Watching Cinema Through the Eyes of the Past (Zizek/Lacan 2)

(For the first post in this series, see "Identifying with Ferguson as Symptom.")

 

This is the second in a series of posts commenting on the ideas in Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture by Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek. While the last post applied Zizek and Lacan to the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, this one is about film. Zizek expresses an idea that I was pleased to realize I had once arrived at myself, and then he takes it one twist further.

In “Classic Movies: Three Levels of Experience,” I posited three modes of interacting with old cinema. The first is immediate experience of a film’s express content--the story, acting, special effects, etc.--the way we would interact with any film. The second is the experience of a classic movie as a representative of the past, with its different cultural context, cinematic techniques, and so forth. But it was the third that I was most itching to express:

“The third level of experience is where it gets really interesting. No longer are we simply experiencing a classic movie for its content, or viewing it as a curious relic from times gone by. Instead, we now see it through the eyes of its contemporaries. We assume, as best we can, the standpoint of movie-goers in the early to mid 20th Century and experience the movie as they would have at the time, as if viewing the past from the past.”

The example I used was Marlene Dietrich in Morocco (1930) wearing a men’s tuxedo and kissing a woman. It doesn’t matter that two people of the same sex kissing each other is no big deal to us today: the scene was shocking then, so it remains electric today. Zizek says much the same thing with regard to classic film noir, only in the more sophisticated terminology of Lacanian psychoanalysis and film theory:

“That is to say, what fascinates us is precisely a certain gaze, the gaze of the ‘other,’ of the hypothetical, mythic spectator from the ’40s who was supposedly still able to identify immediately with the universe of film noir. What we really see, when we watch a film noir, is this gaze of the other: we are fascinated by the gaze of the mythic ‘naïve’ spectator, the one who was ‘still able to take it seriously,’ in other words, the one who ‘believes in it’ for us, in place of us.”

For Zizek, this is the gaze of nostalgia, which the philosopher goes on to say takes its “purest form” not when we watch a movie from the past, such as the 1944 film Double Indemnity, but when we watch a modern film, perhaps even about modern times, that nonetheless borrows an aesthetic from the past (such as the Double Indemnity-inspired Body Heat). Despite all the dizzying Lacanian theory that Zizek employs, this idea of nostalgia is exactly how the word is used in reviews and so forth to describe any movie today that hearkens back to films of the past.

The first example of such a film that comes to my mind is Open Range, the Kevin Costner film based on the novel by Lauran Paine. Released in 2003, it came out long after the heyday of western cinema, at a time when straight-up westerns were not only rare but likely to be mocked. Nonetheless, Open Range is unflinching in adopting the cinematic and narrative techniques of classic westerns to tell its story. It avoids newfangled techniques used in films like The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) to update the genre.

Consider Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s Grindhouse films Planet Terror and Death Proof (2007). These films are grossly obvious examples of films in which, in Zizek’s words, “the logic of nostalgia is brought to self-reference.” These movies aren’t just what they are on their own, they gain something more by recalling the vision and style of their outmoded precursors, the exploitation films of yesteryear.

These posts are learning experiments allowing me to hopefully get a better grasp of the ideas in Looking Awry by turning input (reading) into output (blogging). This time, I enjoyed being able to say, “I knew it! Even before I read it in Zizek!” But the reader is advised to take all of the above with a grain of salt since I’m still figuring a lot of this out.