Out of the past

Both noir and Lacan are areas that have in the past been well explored in Film Studies, and this project engages with the corpus of work on each, but my purpose will be twofold: fi rst, I

GR AV

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L A C N S E

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OUT OF THE PAST

LACAN AND FILM NOIR

BEN TYRER

Series Editors

Calum   Neill School of Psychology and Sociology Edinburgh Napier University Edinburgh ,  United Kingdom

Derek   Hook

Duquesne University  

Pittsburgh, USA

settle into the 21st century, the resonance of Lacan’s thought arguably only beginning now to be properly felt, both in terms of its application

to clinical matters and in its application to a range of human activities and interests Th e Palgrave Lacan Series is a book series for the best new writing in the Lacanian fi eld, giving voice to the leading writers of a new generation of Lacanian thought Th e series will comprise original mono-graphs and thematic, multi-authored collections Th e books in the series will explore aspects of Lacan’s theory from new perspectives and with original insights Th ere will be books focused on particular areas of or issues in clinical work Th ere will be books focused on applying Lacanian theory to areas and issues beyond the clinic, to matters of society, poli-tics, the arts and culture Each book, whatever its particular concern, will work to expand our understanding of Lacan’s theory and its value in the 21st century

More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/15116

Out of the Past

Lacan and Film Noir

Th e Palgrave Lacan Series

ISBN 978-3-319-30941-5 ISBN 978-3-319-30942-2 (eBook)

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-30942-2

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016940578

© Th e Editor(s) (if applicable) and Th e Author(s) 2016

Th is work is subject to copyright All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifi cally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfi lms or in any other physical way, and trans- mission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed

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Th e publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made

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Printed on acid-free paper

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To Sarah Cooper; without her unending support and infi nite patience this project could not have existed To Hector Kollias for reminding me that Lacanians squabbling are “like dogs pissing in the street” To Ginette Vincendeau, in whose undergraduate class on noir the idea for this project

fi rst germinated To the Arts and Humanities Research Council, which supported the doctoral research upon which this monograph is based, and to Richard Dyer and Jo Malt for their help in securing that funding

To Todd McGowan for his helpful comments on the manuscript and for his on-going support of my work To Eleanor Christie, Sharla Plant and everyone at Palgrave Macmillan and my excellent editors, Derek Hook and Calum Neill, for believing that we could turn all of this into my fi rst book To the following friends, colleagues and fellow travellers: Louis Bayman, Mark Betz, Pietro Bianchi, Lucy Bolton, Tom Brown, Judith

Forgacs, Markos Hadjioannou, Hannah Hamad, Mary Harrod, Alice Haylett Bryan, David Henderson, Owen Hewitson, Lilly Husbands,

Ed Lamberti, Rob Lapsley, Aaron McMullan, John Mullarkey, Alastair Phillips, Michele Pierson, Agnieszka Piotrowska, Alex Sergeant, Martha Shearer, Mark Shiel, Greg Singh, David Sorfa, Belén Vidal, Catherine Wheatley, and Daniel White To Emma, for enduring the stress and the mess of long years of research And to M + P; this is for you

An earlier version of part of Chapter 2 was previously published under the title, “Film Noir as Point de Capiton: Double Indemnity , Structure and

Temporality” in Film-Philosophy 17 (2013) http://www.fi lm-philosophy.com/index.php/f-p/article/view/288 ; and an earlier version of part of Chapter 4 was previously published under the title, “Film Noir Doesn’t Exist: A Lacanian Topology” in Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society , ed

David Henderson (Newcastle: CSP, 2012), 127–141 Both are reprinted here with permission from the respective publishers

1.1 Film Noir/Film Th eory/Psychoanalysis: Parallel Histories 3

2.5 Double Indemnity , the Graph of Desire, Metalepsis 56 2.6 Gilda, Th e Killers and the Meaning of the Letter 63

6.1 Open Endings, Sutured Narratives:

7.3 Th e Necessary Fiction of Noir 230

© Th e Editor(s) (if applicable) and Th e Author(s) 2016

B Tyrer, Out of the Past, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-30942-2_1

1

Th is project begins as an act of mourning For a lost cinematic past For

a longstanding critical tradition For fi lm noir It is about the loss of an idea, and how we came to have it in the fi rst place Th is loss was precipi-tated by three works: James Naremore’s More Th an Night , Marc Vernet’s

“ Film Noir on the Edge of Doom” and Th omas Elsaesser’s Weimar Cinema and After Th e history off ered by these revisionist accounts necessitated a wholesale re-evaluation of my understanding of fi lm noir: it was not the one I had been taught by Paul Schrader or Raymond Durgnat, where—for example—noir was the articulation of German Expressionism in Hollywood, or an American response to war-time turmoil Instead, the idea of fi lm noir appeared as the product of complex discursive construc-tion, an overdetermined site of critical concern and academic investment

An entire tradition had been founded on something that now appeared not to exist Film noir crumbled before me, and left in its place were fascinating accounts of trans-Atlantic cultural infl uence and complex timelines of discovery and rediscovery that seemed to pose fundamental questions regarding historiography and our relation to the past It was in the work of Jacques Lacan that I found both a way to come to terms with this loss and the possibility of proposing answers to these questions of

Introduction: Into the Past/Out

of the Past

(fi lm) history Reading texts from his Écrits , such as “Th e Instance of the

Dialectic of Desire”, I saw a structural corollary between the sation of noir as a retroactively constituted critical category and Lacan’s investigation, through structural linguistics, of the retroactive production

characteri-of meaning Here, then, was another lost past—characteri-of psychoanalysis and cinema—that called out to me And as I watched again fi lms such as Th e Maltese Falcon (1941), Double Indemnity (1944) and D.O.A (1950) and

saw them to be concerned throughout with the retroactive production of knowledge, it seemed to me that, despite the sense in which “the time of

the study of cinema, there remained the richly suggestive possibilities of

an exploration of Lacan and fi lm, even over the heretofore well-trodden ground of fi lm noir I mourn the loss of the idea of noir and seek through this study to honour its memory; however, I also insist upon a more melancholic attachment to the project of psychoanalytic fi lm theory Lost for a while, perhaps, but certainly not dead: it is an object I refuse

to relinquish because of the unexplored possibilities it off ers No longer should Lacan be made to play the part of Jeff Bailey in Out of the Past

(1947), held forever responsible for the sins that went before Th is book will seek to revisit that intersection of psychoanalytic and fi lm theories

fi rst articulated in the 1970s, to plot a new trajectory—alongside that

of Slavoj Žižek or Todd McGowan—for Lacan and cinema My aim is therefore to present a new reading of the constitution of the critical cat-egory of noir through Lacanian psychoanalysis Both noir and Lacan are areas that have in the past been well explored in Film Studies, and this project engages with the corpus of work on each, but my purpose will

be twofold: fi rst, I will engage with Lacanian theory in order to perform

a meta-critical analysis of the writing on noir in the last seven decades

in order to present an original theory of criticism and historiography for the cinema; and, second, through this account—and through the exploration of Lacan with particular noir fi lms, such as Double Indemnity

and Th e Maltese Falcon —I will aim to demonstrate the possibilities for a

Lacanian Film Studies (as one that engages fully with Lacan’s entire body

of work) that has hitherto not been realised

1.1 Film Noir/Film Theory/Psychoanalysis:

Parallel Histories

Th e developments of cinema, psychoanalysis and fi lm noir present tant intersections in the history of Film Studies Th ese stories are so well known that they hardly need repeating here: from the Lumière Brothers and Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer in 1895, to the Surrealists, and Sam Goldwyn’s $100,000 off er to Freud for a screenplay about love in

impor-1925, the early developments of cinema and psychoanalysis are intimately connected 1 Indeed, Janet Bergstrom’s collection Endless Night charts the

