My last entry touched on how “free” market propaganda denying global warming had long been covered in the mainstream media, despite that those covering it had the facts at their disposal to thoroughly discredit it. Here is an article [2] I recently found showing the origins of the American movement most closely associated with such propaganda – libertarianism. The article shows how this movement, which presents itself as (and has hoodwinked many of its members into believing it is) a group of rebels fighting the establishment was itself established by - and, in fact, is being sustained by [3] the ultra-wealthy and powerful. I'll use the above-quoted movie as I look deeper into my aforementioned entry's discussion of Lacan’s seminar on Anxiety [4] and to explore the disavowal (the ability to live with our “eyes wide shut”) necessary to maintain this charade.
We see our protagonist,
Bill Harford, and his wife, Alice, getting ready for a Christmas party. Bill, framed by red curtains around windows
that reflect an unnaturally cyan/blue light [5], searches for his wallet*
before finding it, at Alice's suggestion, on the bedside table. After saying
goodnight to their daughter, Helena and her babysitter, they leave for the
Ziegler mansion. They talk briefly with their host, Victor, and his wife, then
Bill recognizes the pianist, Nick Nightingale, a former classmate who had
dropped out of medical school. Alice excuses herself, and Bill chats with his
old friend. Nick is soon called away, however, though he tells Bill that he is
playing at the Sonata Café in the Village. While Alice waits for her husband, a
suave Hungarian, Sandor Szavost, tries to seduce her. He dances with her and
offers to bring her upstairs to their host’s gallery of Renaissance bronzes**
while two models approach and flirt with Bill, offering to take him “Where the
rainbow ends.” With these invitations we'll enter the next seminar in our
series, where
{Lacan
recaps the three reference points from his last class, especially the third
point - that the analyst’s desire itself provokes anxiety, and adds that this
is true even in non-human subjects. He relates this point to the illusory
nature of a subject “transparent in his own act of knowing,” adding that} if
psychoanalysis did not exist, one would know [this nature] from the following:
the fact is that there exist moments of the appearance of the object which
throw us into a completely different dimension, a dimension which merits –
since it is given by experience – to be detached as such as primal in
experience, which is precisely the dimension of the strange, of something which
can in no way allow itself to be grasped, as leaving before it the subject
transparent to his knowledge. [6]
One of Victor’s servants quickly interrupts Bill’s “journey”, taking him upstairs to Ziegler’s bathroom. Victor, shirtless, zips up his fly, answers the door, and indicates a naked young woman, Mandy, who had, five minutes previously, passed out there – She “had a bad reaction” to a “speedball or a snowball … heroin and coke.” Bill tells Mandy to move her head if she can hear him, and she complies. At this compliance we can turn the page, where we find that,
There is not a single one of our muscles which is not involved when we nod our head, that every reaction to a situation implies the totality of the organic response; and if we follow it, we see emerging two terms closely woven with one another, the term of catastrophic reaction, and in its phenomenon, within the field of this catastrophic reaction, the mapping out as such of phenomena of anxiety. {bringing up nightmares and their relation to myths such as the incubus and the sphinx, Lacan shows a correlation between his outline} and the phenomenology of the hysterical symptom, the hysterical symptom, in the broadest sense...the obsessional,... operates, precisely in the sense of rediscovering under the signifier, the sign. [7 (scholarly citations removed)]
After reviving Mandy and telling Ziegler (to his disappointment) to keep her there for another hour and have someone take her home, Bill agrees not to mention the incident to anyone. We then see various scenes of the Harfords engaging in routine activities [8] the following day, then Bill and Alice smoking a “joint” before bedtime. When Alice, wondering why Bill had disappeared at the party, asks about the women who had been flirting with him, he asks her about Ziegler’s Hungarian friend. Alice becomes angry when Bill suggests that Szavost’s attempt to seduce her was “understandable.” Their argument turns on Bill's social-Darwinist belief in male and female differences, as Alice says, “millions of years of evolution – right? Men have to put their sperm into as many women as they can, but women stay at home with pretty pink things and take care of the children?” With Bill’s agreement with Ziegler and argument with Alice we can uncover Lacan’s identification of the signifier as an “effaced trace” as he compares this effacing to actions of non-humans:
One sees animals effacing their traces. One sees even complex behaviours which consist in covering a certain number of traces, with dejection, for example. It is well known among cats. [9]
When Bill claims that Alice’s characterization of his belief, if a little oversimplified, is essentially accurate, she says, “If you men only knew,” and he accuses her of trying to make him jealous. Alice asks why he wouldn’t be jealous, and at his reply that he is “sure of” her, she bursts out laughing, then reminds Bill of a vacation they took together. She relates feelings she had had about a naval officer she had seen there, her manner becoming increasingly trance-like as she speaks:
He was following the bellboy with his luggage to the elevator. He glanced at me as he walked past. Just a glance. Nothing more. But I could hardly move. That afternoon Helena went to the movies with her friend and you and I made love. And we made plans about our future and we talked about Helena. And yet, at no time was he ever out of my mind. And I thought if he wanted me -even if it was only for one night – I was ready to give up everything… You. Helena. My whole fúcking future. Everything. And yet it was weird, because at the same time, you were dearer to me than ever. And at that moment, my love for you was both tender and sad. I barely slept that night, and I woke up the next morning in a panic. I didn't know whether I was afraid that he had left...or that he might still be there. [10]
