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Time Denied: |
Roland Barthes defines the imaginary as the ‘total assumption of
the image’. (1) Here is, undoubtedly, one of the scenes from film history that
best fits this definition:
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1. Roland Barthes (trans. Richard Howard), Roland
Barthes by Roland Barthes (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977), p.
105.
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There has already been a great deal of commentary on the moment in
this scene of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) when Scottie (James Stewart) excitedly waits for Judy’s (Kim Novak’s) ultimate
surrender (dyeing her hair ‘Madeleine blond’), and sees her emerge from the
background, like a ghostly apparition. What has been less analysed is the
brutality of the movement from this assumption of the image (Judy’s reality finally
conforms perfectly to Madeleine’s image) to the most trivial reality. Between
the first and second part of this clip, there is a black hole where the film
makes a vertiginous fall from grace to gravity, from the ethereal, disembodied
sublime of the imaginary to conjugal triviality. When we see them, ready to go
out for the evening, after the fade to black on the image of Eurydice coming
back to life, we get the impression that twenty-five years of marriage have
flown by: ‘Oh no, you’ll muss me! Where shall we go for dinner?’ Judy’s body
has become the worn-out body that Hitchcock feared when reluctantly agreeing to
give Novak the part.
Our memory of the film can be deceiving: the deflation of the
imaginary is not the consequence of the discovery of the jewelry that betrays
Judy/Madeleine’s double dealing. It is prior to this discovery. When Scottie
realises how he has been manipulated, the damage has already been done. The
abandonment has already taken place when Scottie finds a good reason for it in
the necklace. I am inclined to say, rather, that this verifies something: he who wants to kill the object of his imaginary
projection accuses it of betrayal.
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In Traversée des ombres (Across the Shadows),
Jean-Bertrand Pontalis talks about one of his patients, Hugues, who has lost
the woman he loved and sometimes finds her, alive, in his sleep. In one of his
dreams, he encounters a young woman in the street. He is strongly attracted
to her, follows her, and tells his analyst during a session: ‘Believe me, it
was her – same hair, same eyes, same walk. It was more than a resemblance, it
was the same person who reappeared’. (2)
This is what happens for Michael (Cliff Robertson) in Brian De
Palma’s Obsession (1976), at the end
of the first scene in San Miniato where he has just come upon the doppelgänger
of his dead wife (Geneviève Bujold), at the exact same spot where he had met
her for the first time. Michael finds the most economical exquisite
formula for the return of the same. To the question ‘How was it?’ posed by his
partner – whom he asks to stay outside for this pilgrimage – Michael laconically
responds, in a daze: ‘The same’.
Pontalis continues: |
2.
Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, Traversée des ombres (Paris
: Éditions Gallimard, 2003), p. 36.
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These dreams [of the dead] are what remain for us of the belief in resurrection. But, if they make our dead visible and sometimes conversant with us, they do not allow us to touch them. The images, however luminous and intense they may be, remain impalpable. They do not have the power for reincarnation. (3) | 3.
Ibid., p. 30.
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This is exactly what happens to Scottie: he obsessively
reconstructs the dead creature, laboriously managing to bring her back to life
– but when he wants to touch her, she instantly transforms into a trivial ‘missus’,
graceless, tired flesh, too real, that he can no longer even bring himself to
kiss without obvious disgust.
The major difference between Scottie in Vertigo and Michael
in Obsession is that Michael is in a deeper sleep than Scottie. He wants
to believe in the reality of his waking dream with a deep and naïve conviction.
The whole film is an obstinate refusal to wake up, to leave the bliss of the
imaginary. He rushes like a bull towards the first illusion that is offered to
him – this woman who is the reincarnation of his dead wife.
