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(film reel whirring)
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The problem for us is not
are our desires satisfied or not.
(film reel whirring)
The problem is how do we know what we desire?
There is nothing spontaneous,
nothing natural about human desires.
Our desires are artificial.
We have to be taught to desire.
Cinema is the ultimate pervert art.
It doesn't give you what you desire.
It tells you how to desire.
(dark, unsettling music)
(bell dinging)
Oh, I do like you,
but it just isn't good enough.
(bell dinging)
Oh, I forgot.
Your mother asked me up for supper.
Okay, bring some ice cream with you, will you?
Sure, what kind you want, chocolate or vanilla?
-Chocolate. -Okay.
What we get in this wonderful clip
from Possessed
is commentary on the magic art of cinema
within a movie.
We have an ordinary working-class girl
living in a drab, small provincial town.
All of a sudden, she finds herself in a situation
where reality itself reproduces the magic cinematic experience.
She approaches the rail.
The train is passing,
and it is as if
what in reality is just a person standing near
a slowly passing train,
turns into a viewer observing
the magic of the screen.
(soft music)
Have a drink?
(upbeat music)
Oh, don't go away.
Looking in?
Wrong way, get in and look out.
We get a very real ordinary scene
onto which the heroine's inner space, as it were,
her fantasy space is projected,
so that although all reality is simply there--
the train, the girl--
part of reality in her perception,
and in our viewer's perception
is, as it were, elevated to the magic level,
becomes the screen of her dreams.
This is cinematic art at its purest.
(tense music)
This is your last chance.
After this, there is no turning back.
You take the blue pill, the story ends,
you wake up in your bed and believe
whatever you want to believe.
You take the red pill,
you stay in wonderland,
and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.
(tense music)
(thunder rumbling)
But the choice between the blue and the red pill
is not really a choice between illusion and reality.
Of course, Matrix is a machine for fictions,
but these are fictions which already structure our reality.
If you take away from our reality
the symbolic fictions that regulate it,
you lose reality itself.
I want a third pill!
So what is the third pill?
Definitely not some kind of transcendental pill
which enables a fake fast-food religious experience,
but a pill that would enable me to perceive
not the reality behind the illusion,
but the reality in illusion itself.
If something gets too traumatic, too violent,
even too... too filled in with enjoyment,
it shatters the coordinates of our reality.
We have to fictionalize it.
(boat motor humming)
(seagulls squawking)
(birds chirping)
The first key to horror films
is to say, "Let's imagine
the same story, but without the horror element."
This gives us, I think, the background.
(boat motor humming)
We're in the middle of Bodega Bay,
where the action of Hitchcock's Birds takes place.
(seagull squawking )
(boat motor sputtering)
Birds is film about a young, rich, social,
socialite girl from San Francisco
who falls in love with a guy.
Goes after him to Bodega Bay,
where she discovers that he lives with his mother.
Of course, it's none of my business,
but when you bring a girl like that--
-Darling? -Yes?
I think I can handle Melanie Daniels by myself.
Well, as long as you know what you want, Mitch.
I know exactly what I want.
And then, there is the standard edible imbroglio
of incestuous tension between mother and son.
The son's split between his possessive mother
and the intrusive girl.
What's the matter with them?
What's the matter with all the birds?
Where'd you want this coffee?
Uh, in on the table, honey.
Hurry up with yours, Mitch.
I'm sure Miss Daniels wants to be on her way.
I think you ought to stay the night, Melanie.
We have an extra room upstairs and everything.
The big question about The Birds, of course, is
the stupid obvious one:
Why do the birds attack?
Mitch?
(birds flocking)
It is not enough to say that
the birds are part of the natural setup of reality.
It is rather as if a foreign dimension intrudes,
that literally tears apart reality.
(birds screeching)
We humans are not naturally born into reality.
In order for us to act as normal people
who interact with other people
who live in the space of social reality,
many things should happen,
like we should be properly installed
within the symbolic order, and so on.
When this, our proper dwelling within a symbolic space,
is disturbed, reality disintegrates.
(wings beating)
So to propose the psychoanalytic formula,
the violent attacks of the birds are obviously
explosive outbursts of maternal superego,
of the maternal figure preventing, trying to prevent
sexual relationship.
So, the birds are raw incestuous energy.
(boat motor humming)
What am I doing, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, now I got it.
(boat motor humming)
My God, I'm thinking like Melanie.
You know what I'm thinking now?
I want to fuck Mitch, that's what she was thinking.
Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry.
I got this spontaneous confusion of directions.
(boat motor humming)
Mrs. Bates?
(suspenseful music)
(screaming)
We are in the cellar of the mother's house
from Psycho.
What's so interesting is that
the very disposition of mother's house.
Events took place in it at three levels:
first floor, ground floor, basement.
It is as if they reproduced
the three levels of human subjectivity.
Ground floor is ego.
Norman behaves there as a normal son,
whatever remains of his normal ego taking over.
Up there, it's the superego...
...maternal superego because
the dead mother is basically a figure of superego.
Now, Mother, I'm gonna
bring something up.
I am sorry, boy, but you do manage to look ludicrous
when you give me orders.
Please, Mother.
No, I will not hide in the fruit cellar!
Ha, you think I'm fruity, huh?
And down in the cellar,
it's the id,
the reservoir of these illicit drives.
So we can then interpret
the event in the middle of the film
when Norman carries
the mother--or, as we learn at the end, Mother's mummy,
corpse, skeleton--from the first floor to the cellar.
Not ever again, now get out!
I told you to get out, boy.
I'll carry you, Mother.
It's as if he is transposing her
in his own mind
as a psychic agency
from superego to id.
Put me down, put me down!
Of course, the lesson of it is
the old lesson elaborated already by Freud,
that superego and id are deeply connected.
The mother complains first as a figure of authority.
"How can you be doing this to me?
Aren't you ashamed?
This is a fruit cellar!"
And then, mother immediately turns in to obscenity.
"Do you think I'm fruity?"
Superego is not an ethical agency.
Superego is an obscene agency
bombarding us with impossible orders,
laughing at us when, of course, we cannot ever
fulfill its demand.
The more we obey it, the more it makes us guilty.
There is always some aspect
of an obscene madman
in the agency of the superego.
(footsteps)
We often find references to psychoanalysis
embodied in the very relations between persons.
For example, the three Marx brothers,
Groucho, Chico, Harpo.
It's clear Groucho, the most popular one
with his nervous hyperactivity, is superego.
Well, that covers a lot of ground.
Say, you cover a lot of ground yourself.
You better beat it, I hear they're gonna tear you down,
and put up an office building where you're standing.
You can leave in a taxi,
if you can't get a taxi, you can leave in a huff.
If that's too soon, you can leave in a minute and a huff.
You know you haven't stopped talking since I came here?
Chico, the rational guy,
egotistic, calculating all the time, is ego.
Chicolini, you're charged with high treason.
And if found guilty, you'll be shot.
-I object! -Oh, you object?
On what grounds?
I couldn't think of anything else to say.
Objection sustained!
And the weirdest of them all,
Harpo, the mute guy, he doesn't talk.
Freud said that drives are silent.
He doesn't talk.
He, of course, is id.
Who are you guys?
What are you doing in my room?
He's my partner, but he no speak,
he's dumb and deaf.
The id in all its radical ambiguity.
(honking)
Maybe what is so weird about the Harpo character
is that he's childishly innocent,
just striving for pleasure,
likes children, plays with children, and so on.
But, at the same time...
...possessed by some kind of primordial evil,
aggressive all the time.
And this unique combination
of utter corruption and innocence
is what the id is about.
-Get him off there! -Get off the table!
What do you think you're--what d'ya think this is here anyway?
(yelling)
-Dr. Klein. -Yes, I'm Dr. Klein.
-This is Dr. Taney. -How do you do?
Things have gotten worse since I phoned you.
I think you better come upstairs.
She having the spasms again?
Yeah, but they've gotten violent.
Did you give her the medication?
Voice is not an organic part
of the human body.
It's coming from somewhere in-between your body.
Mother, please!
Please, Mother, make it stop!
It's burning!
-It's burning! -Do something, doctor!
Whenever we talk to another person,
there is always this minimum of ventriloquist effect,
as if some foreign power took possession.
(screaming)
Let the enemy have no power over her.
And the son of iniquity be powerless to harm her.
Your mother sucks cocks in Hell,
Karras, you faithless slime.
Remember that at the beginning of the film,
this was a beautiful young girl.
How did she become a monster that we see?
By being possessed,
but who possessed her?
(growling)
A voice, a voice in its obscene dimensions.
See the cross of the Lord.
Be gone, you hostile power.
The first big film
about this traumatic dimension of the voice--
the voice which freely floats around
and is a traumatic presence,
feared the ultimate moment,
object of anxiety, which distorts reality--
was in '31 in Germany,
Fritz Lang's The Testament of Dr. Mabuse.
We do not see Mabuse till the end of the film.
He's just a voice.
And to redeem through Your Son,
who lives and reigns with You
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
God, forever and ever.
Amen.
So, the problem is--
which is why we have the two priests at her side--
how to get rid of this intruder,
of this alien intruder?
