The following is
part of a series in which I apply rudimentary concepts from Lacanian
psychoanalysis to current events and film. My two principal texts are Lacan, an
introductory text by Lionel Bailly, and Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture by philosopher Slavoj Zizek. I present
these posts in order to deepen my imperfect understanding of the concepts as
well as to venture some insights of my own.
A phrase that kept leaping out at me as I read Slavoj Zizek’s
Looking Awry was the “impossibility of sexual relations.” It’s an awkward and
counterintuitive phrase, but also a perfect expression for an experience nearly everyone has had.
Consider the classic film noir Double Indemnity (1944). Insurance
salesman Walter plots with the hot-as-L.A. Phyllis to kill her rich husband for
a massive insurance payout. After the murder, their relationship cools as they
each realize the other could go to the police, turn in his or her partner in
crime, and make off with the loot. Walter goes to Phyllis’s mansion to kill
her, but she gets the drop on him. After she pulls the trigger, you see in her
eyes that she truly loves him, but she has realized it a moment too late--a fatal
moment. Walter, mortally wounded but still standing, puts a couple bullets in her and stumbles
away.
This is a perfect, if troubling, illustration of love and
sex, for all the gears rarely sync up for both partners at the same time. The
relationship works, then doesn’t, then does for one partner but not the other,
then for the other but not the other, and so forth. If science is correct, then
the euphoria early in a relationship lasts two years if you’re lucky--but the
tug-of-war, the soul-searching and the confusion is powerful even then, is it
not?
In Lacan, Lionel Bailly describes it this way:
[Lacan] was not saying that sexual relations don’t exist, but that those relations do not have a character of mutual understanding, agreement, or rapports. The individual man and the individual woman in a joint sexual act is each pursuing a form of enjoyment that is distinct from and irrelevant to the other’s.
We think of lovers as counterparts, but in their psyches, any two people are less like a matching bolt and screw than a square peg and a round hole fated to fit imperfectly. This is because the early childhood drama forms each of us differently. According to Jacques Lacan, boys and girls respond differently to castration, the realization that one does not possess the all-powerful Phallus. For the rest of our lives, we seek the Phallus in various objects tailored to our own symbolic economy and shared by no one.
For another example, consider Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution (2007), one
of my favorite films. During the Japanese occupation of China, Wong Chia-Chi is
a member of the Chinese resistance who becomes the mistress of Mr. Yee, a high
official in the collaborationist government. Chia-Chi and her comrades devise a plan for Mr. Yee's assassination. When she and her lover go to pick up a diamond
ring he has bought for her, resistance thugs will seize the opportunity to
assassinate him. However, as they inspect the ring at an Indian
jeweler’s, Chia-Chee realizes that Mr. Yee truly loves her and she him. From the book by
Eileen Chang:
He really loves
me, she thought. Inside, she felt a raw tremor of shock--then a vague sense of
loss.
The Indian
passed the receipt to him. He placed it inside his jacket.
‘Run,’ she said
softly.
For a moment he stared, and then
understood everything. Springing up, he barged the door open, steadied himself
on the frame, then swung down to grab firm hold of the banister and stumbled
down the dark, narrow stairs. She heard his footsteps break into a run, taking
the stairs two or three at a time, thudding irregularly over the treads.
Too late. She had
realized too late.
This is a perfect scene. You can feel the whole drama from
start to finish hinging on this one moment. Will the killers come barging in?
Will Mr. Yee notice something is fishy? Will Chia-Chi warn him? It’s a much
tighter scene even than the one in Double Indemnity, but it illustrates the
same thing: a perfect rapport between lovers is not possible. No matter how
close you get, something will always be slightly off.
But, we all know this, don’t we? As good as it gets, it
never gets that good. And you don’t need Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Zizek or me to
tell you so. Not only will your partner never be perfect, but the perfect
partner doesn’t exist. That’s why perhaps the longest standing piece of
marriage advice humanity has come up with is accepting your partner with all his or her faults. Love and sex do, after all, provide a measure--but only a measure--of
comfort.
Identifying with Ferguson as Symptom
Watching Cinema Through the Eyes of the Past
Don’t Look Away from Mike Brown
Double Fantasy: Total Recall and The Woman in the Window
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