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Now we come to the scene in Obsession that I call ‘haste to get married’. It describes the most important thing about
the relationship to Michael’s waking dream, a waking dream that is also De
Palma’s film. In this scene, we find a feeling of already having experienced something, déjà-vécu, a
feeling we are all familiar with from dreams. It is the moment when we are at
the height of pleasure because the dream gratifies us with the instantaneous
realisation of all kinds of desires: that a dead person is still alive; that a
woman goes out with us without any of the manoeuvres or laborious stages of
seduction that are necessary in cruel reality; that we are effortlessly transported
to a magical place where we are certain that we are going to be happy (in this
film, the church of San Miniato). But something sticks out in this state of
fulfillment that is too good to be true, the very diffuse sensation – still
germinating but threatening, and that we are forced to chase away while knowing
very well that it is going to gain ground – that none of this is going to last,
that it is a dream, that the dead do not really come back to life, that this
woman who could fill in all that is missing does not exist, that this place
where we should finally and fully feel at home is not real, that we are going
to have to wake up. Credit must be given to De Palma for giving us the most
just cinematic translation of this moment of unease and panic for the dreamer –
who does not want to be chased from his dream by a return to waking reality.
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Michael is stricken with a mad sense of urgency, pressuring Sandra
to marry him as quickly as possible, in private – even though he had been dreaming
of a big, fancy wedding to proclaim his love for her to everyone he knows. In
this scene, threatening reality assumes the form of a ‘medical body’ in the
strict sense: the obscene presence of the psychologist’s face, in close-up on
the edge of the frame, in a mode of figuration entirely unique in the film. The
secretary’s face, during a telephone call, is also filmed in the same, very
crude manner. These two figures come onto the stage of the dream to demand that
the dreamer come out of his dream. Michael violently, and without warning,
ejects the shrink because he absolutely does not want to be cured of his madness;
on the contrary, he wants to remain at all costs in this world where everything
responds to his desires. He manages to protect his waking dream from the
characters that represent a return of (and to) reality.
In his urgency to marry, Michael sacrifices a fantasy of the
collective imagination (the big wedding with two hundred guests) in order to
preserve his state of waking dreamer at all costs. He is exactly in the
position of a filmmaker who sacrifices a scene that is too expensive, agreeing
to shoot it with four extras instead of two hundred in order to still make his
film, while negotiating a compromised solution with his producer (and the reality
principle he embodies). Michael is ready to completely relinquish his fantasy in order to maintain the
illusion of the imaginary.
In Rear Window (1954), there was already a sinister
representative of reality, a disrupter of the fantasy, the private detective
(Wendell Corey), always boringly realistic, whom the reality of the story ends
up proving wrong, to the viewer’s great pleasure. In Vertigo, an element
of the fictional universe, the necklace, is also there to ‘represent’ the
threat of a close return of (to) reality, and provoke the deflation of the
imaginary. The major difference between Scottie and Michael is that one
wakes up, the other does not. Scottie wakes up the moment that his desire
is realised (the rebirth of Madeleine’s image). Michael keeps himself in a
regime of thought and belief that is resolutely out of touch with reality,
entirely dominated by the imaginary. Obsession is a film that only
functions in the imaginary and in the crude Symbolism of the dollar value of
people and things. It is also a film without any moment of reality and, of
course, without any point of reality, where everything plays along with the
imaginary of the characters, where everything glides along as though covered in
grease – without the rough, necessary aspect of reality ever having the
slightest chance of putting the film’s regime in danger, of extracting the
character and the viewer from their waking dream.
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For Simone Weil, in Gravity and Grace, ‘a test of what is
real is that it is hard and rough. Joys are found in it, not pleasure. What is
pleasant belongs to dreams’. (4) Obsession is above all ‘pleasant’ in
this sense, being a film imposing the supremacy of waking dreams over reality,
contrary to Vertigo where fiction has the final say. De Palma draws us
into the story of a man who is ready to do anything so that he may be left to
dream of incest without guilt, of the negation of time by the resurrection of a
body, and even to kill the one who wants to ‘awaken’ him and bring him back to
reality: his manipulative partner, Robert LaSalle (John Lithgow).
* * *
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4. Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (New York : Routledge Classics, 2003), p. 53.