It is as if we are expecting
the famous scene from Ridley Scott's Alien
to repeat itself.
(screaming)
As if we just wait for some
terrifying alien, evil-looking, small animal
to jump out.
(heart beating)
There is a fundamental imbalance, gap,
between our psychic energy--
called by Freud, libido,
this endless, undead energy
which persists beyond life and death--
and the poor, finite, mortal reality
of our bodies.
(groaning)
(intense music)
This is not just the pathology of
being possessed by ghosts.
(intense music)
The lesson that we should learn,
and that the movies try to avoid,
is that we ourselves are the aliens
controlling our bodies.
Humanity means the aliens are controlling our animal bodies.
(heart beating)
Our ego, our psychic agency
is an alien force
distorting, controlling our body.
Nobody was as fully aware
of the properly traumatic
dimension of the human voice--
the human voice, not as the sublime, ethereal
medium for expressing the depth of human subjectivity,
but the human voice as a foreign intruder--
nobody was more aware of this than Charlie Chaplin.
(speaking foreign language)
(coughing)
Chaplin himself plays in the film two persons,
the good, small Jewish barber...
(whimsical music)
...and his evil double...
(speaking foreign language)
...Hynkel,
dictator, Hitler of course.
Come on, why you!
Oh!
Oh, he bit my finger!
The Jewish barber, the tramp figure,
is, of course, the figure of silent cinema.
Silent figures are basically like
figures in the cartoon.
They don't know death,
they don't know sexuality, even.
They don't know suffering.
They just go on in their oral egotistic striving,
like cat and mouse in a cartoon.
You cut them into pieces, they're reconstituted.
There is no finitude, no mortality here.
There is evil,
but kind of a naive, good evil.
You're just egotistic.
You want to eat,
you want to hit the other,
but there is no guilt proper.
What we get with sound is
interiority, depth, guilt...
...culpability.
In other words, the complex, oedipal universe.
Here you are, get a Hynkel button, get a Hynkel button.
A fine photo with a phooey on each and every button.
Two?
(indistinct announcement)
The problem of the film
is not only the political problem--
how to get rid of totalitarianism,
of its terrible seductive power--
but it's also this more formal problem,
how to get rid of this terrifying dimension
of the voice?
(announcement continues)
Or, since we cannot simply get rid of it,
how to domesticate it?
How to transform this voice
nonetheless into a means of expressing
humanity, love, and so on?
(solemn music)
German police grabs the poor tramp,
thinking this is Hitler, and he has
to address a large gathering.
(solemn music)
I'm sorry,
but I don't want to be an emperor.
That's not my business.
I don't want to rule or conquer anyone.
I should like to help everyone if possible.
Jew, gentile, Black man, white,
we all want to help one another.
Human beings are like that.
There, of course, he delivers his big speech
about the need of love, understanding between people.
But there is a catch,
even a double catch.
Soldiers, in the name of democracy,
let us all unite!
(cheering)
People applaud exactly in the same way
as they were applauding Hitler.
The music that accompanies this great humanist finale,
the overture to Wagner's opera, Lohengrin,
is the same music as the one we hear
when Hitler is daydreaming about conquering the entire world,
and where he has a balloon in the shape of the globe.
The music is the same.
(solemn music)
This can be read as the ultimate redemption of music,
that the same music which served evil purposes
can be redeemed to serve the good.
Or, it can be read-- and I think it should be read--
in the much more ambiguous way
that with music, we cannot ever be sure.
(somber music)
In so far as it externalizes
our inner passion,
music is potentially always a threat.
(singing in foreign language)
There is a short scene
in David Lynch's Mulholland Drive,
which takes place in the theatre
where we are now,
where behind the microphone,
a woman is singing.
Then, out of exhaustion, or whatever, she drops down.
Surprisingly, the singing goes on.
(singing in foreign language)
Immediately afterwards,
it is explained it was a playback.
But for that couple of seconds,
when we are confused,
we confront this nightmarish dimension
of an autonomous partial object.
(singing in foreign language)
Like, in the well-known adventure of Cheshire Cat
from Alice in Wonderland, where the cat disappears,
the smile remains.
You may have noticed
that I'm not all there
myself.
(laughing)
And the mome raths outgrabe
The fascinating thing about partial objects,
in the sense of organs without bodies,
is that they embody what Freud called death drive.
Here, we have to be very careful.
Death drive is not kind of a Buddhist striving
for annihilation, "I want to find eternal peace,
I want"--No, death drive is almost the opposite.
Death drive is the dimension of what--
in the Stephen King-like horror fiction--is called
the dimension of the undead,
of living dead,
of something which remains alive even after it is dead.
And it's, in a way, immortal in its deadness itself.
Goes on, exists, you cannot destroy.
The more you cut it, the more it exists, it goes on.
This dimension of kind of diabolical undeadness
is what partial objects are about.
(lively music)
The nicest example here for me, I think,
is Michael Powell's Red Shoes, about the ballerina.
(lively music)
Her passion for dancing is materialized
in her shoes taking over.
The shoes are literally the undead object.
(eerie music)
(speaking foreign language)
(aggressive dramatic music)
(cheering)
(groaning)
Perhaps the ultimate bodily part
which fits this role of the autonomous partial object
is the fist, or rather, the hand.
(thudding)
This hand raising up.
That's the whole point of the film.
It's not simply something foreign to him.
It's the very core of his personality out there.
Security!
I am Jack's smirking revenge.
(dark music)
Oh!
What the hell are you doing?
(glass shattering)
(dark music)
That hurt.
Far from standing for some kind of perverted masochism,
or reactionary fantasy of violence,
this scene is deeply liberating.
I'm here, as it were, on the side of the fist.
I think this is what liberation means.
In order to attack the enemy,
you first have to beat the shit out of yourself.
To get rid, in yourself,
that which in yourself
attaches you to the leader, to the conditions of slavery,
and so on, and so on.
No, please stop!
(gagging)
(dark music)
What are you doing?
Oh, God, no, please, no!
For some reason, I thought of my first fight
with Tyler.
(bells dinging)
There is always this conflict between me and my double.
(train whistle blaring)
Motherfucker!
You hit me in the ear!
-Well, Jesus, I'm sorry! -Ow!
Christ!
-Why the ear, man? -Oh, I fucked it up kind of.
No, that was perfect.
Oh!
It is as if the double embodies myself,
but without the castrated dimension of myself.
(intimidating music)
-You all right? -Yeah.
There is an episode
in the wonderful British horror classic,
Dead of Night...
I knew you wouldn't leave me, Hugo.
I knew you'd come back.
...in which Michael Redgrave plays a ventriloquist
who gets jealous of his puppet.
Now don't get excited, I was only joking.
You know me.
Maxwell, Maxwell!
Maxwell!
I can't believe--
-Stop there! -Maxwell!
(screaming)
Hey, you fool!
Officer, quickly, open this door!
Quick!
In an outburst of violence,
destroys the puppet, breaks down.
Then, in the very last scene of the film,
we see him in the hospital
slowly regaining consciousness, coming back to himself.
First, his voice is stuck in the throat.
Then, with great difficulty,
finally, he is able to talk.
But, he talks with
the distorted voice of the dummy.
Why, hello, Sylvester.
I've been waiting for you.
And the lesson is clear,
the only way for me
to get rid of this autonomous partial object
is to become this object.
Anytime you are ready, tell me.
-Okay, I'm ready. -Wait a minute,
so as I don't confuse them.
Where is my key--my key is here, the other one is here.
Okay, and you shout when.
I'm standing on the very balcony
where the murder, the traumatic murder scene
occurs in The Conversation.
The murder of the husband
observed through the stained glass in front of me
by the private detective, Gene Hackman.
The detective is in the nearby room.
Significantly, just before he sees the murder,
he observes the balcony
through a crack in the glass wall.
Whenever we have this famous
proverbial peeping tom scene
of somebody observing traumatic event through a crack,
it's never as if we are dealing with two parts
on both sides of the wall of the same reality.
Before seeing anything,
or imagining to see something,
he tries to listen.
He behaves as an eavesdropper
with all his private detective gadgets.
What does this make him?
Potentially, at least,
it makes him into a fantasized, imagined entity.
I can't stand it.
I can't stand it!
You're going to make me cry.
-(unintelligible), me too. -No, don't!
He doesn't fantasize the scene of the murder.
He fantasizes himself as a witness to the murder.
I love you.
What he sees on that blurred window
glass which effectively functions
as a kind of elementary screen,
cinematic screen, even,
that should be perceived as a desperate attempt
to visualize, hallucinate even,
the bodily, material support of what he hears.
(screaming)
(knocking)
(breathing heavily)
(door slams)
-Hello, baby. -Shut up!
It's Daddy, you shithead, where's my bourbon?
(pouring bourbon)
Dorothy's apartment is one of those
hellish places which abound in David Lynch's films,
places where all moral or social inhibitions
seem to be suspended,
where everything is possible,
the lowest masochistic sex,
obscenities, the deepest level of our desires
that we are not even ready to admit to ourselves.
We are confronted with them in such places.
Spread your legs.
Wider.
Now show it to me.
Don't you fuckin' look at me.
From what perspective should we observe this scene?
