Many of the approaches described in this module focus on the ways in which media texts position audiences to adopt certain ideological stances and how audiences’ ideologies shape their experiences with texts. However, the meaning of these texts is also shaped by psychological forces associated with subconscious experiences and subjectivity reflected in certain desires and needs evoked by the experience with media texts.

Subjectivity is central to audiences’ experiences with media texts. Emotions function as “ways of seeing” (Solomon, 1976) and are “constitutive of acts of perceptions”(Vetlesen, 1994, p. 168) that actively orient participants’ attention in certain ways. As Vetlessen (1994) notes, “emotions are active in disclosing a situation to us” by illuminating others’ perceptions of a situation:

Emotions make us attentive to the issue of how the other perceives the situation; emotions link our own perceptions of the situation to that of the other involved in it…to “see” suffering as suffering is already to have established an emotional bond between myself and the person I “see” suffering. (p. 166).

These emotions reflect a moral responsiveness to or the need to be concerned about situation or event. Emotions shape perceptions of a situation “as laying a moral obligation on us, or as ‘addressing’ us, and, second, how we are the addressee of such an obligation by virtue of the kind of being we are—human subjects” (Vetlessen, 1994, p. 169).

During the 1970s and 1980s, film theorist were heavily influenced by psychoanalytic theories applied to understanding these subjective experiences with texts, work published in the journal Screen, founded in 1950.

For Lacan, the self is continually attempting to define their identity through three stages of development—need (“the Real”), demand (“the Imaginary”), and desire (“the Symbolic”). In the initial stage of the Real, an infant from birth to 6 months has their needs fulfilled from the mother; there is therefore no experience of loss. Then from 6 to 18th month, the infant experiences sense of demand as it recognizes itself in the mirror as having a sense of a whole body similar to other people, creating the illusion in the Imaginary phase of having a sense of self or “ideal ego,” even though that sense of self is an illusion in the mirror. The child recognizes that there are others in the world and there is such a thing as a “self.” Once the child begins to perceive herself in terms of being the “other” self in the mirror, they project themselves onto the image in the mirror through language, the Symbolic phase. The child can then function as an “I” through their use of language. They then begin to experience a sense of loss or absence because they recognize that they are incomplete. They also define themselves in terms of gender differences. (summary of a longer summary version of Lacan’s theory of development by Mary Klages, University of Colorado)

For Lacan, language assumes an important role in shaping unconscious meanings and desires. Language reflects cultural socialization, for example, around gender differences. The meaning of words such as “woman” reflect cultural experiences and perceptions. For example, the fact that there are separate toilets labeled “ladies” and “gentleman” is a reflection of cultural practices in Western culture in which different genders use different toilets (Green & LeBihan, 1996).

For applications of Lacan to film/media:

Allen, R. (1997). Projecting illusion: Film spectatorship and the impression of reality. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Fuery, P. (2000). New developments in film theory. New York: Palgrave.

Fuery, P. (2003). Madness and Cinema : Psychoanalysis, Spectatorship and Culture. New York: Palgrave.

Gledhill, C., & Williams, L. (2001). Reinventing film studies. London: Arnold.

McGowan, T. & Kunkle, S. (Eds.). (2004). Lacan and contemporary film. New York: The Other Press.

Rocchio, V. (2000). Reel racism: Confronting Hollywood's construction of Afro-American culture. New York: Westview.

Zizek, S. (1992). Looking awry: An introduction to Jacques Lacan through popular culture. New York: October Books.

Zizek, S. (2001). Enjoy your symptom!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and out. New York: Routledge.