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De Palma never shies away from any means at his disposal, as a self-conscious,
virtuosic filmmaker, to give himself a chance of gently enveloping the viewer
in the warm quilt of the imaginary. Obsession imposes, from the start,
and by every cinematic means, a belief in the imaginary as the coalescence of
the sign, as the ‘similitude of signifier and signified’, as Barthes would put
it. (5)
1. By narrative processes
Speech is enough to actualise, in the image, the corresponding
reality: the boat,
Florence,
the key to the bedroom. It is enough to state that we are going somewhere, in
order to already be there. To imagine, to recount what we want to do, is enough
to render it instantaneously real. In Obsession,
we often see a scene take place in the present over the sound of the voice
(from a previous scene) that is projecting it. To conceive, to desire, is
enough to make the thing real.
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5. Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, p.
44.
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2. By the general tonality of the image
Obsession’s images are, throughout, cottony, almost foggy, as if to
keep us in a semi-dream state by blurring, even denying, the rough ‘reality of
reality’. Light becomes translucent matter: things are no longer lit by an external
light source; light seems to emanate from them. The world is enveloped in a sfumato that eliminates precise details, preventing any resistance of reality – like in
David Hamilton’s photographs, or the worst American soap operas – in order to
make us believe that the image is really there to ‘substitute the real world
with a world that accords’ with our dream. (6) The images of the present are
permanently bathed in diffused light – which Hitchcock, in Vertigo, used
especially for the amorous tailing – that does not fall within the traditional
indexical connotation of the past. The cinematographer, Vilmos Zsigmond, says
that in
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6.
Translator’s note: Bergala is paraphrasing the quote attributed (incorrectly)
to André
Bazin at the beginning of Contempt:
‘The cinema substitutes for the real world one that accords more closely with
our desires’.
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3. By obsessive camera movements
A slow zoom-in draws the viewer into the bottomless pit of the
imaginary. In Samuel Blumenfeld and Laurent Vachaud’s book of interviews (7), De
Palma talks about the Kubrick of Barry Lyndon (1975), of the slowness of
that film, of ‘the impression that everything was happening in slow motion: the
movements of the camera and the actors. You really got the feeling of
perceiving time in a different way, as if we had actually returned to the 18th century’. In the same interview, he claims, regarding the zooms that are used
systematically in that film, that he would be bored, personally, to repeat the
same technique throughout an entire film. And yet this is what he does
tirelessly in Obsession, where he multiplies the long, fluid shots of
the undulating imaginary.
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7. Samuel Blumenfeld and Laurent Vachaud, Brian
De Palma (Paris
:
Calmann-Lévy, 2001).
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I will focus on two particular shots – De Palma being, by all
evidence, a filmmaker who loves shots one by one, and never shies away
from the temptation of virtuosity – as little as the script might lend itself
to it. The first is the 360 degree circular shot at the site of the memorial
that (with a discreet cross-fade) allows us to pass, in the same enveloping
movement, from the period of the death of his wife in 1959 to the film’s
present in 1975, where he finds her double ‘at the same age’ – a flagrant
confirmation that time does not exist for the unconscious person.
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In this shot, as in the bath scene in Kenji Mizoguchi’s The
Life of Oharu (1952) – whose beautiful paradox Godard picked up on in his
day – space ‘zaps’ time. We find the same process of the negation of time by
space again, in another circular panning shot, the one where Sandra enters the
forbidden bedroom (see next clip).
My second example is the metronome-shot between Michael and his
partner in the café overlooking the piazza of the Palazzo Vecchio, in the rain,
before the big scene of the return of the Same.
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What is this shot’s function? It is clearly the hypnotic balance
of a pendulum, preparing us – by putting us to sleep – for the scene of the
lure that follows. It is also, plainly, a reprise of the shot of the lamp on
the table in the couple’s Roman apartment in Godard’s Contempt (1963). De
Palma knows that film by heart. He talks, notably, about Georges Delerue’s
music, who he says is the greatest French composer of movie scores. Early on,
we know, he wanted to be Godard or nothing.