“parallel histories” of cinema and psychoanalysis through the twentieth century: parallels that I seek further to nuance through this investigation

noted, the popularisation of psychoanalysis in America coincided with the

travelled to the US in 1909 and, as their steamship pulled into New York harbour, Freud is said to have joked, “Th ey don’t realise we’re bringing them the plague”, it was not until fi lms as diverse as Bringing Up Baby

and Stranger on the Th ird Floor (1940)—arguably the fi rst American noir,

featuring a surreal and expressive dream sequence—that the “symptoms”

of psychoanalysis could truly be discerned in Hollywood 4

In fact, fi lm noir is replete with references of one sort or another to

Ladd’s Raven reveals, “Every night I dream I read somewhere about a

… about a kind of doctor A psycho-something If you tell your dream, you don’t have to dream it anymore”, to the topography of the conscious/unconscious that a psychiatrist draws for Oedipal anti-hero Al Walker in

Th e Dark Past (1948) And from the less pronounced Freudianisms of

elicit or repressed sexuality in Double Indemnity , Gilda (1946) and Th e Big Sleep (1946) to the extended explorations of psychology and psychia-

try in Spellbound (1945), Th e Woman in the Window (1944), Th e Dark Mirror (1946) and Whirlpool (1949), a popularised version of psycho-

analysis can be seen as a key determinant of the noir universe Indeed, this has been recognised by key critics from Raymond Borde and Etienne

Chaumeton, who list psychoanalysis in their “Sources of Film Noir” and note that questions of “hidden meaning” and the play between eroticism and censorship characterise the series, to Schrader, who insists that “the roots of fi lm noir are World War II, and German Expressionism, exis-tentialism and Freud” 5 Frank Krutnik is more specifi c, suggesting that it was between the emergence of hard-boiled fi ction and its adaptation into

fi lm noir that psychoanalysis came to prominence in American culture, rendering it a dimension particular to the cinematic rather than liter-ary exploration of noir; and more recently, Marlisa Santos has devoted a book-length study— Th e Dark Mirror: Psychiatry and Film Noir —to the

argument that fi lm noir was utterly dependent upon the introduction

of psychoanalytic principles, through, for example, the psychiatric ment of war veterans 6

In fact, we should note that both psychoanalysis and noir are selves also crucial to the development of academic Film Studies and fi lm theory as a discourse 7 For example, Naremore notes the parallel trajec-tories of the terms “ auteur ” and “ fi lm noir ” in the work of the Cahiers du Cinéma group, both operating as the triumph of “style”—one individual

them-and one collective—over the constraints of the studio system; he adds that “it is no accident that the two terms would enter the English lan-guage at the same time” In America, the rise of academic Film Studies

in the late 1960s coincided with renewed popularity of fi lm noir (for example, in college fi lm societies) 8 Mark Bould argues that in Britain,

Marxism, Lacanian psychoanalysis and (post-)structuralism”—was at the centre of the theoretical developments then shaping Film Studies 9 And

it is, moreover, the British tradition I would argue—in its relation to the French and American—that was central to the development of psycho-analytic fi lm theory

Th e principal site of this discourse was, of course, the journal Screen ,

which, as Philip Rosen notes, made a concerted eff ort to publish English translations of foreign critical works on fi lm with the aim of establishing new modes of thinking in British fi lm culture 10 Th rough this combina-tion of continental theory and the analysis of Hollywood fi lms, Screen —

as we know—rapidly established itself as a leading venue for the critical examination of the cinema Such discourse can ultimately be traced back

to 1970 and Jean-Louis Baudry’s essay “Ideological Eff ects of the Basic

translated in Film Quarterly ), but for Anglophone studies it is the same

year’s collaborative reading of Young Mr Lincoln (1939) by the Cahiers

du Cinéma group, translated in Screen in 1972: from this point,

psy-choanalysis became the dominant discourse of the journal, which itself

Freud and Lacan 11

and soon after by Screen 12 Metz began his career as a semiologist of the cinema, producing studies that expounded a structuralist understand-

(a Saussurean language system of intercommunication, arbitrary signs, and double articulation); it could nonetheless be considered a language because it consisted of the ordering of signifying elements 13 Metz’s turn

in the structuralist mode developed by Lacan—was then a logical

question: “What contribution can Freudian psychoanalysis make to the study of the cinematic signifi er?” His answer was a theory of spectator-ship that, for example, considered the modes of presence and absence in

fi lm as compared with theatre, leading him to the conclusion that “every

fi lm is a fi ction fi lm”, which is to say, predicated upon the presence of absence 14 Moreover, taking up Baudry’s suggestions regarding the cinema and the mirror stage, Metz formulated a theory of cinematic identifi ca-tion (with both the mechanism and the content of the fi lm) situated in

psychoanalysis and Film Studies led to a proliferation of psychoanalytic

fi lm theory in the work of critics such as Stephen Heath, Ben Brewster and Colin MacCabe and moreover to some of the most infl uential works

of fi lm theory in general: such as Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema”, in which psychoanalysis, noir and fi lm analysis all converge to produce a theory of male castration anxiety formulated in terms of the noir femme fatale 15 Introducing feminism to the theory of

spectatorship, Mulvey’s article thus suggested yet another possibility for the ideological critique of the cinema and has since become a canoni-cal work in the fi eld of not only fi lm theory but also Film Studies more broadly

Two years later, Screen again took up the theorisation of fi lm and

Lacanian psychoanalysis in terms of the concept of “suture” Th e “Dossier”

on suture published in 1977 included Jacques-Alain Miller’s original oretical work—“Suture (Elements of the Logic of the Signifi er)”—and Jean-Pierre Oudart’s ground-breaking application of suture to the cin-ema 16 Th is work suggested that Miller’s Lacanian theory of the relation between the Subject and the signifi er could account for the continuity

the-eff ect of the shot/reverse shot technique: the action of suture rendering such fi lmic structures invisible to the spectator Again, Heath was instru-mental in the dissemination of this psychoanalysis: his article “Narrative Space” fi rst gestures towards these conceptions and subsequently, in

more generalised version of the theory, based on the “rhythm of lack and absence” 17 Kaja Silverman follows on from Heath, suggesting that suture can account for the role of the narrative as a whole as it constructs a posi-tion for the spectator 18

