isabel has adopted: it’s possible because Samantha did it. While some Christian online reviewers3 notice the witching content of Bewitched and discuss the likelihood of the film enticing vulnerable young girls into participating in witchcraft, it seems the greater ‘danger’ comes from the narrative of identity as performance and the possibility that spectators might perform the identity of celebrity. Identifying with Isabel and being stitched into her narrative, the spectator is affirmed as a participant

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in the powerful ideology of the cult of the individual focused in celebrity: the idea that the pursuit of individual fulfilment is natural and right, and that it can and should take priority over traditional family values. Whether such participation is a positive or a negative is a question suitable for theological discussion. There is nothing unique about the way Bewitched affects ideological participation. Bewitched is but one more example of how the values of a particular ideology are naturalized, indeed, like Isabel, made ‘normal’. But it is a useful example of the way in which analysing the unconscious operations of cinematic representation uncovers the specifics of the subject’s construction within an ideology and provides, at times, unanticipated questions for theological or religious analysis.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Tim Burton) As a youngster, in those unworried days before US and Japanese animated pulp TV came to dominate children’s programming, I would get home from school, kick off my shoes, grab a biscuit and switch on the telly. Then, for 15 minutes, I would surrender my imagination to some beguiling storyteller and allow them to weave me into the narrative world of BBC’s Jackanory. My delight at one particular story, read in February 1968 by Bernard Cribbins, stayed with me into early parenthood, when I snuggled into bed with a small boy and a bar of chocolate to read Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with my then 5-year-old son. Being an ordinary 10-year-old, in a very ordinary working family, wearied at the end of one more ordinary day in one more ordinary primary school, what was so great was that Charlie Bucket was just like me. In fact, as director Tim Burton put it, there was nothing in any way special about Charlie, he was just like the 90 per cent of school kids who never get noticed.4 Except that, Charlie was noticed, and was about to become the luckiest boy in the world. Back in 1968, watching Charlie and identifying with him, fostered a faint hope that, like him, I too might noticed; I too might be so lucky. I brought the pleasure of this early experience to watching Burton’s Charlie. But, instead of reprising my childhood delight as I anticipated, I found that, 40 years on, I was watching as a parent. Instead of sharing Charlie’s wonder and excitement, I felt protective: I wanted to shield the on screen Charlie from the pain of his disappointment; he deserved more, and I wanted him to have it. So Charlie, ostensibly a children’s film, works at two levels – as many children’s films do: for children in the audience, Charlie (Freddie Highmore)

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is available for direct identification, and for adults, he is available at a level once removed. But what is interesting about Charlie is that he works – as an object of identification – not to stitch us into his story, but as a way of stitching us into the narrative of chocolatier Willy Wonka (Johnny Depp). Charlie is an ordinary kid and as an ordinary kid he does nothing, unlike Mel Stuart’s 1971 version, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, scripted by Dahl himself, in which Charlie has to pass a character test and prove himself worthy of the prize. Burton’s Charlie shows no character development at all – the kid just gets lucky. Charlie’s find is enough to get him (and us, the audience) into Wonka’s factory; after that his contribution is only to nudge the narrative along. For example, his enthusiasm to model Wonka’s factory from deformed toothpaste tube tops nudges Grandpa Joe (David Kelly) into relating the back-story of the mysterious factory. And later, his questions to Mr Wonka – did he remember being a kid? did he remember his first candy? – nudge Wonka’s flashbacks and open out his dark psychological past. If Stuart’s Willy Wonka narrated Charlie’s development, Burton’s Charlie narrates Wonka’s salvation. Charlie’s extended family may be poor, but it is complete (he has both parents and both paternal and maternal grandparents) and full of mutual love and respect – even the blissfully demented Grandma Georgina (Liz Smith) is accepted as she is (and plays an important part in the narrative, inspiring Charlie with hope, embracing him and telling him in a whisper that nothing is impossible). In contrast, Wonka’s family is the antithesis. He has no grandparents and we learn nothing of his mother; but his father, Dr Wilbur Wonka (Christopher Lee), the city’s most famous dentist, is a towering, oppressive ogre, who seems to pleasure in depriving a small boy of his ‘trick or treat’ candy, cruelly tipping the indulgence into the fire with a sinister, perfect-teeth revealing grin. Cast in the terms of a Lacanian Oedipal economy, the respected Dr Wonka represents the Symbolic (signified by the brass plaque by his door), and his paternal efforts to compel his son to disavow destructive self-indulgence threaten to castrate the young Willy (signified by the monstrous orthodontic headgear – le ‘non’ du père that makes eating candy an impossibility). The boy’s lack of a mother fuels his desire to be pleasurably associated with the lack he desires (connoted in and signified by the forbidden candy – his mother substitute) and he finally refuses his father’s well intentioned, but brutally severe orthodontic regime and runs away. Refusing the paternal Symbolic, Willy is abandoned to the Imaginary; returning home, he finds his father, together with his actual house, has left him. Surrendering himself to the Imaginary (because, as he would later tell Charlie, a chocolatier has to be an independent spirit – no matter what the cost), Willy Wonka gave himself over to candy and became the chocolatier

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his father had thought too fantastic to permit. By the time he opened his first candy store on Cherry Street, 20 years before Charlie’s story began, Wonka was already a chocolate genius. With the whole world wanting his candy, he opened the largest chocolate factory in history; but challenged by harsh capitalist (Symbolic) realism in the practices of competitive adults, Wonka retreated behind the sober façade of his grey-faced factory and took refuge in his fantastical (Imaginary) empire – there, cut off from adults and accompanied only by Oompa-Loompas, he indulged his phantasies. So why, Charlie asks, has Wonka decided now to let five children inside his chocolate world? Wonka avoids Charlie’s questions, but the fact is that he needs an heir, someone to watch over his factory and his beloved Oompa Loompas. Wonka could not trust an adult, hence he invited five children, the least rotten of whom would win the factory. And the deal? Charlie can have the factory if he gives up his family: Wonka wants Charlie to make the same journey he did, abandoning the Symbolic to revel in the Imaginary. Whether we in the audience have been identifying with Charlie directly (because we too are only 10 years old) or indirectly (because we are parentally protective adults), we understand the impossibility and the cruelty of this all or nothing choice. Charlie will never give up his family; he was the one child prepared to offer his ticket on the open market to raise money to feed his family. We understand his crushing disappointment, we understand his security within and loyalty towards his family; and we understand these things because, identifying with Charlie has stitched us into his narrative and we have become participants in his reality. His disappointment has become our disappointment, and it is visceral. But Charlie is a salvation narrative and Charlie Bucket will save Willy Wonka from himself. As Grandma Georgina predicts, things were about to get better, but it is not until Wonka speaks heart to heart with Charlie that things pick up for him. Charlie’s offer to go with Wonka Jr to see Wonka Sr leads to a reunion with the patriarch who, despite his early disapproval of his son’s chosen career, had nevertheless collected newspaper cuttings documenting his success as a chocolatier. Their awkward embrace in the great doctor’s surgery unites the Symbolic and the Imaginary and so ‘saves’ both Wonkas. We, in the audience, watch the final credits knowing that Charlie Bucket might have won a factory, but Willy Wonka has found a family. Identifying with Charlie, stitched into his narrative, we as spectators participate in an ideology at odds with that of Bewitched. Whereas Bewitched narrates an ideology of individual fulfilment over traditional family values, Charlie naturalizes and makes unquestionable the idea that individual fulfilment is possible, not through celebrity but through traditional family

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commitments. And Charlie’s ‘redemption’ of Wonka is achieved, not by some grand gesture (although one might counter that giving up the factory in favour of his family was just such a grand gesture), but by the simplicity of his innocence as a child uncorrupted by the indulgence of misguided adults.

Conclusion: A Third Task – Moving beyond the ‘So what!’ Having analysed these films for character-actor/star (mis)identification, and having then considered the ideologically loaded narrative ‘reality’ constructed by the films in which the spectators participate, there remains a final task for religious film analysis: to bring the insights of analysis into dialogue with theology/religious studies. Superficial reading of any film will yield only superficial themes and make possible only that kind of superficial theological/religious engagement that provokes the response: ‘So what!’ Superficially, Batman Begins might be read as dealing with the age-old themes of good verses evil. A more imaginative religious film analyst might see in the film’s comic book violence, themes of redemptive violence; or, given Wayne’s journey to Ra’s Al Ghul’s mountain retreat in search of a path to true justice, a religious film analyst might be interested in how religion itself is presented in the film. There is, of course, nothing wrong with these readings, they are perfectly possible readings and therefore perfectly legitimate readings. However, my argument throughout has been that spectators connect with film at a level beyond the superficial, that films operate at the level of the unconscious, that it is connection at this level that affects the pleasure of watching film and, consequently, it is at this level that effective religious film analysis needs to be focused. Without this kind of engagement, Bewitched is just a romantic fantasy about witches, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a kid’s story about candy. ‘So what!’ The approach I am proposing, rooted as it is in the project of 1970s British film journal Screen is opaque, labyrinthine, at times ‘intellectually elusive’ (Deacy 2001, 91); so called ‘Screen theory’ is not without its cultured despisers (Carroll 1988; Bordwell 1989; Bordwell and Carroll 1996; Lyden 2003; Marsh 2004), but in my view it has a singular strength, over and above other approaches proposed by religious film analysts. Rather than reduce film to either quasi-literature or quasi-religion, it treats film as film; as the cinematic experience that it is. In my view, it is only when religious film analysts actually do this, actually treat film as film rather than simply saying that

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is what they intend to do, only then will they have anything more than their own subjective presuppositions to dialogue with. Critically appropriated, the hermeneutic of suspicion I propose offers theology and religious studies an opportunity to press beyond the ‘demand for a surface realism’ (Screen 1972, 2) and the ‘subjective taste-ridden criticism’ (Screen 1971, 4–5) it sponsors, by deconstructing the operations of film as cinematic representation – an opportunity to move theological film criticism towards interpretations that are more politically and culturally incisive by reading in the gaps (Cahiers du cinéma ([1970b]1976) and thereby deepen theological dialogue with film and contemporary culture, moving the emerging discipline of religion/theology and film beyond the ‘So what!’

Notes

Introduction to Part One 1 2

For a history of the early response of religion to cinema, see Lindvall (2001). Lyden is with Johnston in wanting to understand film ‘even when we do not agree with its messages’ (2003, 3). However, he goes on to argue strongly, if unconvincingly, that films perform a religious function for their audiences and so should be interpreted through religious categories.

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For further discussion on the failure of biblical spectaculars see Wall (1970). In an invited, critical response to Explorations in Theology and Film, David Jasper suggests an alternative formal parallelism based on cinema and theology’s shared tendency towards ‘systematization’. ‘Like theology, Hollywood thrives on systematization. . . . Just as theologians look to philosophy and continually reinvent religion within the context of changing understandings of our world and its society, so the cinema assures us that, in spite of all our fears to the contrary, things will work out and the story can still be told.’ Citing the example of Apocalypse Now, a ‘demonic celebration of war’, ‘a literal hell for director and actor’, Jasper proposes that cinema comes closest to stimulating theological reflection, ‘not by its themes or specific motifs (directors, with the occasional exception like Martin Scorsese are theologically illiterate, nor should they be expected to be otherwise) but by its very form and nature’ (1997, 236, 240). Behind Bazin’s convictions about cinematic language as the vehicle through which reality is revealed lies the influence of the Personalist spirituality of Emmanuel Mounier, an ‘amalgam of Existentialism and Christianity’. In the period following the war, Mounier’s Personalism represented something of a ‘third force’ between the depersonalizing freedom of capitalism and the depersonalizing materialism of communism. Mounier’s stress on the importance of personal moral choice leading to committed action was a spiritual ethic, concerned with personal development. Bazin’s film criticism is informed by this ethic, which uncouples the spiritual from the political and allows the ‘spiritual’ to become the prime social force (Hess 1974). Thompson retains the convention of Ingarden’s translator, capitalizing Representation (Repräsentation) in the sense of ‘standing in for’ or ‘imitating’ something, and representation (Darstellung) in the sense of ‘depicting’ or ‘presenting’.

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Chapter 2 1 2

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Interest in film as ‘visual story’ is also central in Johnston (2000, 99–124). According to Alan Lovell, two diverging ideologies informed film education in post-war Britain. During the 1950s, the educational work of the British Film Institute (BFI) had been built on an ideology stemming from the 1930s Documentary movement, which had its premise in the concept that films basically had a corrupting effect on the moral development of children. It followed from this that the task of film educators was to equip children to understand the operations of film in order that they might appreciate ‘good’ films over ‘bad’. This model of film aesthetics was characteristically a pre-Cahiers, ‘film grammar’ approach, which regarded film as an essentially realist medium. From the early 1960s Leavisite ideology began to inform the work of the BFI Education Department. Lovell regards the shift as ‘probably inevitable’ given the decline in the documentary movement and the ‘radical impact of Leavis and his followers on the teaching of English, in particular the concern with the effects of the mass media that was an integral part of that teaching’ (1971, 15). See also Whannel (1969). Malone examines ‘Jesus-figures’ and ‘Christ-figures’, arguing that ‘Jesus-figures’ are representations of Jesus himself, more or less explicitly biblical portrayals of the historical Jesus such as in King of Kings (Nicholas Ray 1961) or The Greatest Story Ever Told (George Stevens 1965), while ‘Christ figures’ are characters from history, fiction, or the arts, presented as resembling Jesus (Malone 1990). The obvious theological parallel to the ‘Christ of faith’ is made clear in Baugh’s more scholarly treatment of the image of Christ in cinema. However, in making explicit the view that Christ-figures are metaphors or analogies of Christ, Baugh demonstrates that theological interest in the cinematic Christ is in fact May’s preoccupation with cinematic analogue (Baugh 1997). Telford offers the insights of a New Testament scholar on the cinematic portrayal of Jesus see Telford (1997). Due to the imposition of trading restrictions, post-Revolutionary Soviet cinema laboured under severe shortages. These constraints contributed to the development of Russian montage as ‘new’ films were created from existing material.

