Fetishism in the Cinema
Litsa Mouka
1 I know very well, but all the same… A study of fetishism
I know very well, but all the same...
A study of fetishism in relation to cinema
This dissertation is an exploration into the different ways cinema utilises processes of fetishisation to evoke desire and disavow lack. In all cases it will show how the basic notion of fetishism functions as a symbolic substitution for the lack and as such, how it imposes itself onto the structure of film and the experience of watching/looking. Furthermore, how commodity (Marxian) fetishism - as an intrinsic value of the socioeconomic structure of capitalism – exists in the context of film, and additionally how film itself poses as a commodity itself; the two are inexorably linked. Drawing on Laura Mulvey’s feminist Freudian analysis, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, in the first case I will show how classical Hollywood narrative depends on the erotic spectacle of the woman’s body; which simultaneously evokes a castration threat and then assuages it through its eroticised fetishisation. Techniques of camera, lighting, make-up, costume and the narrative’s technique of objectifying the female body through the eyes of the male protagonist (the spectator’s on-screen surrogate) combine to create an effect where the heightened spectacle of the female body substitutes for its lack of a penis and the unconscious threat of castration that is invoked by it. The female body comes to symbolise the phallus. In the second case, (drawing on Christian Metz’s essay The Imaginary Signifier I will show how, at another level, the whole on-screen image is fetishised; how the absence/presence of the screen image, its illusory nature, where the illusion of an animate threedimensional world is created by the projection of light onto a two-dimensional screen in a darkened room, invokes an absence which is assuaged by an illusory presence. It provides the symbolic substitution for the lack it evokes. In turn, this evokes -
1 I know very well, but all the same… A study of fetishism
I know very well, but all the same...
A study of fetishism in relation to cinema
This dissertation is an exploration into the different ways cinema utilises processes of fetishisation to evoke desire and disavow lack. In all cases it will show how the basic notion of fetishism functions as a symbolic substitution for the lack and as such, how it imposes itself onto the structure of film and the experience of watching/looking. Furthermore, how commodity (Marxian) fetishism - as an intrinsic value of the socioeconomic structure of capitalism – exists in the context of film, and additionally how film itself poses as a commodity itself; the two are inexorably linked. Drawing on Laura Mulvey’s feminist Freudian analysis, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, in the first case I will show how classical Hollywood narrative depends on the erotic spectacle of the woman’s body; which simultaneously evokes a castration threat and then assuages it through its eroticised fetishisation. Techniques of camera, lighting, make-up, costume and the narrative’s technique of objectifying the female body through the eyes of the male protagonist (the spectator’s on-screen surrogate) combine to create an effect where the heightened spectacle of the female body substitutes for its lack of a penis and the unconscious threat of castration that is invoked by it. The female body comes to symbolise the phallus. In the second case, (drawing on Christian Metz’s essay The Imaginary Signifier I will show how, at another level, the whole on-screen image is fetishised; how the absence/presence of the screen image, its illusory nature, where the illusion of an animate threedimensional world is created by the projection of light onto a two-dimensional screen in a darkened room, invokes an absence which is assuaged by an illusory presence. It provides the symbolic substitution for the lack it evokes. In turn, this evokes -
Bibliography: Kaplan, Ann E. (ed.) Psychoanalysis and the Cinema (American Film Institute Rutledge, 1990) • Metz, Christian. The Imaginary Signifier. (Indiana University Press, 1986) Mulvey, Laura