However, the backlash against psychoanalysis (and psychoanalytically informed feminism) in Film Studies was almost immediate In 1976, even before the development of suture, four of Screen ’s editors announced

that they could no longer contribute to the publication, whose nant discourse was now the “unnecessarily obscure and inaccessible” psy-choanalytic fi lm theory 19 Nonetheless, we can see that the eff orts of the

domi-Screen theorists in the late 1970s served to establish psychoanalysis as one

of the dominant discourses in theoretical investigations into fi lm, and as

com-plaints against so-called “Lacanian fi lm theory” are equally as well known

as its history: more recently, for example, David Bordwell and Noël Carroll’s Post-Th eory sets itself up in express opposition to the “aggregate

of doctrines” and the “vagaries of Grand Th eory” represented by the

Screen appropriations of Structuralist Marxism and Freudo- Lacanian

psy-choanalysis and insists instead upon a cognitivist, empirical approach to

fi lm 20 Moreover, we should note that there has been, since the 1990s, a

of possibilities off ered by philosophical investigations into cinema For example, Vivian Sobchack’s existential- phenomenological project opposes

a psychoanalytically oriented understanding of fi lm as an object of vision, formulating instead a notion of embodied vision inspired by Maurice

movement away from what is perceived as the ocularcentric, lytic “ Screen Th eory” towards theorising the cinema in terms of aff ective and bodily sensations: for example, in the work of Patricia Pisters and Barbara Kennedy And Laura U Marks’s work stands out for its combina-tion of Sobchack’s theory of subjectivity and a formulation of a Deleuzian haptic visuality in opposition to psychoanalytic optic visuality 22

Perhaps most interesting in this Deleuzian vein, I suggest, are the

Body presents a radical rejection of the “psychoanalytic model currently in

vogue [in the early 1990s] in academic discussions of fi lm theory” 23 Th is wildly polemical text compares psychoanalytic fi lm theory to the suff o-cating orthodoxy of a religious cult and aims to explode this hegemonic paradigm by introducing to the viewing experience a Deleuzian notion

of the body in its capacity to be aff ected In contrast to this “cinematic

of fi lm thinking that is almost entirely blind to psychoanalytic erations 24 Th e fi eld of fi lm theory has then developed far beyond the

is the founder of the Film-Philosophy journal, which endeavours to bring

both continental and analytic philosophy and Film Studies together in productive ways, publishing, for example, special issues on Jean-Luc Nancy and Stanley Cavell and organising an annual international con-ference supporting not only work on classic fi lm theorists such as Béla Balázs and Jean Epstein but also emerging encounters between fi lm and the philosophies of Alain Badiou or Ludwig Wittgenstein Scholarship within the area of fi lm-philosophy is then not limited to the Deleuzian

fi eld, with, for example, Sarah Cooper’s work on Emmanuel Levinas and documentary, and the notion of soul in fi lm theory, suggesting further possibilities for philosophical engagement with cinema outside the psy-choanalytic paradigm developed in this project 25 Th ese current trends in

fi lm-philosophy seem to suggest that there is no place for Lacan anymore, except perhaps to be confi ned as an historical curio to undergraduate survey courses of mid-to-late twentieth-century fi lm theory

Is psychoanalytic fi lm theory then in a terminal decline? Th e answer must

be a resounding No! Th e picture in the new millennium was certainly bleak: McGowan and Sheila Kunkle declared that “[w]ithin fi lm studies, not only has Lacanian psychoanalysis disappeared, but theory as such has given way almost completely to historicism and empirical research

post-theoretical” 26 Th is was reiterated by Richard Rushton, who noted that “the engagement between psychoanalysis and cinema has, to a large degree, disappeared”, and Žižek, who read the decline of the status of suture theory as an “indication of the decline of cinema studies” 27 It is, however, with such thinkers, I insist, that the fate of (Lacanian) psycho-analytic fi lm theory rests First and foremost is Žižek, who, along with Joan Copjec and his Slovene colleagues (particularly Mladen Dolar and Alenka Zupančič), is responsible for the continued interest in Lacan and cinema Heath observes that “[s]uture is no longer doing too well, nor, on the whole, is fetishism; the phallus is mostly holding up, while fantasy is

fi ne but prone to disparate appreciations; as for real and symptom, they have come up strong indeed” and goes on to argue that this is as a result

of what he calls “Žižek-fi lm”: the exciting new possibilities suggested by Žižek’s Lacanian interrogation of the cinema 28 Indeed, it is particularly interesting to note, I would say, that in a recent article Shaviro softens the stance taken in Th e Cinematic Body against psychoanalysis: he admits that

there is another Lacan suggested by the work of Žižek and closes ranks with psychoanalysis in the face of a common threat from Bordwellian cognitivism 29

In Th e Fright of Real Tears , Žižek launches a robust defence of Th eory against Bordwell and Carroll, suggesting that the critique of Post-Th eory

Žižek insists that he does not recognise the “Lacanian” theory described

by Bordwell; this “Grand Th eory” is a straw man, an effi gy of Mulvey and

with Lacan Indeed, we can say that this engagement owes as much to

Louis Althusser as it does to Lacan himself; Althusser’s work provided

an approach to psychoanalysis through the critique of ideology that was

in accord with the expressly political motivations of the so-called Screen

theorists Žižek thus complains that,

as a Lacanian, I seem to be caught in an unexpected double-bind: I am, as

it were, being deprived of what I never possessed, made responsible for something others generated as Lacanian fi lm theory My response to this,

of course: what if one should fi nally give Lacan himself a chance? 31

McGowan and Kunkle reiterate this argument, insisting that such

an understanding of psychoanalysis is mistaken, predicated upon an

“Imaginary Lacan” 32 Th e rejection of what has been characterised as

“Lacanian fi lm theory” in the philosophical turn is thus unfounded,

I would argue: it is a valid critique of 1970s Screen theorising perhaps

but can claim no basis in a critique of Lacanian psychoanalysis in Film

con-tribution to the fi eld, Th e Real Gaze , the notion of the gaze attributed

to Screen Th eory is not to be found on the side of the Subject; rather,

it must be considered a properly Lacanian object, objet a 34 McGowan’s work—which includes both a Lacanian-auteur study of David Lynch and the aforementioned Lacanian theory of the fi lm experience—is therefore

at the forefront of a new wave of psychoanalytic fi lm theory However, McGowan’s focus in such works is on spectatorship and the cinematic medium and his Lacanian frame of reference is, as I suggested, the concept

of the gaze, as elaborated, for example, in Seminar XI My own project is

not a consideration of the cinema experience but a consideration of fi lm narrative, fi lm genre and fi lm criticism centred on noir that—through its combination of historical analysis and theoretical speculation—seeks

a similar re-invigoration of the area of Lacanian Film Studies but in new directions In concert with the work of Žižek and McGowan, then, I insist that, far from being exhausted, from having not enough to say, the work of Lacanian investigation into the cinema has only just begun 35

My project therefore is in accord with Bergstrom’s sentiment expressed

in the introduction to Endless Night , where she insists that

psychoana-lytic Film Studies “has renewed itself over time and remains one of the most vital areas within contemporary fi lm theory”, and points to the sense of “unfi nished business” that motivates each new turn in this dis-course 36 Such unfi nished business, I propose, extends to a new way of approaching even the perennial favourite of fi lm criticism: fi lm noir We can observe that work on the ontology of noir appears broadly to fall into two categories: the endeavour to defi ne noir, fi rst in France in the 1940s and then in America in the 1970s, and then the consideration of the relationship between noir and criticism itself It will be the role of

my second chapter to explore the development of such noir criticism in

at this point that it is in particular the revisionist work of three authors (Naremore, Vernet and Elsaesser) that will serve as a starting point for

my investigation Given the vast frame of reference of his work, it is unsurprising that Žižek should have made some brief comments on the idea of noir He notes the theoretical paucity of work associated with the

fi rst movement in noir criticism (when compared with similar work on Alfred Hitchcock), characterising the former as a bric-à-brac of clichés and suggesting that “[i]nstead of directly trying to supplant [writings on noir] with a new, better theory, our fi rst step should therefore be a kind of