Chapter 3 1

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Deacy makes the point: ‘implicit in many aspects of human life, to the extent that the film industry is one of many contemporary secular agencies that have taken on many of the functions that we would historically associate with traditional religious institutions’ (2005, 137). Somewhat incongruously, Lyden makes the following statement about his use of audience reception studies: I have made some reference to the need for audience reception studies, especially insofar as these can lead us to understand better how ordinary film viewers (rather than film theorists or critics) understand the films. There are only a limited number of ethnographic studies surveying audience reaction to films, so one might think that the absence of extensive data would argue against

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drawing definitive conclusions about ‘what audiences really think’. In fact, however, we can never draw definitive conclusions about this sort of thing, even if we should be flooded by audience studies, as ethnography by its very nature really only allows one to draw conclusions about the population surveyed (although the conclusions may have wider applicability, if one grants that the survey group is typical). Given that no amount of data guarantees certainty regarding generalized conclusions, I have not allowed the absence of extensive data to prevent me from drawing some tentative conclusions about the way some audiences may appropriate some films. And, after all, using a little bit of audience study is better than using not at all, which has often in practice been the method of film studies. (2003, 137)

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For work that is more empirically rooted, see Deacy 2005; Marsh 2007. Heath, a ‘cultural critic’ Lyden might count among those who regard films as ‘purveyors of ideology’ (Lyden 2003, 32), describes the Screen project as an ‘encounter of Marxism and psychoanalysis on the terrain of semiotics’ (Heath 1985, 511). This account resonates with Geertz’ definition (suitably restructured): a religion (3) formulates conceptions of a general order of existence [ideology], which it (4) clothes with such an aura of factuality [ideology] that (2) powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations are established in men [psychoanalysis] in such a way that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic [psychoanalysis/ ideology] based on (1) a system of symbols [semiotics]. Marsh appears, more recently, to have moderated his view. Whereas he did propose film-watching along with sport, TV and education as contenders in ‘a range of activities currently competing for the sociologists’ attention as “substitiute religions” or “alternatives to relgion”’ (2004, 4), he now regards cinemagoing and film-watching as ‘social practices within [the] rich mix of diverse and complex contexts of meaning making’ that includes sport, contemporary music and television (2007, 151).

Introduction to Part Two 1

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The term is taken from Julia Kristeva, who regards signification as exceeding the fixed sense and closed structure of the sign, and who takes the literary or poetic text as the object of analysis, a ‘signifying practice carried out through langue but remaining irreducible to its categories’ (1973, 38). Constantine V.: ‘[T]he bread which we receive is an image of his body, taking the form of his flesh and having become a type of his body’. Nicephourous Antirrheticus, 2.3 in ed. J-P Migne, Patrologiæ Graecæ, vol. 100 (Paris, 1844–64), 337 (cited in Pelikan 1978, 109). Theodore of Studios defined an image as ‘a likeness of that of which it is the image, in itself showing by imitation the character of its archetype . . . the true in the likeness, the archetype in the image’, or again ‘a kind of seal and representation, bearing within itself the authentic form of that from which it also gets its name’ (Pelikan 1978, 118).

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John of Damascus considered an image to be ‘a likeness, an illustration, and a representation of something, showing forth in itself that which is imaged’ (Pelikan 1978, 119). With specific relation to religious images, Ouspensky (1978) offers an alternative understanding of what might be termed ‘liturgical reality’. For Ouspensky, the ‘organic bond’ that exists between ‘the veneration of the saints and that of the icons’ creates a ‘double realism’ in the icon which ‘unites two realities in itself: the historical, the earthly reality and the grace of the Holy Spirit, the reality of the world and that of God’ (1978, 195, 196). From this, he concludes (without irony) that sacred art ‘is a realistic art in the strictest sense of the word’ (1978, 201) because the icon’s ‘fidelity to historical truth’ preserves ‘Each characteristic trait of a saint’ and so preserves ‘a direct and living link with the person whom the icon represents’ (1978, 196). Ouspensky’s claim, that there is an ‘ontological unity between the ascetic experience of Orthodoxy and the Orthodox icon’ (1978, 208), is a claim for a liturgical representation as a form of a metaphysic presence, and marks a significant parallel around the problematic established with Bazinian film theory. Contrasting the attitudes of the Roman tradition with that of Orthodoxy, Brubaker notes that, despite the wealth of religious art in Western churches, Rome never granted the same privilege to images per se that Orthodoxy has given to icons. Brubaker suggests the contrasting emphases arose from political rather than theological concerns, and argues that the early medieval West favoured relics to sacred icons because they facilitated the exercise of ‘holy power’. ‘Access to the holy power of images was readily available in many locations, including . . . one’s own home. On the other hand, access to the holy power of relics was constricted to particular places, and these places were controlled by the church’ (1995, 13). I am here anticipating my application of film theory to liturgical representation, which will be around the three heads of: identity with an other; suture into a narrative; and participation in ideological ‘reality’. These heads will emerge from my discussion of what film theory can offer liturgical representation and my reassessment of the insights of film theory in terms of Lacanian psychoanalysis.

Chapter 4 1

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Tanner renders ‘configurantur’ as ‘patterned to the priesthood of’ and ‘fashioned in the image of’ (1990, 1044, 1057). ‘The sacrament of Holy Orders, like [Baptism and Confirmation], confers an indelible spiritual character and cannot be repeated or conferred temporarily’ (CCC, 1582; see also PO, 2). For additional expressions of Christ’s presence, for example in ‘the poor, the sick and the imprisoned’, see OBOB 45. The Council of Trent (1545-63) propounded Rome’s traditional teaching on transubstantiation (Session 13, 11 October 1551, ‘Decree on the most holy sacrament of the eucharist’, Chapter 4). This is restated in CCC, 1376. A moderated interpretation of Trent is offered by the Anglican/Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC): ‘The word transubstantiation is commonly used in the

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Roman Catholic Church to indicate that God acting in the eucharist effects a change in the inner reality of the elements. The term should be seen as affirming the fact of Christ’s presence and of the mysterious and radical change which takes place. In contemporary Roman Catholic theology it is not understood as explaining how the change takes place’ (ARCIC-ED, 6, n. 2). For Augustine, ‘A sign was “a thing which, over and above the impression it makes on the senses, causes something else to come into the mind as a consequence of itself”; but when signs pertained to divine things, they were called sacraments’ (Pelikan 1971, 306). To some extent this controversy grew out of the ambiguity of the notion of the ‘body of Christ’, which could be understood as physically, to mean Christ’s human body, or sacramentally, to mean the Eucharist (again, it could be taken to mean the Church). Berengar attacked the identification that ‘there are not two bodies, that which is received from the alter and that which was received from the womb of the Virgin . . . [but] one and the same body’ (Pelikan 1978, 192). Although later coerced to recant his position, Berengar argued that the fathers had distinguished between Christ’s physical and sacramental body. For a discussion of ‘real presence’ theology and the disputes surrounding Berengar, see Pelikan (1978, 184–204). ‘The doctrine that sensible things are composites of matter (Greek hule) and form (morphe)’ (McCord Adams 1995, 384). Writing as late as 1956 on the concept of symbolic reality, Leeming typifies the Roman position. He comments: ‘The term “symbolic reality” is a translation of the technical expression res et sacramentum, literally, a thing or reality and a sacrament. It designates an effect of the rite which is different from grace. In the Eucharist, the Blessed Sacrament is this symbolic reality; a reality, because the real body of Christ is present, a sacrament, because it is an abiding sign and cause of grace’ (1956, 251). For Leeming, the sign, or representation of Christ, is a metaphysical presence, a presence which is at the same time indissoluble from its sign. Commenting on Schillebeeckx, Martos concludes: ‘Schillebeeckx’s success in translating the ideas of scholastic language was one of the major reasons why the bishops of Vatican II felt secure in allowing Catholic theologians to reexamine the traditional teachings of the church and to restate them in nontraditional ways’ (1981, 143). The Eucharistic tradition of Mark (14.22–25) and Matthew (26.26–29) omits anamnesis from its institution narratives. Set alongside each other, these four texts suggest the possibility that from the earliest period (between 53/54 CE and 100 CE) two separate, if interdependent, traditions existed: a Pauline-Lucan and a Marcan-Matthean. The Fourth Gospel lacks an institution narrative, although the bread of life discourse (Jn 6.26–59) echoes Eucharistic language: ‘Whoever eats of this bread will live forever. . . . Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life’ (Jn 6.51,54). For a discussion of these traditions, see Jones (1992). Differences between Roman and Protestant scholars emerge in their interpretation of the sacrificial theology operative in anamnesis. Traditional Roman Catholic Eucharistic theology on the sacrificial nature of the Mass was restated at the Council of Trent: ‘In this divine sacrifice which is performed in the mass, the very same Christ is contained and offered in bloodless

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manner who made a bloody sacrifice of himself once for all on the cross. Hence the holy council teaches that this is a truly propitiatory sacrifice’ (Session 22, 17 Sept 1562, ‘Teaching and canons on the most holy sacrifice of the mass’, Chapter 2). In 1963, Vatican II endorsed this position, choosing to speak of ‘Offering the immaculate victim’ (SC, 47). Bouyer, in rejecting the idea of anamnesis as a ‘subjective, human psychological act’ and asserting instead that it is an ‘objective reality destined to make some thing or some one perpetually present before God and for God’, ascribes metaphysical status to the anamnesis whose sacrificial associations he finds implicit in its Semitic roots and made explicit in the translation to Hellenistic mileu (Bouyer 1968, 103–4). Eucharistic objectivity is supported by Josef Jungmann, who argues for anamnesis as an objective memorial in which the ‘historical fact’ of Jesus’ death and resurrection somehow become present. Jungmann concludes: ‘To the extent to which we grant the sacrificial character of the Lord’s death on the Cross, the sacrificial character of the Eucharist should also be granted’ (1959, 108). Gregory Dix represents an Anglo-Catholic perspective, which demonstrates the impact of protestant Eucharistic theology. Rejecting the idea of ‘fresh destruction’ as illegitimate for Anglicans, Dix argues that ‘the properly sacrificial action’ is ‘in the fact of the consecration of the sacrament under two kinds separately, as a representative likeness of the death of Christ’. Consequently, the Eucharist as anamnesis is ‘the “re-calling” before God of the one sacrifice of Christ in all its accomplished and effectual fullness so that it is here and now operative by its effects in the souls of the redeemed’ (1945, 241–3). The work of ARCIC was to find a common approach to Eucharistic interpretation, which it located in anamnesis and the concept of ‘sacramental reality’ (ARCIC-ED, 5). However, the extent to which this has mediated the problem is questionable. Indeed, ARCIC has been criticized both in that its use of the term anamnesis ‘may conceal the reintroduction of the theory of a repeated immolation’ (ARCIC-ED: E, 3), and for an ambiguity of language which ‘enables members of the two churches to see their own faith in the Agreed Statement’ (ARCIC-ED: E, 4). So, conservative Anglican theologian Gregg, in his consideration of the ‘emerging ecumenical consensus’ in the light of the biblical evidence, has maintained traditional protestant rejection of sacrifice in favour of memorial understood as commemoration (1976, 32). However, ARCIC’s work seems to have impacted Roman thinking: Catechism of the Catholic Church brings sacrifice together with memorial, stating that ‘The Eucharist is thus a sacrifice because it re-presents (makes present) the sacrifice of the cross, because it is its memorial and because it applies its fruit’ (CCC, 1366); while the Bishops cite ARCIC in an attempt to clarify protestant misunderstandings about traditional Roman Eucharistic theology: ‘The Mass is the sacrament of salvation, the memorial of the sacrificial death and resurrection of Jesus Christ’ (OBOB, 29–30). Vergegenwärtigung, In Heidegger the term is linked with the notion of ‘making present’ (Gegenwärtigen) (1962, 410). An alternative to the historical orientation typified in Childs’ discussion of memorial orientated perspective is the eschatological, future orientation suggested by Geoffrey Wainwright. In contrast to the trajectory of Western theologians’ Eucharistic treatises, which he characterizes as dealing with the sacrificial merits

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of Christ’s presence insofar as it relates to individual recipients, Wainwright proposes that the notion of anamnesis offers a framework within which to understand the ‘twofold fact’ that Christ’s coming is still awaited, yet he also comes to his people in the Eucharistic celebration. Wainwright is persuaded by Jeremias’ interpretation of Jesus’ institution of the Eucharist, not as a reminder for the disciples but a reminder to God, imploring the final consummation of his salvific work. There can be little argument that the theological consensus would admit the promise of future hope as a benefit of Christ’s sacrifice. However, it less certain that the ecumenical consensus would uphold Wainwritght’s thesis, which he admits is influenced by the then current ‘theological vogue’ for eschatology. In any case, the anamnesis would remain ‘a dominically instituted memorial-rite which, not only serving to remind men but also being performed before God, is sacrificial at least in so far as it recalls before God with thanksgiving that one sacrifice and prays for the continuing benefits of that sacrifice to be granted now’ (Wainwright 1971, 67). In this the Bishops are articulating the governing ideas of the ‘Directory concerning ecumenical matters’ (IQ, IV–compare II). The Eucharist is politicized in two directions: internally, as a form of political correctness – only those who think and desire aright may partake; externally, because the practices of other churches stand outside the traditions of apostolic succession they lack the legitimacy of Church authority and, by definition, salvific capacity: ‘The Eucharist is properly the sacrament of those who are in full communion with the Church’ (CCC, 1395). For a statement on the status of sacramental sharing with particular reference to the nature of Holy Orders, see OBOB, 41.