(sinister music)
(inhaling deeply)
Imagine the scene as that of a small child
hidden in a closet, or behind a door...
Mommy!
...witnessing the parental intercourse.
He doesn't yet know what sexuality is,
how we do it.
All he knows is what he hears,
this strange deep breathing sound,
and then he tries to imagine what goes on.
At the very beginning of Blue Velvet,
we see Jeffrey's father
having a heart attack, falling down.
We have the eclipse of the normal paternal authority.
Hey, Dad.
(machines beeping)
Oh, Mommy!
Mommy!
-Mommy loves you. -Baby wants to fuck!
It is as if Jeffrey fantasizes this
wild, parental couple of Dorothy and Frank
as kind of a phantasmatic supplement
to the lack of the real paternal authority.
Get ready to fuck!
You fuckers fuck her!
You fucker!
Don't you fuckin' look at me!
Frank not only obviously acts,
but even overacts.
It is as if his ridiculously excessive gesticulating,
shouting, and so on
are here to cover up something.
The point is, of course, the elementary one,
to convince the invisible observer
that father is potent,
to cover up father's impotence.
So, the second way to read the scene
would have been as a spectacle,
a ridiculously violent spectacle
set up by the father
to convince the son of his power,
of his over-potence.
(intense music)
(screaming)
The third way would have been
to focus on Dorothy herself.
Many feminists, of course,
emphasized the brutality against women in this scene,
the abuse, how Dorothy's character is abused.
There is obviously this dimension in it.
But I think one should risk
a more shocking and obverse interpretation.
What if the central, as it were, problem
of this entire scene is Dorothy's passivity.
Don't you fuckin' look at me!
Yes.
(sinister music)
So, what if what Frank is doing
is kind of a desperate, ridiculous,
but nonetheless effective attempt
of trying to help Dorothy.
To awaken her out of her lethargy,
to bring her into life.
(grunting)
So if Frank is anybody's fantasy,
maybe he's Dorothy's fantasy.
(sinister music)
There is kind of a strange,
mutual interlocking of fantasies.
(sinister music)
You stay alive, baby.
It's not only ambiguity, but oscillation between
three focal points.
This, I think, is what accounts for the strange reverberations
of this scene.
(suspenseful music)
This brings us to our third, and maybe crucial example,
what is, for me, the most beautiful shot
in the entire Vertigo.
(tense music)
The shot in which we see
Scottie in the position of a peeping tom,
observing through a crack.
(tense music)
It is as if Madeleine is really there
in common reality,
while Scottie is peeping at her
from some mysterious interspace
from some obscure netherworld.
This is the location of the imagined, fantasized gaze.
Gaze is that obscure point, the blind spot,
from which the object looked upon
returns the gaze.
(water running)
After suspecting that a murder is taking place
in a nearby hotel room,
Gene Hackman, playing the private detective,
enters this room, and inspects the toilet.
The moment he approaches the toilet in the bathroom,
it is clear that we are in Hitchcock territory.
It is clear that some kind of intense, implicit dialogue
with Psycho is going on.
In a very violent gesture,
as if adopting the role of Norman Bates' mother,
the murderer in Psycho,
he opens up the curtain, inspects it in detail,
looking for traces of blood there.
Even inspecting the gap, the hole,
at the bottom of the sink,
which is precisely another of these focal object.
Because in Psycho, the hole--
through fade out, the hole is morphed into the eye
returning the gaze.
(water pattering)
We say the eye is the window of the soul.
But what if there is no soul behind the eye?
What if the eye is a crack through which
we can perceive just the abyss of a netherworld?
(shower running)
When we look through these cracks,
we see the dark other side
where hidden forces run the show.
(water running)
It is as if Gene Hackman establishes no, we are
nonetheless not in Psycho, let's return to my
first object of fascination, toilet bowl.
He flushes it, and then the terrible thing happens.
(intense music)
(water spilling)
(intense music)
In our most elementary experience,
when we flush the toilet,
excrements simply disappear out of our reality,
into another space,
which we phenomenologically perceive
as a kind of a netherworld.
Another reality, chaotic, primordial reality.
And the ultimate horror, of course,
is if the flushing doesn't work,
if objects return,
if excremental remainders
return from that dimension.
The bathroom.
Hitchcock is all the time playing with this threshold.
Well, they cleaned all this up now.
Big difference.
You should have seen the blood.
The whole place was--
Well, it's too horrible to describe. Dreadful.
The most effective, for me, and even the most touching
scene of entire Psycho is
after the shower murder,
when Norman Bates
tries to clean the bathroom.
(eerie music)
(faucet running)
I remember clearly when, in my adolescence,
I first saw the film,
how deeply I was impressed
by--not only by the length of the scene,
it goes on almost for ten minutes,
details of things, and so on, and so on--
but also by the care, the meticulousness,
how it is done, and also by our spectator's
identification with it.
(eerie music)
(water running)
I think that this tells us a lot about
the satisfaction of work,
of a job well done--
which is not so much to construct something new,
but maybe human work at its most elementary,
work as it were at the zero level,
is the work of cleaning the traces of a stain.
(intense music)
The work of erasing the stains,
keeping at bay this chaotic netherworld,
which threatens to explode anytime
and engulf us.
(intense music)
I think this is the fine sentiment
that Hitchcock's films evoke.
It's not simply that something horrible happens in reality.
Something worse can happen
which undermines the very fabric
of what we experience as reality.
I think it's very important
how the first attack of the birds occurs
in the film.
When a fantasy object, something imagined,
an object from inner space,
enters our ordinary reality,
the texture of reality is twisted, distorted.
This is how desire inscribes itself into reality,
by distorting it.
Desire is a wound of reality.
The art of cinema consists
in arousing desire
to play with desire.
But, at the same time,
keeping it at a safe distance,
domesticating it, rendering it palpable.
(white noise)
When we spectators are sitting in a movie theatre
looking in the screen--you remember, at the very beginning,
before the picture is on, it's a black, dark screen,
and then light thrown on.
Are we basically not
staring into a toilet bowl
and waiting for things to reappear out of the toilet?
And are--is the entire magic
of spectacle showed on the screen
not a kind of a deceptive lure
trying to conceal the fact that
we are basically watching shit, as it were?
There was a young lady of Ongar
who had an affair with a conger.
They said, "How does it feel to sleep with an eel?"
Well, she said, "Just like a man, only longer."
(film projector clicking)
Usually, people read
the lesson of Freudian psychoanalysis
as if the secret meaning of everything is sexuality,
but this is not what Freud wants to say.
I think Freud wants to say the exact opposite.
It's not that everything is a metaphor for sexuality,
that whatever we are doing we are always thinking about that.
The Freudian question is
"But what are we thinking when we are doing that?"
(unsettling music)
In sexuality, it's never only me and my partner,
or more partners, whatever you are doing.
There has to be always some phantasmatic element.
There has to be some third imagined element
which makes me...
makes it possible for me, which enables me
to engage in sexuality.
If I may be a little bit impertinent,
and relate to an unfortunate experience
probably known to most of us now.
It happens that while one is engaged in sexual activity,
all of a sudden one feels stupid.
One loses contact with it, as if, "My God,
what am I doing here?
Doing these stupid, repetitive movements,"
and so on, and so on.
Nothing changes in reality,
in this strange moment, where I, as it were, disconnect.
It's just that I lose the phantasmatic support.
(tense music)
(squishing)
There is an irresistible power of fascination,
at least for me, in this terrifying scene
when Neo awakens from his sleep within the Matrix
and becomes aware of what he really is
in that fetal container,
floating in liquid, connected to virtual reality,
where you are reduced to a totally passive object
with your energy being sucked out of you.
(zapping)
So why does the Matrix need our energy?
(zapping)
I think the proper way to ask this question
is to turn it around.
Not why does the Matrix need the energy,
but why does the energy need the Matrix?
That is to say, since I think that the energy
we are talking about is libido, is our pleasure,
why does our libido need
the virtual universe of fantasies?
Why can't we simply enjoy it directly,
a sexual partner and so on?
That's the fundamental question.
Why do we need this virtual supplement?
Our libido needs an illusion in order to sustain itself.
(eerie music)
One of the most interesting motifs in science fiction
is that of the id machine,
an object which has the magic capacity
of directly materializing,
realizing in front of us,
our innermost dreams, desires,
even guilt feelings.
There is a long tradition of this
in science fiction films,
but of course the film about id machine
is Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris.
(wind chimes tinkling)
Solaris is the story of Kelvin, a psychologist,
who is sent by a rocket to a spaceship
circulating around Solaris, a newly discovered planet.
(soft music)
Strange things are reported from the spaceship.
All the scientists there are going crazy,
and then Kelvin discovers what is going on there.
This planet has the magic ability
to directly realize your deepest traumas,
dreams, fears, desires.
The innermost of your inner space.
The hero of the film finds one morning
his deceased wife,
who made suicide years ago.
So he realizes not so much his desire
as his guilt feeling.
When the hero is confronted with the spectral clone,
as it were, of his deceased wife...
...although he appears to be deeply sympathetic,
spiritual, reflecting, and so on,
his basic problem is how to get rid of her.
