Psychoanalytic Film Theory and The Rules of the Game

Film Theory in Practice

by Todd McGowan

The Film Theory in Practice Series fills a gaping hole in the world of film theory. By marrying the explanation of film theory with interpretation of a film, the volumes provide discrete examples of how film theory can serve as the basis for textual analysis. The first book in the series, Psychoanalytic Film Theory and The Rules of the Game, offers a concise introduction to psychoanalytic film theory in jargon-free language and shows how this theory can be deployed to interpret Jean Renoir's classic film. It traces the development of psychoanalytic film theory through its foundation in the thought of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan through its contemporary manifestation in the work of theorists like Slavoj Žižek and Joan Copjec. This history will help students and scholars who are eager to learn more about this important area of film theory and bring the concepts of psychoanalytic film theory into practice through a detailed interpretation of the film.

Genres: Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Film, Nonfiction

192 pages, Hardcover

First published January 29, 2015

About the author

Todd McGowan is Associate Professor of Film at the University of Vermont, US. He is the author of The Fictional Christopher Nolan (2012), Out of Time: Desire in Atemporal Cinema (2011), The Impossible David Lynch (2007), The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan (2007), and other books.

Reviews

[Trevor · Rating 5 out of 5]

The last part of this book is literally an analysis of a film called The Rules of the Game – a 1939 film by the French director Jean Renoir. I’ve never seen this film and so, like so many pieces of modern film criticism that works through a film I have never seen, I tend to get a bit lost in it all. Film is such a visual medium and descriptions of film always feel like they are leaving out what is most important in the film itself – its immediacy and the symbolic meaning of its imagery – that I’m not sure how to attend to the descriptions that I’m being presented with or the interpretations I’m being offered.

This is an extended discussion of Lacanian psychology, particularly that of the gaze. Now, I don’t pretend to fully understand this. The difference between the gaze and just watching is that we are confronted by ourselves in the gaze. In the gaze we see hints of our repressed desires. And film works best when it forces this realisation upon us. The author mentions the moment in Psycho after the shower scene when the murderer seeks to get rid of the woman’s car by driving it into a swamp. The problem is that the car does not fully sink. And it is here that we are confronted with the gaze – with our unfulfilled desires. Because we ought to be glad the car didn’t sink, since it is the best hope we have that he will be caught and held accountable for his murder – and yet, like him, our repressed desire is that he will get away with his murder and it will be – unlike the car – covered up.

The problem with desires is that they only remain desires if they are thwarted. Once we possess the desired object, it is no longer desired. And this makes for interesting film criticism, since ‘getting the girl’ is always something that comes after a long process of obstacles that need to be overcome and where this penultimately means the object of our desire will be forever denied us. These obstacles heighten our desire for the desired object. And the problem is multiplied because our desire for the other implies that we should seek to obtain them by giving them what they want – but we can’t do this because not only do we not know what they want, it is likely they don’t know what they want either. The Guardian has a kind of ongoing series of articles in which couples talk about the time when they knew their partner was the one. What is often interesting about these is that this isn’t always the most likely moment, but is often an everyday event that suddenly acquires heightened significance. They perform a simple act of love and it is like the entire world changes. This is probably also true of the opposite – when we suddenly stop desiring the other. It doesn’t have to be an act of cruelty, it can also be a mundane act. Suddenly, we see them as they are, or as they are now, and our desire slips away.

This is a kind of working out of Lacan’s distinction between the gaze and the look. In the gaze, we never see what we are looking at, but what is always hidden. This is the nature of desire, and this can be taken both literally and figuratively. This is part of the reason why lingerie is sexier than nudity. What is hidden plays with the gaze rather than the look. Metaphorically, cinema is at its height when it forces us to see what is left unseen. That we cannot merely look at and see. Here desire is heightened and we gaze, because there is always more to see, even though we cannot already see what it is we most want to look upon. And if the scene is particularly good, not only will we form an image of the unseen in our mind’s eye, but also this image will display the other hidden object – the object of our desire, the object of our repressed desires.

I’m going to have to read some Lacan, it seems.

[Cindy Zeiher · Rating 5 out of 5]

A logical and comprehensive application of psychoanalytic theory read alongside a wonderful film choice. I highly recommend this to anyone approaching Freudian or Lacanian psychoanalysis for the first time as well as to those who are relatively conversant with psychoanalytic theories. Complex conceptualisations and terms are deftly explicated and the film allows the reader a way in which to understand and appreciate psychoanalysis. McGowan is a truly masterful theoretician - the dovetailing of film and psychoanalysis is in good hands.

