Reflections on Psychoanalysis and Cinema

Cinematic Instruction of Desire

Human desires are not spontaneous or natural but are fundamentally artificial and learned. Cinema acts as the ultimate pervert art because it does not grant what a person desires; rather, it instructs them on how to desire. In the film Possessed, a working-class girl's perception of a passing train creates a magic cinematic experience where reality is elevated to a fantasy space. This illustrates how cinema projects inner dreams onto the screen of reality. In The Matrix, the choice between the red and blue pills is not a simple choice between illusion and reality, but an exploration of how symbolic fictions regulate existence. A "third pill" would allow one to perceive the reality within the illusion itself, recognizing that trauma or excessive enjoyment often requires fictionalization to be processed.

Psychoanalytic Structures in Film

Alfred Hitchcock often utilized physical space to map human subjectivity. In Psycho, the three levels of the Mrs. Bates house correspond to the Freudian agencies: the top floor is the maternal superego, the ground floor is the ego, and the basement is the id. The movement of the mother's corpse from the first floor to the cellar represents a shift in Norman Bates' mind from the superego to the id. The superego is portrayed not as an ethical agency, but as an obscene authority that bombards the subject with impossible orders. Similarly, the Marx Brothers embody this triad, with Groucho as the hyperactive superego, Chico as the calculating ego, and the mute Harpo as the silent, primordial id, combining bottomless malice with childish innocence.

The Traumatic Voice and the Undead Object

The human voice is often depicted in cinema as an alien intruder or a partial object detached from the body, as seen in The Testament of Doctor Mabuse and The Exorcist. In The Great Dictator, Charlie Chaplin uses the transition from silent film to sound to illustrate the move from a naive, oral-egotistic state to a complex universe of guilt and depth. The speech delivered by his character, Hinkle, uses the same music—Wagner's Lohengrin—for both humanistic and totalitarian purposes, highlighting the inherent ambiguity of music. This leads to the concept of the "undead" or "death drive," where partial objects like the shoes in Red Shoes or the fist in Fight Club represent autonomous forces that persist beyond mortal limits.

The Netherworld of Excremental Reality

In films like The Conversation and Blue Velvet, the act of eavesdropping or peeping creates a phantasmatic gap between the observer and the traumatic event. Hitchcock and David Lynch often use the "toilet bowl" or sink as a threshold to a chaotic netherworld of primordial reality. When Norman Bates cleans the bathroom in Psycho, it represents the elementary human work of erasing stains to keep this chaotic dimension at bay. Desire functions as a "wound of reality," and the art of cinema maintains a safe distance from this trauma while rendering it palpable. The Matrix container is a metaphor for the passive object of the libido, suggesting that humans require a virtual supplement of fantasy to sustain their enjoyment.

The Fantasy of the Feminine Subject

Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris presents the "id machine," which materializes the protagonist's guilt in the form of his deceased wife. This reflects a male mythology where the woman exists only as a man's realized dream or guilt. In Vertigo, Scotty's obsession with the image of Madeline leads to the brutal, mortifying refashioning of Judy. This coordination between fantasy and reality results in a nightmare, where the subject must annihilate the actual woman to preserve the phantasmatic coordinate. David Lynch’s Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive further explore the enigma of feminine desire, portraying a gap between cause and effect and the traumatic point where fantasy disintegrates into a nightmarish real.

Ontological Incompleteness and Formalism

Modern cinema often embraces an ontology of an unfinished universe, as seen in Alien Resurrection with its failed clones. Lars von Trier's Dogville uses a minimalist set to prove that knowing a spectacle is fake does not prevent identification; the illusion persists because there is something real in it. The Wizard of Oz demonstrates that there is more truth in the appearance than in the man behind the curtain. Hitchcock’s use of repeated formal motives—such as characters hanging over an abyss in Saboteur, Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, and North by Northwest—suggests a cinematic materialism where forms interact and morph beneath the level of narrative meaning.

Political Terror, The Law, and Final Recognition

There is a deep connection between administrative terror and obscene laughter, evidenced by Joseph Stalin's affinity for musicals and Sergei Eisenstein's depiction of Ivan the Terrible. The Pluto's Judgment Day cartoon serves as an allegory for Stalinist show trials, where the law mocks its victims. In the conclusion of City Lights, the recognition between the tramp and the blind girl highlights the danger of loving someone only insofar as they fit a fantasy coordinate. Human emotions are often deceiving, with anxiety being the only exception. Ultimately, cinema provides the crucial dimension necessary to confront and understand the realities of the modern world that people are otherwise unready to face.

Questions & Discussions

The text includes various reflections on the nature of cinematic engagement. At one point, the speaker contemplates the spontaneity of directions and the confusion of identifying with characters like Melanie or Norman Bates. There is an exchange regarding the scene in Vertigo where the speaker asks if others recall a specific scene at a balcony, but the interlocutors do not recognize it. Furthermore, the discussion touches upon the impotence of male fantasizing in Eyes Wide Shut and the psychological rape depicted in Wild at Heart through characters like Bobby Peru. These interactions emphasize the fragile balance between reality and the phantasmatic support required for sexual and social existence.