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During my analysis I went to see films much more often than any time in my life before or since. At the time I thought of it as mostly escapism and perhaps some sort of decompression chamber in the transition from my analytic session to the Symbolic Order I had to “return” to. At the time I had read nothing of Lacan, so I wasn't thinking in those terms or concepts. My thought now is that I sought, often desperately sought, the film experience to find respite from an encounter with the Real in the analytic hour, or, as Todd McGowan and Sheila Kunkle in Lacan and Contemporary Film (2004) put it, “we must take stock of the relation between the subject to the Real…by analyzing how the subject is faring as it moves closer into the coordinates of the Real through the confrontation… of its most dreaded fears” (p. xxviii). But a useful analytic theory of film, be it Lacan or otherwise, must have greater ambitions that take it beyond this point.
My primary aim in this essay is to question whether Lacanian concepts, central to the “second wave” of Lacanian film theory, have a useful application to the understanding of what happens to a spectator while experiencing a film, in other words, film theory. To assist in this effort I will draw primarily on the ideas of several authors compiled in the book Lacan and Contemporary Film (2004) edited by Todd McGowan and Sheila Kunkle. My purpose is to present the gist of the ideas of the editors and the nine contributing essayists and to discuss the relevance of Lacanian theory.
In the political uprisings in the 1960s in the United States and Western Europe, film theory became dominated by the idea that film is a perpetuation of ideology. It was the deconstruction of such ideologies that utilized psychoanalytic concepts. Paula Murphy (2005) wrote that prior to this era “classic” film theory was dominated by the debate between cinema's objective portrayal of reality and the manipulation of reality. These classic theori