(clattering)
(screaming, moaning)
(grunting)
What makes Solaris so touching is that,
at least potentially, it confronts us
with this tragic subjective position
of the woman, his wife, who is aware
that she has no consistency,
no full being of her own.
For example, she has gaps in her memory
because she knows only what he knows that she knows.
(she sighs)
She is just his dream realized.
And her true love for him is expressed
in her desperate attempts to erase herself,
to swallow poison or whatever, just to clear the space,
because she guesses that he wants this.
(clanging)
It's relatively easy to get rid of a real person.
You can abandon him or her, kill him or her, whatever.
But a ghost, a spectral presence,
is much more difficult to get rid of.
It sticks to you as a kind of a shadowy presence.
What we get here is the lowest male mythology.
This idea that woman doesn't exist on her own.
That a woman is merely a man's dream realized
or even, as radical anti-feminists claim,
the man's guilt realized.
Women exist because male desire got impure.
If man cleanses his desire,
gets rid of dirty material,
fantasies, woman ceases to exist.
(ominous music)
At the end of the film,
we get a kind of a Holy Communion,
a reconciliation of him not with his wife,
but with his father.
(waves crashing)
Did you see Hitchcock's Vertigo?
Sorry, I don't understand.
Sorry. Hitchcock's Vertigo, the film.
Alfred Hitchcock.
I think it happened here, you know.
Oh, you don't know the scene, okay.
Probably.
(melancholy music)
(bird squawking)
(horn blaring)
Often, things begin as a fake, inauthentic, artificial,
but you get caught into your own game.
And that is the true tragedy of Vertigo.
It's a story about two people
who, each in his or her own way,
get caught into their own game of appearances.
For both of them, for Madeleine and for Scottie,
appearances win over reality.
(music stops)
What is the story of Vertigo?
It's a story about a retired policeman
who has a pathological fear of heights
because of an incident in his career,
and then an old friend hires him
to follow his beautiful wife, played by Kim Novak.
The wife mysteriously possessed by the ghost
of a past deceased Spanish beauty,
Carlotta Valdes.
(suspenseful music)
The two fall in love.
The wife kills herself.
(intense music)
(screaming)
(thudding)
(dark music)
The first part of Vertigo, with Madeleine's suicide,
is not as shattering as it could have been,
because it's really a terrifying loss,
but in this very loss, the ideal survives.
(tense music)
The idea of the fatal woman possesses you totally.
What, ultimately, this image,
fascinating image of the fatal woman
stands for is death.
The fascination of beauty is always the veil
which covers up a nightmare.
Like the idea of a fascinating creature,
but if you come too close to her,
you see shit, decay,
you see worms crawling everywhere.
The ultimate abyss is not a physical abyss,
but the abyss of the depth of another person.
It's what philosophers describe
as the night of the world.
Like when you see another person,
into his or her eyes, you see the abyss.
That's the true spiral which is drawing us in.
(soft music)
Scottie alone, broken down, cannot forget her,
wanders around the city looking for a woman,
a similar woman,
something like the deceased woman,
discovers an ordinary, rather vulgar, common girl.
The denouement of the story, of course,
is along the lines of the Marx Brothers' joke,
"This man looks like an idiot, acts like an idiot.
This shouldn't deceive you.
This man is an idiot."
The newly found woman looks like Madeleine,
acts like Madeleine, the fatal beauty.
(moody music)
We discover she is Madeleine.
(tense music)
What we learn is that Scottie's friend,
who hired Scottie, also hired this woman, Judy,
to impersonate Madeleine in a devilish plot
to kill the real Madeleine, his wife,
and get her fortune.
(dark music)
We could just see a lot of each other.
Why?
'Cause I remind you of her?
(somber music)
It's not very complimentary.
The profile shot in Vertigo is perhaps the key shot
of the entire film.
We have there Madeleine's, or rather Judy's, identity
in all its tragic tension.
It provides the dark background
for the fascinating other profile of Madeleine
in Ernie's restaurant.
(melancholy music)
Scottie is too ashamed, afraid to look at her directly.
It is as if what he sees is the stuff of his dreams,
more real in a way for him than the reality
of the woman behind his back.
That's not very complimentary, either.
I just want to be with you as much as I can, Judy.
When we see a face,
it's basically always the half of it.
A subject is a partial something,
a face, something we see.
Behind it, there is a void, a nothingness.
And of course, we spontaneously tend
to fill in that nothingness with our fantasies
about the wealth of human personality,
and so on, and so on.
To see what is lacking in reality,
to see it as that, there you see subjectivity.
To confront subjectivity
means to confront femininity.
Woman is the subject.
Masculinity is a fake.
Masculinity is an escape from the most radical,
nightmarish dimension of subjectivity.
-Scottie, what are you doing? -I'm trying to buy you a suit.
But--but I love the second one she wore.
And this one, it's beautiful.
No, no. They're none of them right.
Oh, I think I know the suit you mean.
We had it some time ago.
Let me go and see. We may still have that model.
Thank you.
You're looking for the suit that she wore, for me.
You want me to be dressed like her.
Judy, I just want you to look nice.
I know the kind of suit that would look well on you.
No, I won't do it!
Judy...
Judy, it can't make that much difference to you.
-I just want to see what... -No, I don't want any clothes.
I don't want anything. I want to get out of here.
Judy, do this for me.
Here we are.
-Yes, that's it. -I thought so.
(ominous music)
When Judy, refashioned as Madeleine,
steps out of the door, it's like fantasy realized.
And, of course, we have a name,
a perfect name for fantasy realized.
It's called "nightmare."
Fantasy realized.
What does this mean?
Of course, it is always sustained
by an extreme violence.
The violence in this case of Scottie's refashioning,
brutal refashioning of Judy,
a real, common girl, into Madeleine.
It's truly a process of mortification,
which also is the mortification of woman's desire.
It is as if in order to have her, to desire her,
to have sexual intercourse with her, with the woman,
Scottie has to mortify her,
to change her into a dead woman.
It's as if, again,
for the male libidinal economy,
to paraphrase a well-known old saying,
the only good woman is a dead woman.
(melancholy music)
Scottie is not really fascinated by her,
but by the entire scene, the staging.
He is looking around, checking up,
are the phantasmatic coordinates really here?
At that point, when the reality fully fits fantasy,
Scottie is finally able to realize
the long-postponed sexual intercourse.
So the result of this violence
is a perfect coordination
between fantasy and reality.
A kind of direct short circuit.
(dark music)
In Lynch's films, darkness is really dark.
Light is really unbearable, blinding light.
Fire really hurts, it's so hot.
(hissing)
(crackling)
At those moments of sensual over-intensity,
it is as if events on-screen itself
threatens to overflow the screen
and to grab us into it, to reach towards us.
It's, again, as if the fantasy space,
the fictional, narrative space, gets too intense
and reaches out towards us spectators
so that we lose our safe distance.
(crashing, shattering)
This is the proper tension of the Lynchian universe.
(dark music)
The beauty of Lynch, if you look closely,
it's never clear.
Is it really the brutal real out there which disturbs us,
or is it our fantasy?
Blue Velvet
Whoa, whoa
("Blue Velvet" by Bobby Vinton)
She wore blue velvet
Whoa, whoa
Bluer than velvet was the night
Whoa, whoa, whoa
Softer than satin was the light
from the stars
She wore blue...
At the very beginning of David Lynch's Blue Velvet,
we see an idyllic, American small town.
...were her eyes
Whoa, whoa, whoa
Warmer than May her tender sighs
Love was ours
What can be more normal than father of the family,
in front of a white clean house,
watering the lawn?
I held tightly,
feeling the rapture grow
But all of a sudden, father has a heart seizure,
falls down to the grass.
(choking)
And, then, instead of showing the family confused,
calling for an ambulance, whatever,
Lynch does something typically Lynchian.
The camera moves extremely close to the grass,
even penetrates the grass,
and we see what is the real
of this idyllic green lawn.
(rustling)
(sinister music)
We should not forget this,
how this happens precisely when father has a seizure.
That is to say when, symbolically,
the paternal authority breaks down.
(squishing)
I'll send you straight to hell, fucker!
...I walk with you
In dreams...
I walk with you.
...I talk...
In dreams, I talk to you.
In dreams...
In dreams, you're mine.
-All of the time. -All the time.
We're together
-in dreams... -Forever.
The logic here is strictly Freudian,
that is to say we escape into dream
to avoid a deadlock in our real life.
But, then, what we encounter in the dream
is even more horrible, so that at the end,
we literally escape from the dream,
back into reality.
It starts with, dreams are for those who cannot endure,
who are not strong enough for reality.
It ends with, reality is for those
who are not strong enough to endure,
to confront their dreams.
(dark music)
Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive
are two versions of the same film.
What makes both films, especially Lost Highway,
so interesting
is how they posit the two dimensions,
reality and fantasy, side by side,
horizontally, as it were.
(static crackling)
It must be from a real estate agent.
What we get in Lost Highway...
-Maybe. -...is the drab, gray,
upper-middle-class suburban reality,
hero, married to Patricia Arquette,
obviously terrorized by the enigma of his wife,
who doesn't respond properly to his advances.
(soft music)
When they have sexual intercourse,
he miserably fails.