“meta-commentary” which elucidates the very opposition of Hitchcock and fi lm noir ” 37 And from here, Žižek launches into an extended dis-cussion of the femme fatale, the father and the detective For my own part, I will indeed be taking up this call for a meta-commentary on noir (albeit sans Hitchcock and moving in another direction): as I will explain

below, this book will present an overview of fi lm noir criticism explored

from a Lacanian perspective Elsewhere, Žižek gestures towards the ond, self-refl exive movement in noir criticism: he obliquely references what he calls Naremore’s “cognitive semantics” with its radial structure

sec-of family resemblance and takes up Vernet’s rejection sec-of noir—primarily

as a means of critiquing the notion of “poststructuralist deconstruction” (conversely to noir, an American invention of French origin)—to suggest that the category functions as an “Hegelian concept” 38 Žižek reiterates this notion in Th e Fright of Real Tears , characteristically adding a new

twist by discussing noir in terms of the structural necessity of the tion in the construction of the universal (and, again, this is an idea I will

excep-be taking up, in another way) 39

Aside from Žižek’s passing references, then, it is my contention that

theorised and that exploration of the “second movement” in noir criticism

is distinctly lacking Both Naremore and Elsaesser do remark that there

is perhaps a dimension of Nachträglichkeit in noir Naremore describes a

postmodern condition in which the idea of noir has become a worldwide image and features in high fashion editorials; he suggests that “our con-temporary fascination with noir may entail a sort of Nachträglichkeit , or

is, however, the extent of his insight Th e theoretical ambitions of his project are not far-reaching, as he himself professes: “my own approach

Naremore invokes Freud but briefl y, as an aside to his historiography His investigation of noir is crucial to any understanding of the formation of the category, but its implications for critical theory have not been realised (and I will return to this point in Chap 2 ) Elsaesser is more theoreti-cally engaged; his concept of the “historical imaginary” depends explicitly upon Lacan and Elsaesser’s suggestion that the category’s most striking feature is its “historical imaginary as deferred action ( Nachträglichkeit )”

requires the further discussion it will receive in Chap 5 41 His work does not, however, entail a detailed exploration of structure and retroaction

in noir and its relation to Lacan It is, I should say, perhaps unsurprising that this sort of parallel has before been suggested—it is a truism, after all, that fi lm noir is a retroactive category—but the possibilities of this

comparison for an enquiry into psychoanalysis and cinema have not been brought out: such work provides but the ground upon which my fully realised theoretical project on noir must be built

Heretofore, psychoanalytic work on fi lm noir has, I suggest, largely been oriented towards questions of sex and gender, and the fi eld is extensive

Th e femme fatale has been the subject of widespread psychoanalytic

psychoanalytically informed work by Claire Johnston and Patricia White,

is a founding moment of this discourse, which is taken further by Kaplan

Shades of Noir and elsewhere suggests that the femme fatale is a

“catch-phrase for the danger of sexual diff erence” 42 Copjec too takes up the femme fatale and “lethal jouissance” in an extended discussion of the Lacanian logic of sexuation Even Žižek’s most sustained examination

of noir is in fact in terms of the femme fatale’s role as “Woman” in the construction of “Man”, and her relation to the obscene-knowing Father

Psychoanalysis off ers (as the title suggests) an examination of noir in terms

drawing in particular on her essay, “Gilda: Epistemology as Strip Tease”, which provides invaluable insight into the role of femininity as epistemo-logical trouble in fi lm noir (although, as I will explain, I will be taking these ideas in new directions) 44

Representing the “other side” of sexual diff erence, most signifi cantly, is Krutnik’s In a Lonely Street , which, like my own project, brings together

psychoanalysis and noir and considers the latter as a genre However,

Krutnik’s approach is more Freudian and focuses on questions of der (particularly masculinity) in fi lm noir My project, fi rstly, off ers a Lacanian approach to noir and, secondly, does not focus particularly on masculinity as Krutnik does In fact, Krutnik’s approach to genre itself

gen-does not involve any psychoanalysis , whereas I propose a fully Lacanian

theory of genre and, instead of using psychoanalysis to understand culine or feminine identity, I deploy Lacan to explore noir narratives in terms of the categories of Symbolic, Real and Imaginary Furthermore,

mas-I respond directly to Krutnik’s approach to genre in order to argue that

he presents but one way of answering the question, “What is fi lm noir?”, that can be understood in Lacanian terms and placed amongst other responses, which I set out across this work Both Doane’s and Krutnik’s works are, then, primarily a psychoanalysis of gender in noir Indeed, as an

necessarily, as I suggested—part of my consideration of the fi lm in Chap

2 ; however, I will take the discussion away from gender to suggest that

Gilda functions as what Lacan calls a “letter”, or fl oating signifi er Th e femme fatale in particular is clearly an important fi gure to consider in a psychoanalytic investigation of noir, as the wealth of research in this area testifi es As such, though, she will not be the specifi c focus here, because

my interests lie with other possibilities Moreover, I should note that both

marks a timely return to the question of noir and psychoanalysis, ing answers from a specifi cally Lacanian angle

Th ere are, furthermore, works examining aspects of noir from a

psy-choanalytic perspective, which do not necessarily entail questions of sex and gender For example, Hugh S Manon draws upon Metz, Freud

Indemnity ; Deborah Th omas’s “Psychoanalysis and Film Noir”, which despite its title, off ers a discussion of noir informed by Gilles Deleuze

Psychoanalysis and Film Noir”; and Mark Osteen’s Nightmare Alley

con-tains a chapter looking (slightly superfi cially) at the representation of psychoanalysis itself in fi lm noir 45 Th ere are psychoanalytically informed investigations of noir narrative and structure: Maureen Turim’s Flashbacks

in Film contains a chapter on noir fl ashbacks and Freud on death and

repetition; and JP Telotte’s Voices in the Dark draws upon psychoanalytic

theory at certain points, such as on spectatorship and the mirror stage 46Here, we might also turn to Fabio Vighi’s book, Critical Th eory and Film: Rethinking Ideology through Film Noir Ostensibly a study of Frankfurt

School Critical Th eory through classic fi lm noir (using the latter as a

Žižekian way —combine a consideration of Marxism with references to

Lacan (particularly, enjoyment and objet a ) 47 In contrast, I am adopting

a specifi cally and fully elaborated Lacanian orientation through a variety

of concepts and, as I will explain, do not seek to privilege either fi lm or theory over the other, instead engaging both in a mutually informing relationship