Speaking of fantasies, in the following passage, Lacan, distinguishing humans by their ability to “make false traces in order to make us believe they are false,” discusses the connection between the imaginary order, the signifier, and the drive:
It is in the whole measure that the phantasy $ <> o presents itself in a privileged fashion, as in the neurotic, as $ <> D, in other words that it is a lure of the phantastical structure in the neurotic which allowed this first step called the drive to be made which Freud always and without any kind of wavering designated as Trieb [desire], namely as something which has a history in German philosophical thought, which it is absolutely impossible to confuse with the term instinct. [11]
The phone rings, and Bill learns that one of his patients, Lou Nathanson, has just died, and tells Alice that he has to go over and “show his face.” We see him in a taxi, the camera giving us a close-up of his brooding face, then of his mental image of Alice and a naval officer about to copulate. When Bill gets to the patient's home, a maid lets him into the large gold-colored hall [12], and he enters the patient's bedroom and talks to the man’s grieving daughter, Marion. Marion, looking shell-shocked, relates how Nathanson had seemed improved and that he had remembered “many things.” She says that he had taken a nap, and, stifling sobs, that when she had returned in about a half an hour, she had thought he was still sleeping. While she mourns, we can ponder Lacan’s addition, referring to the Freudian “oral drive,” of the
idea of a loss, it is in as much as something in it does not undergo [the (dialectic) inversion of the signifier and subject, a subject which uses language to make] his inside pass to the outside. [13]
Telling Marion that it sounds as if her father died peacefully, Bill then asks if she had notified anyone. She says that her stepmother had been out, but that her significant other, Carl, will be there soon. Glancing sideways at Bill, she says that she thinks he had met Carl before. Bill replies that he had, and Marion says that they are engaged. When Bill congratulates her, she looks disappointed and says they will be moving to Michigan. Bill says that that would be a wonderful change for her, and she starts to cry, kisses him passionately, and repeatedly says that she loves him. Bill tries to calm her, reminding her that they had never had a single conversation that wasn't about her father, then Carl enters. Bill excuses himself, leaving Marion still looking wild-eyed. Outside [14], Bill again torments himself with images of Alice and the officer before encountering a group of Yale jocks and, although he steps aside, he almost falls when one of them shoves him against a parked car. They pause for a few moments, hurling sexual insults at him – one calling him a “fagot,” and another telling him that he has “dumps” that are bigger than him – before walking away. These insults can help us thrash out Lacan’s transition from one seminar – in which he identifies the sphincter’s action as a “determining function,” to the next – in which he quotes Ferenczi, from the book, Research into a Theory of Genitality, commenting that the book arrives
… at a too harmonious, a too all-englobing notion of what constitutes its object, namely, the genital perspective, realisation. ... The development of genital sexuality, cursorily described above in the male”, he says – it is in effect what is involved in the male man, the male – “undergoes in the female”, what is translated as, “a rather sudden interruption”, an altogether incorrect translation because what is involved in German is ” eine zimmlich unvermittelte Unterbrechung”, an interruption, that means that it is most often unmediated, that it is not a part of what Ferenczi describes as amphimixis [sexual reproduction], which is only when all is said and done, one of the natural forms of what we call “thesis, antithesis, synthesis”, of what we call dialectical progress, as I might put it. [15]
Soon afterward [16], Domino (a college student using a means of financing her education perhaps more unconventional than that of Bill’s molesters,) approaches him, coaxing him into her apartment for “a little fun.” When he asks her the price, she says it depends on what he wants to do. She echoes his next question, “What do you recommend?*” laughing and saying that she’d rather not put it into words. As they start, Bill’s cell phone rings. We get a nice contrast as Alice, in her blue bathrobe and sterile kitchen, asks if he will be much longer, and Bill, standing by an old brown mirror** and some books*** in Domino's grungy apartment, says it is difficult to talk. He tells her he doesn't know how long he will be, since he is “waiting for some relatives to arrive,” and they say goodnight to each other. We then get a close-up of Domino by her stuffed tiger on her earth-toned bedding asking if that was “Mrs. Dr. Bill” Bill, walking toward her past several “African” masks and her large vanity, says that it was and, to her further query, that he has to go, paying her $150, despite her saying twice that he doesn't have to. With this interruption, we can return to Lacan as he
{continues to quote Ferenczi, following Freud, regarding the “interruption” in sexual development, characterized “by the displacement of erogeneity from the clitoris … to the cavity of the vagina,” calling this cavity “the place of the void,” and noting the paradox of locating the home of jouissance in the relatively insensitive area. Referring to a diagram he had drawn of the subject’s relation to the ego ideal, he indicates that the line between these symbols represents a mirror. He reminds us that a} mirror does not stretch out to infinity, a mirror has limits, and what reminds you of this is that, if you refer to the article from which this schema is taken, I take into account the limits of the mirror; one can [be sure of] something in this mirror from a point situated, as one might say, somewhere in the space of the mirror, from which it is not perceptible by the subject. [17]
Back on the street, Bill hears jazz piano as he approaches a building with a red canopy that bears the legend, “Sonata Café,” and a cyan neon sign that reads, “Sonata Jazz.” He smiles as he sees Nick's photo [18] and enters, walking down a mirror-lined stairway to a red room – red, that is, except for the stage, which is bathed in an eerie blue light. Bill’s descent takes us to Lacan’s discussion of