4. By the sound treatment
The music covers the images in folds, without the slightest
restraint, in order to bring us to a gentle, emotional participation that often
anticipates the actual scene itself; this is the case at San Miniato. This
music had been written once the film was edited, but Bernard Herrmann,
according to the filmmaker, conducted the orchestra too slowly, posing him problems
of synchronisation with the rhythm of the images. Herrmann was very happy with
this music, which he proclaims was inspired: ‘Coming out of the screening, I
heard the music’. One night, he got the idea that a choir was needed: ‘I don’t
remember writing that music’.
From the first shot, inside the house, De Palma mixes the sound in
a totally arbitrary manner, in order to eliminate any ‘effect of the real’
(Barthes’ term) on the aural level. Sounds are most often muffled, the shots
frequently de-realised and ‘emphatised’ by the music that freely takes over the
entire soundtrack.
5. By multipliers of the imaginary
Obsession is, from end to end, a great ‘evoker of imaginaries’. De Palma takes profit from
everything he can: not content with the imaginary of his own fiction, he garnishes
his film with all kinds of imaginary-evokers derived from elsewhere: from
literature (Dante and Beatrice in
La Vita Nuova), from fairy tales (Bluebeard,
Donkey Skin), from the tradition of imaginary high places (the forbidden
bedroom, the church), from Italian Renaissance painting and from mythology
(Orpheus-Michael lets the one who has returned from the land of shadows
disappear for a second time: ‘I missed my second chance to prove I loved her’).
It is also the case that, in our cinema-spectator imaginary, time does
not exist: a film can trigger in us a rush of memories of a movie posterior to
the one we are seeing. De Palma belongs to the generation of cinephilic
American filmmakers, admirers of the Nouvelle Vague and its way of infusing creation
with cinephile culture. Obsession constantly evokes memories of very
different films and cinematic universes; it matters little, for the imaginary
path of the film, whether they were conscious (as with Hitchcock’s films) or
not.
The fiction begins at the end of the War, in
Italy, where the hero meets his first wife in
the
Michael’s dream of marriage evokes the dream at the end of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966) – ‘I am Elisabet’ – and the passage from young adult
woman to the little girl she once was, in the airport sequence, irresistibly
evokes Lena Olin’s transformations in the same director’s After the
Rehearsal (1984). Sandra calls out ‘Mummy’ with her little girl’s voice,
like Marnie (in Hitchcock’s 1964 film) rediscovering her childhood voice in the
final sequence, where she accesses an instantly liberating, traumatic memory.
Hitchcock is omnipresent in this film, the idea of which was planted in De
Palma after a screening of a new print of Vertigo in the company of Paul
Schrader – who would go on to write the script with him, using Hitchcock’s film
as the avowed model. But Obsession is connected just as much to Rebecca (1940), Marnie and even Dial M for Murder (1954), from which it borrows
(following Godard) scissors as a murder weapon.
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When they first meet, Sandra tells Michael how she left her boring
life, working under the orders of petty
bosses (the Law), for the gentle tranquility of this church where she
does menial labour but feels happy. She does not measure herself against the
social scale but against a purely imaginary ‘well-being’ outside of reality, of
history – under the sign of the Virgin, in the warm, soft light of the church
candles. This is one of numerous movies that play with titillating the desire
or dream of being somewhere else, in a mythic place, in another life than one’s
own. In Camera Lucida, Barthes talks about this feeling – ‘It is quite
simply there that I should like to live’ – before a photograph of the
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8.
Roland Barthes (trans. Richard Howard), Camera
Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill & Wang, 1982), p.
38.
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* * *
Last names in this film impose, sometimes with a certain American
candour (the name D’Annunzio, for example), a perfect ‘similitude of signifier
and signified’. Amy/Sandra. Amy: Am I? What am I worth to my father?
This value can only come from a Symbolic order: how much am I worth in dollars?