Furthermore, I should note that McGowan’s Lynch book makes ing references to the noir aspects of the director’s work but is not a wide- ranging study of various facets of fi lm noir such as this project Similarly, McGowan’s Th e Fictional Christopher Nolan references the noir features

pass-of the director’s oeuvre Moreover, it focuses on an idea pass-of “fi ction” that might seem close to my own concerns in Chap 7 Here, however, is the distance between McGowan’s work and my own most pronounced: the Nolan book sees McGowan move away to a large extent from a Lacanian orientation to present what he characterises as a more Hegelian approach

to cinema As a function of this, his approach to “fi ction” is markedly diff erent from my own: although McGowan does cite Lacan’s twenty-fi rst seminar, Les non-dupes errent [“those who are not duped are in error”],

nowhere does he consider Jeremy Bentham’s Th eory of Fictions or Lacan’s

engagement with it in Seminar VII As I will elaborate, these two texts

form the core of my own exploration of noir in this book, which off ers

a very diff erent approach to fi ction, rigorously defi ned in contrast to the

“lie”, through an exploration of Th e Maltese Falcon 48

Moreover, I would say that the increasingly general condition in the contemporary encounter between psychoanalysis and noir is the (some-times passing) reference in one context to the other: either theoretical works that refer to fi lm noir or works of fi lm analysis that refer to psy-choanalysis As I noted above, Elsaesser draws upon a Lacanian notion

to explore noir and German cinema, and Naremore’s book is peppered with references to Freud Robert Miklitsch uses noirs such as Th e Woman

in the Window and Th e Maltese Falcon to critique Žižek’s Lacanian

the-ory of fantasy, and Henry Bond’s book on Lacanian criminal

to resembling stills from fi lm noir classics”; and, again with reference

to the space of the crime scene, Edward Dimendberg—in his resolutely non- psychoanalytic study, Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity —refer-

ences Freud on memory and the uncanny and makes the briefest of nods towards Lacan’s “Seminar on ‘Th e Purloined Letter’” 49 Such works are then a testament to the position of both psychoanalysis and fi lm noir in the cultural imagination and the contemporary critical idiom

Noir criticism has not, however, always been receptive to sis We could look to Alain Silver’s dispute with Vernet over noir and structuralism, which shows that the rejection of Th eory is not limited to cognitivism and Deleuzian fi lm-philosophy 50 Indeed, to the uninitiated, Vernet’s suggestion that the problem of fi lm noir is whether “[t]o commit

However, understood in its properly structuralist—i.e., Lévi-Straussian and Lacanian—context, such a statement I suggest contributes to a com-plex discussion of the structure of noir narratives Combined with Vernet’s

provides a basis for further exploration of noir Moreover, the suggestions made in the work of Žižek and Copjec, and Vernet and Elsaesser present what I see as an opportunity to theorise the emergence of the concept of noir, as described by Naremore and as it appears in the work of Frank, Jean-Pierre Chartier, and Borde and Chaumeton Taking the notion of a cinematic category formed after the fact and subject to subsequent, retro-active determination, made up in part by a group of fi lms that depict or are structured by the retroactive production of knowledge, I contend that

an intersection between the fi elds of fi lm noir and psychoanalysis can be suggested And such an intersection, in turn, can suggest a new under-standing of, for example, Lacan’s theory of sets and provide fresh insight into the question of fi lm genre Beyond previous psychoanalytic inter-ventions on noir and gender, and avoiding the regressive move suggested

by Rushton’s reconsideration of Metz, it will be possible for us to return

to the intersection of fi lm and psychoanalysis to plot a new trajectory for

fi lm theory My aim here is not to diminish or reject such earlier work (e.g., Krutnik or Metz); indeed, considerations of structure and gender are as inseparable in noir as they are in Lacan Rather, my aim is to take psychoanalytic enquiry in a new direction, carrying forth with it some of the valuable insights such work has granted

Furthermore, while Metz stands as a crucial fi gure in the development

of fi rst semiological and then psychoanalytic investigations of fi lm, I will aim to achieve quite diff erent goals in my deployment of such theory I will approach fi lm noir narratives through structural linguistic principles, not in an eff ort to categorise their scenes in a Grande Syntagmatique but

to understand the temporality involved in a fi lm where a fi nal, climactic scene confers (new) meaning on all the scenes that have preceded it And

I will treat fi lms themselves as signifi ers in a critical discourse, as diff tial elements in a system of relations that constitutes, for example, a fi lm

the cinema and discussed the interplay of absence and presence off ered by the medium in terms of fi ction and the Imaginary Again, both of these terms play a crucial role in my investigation of noir, but to very diff erent

and categorised , in terms of not only the Imaginary but also the Symbolic

and the Real, and, importantly, Lacan’s version of set theory Th is book engages with similar questions of language and structure to those articu-lated by Metz, not in an eff ort to produce, for example, an ontology of the cinema—and without proposing a nostalgic return to his psychoana-lytic semiology—but in order to understand the critical processes sur-rounding the cinema as well as to produce extended, close analyses of individual fi lms themselves 52 And so, while I will proudly claim Metz

as an intellectual predecessor, I also aim to move far beyond his own deployment of structuralism and psychoanalysis In place, then, of Metz’s originary question, in this book I ask instead: “What contribution can

Lacanian psychoanalysis make to the study of the cinematic signifi er ‘noir’ ?”

Moreover, I contend that it is not enough simply to bring (Lacanian) theory to bear on fi lms nor solely to use fi lm as a means of illustrat-ing theory To avoid the stultifying practice of “applied theory”, where moribund structures and terms are imposed upon a given cultural object (“A Lacanian/Feminist/Deleuzian Perspective on…”), as well as the sub-ordination of fi lm to theory, whereby it serves only as corroboration in

do the work of theory Of course, we must always bring new insights to a

fi lm or indeed the medium itself (there would otherwise be little point

in the enterprise), but fi lm theory must also look to the ways in which it

is possible to theorise with fi lm , to explore the ways in which fi lms off er

a challenge to theory: as much, I will say, what Th e Maltese Falcon can

reveal about Lacan as what Lacan can reveal about Th e Maltese Falcon

Th is will ensure that fi lm theory remains a living, breathing discourse, sensitive to the exigencies of a fi lm as much as any pre-given conceptual framework As such, there will be portions of this project devoted solely

to fi lm critical or historical topics or to Lacanian theory alone; however, these will be necessary steps required to prepare the ground for a fully

pro-pose that engaging Lacan and fi lm noir in a dialectical relation, which avoids such a subordination of fi lm to theory or theory to fi lm, can serve

to initiate an investigation of the structures of noir in comparison with Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis to produce a new understanding

of the formation and function of the category and its constituent fi lms

Th is can be achieved, in the fi rst instance I suggest, through a eration of the structural linguistic import of Lacan’s theory of the point de capiton , which is currently understood largely in terms of Ernesto Laclau

reconsid-and Chantal Mouff e’s “nodal point” reconsid-and its development by Žižek as the ideological “quilting point” 53 Elaboration of this concept will also require me to interrogate Lacan’s deployment of set theory and the philo-sophical notion of fi ction in order to explain the point de capiton /master

signifi er distinction at work in Lacanian psychoanalysis

Overall, this book has the structure of Lacan’s Borromean knot: the

fi rst three sections are each articulated around one of the three orders—Symbolic, Real and Imaginary—whereas the fourth presents a knotting

of these orders that brings together the conclusions of each preceding section and develops them into a Lacanian theory of fi lm noir Th e fi rst section will take the Symbolic and the idea of noir as a retroactive critical category as its starting point Beginning with an overview of the devel-opment of the idea of noir, through work in the 1940s in France, 1970s

in America and again more recently, Chap 2 , “Film Noir as Point de Capiton: Retroactive Temporality and Symbolic Structure”, will restate

the truism of fi lm criticism that noir is a retroactive category—a cal concept posited ex post facto —and I will add that such retroactivity

criti-can also be discerned in the narratives of certain key fi lms noirs I will introduce the conceptualisation of retroactivity—from Freud’s notion of

