New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics

150 PSYCHOANALYSIS
achieve this ambiguous duality, the cinema in some sense “constructs” its
spectator along a number of psychoanalytic modalities that link the
dreamer to the film viewer. But a film is not exactly the same thing as a
dream; in order for the film spectator to become the subject of a fantasy
that is not selfgenerated, a situation must be produced in which the viewer
is “more immediately vulnerable and more likely to let his own fantasies
work themselves into those offered by the fiction machine” (Augst 1981:
3). This process hinges on the distinction between the real person (as an
individual) and the film viewer (as a construct), and psychoanalytic film
theory draws on operations of the unconscious in order to explain it. Five
intersecting factors go into the psychoanalytic construction of this viewer:
(1) a state of regression is produced; (2) a situation of belief is constructed;
(3) mechanisms of primary identification are activated (onto which
secondary identifications are then “grafted”); (4) fantasy structures, such
as the family romance, are put into play by the cinematic fiction; and (5)
those “marks of enunciation” that stamp the film with authorship must be
concealed.
We have already seen how the processes of the apparatus itself—
and more specifically, the conditions of reception—induce a state of
regression in the viewer which makes susceptibility to the cinematic fantasy
come about. This also creates the context for the peculiar kind of belief
that characterizes the viewing situation—the cinema spectator is first and
foremost a credulous one. Using the psychoanalytic model of FETISHISM
(strictly speaking, the child’s maintenance of a belief in the maternal
phallus in the face of the anxiety-inducing evidence of her castration), and
drawing his discussion in part from the work of psychoanalyst Octave
Mannoni, Metz describes belief in the cinema as a process of denial or
DISAVOWAL—the mechanism, or mode of defense, invoked in fetishism,
whereby the subject refuses to recognize the reality of a traumatic
perception. Behind every incredulous spectator (who knows the events
taking place on the screen are fictional) lies a credulous one (who
nevertheless believes these events to be true); the spectator thus disavows
what he or she knows in order to maintain the cinematic illusion. The
whole effect of the film-viewing situation turns on this continual back-andforth
of knowledge and belief, this split in the consciousness of the
spectator between “I know full well…” and “But, nevertheless…,” this
“no” to reality and “yes” to the dream. The spectator is, in a sense, a
double-spectator, whose division of the self is uncannily like that between
conscious and unconscious.
“I know…but, nevertheless” is the structure of fetishism in
psychoanalysis, for the subject disavows the lack interpreted as resulting
from castration precisely by an imaginary belief in its fulfillment. Fetishism
is different from negation, or total suppression, in that by virtue of its
disavowal of difference, it continually evokes what it is meant to deny.