Sandra: she who rises from the ashes of the first woman, burned alive in the
car explosion.
In most of De Palma’s films there is a somewhat dubious primal
scene that he himself has described and analysed many times: to avenge his
mother for a supposed betrayal by his father. Here, this is again Sandra’s
apparent situation: to avenge her dead mother for her father who let her die.
But, strangely, the father’s confession – ‘I killed her!’ – in the Dante and
Beatrice setting touches her: she realises that this man, who feels guilty for
the death of her mother, is anything but cynical. Even if the unconscious
situation, we shall see, is entirely different: by killing her mother, he made
it possible to realise her desire of marrying her father. She is, then,
debating with her own guilt, more than with her father’s supposed mistake. This
joins up to De Palma’s autobiography. He claims to have felt guilty, once he
was an adult, for having suspected, hunted and condemned his father too hastily.
Maria Virginia Portinari: she is the Virgin Mary, she who had no
need of a man to procreate. She is the figure of the denial of incest: instead
of being the mother who would make incest with the father impossible, she asks
for it on her death bed. Her daughter will not, then, be able to shy away from
it. She solemnly promises to do it at this fateful moment. From summation to
consummation: a dying mother (even a false mother) seals the possibility of
consummating the incest by a summation from which her daughter cannot escape.
Michael Courtland has a funny name for a builder who prefers
natural parks over construction projects.
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Robert LaSalle. The name LaSalle name is morphologically
constructed like De Palma (9): he is undoubtedly motivated by the same urge to
act upon the lives of others, to retroactively act upon the primal scene.
Contrary to the manipulator in Vertigo who barely exists as a character
and wants one simple thing (to rid himself of his wife by the perfect murder),
the character of LaSalle is much more difficult to grasp: what exactly does he
want out of this whole story? The apparent stakes are purely the lure of what
is to be gained: the domain of Pontchartrain. Bob disapproves of the fact that
Michael does not want to make this terrain – which he has turned into a
sanctuary – bear fruit. But it is clear that this is a matter of something
else: LaSalle being visibly richer than Michael, as witnessed by his
megalomaniac’s house. His deranged engagement in the destruction of Michael’s
family obeys more troubled, jealous urges, probably of a homosexual nature
(ruin, destroy the image of this too-perfect, too-happy family that he himself
will never create), with a point of masochism at the end of the film when he hysterically
screams at Michael – with whom he is undoubtedly, unconsciously in love – ‘Kill
me!’ All the evidence points to there being more invested psychologically than
purely financially in his determination to destroy the attraction between
father and daughter. It is an attraction whose force he sees clearly, that he
will never know, and that he does not know how to buy. It is with far too much
visible jubilation that he says to Sandra: ‘Your father never gives money, you
aren’t worth anything to him!’
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9.
Bergala mistakenly assumes here that the filmmaker ‘always
writes his family name connected like this’, i.e., DePalma, which is how he
renders it throughout the French text.
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* * *
1. The scene of the first dialogue in the San Miniato church is
sprinkled with complaisant signifiers. Sandra is working on the restoration of
Daddi’s Virgin (Daddy, obviously) and asks Michael if he loves the Virgin –
meaning, it is clear, the little girl that she was. Incidentally, there is no
work by Bernardo Daddi in San Miniato; what we do find there, however, are
works by Gaddi. There is only a step from Gaddi to Daddi, but this step makes a
‘Daddy’s Virgin’, on which Sandra is working, appear, obviously, a signifier of
her. When she asks him the question: was it necessary to restore Daddi’s Virgin
or sacrifice it for the older, rediscovered fresco at the moment of restoration?
– he responds that they must keep Daddi’s ‘covering’ image, meaning the New
Virgin hiding the first, the daughter who is hiding the mother. A few scenes
later, in regards to Dante and Beatrice, she tells him the story of the Lady of
the Screen whom Dante pretended to love, in order to be able to look at
Beatrice without bothering her: his dead wife was undoubtedly this Lady of the
Screen allowing him to love his daughter, without confronting society and the
underlying incest taboo.
