This week, we examined  the Buffy episode, "Hush," an episode that, as I argued, exemplifies certain Lacanian elements that we read about in Slavoj Žižek and the Jacques Lacan modules in the Guide to Theory: specifically, the relation of language to desire; the opposition between desire and sexuality; an exemplification of how the superego's command, according to Lacan, is "Enjoy!"; and the dual nature of the superego, which tends to be split between benevolent patriarchy (the rules we need to live together, or the Name-of-the-Father) and a perverse superego (what Lacan terms the Father-of-Enjoyment or père-version).

LACAN AND POSTMODERNISM

I backed into the "Hush" episode by first clarifying certain concepts in Lacan and Zizek. I first reiterated how Lacan can be seen as the postmodern break with Freud, a fact that I mention at the beginning of the first Lacan module. Indeed, Lacan has been a major influence on a number of theorists of postmodern culture, many of which we will be reading later in the semester: Julia Kristeva, Laura Mulvey, Kaja Silverman, Judith Butler, Fredric Jameson, Jean Baudrillard, and Louis Althusser. Of particular importance for postmodernists is the distinction Lacan makes between reality and the Real. "Reality" is the world that we think we experience around us, a world that, according to Lacan, is in fact continually being reorganized and rewritten by our perceptions and mental processes. The Real, by contrast, is that materiality of existence from which we were severed because of our entrance into language. "Reality" is analogous to what the Wachowski brothers in their film call "the matrix": "It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth." When Morpheus welcomes Neo to the "desert of the real," he is making reference to the Lacanian concept of the Real (filtered through the postmodern theories of Jean Baudrillard, which the Wachowski brothers gave to his main actors to read in preparation for the film).

ENJOY!

OBJET PETIT A AND THE NARCISSISTIC PROJECTION OF DESIRE

On Monday and Wednesday, I illustrated how each of the sections of the Zizek reading ties in with a specific example in pop culture, most of them from the scenes we've already watched in class.  I started by clarifying how desire, for Lacan, is all about one's narcissistic projection of desire onto one's love object (what Lacan terms the "object-cause of desire" or the "objet petit a"). An example that perfectly illustrates this state of things, is a sequence I showed from the Buffy episode "Him." In that show, a leather jacket with a big 'S' on it has the power to attract women. As the show illustrates, the person wearing the jacket is not in and of himself particularly interesting (as a visit to the former owner, a now overweight and listless pizza-delivery man, illustrates). Once the new wearer of the jacket arrives at the Buffy household and all four women (Buffy, Dawn, Willow and Anya) fall under the jacket's spell, we find in the next sequence that the women are not at all interested in the boy's actual physical reality. Indeed, as Willow states, "this isn't about his physical presence, it's about his heart." As Anya exclaims to the lesbian Willow, "his physical presence has a penis!" Willow responds by stating that she "can work around that" and argues that her love is the most worthy of the four because "I'm willing to look past the whole orientation thing." The following sequence, with each woman trying to prove her love through various outrageous scenarios, illustrates that desire is here articulated as a competition among the women and has little to do with the actual object of desire. This is a situation that is usually reversed in traditional Hollywood fare, with two men more commonly competing for the affections of a woman, who is thus made the passive object of desire (and the passive object of the male gaze). In such Hollywood narratives, the interest of the story lies not in any physical aspect of the object of desire (who resembles a blank screen, more than anything) but in the interaction between the men.

FANTASY VS. THE REAL

We then turned to Žižek's example for the disjunction between fantasy and the Real, i.e. the feeling we get when sitting in a car that the inside is much larger than it appears from the outside, as well as the sense of a disconnect with outside reality: "when we are safely inside the car, behind the closed windows, the external objects are, so to speak, transposed into another mode. They appear to be fundamentally 'unreal,' as if their reality has been suspended, put in parenthesis—in short, they appear as a kind of cinematic reality projected onto the screen of the windowpane" (Looking Awry 15). The Xander Harris dream sequence in "Restless," as someone pointed out (sorry, can’t remember who), provides us with a perfect exemplification of this understanding of fantasy: the disjunction from the outside is underlined through the obvious use of rear-screen projection and the inside of the vehicle is clearly associated with Xander's fantasies of desire (in this case, a scopophillic one); once he moves towards the fantasy object, the inside of the van appears infinitely large, which illustrates how fantasy space does not correspond to the Real.

THE SYMBOLIC COBWEB

Recalling the scene from "Normal Again," in which the possibility is raised that the entire Buffy universe is in fact the psychotic fantasy of a girl in a semi-comotose schizophrenic state in an L.A. mental institution, I suggested that Buffy exemplifies an important aspect of Lacanian psychoanalysis, as explained by Žižek: "As soon as we take into account that it is precisely and only in dreams that we encounter the real of our desire, the whole accent radically shifts: our common everyday reality, the reality of the social universe in which we assume our usual roles of kind-hearted, decent people, turns out to be an illusion that rests on a certain 'repression,' on overlooking the real of our desire. This social reality is then nothing but a fragile, symbolic cobweb that can at any moment be torn aside by an intrusion of the real. At any moment, the most common everyday conversation, the most ordinary event can take a dangerous turn, damage can be caused that cannot be undone" (Looking Awry 17). The Buffyverse explores, first of all, the radical nature of the traumas of growing up (our first sexual experience, accepting responsibility, getting a first job, starting university, etc.), all of which are then projected outward into manifestations of our traumatic emotions (monsters, etc.)—the ways that "the most ordinary event can take a dangerous turn." Even on the diegetic level, though, we are shown that the barrier between the dream world of psychosis and the supposedly "real" world of normalcy is as thin as a cobweb.