Chapter 5 1

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Language about present but silent meaning is clear reference to the kinds of ‘revelations’ typical of psychoanalysis, which, in the editors’ minds, was to be achieved by the doubly structured overdeterminations of Marxism and Freudianism: political ideology and psychoanalysis. Historiographically, the significance of the Cahiers’ article lies in its appropriation of Marxist and Lacanian theory for the purpose of reading film. However, the editors not only misunderstood Lacan’s concept of the Law and the role of the Mother, more significantly, they uncoupled Lacan from the clinical context and put him to work in the kind of socio-political environment in which he himself had no interest. This move was programmatic for film theory’s appropriation of Lacan. From Leonard Maltin’s Movie Encyclopedia, cited at www.dukewayne.com/archive/ index.php/t-2110.html (retrieved 20 October 2008). It will be apparent that I am using the term ‘other’ in two forms, capitalized and in lower case. This is to anticipate Lacan’s distinction between the ‘little other who is not really other, but a reflection and projection of the ego’ and the big Other, which ‘designates radical alterity, an other-ness which transcends the illusory otherness of the imaginary because it cannot be assimilated through identification’ (Evans 1996, 132–3). Lacan introduced this distinction in the Seminar of 25 May 1955, ‘Introduction of the big Other’ (S2, 235–47).

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Gruber’s membership of the radical (and fictional) West German Volks Frei movement locates him no more concretely than as the generic Eurovillain, cultured but unprincipled. Gruber betrays the integrity of his terrorist beliefs in pursuit of $640 million in negotiated bearer bonds. It is interesting to observe that those writers who do look for the cinematic analogue to theological themes generally assume that the direction of analogical dependency moves towards the theological. Basing his work on the writings of Joseph Campbell, Christopher Vogler implicitly challenges this assumption with his analysis of ‘The Hero’s Journey’ (Campbell 1993; Vogler 1998). On the issue of ‘subjective taste-ridden criticism’ see the exchange between Alan Lovell and film critic Robin Wood: Lovell 1969; Wood 1969; Lovell 1970. These essays are collected and published in two volumes (C. Metz, Essais sur la signification au cinema, Paris: Editions Klincksieck, 1968, 1972), and partly translated into English (Metz 1974). Struggling with the possibility of a ‘cinematographic language’, Barthes locates the problem in terms of contiguity with reality: ‘articulated language’, being a code based on a system of signs, and as such nonanalogical, while cinema ‘presents itself . . . as an analogical (and moreover, continuous) expression of reality’ ([1963]1986, 277). Barthes had argued that in a photograph the scene, captured mechanically, is there, and that this involves the unprecedented consciousness, not of the beingthere of the thing, but rather the ‘awareness of its having-been-there’. The result is ‘a new space-time category: spatial immediacy and temporal anteriority, the photograph being an illogical conjunction between the here-now and the there-then’ ([1963]1986, 44). Although MacCabe was a contributor to and editorial board member of Screen from 1973, when he draws attention to the rebirth of Marxist theory following the events of May 1968 he makes no specific mention of Althusser, preferring instead to cite the influence of Bertholt Brecht (1985). David Bordwell correctly clarifies the Althusser-Brecht axis as ‘Brecht’s critique of representation (as refracted through Althusser, Barthes, and Walter Benjamin)’ (1989, 91). For critical assessments of Screen, see Britton 1978; Fuchs 1978; Carroll 1982 and 1988; Bordwell 1989. For critical appreciation, see Easthope 1983 and 1988; Lapsley and Westlake 1988. www.thesiege.com (no longer active). ‘Arab Americans Protest Willis Movie’, StudioBrief, 27 August 1998, Internet Movie Database, www.imdb.com/news/ni0072485/ (retrieved 20 October 2008). Poitier was awarded Best Actor as the handyman Homer Smith, who finds himself in a small desert town helping nuns to build their prayed-for chapel in Lilies of the Field (Ralph Nelson, 1963); Washington won the same award 39 years later for his role as LAPD detective Alonzo Harris in Training Day (Antoine Fuqua, 2001).

Chapter 6 1

Like Metz, Baudry is informed by Althusser’s concept of interpellation. Here, he builds on Comolli’s argument, that the camera was designed to accurately

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reproduce reality as its inventors had learned to perceive it. Comolli had argued that the inventors imposed upon the cinema the visual codes of the conservative bourgeoisie, codes which progressive filmmakers have long since challenged ([1971]1990). Baudry proposes that the techniques of cinematic representation, specifically those related to the cinematic apparatus (the camera and its lenses), are implicated in constituting spectators as transcendental idealist subjects. In other words, they determine the identifications that the spectators will make. From the Bazinian base that the camera, as cinematographic apparatus, occupies a position between ‘objective reality’ and the finished film, Baudry regards the camera as a site of inscription situated between operations that mask the transformations of reality. Because of this, the camera’s perspective is analogous to the Quattrocento perspective projections developed during the Italian Renaissance, and consequently this perspective can be regarded as inscribed with an inherent ideology. For Baudry, what the spectator does not realize, however, is that the knowledge appropriated by the camera, and in turn by the spectator, is knowledge within the ideological frame of the perspective built into the cinematic apparatus. Not only is the perspective ideologically constructed, but what is represented is represented from an already politicized viewpoint. In other words, identification with the ‘transcendental subject’ constructs the spectator in terms of the dominant ideology. This ‘something between’ is taken from Arnheim (1958, 20) and parallels Wollen’s application to cinema of Peirce’s semiotic categories. Peirce distinguishes three relations between a sign and its object: an icon, which represents by similarity, as with a portrait; an index, which has some causal relation to its object, as smoke may be an index of fire; and a symbol, which corresponds to Saussure’s arbitrary sign. For Wollen, it is the indexical quality, that between iconic identity and arbitrary symbol, which helps with understanding how cinema functions in creating meaning (1969, 122–3). Although Lacan introduces suture as a term in his 1964 Seminar he does not give it full treatment as an independent concept (S11, 117–18). Suture may be considered a neo-Lacanian concept insofar as it was developed by Lacan’s student, Jacques-Alain Miller for the 1965 seminar. Oudart’s key works in this area are available in Browne (1990). For Oudart this risks exposing the film’s operation within ideology. Arguing along Metzian lines, that art is a discourse constructed according to codes which are themselves the product of ideology, Oudart contends that the discourse predetermines how the subject should read the ‘text’, while the text itself masks and naturalises the presence of the figurative codes. Operating beneath perception, the codes create an impression of ‘reality’ or ‘truth’, which is threatened when the spectator becomes aware of the frame, but which is overcome by the process of shot/reverse-shot, the system of suture. Oudart was brought to the attention of English readers by Dayan whose commentary treats the shot/reverse-shot as ‘the system of suture’ operating to hide the ideological effects of film. However, Dayan develops Oudart only in insofar as he argues that the articulation of the codes productive of ideological effect are hidden (sutured) by the narrative, thus ‘Unable to see the workings of the code, the spectator is at its mercy. His imaginary is sealed into the film’ (Dayan 1976).

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Heath points out that Oudart and Dayan make both psychoanalytic and linguistic errors in their attempts to understand cinema as discourse: cinema does not operate like the mirror stage, it assumes the symbolic, and Dayan in particular wrongly equates the operations of language and ideology. ‘A close-up of a revolver does not mean “revolver” (a purely virtual lexical unit) but at the very least, and without speaking of the connotation, it signifies “Here is a revolver!”’ (Metz [1964]1974, 67). Heath recognized that suture is doubly problematic: the description of the particular discursive specification of cinema and the characterization of the general logic of cinematic discourse. The first problem deals with the articulation of the system of suture within the structure of shot/reverse-shot. While Oudart-Dayan have been heavily criticized – classically by Rothman and Salt – the criticisms have not damaged suture as a concept, but rather focused attention on ‘the organization and hold of the look and looks in film’. See Rothman (1975); Salt (1977). Rothman objects that no ‘ghostly sovereign’ is required to account for the operation of the point-of-view shot, and he argues that the ‘Oudart/Dayan scenario’ is wrongly based on a two-shot (view/viewer) figure, whereas it should more accurately be understood as a three shot (viewer/view/viewer) sequence. For Rothman, this is because ordinarily the point-of-view shot manifests only the power of film to appropriate a character’s gaze without authorization. The point-of-view shot does not then compel the viewer to accept a figure as the source of that power. Commenting on Silverman’s similar caution against identifying the system of suture too closely with the shot/reverse shot, Mast, Cohen and Braudy note that, ‘The shot/reverse shot is merely one device for encoding anticipation into a film, for directing our attention and our desire beyond the limits of one shot to the next’ (Mast et al. 1992, 118). Against this, Žižek objects that the Post-Theory critique of the ‘Gaze’ relies on a commonsense notion of the spectator; and to develop his argument, Žižek unnecessarily works a polemical slight of hand. In describing Rothman’s critique, Žižek projects onto the Post-Theorists a critique of the ‘Gaze’. However, Rothman, who is not included among the Post-Theorists, shows no interest in the ‘Gaze’ as a theoretical concept, nor does the concept occur in Post-Theorists Bordwell and Carroll. Žižek offers several examples of this Hitchcockian failure of the suture: the shift from ‘God’s-view’ shot to uncanny subjectivisation in which the subjectivity of the ‘impossible/traumatic subjectivity of the Thing itself’ intervenes; the sudden intrusion into the subjective/objective shots of a violent element – a ‘blot of the Real’; or the unexpected objectivization of what at first appeared to be a subjective shot (2001, 38). The thrust of psychoanalytic film theory has been to argue that subjects identify with the camera (Baudry) or with the act of perception (Metz). This materialist trajectory was developed to critique the ‘commonsense’ assumptions of realism. In proposing that subjects are sutured when they identify with an other I am suggesting a return to the screen image as a focus for identity, not to advocate a return to ‘commonsense’, but because I believe that analysis of the screen image allows for a more effective and less reductive application of Lacan. I am not, however, advocating ‘the central misconception of film theory’, that the screen image

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is a mirror. For a synopsis of film theory discussions about identity see Lapsley and Westlake (1988): on identification with perception (Metz 82–3); on identification with the camera (Baudry and Heath 140–2); on realism (MacCabe 171–3).

Chapter 7 1

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Unless otherwise stated, references to Écrits are from Alan Sheridan’s translation (Lacan 1977). There is inconsistency among Lacan’s commentators about whether or not to capitalize his three ‘Orders’, the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real. Unless quoting Lacan directly, in this chapter, I capitalize to emphasize them as technical terms. The concept was introduced into psychoanalysis by Jung: ‘The more limited a man’s field of consciousness is, the more numerous the psychic contents (imagos) which meet him as quasi-external apparitions’ ([1928]1953, para 295). However, Laplanche and Pontalis note that, although Freud borrowed the term from the Zurich psychoanalytic school of Bleuler and Jung (who understood it to mean the unconscious linkage of the subject’s recollections) and used it initially for its descriptive capacity to single out groups of strongly emotional thoughts, he soon felt misgivings with the term. ‘The fact is that Freud, unlike many authors claiming allegiance to psycho-analysis, makes very little use of the term’ (1973, 73). ‘Displacement is the replacing of one particular idea by another in some way closely associated with it. In displacement the psychical charge is transferred entirely from one representation to another. One of the characteristics of displacement is that it encourages condensation and even enables it to occur. Displacement is a more general, more permanent operation, of which condensation is, in a sense, a particular case. In short, dreams are symbolic fulfilments of unconscious wishes, and the essential function of both condensation and displacement is, of course, to deceive the censor’ (Sarup 1992, 149). This is not yet the Real of Lacan’s classic triad. It is important to note that in focusing on weaning, the ‘psychic trauma’ is not restricted to the particular of weaning but concerns the general loss of intimacy, as developed in Freud’s discussion of the Fort da game (PFL11, 283–4). ‘Either the subject seeks to return to the maternal object, where he will be caught in a refusal of the real and a destruction of the other [sibling as intrusive object], or, having been confronted by some other object, the subject relates to it as an object with which he can communicate in a way characteristic of human consciousness, since competition implies both rivalry and accord’ (Lacan [1938]1988, 18). The strategy of negation/disavowal, which constitutes the ego and emerges most clearly at the Mirror Stage, is itself constituted in the intrusion complex by the dynamic of jealousy. The centrality of jealousy to Lacan’s thinking on subjectivity should not be underestimated and will be seen to link with paranoiac knowledge. Hill’s attempt to explain Lacan in terms of the Heisenberg principle similarly stresses the impossibility of symbolizing the Real (1997, 47). See also Samuels (1993, 143–4).

