The Pervert's Guide To Cinema Page #2

with his nervous hyper-activity, is superego.

Well, that covers a lot of ground.

Say, you cover a lot of ground yourself.

You better beat it.

I hear they're gonna tear you down

and put up an office building

where you're standing.

You can leave in a taxi. If you can't get

a taxi, you can leave in a huff.

If that's too soon,

you can leave in a minute and a huff.

You know you haven't stopped talking

since I came here?

Chico, the rational guy, egotistic,

calculating all the time, is ego.

Chicolini, you're charged with high treason,

and if found guilty, you'll be shot.

- I object.

- Oh, you object?

- On what grounds?

- I couldn't think of anything else to say.

Objection sustained.

And, the weirdest of them all, Harpo,

the mute guy, he doesn't talk.

Freud said that drives are silent.

He doesn't talk. He, of course, is id.

Who are you guys?

What are you doing in my room?

That's my partner.

But he no speak. He's dumb and deaf.

The id in all its radical ambiguity.

Namely, what is so weird

about the Harpo character

is that he's childishly innocent,

just striving for pleasure,

likes children, plays with children and so on.

But, at the same time,

possessed by some kind of

primordial evil, aggressive all the time.

And this unique combination

of utter corruption and innocence

is what the id is about.

Get off there. Get off that table.

What do you think this is here, anyway?

Put that down.

- Lunatic!

- Stop it.

Stop that, here!

- Hey, you want to break that?

- Get him out of here.

Here, let it alone.

- Dr Klein?

- Yes, I'm Dr Klein. This is Dr Taney.

- How do you do?

- I'm Sharon. Things have gotten worse

since I phoned you.

I think you better come upstairs.

- Is she having spasms again?

- Yeah, but they've gotten violent.

Did you give her the medication?

Voice is not an organic part of a human body.

It's coming from somewhere

in between your body.

- Mother, please!

- Mrs MacNeil, this is Dr Taney.

- Please, Mother, make it stop!

- What is it? What's happening?

- It's burning! It's burning!

- Do something, Doctor. Please, help her!

Whenever we talk to another person,

there is always this minimum

of ventriloquist effect,

as if some foreign power took possession.

Let the enemy have no power over her.

And the son of iniquity be powerless to harm her.

Your mother sucks c*cks in hell,

Karras, you faithless swine!

Remember that at the beginning of the film,

this was a beautiful young girl.

How did she become a monster that we see?

By being possessed, but who possessed her?

A voice. A voice in its obscene dimensions.

See the cross of the Lord.

Begone, you hostile powers.

The first big film

about this traumatic dimension of the voice,

the voice which freely floats around

and is a traumatic presence, feared,

the ultimate moment or object of anxiety

which distorts reality,

was in '31, in Germany,

Fritz Lang's The Testament of Dr Mabuse.

You and the woman

will not leave this room alive.

Monster!

Stop, please!

We do not see Mabuse till the end of the film.

He is just a voice.

You will not leave this room alive.

And to redeem through your son,

who lives and reigns with you

in the unity of the Holy Spirit,

God, forever and ever.

- Amen.

- Good Lord, hear my prayer.

So, the problem is, which is why

we have the two priests at her side,

how to get rid of this intruder,

of this alien intruder.

It is as if we are expecting

the famous scene from Ridley Scott's Alien

to repeat itself.

As if we just wait for some terrifying, alien,

evil-looking, small animal to jump out.

There is a fundamental imbalance,

gap, between our psychic energy,

called by Freud "libido," this endless undead

energy which persists beyond life and death,

and the poor, finite, mortal reality of our bodies.

This is not just the pathology

of being possessed by ghosts.

The lesson that we should learn

and that the movies try to avoid

is that we ourselves are the aliens controlling our bodies.

Humanity means that the aliens are

controlling our animal bodies.

Our ego, our psychic agency, is an alien force,

distorting, controlling our body.

Nobody was as fully aware of the properly

traumatic dimension of the human voice,

the human voice

not as the sublime, ethereal medium

for expressing the depth of human subjectivity,

but the human voice as a foreign intruder.

Nobody was more aware

of this than Charlie Chaplin.

Chaplin himself plays in the film two persons,

the good, small, Jewish barber

and his evil double,

Hynkel, dictator. Hitler, of course.

- Come on. Leave me alone.

- Why, you...

He bit my finger.

The Jewish barber, the tramp figure,

is of course the figure of silent cinema.

Silent figures are basically

like figures in the cartoon.

They don't know death.

They don't know sexuality even.

They don't know suffering.

They just go on in their oral, egotistic striving,

like cats and mice in a cartoon.

You cut them into pieces, they're reconstituted.

There is no finitude, no mortality here.

There is evil, but a kind of naive, good evil.

You're just egotistic, you want to eat,

you want to hit the other,

but there is no guilt proper.

What we get with sound is

interiority, depth, guilt,

culpability,

in other words, the complex oedipal universe.

Here you are.

Get a Hynkel button. Get a Hynkel button.

A fine sculpture with a hooey

on each and every button.

The problem of the film

is not only the political problem,

how to get rid of totalitarianism,

of its terrible seductive power,

but it's also this more formal problem,

how to get rid of this

terrifying dimension of the voice.

Or, since we cannot simply get rid of it,

how to domesticate it,

how to transform this voice nonetheless

into the means of expressing humanity,

love and so on.

German police grabs the poor tramp

thinking this is Hitler

and he has to address a large gathering.

I'm sorry, but I don't want to be an emperor.

That's not my business.

I don't want to rule or conquer anyone.

I should like to help everyone, if possible.

Jew, gentile, black man, white,

we all want to help one another.

Human beings are like that.

There, of course, he delivers his big speech

about the need for love,

understanding between people.

But there is a catch,

even a double catch.

Soldiers, in the name of democracy,

let us all unite!

People applaud exactly in the same way

as they were applauding Hitler.

The music that accompanies

this great humanist finale,

the overture to Wagner's opera, Lohengrin,

is the same music as the one we hear

when Hitler is daydreaming

about conquering the entire world

and where he has a balloon

in the shape of the globe.

The music is the same.

This can be read

as the ultimate redemption of music,

that the same music which served evil purposes

can be redeemed to serve the good.

Or it can be read,

and I think it should be read,

in a much more ambiguous way,

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