In 1995 the world celebrated the hundredth anniversary of the birth of cinema. The practice of theorizing about movies is only slightly less ancient: the psychoanalytic study of film began at least as early as 1916, with the publication of Hugo Münsterberg's The Film: A Psychological Study. In the academy, however, the dominant strains of psychoanalytically informed film theory are barely twenty years old. Professors still assign canonical essays by Laura Mulvey, Christian Metz, Jean-Louis Baudry, Brian Henderson, Colin MacCabe, Peter Wollen, Stephen Heath, Richard Dyer, and Charles Eckert, all of them dating to the mid-1970s. Writing about recent trends in so young an arena may strike some as inseparable from writing about fads.
Indeed, psychoanalytic film study in the 1990s takes place under the shadow of a profound skepticism expressed most explicitly in two books from the late 1980s, Noël Carroll's Mystifying Movies: Fads and Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory (1988) and David Bordwell's Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema (1989). The writers took different paths to their complementary conclusions: Carroll, who holds doctorates in both philosophy and cinema, was once a strong advocate of the value of psychoanalysis for film studies but has since rewritten his earlier essays to eliminate all psychoanalytic methodologies; Bordwell, for many years the capo di tutti capi among cinema scholars, seems to have read every book and article in film studies since the 1960s while developing an approach he calls “historical poetics.” Ultimately, both Carroll and Bordwell urge film scholars to abandon, or at least to rethink radically, the dominant strains of psychoanalytically inflected film study, dubbed “SLAB Theory” (as in Saussure, Lacan, Althusser, Barthes) by Bordwell. For Carroll, the central metaphors of film theory can be refuted by appeals to simple empirical logic: the idea that “films are dreams” fails to account for the chatting, changing of seats, and visits to the concession stand that are an inevitable part of audience activity in movie theaters. For Bordwell, psychoanalysis is one of several inefficient machines for manufacturing dubious meanings in films primarily for the sake of professional advancement for university professors.
The books of Carroll and Bordwell by no means marked the end or the beginning of debates about psychoanalytic film theory, but they did help center a number of issues that previously had dwelt at the margins of film study. The Chronicle of Higher Education subsequently contributed to the popularization and polarization of these debates by interviewing feminist theorist Tania Modleski for a response to Bordwell's arguments. At least in the prose of the Chronicle's article, the debate about psychoanalytic theory in film study was part of a political struggle, pitting feminists against male formalists, and advocates of “SLAB Theory” against the small group of historians that Bordwell praised in the conclusion to his book. The debate became even more intense in 1992, when Lloyd Michaels, editor of the journal Film Criticism, devoted an entire issue to Making Meaning, inviting several film scholars to take issue with Bordwell's critique.
Perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, the debates over the application of psychoanalysis to film study have taken place at a moment when a number of scholars have moved away from film theory toward more historical and/or text-oriented work. In the most dramatic defection from the community of psychoanalytic film study, Ben Brewster, a translator of Christian Metz and Louis Althusser and an early member of the Screen collective, has embraced early cinema research over theory. Constance Penley, one of the founders of the feminist/psychoanalytic film journal Camera Obscura and an assiduous student of psychoanalysis's heuristic potential for both avant-garde and mainstream film, has recently written on the phenomenon of underground writing by devotees of Star Trek. Finally, John Champagne, one of the most brilliant of the new generation of “queer theorists” within cinema studies, has endorsed the discourse theory of Michel Foucault as a more useful alternative to the historically specific episteme of psychoanalysis. It may be no coincidence that these transformations within the academy took place at roughly the same time that The New York Review of Books, a journal on the cusp of academia, was publishing Frederick Crews's hyperbolic attacks on Freud and the entire Freudian project.
But psychoanalytic film study in the university has not died. Many recent works use Freudian and post-Freudian methods to close-read individual films, to explore changes in a culture's zeitgeist, to map the inner world of a director, and even to psychoanalyze film scholars. That these works do not always openly proclaim themselves to be psychoanalytic may be attributed, on the one hand, to the reluctance of critics to take sides within the current politics of the discipline; on the other hand, it is just as likely that psychoanalysis has become so conventionalized and familiar that critics need not engage in polemics when psychoanalysis plays some role in their pluralistic methodology. For example, in the opening section of Flashbacks in Film: Memory and History (1989), Maureen Turim sketches in the various approaches to understanding flashback narration—formalism, structuralism, semiotics, theories of ideology, philosophies of memory and consciousness, as well as psychoanalysis. She then proposes to leave behind the exposition of her theoretical apparatus in order to apply it to flashbacks, even if the various methods might seem to be in conflict: “one theory,” she writes, “will come to the foreground temporarily, while another recedes. This ebb and flow of points is in part a response to the historical shifts that the flashback undergoes, but it is also a product of my desire not to fix on a single theoretical vantage point that ignores others. Rather than seek to hold on to all perspectives simultaneously throughout this analysis, an impossible and immobilizing task, it is better, I believe, to allow the vantages to shift and comment on one another self-consciously” (p. 20). It would be unfair and incomplete to regard Timm's work on flashbacks as simply an example of “psychoanalytic film study,” just as it would be inaccurate to say that she has moved beyond or in some way abandoned psychoanalysis.