178 10

11 12

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Introduced to Saussure by Claude Lévi-Strauss, Lacan first mentions the linguist in a seminar devoted to St Augustine’s De locutionis significatione (23 June 1954) (S1, 247–60). However, characterizing Lacan’s linguistics as a linguisterie, a derivation of linguistics, Macey notes that, ‘the linguistics invoked by Lacan represents a curiously truncated or incomplete version of the discipline’ (1988, 121). In addition, Macey highlights that, apart from Saussure and Jakobson, Lacan fails to discuss any of the major linguistic theorists, such as Hjelmslev, Martinet, Harris or Chomsky, neither does he discuss the extensive psychoanalytic literature on language, all of which he regards as strange given both the extent of Lacan’s privileging of language and the claims of Screen and Tel Quel that Lacan makes a major contribution to a materialist theory of language. I will deal with this in more detail below. ‘Thus the way that the subject gives an account of himself, with all his hesitations and omissions, his imaginary formations such as dreams, delusions and phobias, and his moments of incoherence, are phenomena which reveal the mental life of the individual’ (Benvenuto and Kennedy 1986, 70). ‘I might as well be categorical: in psychoanalytical anamnesis, it is not a question of reality, but of truth, because the effect of full speech is to reorder the past contingencies by conferring on them the sense of necessities to come, such as they are constituted by the little freedom through which the subject makes them present’ (E, 48). ‘At such and such a period, some riot or other in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine is experienced by its actors as a victory or defeat of the Parlement or the Court; at another, as a victory or defeat of the proletariat or the bourgeoisie. And although it is “the peoples” (as Cardinal de Retz would have said) who always foot its bill, it is not at all the same historical event – I mean that the two events do not leave the same sort of memory behind in men’s minds’ (E, 52). Lacan is clear that history is not the same as memory: ‘One mustn’t confuse the history, in which the unconscious subject inscribes himself, with his memory – a word I wouldn’t be the first one to tell you is used in a confusing way. On the contrary, at the point we have reached, it is important to draw a very sharp distinction between memory and remembering [remémoration], which pertains to the order of history’ (S2,185). ‘Lacan insists the “objet petit a” should remain untranslated, thus acquiring, as it were, the status of an algebraic sign’ (Sheridan 1977, xi). The seminars for 9 and 16 December 1959 (S7, 43–70). Although as an explicit theme the concept of the Thing disappears almost immediately, ‘the ideas associated with it provide the essential features of the new developments in the concept of the objet petit a as Lacan develops it from 1963 onwards’ (Evans 1996, 205). Lacan is here dependent on Totem and Taboo (PFL13, 43–224), which he describes as ‘the Freudian myth’, and which he argues retains value insofar as it reveals an ‘essential connection’ between the order of the law and psychoanalysis (S7, 42). Rose translates Vorstellung with representation: ‘It is representations (Vorstellung in the sense in which Freud uses the term to signal something repressed)’ (Lacan [1960]1982, 90). For Lacan, the pleasure principle ‘governs the search for the object’. As the search for objet petit a encounters a series of satisfactions tied to it and polarised

Notes

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22

23 24

25

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by it, the pleasure principle ‘fixes the level of a certain quantity of excitation which cannot be exceeded without going beyond the limit of the Lust/Unlust polarity’. In other words, the pleasure principle regulates the search through pleasure/unpleasure, and in so doing the law of pleasure imposes ‘detours which maintain the distance in relation to its end’ by the transfer from representation to representation. In articulating his point that ‘the dream-work follows the laws of the signifier’, Lacan makes a close association with Russian/American linguist Roman Jakobson’s conception of metaphor and metonymy. In his work on language and aphasic disturbance, Jakobson suggests: ‘The development of a discourse may take place along two different semantic lines: one topic may lead to another either through their similarity or through their contiguity. The metaphoric way would be the most appropriate term for the first case and the metonymic way for the second, since they find their most condensed expression in metaphor and metonymy respectively. In aphasia one or the other of these two processes is restricted or totally blocked’ (1956, 109–10). Lacan finds little to distinguish these two privileged mechanisms of dream work from their homologous function in discourse, other than what he refers to as the ‘consideration of the means of representation’, a condition that ‘constitutes a limitation operating within the system of writing; this is a long way from dissolving the system into a figurative semiology on a level with phenomena of natural expression’ (E, 160–1). Typically, however, Lacan reads Jakobson to suit his own purpose. Jakobson in fact makes his own, more subtle connections with Freud: ‘Thus in an inquiry into the structure of dreams, the decisive question is whether the symbols and the temporal sequences used are based on contiguity (Freud’s metonymic “displacement” and synecdochic “condensation”) or on similarity (Freud’s “identification and symbolism”)’ (1956, 113). To illustrate his point, Lacan draws a parallel with the parlour-game ‘charades’, where communicating solely through gesture limits the players. Lacan observes that the players’ difficulty is due to their lack of taxematic material to represent logical articulations: causality, contradiction, hypothesis. In making his point, that game and dream are limited by the same representational restrictions, Lacan argues this proves dreams to be ‘a form of writing rather than of mime’. For Lacan, ‘the dream-work follows the laws of the signifier’ (E, 161). Because they possess a ‘linguistic structure’ dream-images are capable of being read: ‘a qualified and skilled translation of the cryptogram representing what the subject is conscious of at the moment’ (S1, 13–14). On the distortions of Lacan’s theoretical piracy, see footnotes 10 and 22 above. Freud observed four operations in the dream work, which he extended to include ‘considerations of representability’ and ‘secondary revision’ (PFL4, 454ff., 629–51). Lacan uses the French term captation with regard to the specular image to mean both ‘captivation’ (seductive power), and ‘capture’ (imprisonment) (Evans 1996, 20). Glossing Metz, Sarup comments that, ‘when we watch a film we are somehow dreaming it as well; our unconscious desires work in tandem with those that generated the film-dream’ (1992, 150). Commenting on Oudart, Silverman echoes this point with regard to the shot/reverse shot formation, which she suggests ‘derives its real importance and interest for many of the theoreticians of suture

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because it demonstrates so lucidly the way in which cinema operates to reduplicate the history of the subject’ (1983, 201). For Lacan, fantasy has a protective function. ‘Lacan compares the fantasy scene to a frozen image on a cinema screen; just as the film may be stopped at a certain point in order to avoid showing a traumatic scene which follows, so also the fantasy scene is a defence which veils castration’ (Evans 1996, 60). Conceiving psychoanalysis in terms of Hegelian dialectic is an orientation peculiar to Lacan, and his psychoanalytical dialectic is dominated by his idiosyncratic version of the master-slave encounter. Whereas, for Hegel, the evolution of selfconsciousness was implicitly an intrasubjective process, in Kojève’s Marxist interpretation, the process was more explicitly intersubjective. It is the intersubjectivity of this Kojèvean dialectic that is worked out in Lacan. Whereas Kojève translated the Hegelian parable into the relations of Capitalism (bourgeois-worker), Lacan translates it into the evolution of consciousness and the relations of analysis, which he characterises as two subjects in relation, subject (analyst) to (analysand) subject, and which he opposes to any Cartesian conception of subject (analyst) to object (analysand). This master-slave dialectic finds its occasion in the complexes, specifically the intrusion and Oedipus complexes. Lacan translated Freud’s ‘Über einige Neurotische Menchanismen bei Eifersucht, Paranoia und Homosexualität’, in Revue française de psychanalyse 3 (1932), 391–401. Lacan’s term, connaissance paranoïaque, is variously translated as ‘paranoic knowledge’ (Sheridan: É, 17), ‘paranoid knowledge’ (Benvenuto and Kennedy 1986, 45; Tomaselli S3, passim.) and (by Lacan himself) ‘paranoiac knowledge’ (Lacan 1953, 12). The term belongs to Ernest Jones, who used it to describe ‘the fundamental fear which lies at the basis of all neuroses’, the disappearance of sexual desire: ‘the total, and of course permanent, extinction of the capacity (including opportunity) for sexual enjoyment’. This is a fear shared by both sexes, and gives rise to the Castration complex (Jones 1948, 440). Lacan modifies Jones’ term to mean the disappearance or fading of the subject that inaugurates the dialectic of desire (E, 283–4; S11, 207–8, 216–29). For Lacan the phallus is primarily a signifier of lack and not ‘the organ, penis or clitoris, that it symbolises’ (E, 285). However, Grosz objects that the penis becomes misappropriated by the phallus (1990, 116–22). Lacan’s comments here have been the subject of intense debate among many feminists, who object to what appears to be his suggestion that women should be defined by a lack. Thus, in Seminar XX, Lacan states: ‘“Woman” (la) is a signifier, the crucial property (propre) of which is that it is the only one that cannot signify anything, and this is simply because it grounds woman’s status in the fact that she is not-whole. That means we can’t talk about Woman (La femme)’ (S20, 73). Rose defends Lacan suggesting that he does not mean women are excluded by biology, but by culture. Translating ‘not-whole’ (pas-toute) as ‘not all’ she suggests that, ‘Within the phallic definition, the woman is constituted as “not all”, in so far as the phallic function rests on an exception (the “not”) that is assigned to her. Woman is excluded by the nature of words, meaning that the definition poses her

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as exclusion’ (1982, 49). Against this, Grosz maintains that Lacan is a biological determinist: ‘men have the phallus only if some subjects (ie women) do not have it, because the phallus is predicated on the division of some from all. They define the others as not-all. No-one is all. Yet women are distinguished from men by being not-all (men, presumably must be not not-all)’ (1990, 138). Žižek attempts to resolve the debate on the basis that Lacan’s designation of woman ‘as the symptom of man’ should be read in continuity with the later Lacan, rather than the Structuralist Lacan of the 1950s. ‘In this sense, “woman is a symptom of man” means that man himself exists only through woman qua his symptom: all his ontological consistency hangs on, is suspended from his symptom, is “externalized” in his symptom. In other words, man literally ex-ists: his entire being lies “out there”, in woman. Woman, on the other hand, does not exist, she insists, which is why she does not come to be through man only – there is something in her that escaped the relation to man, the reference to the phallic signifier; and, as is well known, Lacan attempted to capture this excess by the notion of a “not-all” feminine jouissance’ (1992, 155–6). Lacan is here making reference to his little noticed 1945 work, ‘Logical time and the assertion of anticipated certainty: a new sophism’. Lacan is clear: ‘“Fictitious” does not mean illusory or deceptive as such. It is far from being translatable into French by “fictif”. . . . “Fictitious” means “fictif” . . . in the sense that every truth has the structure of fiction’ (S7, 12). In describing the construction of infantile sexuality in terms of a male paradigm, Lacan uncritically follows Freud. ‘[H]ere we have two conceptions which seem to lead in exactly opposite directions. . . . The super-ego is constraining and the ego-ideal exalting. . . . These are things that one tends to gloss over, because we move from one term to the other as if the two were synonymous. It is a question which is worth pursuing in relation to the transference relationship. . . . the super-ego is essentially located within the symbolic plane of speech, in contrast to the ego-ideal. . . . The super-ego is an imperative . . . it is consonant with the register and the ideal of the law, that is to say with the totality of the system of language. . . . The super-ego has a relation to the law, and is at the same time a senseless law’ (S1, 102). For a summary of the development of feminist film theory, see Doane, Mellencamp and Williams (1984, 1–17). For a challenge to Mulvey’s binary oppositions, see Dyer (1982); Neale (1983). For an alternative, psychoanalytic perspective on female identity/spectation, see Doane (1982; 1991). Doane makes use of concept of the masquerade as proposed by psychoanalyst Rivière ([1929]1986). I have dealt with Mulvey and Stacey in more detail elsewhere (Nolan 1998b). The term ‘ideological effect’ is taken from Stuart Hall (1977), ‘Culture, the media and the “ideological effect”’, in James Curran, Michael Gurevitch and Janet Wollacott (eds), Mass Communication and Society. London: Edward Arnold, 315–48. Glossing Metz, Sarup comments that, ‘the spectator has a capacity for belief, and . . . this belief in the film involves a basic process of disavowal’ (1992, 150); see Metz (1975, 67–75).

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Chapter 8 1

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In total, Going My Way garnered six Oscars®: Best Actor (Bing Crosby); Best Supporting Actor (Barry Fitzgerald); Best Director, Best Original Story (Leo McCarey); Best Screenwriter (Frank Butler and Frank Cavett); and Best Picture. The film charts the ups and downs in the relationship between new boy Father O’Malley (Crosby) and old guard Father Fitzgibbon (Fitzgerald). While Going My Way took $6.5m in US theatrical rentals, The Bells of St Mary’s realized rentals of $8m. Source: Going My Way, www.imdb.com/title/tt0036872/ business; The Bells of St Mary’s, www.imdb.com/title/tt0037536/business (retrieved 20 October 2008). Henry Zecher, ‘American culture began with Bing’, www.henryzecher.com/ bing_crosby.htm (retrieved 20 October 2008). Dale O’Connor, ‘Mini-biography’, www.imdb.com/name/nm0001078/bio (retrieved 20 October 2008). ‘The production was overseen by a Catholic priest who served as an advisor during the shooting. While the final farewell sequence was being filmed, Bing Crosby and Ingrid Bergman decided to play a prank on him. They asked director Leo McCarey to allow one more take, and, as “Father O’Malley” and “Sister Benedict” said their last goodbyes, they embraced in a passionate kiss, while the offscreen priest-advisor jumped up roaring in protest.’ www.imdb.com/title/tt0037536/ trivia (retrieved 20 October 2008). Characteristically, Fr Gabriel refuses, but after embracing Mendoza he gives the former mercenary a small cross that he himself had taken from a Jesuit martyred by the Guarani as the film opened. Gustaf Molin, ‘Mini-biography’, www.imdb.com/name/nm0000460/bio (retrieved 20 October 2008). ‘In a way, I did understand why Dad’s fans loved him so. When I saw Going My Way I was as moved as they were by the character he played. Father O’Malley handled that gang of young hooligans in his parish with such kindness and wisdom that I thought he was wonderful too. Instead of coming down hard on the kids and withdrawing his affection, he forgave them their misdeeds, took them to the ball game and picture show, taught them how to sing. By the last reel, the sheer persistence of his goodness had transformed even the worst of them into solid citizens. Then the lights came on and the movie was over. All the way back to the house I thought about the difference between the person up there on the screen and the one I knew at home’, www.nospank.net/crosbyg.htm (retrieved 20 October 2008). As will become clear, I am placing McNeill’s status as a priest ‘under erasure’ (Fr) to signify that having ‘failed’ to deny the ‘human weakness of his flesh’, the Episcopal/ecclesial authorities denied Father McNeill his calling as a priest. Cast in Oedipal terms: the castrating God. Frank McCourt relates a similar tale of suppression and sexual guilt in his experiences with Redemptorist priests (1997, 340–1). ‘The real is distinguished, as I said last time, by its separation from the field of the pleasure principle, by its desexualisation, by the fact that its economy, later, admits something new, which is precisely the impossible’ (S11, 167). Žižek, argues