Barbara Creed (2000) identifies several psychoanalytic theories that draw on Lacan:

1). Apparatus theory. Apparatus theory refers to the ways in which film creates a sense of spectatorship in which the audience assumes a sense of unity and control. This sense of unity in the audience-screen relationship represents a return to the Imaginary or the mirror stage in which the child perceives herself in terms of a sense of idealized wholeness. In identifying with the film star, a viewer harks back to the initial experience of perceiving oneself in idealized terms. Creed (2000) notes that Christian Metz (1982) posited that this viewing experience was voyeuristic because there is always a distance between the viewer and the screen image. This results in what Metz described as the “imaginary signifier”—the viewer’s recognition that the screen image’s portrayal of what is seemingly whole—as in the Imaginary, is only an illusion, then the viewer recognizes a sense of loss or something lacking. This sense of something lacking is related to male awareness of the mother lacking a penis, a lack which is made up by imaginary other forms of the phallus for females, evident in responses to female phallic symbols of the breast or high heel shoes.

2). The male gaze. Creed notes that feminist theorist reacted negatively to some of the largely male-focused uses of Lacan’s theories. For example, Laura Mulvey’s Screen article, “Visual pleasure and narrative cinema,” published in 1975, launched a focus on the ways in which the “male gaze” was shaped by psychological and cultural forces of male desire.
Mulvey argued that the female image on the screen is largely that of the passive object subject to the “male gaze.” The “male gaze” stance pervades much of the media in which the female image becomes the object of male desire. While the male gaze reflects male desires, it also evokes unconscious anxieties related sexual difference. In many film, the threatening, “strong” woman was often punished at the end, serving the remove this threat for the presumed male audience. In a later article, Mulvey (1981) explored the female audience stance associated with positive identification with the strong, phallic female character, a reversion to Freud’s pre-Oedipal phase of moving between both masculine and feminine perspectives, creating a tension between the two.

The male gaze: examples from different films

Dan Chandler: Notes on The Gaze

3. Fantasy theory and the mobile gaze. Creed notes that Mulvey’s arguments have been criticized by others who posit that female desire can be defined in ways that go beyond Freudian theory and in ways that do not presuppose masculinity as the norm, as well as assuming a less deterministic, static stance (Doane, 1987 Kaplan, 2000; Modleski, 1988).

Terje Skjerhal: Laura Mulvey against the grain: a critical assessment of the psychoanalytic feminist approach to film

For example, viewers may adopt a range of different fantasies of identity, sexuality, and castration/difference, often moving between those fantasies through adopting a mobile, shifting gaze (Cowie, 1984). Other theorists posited that pleasure can be derived from positions of passivity and submission, as well as the portrayal of alternative forms of masculinity other than the traditional controlling male (Silvermann, 1992).

Psychoanalytic perspectives on sexuality also encompasses some queer theory perspectives that focus on the ways in which different forms of desires, including lesbian desires. Queer theory explores the portrayals of alternative portrayals of different forms of sexuality in media texts and films.

Queertheory

Popcultures: Queer theory

Queer theory and film analysis

For application of Queer Theory to media/film:

Bad object-choices. (Ed.). (1991). How do I look? Queer film and video. Seattle: Bay Press.

Barrios, R. (2001). Screened out: Playing gay in Hollywood from Edison to Stonewall. New York: Routledge.

Benshoff, H., & Griffin, S. (2004). Queer cinema: the film reader. New York: Routledge.

Bornstein, K. (1994). Gender outlaw: Of men, women, and the rest of us. New York: Routledge.

Campbell, J. (2000). Arguing with the phallus: Feminist, queer and postcolonial theory: A psychoanalytic contribution. New York: Zed Books.

Creekmur, C., & Doty, A. (Eds.). (1995). Out in culture: Gay, lesbian, and queer essays on popular culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Doty, A. (1993). Making things perfectly queer: Interpreting mass culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Dyer, R. (2002). Now you see it: Studies on lesbian and gay film. New York: Routledge.

Hanson, E. (Ed.). (1999). Out takes: Essays on queer theory and film. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Jagose, A. (1996). Queer theory: An introduction. New York: New York University Press.

Mayne, J. (2000). Framed: Lesbians, feminists, and media culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Tasker, Y. (1993). Spectacular bodies: Genre, genre, and the action film. New York: Routledge.

Wilton, T. (1995). Immortal invisible: Lesbians and the moving image. New York: Routledge.

