Chapter 13

Theorising about Film: How Movies Work

In This Chapter

Revealing the big ideas of film theory

Theorising film texts with Marxism

Using other academic disciplines to analyse films

I’m going to be upfront with you: film theory isn’t easy. Most theory involves outdated, jargon-laden language, and even after you decode the written style, the central concepts can be tricky to get your head around. Add to that the fact that many of the important film-theory books and articles take part in a philosophical conversation with other complex, jargon-heavy ideas that you’ve probably never heard of, and you have a recipe for giving up, throwing your film-theory book across the room and going to watch The Hunger Games movies on Netflix to work through your frustration. So, why bother?

As the saying goes, nothing good ever comes easy. Film theory can be difficult, but if you really want to understand how movies work, the effort is well worthwhile. Film theory aims to help answer the seriously big questions of film studies, such as: why do you enjoy watching films? Does a film reflect the culture that creates it – or does it help to shape that culture?

If you don’t think these questions are worth thinking about, you can skip this chapter. But then again you’re reading this book, and so I hope that you do care about this stuff. Plus, millions of film students around the world have grasped these ideas successfully and you can too. So stick at it, soldier. One day you’ll be glad that you read this chapter and therefore know how film connects to some of the great ideas of the last hundred years or so: formalism, Marxism, structuralism and psychoanalysis.

Building a Foundation of Film Theory: Text, Context and Spectator

All film theory is about the relationship between three elements: a film text (the object of your study), its context (or place within wider culture and society) and the spectator (yes, that’s you).

Not all types of film theory engage with all three elements to the same extent: some focus on just one (such as formalism) and others concern themselves with the relationship between two elements. For example, as well as formalism, in this section I describe notions of realism, which are largely about the relationship between the text and its context, and reception theory, which examines the relationship between the spectator and the text.

Formalism: What is a film?

In order to understand something, you have first to know what it is. This statement may sound blindingly obvious – it’s a film, you fool. But how do you know it’s a film? What are its basic formal properties and how are these similar or different from other cultural forms?

Formalism attempts to answer these questions by studying structure and technique as the basis of an art form. Unlike many other methods of theorising a text, this type of film theory isn’t particularly concerned with content or meaning. Instead of subjective interpretation, formalism attempts to impose scientific objectivity by establishing methods for rigorous analysis.

Formalism takes its name from a group of Russian academics and critics who, inspired by the 1917 Revolution, decided to overthrow traditional methods of discussing art and literature. The Russian formalists were interested mainly in literature, but their method of analysing structure, and especially narrative patterns, can be applied to film. Several well-known film-makers were also involved in this vigorous outpouring of ideas, particularly Sergei Eisenstein who used the formalist framework to come up with his theory of montage as a radical editing style (you can meet Sergei in Chapter 4).

Formalism tries to address several specific issues, notably:

• What makes art different from communication? The formalists identified that poetry and metaphor are vital elements of literature. Viktor Shklovsky argued that artists defamiliarise the everyday world by making it seem strange and unfamiliar. This idea often relates to avant-garde film or art cinema (check out Chapter 7).
• Do groups of texts work in similar ways? Several formalists laid the foundations for genre theory and structuralism (see Chapter 5 and the later section ‘Taking Films to Bits: Structuralism’, respectively) by linking groups of texts together. They analysed folk tales, for example, and yielded common characters and narrative elements. Literary theorist Tzvetan Todorov applied psychoanalysis (flip to the later section ‘Getting into Your Head: Psychoanalysis and Film’ for details) to discover new genres, such as the fantastic, which blurs the lines between reality and fantasy.
• How is a text affected by its context (how it is made, for example)? More recent neoformalist critics such as Kristin Thompson rethink formalist ideas with renewed focus on production context. Thompson points out that the notion of defamiliarisation requires you to first understand the everyday world of a film’s contemporary audience.