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10. Bergala is alluding to the famous formula
for defining fetishism proposed by philosopher-psychoanalyst Dominique-Octave
Mannoni: je
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2. As in Vertigo, there is the re-encounter of a woman. But
where Scottie has to work, convince, intimidate and use force to make Judy
accept becoming the copy that conforms to Madeleine, Michael, for his part,
need make no effort for the second woman to perfectly conform to his fantasy.
She opposes him with neither physical resistance (her body is already and exactly the same), nor mental resistance (since her own desire is
the same). This is the reason he traverses the entire re-encounter with a
tired, sleepwalker’s air, a hypnotised gaze. He is laid back, and this is not
one of the least sources of pleasure (of imaginary coaxing) that the film
produces: reality bends to his desire practically without resistance, realises
it without hesitation, almost instantaneously, canceling time and death. It is
a film that believes in the resurrection and reincarnation that were buttresses
to Vertigo. In the very beautiful scene of Sandra ‘from behind’, where
she walks like her mother with smooth steps, weightlessly, she does it without
the suffering that represents for Judy, in Vertigo, the conformance to
Madeleine’s image. The ‘walk’ scene that brings back the image of a vanished
woman inevitably evokes Wilhelm Jensen’s novel Gradiva (1902): reality
is complaisant to the fantasy and brings back to life, ‘on a stage’, an image
that comes from another time.
3. The false mother intervenes like a pseudo-instance of reality.
With her providential illness, she prevents a tender evening alone together –
but all the better to push them in the direction of their marriage fantasy.
Besides, she will not bother them for long, since soon – after having accomplished
her symbolic mission – the script discreetly kills her.
4. The scripted reality’s greatest complaisance to desire and the
imaginary is the U-turn made by the plane bringing Sandra to
5. The final scene is the apotheosis of the two protagonists’
fierce desire to drown in the imaginary. They physically replay the film’s very
subject, like in a Minnellian dance: two beings rushing into incest, with
nothing able to introduce the slightest obstacle to their irresistible movement
towards imaginary fusion – materialised in the airport corridor by the first
circular tracking shot in De Palma’s work. (This filmmaking figure that, of
course comes from Hitchcock and Vertigo, will become a stylistic signature in De Palma). The coincidence
of their fantasies is too strong for reality to resist. This scene has a
beautiful pulsating effect (as Dominique Païni would say), from the beating of
the neon lights filmed in slow motion – an on-set accident accepted by the
filmmaker and, ultimately, entirely welcome.
* * *
The only thing the father and daughter must succeed in getting rid
of is the guilt involved in fleeing from reality and crossing the bounds of the
incest taboo. Reality is not threatening, but the gnawing guilt of the awakened
dreamer is: do I have the right to impudently live in the delights of the
imaginary? Neither one is psychotic. Like the brother and sister in Vladimir
Nabokov’s novel Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969), they are well
aware that there is another reality than the one of their fantasy – even if
they do not want to go back to it. This guilt takes the unoccupied place of the
real world in the fiction, but, ultimately, does not weigh heavily on them.
The memorial monument is truly a tomb for the guilt that, for
Michael, should be linked to
Elizabeth’s
death (‘I killed her’). A massive, sealed tomb. We find it again in miniature
overlooking the wedding cake, signifying that the secret of the incest is well
sealed at the very moment when this incest is accomplished within the
legitimacy of marriage. Michael sacrificed a lot of money there that would have
been easy to keep. But this sanctuary (constructed on the grounds of
Pontchartrain) is obviously what will cause the return of what has been
deliberately barred, via the
character of LaSalle who cannot stand the maintaining of this land as a private
sanctuary.
