Pollen

Photo courtesy of Bill DiLillo and the University of Vermont

Todd McGowan is a professor at the University of Vermont. He has recently authored The Impossible David Lynch (Columbia University Press) and The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan (SUNY Press).

From University of Vermont web site:

Todd McGowan teaches courses in film theory, history, and genre. His areas of interest include Hegel, psychoanalysis, and existentialism, and the intersection of these lines of thought with the cinema. He is currently at work on a book on politics and psychoanalysis.

How would you describe “the gaze” in Lacanian psychoanalysis? What’s a good example of how “the gaze” works in film?

First of all, it is important to distinguish between the gaze as it has traditionally been understood in film studies and the gaze in the Lacanian sense. The traditional film studies’ concept of the gaze defines it as a subjective act of looking that dominates what is seen. The gaze in this sense works as a tool of mastery.

For instance, through the male gaze, the spectator dominates the female image that popular films display. The gaze in the Lacanian sense has nothing to do with mastery and domination, nor does it occur on the side of the subject looking. The Lacanian gaze is an object on the screen, though it is no ordinary object. It is the point on the screen where the spectator loses her or his sense of mastery, the point at which the spectator’s look stumbles and encounters an obstacle that cannot be integrated into her or his world of meaning.

As this nonsensical point, the gaze forces spectators to become aware of their investment on the level of desire in the images on the screen. The gaze is thus the point at which the screen reaches out and grabs hold of the spectator. My favorite example of this occurs in Steven Spielberg’s Duel (1970), where an unknown truck driver pursues and tries to kill David Mann (Dennis Weaver). Throughout the entire film, the spectator never learns the identity of the truck driver, nor the reason for his murderousness, nor why it targets Mann. Spielberg shows the truck driver only with images of his windshield under the glare of the sun. Rather than see the truck driver’s face, the spectator sees the glass reflecting the sun. For me, this image—and the lack of knowledge it embodies—is one of the great cinematic depictions of the gaze.

You’ve written extensively on how our society has moved towards one that demands enjoyment. Does this show in the history of cinema?

I think it shows in two contradictory ways. On the one hand, most films focus less on spectator desire today. The absences and failures necessary to constitute the desiring spectator are not so apparent in contemporary cinema. Instead, films bombard us with the overpresence of the image and attempt to deliver enjoyment directly through this overpresence. A film like 300 (Zack Snyder, 2006), for instance, spends no time at all constructing desiring spectators; instead, it spends almost the entire duration of the film subjecting them to images of sex and violence that are supposed to facilitate spectator enjoyment (though fail entirely, in my view). But on the other hand, an alternative cinema has emerged in order to combat this kind of filmmaking, and this alternative emphasizes using cinema to show the failure of seeing in order to privilege spectator desire. I see directors such as Abbas Kiarostami, Sophia Coppola, Christopher Nolan, and Jim Jarmusch as exemplars of this aesthetic.

How has the gaze changed over the years in film? Do these changes mark distinct regimes of film?

I don’t think that cinema as an art form has made—nor can it make—any progress relative to the gaze. Because the gaze is the impossible object that drives cinematic production as such, that production can never achieve mastery over it. The gaze is an object that remains a sticking point, a fundamental stumbling block, for the cinema. The approach to and depiction of the gaze shifts, but not in any kind of progressive fashion. In the book, I note that some of the most complex approaches to the gaze appear early in the history of cinema.

Does any one cultural phenomenon stick out that has been engendered by a specific gaze shown in film?

It’s fascinating to consider the possibility that a specific depiction of the gaze might shape culture, but I don’t think the lines of causality that the gaze engenders can ever be clear within a matrix of cause and effect. As an impossible object, the gaze acts as a cause of desire. But precisely because it is an impossible object and irreducible to the field of meaning, no specific gaze can be pinned down as the direct cause of a particular cultural phenomenon. One might even say that all culture is structured around the gaze—both as what culture desires and what it avoids. The same is true within the cinema: in The Real Gaze, I examine films in terms of the relation they take up to the gaze. Do they affirm it as an absence, reveal it as a distorting presence, or retreat from it?

Slavoj Žižek has also written extensively on Lacanian film analysis. Is there a point at which your methods diverge theoretically?