{the inaugural dream in the history of analysis - the dream of the Wolfman, which reveals that the patient is “always seen.” Written in Italian using the word, “vista,” the message, Lacan points out, has an ambiguous meaning, as this word can convey both the function of sight and the fact of being seen. He returns to a relationship I brought up in my last entry - the relationship between the stage and the world, and makes the cryptic claim that} The stage which proposes itself in its own dimension, beyond no doubt we know that what ought to be referred to it is what cannot be said in the world. [19]
Bill orders a beer, and when Nick's band finishes, also gets his friend a drink. When the conversation turns to their respective families, Nick says that his is in Seattle, and Bill remarks that he is a long way from home. Nick replies that he’s “gotta go where the work is.” On further questioning, he says that he has another gig later that night, but that he doesn't know the address yet, since he only gets it about an hour before. Then, leaning forward, his face getting the signature Kubrick lighting from the table lamp, he says, “I play blindfolded,” adding that, “the last time the blindfold wasn't on so well. Oh, man. Bill, I have seen one or two things in my life, but never anything like this, and never such women” Suddenly, Nick’s cell rings, and he nervously writes “Fidelio” on a napkin. “It's the password,” he explains, and tries to excuse himself. With Nick's napkin we'll unfold Lacan’s next paragraph:
It is what we always expect when the curtain rises, it is this quickly extinguished brief moment of anxiety, but which is never lacking to the dimension which ensures that we are doing more than coming to settle our backsides into a more or less expensive seat, which is the moment of the three knocks, which is the moment the curtain opens. And without this, this quickly elided introductory moment of anxiety, nothing could even take on the value of what is going to be determined as tragic or as comic, that which cannot be, here again, not every tongue provides you with the same resources, it is not a konnen [ability] that is involved. Of course many things can be said, from a material point of view. It is a matter of a being able, durfen, which badly translates what is permitted or not permitted, since durfen refers to a more original dimension. [20]
Bill begs him for the address, and Nick tries to dissuade him, finally replying that, even if he gave it to him, “Everyone is always costumed and masked. Where the hell you going to get a costume at this hour in the morning?” We then cut to Bill's taxi pulling past a sewing thread store to the front of Rainbow Costumes [21], driving us further into Lacan’s argument:
It is even because Man durf nicht, that it cannot be done, that Man kan, that after all one is going to be able, and that here there comes into play the forcing, the dimension of relaxation, that properly speaking constitutes the dramatic action. We could not spend too much time on the nuances of this framing of anxiety. Are you going to say that I am appealing to it in the sense of bringing it back to expectation, to preparation, to a state of alert, to a response which is already one of defence to what is going to happen. That yes! It is the Erwartung [expectation,] it is the constitution of the hostile as such, it is the first recourse beyond Hilflosigkeit [helplessness]… Anxiety is when there appears in this frame something which is already there much closer to home: Heim, the [hostile?*] guest, you will say, and in a certain sense, of course, this unknown guest who appears in an unexpected fashion has a good deal to do with what is met with in the Unheimlich, but it is not enough to designate him in this way. For, as the term indicates to you very well as it happens in French, this guest, in the ordinary sense of the word, is already someone who has been well worked over in terms of expectation. [22]
Milich, a middle-aged man with an eastern European accent, answers the buzzer, and Bill, showing his medical board card, says that he is looking for a patient of his, Peter Grening. Milich tells him that Grening had moved to Chicago over a year ago. Bill then offers first $100, then $200 over the rental price for the inconvenience of procuring him a costume. Inside, Milich, like Nightingale, gets the Kubrickian lighting from a table lamp as he echoes Bill's request for a “cloak, a hood, and a mask.” Then, while looking for a cloak, Milich abruptly lifts his head, asking if Bill hears something. He goes to a glass-enclosed back room and switches on a light, shaking his head at the remnants of a meal on the coffee-table. As he lifts a discarded negligee from a sofa, he hears a sneeze from behind a rack of clothes. Pulling a green furlined cloak aside, he sees a Japanese man in nothing but a thong and a wig. He takes the wig and strikes something behind the sofa, and a teenage girl in only a bra and panties, then another wigged Japanese man, stand up. Milich asks the men if they have no sense of decency, exclaiming, “This is my daughter! Couldn't you see she's a child? You will have to explain to police!” He yells at his daughter, calling her a “little whore,” and she runs behind Bill, [23] smiling impishly up at him. Milich locks the men in the room*, shouting at them to be quiet (“I'm trying to serve my customer!”) and orders his daughter to go to bed at once, saying he'll deal with her as soon as he “serves” ** the gentleman. She whispers something in Bill's ear and backs away, gazing at Bill seductively. Let's break at this bizarre scene to see what Lacan has in store in his discussion of Freud's concept, “the
This guest, in the ordinary sense, is not the heimlich, it is not the person who lives in the house, it is someone hostile who has been softened, pacified, accepted. That which belongs to Heim, that which belongs to Geheimnis [secret,] has never passed through these detours when all is said and done, has never passed through these networks, through these sieves, through these sieves of recognition: it has remained unheimlich, less uninhabitable than inhabitant [24 (Scholarly citations removed.)]