The overpowering guilt about the temptation towards incest is clearly signified in the first scene of the film – a scene that is meant to celebrate the success of a perfect couple. From the first shot of this scene, however, the house is filmed like the house where the crime is committed in Halloween (1978) or Blow Out (1981): seen at night, from afar, the windows lit intermittently (because of what – as we do not at first know – are film slides of the happy marriage). Something is threatening in the first, exterior views of the house, contrasting with the exhibition of happiness taking place inside. |
This house will rapidly become the site of a murder where a secret
is buried with its ‘Bluebeard bedroom’. But all of the returns of guilt will be
swept away by the desire shared between the two protagonists (father and
daughter) to deny reality and Law, and to remain in the imaginary of their
desire for incestuous fusion.
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Rebecca is clearly the model for this scene in which the couple arrives,
after a long trip, in the man’s house, where the memory of the dead, mythic
first wife reigns. But De Palma mixes this scene with a scene from another
Hitchcock: the assumption of the imaginary in Vertigo.
The placement of the camera in the shot of their taxi’s arrival is
manifestly that of the dead woman who awaits them.
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When they penetrate into the house, De Palma mimics the shot of
the assumption of the imaginary from our first Vertigo clip: the shot
with the green light that seems to emerge from the character who moves forward
like a ghost towards the desiring subject. But here, the schema of Vertigo is reversed: it is him seen by her, as though to mark the
inversion of the two scripts in regards to the desire directing the film.
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In Vertigo, poor Judy’s desire is literally blocked by
Scottie’s mad urge to recreate a vanished creature out of her. The strong,
obsessive, blind desire belongs to the man. Judy never really manages to
express her own desire. Here, to the contrary of the model film, there is
another desiring subject, Amy/Sandra. Because Obsession’s script is also
– I want to say especially – about a girl who wants to sleep with her
complaisant father, a script about a fulfilled and ultimately happy Oedipus.
The major difference with Vertigo is that here it is a matter of incest
– meaning blind adhesion to the Imaginary – leaving the Law off-screen. De
Palma even wrote and shot the scene where Michael actually sleeps with
his daughter, placing
it beyond doubt for the spectator – but the
distributors got scared, and De Palma was obliged to mask the wedding night
sequence as a hard-to-read dream, in ‘undulating’ images signifying the
presence of a dream ... in this film that is already, in its normal regime, a
dream.
As in Vertigo, the lured man does not know that another man
(his partner) is the cause of the staging of the return of the same, and that
the returning person is manipulated by a third party to signal the singularity
of his desire. But in reality, contrary to Vertigo this time, the true
motor (and manipulator) of the whole story is the nine-year-old girl’s desire
to marry her father, the film realising this innocent incestuous fantasy to the
letter. The film’s first scene is very clear in this regard. It is the evening
of the apotheosis of this successful couple that everyone envies: ten years of
marriage, social success, an adorable little girl – and still desire and love
between them, like on the first day. But coming between this ideal couple
exhibiting their bourgeois perfection is the little girl’s desire to dance with
her father; his initiation of a dance à trois – father-mother-daughter –
is very quickly abandoned to the benefit of the father-daughter couple alone.
The daughter manages, without the least difficulty, to move the mother away and
take her place, realising her and her father’s desire without any opposition.
This scene is in some ways the happy, positive side of the devastating opening
scene of Rossellini’s Europa ’51 (1952), where the boy desires to turn
his mother’s attention to him and away from worldly things that are preventing
any filial bonding with her – like young Proust at the beginning of In
Search of Lost Time. But the little boy dies, whereas everything (even her
mother and rival) bends to the desire of the little girl in Obsession.
The little girl’s story is articulated around the initial
question: What am I worth? If her
father gives bundles of white paper rather than real bills to her kidnappers,
it means that, in his eyes, she is worthless. She must, then, escape from the
system of exchange value, from the symbolic order, in which she is worthless in
her father’s eyes, in order to take refuge in another order, that of the
imaginary. Here, value has no general equivalent, and bonding with her father,
outside the authority of the Law, overcomes any scale of value – the only thing
that counts, to these indistinct subjects, is the perfect symmetry of their
desires. And she manages this, as the true manipulator of the film’s scenario
of unconsciousnesses. It is her, and not LaSalle, who is the true stage-manager
of this story.