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that for Lacan, ‘the horrifying abyss of the Thing’ (objet petit a, described in Chapter 7 as the Thing in the Real that is ‘the beyond-of-the-signified’) embodies jouissance, ‘the impossible/real foreign kernel, [which is] irreducible to the symbolic order [and which] can only be approached in a suicidal heroic act of transgression, of excluding oneself from the symbolic community’ (2001, 19). The priest, of course, finds his own meaning by making his identification with the representation of his own desire. In the UK video and DVD release, which runs to around 117 minutes, the first sequence begins at 00:40:52, and lasts for 26 seconds, while the second sequence begins at 01:20:30, and lasts for 48 seconds. In the scene in which, with his uncle, Fr Karras visits his mother in hospital, his uncle ruminates: ‘You know it’s funny! If you wasn’t a priest, you’d be a famous psychiatrist by now. . . . Your mother, she’d be living in a penthouse instead of . . .’ However, the irony is doubled insofar as, had Karras not become a priest, he may never have had the chance of the university education that is now robbing him of his vocation. A similar type of metaphorical sparking occurs in The Darkest Light (Eltringham and Beaufoy 1999). In this small budget British film about how human experience is interpreted by different faith perspectives, a young boy is treated for leukaemia. Cutting from an invasive needle piercing the boy’s body, to an overhead shot of him lying in the foetal position, the camera cuts finally to a Holy Communion and the priest’s words, ‘The Body of Christ’. According to Hurley, Fr Corridan acted as an (uncredited) special advisor on the set (1991, 189, n 2). According to Hurley, this dramatic scene is based on an actual sermon delivered by Fr Corridan to the Knights of Columbus in 1948. ‘Corridan’s prophetic homily was called “Christ Looks at the Waterfront”, reminding his hearers that Christ “carried carpenter’s tools in His hands and earned His bread and butter by the sweat of His brow”’ (1991, 98). Liberation theologian, Jon Sobrino, has developed the idea of a ‘crucified people’ (1994, 254–71). The only liturgical actions offered by the fugitive priest are baptism and the last rites. ‘I might as well be categorical: in psychoanalytical anamnesis, it is not a question of reality, but of Truth, because the effect of a full Word [parole pleine : Sheridan: ‘full speech’] is to reorder the past contingent events by conferring on them the sense of necessities to come, just as they are constituted by the little liberty through which the subject makes them present’ (Lacan [1953]1968, 18).

By Way of Analysis 1

2

The overwhelming majority of character-actor/stars are male. Hence, the development of Feminist film critique. For Lacan the term name of the father is associated with entry into the Symbolic. He plays with the homophony of le nom du père (the name of the father) and le ‘non’

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du père (the ‘no’ of the father) to signify ‘the Oedipal prohibition, the “no” of the incest taboo’ (Evans 1996, 119). For example: www.crosswalk.com/movies/1336950/; www.pluggedinonline.com/ movies/movies/a0002197.cfm; www.usccb.org/movies/b/bewitched.shtml (retrieved 20 October 2008). Tim Burton speaking on the featurette ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: Chocolate Dreams’, packaged as supplementary material with the UK two-disc edition of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc., 2005.

Bibliography

Bibliography of Religion and Film The following chronological listing of over 200 English language books on aspects religion/theology and film has been gathered from a variety of sources including published bibliographies, journal articles and library and internet searches. Listing the books by year gives an easy demonstration of how the discipline has developed. 1932 Burnett, Richard George and Martell, E D, The Devil’s Camera: Menace of a FilmRidden World, 2nd edn, London: Epworth Press.

1938 Rice, John R, What is Wrong with the Movies? Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan. Wing, Alfred Douglas, Films and the Faith, London: SPCK.

1947 Miles, Herbert Jackson, Movies and Morals, Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

1961 Getlein, Frank and Gardiner, Harold C, Movies, Morals and Art, New York: Sheed and Ward.

1967 Jones, G William, Sunday Night at the Movies, Richmond, VA: John Knox.

1968 Schillaci, Anthony, Movies and Morals, Notre Dame, IN: Fides.

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Bibliography

1969 Butler, Ivan, Religion in the Cinema, New York: AS Barnes. Gibson, Arthur, The Silence of God: Creative Response to the Films of Ingmar Bergman, New York and London: Harper and Row. Summers, Stanford, Secular Films and the Church’s Ministry, New York: Seabury Press.

1970 Cooper, John C and Skrade, Carl (eds), Celluloid and Symbols, Philadelphia: Fortress Press. Hurley, Neil P, Theology through Film, New York: Harper and Row. McClain, C, Morals and the Movies, Kansas City, MO: Beacon Hill.

1971 Kahle, Robert and Lee, Robert E A, Popcorn and Parable: A New Look at the Movies, Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg. Wall, James M, Church and Cinema: A Way of Viewing Film, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

1972 Arnold, James W, Seen Any Good Dirty Movies Lately? A Christian Critic Looks at Contemporary Films, Cincinnati: St Anthony Messenger Press. Konzelman, Robert G, Marquee Ministry: The Movie Theatre as Church and Community Forum, New York: Harper and Row. Schrader, Paul, Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer, Berkeley: University of California Press.

1974 Drew, Donald J, Images of Man: A Critique of the Contemporary Cinema, Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity.

1976 Ferlita, Ernest and May, John R, Film Odyssey: The Art of Film as Search for Meaning, New York: Paulist Press.

1977 Holloway, Ronald, Beyond the Image: Approaches to the Religious Dimension in the Cinema, Geneva: World Council of Churches.

1978 Hurley, Neil P, The Reel Revolution: A Film Primer on Liberation, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis.

Bibliography

187

1981 Campbell, Richard H and Pitts, Michael R, The Bible on Film: A Checklist 1897–1980, Metuchen, NJ and London: The Scarecrow Press. Martin, Thomas M, Images and the Imageless: A Study in Religious Consciousness and Film, Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press.

1982 Friedman, Lester D, Hollywood’s Image of the Jew, New York: Frederick Ungar. May, John R and Bird, Michael (eds), Religion in Film, Knoxville: University of Tennessee.

1984 Butler, John, TV, Movies, and Morality: A Guide for Catholics, Huntington, IN: Our Sunday Visitor. Elley, Derek, The Epic Film: Myth and History, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Keyser, Les and Keyser, Barbara, Hollywood and the Catholic Church: The Image of Roman Catholicism in American Movies, Chicago: Loyola University Press.

1987 Friedman, Lester D, The Jewish Image in American Film, New Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press.

1988 Greeley, Andrew, God in Popular Culture, Chigaco, IL: Thomas More Press.

1989 Billingsley, K Lloyd, The Seductive Image: A Christian Critique of the World of Film, Westchester, IL: Crossway Books. Drouzy, Martin and Jørgensen, Lisbeth Nannestad (eds), Letters about the Jesus Film: 16 Years of Correspondence Between Carl Th. Dreyer and Blevins Davis, Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen. Gabler, Neal, An Empire of their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, New York: Crown Publishers.

1990 Malone, Peter, Movie Christs and Antichrists, New York: Crossroad. O’Brien, Tom, The Screening of America: Movies and Values from Rocky to Rain Man, New York: Continuum. Pavelin, Alan, Fifty Religious Films, Chislehurst, Kent: A P Pavelin.

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1991 Blake, Richard A, Screening America: Reflections on Five Classic Films, New York: Paulist Press. MacDonald, Alan, Films in Close-Up: Getting the Most from Film and Video, Leicester: Frameworks.

1992 Cosandey, Roland, Gaudreault, André and Gunning, Tom (eds), An Invention of the Devil? Religion and the Early Cinema. Une Invention de Diable? Cinema des Premiers Temps et Religion, Sainte Foy, Canada: Les Presses de l’Université Laval. Hill, Geoffrey, Illuminating Shadows: The Mythic Power of Film, Boston: Shambala. Kinnard, Roy and Davis, Tim, Divine Images: A History of Jesus on the Screen, New York: Carol Publishing. May, John R (ed.), Image and Likeness: Religious Visions in American Film Classics, Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press.

1993 Babington, Bruce and Evans, Peter William, Biblical Epics: Sacred Narrative in the Hollywood Cinema, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hurley, Neil P, Soul in Suspense: Hitchcock’s Fright and Delight, Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press. Jewett, Robert, Saint Paul at the Movies: The Apostle’s Dialogue with American Culture, Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press. Kreitzer, Larry J, The New Testament in Fiction and Film: On Reversing the Hermeneutical Flow, Sheffield: JSOT Press. Sinetar, Marsha, Reel Power: Spiritual Growth through Film, Liguori, MO: Triumph Books. Skinner, James, The Cross and the Cinema: The Legion of Decency and the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures, 1933–1970, Westport, CT: Praeger. Walls, David R, Finding God in the Dark, Wheaton, IL: Victor Books.

1994 Black, Gregory D, Hollywood Censored: Morality Codes, Catholics, and the Movies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kreitzer, Larry J, The Old Testament in Fiction and Film: On Reversing the Hermeneutical Flow, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Miller, Frank, Censored Hollywood: Sex, Sin and Violence on Screen, Atlanta: Turner Publishing. Scott, Bernard Brandon, Hollywood Dreams and Biblical Stories, Minneapolis: Fortress Press.

1995 Blake, Richard A, Woody Allen: Profane and Sacred. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press.

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Bliss, Michael, The Word Made Flesh: Catholicism and Conflict in the Films of Martin Scorsese, Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. Martin, Joel W and Ostwalt Jr, Conrad E (eds), Screening the Sacred: Religion, Myth and Ideology in Popular American Film, Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

1996 Couvares, Francis G (ed.), Movie Censorship and American Culture, Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press. Exum, J Cheryl, Plotted, Shot, and Painted: Cultural Representations of Biblical Women, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Miles, Margaret R, Seeing and Believing: Religion and Values in the Movies, Boston: Beacon Press. Walsh, Frank, Sin and Censorship: The Catholic Church and the Motion Picture Industry, New Haven: Yale University Press.

1997 Baugh, Lloyd, Imaging the Divine: Jesus and Christ-Figures in Film, Kansas City, MO: Sheed and Ward. Marsh, Clive and Gaye Ortiz, (eds), Explorations in Theology and Film: Movies and Meaning, Oxford: Blackwell. May, John R (ed.), New Image of Religious Film, Kansas City, MO: Sheed and Ward. Tatum, W Barnes, Jesus at the Movies: A Guide to the First Hundred Years, Santa Rosa, CA: Polebridge Press.

1998 Black, Gregory D, The Catholic Crusade Against the Movies, 1940–1975, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fraser, Peter, Images of the Passion: The Sacramental Mode in Film, Westport, CT: Praeger. Maher, Ian, Reel Issues: Engaging Film and Faith, Swindon: Bible Society.

1999 Fields, Doug and James, Eddie, Videos that Teach: Teachable Movie Moments from 75 Modern Film Classics, Grand Rapids, MI: Youth Specialties/Zondervan. Jewett, Robert, Saint Paul Returns to the Movies: Triumph over Shame, Grand Rapids, MI: William B Eerdmans. Kreitzer, Larry J, Pauline Images in Fiction and Film: On Reversing the Hermeneutical Flow, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Kupfer, Joseph H, Visions of Virtue in Popular Film, Boulder, CO: Westview. McNulty, Edward, Films and Faith, Viaticum Press. Plate, S Brent and Jasper, David (eds), Imag(in)ing Otherness: Filmic Visions of Living Together, Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press. Stern, Richard C, Jefford, Clayton N and DeBona, Guerric, Savior on the Silver Screen, New York: Paulist Press.

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2000 Alsford, Mike, What If? Religious Themes in Science Fiction, London: Darton, Longman and Todd. Bergesen, Albert J and Greeley, Andrew M, God in the Movies: A Sociological Investigation, New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. Blake, Richard A, Afterimage: The Indelible Catholic Imagination of Six American Filmmakers, Chicago, IL: Loyola Press. Forest, Ben, with Mueller, Mary Kay, God Goes to Hollywood: A Movie Guide for the Modern Mystic, Lincoln, NE: Writers Club Press. Fraser, Peter and Neal, Vernon Edwin, ReViewing the Movies: A Christian Response to Contemporary Film, Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books. Gire, Ken, Reflections on the Movies: Hearing God in the Unlikeliest of Places, Colorado Springs: Victor. Johnston, Robert K, Reel Spirituality: Theology and Film in Dialogue, Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic. McNulty, Edward, Let’s Go to the Movies: Alternative Studies for Christian Growth, Louisville, KY: Bridge Resources. Stone, Bryan P, Faith and Film: Theological Themes at the Cinema, St Louis, MO: Chalice Press. Wilkinson, David, The Power of the Force: The Spirituality of the Star Wars Films, Oxford: Lion.

2001 Deacy, Christopher, Screen Christologies: Redemption and the Medium of Film, Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Lindvall, Terry (ed.), The Silents of God: Selected Issues and Documents in Silent Film and Religion 1908–1925, London and Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. McNulty, Edward, Praying the Movies: Daily Meditations from Classic Films, Louisville, KY: Geneva Press. Malone, Peter and Pacatte, Rose, Lights, Camera . . . Faith! A Movie Lectionary, Cycle A, Boston, MA: Pauline Books and Media. May, John R, Nourishing Faith through Fiction: Reflections of the Apostles’ Creed in Literature and Film, Franklin, WI: Sheed and Ward.

2002 Aichele, George and Walsh, Richard (eds), Screening Scripture: Intertextual Connections between Scripture and Film, Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International. Cunningham, David S, Reading is Believing: The Christian Faith through Literature and Film, Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press. Fields, Doug and James, Eddie, Videos that Teach 2: Another 75 Scenes from Popular Films to Spark Discussion, Grand Rapids, MI: Youth Specialties/Zondervan. Godawa, Brian, Hollywood Worldviews: Watching Films with Wisdom and Discernment, Downers Grove, IL: InverVarsity Press.