We get a montage showing the long cab ride to Bill's destination and him still obsessing over his wife's sailor fantasy. The cab approaches the ornate gates of the Somerton mansion, and Harford tears a hundred-dollar bill in half, promising to give the other half plus the meter price if the driver waits for him, adding that he'll leave his “stuff” in the back. Bill then gives the gatekeepers the password. With that we'll enter the following passage:
The signifiers make of the world a network of traces, in which the passage from one cycle to another is henceforth possible. What does that mean? What I told you the last time: the signifier generates a world, the world of the speaking subject whose essential characteristic is that it is possible to make a mistake about it. Anxiety is this very cut, without which the presence of the signifier, its functioning, its entry, its furrow in the real is unthinkable. It is this cut which is opened up and which allows there to appear something that you will understand better when I say the unexpected, the visit, the piece of news, what is expressed so well by the term presentiment which is not simply to be understood as the presentiment of something, but also the “pre” of Reeling, that which is before the birth of a feeling. [25]
After Bill is driven up to the “house,” a guard takes his coat, and Bill puts on his mask. We hear creepy music accompanying a Romanian Orthodox Church sermon played backwards [26] as he enters an enormous hall where a character (only identified in the credits by his red cloak,) holding a staff and incense burner, circles inside a ring of figures who, like the crowd of onlookers, wear black cloaks, masks and hoods. Bill then notices a couple on a balcony staring down at him. One of them gives him a formal nod, and he responds in kind. Near the end of the ritual, the figures drop their cloaks to reveal female bodies naked but for thongs, chokers and masks. Finally, as Red Cloak taps his staff on the floor in front of each woman, she leaves the circle to approach and kiss a patron before leaving with him. One statuesque woman in a feather headdress (“Mysterious Woman”) comes to Bill. As they leave the hall she says, “I'm not sure what you think you’re doing here, but you don't belong here,” and when he says that she is mistaken, replies, “You are in great danger. You must get away while there's still a chance.” This warning can alert us to Lacan's next point:
All the switching points are possible starting from something which is anxiety, which is, when all is said and done what we expected and which is the true substance of anxiety, the “what does not deceive”, what is beyond doubting, for do not allow yourself to be taken in by appearances: it is not because, of course, the link between anxiety and doubt and hesitation, and what is called the ambivalent game of the obsessional, may appear clinically obvious to you, that it is the same thing. [27]
A participant [28] takes her arm, excuses them, and leads her upstairs. Bill ignores her warnings and roams through the opulent rooms, filled with beautiful masked nudes copulating with each other for the entertainment of the still-cloaked and masked patrons. With Harford's boldness, we'll continue our own exploration of “Anxiety,” in which Lacan tells us,
...I think that you will stop me here to tell me, or to remind me, of what I put forward more than once in aphoristic forms, that all human activity expands into certainty or again that it generates certainty or in a general fashion that the reference to certainty is essentially action. Well yes, of course, and it is precisely this that allows me to introduce now the essential relation between anxiety and action as such, it is precisely perhaps from anxiety that action borrows it[s] certainty. [29]
After the naked servant of a patron who had nodded to him asks Bill if he wants to go somewhere more “private,” Mysterious Woman returns and asks her colleague if she can “borrow” him. In the hall, she whispers urgently about the danger Bill is in, and he tries to get her to come away with him. She answers that doing so “would cost me my life and possibly yours.” He then asks her to let him see her face, and when he moves to take off her mask, she leaves, telling him to do the same. Just then, a large, gold-masked “butler” approaches him, asking if he is the gentleman with the taxi. Telling Bill that his driver would urgently like a word with him, he brings him to the courtroom. Inside, Red Cloak sits on a golden throne, flanked by two large men in purple cloaks and surrounded by a crowd of the participants. He majestically tells Bill to come forward, and as Bill complies, the circle closes behind him. Red Cloak asks Bill for the password, and when Bill answers, “Fidelio,” Red Cloak specifies – he wants the one for the “the house.” Bill tells him that he had forgotten it, to which Red Cloak replies, “Here it doesn’t matter whether you have forgotten it, or if you never knew it.” This frightening scene can goad us to remember some of Lacan's distinctions, such as that:
{between the two terms, “passage a l’acte” and “acting out,” as he reminds his students of} the opposition that was already implied and even expressed in my first introduction of these terms, and whose position I am now going to underline, namely between the dimension of too much which is in embarrassment and the dimension of the too little in what I told you, by means of an etymological commentary which … I underlined about the sense of dismay. [30 (Scholarly citations removed.)]