Nachträglichkeit to Lacan’s après-coup —as a fundamental principle of

psy-choanalysis I will argue that retroactivity in psychoanalysis establishes a relation of meaning between two events, and through the idea of mean-ing I will introduce Lacan’s structure of the point de capiton as a central

theoretical concept of not only the chapter but also my project as a whole

Th e point de capiton expresses Lacan’s theory of the relation between past,

present and future, the anticipation of meaning and its subsequent, roactive determination Th e main contention of this chapter, then, will

ret-be that the concept of noir can ret-be understood, can ret-be formalised , in terms

of this Lacanian point de capiton : as a signifi er, an ordering principle, that

intervenes after the fact to confer meaning upon a disparate group of

fi lms Reading Naremore, I will argue that the signifi er “noir” functions this way in 1946 for the French critics who fi rst “discovered” American

fi lm noir and then again for the American critics of the 1970s who (re)discovered the French term as a means of understanding their own past Having established noir as a point de capiton in critical discourse, I will

move to consider individual fi lms noirs themselves to suggest that a lar organisation can be found in the retroactively structured narratives of

simi-Th e Maltese Falcon or Double Indemnity so that a corollary can be

estab-lished between the shape of certain fi lm noir narratives and the category

to which they belong Finally, my exploration of Gilda and Th e Killers

will suggest a way in which to understand the progressive vector of the

point de capiton : the unfolding of the chain of signifi ers in the anticipated

certainty of its completion at a later point I will argue that these fi lms present “letters”, fl oating signifi ers that require the addition of another signifi er to confi rm their meaning

Th e second section will begin with the Lacanian Real and its relation

to the Symbolic I will start by arguing that Vernet’s work on noir can

be understood in terms of diff erent articulations of that relationship

In a fi rst interlude, which off ers a reading of Vernet’s essay, “Th e Filmic Transaction”, I will propose that his examination of noir narrative struc-ture—in terms of a “set up” and the explosion of a “black hole”—can be

reconsidered as an expression of Lacan’s theory of trauma as tuché and automaton as set out in Seminar XI : the symbolic machinery that works

in response to the intrusion of some traumatic event, which cannot be directly symbolised but nonetheless has a powerful eff ect on this struc-ture In Chap 4 , “Film Noir Doesn’t Exist: Impossibility, Defi nition and the Point of Failure”, I will defend Vernet against the critique of Silver, who attempts to dismiss his work as mere theoretical excess Instead, I will show that Vernet off ers an intelligent study of noir that can serve

as the basis for a Lacanian theory of fi lm noir criticism From here, I will take further Lacan’s concept of the Real as a conceptualisation of impossibility and failure Th is will entail a journey into the archives of noir criticism to explore contemporaneous reactions in the classic noir period in order to understand the ways in which the American tradition

in the 1940s and 1950s might—following Vernet’s deconstruction of the

Eurocentric characterisation of noir off ered in Chap 2 I will discuss Sheri Chinen Biesen’s thesis that noir was referred to as a “red meat”

fi lm cycle in the American press as just such a problem and suggest that this thesis should itself be found wanting In the fi nal and most signifi -cant development of this chapter, I will take the dissolution of the noir category as a point of departure for a Lacanian ontology of noir—based

in the theory of feminine sexuation (understood as a logical rather than

discussion will thus off er a wholly new take on the question of fi lm noir

In the third section, I will introduce the Imaginary as a compensatory response to the wound of the Real In Chap 5 , “Th e Boundaries and Meaning of Noir: Suture, Metaphor and the Historical Imaginary”, I will

fi rst off er a response to this open ontology of noir, proposing that the project to defi ne noir—as exemplifi ed by Krutnik, amongst others—can

be understood in terms of the Lacanian logic of masculine sexuation I will argue that any determinate defi nition of noir (or a defi nition as such)

is impossible because the Lacanian Symbolic order off ers no fi rm ground

on which a defi ning statement can rest Th rough a reconsideration of the concept of “suture”, in its original context as the relationship between zero and one, void and structure, I will off er a solution to this impos-sibility: imaginary borders must be established—through a “masculine”

logic of inclusion/exclusion—to allow the set of noir (as a defi ned entity)

to function “as if ” it were closed Th e crucial point of this section will be

my contention that this does not constitute some “solution” to the open set but another mode of ontology, a mode that represses impossibility rather than turning it into a condition of possibility I will then carry the concept of the Lacanian Imaginary from ontology to the historiog-raphy of noir Th is involves my engagement with Elsaesser’s formulation

of the “historical imaginary”: as a process whereby the intricacies and inconsistencies of the history of noir are replaced by a consistent and seemingly impermeable discourse, which insists unproblematically that, for example, American fi lm noir was the product of the infl ux of German émigrés to Hollywood following the rise to power of National Socialism Drawing out aspects of the concept overlooked or disavowed by Elsaesser,

I will compare the repressive function of the historical imaginary with the Lacanian structure of the paternal metaphor, where a signifi er is repressed

by the intervention of the Name-of-the-Father and results in the nary discourse of phallic signifi cation I will then consider Elsaesser’s own attempt to rediscover lost possibilities in the history of noir in terms the relationship to the past theorised by psychoanalysis and the possibility

imagi-of introducing there new possibilities as expressed by Žižek via Henri Bergson Finally, I will show that the emergence of necessity from contin-gency attending the production of the historical imaginary is a retroactive

eff ect reshaping the past in the image of the present: this I will strate through a reading of Ginette Vincendeau’s study of Poetic Realism

demon-as “French Film Noir” and the transformation of the point de capiton into

the master signifi er in Lacanian theory

In the fourth section of the book, I will draw together all of these strands to tie my Borromean knot: the culmination of this investigation

of Lacan and noir After a second interlude in which I return once again

to noir narrative structure (this time in terms of the “open” and “closed” logics I theorised in the previous sections), I will present in Chap 7 , “Th e Idea of Noir: Fiction, Signifi er, Genre”, an extended discussion of Th e Maltese Falcon drawing primarily upon the “as if ” mode fi rst identifi ed in

Chap 5 Firstly, I will explore the Falcon statue itself in terms of Lacan’s use of the theory of imaginary numbers—as something that “does not exist” (it is a fake) yet has an eff ect (people die in search of it)—to suggest

a way in which Lacan’s much misunderstood deployment of the square root of minus one should be understood in terms of the imaginary func-tion of signifi cation Following on from this, I will explore the way in which the imaginary status of the Falcon allows the fi lm narrative to con-struct certain “fi ctions”—understood in the sense of something treated as

if it were true or real—that point to a rapport between the psychoanalysis

of Lacan and the philosophy of Bentham Th ese sections will therefore be particularly signifi cant because they present the clearest example of the kind of dialectical relationship between fi lm and theory that I envisage for this project Echoing my suggestion in Chap 2 , I will argue that, like the point de capiton , the concept of fi ction speaks to both the discursive

and fi lmic levels of noir; it grants insight into the functioning of the critical category and a key constituent fi lm, and at the same time these subjects suggest new ways in which to understand Lacan I will argue, therefore, that the idea of noir is a necessary fi ction that must be retained

by Film Studies In my fi nal, crucial move, I will turn to the development

of noir since the 1970s (introduced in Chap 2 ) and the emergence of contemporary permutations such as neo-noir I will consider these ver-sions of noir in terms of repetition and how they establish a relation-ship to their past Furthermore, my understanding of the development

of noir, and then neo-noir, into a fully fl edged genre at both the critical and industrial levels will permit me to introduce a fi nal distinction to my formulation of noir as point de capiton that has run throughout the book:

in terms of the empty, master signifi er and the noir genre as a network of knowledge serving to fi ll out this signifi er with positive content Bringing theory and fi lm together for the last time, I will close my project with

an investigation of the way in which the exploration of noir as genre can suggest a new understanding of the development of Lacanian psycho-analysis, while concomitantly presenting what should be considered a