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John, J and Stibbe, Mark, The Big Picture: Finding the Spiritual Message in Movies, Bletchley: Authentic. Kraemer, Ross S, Cassidy, William and Schwartz, Susan, Religions of ‘Star Trek’, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Kreitzer, Larry J, Gospel Images in Fiction and Film: On Reversing the Hermeneutical Flow, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Maher, Ian, Faith and Film: Close Encounters of an Evangelistic Kind, Cambridge: Grove Books. Malone, Peter and Pacatte, Rose, Lights, Camera . . . Faith! A Movie Lectionary, Cycle B, Pauline Books and Media. Sanders, Theresa, Celluloid Saints: Images of Sanctity in Film, Macon, GA: Mercer University Press.

2003 Bandy, Mary Lea and Monda, Antonio (eds), The Hidden God: Film and Faith, New York: Museum of Modern Art. Coates, Paul, Cinema, Religion and the Romantic Legacy: Through a Glass Darkly, Aldershot: Ashgate. Couch, Steve, Matrix Revelations: A Thinking Fan’s Guide to the Matrix Trilogy, Southampton: Damaris Publishing. Cunneen, James, Robert Bresson: A Spiritual Style in Film, New York: Continuum International. Gertel, Elliot, Over the Top Judaism: Precedents and Trends in the Depiction of Jewish Beliefs and Observances in Film and Television, Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Higgins, Gareth, How Movies Helped Saved My Soul: Finding Cultural Fingerprints in Culturally Significant Films, Lake Mary, FL: Relevant Books. John, J and Stibbe, Mark, The Big Picture 2: More Spiritual Insights from Modern Movies, Bletchley: Authentic. Lyden, John, Film as Religion: Myths, Morals, and Rituals, New York: New York University Press. McNulty, Edward, Praying the Movies II: More Daily Meditations from Classic Films, Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press. Malone, Peter and Pacatte, Rose, Lights, Camera . . . Faith! A Movie Lectionary, Cycle C, Boston, MA: Pauline Books and Media. Mitchell, Jolyon and Marriage, Sophia (eds), Mediating Religion: Conversations in Media, Religion and Culture, London: T & T Clark. Plate, S Brent (ed.), Representing Religion in World Cinema: Filmmaking, Mythmaking, Culture Making, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Reinhartz, Adele, Scripture on the Silver Screen, Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press. Riley, Robin, Film, Faith, and Cultural Conflict: The Case of Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, Westport, CT: Praeger. Runions, Erin, How Hysterical: Identification and Resistance in the Bible and Film, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Schleich, Kathryn, Hollywood and Catholic Women: Virgins, Whores, Mothers, and Other Images, iUniverse.com

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Seay, Chris and Garrett, Greg, The Gospel Reloaded: Exploring Spirituality and Faith in The Matrix, Colorado Springs, CO: Pinon Press. Vollmer, Ulrike, Seeing and Seen: Film and Feminist Theology in Dialogue, Sheffield: Sheffield University Press. Walsh, Richard G, Reading the Gospels in the Dark: Portrayals of Jesus in Film, Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International. Yeffeth, Glen (ed.), Taking the Red Pill: Science, Philosophy and Religion in The Matrix, Chichester: Summersdale.

2004 Anker, Roy M, Catching Light: Looking For God in the Movies, Grand Rapids, MI: William B Eerdmans Publishing Company. Barsotti, Catherine M and Johnston, Robert K, Finding God in the Movies: 33 Films of Reel Faith, Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books. Burnham, Johnathan (ed.), Perspectives on The Passion of the Christ: Religious Thinkers and Writers Explore the Issues Raised by the Controversial Movie, New York: Miramax Books. Cawkwell, Tim, The Filmgoer’s Guide to God, London: Darton, Longman and Todd. Corley, Kathleen E and Webb, Robert L (eds), Jesus and Mel Gibson’s The Passion of The Christ: The Film, the Gospels and the Claims of History, London: Continuum International. Dönmez-Colin, Gönül, Women, Islam and Cinema, London: Realktion Books. Egan, Joe, Brave Heart of Jesus: Mel Gibson’s Postmodern Way of the Cross, Blackrock, CO, Dublin: Columba Press. Faller, Stephen, Beyond the Matrix: Revolutions and Revelations, St Louis, MO: Chalice Press. Fields, Doug and James, Eddie, Videos that Teach 3: 75 More Moments to Get Teenagers Talking, Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan. Johnston, Robert K, Useless Beauty: Ecclesiastes through the Lens of Contemporary Film, Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic. Loughlin, Gerard, Alien Sex: The Body and Desire in Cinema and Theology, Oxford: Blackwell. Marsh, Clive, Cinema and Sentiment: Film’s Challenge to Theology, Milton Keynes: Paternoster. Pinsky, Mark I, The Gospel According to Disney: Faith, Trust, and Pixie Dust, Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press. Plate, S Brent (ed.), Re-Viewing The Passion: Mel Gibson’s Film and its Critics, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Pungente, John J and Williams, Monty, Finding God in the Dark: Taking the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius to the Movies, Boston: Pauline Books and Media. Wright, Greg, Peter Jackson in Perspective – the Power Behind Cinema’s The Lord of the Rings: A Look at Hollywood’s Take on Tolkien’s Epic Tale, Burien, WA: Hollywood Jesus Books. Wright, Greg and Wright, Jenn (eds), Hollywood Jesus Reviews: 2003–2004, Burien, WA: Hollywood Jesus Books.

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2005 Burston, Daniel and Denova, Rebecca (eds), Passionate Dialogues: Critical Perspectives on Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, Pittsburgh, PA: Mise Publications. Christianson, Eric, Frances, Peter and Telford, William R (eds), Cinéma Divinité: Religion, Theology and the Bible in Film, London: SCM Press. Clarke, Anthony J and Fiddes, Paul S (eds), Flickering Images: Theology and Film in Dialogue, Oxford: Regent’s Park College with Smyth and Hewlys. Deacy, Christopher (2005), Faith in Film: Religious Themes in Contemporary Cinema, Aldershot: Ashgate. Fields, Doug and James, Eddie, Videos that Teach 4: 75 More Moments to Get Teenagers Talking, Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan. Kniep, Seth, The Truth Behind the Passion Film and How to Respond, PublishAmerica. Lewerenz, Spencer and Nicolosi, Barbara (eds), Behind the Screen: Hollywood Insiders on Faith, Film, and Culture, Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books. Malone, Peter, Can Movies be a Moral Compass? London: St Pauls. Miller, Monica Migliorino, The Theology of The Passion of the Christ, New York: St Pauls/Alba House. Paietta, Ann C, Saints, Clergy, and Other Religious Figures on Film and Television, 1895– 2003, Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co. Ryan, Judylyn S, Spirituality as Ideology in Black Women’s Film and Literature, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Stibbe, Mark and John, J, Passion for the Movies: Spiritual Insights from Contemporary Films, Milton Keynes: Authentic. Walsh, Richard G, Finding St Paul in Film, New York: T and T Clark International. Wetmore, Kevin J, The Empire Triumphant: Race, Religion and Rebellion in the ‘Star Wars’ Films, Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Worthing, Mark W, The Matrix Revealed: The Theology of the Matrix Trilogy, CITY: Hindmarsh, Australia: ATF Press. Wright, Greg and Wright, Jenn (eds), Hollywood Jesus Reviews: 2004–2005, Burien, WA: Hollywood Jesus Books.

2006 Beal, Timothy K and Linafelt, Tod (eds), Mel Gibson’s Bible: Religion, Popular Culture, and The Passion of the Christ, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dwyer, Rachel, Filming the Gods: Religion and Indian Cinema, London: Routledge. Exum, J Cheryl (ed.), The Bible in Film: The Bible and Film, Leiden: Brill. Fredrickson, Paula, On The Passion of the Christ: Exploring the Issues Raised by the Controversial Movie, Berkeley: University of California Press. Gunn, Mike, with Wright, Greg and Jenn, The Da Vinci Code Adventure: On the Trail of Fact, Legend, Faith, and Film, Burien, WA: Hollywood Jesus Books. Humphries-Brooks, Stephenson, Cinematic Savior: Hollywood’s Making of the American Christ, Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers. Leonard, Richard, Movies that Matter: Reading Film through the Lens of Faith, Chichago, IL: Loyola Press.

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Malone, Peter and Pacatte, Rose, Lights, Camera . . . Faith! The Ten Commandments, Boston, MA: Pauline Books and Media. Paffenroth, Kim, Gospel of the Living Dead: George Romero’s Visions of Hell on Earth, Waco, TX: Baylor University Press. Sison, Antonio D, Screening Schillebeeckx: Theology and Third Cinema in Dialogue, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Wilson, Eric G, Secret Cinema: Gnostic Vision in Film, New York: Continuum. Wright, Greg and Wright, Jenn (eds), Hollywood Jesus Reviews: 2005–2006, Burien, WA: Hollywood Jesus Books.

2007 Burns, Paul (ed.), Jesus in Twentieth Century Literature, Art and Movies, New York: Continuum. Cargal, Timothy B, Hearing a Film, Seeing a Sermon: Preaching and Popular Movies, Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press. Cohen, Jeremy, Christ Killers: The Jews and the Passion from the Bible to the Big Screen, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Exum, J Cheryl (ed.), Retellings: The Bible in Literature, Music, Art and Film, Leiden: Brill. Flesher, Paul V M and Torry, R, Film and Religion: An Introduction, Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press. Garrett, Greg, The Gospel According to Hollywood, Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press. Geivett, R Douglas and Spiegel, James S (eds), Faith, Film and Philosophy: Big Ideas on the Big Screen, Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic. Johnson, William Bruce, Miracles and Sacrilege: Roberto Rossellini, the Church, and Film Censorship in Hollywood, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Johnston, Robert K (ed.), Reframing Theology and Film: New Focus for an Emerging Discipline, Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic. Keck, Ron, Finding Redemption in the Movies, Nashville, TN: Serendipity House. Lang, J Stephen, The Bible on the Big Screen: A Guide from Silent Films to Today’s Movies, Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books. Lindvall, Terry, Sanctuary Cinema: Origins of the Christian Film Industry, New York: New York University Press. McDannell, Colleen (ed.), Catholics in the Movies, Oxford: Oxford University Press. McDowell, John C, The Gospel According to Star Wars: Faith, Hope, and the Force, Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press. McKee, Gabriel, The Gospel According to Science Fiction: From the Twilight Zone to the Final Frontier, Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press. McNulty, Edward, Studying Faith and Film: A Guidebook for Leaders, Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press. Malone, Peter (ed.), Through a Catholic Lens: Religious Perspectives of Nineteen Film Directors from Around the World, Lanham: Sheed and Ward. Marsh, Clive, Theology Goes to the Movies: An Introduction to Critical Christian Thinking, London: Routledge. Mitchell, Jolyon and Plate, Brent S (eds), The Religion and Film Reader, London: Routledge.

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2008 Cowan, Douglas E, Sacred Terror: Religion and Horror on the Silver Screen, Waco, TX: Baylor University Press. Deacy, Christopher and Williams Ortiz, Gaye, Theology and Film: Challenging the Sacred/Secular Divide, Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Detweiler, Craig, Into the Dark: Seeing the Sacred in the Top Films of the 21st Century, Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic. Hallback, Geert and Hvithamar, Annika (eds.), Recent Releases: The Bible in Contemporary Cinema, Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press. Hogan, James, Reel Parables: Life Lessons from Popular Films, New York: Paulist Press. McDannell, Colleen (ed.), Catholics in the Movies, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Watkins, Gregory J (ed.), Teaching Religion and Film, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Author Index

Althusser, Louis 5, 67–8, 69, 79, 82, 84, 92, 93, 112, 127, 174n10, 174–5n1 Arnheim, Rudolf 175n3 Barker, Martin 33 Barthes, Roland 68, 174n8, 174n9 Baudry, Jean-Louis 81–2, 92, 102–3, 113, 151, 174–5n1, 175n2 Baugh, Lloyd 168n3 Bazin, André 11–12, 16, 19, 39, 40, 58, 66–7, 69, 85, 86 Benjamin, Walter 174n10 Bird, Michael 14 Bordwell, David 89, 174n10, 176n12 Bouyer, Louis 171–2n11 Bowie, Malcolm 96 Bradshaw, Steve 60, 64, 65 Brecht, Bertholt 174n10 Brubaker, Leslie 170n6 Campbell, Joseph 156, 158, 174n5 Carroll, Noël 89, 176n12 Childs, Brevard 50–1 Comolli, Jean-Louis 174–5n1 Copjec, Joan 88 Crichton, J. D. 33, 34 Crosby, Gary 139 Cunneen, Joseph 14 Dahl, Roald 162, 163 Daney, Serge 85, 90 Dayan, Daniel 175n7 Deacy, Christopher 25–7, 28, 36 Dix, Gregory 171–2n11 Dyer, Richard 59–60, 128, 135, 142 Eagleton, Terry 41 Easthope, Antony 2, 70

Eliade, Mircea 48 Eliot, T. S. 20–1, 36 Evans, Dylan 124–5 Fink, Bruce 96–7 Fraser, Peter 14–15, 17 Freud, Anna 94 Geertz, Clifford 29–32 Gerges, Fawaz A. 70, 71–2 Greene, Graham 148 Grosz, Elizabeth 99 Hall, Stuart 181n42 Heath, Stephen 67, 81–2, 83, 86–7, 92–3, 112, 127, 176n8 Hegel, Georg W. F. 117, 180n28 Heidegger, Martin 50, 172n12 Hitchcock, Alfred 88 Huntington, Samuel 62 Hurley, Neil 35, 147 Ingarden, Roman 17–18, 167n4 Jakobson, Roman 179n21 Jasper, David 167n2 Jewett, Robert 22 Johnston, Robert K 9–10, 20, 36 Jones, Ernest 180n31 Jungmann, Josef 171–2n11 Klein, Melanie 98 Kojève, Alexandre 117, 180n28 Kreitzer, Larry 22–5 Kristeva, Julia 169n1 Leavis, F. R. 21–2, 25, 67, 168n2 Lovell, Alan 168n2, 174n5 Lyden, John 10, 28–32, 35–6, 167n2