I owe a tremendous debt to Žižek’s thinking about Lacan and cinema. I’m not sure if there is a theoretically point at which I diverge from him, though I came to Lacanian theory from a different direction, which has perhaps created a difference in emphasis. My path to Lacan was through Sartre and existentialism, and I tend to think of Lacan as an existentialist thinker, despite the difficulty of reconciling the existentialist privileging of consciousness with the insights of psychoanalysis. Žižek, in contrast, tends to mobilize Lacan’s thought toward political ends. The Real Gaze deals extensively with the political implications of the gaze in cinema, so I share in this project as well. So it is not on the theoretical level that the real difference resides. Where The Real Gaze and all my writing diverge most significantly from Žižek’s on the cinema is in their approach to the filmic text itself. My method is one of arriving at theoretical claims through a close reading of cinematic form, whereas Žižek is interested less in the form of the text itself than in its theoretical fecundity. I must say that I prefer Žižek’s more speculative type of analyses but simply find myself unable to do them.

Are there any directors out there that you think are aware of their Lacanian themes? It’s pretty hard to imagine that David Lynch is not.

I really don’t know if any directors are aware of Lacanian themes or ideas, but my sense is that this wouldn’t help someone to create a thoroughly Lacanian film. In fact, conceptual knowledge can get in the way of the knowledge that the creation of a work of art requires. A director who knew too much Lacan might be unable, because of this knowledge, to produce a film that resonated psychoanalytically. I would argue that there is no more Lacanian director than David Lynch, and yet I think his theory of the psyche, as he conceptualizes it outside the cinema, is not at all Lacanian. Lynch spends a great deal of time pursuing—and arguing on behalf of—the thoroughly anti-psychoanalytic transcendental meditation, a practice that attempts to attain pure consciousness rather than access the unconscious.

How many films did you watch or re-watch in order to complete The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan? I’m guessing a lot, how did you find the time?

I talk specifically about 125 films in The Real Gaze, but I had an additional four chapters (with many more films discussed) that I decided to cut from the final version of the book. I also tried to watch all the films from the different directors I talk about, even when I wasn’t going to mention them in the book. All this viewing wasn’t really a great burden for me, since other than reading theory there is really nothing else that I like to do. I assume I would have watched the same number of films even without the writing of the book to motivate me.

Do you have another book that you are working on? If so what can we expect?

My book on David Lynch (The Impossible David Lynch), which is a kind of supplement to The Real Gaze, has just appeared. I’m currently working on two very different projects: a book on the emergence of films that distort the temporal structure of their narratives (such as Memento [2000] or 21 Grams [2003]), and a book on a specifically psychoanalytic conception of politics, tentatively entitled The Enjoyment of Loss: Politics and Psychoanalysis. The film book will focus on how certain contemporary films, through their alternative narrative structures, are articulating a notion of temporality that approximates the death drive. They force spectators to experience time as repetition turning around trauma rather than as movement forward. The Enjoyment of Loss represents an attempt to come up with a political theory founded solely on the psychoanalytic conception of the subject and society. Typically, psychoanalytic theory functions as a tool for the critique of political activity, and my wager here will be that it can also provide the basis for a different kind of politics, a politics focused on the experience of loss rather than the possibility for gain.

Favorite film? Favorite director?

For me, there is no director even close to Orson Welles. Though every film that he ever made (with the exception of Citizen Kane [1941]) suffered some degree of damage because of his relationship to Hollywood (from lack of sufficient funding to grotesque re-editing), he nonetheless made many of the greatest films in history. Obviously, Citizen Kane stands out, but my personal favorite is Mr. Arkadin (1955). When I watch this film (and all of the films of Welles), I feel as if I’m completely submerged in the cinematic experience. This is because Welles has such great control over the spectator’s relationship to absence and plenitude. He allows one to experience the failure of arriving at the cinematic object as the only possible success. In this sense, his films mirror his career. Critics think of his filmmaking in terms of what he might have accomplished if he had realized his original promise as a young filmmaker, but I see his genius and great success in the failure itself.

Any final comments?

My hope is that The Real Gaze is part of a return to prominence of Lacanian film theory. The discipline of film studies has become very hostile to psychoanalytic theory and theory in general, but I feel like there are a number of young theorists, influenced by Žižek and Joan Copjec, who are right now reinvigorating film theory from a specifically psychoanalytic orientation. These theorists include Jennifer Freidlander, Hugh Manon, Hilary Neroni, and Sheila Kunkle, among others. I would encourage everyone to read them for great insights into how Lacan might enrich the cinematic experience.