Red Cloak first orders him to remove his mask, then to get undressed. Bill stutteringly repeats the second order, and Red Cloak says sternly, “Remove your clothes.” Bill looks around, rubbing his forehead. “Gentlemen, please...” and Red Cloak repeats his demand, adding - “Or would you like us to do it for you?” His demand can further prod our memories as
{Lacan elaborates on the concepts. Dismay} is essentially the evocation of a power which is lacking, esmayer, the experience of what you are lacking in need. It is in the reference to these two terms whose link is essential in our subject; for this link underlines the ambiguity: if there is too much, what we have to deal with then is not lacking to us; if it is lacking to us, why say that elsewhere it embarrasses us, let us be on our guard here not to yield to the most flattering of illusions. {Lacan then claims that what is seen in a scientific analysis of anxiety is} an immense deception...To master the phenomenon by thought, is always to show how one can remake it in a falsified way, it is to be able to reproduce it, namely to be able to make a signifier of it. {Lacan uses as an example Freud’s Story of “Little Hans,” a boy who had concluded that} it is impossible for an animate being not to have a phallus, something that, as you see, poses logic in this essentially precarious function of condemning the real, of eternally stumbling into the impossible. And we have no other means of apprehending it, we advance from stumble to stumble. Example: there are living beings, Mummy for example, who do not have a phallus, so there must be no living beings, hence anxiety. [31)
Suddenly, Mysterious Woman appears on the balcony, demanding that they let Bill go, declaring herself “ready to redeem him!” The crowd murmurs as Red Cloak rises, asking if she is sure she understands what she is taking upon herself, and she resolutely answers, “Yes.” Red Cloak tells Bill that he is free. We'll use Mysterious Woman's actions to lend force to the following words:
And the following step is to be taken. It is certain that the easiest thing is to say that even those who do not have one, have one. This indeed is why it is the one that we hold onto in general. It is that the living beings which do not have a phallus have one despite and against everything. It is because they have a phallus that we psychologists will call unreal – this will simply be the signifying phallus – that they are living beings. [32]
Red cloak threatens Bill with the most dire consequences for him and his family if he makes any further inquiries or tells anything about what he has seen. Bill nods, then looks up as a figure in a plague doctor costume takes the mysterious woman away. He asks what will happen to her, and Red Cloak says that no one can change her fate now, ordering him to go. This threat from the uncanny underworld against Bill's “real” life can admonish us that:
if man is tormented by the unreal in the real, it would be altogether vain to hope to rid oneself of it for the reason, which is what in the Freudian conquest is quite precisely disturbing, that in the unreal, it is the real which torments him. [33]
We see Bill’s apartment door open, and he enters, looking in on Helena before proceeding to his office. Stashing the costume in a cabinet, he enters the master bedroom, which is all blue-toned except for the maroon headboard of the bed where Alice lies. She laughs in her sleep, and he wakes her. When he asks what she was dreaming, she tells him, crying, that they had entered a deserted city naked. Terrified, ashamed and angry, she had blamed him. After he left to find them clothes, however, it was completely different - she felt wonderful. As she lay in a beautiful garden, stretched out in the sunlight, the naval officer approached, staring at her. At this point of her story, Alice buries her face in the pillow which, formerly purple, now looks closer to the color of the headboard. Bill sits up and urges her to continue. She hugs him, finally telling the rest. She and the officer had sex, then she took part in an enormous orgy, losing count of her partners. She knew Bill could see her and, wanting to mock him, laughed as loud as she could – then Bill had wakened her. She draws him closer, stroking his hair as they fade to black. Let's use this dream of illicit sex as a foil to Lacan's next subject, where, entering a discussion of Judaism, he tells us that
...to enjoy when ordered to do so, is all the same something in which everyone senses that if there is a source, an origin of anxiety, it ought all the same to be found somewhere there. [34]
In the next scene, Bill's cab drives past the “Sewing Thread” sign again, and he gets out in front of the Sonata cafe. Finding it closed, he enters the diner next door and asks about Nick. After he shows the waitress his board card, saying he needs to see the pianist about a medical matter, she tells him where the Nick is staying. We see Bill walk into a hotel and talk to a flirtatious male desk clerk (played by Alan Cumming.) Again flashing his medical card, Bill finds that his friend had come in at about 4:30 that morning, with two big (though “well-dressed” and “well-spoken”) men, with a bruised cheek and that he had looked “a little scared.” Further, after Nick had gotten his things from his room – escorted – he had tried to pass the clerk an envelope, but one of the men had taken it, saying “that any mail or messages for him would be collected by someone properly authorized to do so.” Bill leaves, the clerk looking admiringly after him and fixing his hair [35]. At this clerical scene we can inscribe Lacan's assertion that
There is obviously in this ritual attention of circumcision a reduction of bisexuality which cannot but obviously generate something healthy as regard the division of roles. [36]
When Bill returns his costume, Milich notices that the mask is missing, and Bill, nervously, puts it on his tab. Milich's daughter enters, closing her robe, and, at her father's request, greets Bill. Then the men from the previous evening enter from the same direction. Taking their leave, the elder man tells Milich that he will call him soon, and the younger blows his daughter a kiss. Bill, trying to speak calmly, says, “Mr. Milich, last night...you were going to call the police.” Milich answers that they “have come to another arrangement” and adds that if Bill “should ever want anything again...,” and puts his arm around his daughter, ending with, “it needn't be a costume...” The loss of a mask and perversion of fatherhood could reveal meaning in Lacan's answer to his critics, that
some investigation or other involving properly speaking the calculus of signifiers may be something on which I delay from time to time, it will never make me mistake as I may say my illusions for the lantern of knowledge; or indeed rather, if this lantern turns out to be a blind lantern, to recognise my illusion in it, but more directly than Freud because, coming after him, I question his God: “Che vuoi?”, “What do you want of me?”, in other words: “What is the relationship of desire to the law?” [37]