208

Author Index

MacCabe, Colin 70, 79, 174n10 Macey, David 151, 178n10 Malone, Peter 168n3 Maltin, Leonard 60 Marsh, Clive 28, 32–6 Martin, Thomas 16–17, 19 Martos, Joseph 48, 49, 50 May, John 9–10, 20–2, 25, 30, 36 Metz, Christian 39–40, 68–9, 80–1, 86, 174–5n1 Miller, Jacques-Alain 83, 175n4 Mulvey, Laura 127–8, 181n41 Niebuhr, H. Richard 10 Ortiz, Gaye 34 Ostwalt, Conrad E. 2, 3 Otto, Rudolf 13 Oudart, Jean-Pierre 82, 83–6, 91, 92, 112–3, 127 effet de réalité 85, 86, 91 effet de réal 85, 175nn5–7 Ouspensky, Leonid 170n5 Peirce, C. S. 175n3

Rothman, William 88 Said, Edward 70, 71–2, 74 Sarris, Andrew 22 Sarup, Madan 179–80n26, 181n43 Saussure, Ferdinand de 94, 101, 107, 108, 178n10 Schrader, Paul 12–13, 16, 17, 18, 19, 25 Silverman, Kaja 179–80n26 Stacey, Jackie 127–8, 181n41 Tan, E. S. and Frijda, N. 33 Telford, William 168n3 Thompson, John O. 16–19, 167n4 Tillich, Paul 10, 14, 20 Vogler, Christopher 156–9, 174n45 Wainwright, Geoffrey 172–3n13 Wollen, Peter 175n3 Wood, Robin 174n6 Žižek, Slavoj 79, 87–90, 101

Film Index

Air Force One (1997) Wolfgang Petersen 58, 63 Apocalypse Now (1979) Francis Ford Coppola 167n2

Last Temptation of Christ, The (1988) Martin Scorsese 26 Lilies of the Field (1963) Ralph Nelson 174n13

Batman Begins (2005) Christopher Nolan 156–9, 165 Bells of St Mary’s, The (1945) Leo McCarey 132, 155, 182nn1–2 Bewitched (2005) Nora Ephron 156, 159–62, 164, 165

Man with a Movie Camera (1929) Dziga Vertov 66 Mission, The (1986) Roland Joffé 136–8

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005) Tim Burton 156, 162–5 Citizen Kane (1941) Orson Welles 88

On the Waterfront (1954) Elia Kazan 146–8

Darkest Light, The (1999) Bille Eltringham and Simon Beaufoy Die Hard (1988) John McTiernan 58, 60–1, 63

Passion, The (1897) Auguste and Louis Lumières 9 Passion Play of Oberammergau, The (1898) Thomas Edison Company 9 Peacemaker, The (1997) Mimi Leder 58, 63

Executive Decision (1996) Stuart Baird 58, 64 Exorcist, The (1973) William Friedkin 144–6

Road to Singapore, The (1940) Victor Schertzinger 133 Rocky Horror Picture Show, The (1975) Jim Sharman 29

Fugitive, The (1947) John Ford 148–50

Siege, The (1998) Edward Zwick 58, 64–5, 72–5 Soldiers of the Cross (1900) Joseph Perry with Herbert Booth 9 Stepford Wives, The (2004) Frank Oz 160

God Needs Men (1950) Jean Delannoy 11 Going My Way (1944) Leo McCarey 132–3, 182nn1–2 Greatest Story Ever Told, The (1965) George Stevens 26, 168n3 King of Kings (1961) Nicholas Ray 26, 168n3

Training Day (2001) Antoine Fuqua 174n13 True Lies (1994) James Cameron 58, 64

210

Film Index

Voyage à travers l’impossible (1904) Georges Méliès 66

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971) Mel Stuart 163

Walking on the Water (1899) Georges Méliès 9

Young Mr Lincoln (1939) John Ford 59, 62

Subject Index

absent/absence 80, 83–4, 86, 87, 88, 89, 113 Absent One, the 83–4, 112 active reading 59 actualization 51 aesthetics of reality 67 Alexander of Hales (d. 1245) 48 American Dream, the 60, 128 analysis 94, 96, 99, 100, 101, 102, 113 Anamnesis active remembering 44, 50, 51, 52, 171–2n11 analytic 151 anamnetic participation 52, 55, 100–2, 135 liturgical 4, 6, 40, 44, 50, 51, 52, 53, 56, 100–2, 103, 104, 109, 113, 132, 152, 153, 154, 171–2n11 subject’s analytic 4, 6, 40, 44, 50, 51, 52, 53, 56, 100–2, 103, 104, 109, 111, 152, 171n11 Apollo Theatre, Manchester 1 archetypes (Jungian) 158 ARCIC 171–2n11 Aristotelian philosophy 48 Augustine 171n5, 178n10 auteur filmmaker as 21–5 theory 22 authorial intent 24 autonomy 20–1, 30, 36 B-movie narratives 1 Bale, Christian 156 Bazinian realism 12, 19, 85, 86, 91 Berengar of Tours (d. 1088) 48, 171n6 Bergman, Ingrid 133 Bewitched (TV sitcom) 159–60

biblical spectacular film 13, 17 Blair, Linda 144 Bresson, Robert 11 Bühler, Charlotte 119 Burton, Tim 162 Cahiers du Cinéma 22, 58, 59, 62, 103 Calvin/Calvinistic 12 castration complex 180n31 celebrity 161–2, 164 Chaplin, Charlie 22 Chicago School, the 119 Christ (Idea-I) 141, 142, 143 Christ-figures 3, 168n3 Christology 26–7, 44 cinematic analogue 3, 19, 20, 21, 25, 34, 35 apparatus 81–2, 102 discourse 79, 83–4, 86–7, 90–3, 95, 104–14, 129, 130, 144, 148 identification 47, 80, 82 language 39, 67, 167n3 narrative 62, 75, 82, 151 One-Like 129, 142 ‘other’ 59–62, 75, 95, 114–30 perspective 80–2 realism 11, 66, 67, 69 ‘reality’ 5, 58, 59, 75, 155 representation 4, 81, 102, 112, 162, 166 sexual subject 127 signifier 113 star/hero as the ‘other’ of 4, 42, 59–62, 95 ‘cinematographic language’ 68 cinesemiotics 68 codes (of discourse) 84, 85–6, 92 Communism 60, 64, 65, 70

212

Subject Index

connotation 39 construction liturgical identity/subjectivity 15, 17, 19, 95, 130, 155 of the individual 80 religious identity 2, 5, 90, 93, 95, 129 spectator identity 2 subject identity 3, 90, 92, 103, 119, 161, 162 transcended subject 92 Crosby, Bing 133–6, 137, 138, 139, 141, 182n1 De Mille, Cecil B. 9 De Niro, Robert 137 denotation 39 Depp, Johnny 163 Dillon, Marshall 60 disavowal/negation 5, 6, 95, 98, 99, 104, 123, 129, 130, 131, 132, 134, 135, 138, 139–41, 142, 143, 152, 177n8 of sexual fulfilment 6 discourse(s) of desire 6, 131, 132, 150, 154 Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 23 dream as metaphor of desire 104, 110, 112 structure of a/the sentence 107, 108 Dufrenne, Mikel 14 Eastern Orthodox Churches 55 ego, the 69, 95, 98, 100, 119, 123, 124, 125 as Imaginary function 124 genetic theory of 114–15 narcissistic structure of 114, 125 Ego psychology 94 Eisenstein, Sergei 24 Eliade, Mircea 14 Ephron, Nora and Della 160 Episcopal/ecclesial authority 6, 41, 44, 47, 52, 54, 153 (ideological) ‘reality’ 4, 41, 44, 46, 52, 53–7, 130, 132, 143, 150–4 priest as representative of 47

erotic attraction (hetero-/homo-) 132, 135, 136–8, 143, 152 ethnography 30 Eucharist 19, 40, 43, 46, 48, 50, 54, 55, 56, 135, 145 as image of Christ 48 politicized 56, 173n15 union with Christ 44 Eucharistic prayer of remembrance 40, 44, 52 sacramental theology 46, 55, 56, 171–2n11 Exodus 50 exorcism 144, 146 female Hollywood stars 128 Feminist critique (of Lacan), 180–1n33 film theory 127–8, 181n38 and the male gaze (voyeuristic) 127 Ferrell, Will 159–60 film noir 25–6 film star (defined) 4, 59–60, 135 as fictional representation 128, 136 filmic space 81, 113 Fonda, Henry 59, 148 Ford, John 150 Ford, Harrison 63 formation of the faithful 44, 47, 54, 56, 153 Freud, Sigmund 94, 97, 100, 101, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 111, 115–16, 118 dream as rebus (picture puzzle) 107 dream work (condensation/ displacement) 108, 179n24 Fort-da game 111 incest taboo 105 Interpretation of Dreams, The 110 jealousy (normal, projected, delusional) 117–19, 126, 134, 136 narcissism 116 pleasure principle 105, 106, 178–9n20 gegenwärtigen (making present) 172n12

Subject Index Hawks, Howard 85 Heideggerian Thomism 49 heirophany 14 Heisenberg principle 177n9 hermeneutic of suspicion 155, 166 Hero’s Journey, the 156–7, 158–9 heteronomy 20, 29, 30, 36 High Scholasticism 45, 48–9 Highmore, Freddie 162 Hollywood 26, 35, 59, 60, 61, 63, 65, 70, 73, 82, 87, 151, 159 Hollywood realism (ideological ‘reality’ of) 4, 42, 59, 66–75, 102, 127, 159 Holy Name, Church of the 1 homoerotic pleasure 128 hope 143, 144, 145, 149, 150, 162, 163 Hope, Bob 133 Hugh of St Cher (d. 1263) 48 Hugh of St Victor (d. 1141) 48 iconoclast controversy, the 39, 50 iconoclasts 39 Constantine V (iconoclast emperor) 39, 48 iconophiles 39 John of Damascus 40 Theodore of Studios 40 identification 132 dialectic of 117, 124 imaginary 83, 91 mechanisms of 112, 114–30 pseudo-identification 5, 80, 83, 92–3, 103–4, 122, 131, 132, 134, 138, 143, 144, 155, 161 spectator’s solipsistic 102, 113, 129, 142 with an other 27, 92 with cinematic ‘other’ 5, 27, 95, 103 with cinematic signifier 92 with female Hollywood stars 128 with film star/actor 61, 62, 75, 80, 103, 127, 133, 151, 155, 160, 161 with liturgical ‘other’ 41, 44–7, 56, 75, 132 with noir protagonist 27

213

with priest 4, 5, 44, 56, 61, 132–43, 148 with ‘transcendental subject’ 81, 92 with represented ‘other’ 4, 5, 27, 44 worshipper’s solipsistic 141, 142, 143, 149 ideological effect 128, 181n42 Ideological State Apparatuses 82 ideology 2, 4, 35, 58–60, 63–4, 67–70, 74, 81, 82, 84, 85, 87, 91–2, 127, 128, 158 implied reader 31 impression of reality 96, 103, 114, 126 cinematic 5, 16, 40, 58, 68, 69, 79, 81, 91, 92, 93, 95–104, 151 participation in 100–2, 151 subjective 95, 96, 97, 99, 100, 101, 102, 106, 108, 111, 113, 114, 129–30, 131, 151 in nomine totius populi 41, 44, 46, 50, 135, 136, 146, 147 in persona Christi 41, 44, 45, 47, 50, 135, 136 interpellation 69, 82, 84, 91, 174–5n1 Irons, Jeremy 136, 138 Islam 64, 65, 70, 71, 72, 74 as Other 72 Islamist militants 63, 64–5 terrorist 70, 71, 72, 73 Jackanory 162 Jesus 18 Jesus-figures 27, 168n3 Khomeini, Ayatollah 71, 74 Kidman, Nicole 159–61 Kieslowski, Krzysztof 14 Kracaur, Siegfried 14 Kuleshov, Lev; the ‘Kuleshov effect’ 4, 146 Lacan, Jacques 5, 68, 69, 70, 79, 83, 86, 87–90, 94–130, 141, 142, 144, 151–2, 173nn1–2, 175–83passim

214

Subject Index

Lacanian psychoanalysis alienation/separation 115, 117, 119–21, 131, 134, 141, 143, 152 aphanisis (fading of the subject) 121 auto-eroticism 116 captation 114, 117, 179n25 complex(es) 95–6, 97–100, 106, 109, 129 intrusion, Oedipus and weaning 98, 114, 117, 123–4, 125, 129 representational nature of 97–100, 107 condensation/displacement 108, 109, 110, 113, 114, 122, 128, 144, 148, 153 desire discourse of 5, 6, 131, 132, 134 for lost object 110, 112 fundamental 105 imaginary object of 104, 106, 108–9 of the Other 109, 110, 111, 113, 119, 121–2, 130, 134, 137–8 subject’s (unconscious discourse of) 110, 113, 132 to repeat the trauma (homeostasis) 111, 113 dream-image 104, 108, 109 as rebus (picture puzzle) 107 understood as signifier 108, 110 dream-work 179n22 ego-ideal 123–6, 135 énoncé (subject/content of statement or utterance) 83, 86 énonciation (the act of stating or uttering) 83, 86 fantasy 180n27 gaze, the 88, 176n12 gaze/look (narcissistic pleasure in) 125, 134–5, 138 Gestalt 115, 119, 123, 124 homeostasis 111 Ideal-I (ideal-ego) 115, 119, 123–6, 129, 130, 134, 135, 143, 150 Imaginary (order), the 5, 69, 80, 83, 91, 92, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100,

