The Pervert's Guide To Cinema Page #5

There is an irresistible power of fascination,

at least for me, in this terrifying scene

when Neo awakens from his sleep

within the Matrix

and becomes aware of what he really is

in that foetal container,

floating in liquid, connected to virtual reality,

where you are reduced to a totally passive object

with your energy being sucked out of you.

So why does the Matrix need our energy?

I think the proper way to ask this question

is to turn it around.

Not why does the Matrix need the energy,

but why does the energy need the Matrix?

That is to say, since I think that the energy

we are talking about is libido, is our pleasure,

why does our libido

need the virtual universe of fantasies?

Why can't we simply enjoy it directly,

a sexual partner and so on?

That's the fundamental question.

Why do we need this virtual supplement?

Our libido needs an illusion

in order to sustain itself.

One of the most interesting motifs

in science fiction is that of the id machine,

an object which has the magic capacity

of directly materialising, realising in front of us,

our innermost dreams,

desires, even guilt feelings.

There is a long tradition of this

in science fiction films,

but of course the film about id machine

is Andrei Tarkovsky's, Solaris.

Solaris is the story of Kelvin,

a psychologist, who is sent by a rocket

to a spaceship circulating around Solaris,

a newly discovered planet.

Strange things are reported from the spaceship.

All the scientists there are going crazy,

and then Kelvin discovers what is going on there.

This planet has the magic ability

to directly realise

your deepest traumas, dreams, fears, desires.

The innermost of your inner space.

The hero of the film finds one morning

his deceased wife, who made suicide years ago.

So he realises not so much his desire,

as his guilt feeling.

When the hero is confronted

with the spectral clone, as it were,

of his deceased wife,

although he appears to be deeply sympathetic,

spiritual, reflecting and so on,

his basic problem is how to get rid of her.

What makes Solaris so touching

is that, at least potentially,

it confronts us with this tragic

subjective position of the woman,

his wife, who is aware

that she has no consistency,

no full being of her own.

I don't even know my own self.

Who am I?

As soon as I close my eyes I can't

recall what my face is like.

For example, she has gaps in her memory

because she knows only

what he knows that she knows.

Do you know who you are?

All humans do.

She is just his dream realised.

And her true love for him is expressed

in her desperate attempts to erase herself,

to swallow poison or whatever,

just to clear the space,

because she guesses that he wants this.

It's horrifying, isn't it?

I'll never get used

to these constant resurrections!

It's relatively easy to get rid of a real person.

You can abandon him or her,

kill him or her, whatever.

But a ghost, a spectral presence,

is much more difficult to get rid of.

It sticks to you as a kind of a shadowy presence.

-Do I disgust you?

-No.

-You're lying!

-Stop it!

I must be looking disgusting!

What we get here is the lowest male mythology.

This idea that woman doesn't exist on her own.

That a woman is merely a man's dream realised

or even, as radical, anti-feminists claim,

the man's guilt realised.

Women exist because male desire got impure.

If man cleanses his desire,

gets rid of dirty material,

fantasies, woman ceases to exist.

At the end of the film,

we get a kind of a Holy Communion,

a reconciliation of him not with his wife,

but with his father.

- Did you see Hitchcock's Vertigo?

- Sorry, I don't understand.

Sorry. Hitchcock's Vertigo, the film.

Alfred Hitchcock.

I think it happened here, you know.

- Oh, you don't know the scene, okay.

- Probably.

Often things begin as a fake,

inauthentic, artificial,

but you get caught into your own game.

And that is the true tragedy of Vertigo.

It's a story about two people who,

each in his or her own way,

get caught into their own game of appearances.

For both of them, for Madeleine and for Scottie,

appearances win over reality.

What is the story of Vertigo?

It's a story about a retired policeman

who has a pathological fear of heights

because of an incident in his career,

and then an old friend hires him

to follow his beautiful wife,

played by Kim Novak.

The wife mysteriously possessed

by the ghost of a past deceased

Spanish beauty, Carlotta Valdes.

The two fall in love.

The wife kills herself.

The first part of Vertigo,

with Madeleine's suicide,

is not as shattering as it could have been,

because it's really a terrifying loss,

but in this very loss, the ideal survives.

The idea of the fatal woman

possesses you totally.

What, ultimately, this image,

fascinating image of the fatal woman

stands for is death.

The fascination of beauty is always

the veil which covers up a nightmare.

Like the idea of a fascinating creature,

but if you come too close to her,

you see sh*t, decay,

you see worms crawling everywhere.

The ultimate abyss is not a physical abyss,

but the abyss of the depth of another person.

It's what philosophers describe

as the "Night of the World."

Like when you see another person,

into his or her eyes, you see the abyss.

That's the true spiral which is drawing us in.

Scottie alone, broken down, cannot forget her,

wanders around the city

looking for a woman, a similar woman,

something like the deceased woman,

discovers an ordinary, rather vulgar, common girl.

The dnouement of the story, of course,

is along the lines of the Marx Brothers' joke,

"This man looks like an idiot, acts like an idiot.

"This shouldn't deceive you.

This man is an idiot."

The newly found woman looks like Madeleine,

acts like Madeleine, the fatal beauty.

We discover she is Madeleine.

What we learn is that Scottie's friend,

who hired Scottie, also hired this woman, Judy,

to impersonate Madeleine in a devilish plot

to kill the real Madeleine, his wife,

and get her fortune.

We could just see a lot of each other.

Why? 'Cause I remind you of her?

It's not very complimentary.

The profile shot in Vertigo is perhaps

the key shot of the entire film.

We have there Madeleine's, or rather Judy's,

identity in all its tragic tension.

It provides the dark background

for the fascinating other profile

of Madeleine in Ernie's restaurant.

Scottie is too ashamed,

afraid to look at her directly.

It is as if what he sees is the stuff of his dreams,

more real in a way for him

than the reality of the woman behind his back.

That's not very complimentary, either.

I just want to be with you as much as I can, Judy.

When we see a face,

it's basically always the half of it.

A subject is a partial something,

a face, something we see.

Behind it, there is a void, a nothingness.

And of course, we spontaneously tend

to fill in that nothingness

with our fantasies about the wealth

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