We see Bill sitting in his office, again re-imagining Alice's fantasy, before his secretary enters with his lunch. Bill says he can't make that afternoon's two appointments and that he wants his car in half an hour. We see him on the highway as he drives past a “Glen Cove” sign, then him approaching the Somerton gates. To a nerve-wracking piano piece, he walks in front of them, looking through the bars before noticing that a camera on one of the posts is following him. Turning his head, he sees a car from the mansion coming toward him. An old man gets out, wordlessly hands him an envelope through a gate, and returns. (Bill’s name on the envelope and the message, “Give up your inquiries...,” inside are both typed.) Peering through the gates of power, we can catch more of Lacan's thought on the Old Testament God, who
...orders us to enjoy, and what is more he goes into how it should be done. He specifies the demand, he separates out the object. This is why, I think, for you as for me, there could not fail to appear for a long time, the extraordinary entanglements, the confusion of the analogical evocation that there is in the supposed reference of circumcision to castration. Of course this has a relationship with the object of anxiety. [38]
When Bill returns home that night, his daughter exhibits all the math homework problems she has solved. Alice asks if he wants to eat at 7:00, and Bill asks to eat earlier, saying he has to go back to the office. After answering his daughter that he'll “see about” getting her a puppy for Christmas, he watches Alice help her solve another problem (calculating which of two boys has more money.) We see Bill’s face as we get a voiceover of Alice telling him her dream. Alice smiles at him as we hear, “I was fúcking other men.” This family scene can relate to Lacan's thought on
desire and the law, which appear to be opposed in a relationship of antithesis, [but] are only one and the same barrier to bar our access to the thing. Nolens, volens: desiring, I commit myself to the path of the law. [39]
The camera cuts to a blue-lit hall, pans over past a reception desk to a magenta-lit lobby, then cuts to Bill in his office, showing him still brooding about Alice's fantasy. He picks up his phone, and we see the gold-toned hallway of the Nathanson home (and a sculpture in the background that resembles one of the Somerton masks [40].) Carl answers, and Bill hangs up. We'll use Bill's frustrated attempt to contact Nathanson's daughter to summon Lacan's claim and caution about Freud, who
...relates the origin of the law to the opaque ungraspable desire of the father. But what this discovery and all analytic enquiry leads you to, is not to lose sight of the truth there is behind this lure. [41]
In the next scene, Bill, with a cake [42], exits a taxi in front of Domino’s building and walks through its red doors. Domino’s roommate, Sally, answers the buzzer. When he asks her to give the cake to Domino, she asks whom it is from, and recognizes Bill's name - “Domino said how nice you were to her.” She invites him in and moves seductively toward him*, introducing herself **. Removing his coat, he asks when Domino will be back, and smiles when Sally says she has no idea. He repeats her answer flirtatiously, and when she says that Domino “may not even be coming back,” Bill laughs and starts to undo her shirt. He continues as she tries to elaborate and, when she eventually says there's something he should know, he starts to fondle her breasts. Finally, Sally asks him to sit down, and he complies, playfully echoing her attempts to speak. His face falls as she tells him that Domino has been diagnosed with HIV. He says that he is very sorry to hear it, declines Sally's offer of coffee, and leaves. Let's pause on this scene of mortification for our next Lacan quote:
On the one hand there is the wolf, on the other the shepherdess. This is where I will leave you at the end of these first talks about anxiety, there is something else to be understood about the anxiety-provoking order of God, there is Diana’s hunt which, at a time that I chose, that of Freud’s centenary, was, I told you, the path of Freud’s quest, there is something to which I invite you for the coming trimester regarding anxiety, there is the death of the wolf. [43]
Outside, we hear the odd piano music as Bill notices that he is being followed by a very large man in an expensive coat. When he finds that the taxi he tries to hail is off duty, he takes refuge at a newspaper stand and buys a paper with the headline, “Lucky to be alive.” After his purchase, he stands there, staring at the man until he is out of sight, and then enters a nearby restaurant. We hear Mozart's Requiem playing as Bill orders a cappuccino and sits next to a reproduction of Rossetti's “Astarte.” Opening the newspaper [44], he finds a story about an “Ex-beauty queen in hotel drugs overdose.” We get a closeup of Bill's shocked face before cutting to the hospital, then to a closeup of red designs painted on its revolving doors. With that, we'll turn to Lacan's thoughts on the signifier's (other's) interaction with the subject's identity, or image:
From this economic oscillation, this reversible libido from i(o) to i'(o), there is something which we would not say escapes, but which intervenes in the form of an incidence whose style of disturbance is precisely the one that we are studying this year. The most striking manifestation, the signal of the intervention of this object o, is anxiety. [45]
Bill, passing through the doors, again displays his card, telling the receptionist that the woman from the article, Amanda Curren, is his patient. After consulting her computer screen, the receptionist says that the woman had died that afternoon. We then see a cyan-clad orderly bring Bill down a corridor and, reaching his destination, open the drawer containing the corpse. As Bill stares at the body, we hear the voice of Mysterious Woman saying, “It would cost me my life and possibly yours,” and see Bill bend slowly down, as if to kiss her, and finally straighten. This ghostly voice can help us recall the phenomenon also covered in Lacan's Fundamental Concepts, the phenomenon of aphanisis
This does not mean that this object o is only the reverse of anxiety, that it only intervenes, that it only functions in correlation with anxiety. Anxiety, Freud taught us, plays the function of a signal with respect to something. I am saying: it is a signal related to what is happening about the relationship of a subject, of a subject who moreover cannot enter into this relationship except in the vacillation of a certain fading, the one which the notation of the subject by an $ designates, the relationship of this subject, at this vacillating moment, with this object in all its generality. [46 (Scholarly citations removed.)]