For texts on issues of gender and sexuality in films:

Benshoff, H. M., & Griffin, S. (2003). America on film: Representing race, class, gender. New York: Blackwell.

hooks, b. (1996). Reel to real: Race, sex, and class at the movies. New York: Routledge

Hirabyashi, L. R. (Ed.) (2003). Reversing the lens: Ethnicity, race, gender and sexuality through film. Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado.

Don Callen applies Lacan’s theories to an analysis of Citizen Kane:

On a common aesthetic analysis of the place of rosebud in the film, Citizen Kane, the sled functions like a literary "symbol," an icon of unfulfilled promise, perhaps. Its essence is a matter of aesthetic "representation," more or less subjective impression. But in the Lacanian world, the figurative "power" of rosebud represents little Charles's teleological shaping of life, a meaningful integration of speech, action and world, which is actually focused in this childish limb. This condensation of childish mastery is sustained, however, only within the delicate (non-literary) symbolic/intersubjective balance that is broken when Charles Foster Kane is taken away to be made fit for his inheritance. In Lacanian terms, his desire is subjected to the mechanisms of the symbolic order, the big Other. By the same token, Kane's adult life is filled with projects, “objects,"” which exude a very public impotence, for all the symbolic recognition that has been conferred upon him/them by others--perhaps the fundamental paradox of the film. So instead of reading the film in terms of an aesthetic overlay, something added as the expressive view of an artist, or aesthetically sensitive viewers, Lacanian theory has us see the world of our desires as filled with such foci of teleological “necessity,” possibility, promise, and failure--in other words, the content of our specific freedom.

In his film course, Callen explores some of the following themes in various films:

1. The symbolic stage of desire, the big Other, signifiers and signification (The End of the Affair)

2. The imaginary: primary and secondary narcissism, metaphor and metonymy (The Little Thief)

3. The real, meaning and radical contingency (Dead Man)

4. The death drive, time and the eternal, missed encounters the two deaths (Magnolia) or perhaps (Bringing Out the Dead)

5. The modern (paranoid) subject, the tragic dilemma of meaning and being, Is it ever other than foolish to think "I'm the one?" (Matrix)

6. Neurosis, psychosis, perversion (The Talented Mr. Ripley)

7. Family values (American Beauty)

8. Dream and Fantasy (Being John Malkovich), (Fight Club)

9. Jouissance vs. the pleasure principle (Eyes Wide Shut)

Mike Pinsky argues that a central theme in Lacan is the search for the phallus as the object of desire.

In Lacan, the phallus is desexualized. It might be a penis, but it might also be any number of other "objects" that act as signifiers around which we project our Desire. Ironically, the phallus itself, whatever it is, has no intrinsic value. It is in itself worthless. It only gathers significance in reference to the desires projected upon it. But since it is not really what we desire (it is only a representation; the real desire is psychological), we remain unfulfilled and continue our pursuit until we die.

For instance, in The Maltese Falcon, when Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) and company finally gather around the table to uncover the allegedly valuable Maltese Falcon that they have all been scrambling after, they strip away the surface to discover that it is a fake, devoid of actual value. Gutman (Sidney Greenstreet) is disappointed, but we get the impression that the real thrill for him is in the chase. In fact, Spade has been pursuing the Falcon the entire film not because it is worth money, but because it signifies the solution to his partner's murder, the closure of "justice." In this sense, he is the only one who receives fulfillment from winning the phallus, although this justice ironically thwarts his other desire: he has to turn in the woman he loves. This doubling of Desire (sex v. justice) is fairly common in "hard-boiled" detective stories and shows that Desire itself, in the Lacanian sense, does not have to be merely sexual.