Lacanian theory of genre , which both illuminates and questions a concept

and critical practice that is fundamental to any exploration of the cinema

I will therefore end the book, in a sense, where I began, with the structure and temporality of retroaction, and an interdependent relation where the past does indeed determine the present, but the present itself determines what such a past can be While avoiding a return to the psy-choanalytic fi lm theory of the 1970s, my exploration of fi lm noir across

the span of this book will make clear that the possibilities for a Lacanian approach to cinema remain a vital resource for theoretical orientations in Film Studies and can provide an alternative discourse to the Deleuzian and phenomenological traditions currently dominant in fi lm-philosophy

I will argue that, while I recognise the worth of such philosophical tations, my project demonstrates the value of a properly Lacanian under-standing of the cinema: a value that has been overlooked in contemporary

orien-fi lm analysis and was in fact never realised by the orien-fi rst psychoanalytic

fi lm theorists I will emphasise that it comes from the uniquely Lacanian contributions of this project to the understanding of fi lm noir—particu-larly in relation to the question of genre and Lacan’s theory of sets and the imaginary number—and point to the broader implications that such theorisation can have for the contemporary study of cinema

Tom Gunning has suggested that “fi lm noir poses a fascinating thicket for fi lm critics and the temptation, once one enters into it, is never to come out” 54 Such temptation for fi lm criticism I certainly understand, but this I contend is where fi lm theory must intervene: it can off er a means

seek to add new fi lms to the category of noir, to uncover lost B-features

or to recontextualise fi lms not necessarily considered “noir”: a tendency

Expanding the Canon of Classic Film Noir or John Grant’s Comprehensive Encyclopedia of Film Noir: the Essential Reference Guide 55 It does, how-ever, seek to explore such processes of addition and inclusion in the con-stitution of the noir canon and suggest ways in which the noir list (or set) can be understood in Lacanian terms Neither do I propose simply to provide another answer to the question: What is fi lm noir? Th is is perhaps

the question with which to begin (indeed, it is the question with which every fi lm noir class in every undergraduate Film Studies course in every university will begin); however, I will not be off ering a single—fi nal?

authoritative? defi nitive?—answer: an urge clearly demonstrated, for example, by William Park’s recent work, which bears the very title, What

is Film Noir? Instead, I will ask: What are the ways in which this

ques-tion could be answered? What sorts of logics might such answers involve?

What use is Lacan here in exploring the processes by which noir has been

new position that this confl uence of cinema and psychoanalysis leaves both the already well-explored fi eld of fi lm noir as well as the once-fl ag-ging discipline of Lacanian fi lm theory Th is reinvigoration begins, in the following chapter, with a place and a time (France, 1946), a selection

of fi lms (from Th e Maltese Falcon to Double Indemnity ) and a Lacanian

investigation of the discursive constructions of both the fi lms and the criticism that come under the signifi er “noir”

Books, 1957], 453) However, Karl Abraham and Hanns Sachs did work

with UFA on a psychoanalytic fi lm (against Freud’s protestations), which resulted in GW Pabst’s Secrets of a Soul (1926) Directed by one of the

grandfathers of noir, the fi lm’s nightmare sequences (where, for example, the protagonist stages his uxoricidal fantasies) perhaps anticipate the classic noir dream sequences of Stranger on the Th ird Floor (1940) and

2 Janet Bergstrom, ed., Endless Night: Cinema and Psychoanalysis, Parallel Histories (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999)

3 See, for example, Andrew Spicer, Film Noir (Harlow: Longman, 2002);

Deborah Th omas, “Psychoanalysis and Film Noir”, in MBFN , 71–87

4 See Jacques Lacan, “Th e Freudian Th ing, or the Meaning of the Return

to Freud”, in Écrits: Th e First Complete Edition in English , trans Bruce

Fink (New York: Norton, 2007), 336

5 Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton, A Panorama of American Film Noir, 1941–1953 , trans Paul Hammond (San Francisco: City

Lights Books, 2002), 19, 145; Paul Schrader quoted in Foster Hirsch,

Detours and Lost Highways: A Map of Neo-Noir (New York: Limelight,

1999), 2

6 Frank Krutnik, In a Lonely Street: Film Noir, Genre, Masculinity (London:

Routledge, 1991), 45; Marlisa Santos, Th e Dark Mirror: Psychiatry and Film Noir (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2010)

7 Tom Gunning famously claimed that “[f ]ilm noir may be the great achievement of fi lm studies [as] the claims of apparatus theory (…) increasingly seem a dubious grand narrative” (“More than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts (review)”, Modernism/Modernity 6, no 3 [1999]:

151) I will contest his second point

Editors of Cahiers du Cinéma”, trans Helen Lackner and Diana Matias,

Screen 13, no 3 (1972): 5–44

12 Th is special issue of Communications , edited by Raymond Bellour,

Th ierry Kuntzel and Christian Metz, was titled “ Psychanalyse et cinéma ”

13 See Metz, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema , trans Michael

Taylor (New York: Oxford UP, 1974) He subsequently rearticulated his theory in terms of a semiotic code in Language and Cinema , trans

Donna Jean Umiker-Sebeok (Th e Hague: Mouton, 1974) Metz’s ology of the cinema entered Screen in 1973, taken up particularly in the

semi-work of Stephen Heath: see “Film/Cinetext/Text”, Screen 14, no 1/2

(1973): 102–128

14 Metz, Th e Imaginary Signifi er: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema , trans Ben

Brewster et al (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1982), 17, 44

15 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema”, Screen 16,

no 3 (1975): 6–18

16 Screen , 18, no 4 (1977/78): 23–76 Interestingly, given the discussion of

the point de capiton and retroactivity in the subsequent chapters,

Jean-Pierre Oudart in fact describes suture in terms of the anticipatory

signi-fi er and the retroactive signisigni-fi ed (“Cinema and Suture”, trans Kari Hanet, Screen 18, no 4 [1977/78]: 37)

17 Stephen Heath, “Narrative Space”, Screen , 17, no 3 (1976): 68–112; Questions of Cinema (London: Macmillan, 1981), 98 Rosen argues that

Heath’s work “can be considered a reply to certain less-nuanced articles

into English” ( Inventing Film Studies , 296n26)

18 Kaja Silverman, Th e Subject of Semiotics (New York: Oxford UP, 1983),

212

19 Edward Buscombe et al., “Statement: Why We Have Resigned from the Board of Screen ”, Screen 17, no 2 (1976): 107

20 David Bordwell and Noël Carroll, eds., Post-Th eory: Reconstructing Film

work is part of a broader rejection of late twentieth-century French thought, which reached a fever pitch with Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont’s