POLYMORPHOUS PERVERSITY

I asked for an example of Žižek's point on page 21 about polymorphous perversity: "the drives are by definition 'partial,' they are always tied to specific parts of the body's surface—the so-called 'erogenous zones'—which, contrary to the superficial view, are not biologically determined but result instead from the signifying parceling of the body. Certain parts of the body's surface are erotically privileged not because of their anatomical position but because of the way the body is caught up in the symbolic demand... The final proof of this fact consists in a phenomenon often encountered in hysterical symptoms where a part of the body that usually has no erogenous value starts to function as an erogenous zone (neck, nose, etc.)." As Kara McIver pointed out, we have a perfect example of what Žižek is explaining in the Willow dream sequence, where Tara's back is eroticized (Willow is writing a lesbian poem by Sappho on Tara's back). Given the fact that the superego's command is 'Enjoy!' it's absolutely perfect that in the logic of her dream Willow believes she is, in fact, writing out her homework assignment.

BETWEEN THE TWO DEATHS

Finally, the Lacanian concept of "between the two deaths," which is the province of the death drive, is explored quite literally in the Buffyverse through the vampire, which is literally between a material and symbolic death. The vampire manifests pure need (for blood) divorced from the symbolic order. The fact that the vampire cannot see itself in a mirror could even be said to exemplify that they exist in a space that precedes the mirror stage (and the entrance into symbolization).

THE GENTLEMEN, THE SUPEREGO, AND THE FATHER-OF-ENJOYMENT

1. 1)on the one hand, they represent the Name-of-the-Father, as explained by David Flint, Reid Scott, Katy Weismiller, Katelyn Bohney, Jonathan Bailey, and others; they are aligned with the law/authority through their formal dress, their extreme politesse, and their doctor's bag in the scene where they rip out a student's heart. David Flinted

   

   noted also that the Gentlemen float, suggesting their separation from the material world. In addition, the gentlemen are associated with Giles (the father figure) in a sequence that precedes their first appearance in full form: as Jonathan Bailey pointed out, the sequence follows the same metaphorical alignment (watch, Watcher) that we've already scene in the Xander Harris dream sequence in "Restless"; i.e., Giles' glasses followed by the drawn image of the Gentlemen followed by a clock tower followed by the Gentlemen themselves. This also helps to explain, Reid Scott went on, why Riley (Buffy's TA as well as love interest) turns into a gentleman at the end of her dream.
   

2. 2)On the other hand, we have what appear to be mental patients in untied straightjackets, suggesting the release of the id, as Jackie Gross, Katy Weismiller, and Katelyn Bohney argued; they are also tied to physicality since, unlike the Gentlemen, they walk, though in a rather primitive way (like monkeys, as Derek Thein suggested).
   

Of course, each of the superego/Name-of-the-Father figures in the episode are doubled in a similar way (Riley is both affable TA and crossbow-wielding government operative; Maggie Walsh is both a demanding psychology professor and head of a secret government agency; Giles is both a bumbling librarian and a Watcher; Buffy is both a female student and a stake-wielding Slayer).

POSTMODERNISM

Cleary Poore also raised a question for us that we’ll be returning to later in the semester when we turn to postmodernism.  If Joss Whedon is so smart in his exploration of high theory and avant-garde cinematographic techniques, why is he writing a tv show like Buffy, the Vampire Slayer.  I explained that early on he considered a career as a properly avant-garde filmmaker but decided to become a mainstream hollywood writer.  Did he sell out, I asked?  Jonathan Bailey and Derek Thein suggested that perhaps Whedon is consciously trying to bring his ideas to a larger audience by using a form that, on some level, can be appreciated without any knowledge of Lacan or postmodern theory.  I suggested that the debate about postmodernism between Fredric Jameson and Linda Hutcheon, which you’ll be reading later in the semester, will address precisely this point.

CINEMATIC SELF-REFLEXIVITY AND THE ENCODED HISTORY OF FILM

FORMAL PROHIBITIONS: PARANOIA, PSYCHOSIS, AND THE BREAKDOWN OF THE SYMBOLIC ORDER

I also illustrated that one can find examples of each of the three formal prohibitions that Žižek examines in our reading from Looking Awry (contrary to Žižek's claim that his examples represent hapaxes or one of a kinds):

1) The prohibition of the objective shot, which Zizek aligns with paranoia. Of course, we have already seen such an example in "Jose Chung's From Outer Space," where we are never given the objective "truth" but only a sequence of POV and subjective shots. We'll be seeing a yet better example later in the semester when we turn to David Fincher's Fight Club. And both of our examples are, indeed, very much about paranoia.

2) The prohibition against montage (or editing), which Žižek aligns with the breakdown of the separation between reality and the Real. We will have a perfect example in Buffy, "The Body," in which a five-minute long sequence without montage follows Buffy's discovery of her mom's corpse (an experience that is presented precisely as the eruption of the Real into Buffy's symbolic reality).

3) The prohibition against voice, which Žižek associates with "psychotic autism, the isolation from the discursive network of intersubjectivity" (42). Of course, "Hush" is a lovely example, one that explores precisely the breakdown of the symbolic order after the loss of language.

The other prohibition in "The Body," which we'll discuss when I return from Venice, is a prohibition against discursive music, which is completely absent in the episode.