(heavy breathing)
What he gets from her is a kind of a patronizing pat
on the shoulder.
(tense music)
It's okay. It's okay.
Total humiliation.
It's okay.
After killing her in an act of frustration,
the hero enters his fantasy space...
(dark music)
...where he, as it were, reinvents not only himself,
but his entire social environs.
Captain, this is some spooky shit we got here.
(ominous music)
In what? In a kind of a universe
which we usually found in film noir.
(guitar music)
This magic moment
So different and so new
Was like any other
The hero's wife, who is a brunette, becomes a blonde.
In reality, she's restrained.
Then it happened
Here, she praises the hero
within the fantasy space all the time,
his sexual capacities and so on and so on.
I could see it by the look in your eyes
So it seems as if the dream is the realization
of what he was looking for.
In reality, the obstacle was inherent.
Their sexual liaison simply didn't function.
Within the fantasy space, the obstacle is externalized.
It's a beautiful day.
(bluesy music)
Mr. Eddy is the master of Patricia Arquette
within the fantasy space.
He is the obstacle to sexual intercourse.
If I ever found out somebody was making out with her...
...I'd take this and I'd shove it
so far up his ass, it would come out his mouth.
The properly uncanny moments are those
when the second shift occurs,
when the fantasy space, the dreamscape,
as it were, is already disintegrating,
but we are not yet back into reality.
(dark music)
This intermediate space,
neither fantasy space nor reality,
this space of a kind of primordial violence,
dispersion, ontological confusion...
(shouting)
(eerie music)
This is the most subversive moment,
the true horror of these films.
Towards the end of this fantasy episode,
when we get the sexual act,
there, the woman also avoids
the hero.
(suspenseful music)
You'll never have me.
Whispering, "You will never have me."
And at that traumatic point, we are thrown back to reality,
when the hero encounters exactly the same deadlock.
(wind blowing)
What the film truly is about, its focal point,
it's not the hero, it's of course the enigma
of feminine desire.
I'm involved in a mystery, I'm in the middle of a mystery
and it's all secret.
-You like mysteries that much? -Yeah.
You're a mystery.
I like you...
very much.
The enigma of feminine subjectivity
in David Lynch's films,
it's a gap between cause and effect.
You do something to a woman,
but you never know what the reaction will be.
(soft music)
Jeffrey, don't, please.
(birds chirping)
My relationship towards tulips is inherently Lynchian.
I think they are disgusting.
Just imagine. Aren't these some kind of,
how do you call it, vagina dentata,
dental vaginas threatening to swallow you?
I think that the flowers are something
inherently disgusting.
I mean, are people aware
what a horrible thing these flowers are?
I mean, basically it's an open invitation
to all the insects and bees, "Come and screw me", you know?
I mean, it's...
I think that flowers should be forbidden to children.
We men, at least in our standard
phallogocentric mode of sexuality,
even when we are doing it with the real woman,
we are effectively doing it with our fantasy.
Woman is reduced to a masturbatory prop.
Woman arouses us in so far as she enters our fantasy frame.
With women, it's different.
The true enjoyment is not in doing it
but in telling about it afterwards.
Of course, women do enjoy sex immediately,
but I hope I'm permitted as a man
to propose a daring hypothesis,
that maybe, while they are doing it,
they already enact or incorporate
this minimal narrative distance,
so that they are already observing themselves
and narrativizing it.
There is in Ingmar Bergman's Persona a wonderful scene
where Bibi Andersson tells
to mute Liv Ullmann,
a story about small orgy on a beach
which took place years ago.
This scene is so erotic precisely because Bergman
successfully resisted the temptation of a flashback.
No flashback. Just words.
Probably one of the most erotic scenes
in the entire history of cinema.
Although sexuality seems to be about bodies,
it's not really about bodies.
It is how bodily activity
is reported in words.
The ultimate sexual seduction resides in words.
I can be whatever you want me to be.
(horn music)
You want me to romance you,
take you to a classy restaurant, no problem.
You want me to, uh,
be your best friend and fuck you,
treat you good, lick your pussy...
No problem.
Ain't much I haven't done.
The only thing I won't do is beat you up.
You're no good, you're no good
The strange tension and, at the same time,
interconnection between reality and fantasy
we can get it at its purest
in the strange case of pornography.
Pornography is, and it is, a deeply conservative genre.
It's not a genre where everything is permitted.
It's a genre based on a fundamental prohibition.
We cross one threshold, you can see everything,
close-ups and so on,
but the price you pay for it is that the narrative
which justifies sexual activity
should not be taken seriously.
The screenwriters for pornography
cannot be so stupid.
You know, these vulgar narratives
of a housewife alone at home,
a plumber comes, fixes the hole,
then the housewife turns to him:
"Sorry, but I have another hole to be fixed,
can you do it," or whatever.
It--it--obviously, there is
some kind of a censorship here.
You have either an emotionally engaging film
but then you should stop
just before showing it all, sexual act,
or you can see it all, but you're not allowed to--
then to be emotionally seriously engaged.
So that's the tragedy of pornography.
It tries to be as realistic as possible
but it has to maintain the minimum
of phantasmatic support.
(soft music)
Well...
I first saw him that morning in the lobby.
He was--he was checking into the hotel
and he was following the bellboy
with his luggage to the elevator.
He...
He glanced at me as he walked past.
Just a glance.
Nothing more.
But I could hardly...
move.
Eyes Wide Shut is a film
which has an incredibly precise lesson about fantasy.
She tells him, not about herself
effectively cheating him,
but about fantasizing about cheating him
with some naval officer they met in a hotel
and so on and so on.
(moody music)
The entire film is his desperate attempt
to catch up with her fantasy, which ends in a failure.
(thumping)
(chanting)
(sinister music)
Many people don't like,
in that mysterious rich people's castle
where they meet for their orgies, the big orgy.
They complain this orgy is aseptic,
totally non-attractive, without erotic tension.
But I think that's the point.
This utter impotence of male fantasizing.
(chanting)
The film is the story of how
the male fantasy cannot catch up
with the feminine fantasy,
of how there is too much of desire
in feminine fantasy
and how this is the threat to male identity.
Where do we find this aspect of it in Vertigo?
Isn't it that in Vertigo, on the contrary,
all the activity is on the side of Scottie?
But I think that precisely because of this,
his activity is extremely brutal, mortifying.
He has totally to erase
the woman as a desiring entity.
That's for him the condition to desire.
"Let's annihilate the woman,
let's mortify her
so that my fantasy alone rules."
The other solution is, of course,
the masochist solution, which is,
"Let me maintain the appearance of the woman, domina,
as the boss.
I accept my inferior role, but secretly I am the master
because I write the very scenario
of my inferiority."
But...
I do love you.
And you know...
there is something very important
that we need to do as soon as possible.
What's that?
Fuck.
It's as if our inner psychic space is too wild
and sometimes we have to make love,
not to get the real thing but to escape from the real,
from the excessive real
that we encounter in our fantasizing.
(water trickling)
But you know what? Also we have, don't forget,
from Wild At Heart, Bobby Peru, the rape.
Say "Fuck me."
-Then I'll leave. -No way. Get out!
Say it! I'll tear your fuckin' heart out, girl!
Say "Fuck me."
Say "Fuck me!"
Then I'll leave.
Say "Fuck me!"
Whisper it.
Say it. Say it.
Say it.
Say "Fuck me."
Whisper it. "Fuck me."
Bobby Peru enters the room where the young girl,
played by Laura Dern, is resting,
and, slowly, he terrorizes her.
"Fuck me, fuck me,
fuck me."
Fuck me.
Someday, honey, I will!
But I gotta get goin'!
Sing.
Don't cry.
Bobby Peru, as it were, changes the register.
All of a sudden he adopts a nice, polite, smiling face
and says, "Oh, thanks for the offer,
but I've got to go now, maybe another day."
Just arousing the fantasy and then rejecting the act
results in utter psychological devastation.
It is a case of a mental rape
which can be worse than physical rape.
(classical music)
The point is the fragile balance
between reality and fantasy dimension
in our sexual activity.
Michael Haneke's Piano Teacher
is the story of an impossible love affair
between a middle-aged, deeply traumatized woman
and her young student.
She's, in a way, a person
who is not yet sexually subjectivized.
She lacks the phantasmatic coordinates of her desire.
This accounts for a couple of very strange scenes
in the film, like when she goes
to a pornographic store and then watches
in a closed, small room a scene from a hardcore film.
(electronic music)
(music stops)
The way she watches it, it's not to get aroused,
but she watches it as a pupil in a school.
She simply watches it to get the coordinates of desiring,
to learn how to do it, how to get excited.
The notion of fantasy in psychoanalysis
is very ambiguous.
On the one hand,
we have the pacifying aspect of fantasy.
Piano Teacher plays with the opposite aspect
of fantasy.
Fantasy as the explosion of wild, unbearable desires.
What we found in the middle of the film
is probably, arguably,
the most depressive sexual act
in the entire history of cinema.
As if to punish her
for disclosing the fantasy in her letter to him,
he literally enacts her fantasy
in the way he makes love to her,
which, of course, means that fantasy is lost for her.
When fantasy disintegrates, you don't get reality,
you get some nightmarish real
too traumatic to be experienced as ordinary reality.