As a dejected Bill, now alone [47], returns down a corridor, his cell phone rings. He says he will be there in about 20 minutes, and we next see him pulling up to Ziegler's mansion. Inside, the butler leads him through the gold-colored rooms to the poolroom. We see Ziegler, alone at the red pool table, open the door and greet Bill. Taking his coat, he offers him a drink. When Bill compliments his patron's scotch, Ziegler says it's a “25 year old” and offers to send him a case. With this copious supply of alcohol, we can sense the following point about “object” and “subject.”
{Lacan explains his use of the letter “o” for his concept of “object (pointing out the difficulty of the use of the word since Kant,) then discusses the “subject,” speculating} that if it is firstly and primarily unconscious, it is because in [its] constitution…, we must firstly and primarily hold to be prior to this constitution, a certain incidence which is that of the signifier. [48]
After Bill refuses the scotch and declines to play pool, Ziegler awkwardly gets to the point, saying that he knows what happened last night and since, adding that Bill might “have the wrong idea about one or two things.” Bill tries (unconvincingly) to act ignorant, but Ziegler reveals that he had seen him “at the house.” Scolding Bill, Ziegler brings up Nightingale, and Bill protests that “it wasn't Nick's fault.” Ziegler disagrees, adding that he knows that Bill had spoken to the hotel clerk, and it comes out that Ziegler had had Bill followed. Ziegler says that Nick has merely been sent back to Seattle, and to Bill's questioning says that he had deserved more than the bruise that the clerk had mentioned. After being scolded some more about what trouble he was in [49], Bill asks if Ziegler knows who Mysterious Woman was, and Ziegler replies that she was a “hooker.” Standing between a cyan window and the blood-red pool table, Ziegler asks, “Suppose I told you that, that everything that happened to you there...was staged,” later explaining that they needed to scare him to keep him quiet about where he had been and what he had seen. Bill pulls the article about Amanda Curren (a former Miss New York) out of his pocket, asking if Ziegler had seen it. We see interesting positionings of the article and the two men as Bill establishes that she was “the woman at the party.”* Standing up, Bill passionately asks the question quoted at the top of this entry. Ziegler angrily replies that Ms. Curren's “sacrifice” had nothing to do with her real death, adding that after Bill had left, all that happened to her was that “she got her brains fúcked out,” and that, as a “junkie,” “it was always gonna be just a matter of time with her.” Then, paternally clapping Bill on the back, he concludes, “Someone died. It happens all the time. But life goes on. It always does...until it doesn't...” This scene, especially the footnoted camerawork, can symbolize my following summary of pages 50-52 of “Anxiety”:
{Lacan, after separating objects into those which cannot be shared and those which can, notes that the phallus, due to the fact of castration, is the most illustrious member of the latter category.
We cut to Bill's mask lying on purple sheets and hear the unnerving piano piece as the camera pans to a sleeping Alice. Bill enters the apartment, has a beer, goes into the bedroom, and sees the mask. Putting his hand on his chest, he slowly sits on bed and starts to cry. Alice opens her eyes and Bill puts his head on her chest, sobbing and repeating, “I’ll tell you everything...” We'll use this scene to break down Page 53:
{Lacan calls the above observation inadequate, and brings up a story of one of Freud’s patients – the Rat-Man. He shows his students two diagrams, one which looks like a vase and its neck, putting the hole of the neck facing them} to designate…that what is important … is the edge. The second is the transformation which can be carried out as regards the neck and this edge. Starting from there, there is going to appear to you the opportuneness of the long insistence that I placed last year on topological considerations concerning the [third type of identification designated by Freud]… at the level of desire, …. I told you that I kept you so long on the crosscap to give you the possibility of intuitively conceiving what must be called the distinction between the object we are speaking about, o, and the object created, constructed starting from the specular relationship, the common object precisely concerning the specular image…{declaring the ego a “surface,” Lacan twists a belt into a Mobius strip,} something on which an ant walking along passes from one of these apparent faces to the other face, without needing to pass across the edge, namely a surface with a single face. [51]
We see a day-lit Alice in a cyan bathrobe and red-rimmed eyes. Kubrick cuts from her to Bill (on a red loveseat,) and back a couple times before she says that Helena will be up soon, adding that their daughter expects them to take her Christmas shopping. We then see all three of them in a red-walled toy-store as they walk past a man demonstrating a product called, “Magic Circle.” After looking at a doll's baby carriage, Helena runs toward the stuffed animals. Bill and Alice, standing by a rack of stuffed tigers identical to Domino's, start to discuss their future. Then Helena wanders after two of the men from Ziegler’s party, his waiter following her, as Alice says they should be grateful they survived their adventures, whether dreamed or real. Bill asks if she is sure, and she replies, “Only as sure as I am that the reality of one night let alone that of a whole lifetime can ever be the whole truth.” When Bill answers, “No dream is ever just a dream,” Alice says that the important thing is that they're awake now, and that they have to do something as soon as possible. When Bill asks what, Alice replies, “Fùck.” We can match this ambiguous conclusion with our present class’ ending, where Lacan
{demonstrates another way to make a Mobius strip, saying} that in the cross-cap … by means of a section, a cut, which has no other condition than that of rejoining itself, after having included in it the hole-point of the cross-cap, …it remains a Mobius strip. {He identifies the residual part as the “o” and demonstrates} what is involved in the entry of o into the world of the real, which it is only returning to… I think that those who have simply read a little know that it is a common ambiguity concerning the apparition of the phallus in the field of dream appearance – and not only dreams – of the sexual organ where there apparently is no real phallus. Its ordinary mode of apparition is to appear in the form of two phalluses. There, that’s enough for today! [52]
I'll end this part of our “Anxiety” analysis by reminding myself and my readers of the purpose of our exploration with two other current examples of how capitalism orders “values.” [53]
1. Stanley Kubrick. Eyes Wide Shut. (1999.) in:
springfieldspringfield.co.uk. (Undated.)