Drawing on psychoanalytic theories, Norman Holland (1998) argues that readers and audiences apply certain “identity themes” to their responses that reflect a dialectic of sameness and difference by noting patterns in their own and in character’s practices that represent sameness. At the same time, they also note deviations from that pattern that represent difference. He cites the example of a student, Sebastian, whose identity theme was one of wanting to please those in power. In responding to a quote about the character of Colonel Saratoris in William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily”: “’who he who fathered the edict that no Negro woman should appear on the streets without an apron,’” Sebastian focused on the Colonel as a power figure with whom he identities: “’I react to the term `fathered' the edict . . . Fathering the edict seems to in some way be fathering the women, to be fathering that state of affairs. So it implied for me the sexual - well [he laughed] - intercourse that took place between whites and Negroes’” (p. 13). All of this suggests for Holland that identity is “a relationship: the potential, transitional, in between space in which I perceive someone as a theme and variations” (p. 15).
Holland’s notion of “identity theme” suggests that readers’ and audiences’ identities stem from psychological needs for power and support. These needs are manifested in the ways in which readers and audiences respond in a consistent manner—the element of sameness, a consistency that reflects the reiteration of a certain “identity theme.” For example, a reader who is consistently adopts a deferential stances given her concern with offending others, may respond negatively to characters whom she perceives as overly assertive or controlling.

Norman Holland: responses to films:
Shakespeare in Love

The Seventh Seal

8 1/2

Vertigo

In applying these theories to the classroom, students could discuss central role of desire and fantasy in shaping their responses. For example, they could examine the ways in which audiences’ desire for change in themselves or in society may shape their responses to media texts. People who desire a more equitable society may respond positively to documentaries portraying the problems of an inequitable society.

Marshall Alcorn (2002) argues not all of these desires for change are of equal moral worth. He notes that in debates over tax cuts and government spending, a citizen could argue that their desire for a tax cut associated with purchasing a new luxury vehicle to “support the economy” does not carry the same moral weight as the desire to support food or shelter programs for the poor.

For Alcorn, desire creates a dialectical conflict related to a demand for a better symbolic representation of the world and one’s identity. This dialectical conflict standards in opposition to a fixated resistance to dialectical exploration associated with what Lacan describes as the “master discourse”—the need for an authority figure in the form of political or religious leader or authority figure who provide people with a sense of certainty. One of the subjective appeals of a “master discourse” is that it provides a ready-made alignment to a community of similarly devoted members. People then define their identities as loyal followers of the leader or authority figure who fulfills their desires for an identity constituted by a set of non-dialectical, fixated beliefs. For example, the evangelical “Left-Behind” novel series that portrays the plight of those who have not made it to heaven and are fighting the forces of the anti-Christ provides readers with an appealing absolutist cultural model of good versus evil. In these novels, those who are “left behind” to fend for themselves are continually on guard against the omniscient threat of evil temptations. These novels provide readers who subscribe to evangelical religious “master discourse” with a reaffirmation of the value of being a certain kind of person constituted by being a devote follower of this discourse as a means of combating the continual potential threat of evil forces in their lives (Gutjahr, 2002).

Creed (2000) notes that some of these psychoanalytic perspectives fail to account for the influence of historical and cultural forces on the viewer, as well as well as lacking any empirical basis for their claims based on the responses of actual viewers’ responses to media texts.

Gilles Deleuze

Another important theorist related to subjective aspects of media and film is Gilles Deleuze (1989), a French philosopher. Deleuze was interested in how audiences assigned certain subjective meaning to certain perspectives operating in moving images. He identified three types of movement: the perception-image, the action-image, and the affection-image.

Gilles Deleuze’s theories

Daniel Frampton (1991) describes each of these types of movements.

The perception-image

The perception-image is the perception of perception. In the cinema, if we are shown a person going into a room and looking around, and then a cut to a long-shot of the room as it would be from the position of the person, then this is the perception of perception, or the perception-image. It might seem that this is just another term for the familiar point-of-view shot, but Deleuze defines two types of perception-image: the subjectively justified 'point-of-view' shot as described above (direct discourse); and the anonymous viewpoint, where the camera seems to act like a disembodied eye, not quite objective, but semi-subjective (indirect discourse), yet which could always turn out to be truly subjective (e.g., in the horror film, the floating camera in the bushes at the back of the house suddenly spewing a hand that tries the back door)….What Deleuze is getting at here is the idea that there is a cinematic vision of content: in being able to see a viewpoint (subjective), and then the character and his world from a different point of view, the transition effects a transformation in the viewpoint of the character. This can be most prominent when the subjective image picks out something very specific that was not so obvious in the character/world shot.