That would be another definition of nightmare.
(heavy breathing)
Hell is here.
Paradise, at least this perverse paradise, is hell.
One cannot here just throw out the dirty water,
all these excessive, perverse fantasies and so on,
and just keep the healthy, clean baby,
normal, straight or even homosexual, whatever,
but some kind of normal, politically correct sex.
You cannot do that.
What if we throw out the baby and keep just the dirty water?
And put it as a problem: how to deal with dirty water.
And put some order in the dirty water of fantasies.
This is, I think, precisely what happens,
for example, in Kieslowski's Blue.
You can organize, people do it, your life
in mourning the lost object.
Julie, in Blue, discovers that her husband
wasn't what she thought he was.
That he was cheating her,
that he had a mistress who is pregnant.
(shattering)
This is the most terrifying loss,
where all the coordinates
of your reality disintegrate.
(beeping)
The problem is how to reconstitute yourself.
(squeaking)
In a wonderful short scene,
the heroine of Blue, after returning home,
finds there on the floor
a group of newly-born mice,
crawling around their mother.
(squeaking)
This scene terrifies her.
She is too excessively exposed to life
in its brutal meaninglessness.
(squeaking)
What she is able to do at the end
is to acquire a proper distance towards reality.
(somber music)
This is what happens in the famous circular shot
where we pass from Julie's face,
while she is making love.
This magical suspension
of temporal and spatial limitations,
this free floating in a fantasy space,
far from distancing us from reality...
...enables us to approach reality.
She is putting together the coordinates
which enable her to experience her reality
as meaningful again.
As if the lesson is,
not only for men but also for women,
that you can sustain sexual intercourse,
sexual relationship,
only through the support of fantasy.
The problem, of course, is, is this fantasy reconstituted?
Is this the ultimate horizon of our experience?
(dark music)
The function of music here is precisely that of a fetish,
of some fascinating presence
whose function it is to conceal the abyss of anxiety.
Music is here what, according to Marx, religion is,
a kind of opium for the people.
Opium which should, as it were, put us asleep,
put us into a kind of a false beatitude,
which allows us to avoid
the abyss of unbearable anxiety.
We see Julie crying, but through a glass.
This glass stands for, I think, fantasy reconstituted.
These are, I'm tempted to say, the tears of happiness.
"I can mourn now because it no longer
immediately affects me."
Blue proposes this mystical communion,
reconstituted fantasy,
as sustaining our relation to the world.
But the price we pay
is that some radically authentic moment
of accepting the anxiety at the very foundation
of human condition is lost there.
If anything, anxiety at the vocal level
is silence.
It's silence.
It's a silent scream.
In Hitchcock's The Birds,
when the mother, of course,
who but the mother, finds the neighbor dead,
his eyes picked out
by the birds,
she shouts, but the shout literally remains
stuck in her throat.
(footsteps nearing)
(gasping)
And to return from cinema
to so-called "real life,"
the ultimate lesson of psychoanalysis
is that exactly the same goes
for our real life experience.
That emotions as such
are deceiving.
There are no specifically fake emotions,
because, as Freud puts it,
literally, "The only emotion
which doesn't deceive is anxiety.
All other emotions are fake."
So, of course, the problem here is,
are we able
to encounter in cinema
the emotion of anxiety,
or is cinema as such fake?
(film reel rolling)
(reel skipping)
(ominous music)
Cinema is the art of appearances.
Tells us something about reality itself.
It tells us something about
how reality constitutes itself.
(dramatic music)
Not that way!
Ripley.
Ripley, come on.
Ripley, we got no time for sightseeing here.
Ripley, don't.
There is an old agnostic theory
that our world was not perfectly created.
That the god who created our world
was an idiot who bungled the clock
so that our world
is a half-finished creation.
There are voids, openings, gaps.
It's not fully real,
fully constituted.
In the wonderful scene
in the last installment of the Alien saga,
Alien Resurrection,
when Ripley, the cloned Ripley,
enters a mysterious room,
she encounters the previous failed version of herself,
of cloning herself.
Just a horrified creature,
a small fetus-like entity,
then more developed forms.
Finally, a creature which almost looks like her,
but her limbs are like that of the monster.
(beeping)
Kill me.
This means that, all the time,
our previous alternate embodiments,
what we might have been, but are not,
that these alternate versions of ourselves
are haunting us.
(beeping)
That's the ontological view
of reality that we get here,
as if it's an unfinished universe.
(flames hissing)
This is, I think, a very modern feeling.
It is through such ontology of unfinished reality
that cinema became a truly modern art.
(haunting music)
All modern films are ultimately films
about the possibility or impossibility
to make a film.
(dramatic music)
This is the sad tale of the township of Dogville.
Dogville was in the Rocky Mountains in the U.S. of A.
Up here, where the road came to its definitive end
near the entrance to the old, abandoned silver mine,
the residents of Dogville were good, honest folks,
and they liked their township.
With Von Trier, it's not only the problem of belief
in the sense of do peoples generally still believe today,
the place of religion today, and so on.
It's also reflectively
or allegorically
the question of believing in cinema itself.
How to make today people
still believe in the magic of cinema.
In Dogville, all of it is staged
on a set--okay, this is often the case in cinema--
but here the set is seen
as the set.
The action takes place in Dogville, a small town,
but there are no houses.
There are just lines on the floor
signaling that this is the house, this is the street.
The mysterious thing is that this does not prevent
our identification.
If anything, it makes us
even more thrown into the tensions
of the inner life.
Have you seen Grace?
She's at my place.
-Is she busy? -Not anymore.
Go right in.
(tense music)
It's not that naive belief is undermined,
deconstructed through irony.
Von Trier wants to be serious with the magic.
Irony is put into service to make us believe.
Yet again, Grace had made a miraculous escape
from her pursuers with the aid of the people of Dogville.
Everyone had covered up for her,
including Chuck, who had to admit
that it was probably Tom's hat
he'd mistakenly considered so suspicious.
The mystery is that, even if we know that it's only staged,
that it's a fiction, it's still fascinates us.
That's the fundamental metric of it.
You witness a certain seductive scene,
then you are shown that it's just fake,
stage machinery behind,
but you are still fascinated by it.
Illusion persists, there is something real
in the illusion, more real than in the reality behind it.
Do not arouse the wrath of the great and powerful Oz!
I said come back tomorrow!
If you were really great and powerful,
you'd keep your promises.
Do you presume to criticize the great Oz?
You ungrateful creatures!
Think yourselves lucky
that I'm giving you audience tomorrow
instead of 20 years from now!
Oh!
The great Oz has spoken.
Oh!
Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.
The great Oz has spoken!
Who are you?
Oh, uh--I am the great and powerful Wizard of Oz.
What we can learn from a film like Wizard of Oz
is how it is not enough--
the logic of demystification is not enough.
It's not enough to say, "Okay,
it's just a big show, spectacle to impress the people.
What is behind is just a modest old guy,
and so on and so on.
It is that, rather in a way,
there is more truth in this appearance.
Appearance has an affectivity, a truth of its own.
What about the heart that you promised Tin Man,
and the courage that you promised Cowardly Lion?
And Scarecrow's brain?
Why, anybody can have a brain.
That's a very mediocre commodity.
Every pusillanimous creature that crawls on the Earth,
or slinks through slimy seas has a brain.
Back where I come from we have universities.
Seats of great learning,
where men go to become great thinkers,
and when they come out, they think deep thoughts,
and with no more brains than you have,
but they have one thing you haven't got: a diploma.
Therefore, by virtue of the authority
vested in me by the Universitartus Committiartum
E Pluribus Unum, I hereby confer upon you
the honorary degree of Th.D.
-Th.D? -Yeah,
that's Doctor of Thinkology.
The sum of the square roots of any two sides
of an isosceles triangle is equal to the square root
of the remaining side.
Oh, joy, rapture.
I've got a brain!
And that's the paradox of cinema.
The paradox of belief.
We don't simply believe or do not believe.
We always believe in a kind of a conditional mode.
I know very well it's fake,
but nonetheless I let myself be emotionally affected.
How do you do?
Mr. Carl Laemmle feels it would be a little unkind
to present this picture without just a word
of friendly warning:
We are about to unfold the story of Frankenstein,
a man of science,
who sought to create a man after his own image
without reckoning upon God.
Somebody tells us,
"You have to experience horror."
We do it.
So, if any of you feel that you do not care
to subject your nerves to such a strain,
now is your chance to, uh...
well, we warned you.
Ladies and gentlemen,
young and old,
this may seem an unusual procedure,
speaking to you before the picture begins,
but we have an unusual subject.
Behind not red-- this is Hollywood--
but black curtain, Cecil DeMille himself appears,
giving us a lesson of how the story of 10 Commandments
and Moses has great relevance today,
where we are fighting communist, totalitarian danger,
and so on, and so on, giving us all the clues.
Are men the property of the state?
Or are they free souls under God?
This same battle
continues throughout the world today.
This hidden master,
who controls the events,
can also be defined
as ideology embodied,
in the sense of the space
which organizes our desires.
And your name?
What the fuck is your name?
