The Pervert's Guide To Cinema Page #8

maybe another day."

Just arrousing the fantasy

and then rejecting the act

results in utter psychological devastation.

It is a case of a mental rape

which can be worse than physical rape.

The point is

the fragile balance

between reality and fantasy dimension

in our sexual activity.

Michael Haneke's Piano Teacher

is the story of an impossible love affair

between a middle-aged,

deeply traumatised woman

and her young student.

She's in a way a person

who is not yet sexually subjectivised.

She lacks the phantasmatic co-ordinates

of her desire.

This accounts for a couple of

very strange scenes in the film,

like when she goes to a pornographic store

and then watches in a closed, small room

a scene from a hardcore film.

The way she watches it, it's not to get aroused,

but she watches it as a pupil in a school.

She simply watches it

to get the co-ordinates of desiring,

to learn how to do it, how to get excited.

"...next take off the blindfold, please,

"and sit down on my face

"and punch me in the stomach

"to force me to thrust my tongue in your behind."

The notion of fantasy in psychoanalysis

is very ambiguous.

On the one hand,

we have the pacifying aspect of fantasy.

Piano Teacher plays with the opposite

aspect of fantasy.

Fantasy as the explosion of wild,

unbearable desires.

What we found in the middle of the film

is probably, arguably,

the most depressive sexual act

in the entire history of cinema.

As if to punish her

for disclosing the fantasy in her letter to him,

he literally enacts her fantasy

in the way he makes love to her,

which of course means

that fantasy is lost for her.

When fantasy disintegrates, you don't get reality,

you get some nightmarish real

too traumatic to be experienced

as ordinary reality.

That would be another definition of nightmare.

Hell is here.

Paradise, at least this perverse paradise, is hell.

Stop, please.

One cannot here just throw out the dirty water,

all these excessive, perverse fantasies and so on,

and just keep the healthy, clean baby,

normal, straight or even homosexual, whatever,

but some kind of normal, politically correct sex.

You cannot do that.

What if we throw out the baby

and keep just the dirty water?

And put it as a problem:

how to deal with dirty water.

And put some order

in the dirty water of fantasies.

This is I think precisely what happens

for example in Kieslowski's Blue.

During the ... were you conscious?

I'm sorry to have inform you...

Do you know?

Your husband...

died in the accident.

You must have been unconscious.

Anna?

Yes, your daughter, too.

You can organise, people do it,

your life in mourning the lost object.

Julie, in Blue, discovers that

her husband wasn't what she thought he was.

That he was cheating her,

that he had a mistress who is pregnant.

This is the most terrifying loss,

where all the co-ordinates of your reality

disintegrate.

The problem is how to reconstitute yourself.

In a wonderful short scene,

the heroine of Blue, after returning home,

finds there on the floor

a group of newly-born mice,

crawling around their mother.

This scene terrifies her.

She is too excessively exposed

to life in its brutal meaninglessness.

What she is able to do at the end

is to acquire a proper distance towards reality.

This is what happens in the famous circular shot

where we pass from Julie's face,

while she is making love.

This magical suspension

of temporal and spatial limitations,

this free floating in a fantasy-space,

far from distancing us from reality

enables us to approach reality.

She is putting together the co-ordinates

which enable her to experience her reality

as meaningful again.

As if the lesson is,

not only for men but also for women,

that you can sustain sexual intercourse,

sexual relationship,

only through the support of fantasy.

The problem of course is,

is this fantasy reconstituted?

Is this the ultimate horizon of our experience?

The function of music here

is precisely that of a fetish,

of some fascinating presence

whose function it is

to conceal the abyss of anxiety.

Music is here what, according to Marx, religion is,

a kind of opium for the people.

Opium which should put us asleep,

put us into a kind of a false beatitude,

which allows us to avoid

the abyss of unbearable anxiety.

We see Julie crying, but through a glass.

This glass stands for, I think,

fantasy reconstituted.

These are, I'm tempted to say,

the tears of happiness.

"I can mourn now because

it no longer immediately affects me."

Blue proposes this mystical communion,

reconstituted fantasy,

as sustaining our relation to the world.

But the price we pay is that

some radically authentic moment

of accepting the anxiety

at the very foundation of human condition

is lost there.

If anything, anxiety at the vocal level

is silence.

It's silence. It's a silent scream.

In Hitchcock's The Birds,

when the mother, of course who but the mother,

finds the neighbour dead,

his eyes picked out by the birds,

she shouts, but the shout

literally remains stuck in her throat.

To return from cinema to so-called real life,

the ultimate lesson of psychoanalysis

is that exactly the same

goes for our real life experience,

that emotions as such are deceiving.

There are no specifically fake emotions

because, as Freud puts it literally,

the only emotion which doesn't deceive

is anxiety.

All other emotions are fake.

So, of course, the problem here is, are we able to

encounter in cinema the emotion of anxiety,

or is cinema as such a fake?

Cinema, as the art of appearances,

tells us something about reality itself.

It tells us something

about how reality constitutes itself.

Not that way!

Ripley.

Ripley, come on.

Ripley, we've got no time for sightseeing here.

Ripley, don't.

There is an old Gnostic theory

that our world was not perfectly created,

that the god who created our world

was an idiot who bungled the job,

so that our world is a half-finished creation.

There are voids, openings, gaps.

It's not fully real, fully constituted.

In the wonderful scene

in the last instalment of the Alien saga,

Alien Resurrection, when Ripley,

the cloned Ripley, enters a mysterious room,

she encounters

the previous failed version of herself,

of cloning herself.

Just a horrified creature,

a small foetus-like entity,

then more developed forms.

Finally, a creature which almost looks like her,

but her limbs are like that of the monster.

Kill me.

This means that all the time

our previous alternate embodiments,

what we might have been but are not,

that these alternate versions of ourselves

are haunting us.

That's the ontological view of reality

that we get here,

as if it's an unfinished universe.

This is, I think, a very modern feeling.

It is through such ontology of unfinished reality

that cinema became a truly modern art.

All modern films are ultimately films about

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