[Aung Myat Minn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found an another defender of authentic psychoanalysis against its enemies, namely politicization of psychoanalysis, the pathetic foucaultian subjects affected by ideology and trapped within power relations ,the misunderstandings of Screen theorists about Lacanian concepts and so on.I think it is just such an interesting book to distinguish the genuine psychoanalytical approaches towards the films from pesudo theorizing thinkings of screen theories and others like them.

[Ben Albertyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

“If the spectator is all-perceiving, she or he would have no desire to perceive. Film actually offers only a partial perception of the visual and aural fields. It engages us by throwing up obstacles, and we engage a film through what we don’t see or hear, not what we do. It is only film’s ability to present our desire with an obstacle in the form of the gaze or the voice that generates an interest in what’s happening on the screen.”

[Colin Cox · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Psychoanalytic Film Theory and The Rules of the Game, Todd McGowan asks an essential question for anyone interested in theorizing film: What do films do? His answer, inflected psychoanalytically, is, "the cinema remains a dream factory, a form of public dreaming" (1). To that end, films explore the ways we desire. According to McGowan, desire is, psychoanalytically speaking, "always illicit and aims at transgressing a social limit" (3). McGowan continues, "We want the luxury suite in the hotel, a Rolls Royce, and a new romantic partner because they aren't readily available and because others don't have them. We associate enjoyment with these desires, and we enjoy the act of desiring...Every desire, from the most mundane to the most extravagant, touches on this excess that results in repression. The dream lifts repression and facilitates access to our desire, but it does so at the price of a distortion that occurs during the dream work" (3). To punctuate McGowan's reading of Freud and the importance of dreams as they relate to desire, he writes, "Desire depends on not realizing itself, and the dream work makes this clear" (5).

When McGowan writes "dream work," he means the form our unconscious takes. Form matters not only to McGowan but to psychoanalysis at larger. This is why films are so important when one attempts to trace the development and production of desire. McGowan writes, "There is a version of the dream work operative in the cinema, and it is the demands of film form. Just as psychoanalysis pays attention to the dream work in order to understand unconscious desire, psychoanalytic film theory focuses on film form in pursuit of the same end...The form of the film holds the secret not of the desire of the filmmaker but of the spectator" (9).

When McGowan references "the desire of the spectator" later in the introduction, he refers to Lacan's concept, the gaze. The gaze has a rich, interesting, and, at times, confounding history in both film theory and psychoanalysis. For feminist film scholars like Laura Mulvey, the gaze "projects its phantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness." Mulvey's reading is thought-provoking and correct, but it is not what Lacan has in mind with a term like the gaze. Instead, the gaze marks the moment when the visual field disrupts a presumed sense of mastery. In this sense, the gaze is the missing or lost object embedded within the visual field. McGowan, while summarizing Joan Copjec, writes, "The look is the subjective activity of seeing, while the gaze is the objet a within the field of vision that the look cannot see...There is no look that can see the gaze, but there is no look without the gaze that it cannot see" (64). In effect, this means that as a spectator, we cannot enjoy a privileged, quasi-objective position beyond lack in the visual field. This is important to understand because cinema has a distinct ideological function, but the gaze disrupts cinema's ideological interpolation. McGowan writes, "The gaze as Lacan theorizes it--located at the stain in the image--is not the site where ideology works on the subject. It is rather the point of a hole within the ideological structure" (75). This is why ideology's worst enemy, the capital "R" Rogue in its Rouges' Gallery, is the Lacanian gaze: "Ideology functions by obscuring the subject's involvement in the world that it experiences" (75). For films, the gaze is the rebuttal.

The remainder of Psychoanalystic Film Theory and The Rules of the Game applies the concepts from section one to the 1939 Jean Renoir film The Rules of the Game. Even though I was unfamiliar with Renoir's work, McGowan is quite good at leading an uninitiated reader through his analysis of the film. This is certainly one of the many strengths of this series; one need not have familiarity with the film in question to understand the analysis.

While Psychoanalytic Film Theory and The Rules of the Game may not fit as neatly within McGowan's larger theoretical project as some of his recent books, it is an excellent example of how one can apply psychoanalytic theory to a text. Plus, it recuperates, as McGowan sees it, film theory by coupling it with psychoanalysis. For this, anyone persuaded by psychoanalysis should read Psychoanalytic Film Theory and The Rules of the Game.

[Gage Hoefer]

A good primer on the basic tenets of psychoanalysis, with concrete examples in film (that I found very helpful). I had essentially zero knowledge on what psychoanalysis actually was- I basically had heard the name "Lacan" before, without knowing anything else- so I think this was a good place to start.

[Bob Nabers · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best intros to lacanian thought I've read

[Sel · Rating 5 out of 5]

interesting af