Whether or not the current acknowledged, unacknowledged, and partially acknowledged modes of appropriating psychoanalysis are felicitous is another issue entirely. In spite of what has been implied in some recent polemics, psychoanalysis is not monolithic: Freud's theories were being radically revised and rethought long before his ideas entered the armamentarium of the film critic. Although some strains of psychoanalysis may have led film theorists into dead ends, they have also been responsible for inspiring theorists to develop alternative paradigms. This is surely the case with Mulvey's extraordinarily influential article, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”
Krin Gabbard is associate professor of Comparative Literature at SUNY Stony Brook. With Glen O. Gabbard, he is coauthor of Psychiatry and the Cinema. His most recent book is Jammin' at the Margins: Jazz and the American Cinema, forthcoming from University of Chicago Press.
(1975). Mulvey relied on Freudian and Lacanian models to characterize the gaze of the camera as patriarchal, scopophilic, and sadistic. She supported her arguments by examining the fetishization and punishment of women in films directed by Josef von Sternberg and Alfred Hitchcock.
Although Mulvey's argument held sway for several years, it eventually provoked a number of responses, including some of the most important books in the field of psychoanalytic film study. Gaylyn Studlar's In the Realm of Pleasure: Von Sternberg, Dietrich and the Masochistic Aesthetic (1988) found that the films of Sternberg invite a masochistic rather than a sadistic order of spectatorship. Mulvey's reading of Hitchcock's Vertigo in terms of the sadism and voyeurism of Scottie (played by James Stewart) was extensively rebutted in a 1988 book on Hitchcock by Modleski, who found striking parallels between the mad Carlotta, wandering the streets looking for her dead child, and the deranged Scottie, wandering the streets looking for his dead Madeleine. Mulvey's implication that spectators are strictly gendered as they watch mainstream films has been called into question by Carol Clover (1992), who found that slasher films from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to Halloween 4 invariably invite an audience made up primarily of adolescent boys to identify with “the final girl” as she does battle with a male killer. Steven Cohan and Peter Lehman have problematized Mulvey's notion that the object of the cinematic gaze is female by analyzing films in which the bodies of male stars such as William Holden, Fred Astaire, and Richard Gere are held up for display and fetishization. Linda Williams's Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible” (1989) and D.N. Rodowick's The Difficulty of Difference (1991) should also be mentioned here as sophisticated responses to what was once the mainstream of psychoanalytic film theory represented by Mulvey.
Perhaps the most striking developments in film theory in the 1990s have been in the area of “gender studies,” a term that was first developed to expand the field of women's studies and has since grown to encompass gay and lesbian or “queer” theory as well as much of what is now called “men's studies.” One of the more fortuitous projects of gender studies has been the intense scrutiny of the notion that masculinity is monolithic and clearly defined in popular media. As Frank Krutnik has argued, even in the hard-boiled genres associated with film noir the masculinity of actors is regularly undermined, even actors such as Robert Mitchum, Humphrey Bogart, and Kirk Douglas, whose maleness is seldom if ever questioned. Dennis Bingham has found elements of bisexuality lurking beneath the carefully sanitized public image of James Stewart. Thomas DiPiero has even gone so far as to suggest that any display of masculinity is essentially hysterical. Many of these theorists have relied on works such as Judith Butler's Gender Trouble (1990) to argue that masculinity, like femininity, is essentially a masquerade and that no one is essentially male or female. As she suggests in the title of her book, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (1992), Kaja Silverman has looked to the boundaries of what is normally considered male—e.g., the work of the gay German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder—to rethink concepts of spectatorship and the masquerade.
One of the strengths of Silverman's work is her attention to issues of race and class, both of them neglected in much psychoanalytic theory, including recent gender-based revisions of Freudian and Lacanian paradigms. E. Ann Kaplan has also undertaken the project of applying psychoanalysis to films, such as Imitation of Life and Home of the Brave, in which issues of race are central. Nevertheless, the common complaint that psychoanalysis is inevitably ahistorical and blind to race and class has led many film scholars to use psychoanalytic methodologies with suspicion if at all. In particular, the work of Lacan has become less important than it was in the 1970s and early 1980s. Still, one of the most widely quoted theorists among cinema scholars today is Slavoj Žižek, who has rediscovered and perhaps even resuscitated Lacan for the discipline.
Paradoxically, Žižek is much more interested in the critique of self-consciousness since the Enlightenment, as practiced in the works of Kant, Hegel, Derrida, and other Western philosophers. Žižek sees Lacan's writings as an appealing response to and continuation of this tradition. Unlike many who have wrestled with the notoriously imprecise and shifting vocabularies of Lacan, Žižek has embraced the French analyst's system for its suppleness and playfulness. Although Žižek, who is originally from Yugoslavia, claims that he arrived at Lacan through the writings of the Marxist theoretician Louis Althusser, many of Žižek's writings seem apolitical. Furthermore, his references to cinema tend to be mere illustrations for theories of subjectivity and consciousness that ultimately take the reader back to discourses on Hegel. Žižek has explicitly acknowledged that he uses references to films and popular culture only in order to make his ideas accessible to his readers, as well as to himself (1994). But for many who practice film theory, Žižek's readings of films as diverse as Blade Runner, Psycho, and Short Cuts have been especially rewarding.
This survey of recent writing in psychoanalytic film criticism has been sketchy at best, and its narrative strategy has unfortunately elided much important work. Psychoanalytic film study in the academy has certainly not run its course, and many possibilities remain unexplored. One possible avenue of development is an interest in psychoanalytic theorists other than Freud and Lacan. Few if any film theorists to date have searched for new methodologies in the work of, say, D.W. Winnicott or Heinz Kohut. In years to come, university professors may be broadening the purview of psychoanalytic film theory, or, as the sudden prominence of Žižek suggests, they may be returning to paradigms that previously had drifted out of fashion.
References are available on request from Krin Gabbard, Dept. of Comparative Literature, SUNY, Stony Brook, NY 11794–3355.