We are watching the screen watch us

We go to the theater to see a movie, but the final punch line is that movies also watch the audience, the screen sees us, posits us. Jean Paul Sartre depicted the existential position of human being as one always in the "gaze" of an "other." The psychoanalyst Jacque Lacan has formulated a notion of psychological life around this idea whereby, we are who we are always in relation to an Other (or other). The fantasy of the gaze of the Other be it person, thing, or imaginary being or all three, determines our identity. The primordial place where the dynamic of the Other is established is in the relationship between infant and mothering figure. The infant forms its identity through the gaze of the mother; it watches the mother watching it.

For Lacan the central dynamic of human being is desire or more particularly the desire for jouissance, enjoyment or pleasure which is fundamentally sexual. The Other presents itself as a signifier, the object of gratification for this desire. But the other always remains outside the grasp of desire, leaving the subject with a sense of “abyss,” “absence,” “lack,” “gap,” or "void." The intolerability of this lack is defended against through fantasy, and it is fantasy which then becomes the phenomenal stuff of our being. With fantasy as ground of the subject, identity becomes uncertain. Lacan said, "What I look at is never what I want to see."[23]

The goal of Lacanian analysis is to reveal the lack that is always and everywhere there, to understand oneself as a perpetually desiring being in relation through fantasy to an Other which can never be attained. The best that can be hoped for is an "enjoyment" of the symptom.[24] So in addition to understanding ourselves as desirous, more immediately we can come to understand ourselves as fundamentally fantasizing beings.

Our existential position in the movies is that the screen takes the part of the Other. In watching a movie, we are watching the screen watch us. A triple triangle is formed whereby a literal projector is "throwing forward" an image onto the screen, and we the audience, between the projector and the screen, are also projecting our own individual inner lives onto the image, but at the same time a counter projection is occurring whereby the screen is projecting back onto us. www.rubedo.psc.br Artigos © Ronald Schenk