(eerie music)
In David Lynch's Lost Highway,
we have the Mystery Man,
who stands for the very cinematographer,
even director.
Imagine somebody who has
direct access to your inner life,
to your innermost fantasies,
to what even you don't want to know
about yourself.
We've met before, haven't we?
(tense music)
I don't think so.
Where was it you think we met?
At your house, don't you remember?
The best way to imagine what Mystery Man is,
is to imagine somebody
who doesn't want anything from us.
What do you mean, you're where right now?
At your house.
That's fucking crazy, man.
(beeping)
Call me.
That's the true horror of this Mystery Man,
not any evil, demonic intentions,
and so on, and so on.
Just the fact that when he is in front of you,
he, as it were, sees through you.
(dial tone ringing)
I told you I was here.
How'd you do that?
Ask me.
How'd you get inside my house?
You invited me.
It is not my custom to go where I'm not wanted.
It's like the court in Kafka's novels,
where the court or the law
only comes when you ask for it.
Ooh!
Now, why would he do that?
(bird shrieking)
Most peculiar. What on Earth?
Hitchcock was obsessed
with this topic of manipulating emotions.
His dream was even, that once in the future,
we would no longer have to shoot narratives.
Our brains will be directly connected
to some machine, and the director
would only have to press different buttons there,
and the appropriate emotions will be awakened
in our mind.
(birds shrieking)
They're coming, they're coming!
(birds cawing)
What have directors like Hitchcock,
Tarkovsky, Kieslowski, Lynch have in common?
A certain autonomy
of cinematic form.
Form is not here simply to express articulate content.
It has a message of its own.
In Hitchcock, we have the motif
of a person hanging from an abyss
by the hand of another person.
The first example: Saboteur.
Rear Window.
Then, we have in To Catch a Thief.
You've got a full house down there.
Begin the performance.
Then, in North by Northwest.
(dramatic music)
Then, of course, in Vertigo.
(screaming)
So, we see here the same visual motif
repeating itself.
(intense music)
I think it's wrong to look for
a common deeper meaning.
Some French theorists
claimed that what we are dealing here,
it is the motif of fall and redemption.
I think this is already saying too much.
I think that what we are dealing with
is with a kind of a cinematic materialism,
that beneath the level of meaning,
spiritual meaning, but also simple narrative meaning,
we get a more elementary level
of forms themselves
communicating with each other,
interacting, reverberating,
echoing, morphing, transforming one into the other,
and it is this background,
this, as it were, background of proto reality.
A real which is more dense, more fundamental,
than the narrative reality.
The story that we observe.
It is this that provides the proper density
of the cinematic experience.
(bird cawing)
It's the gigantic tree, where, in Vertigo,
Madeleine and Scottie get together,
almost embrace, where their erotic tension
becomes unbearable.
What is this tree?
I think it's another in the series
of Hitchcockian big things,
like the Mount Rushmore statues,
or take another example,
like Moby Dick.
This tree is not simply a natural object.
It is, within our mental space,
what in psychoanalysis is called, "The thing."
It's effectively as if this tree,
in its very extra large distortion,
embodies something that comes out of
our inner space.
Libido, the excessive energy
of our mind.
So, here I think
we can see how films and philosophy
are coming together.
How great cinematographers really enable us
to think in visual terms.
(gasoline rushing)
After the birds attack the city,
there is a fire which breaks out
at a gasoline station, where a guy throws a match
on the gasoline.
Hey, you, watch out, don't drop that match!
-Hold on, get out of there! -Get away from the gasoline!
-Mister, run! -Watch out!
The first part of this short scene
is the standard one: We get the standard exchange
of shots of the fire,
and shots of the person, Melanie, in this case,
who looks at it.
(exploding)
Then, something strange happens.
We cut to way above the city.
We see the entire town.
We automatically take this shot
as kind of standard establishing shot,
like, after details which perplex you,
which prevent you from getting clear orientation,
you need a shot which, like,
enables you some kind of a cognitive map,
in that you know what's going on.
But then, precisely following that logic
of the thing from inner space,
which emerges from within you.
First, we hear these ominous sounds,
which are sounds of the birds, then one bird enters,
another bird enters.
The shot which was taken
as a neutral God's-view shot
all of a sudden changes into an evil gaze.
(birds cawing)
The gaze of the very birds attacking.
(shrieking)
And we are thrown into that position,
and again, we can use here the birds
as the final installment,
and read backwards
other classical Hitchcock scenes in the same way.
(eerie music)
Isn't exactly the same thing happening
in what I consider the ultimate scene in Psycho?
The second murder, the murder of the detective
Arbogast.
Hitchcock manipulates here in a very refined way
the logic of so-called "fetishes de survival,"
the logic of, "I know very well, but..."
We know very well some things,
but we don't really believe in them,
so although we know they will happen,
we are no less surprised when they happen.
(ominous music)
In this case, everything points towards the murder,
and nonetheless, when it happens,
the surprise is, if anything, stronger.
It begins in a standard Hitchcockian way.
He looks up the stairs.
This exchange creates the Hitchcockian tension
between the subject's look
and the stairs themselves, or rather the void
on the top of the stairs returning the gaze,
emanating some kind of a weird,
unfathomable threat.
The camera then provides
kind of a geometrically clear God's point-of-view shot,
image of the entire scene.
(horrifying music)
It is as if: Here we pass from God
as neutral creator
to God in His unbearable, divine rage.
(screaming)
This murder is for us
an unfathomable monster.
We don't know who he is,
but because we are forced to assume
the murderer's position,
in a way we don't know who we are,
as if we discover a terrifying dimension
in ourselves, as if we are forced to act as a doll,
as a tool of another evil divinity's will.
(crying)
(dramatic music)
It's not as classical metaphysics thinks.
We are too terrified to accept the fact
that we are mortal beings, we would like to be immortal.
No, the truly horrible thing is to be immortal.
(reverberated clanking)
Immortality's the true nightmare, not death.
Lord Vader.
(labored breathing)
Can you hear me?
(breathing)
We should remember the exact moment
when the normal, everyday person--
okay, not quite everyday, but ordinary person
of Anakin Skywalker
changes into Darth Vader.
This scene when the emperor's doctors
are reconstituting him after heavy wounds
into Darth Vader, that these scenes
are intercut with scenes of Princess Padmé,
Anakin's wife, giving birth.
(crying)
(speaking in robot language)
Luke.
So, it is as if we are witnessing
the transformation of Anakin into father.
(ominous music)
But, what kind of father?
A monster of a father
who doesn't want to be that.
(steam hissing)
(labored breathing)
This deep breathing is the sound
of the father, the Freudian primordial father,
this obscene, over-important father,
the father who doesn't want to die.
This, I think, is, for all of us,
the most...obscene threat
that we witness.
We don't want our fathers alive.
We want them dead.
The ultimate object of anxiety
is a living father.
This brings us to what we should really be attentive about
in David Lynch's film, namely what is
to be taken seriously and not seriously
in his films.
-Hey, we love Ben. -We love Ben.
-Here's to Ben! -Here's to Ben!
Neighbor.
Here's to Ben.
-Here's to Ben. -Be polite!
(rock music)
-Here's to Ben. -Frank is one of these
terrifying, ridiculously obscene
paternal figures.
Apart from Frank in Blue Velvet, we have Baron Harkonnen in Dune,
we have Willem Dafoe in Wild at Heart,
we have Mr. Eddy in Lost Highway.
(shrieking)
Don't you--don't--!
Don't you tailgate!
-Ever! -Tell him you won't tailgate.
Ever!
-I won't ever-- -Do you know how many
fucking car lengths it takes to stop a car
at 35 miles an hour?
Six fucking car lengths!
That's 106 fucking feet, mister!
If I had to stop suddenly, you would've hit me!
I want you to get a fucking driver's manual,
and I want you to study that motherfucker!
I want to spit once on your head,
just some spittle in your face.
(spitting)
What a luxury.
But I think that this very appearance
of ridiculously violent comedy
is deceiving.
I think that these ridiculous paternal figures
are the ethical focus.
The topic of practically all David Lynch's films.
(ominous music)
Let's fuck!
I'll fuck anything that moves!
(laughing maniacally)
(tires skidding)
(engine whirring)
(upbeat rock music)
A normal paternal authority is an ordinary man
who, as it were,
wears phallus as an insignia.
He has something
which provides his symbolic authority.
This is, in psychoanalytic theory,
phallus--you are not phallus,
you possess phallus.
Phallus is, as it were, something attached to you,
like the king's crown is his phallus.
Something you put on,
and this gives you authority,
so that when you talk, it's not simply you as a common person
who is talking, it's symbolic authority itself,
the law, the state talking through you.
So, these excessively ridiculous paternal figures...
...it's not simply that they possess phallus,
that they have phallus as the insignia of their authority.
In a way, they immediately are phallus.
This is for, if they still exist,
a normal male subject.
This is the most terrorizing experience
you can imagine, to directly being
the thing itself, to assume that I am a phallus.
And the provocative greatness
of this Lynchian pater--
obscene paternal figures is that not only--
they don't have any anxiety.
Not only they are not afraid of it,
they fully enjoy being it.
They are truly fearless entities
beyond life and death
gladly assuming, as it were, their immortality,
their non-castrated life energy.