103, 104, 109, 114, 115, 116, 123, 126, 127, 129, 130, 134, 142, 151, 152, 163, 164, 177n2 imaginary projection 124–6 imago (of the specular ‘other’) 5, 95, 97–100, 106, 109, 123, 124, 129, 131, 177n3 captation by 114 function in formation of ego 123 of the fragmented body 115 of the nurturing relationship 98, 99 paternal, maternal and fraternal 97, 125 relation to complex(es) 107, 109 infans (pre-linguistic stage) 115, 123 interpretation 110 intersubjectivity 117 jealousy 117–19, 134, 136, 177n8 jouissance 85, 90, 105, 182–3n12 lack 83, 86, 113, 119, 120, 121, 122 law 105, 173n1 laws of condensation and displacement 98, 104, 106, 107, 108, 109, 111, 112, 121, 126, 129, 177n5 of metaphor and metonymy 106, 107, 121 of the signifier 110, 112, 113, 134, 148, 179n22 of the unanchored signifier 111 libido 115–17 linguistic theory of dreams 5, 79, 93, 95, 104–14 lost breast (as objet petit a) 105, 129 manque-à-être (lack-of-being) 120 Master-Slave dialectic (Hegel/ Kojève) 117, 120, 124, 180n28 mirror stage 80, 97, 109, 110, 112, 114–21, 123–4, 176n8, 177n8 (m)Other 121–2, 134 name of the father (le nom du père/le non du père) 158, 163, 183–4n2 objet petit a 88–9, 90, 104–6, 109, 129, 142, 178n16, 178–9n20, 182–3n12

Subject Index Oedipus complex 125–6, 163 on psychosis 94, 118 One-Like (imago of) 95, 118, 123, 125, 126, 130 paranoia 117–19 paranoiac knowledge (connaissance paranoïaque) 117–19, 134, 177n8, 180n30 phallus 121–2, 134, 180n32 phantasy 112 pleasurable association 103, 104, 105, 109, 111, 112, 113, 129, 142, 144, 150, 163 pleasure 104, 111, 165 Real (order), the 69, 91, 92, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 104, 109, 110–12, 123, 124, 129, 134, 150, 177n2, 177n6 as impossible 90, 141, 177n9, 182–3n12 as psychic trauma 95, 97, 98, 99, 102, 103, 109, 111, 112, 129, 139–40, 142, 177n6 encounter with the real (tuché) 111, 112 funds subject’s truth 99 shock of 98, 99, 109, 111 unconscious refusal of 5, 96, 98, 99, 129 remainder 104 repetition (of the dream) 111–12 return to Freud 94 rim, the 119–20 S/s (structure of the sign) 107, 119 scoptophilic drives 125 signified 39, 82, 101, 107, 108 signifier 39, 82, 83, 84, 101, 107, 108–10, 120, 131, 134 specular image 113, 136, 138, 143 specular other 114, 115, 129, 130, 134, 144 splitting (of the subject – Spaltung ) 119, 121, 126 subject’s history 101, 113, 152 subject’s truth (analytical truth) 96, 99–100, 101, 102, 105, 151 superego 124, 125, 126

215

Symbolic (order), the 70, 80, 90, 95, 96, 97, 99, 104, 109, 114, 115, 123, 151, 152, 163, 164, 177n2 symbolic introjection 124–6 theory of the complexes 95 subjectivity/subject construction 93, 95, 103 subject identity 95 Thing, the (das Ding) 90, 104–6, 176n13, 182–3n12 transitivism 117–19, 123 unconscious 120 desire 5, 95, 112–14, 129, 131, 143, 144, 149, 150, 153 discourse of 112–13 royal way of, the 109 structured as a language 94 word/speech (full and/or empty) 132, 151–4 Lacanian psycholinguistics 92, 106, 178n10 Lee, Christopher 163 Legion of Decency 9 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 178n10 Light of the World, The (Hunt) 23 liturgical conception of history 50 participation 135 representation 43–57, 79, 93, 101, 131, 132, 138, 141, 146, 147, 155 Eucharistic 40–1 hierarchical nature of 46, 54, 153 in nomine totius populi 41, 44, 46, 50 in persona Christi 41, 44, 45, 47, 50 of Christ 48 priest as 4, 5, 19, 41, 43, 132–43, 138, 143 with Christ (as Ideal-I) 141, 142 subject 6, 19, 132, 143 subjectivity 19, 41, 131 liturgy catechetical aspects of 53 medium of representation 4 Lucas, George 156 Lumière, Auguste and Louis 9

216

Subject Index

McNeill, Father John 139–41, 142, 182n9 Maids of Honour, The (Velázquez) 85 Malden, Karl 147 Marx, Karl 90 Marxism (Althusserian) 3, 58, 90, 91, 92, 173n1, 174n10 materialist cinema 58 Mass, the 1, 29, 52, 53, 56, 135, 145, 146, 150, 154, sacrifice of 43, 50 May–June 1968 58, 174n10 media of representation (representational media) 4, 18, 19, 56, 75 Méliès, Georges 9 memory 50–1, 101–2 metaphor 104, 109, 145, 179n21 metaphysics of presence 48–9, 68 Bazinian idealist 68 metonymy 82, 108, 109, 122, 179n21 midrash 22 Milligan, Spike 6 monomyth 156, 158 Montgomery, Elizabeth 160 Mounier, Emmanuel 167n3 mysterium fascinans 32–3 mysterium tremendum 13, 32–3 narcissistic 5, 95, 115, 125, 136 confusion 95, 130, 138, 143 desire 155 identification 114, 115–17, 126, 131, 134 intrusion 125 (mis)representation 132 structure of the ego 114, 125 narrative space 2, 4, 5, 79, 80–2, 92, 93, 95, 102–3, 113, 127, 129, 155 suture 132 negation/disavowal (see disavowal/ negation) Nicene Creed, the 52 numinous 13

Oompa-Loompas 164 ‘ordinary-guy-in-extraordinary situation’ 59, 62–6 Other/other, the 65, 75, 109, 132, 150, 153, 173n2 fear/threat of 62, 65, 70, 74, 75 field of 109, 120, 121 imago of 143 minority ethnic 72 (m)Other 121–2, 134 Muslim 75 prehistoric (impossible to forget) 105 ‘our’ American way 59, 75, 151 Ozu, Yasujiro 12 participation 132 anamnetic 52, 55, 100–2, 135 external and internal (volition and intellect) 54, 135, 136, 149, 153 in Episcopal (ideological) ‘reality’ 6, 41, 53–7, 132, 153 in ideological ‘reality’ 4, 5, 27, 44, 58, 62, 66–75, 151, 155, 159, 162, 164 in sacramental narrative 4, 43, 50, 51, 52, 75, 151 in sacramental ‘reality’ 49–50, 132, 152, 154 in salvation narrative 52–3, 56 in the sacrifice of Christ 43 in sacrifice of the cross 40, 54, 152 Passover 50 Personalism 167n3 phenomenology 69 photographic ontology 16, 39, 66–7 point-of-view shot (shot/reverseshot) 80, 82, 83–4, 88, 92, 113, 175nn6–7 Poitier, Sidney 72–2, 174n13 post-Cold War ‘terrorist hi-jack’ films 4, 58, 61, 62, 66, 70, 72, 73 postmodern condition, the 155 Post-Theory 34–5, 87–9, 176n12 Powell, Robert 18, 19

Subject Index Presbyterorum ordinis (Decree on the Ministry and Life of Priests, Vatican II document) 135, 139, 153 priest 4, 19 as Ideal-I 135, 136, 138, 141, 143 as liturgical ‘other’ 41, 44–7 as signifier of Episcopal/ecclesial authority 153 as specular image 138 configured to Christ 45, 53, 135, 139 in nomine totius populi 41, 44, 46, 50, 61–2, 135, 136 in persona Christi 41, 44, 45, 46, 47, 50, 61–2, 135, 136 priest’s duty 44, 47, 54 priestly representation 19, 41, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 53, 54, 56, 135, 153 as fictional 136, 141, 142, 152, 154 pro-filmic theory 33 Protestant cinematic sacramentalism 12 Protestantism, Cinematic/filmic 11, 19 psychoanalysis 3, 35, 79, 80, 89, 150, 173n1 psychoanalytic film theory 5, 25, 26, 34, 79, 92, 95, 101, 126, 129, 131, 155, 176–7n14 Pudovkin, V. I. 24 Quattrocento 81, 85–6, 91, 92, 174–5n1 Rahner, Karl 49 Rambo 60 reader-response approach 23, 33 realism (Hollywood/cinematic) 4, 5, 11, 12, 14, 16, 19, 40, 41, 42, 59, 70, 72, 75 realist representation 58, 68 reality 40, 96–8 imaginary 96–7, 98–100, 102–4 redeemer-figures 25 religion (Geertz’ definition of) 29 religion (liturgy) and film 36

217

comparable cultural phenomenon 30 limits to the parallel 16 longstanding conflict 9 paralleled 4–5, 11, 16, 36, 39–40, 41, 47, 61, 75, 131, 136, 143, 151 and literature (interrelation of) 20 religious film analysis 5, 6, 27, 28, 155, 156, 165–6 anthropological interpretation (film as religion/religious practice) 4, 10, 28–36 emerging orthodoxy 19, 25, 27 literary interpretation (film as literature) 4, 10, 20–7 methodological weakness 3, 34 phenomenological interpretation (film as sacrament) 4, 10, 11–19 religious identity 47, 90, 93, 95, 131, 142 re-member 6, 56, 152, 154, 161 Representation (Repräsentation: ‘standing in for’) 167n4 representation (Darstellung: ‘depicting’ or ‘presenting’) 167n4 representation of reality 58, 69 of reference (the signified) 50 of signification (the signifier) 50 return to Lacan 6, 90, 93, 129, 131 reversing the hermeneutical flow (Kreitzer) 22–3 Richardson-Nolan, Marion 6 Rogers, Roy (‘King of the Cowboys’) 60 Rogers, Will 60, 128 Rohmer, Eric 14, 66 Roman Catholic spirituality 43 theology 43 Roman Pontiff, Vicar of Christ 47 Romans 7, 23 sacrament Augustine’s definition 48 Martos’ functional definition 47–8, 50

218

Subject Index

sacramental language 49–50 narrative (of Christ/of the Cross) 6, 41, 43, 44, 47–53, 75, 93, 131, 132, 144, 148, 151, 153, 154 ‘reality’ 6, 49, 50 theology 46, 48, 49 sacramentum et res 48, 49 sacrifice of Christ 43 of the cross 43, 53 of the Mass 43 Sacrosanctum concilium (Vatican II document) 54 Schillebeeckx, Edward 49, 171n9 Schleiermacher, Freidrich 35 Scorsese, Martin 26, 167n2 Screen, (British film journal) 2, 21, 41, 58, 59, 67–8, 69–70, 79, 80, 87, 103, 127, 165, 174n10, 178n10 theoretical mix 3 Screen problematic 2, 3, 5, 36, 155 Screen theory 34, 35, 165 Second Vatican Council, the (Vatican II, 1962–65) 9, 43, 49, 171–2n11 semiotic incarnation 46 semiotics 3, 35, 67, 85 of the cinema 68 theory of representation 39 Sennett, Mack 133 sentiment 33, 34, 35 signified 39, 82, 101, 107, 108 signifier 39, 82, 83, 84, 101, 107, 108, 150 defined 109 as metaphor of desire 110 signifying chain 6, 92, 95, 104, 108, 109–10, 113, 114, 132, 144, 146, 147, 148, 150, 154 signifying practice 39, 40–1, 169n1 liturgy as 41 Smith, Kate 128–9 Sobrino, Jon 183n19 Soviet satellites 63–4, 65 spectator 2, 4, 12–13, 14, 16–19, 24, 27, 28, 40, 41–2, 50, 54, 59, 60–2,

67–70, 72, 75, 80, 83, 86–7, 91, 102, 112, 127, 128, 155 as voyeur 81 female spectatorship 127 star/hero (as the ‘other’) 4, 42, 59–62, 95, 129 stasis 131 subject/subjectivity cinematic/spectating 41, 86, 92 construction 5, 19, 54, 58, 103 identity 75, 79 liturgical 19, 41, 143, 150 spectating 113, 114, 130 suturing of 79, 83–7, 93 submission of volition and intellect (desires and thoughts) 54, 55, 56, 149, 153 suture 2, 4, 5, 79, 80, 82, 90, 91, 92, 93, 95, 103, 104, 112, 113, 114–30, 131, 175n4, 179–80n26 failure of suture 87–90, 176n12 neo-Lacanian concept of 5, 80, 82, 95, 114, 175n4 sutured (stitched) 66, 83, 132 into cinematic narrative 4, 65, 75, 79, 112, 151, 155, 161, 164 into sacramental narrative 4, 41, 44, 47, 53, 75, 143, 148, 150, 153 into the signifying chain 113, 146, 148 suturing identity with cinematic ‘other’ 114–30 with liturgical ‘other’ 144 religious 53 system of suture 84, 175nn6–7 Tarkovsky, Andrey 14 Tel Quel 178n10 Temple, Shirley 60, 128 theology/religion-film dialogue 33 theonomy 20 transcendental style 12–13, 19 transcendental subject 81–2, 92, 102, 151 transubstantiation 170–1n4

Subject Index Trent, the Council of (1545–63) 170–1n4, 171–2n11 tuché (Aristotle) 111 un(yet-to-be-)spoken narrative 96, 103, 151 vergegenwärtigung 172n12 verschiebung 108 visual story (film as) 3, 20, 168n1 volition (and intellect) 4, 55, 149, 153 von Sydow, Max 18, 19

vorstellung(en) 98, 106, 109, 111–12, 121, 129, 178n19 vorstellungsrepräsentanz 106, 111, 121 voyeurism 127 Wallon, Henri 68 Washington, Denzel 65, 73, 174n13 Wayne, John 60 Welles, Orson 22, 88 Willis, Bruce 60–1, 62, 135 Wholly Other 13 worshipper 2, 4, 5, 6, 18, 40–1, 44, 46, 47, 50–4, 56, 75, 150

219

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