You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This essay argues that Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s 1997 film Cure, among other things, dramatizes the Lacanian non-relation through its anatomizing of domestic misogyny. Using the recent English publication of Jacques Lacan’s Seminar XVIII: On a Discourse that Might not Be a Semblance, the essay uses Lacan’s structural framework of language to elucidate the triangulation among Kurosawa’s character’s, Fumie Takabe, detective Kenichi Takabe, and Kunio Mamiya. Cure’s conceptualization of gendered subject positions and how these positions call upon subjects to perform in certain ways helps anatomize the complex, counterintuitive Lacanian intervention regarding sex and gender. Despite Fumie’s relatively small amount of screen time in the film, she opens the film recounting the 17th-century French folktale “Bluebeard.” The story of “Bluebeard” positions Cure as one in a series of allegories of feminine oppression and imperilment. Fumie suffers from schizophrenia, with short-term memory loss that aligns her with the amnesiac Mamiya. Detective Takabe, by contrast, attempts to enforce order on the disordered recall of both Fumie and Mamiya and the disorder of the film itself. This essay shows how this imposition of order is a mandate of hegemonic masculinity, and how the Lacanian view of language suggests such an imposition is futile. Both Lacan’s work and Kurosawa’s work demonstrate how the regime of sense is part and parcel of domestic misogyny and oppression.