(laughing)
Okay.
This is indicated in a very nice way
in the scene towards the end of Wild at Heart,
where Bobby Peru is killed.
Stop, you sons of bitches!
This is the police!
He accepts the mortal danger he is in
with kind of exuberant vitality,
and it's truly that when his head explodes,
it's as if we see the head of the penis
being torn apart.
(gunshot firing)
Oh, for Christ's sakes.
Oh.
That poor bastard.
And then, at the end, these figures are sacrificed.
(breathing heavily)
(dramatic music)
(gunshot)
Oh, Jeffrey.
It's all over, Jeffrey.
(upbeat music and singing)
Joseph Stalin's favorite cinematic genre
were musicals,
not only Hollywood musicals, but also Soviet musicals.
There was a whole series
of so-called kolkhoz musicals.
Why? We should find this strange.
Stalin, who personifies communist austerity,
terror, and musicals.
The answer, again, is the psychoanalytic notion
of superego.
Superego is not only excessive terror,
unconditional injunction,
demand of others' sacrifice,
but at the same time, obscenity, laughter.
And it is Sergei Eisenstein's genius
to guess at this link.
(lively music)
In his last film,
which is a coded portrait of the Stalin era,
Ivan the Terrible: Part 2, which, because of all this,
was immediately prohibited.
In the scene, unique scene towards the end of the film,
we see the Tsar Ivan
throwing a party, amusing himself
with his so-called Oprichniki,
his private guards, who are used
to torture and kill his enemies,
his, if you want, KGB, secret police,
are seen performing a musical.
(actors singing)
An obscene musical,
which tells precisely the story
about killing the rich boyars,
Ivan's main enemies.
(dramatic music)
So, terror itself is staged as a musical.
Now, what has all this to do
with the reality of political terror?
Isn't this just art, imagination?
No, not only were the political show trials
in Moscow in the mid and late 1930s
theatrical performances, we should not forget this,
they were well staged, rehearsed, and so on.
Even more, there is,
horrible as it may sound, something comical about them.
The horror was so ruthless that the victims,
those who had to confess and demand death penalty
for themselves, and so on,
were deprived of the minimum of their dignity,
so that they behaved as puppets,
they engaged in dialogues, which really sound like
out of Alice in Wonderland.
They behaved as persons from a cartoon.
(peppy music)
(laughing maniacally)
Public enemy number one.
(hissing)
You're on trial today for the crimes
that you've committed.
We're gonna prove you guilty!
Just try and get acquitted.
(hissing)
In the mid-30s,
Walt Disney Studios produced
an unbelievable cartoon
called Pluto's Judgement Day...
-Shut up! -...in which
the dog, well-known Pluto,
falls asleep, and in his sleep,
he's persecuted by--
haunted by the dream
of cats,
who were all in the past his victims,
molested by him, dragging him to the court,
where a proper, truly Stalinist political trial
is in process against him.
We've seen and heard enough.
Jury, do your duty.
Just watch us do our stuff
(sinister music)
We find the defendant guilty
He's guilty, he's guilty
G-U-I-L-T-Y
Guilty, guilty, guilty
(cheering)
The law is not only severe, ruthless, blind.
At the same time, it mocks us.
There is an obscene pleasure
in practicing the law.
(cheering)
(fire crackling)
Our fundamental delusion today
is not to believe in what is only a fiction,
to take fictions too seriously.
It's on the contrary.
Not to take fictions seriously enough.
You think it's just a game.
It's reality.
It's more real than it appears to you.
For example, people who play video games.
They adopt a screen persona
of a sadist, rapist, whatever.
The idea is, in reality, I am a weak person,
so in order to--
to supplement my real-life weakness,
I adopt the false image
of a strong, sexually promiscuous person,
and so on, and so on.
But, so this would be the naive reading.
I want to appear stronger, more active,
because in real life, I am a weak person.
But, what if we read it in the opposite way?
That this strong,
brutal rapist, whatever, identity, is my true self,
in the sense that this is the psychic truth of myself?
And that in real life, because of social constraints,
and so on, I am not able to enact it,
so that precisely because I think it's only a game,
it's only a persona, a self image I adopt
in virtual space, I can be there
much more truthful.
I can enact there an identity
which is much closer to my true self.
(birds chirping)
We need the excuse of a fiction
to stage what we truly are.
(gunshot)
(whimpering)
Stalker is a film about a zone,
a prohibited space,
where there are debris, remainders of aliens
visiting us,
and stalkers are people who specialized in
smuggling foreigners who want to visit
into this space where you get many magical objects.
But, the main among them is the room
in the middle of this space,
where, it is claimed,
your desires will be realized.
The contrast between Solaris and Stalker is clear.
In Solaris, we get id machine as an object
which realizes your nightmares, desires, fears,
even before you ask for it, as it were.
In Stalker, it's the opposite.
A zone where your desires,
deepest wishes, get realized
on condition that you are able
to formulate them, which, of course,
you are never able, which is why everybody fails
once you get there in the center of the zone.
Tarkovsky's solution to this tension
is that of religious obscurantism.
The way out of this deadlock is a gesture of self sacrifice.
His last two films, Nostalgia and Sacrifice,
both end up with some suicidal gesture of the hero.
(unsettling laughing)
(dramatic music)
But I don't think this is what makes Tarkovsky interesting.
What makes him interesting is the very form
of his films.
(atmospheric music)
Tarkovsky uses, as this material element
of pre-narrative density,
time itself.
All of a sudden, we are made to feel
this inertia, drabness of time.
Time is not just a neutral, light medium,
within which things happen.
We feel the density of time itself.
Things that we see are more markers of time.
He treats even humans in this way.
If we look at the unique face of Stalker himself,
it's a face of somebody exposed to too much radiation,
and, as it were, rotting, falling apart alive.
It is this disintegration
of the very material texture of reality
which provides the spiritual depths.
Tarkovsky's subjects, when they pray,
they don't look up, they look down,
they even sometimes, as in Stalker,
put their head directly onto the Earth.
Here, I think, Tarkovsky affects us
at a level which is much deeper,
much more crucial for our experience
than all the standard spiritual motif
of elevating ourselves above material reality, and so on.
There is nothing specific about the zone.
It's purely a place where a certain limit is set.
You set a limit, you put a certain zone
of limit, and although things
remain exactly the way they were,
it's perceived as another place.
Precisely as a place unto which
you can project your beliefs,
your fears, things from your inner space.
(heavy breathing)
In other words, the zone is ultimately
the very whiteness
of the cinematic screen.
(triumphant music)
(indistinct remarks)
Chaplin's City Lights is one of those masterpieces
which are really too sophisticated
for the sophisticated.
It's a deceptively simple movie.
When we are enraptured by it,
we tend to miss its complexity
and extreme finesse.
Already the first scene of the movie
provides the coordinates.
It's kind of a microcosm of Chaplin's entire art.
What's the source of Chaplin's comic genius?
What's the archetypal comic situation
in Chaplin's films?
It's being mistaken for somebody,
or functioning as a disturbing spot.
(horn music)
As this disturbing stain.
He distorts the vision.
(energetic music)
So, he wants to erase himself to get out of the picture.
Or people don't even note him, take note of him,
so he wants to be noted.
Or if they perceive him,
he's misperceived,
identified for what he is not.
(whimsical music)
The tramp is wrongly identified
by a beautiful blind girl who is selling flowers
on a street corner
as a millionaire.
He accepts the game,
helps her, even steals money
to pay for her operation to restore her sight,
then after he serves the punishment
and returns, he tries to find her.
(melancholy music)
And I think that this is the metaphor
of our predicament.
All too often, when we love somebody,
we don't accept him or her
as what the person effectively is.
We accept him or her, insofar as this person
fits the coordinates of our fantasy.
We misidentify, wrongly identify,
him or her, which is why, when we discover
that we were wrong, love can quickly turn into violence.
There is nothing more dangerous,
more lethal for the loved person
than to be loved, as it were,
for not what he or she is,
but for fitting the ideal.
In this case, love is always mortifying love.
(somber music)
Here it's not only the tramp
as the figure within the film's narrative,
exposing himself to his beloved girl.
It's, at the same time, Chaplin,
as actor/director,
exposing himself to us, the public.
"I am shameless, I am offering myself to you,
but at the same time, I am afraid."
The true genius of Chaplin
resides in the way he was able
to stage this psychological moment
of recognition
at the level of form, music,
visual aspect, and at the same time,
at the level of acting.
When the two hands meet,
the girl finally recognizes him
for what he is.
This moment is always extremely dangerous,
pathetic.
The beloved falls out of the frame
of the idealized coordinates.
Finally there exposed
in his psychological nakedness.
"Here I am as what I really am."
And I don't think we have to read it as a happy ending.
We don't know what will happen.
We have the letters, "The End,"
the black screen, but the singing goes on,
as if the emotion is now too strong.
It spills over the very frame.
(somber music)
In order to understand today's world,
we need cinema, literally.
It's only in cinema that we get
that crucial dimension which we are not ready
to confront in our reality.
If you are looking for what is, in reality,
more real than reality itself,
look into the cinematic fiction.
(dark dramatic music)