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In his 2007 book The Real Gaze: Film Theory after Lacan, Todd McGowan devotes a chapter to the cinematography of the American director Stanley Kubrick . As the title of his book suggests, the author focuses on French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan's concept of the gaze or the blind spot in the visual field that marks the subjective implication of the spectator in the act of seeing (Lacan, 1963-64/1994). For McGowan the central quality of Kubrick's films is that they respond to the way spectators, in their everyday perception of social reality, tend unconsciously to blind themselves to the obscene underside that marks the functioning of symbolic authority. According to the author: “We obey symbolic authorities because we don't see this underside, because they seem to be acting in the interest of the public good rather than for their own private enjoyment” (2007, p. 45). This recalls the neurotic split in the perception of authority—originally described by Freud in Totem and Taboo (1913 [1912-13])—between the instance of the idealized (dead) father as “guarantor of the ‘neutral’ stature of the Symbolic Law” and his complement, the obscene father who is the “master of enjoyment” (Žižek, 1992/2008, pp. 178-179). As McGowan points out, Kubrick's oeuvre explicitly marks the obscene dimension of authority by staging its legal representatives as excessively enjoying their position: “Whenever a character takes up a position of authority in one of Kubrick's films, he … inevitably finds an obscene enjoyment in this role” (2007, p. 47).
McGowan distinguishes two cinematic techniques used by Kubrick to highlight this surplus of enjoyment: his deployment of scenery and the performances he elicits from his actors. The first concerns the ‘settings’ in which the cinematographic action