Intellectual Impostures: Postmodern Philosophers’ Abuse of Science (London:

1998], 129–170) See also her essay on Th e Maltese Falcon , as discussed

in the fourth section of this book

22 Patricia Pisters, Th e Matrix of Visual Culture: Working with Deleuze in

UP, 2000); Laura U Marks, Th e Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2000)

23 Steven Shaviro, Th e Cinematic Body (Minneapolis, MN: University of

Minnesota Press, 1993), viii

24 Frampton’s only reference to Lacan is a misquotation: “the subconscious [sic] is structured like a language” ( Filmosophy [London: Wallfl ower,

2006], 150)

25 Sarah Cooper, Selfl ess Cinema? Ethics and French Documentary (Oxford:

Legenda, 2006); Th e Soul of Film Th eory (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)

26 Todd McGowan and Sheila Kunkle, “Introduction: Lacanian Psychoanalysis in Film Th eory”, in Lacan and Contemporary Film , ed

McGowan and Kunkle (New York: Other Press, 2004), xiin1

27 Richard Rushton, “Cinema’s Double: Some Refl ections on Metz”, Screen

43, no 2 (2002): 107; Slavoj Žižek, FRT , 31

28 Heath, “Cinema and Psychoanalysis: Parallel Histories”, in Endless Night , 33, 36 Although Heath overlooks Žižek’s rethinking of suture

and “interface” in FRT (39–54)

29 Shaviro, “Th e Cinematic Body: Redux”, parallax 14, no 1 (2008):

48–54 Furthermore, in 2007, the Film-Philosophy journal published a

special edition devoted to Lacan (11, no 3) and continues to support psychoanalytically informed work (including an earlier version of Chap

2 of this book), and the International Journal of Žižek Studies devoted an

early issue to “Žižek and Cinema” (1, no 3 [2007])

30 Žižek, FRT , 1

31 Ibid., 2

32 McGowan and Kunkle, “Introduction”, xiii

33 In point of fact, Screen theorists did not endorse this model of the

cin-ema; the aim was to establish ways in which to resist Imaginary

interpellation

34 I should note that besides the gaze in cinema, there is Lacan’s other tial object: the voice Psychoanalytic infl uences can thus be seen in Michel Chion’s Th e Voice in Cinema (New York: Columbia UP, 1999),

par-Silverman’s Th e Acoustic Mirror: Th e Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and

Mladen Dolar’s A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,

2006)

35 McGowan, Th e Impossible David Lynch (New York: Columbia UP, 2007), Th e Real Gaze: Film Th eory after Lacan (Albany: SUNY Press,

2007)

36 Bergstrom, Endless Night , 2

37 Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out , rev ed

41 Th omas Elsaesser, WCA , 423

42 See Claire Johnston, “ Double Indemnity ”, in Women in Film Noir , rev

and expanded ed., ed E Ann Kaplan (London: British Film Institute, 1998), 89–98; Patricia White, “Female Spectator, Lesbian Spectre: Th e Haunting ”, in Women in Film Noir , 130–150; Kaplan, Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera (London: Methuen, 1983); Elizabeth Cowie,

“ Film Noir and Women”, in Shades of Noir , ed Joan Copjec (London:

Verso, 1993), 121–166; Representing the Woman: Cinema and Psychoanalysis (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997),

125

43 Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists (Cambridge, MA:

MIT Press, 1994), 197–200; Žižek, Enjoy , 149–193 A more exhaustive

bibliography of this topic could list a great many more texts

44 Mary Ann Doane, Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Th eory, Psychoanalysis

(London: Routledge, 1991)

45 Hugh S Manon, “Some Like it Cold: Fetishism in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity ”, Cinema Journal 44, no 4 (2005): 18–43; Mark Osteen, Nightmare Alley: Film Noir and the American Dream (Baltimore, MD:

Johns Hopkins UP, 2013), 19–45

46 Maureen Turim, Flashbacks in Film: Memory & History (London:

Routledge, 1989), 143–188; J.P Telotte, Voices in the Dark: Th e Narrative Patterns of Film Noir (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 146,

162

47 Vighi’s interests do overlap with my own, however, on the concept of

fi ction, although his only Lacanian reference here is a modifi ed version

of Lacan’s dictum: “the unconscious (truth) [sic] has the structure of fi tion”, Critical Th eory and Film: Rethinking Ideology through Film Noir

c-(New York: Continuum, 2012), 158

48 McGowan, Th e Fictional Christopher Nolan (Austin, TX: University of

Texas Press, 2012) I should note that, as both Vighi’s and McGowan’s approaches would suggest, the concept of jouissance (or enjoyment)

can—even should —be central to a Lacanian understanding of noir: it is,

after all, a key category for contemporary psychoanalysis However, I will say that the complexities of the question of jouissance cannot be addressed satisfactorily within the limits of the current project (as I explain with reference to sexuation in Chaps 4 and 5 ) Th is suggests the need for further research on the topic, and here I would direct the reader

to my essay on phallic/Other and feminine jouissance in contemporary cinema: Ben Tyrer, “An Atheist’s Guide to Feminine Jouissance: On

Black Swan and the Other Satisfaction”, in Embodied Encounters: New Approaches to Psychoanalysis and Film , ed Agnieszka Piotrowska (London:

Routledge, 2014), 131–146

49 See Robert Miklitsch, “Flesh for Fantasy: Aesthetics, the Fantasmatic, and Film Noir ”, in Traversing the Fantasy: Critical Responses to Slavoj

Žižek , ed Jeff Boucher et al (Aldershot: Ashgate: 2005), 47–68; Henry

Bond, Lacan at the Scene (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), 119; Edward

Dimendberg, Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity (Cambridge, MA:

Harvard UP, 2004), 128–129, 164, 268n17

50 See Alain Silver, “Introduction”, in FNR , 3–15

51 Marc Vernet, “FT”, 69

52 In Th e Imaginary Signifi er , for example, Metz discusses cinema in more

general terms, seldom making references to specifi c fi lms

53 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouff e, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy ,

2nd ed (London: Verso, 2001), xi; Žižek, SOI , 7 It has also been

trans-lated as “anchoring point” (Alan Sheridan) and “button tie” (Fink): to avoid confusion, I will retain the French throughout, except in quota- tion, and its specifi c action will be “ capitonnage ”

54 Gunning, Th e Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity

Part I

Symbolic

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

B Tyrer, Out of the Past, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-30942-2_2

also be found in the retroactive constructions of film noir flashbacks

Exploring such cinema, not as a signifying image but as a meaningful structure, it is therefore possible for me to say that a retroactive “noir tem-

explore the way in which the signifier “noir” enables the analysis of a tain type of Hollywood film from the 1940s and 1950s, and now stands

cer-in metonymically for an entire ccer-inematic discourse, as well as the way cer-in

which a film noir such as Double Indemnity is thoroughly concerned with

the retroactive production of knowledge through narrative structure I will then investigate the theoretical implications of such an engagement

with the point de capiton as suggested by the specificities of films noirs such as Gilda and The Killers (1946).

Film Noir as Point de Capiton:

Retroactive Temporality and Symbolic

Structure