2. Mark Ames. “The True
History of Libertarianism in America: A Phony Ideology to Promote a Corporate
Agenda” in: alternet.org (September 6, 2013: adapted version of an article that
first appeared on NSFWCORP.)
3. “Political Activities
of the Koch Brothers.” in: wikipedia.org. October 30, 2014.
4. Jacques Lacan.
“Anxiety.” from The Seminar of Jacques
Lacan, Book X. (1962-63.) in: springhero.wordpress.com. (Nov. 19-27, 2010.
I think the seminar numbers are in error in my source, so I’ll identify them by
page number.)
5. There has been much
speculation on Kubrick's symbolic use of color; Here’s a link to a site that engages in it and that explores numerous other details of the film, including:
* “The Importance Of Money” and
** “Renaissance Symbolism In The Film.” In: http://somerton.tumblr.com/ (June 1, 2014 – December 17, 2014.)
* “The Importance Of Money” and
** “Renaissance Symbolism In The Film.” In: http://somerton.tumblr.com/ (June 1, 2014 – December 17, 2014.)
6. Lacan. “Anxiety.”
[31-32]
7. Lacan. “Anxiety.”
[33-34]
8. More in: http://somerton.tumblr.com/:
“The Kubrick Eye Chart” & “How The Grinch Stole Christmas”
9. Lacan. “Anxiety.”
[34-35]
10. Eyes Wide Shut. springfieldspringfield.co.uk.
11. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [36]
12. In: http://somerton.tumblr.com/
13. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [37]
14. In: http://somerton.tumblr.com/
15. Lacan. “Anxiety.”
[38-39]
16. In: http://somerton.tumblr.com/:
“Stanley Kubrick-Works”
* As with color, there has been much said about the extent to which dialogue is repeated in this film. We can use this aspect to emphasize the mirror-like structure of social interaction.
** In: http://somerton.tumblr.com/: “Every Mirror”
***Among these books are: Introducing Sociology and Shadows on the Mirror,
* As with color, there has been much said about the extent to which dialogue is repeated in this film. We can use this aspect to emphasize the mirror-like structure of social interaction.
** In: http://somerton.tumblr.com/: “Every Mirror”
***Among these books are: Introducing Sociology and Shadows on the Mirror,
17. Lacan. “Anxiety.”
[39-40]
18. In: http://somerton.tumblr.com/
19. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [41]
20. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [41]
21. idyllopuspress.com also
has interesting analyses of the storefronts and of other uncanny aspects of EWS.
22*. Lacan. “Anxiety.”
[41] There seems to be a typo in both versions I found online.
23. In: http://somerton.tumblr.com/:
“The Mystery Of A Single Frame”
*“Milich The Gatekeeper Animating Architecture”
** Perhaps it is Milich's accent, but, although the subtitle and script say “serve,” both times he uses the word it comes out sounding like “sell.”
*“Milich The Gatekeeper Animating Architecture”
** Perhaps it is Milich's accent, but, although the subtitle and script say “serve,” both times he uses the word it comes out sounding like “sell.”
24. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [42]
25. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [42]
26. From the “Trivia” box
regarding the incantation in www.moviemistakes.com
27. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [42]
28. In: http://somerton.tumblr.com/
29. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [42]
30. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [43]
31. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [43]
32. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [43]
33. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [44]
34. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [44]
35. In: http://somerton.tumblr.com/
36. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [45]
37. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [45]
38. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [45]
39. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [46]
40. In:
http://somerton.tumblr.com/
41. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [46]
42. In: http://somerton.tumblr.com/:
“Knishery,”
* “Body-Oriented Psychotherapy,”
** “What Are You Waiting For?”
* “Body-Oriented Psychotherapy,”
** “What Are You Waiting For?”
43. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [46]
44. In: http://somerton.tumblr.com/
45. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [46]
46. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [46]
47. ...or is he? In: http://somerton.tumblr.com/
48. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [47]
49. In: http://somerton.tumblr.com/
*See also this YouTube video from about 1:34 to 2:08 for the above-mentioned positionings.
*See also this YouTube video from about 1:34 to 2:08 for the above-mentioned positionings.
50 Lacan. “Anxiety.”
[50-52]
51/a. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [53]
b Rat-Man. in: wikipedia.org. October 23, 2014.
c “crosscap.” in: wikipedia.org. October 6, 2014.
b Rat-Man. in: wikipedia.org. October 23, 2014.
c “crosscap.” in: wikipedia.org. October 6, 2014.
52. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [54]
53a. hyperstillharry.
“Private Space Corp competes with Hollywood for 'spectacular explosion'"
in: imdb.com. October 29, 2014. Originally in The Guardian by Dan
Roberts in Washington and Alan Yuhas in New York. Wednesday 29 October 2014
b. Leigh Phillips. “The Political Economy of Ebola.” in: jacobinmag.com. August 13, 2014.
b. Leigh Phillips. “The Political Economy of Ebola.” in: jacobinmag.com. August 13, 2014.