There are, however, two characters who pay for this
father-daughter bond with their life: the mother – who they ultimately both
wanted dead so as to be able to wed in peace – and the third party who is both
manipulative and bothersome, LaSalle. Michael kills the person who comes to
take them out of their dream, out of the imaginary father-daughter bond,
allowing them to return to this shared dream. Everything happens like in Ada
or Ardor, where Nabokov plunges us into the delights of the imaginary, of the
landscape of Ardis, of innocent sexuality, of a guilt-free insolence and joyousness
– because in this novel, too, incest is accepted by the brother and sister, and
almost by their real father. A third party, Lucette – the sublime younger
sister character – also pays in reality for the other two’s denial of the incest
taboo, by committing suicide at the very moment her sister’s image unexpectedly
appears on a movie screen. The past innocence of the two sublime lovers’
happiness has a price to pay in reality: this death is among the 20th century’s most beautiful passages of writing. But in Ada or Ardor, as in Obsession – and for the same reason – these deaths elicit no remorse;
death does not exist in the imaginary.
* * *
In this film, Brian De Palma – as we have seen at length – puts all
his cinematic eggs in the sole basket of the imaginary, without rough reality
arriving to stop us for any significant amount of time from dreaming of this
happy incest, and returning to it at the film’s end. Obsession is all
pleasant, dreamy, suave emotion created through music, cottony images,
complaisant signifiers and a docile script. Do we have a right to like this
kind of cinema at face value, without a cultural alibi (De Palma is an auteur)
or an analytic one (it is useful to analyse every object)? Is this an unworthy
pleasure?
Rossellini, Godard, Pialat, Kiarostami, a fortiori Straub
and Huillet – in short, our major filmmakers of choice – fiercely refuse this
almost ontological complaisance of cinema to the imaginary, to fantasy, to
dreams. For them (for us?), a film cannot exist in the register of the
imaginary alone. They would find this unworthy of cinema, too easy, a bit
nauseating: what was possible in the great Hollywood cinema of the 1930s and
‘40s, and what they are able to admire in Douglas Sirk, Vincente Minnelli or
George Cukor, is no longer so, after the radical loss of innocence brought
about by the war and the reality of the camps. It is not for nothing that late
Fellini, despite its obvious genius, has always posed a problem to those for
whom cinema must operate on the encounter of the imaginary (a world that is
supremely in accordance with our desires) and reality in its roughest form (a
resistant world).
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Gilles Deleuze, always wary of the concept of the imaginary (11),
once spoke of Godard’s lack of complaisance or sympathy for fantasies: ‘He drains fantasy images of any
imaginary dreams and renders them flat and trivial’. Because,
after all, the gentle, enveloping warmth of the imaginary is also what readers
of romance novels are looking for. Their goal is, in the end, the same as that
of the cultivated cinephile who plunges with delight into Obsession.
When and how does a film functioning in the pure imaginary go back to being a
possible good object, worthy of our love for cinema? Can we today enjoy a film
that only functions in the imaginary, without mixing with the roughness of
reality? Is this not what cultivated people – to whom we belong – find naïve
and alienating for ‘innocent’ viewers, who say they go to the movies to forget
the roughness of life, to dream of another world where nothing would get in the
way of their dreams?
Must we be ashamed, then, of loving Obsession?
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11. See Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations,
1972-1990 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).
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First appeared in
Jacques Aumont (ed.), Les voyages du spectateur. De l’imaginaire au cinéma (Paris:
Léo Scheer/Cinémathèque française, 2004), the proceedings of the Conférences du
Collège d’Histoire de l’Art Cinématographique 2003-4. Translated from the
French by Ted Fendt. Reprinted with permission of the author.
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from Issue 4: Walks |
© Original French text © Alain Bergala 2004; English translation © Ted Fendt and LOLA 2013. Cannot be reprinted without permission of the author and editors. |