The action-image

The action-image defines a structure (and is thus more like traditional theories of film) rather than any one particular image, and is the familiar place of 'determinate, geographical, historical and social space-times' (MI:141), of realism, behaviour, and actual milieux whose forces act on a character making him act to 'modify the milieu, or his relation with the milieu, with the situation, [or] with other characters' (MI:141), and so to attain a new situation. This is Deleuze's 'large form' of the action image: SAS', from situation to new situation via an action; and its variables, SAS: reactionary action an

The affection-image

Deleuze's classification of the affection-image relates to the close-up image, whether of a face crying or angry, or a clock, or indeed any object which is thus immediately 'faceified . . . there is no close-up *of* the face, the face is in itself close-up, the close-up is by itself face and both are affect, affection-image' (MI:88). What Deleuze means by this is that all close-ups give the image as much importance as if it were of a face -- for example, the cut to a clockface *or* a human face will have the same degree of (micro-political) significance if preceded by a large crowd scene -- they both hold not one thought (meaning) but many, by gathering and expressing the effect 'as a complex unity' (MI:103).

These three types of images represent the importance of how images unfold in time as shaping one’s subjective experience of those images. In focusing on the perception-image, an audience considers how different perceptions are operating in a scene—who’s perceiving whom and how is the audience positioned in this network of perceptions to create certain subjective stances. In focusing on the action image, audiences are examining how a series of images is shaped by changes in situations or contexts, changes that create certain subjective reactions. And in focusing on the affection-image, audiences are focusing on how images shown prior to a close up influence the subjective meaning of that close-up.

Gilles Deleuze links:
Gilles Deleuze
Deleuze and Guattari on the web
Deleuze and Guattari internet resources
Theorists and Critics

For further reading on Deleuze and film

Pisters, P. (2003). The matrix of visual culture: Working with Deleuze in film theory. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

References: Psychoanalytic theory

Alcorn, M. W. (2002). Changing the subject in English class: Discourse and the constructions of desire. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.

Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge.

Cowie, E. (1984). Fantasia. m/f, 9, 71-105.

Creed, B. (2000). Film and psychoanalysis. In J. Hill & P. C. Gibson (Eds.), Film studies: Critical approaches (pp. 75-88). New York: Oxford University Press.

Deleuze, G. (1989). Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Doane, M. A. (1987). The desire to desire: The woman’s film of the 1940s. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Green, K., & LeBihan, J. (1996). Critical theory & practice: A coursebook. New York: Routledge.

Gutjahr, P. C. (2002). No longer left behind: Amazon.com, reader-response, and the changing fortunes of the Christian novel in America. Book History, 5, 209-236.

Holland, N. (1998). Reading and identity. [Online]:
http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/nnh/rdgident.htm

Kaplan, A. (Ed.). (1990). Psychoanalysis and the cinema. New York: Routledge.

Labeua, V. (1994). Lost angels: Psychoanalysis and cinema. New York: Routledge.

Lacan, J. (1977). The four fundamental concepts of psycho-analysis. London: Hogarth Press.

Metz, C. (1982). Psychoanalysis and cinema: The imaginary signifier. New York: Macmillan.

Modleski, T. (1988). The women who knew too much: Hitchcock and feminist theory. New York: Methuen.

Soloman, R. (1976). The passions: The myth and nature of human emotions. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.

Vetlesen, A. J. (1994). Perception, empathy, and judgment: An inquiry into the preconditions of moral performance. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Silverman, K. (1992). Male subjectivity at the margins. New York: Routledge.

Module 4: Word document

Applying Critical Perspectives to an Ad

Rhetorical/Audience Analysis

Semiotic Theory

Poststructuralist/ DeconstructivistTheory: Interrogating Language Codes/Categories

Critical Discourse Analysis

Psychoanalytic Theories

Feminist Criticism

Postmodern Theory

Postcolonial Theory

Final Task

References