Few examples of defamiliarisation beat the opening sequence of Blue Velvet (1986), which features a clear blue sky before gently panning down to reveal crimson red roses and a white picket fence. Bobby Vinton croons ‘Blue Velvet’ on the soundtrack as happy firemen wave, children cross wide streets and a middle-aged man waters his garden with a hose: the perfect picture of sunny suburbia. But then … the man clutches his neck in agony before collapsing on the grass. His dog plays with the spraying hose regardless. The camera gets closer to the grass until you see an extreme close-up of beetles and insects living off garden decay. From familiar to defamiliarised in just a few shots – that’s David Lynch.

Realism: Does film reflect reality?

Whereas formalism is mainly about the film text itself, the many theories that come under the banner of realism investigate the complex relationship between a text and its context.

A realist approach to making or analysing films assumes that a real world exists, separate from human understanding of it. If that sounds like stating the obvious, don’t forget that some philosophies do question the existence of reality outside of perception. Just think about the well-known philosophical riddle: if a tree falls in the forest and nobody’s around to hear it, does it make a sound? But don’t ruminate for too long, because I need to keep this section moving along.

In early writing about film, the ability of the camera to capture reality mechanically was a vital element of what made film special as an art form. Realism became the focus of debates about film after World War II, in the wake of the films of Italian Neorealism and French Poetic Realism (see Chapter 11). As a result, critics came to think of techniques that minimised intervention from the film-maker as more realistic than the more stylised film-making of Soviet montage or German Expressionism. Subsequent theorists, however, disputed the cinema’s ability to reflect reality by emphasising its nature as a cultural construction, as well as noting that conventions of realism change over time and across different cultural contexts.

Some key debates around realism include:

• Which of film’s particular qualities are more realistic than others? André Bazin was a key critic of the French film journal Cahiers du Cinéma and a firm advocate of realism as the destiny and the goal of cinema. Bazin praised not only the documentary-style aesthetics of Neorealism, but also commercial film-makers such as Orson Welles for his use of deep focus and long takes, which both avoid the artificial intervention of editing.
• What’s the relationship between realism and fantasy in cinema? Early film historians noted two primary drives of film represented by the actualities (everyday scenes) of the Lumière brothers on the one hand and the fantasy of George Méliès on the other. In particular, Jewish German sociologist Siegfried Kracauer argued that the Expressionist flight from reality in 1920s films indicated a fear of chaos and disorder within German society that made it vulnerable to fascist control (for more on Nazi aesthetics in documentary film, see Chapter 8).
• How does digital film-making relate to the real world? Film theorist Stephen Prince suggests that computer-generated imagery (CGI) compromises the direct relationship between photographic cinema images and reality, and that a different kind of perceptual realism will replace photographic realism, asking: do the images look real or move realistically?

At first glance, Russian Ark (2002) appears to be an exercise in taking Bazin’s notions of realism to extremes. Alexander Sokurov’s film is a 99-minute-long single take with no editing to disrupt its reality effect. Although other film-makers have attempted single-shot films in the past (including Hitchcock with Rope (1948)), the use of light digital cameras that can shoot for long periods made it achievable. But this film is no exercise in documentary style realism. The film explores different periods of history within the same location, requiring complex mise-en-scène (something I discuss in Chapter 4) to produce its overlapping effects. In the end, Russian Ark demonstrates that long takes aren’t inherently realistic after all.

Reception: What is a spectator?

The obvious danger of the formalist approach to cinema (check out the earlier section ‘Formalism: What is a film?’) is that if you spend too much time thinking about what a film is, you can forget that a film doesn’t provide the same experience for each individual spectator.

Reception theory puts the spectator at the heart of the film experience with the aim of avoiding simplifications and generalisations. No single theory of reception exists: you can discuss the vital relationship between text and audience in many different ways. Crucially though, all models of reception place a greater emphasis on what a spectator does with a text than what a text does to her.

Literary theory was the inspiration for film studies to pay greater attention to the spectator rather than just the film text. Roland Barthes was particularly influential with his provocative claim that the author was dead: he meant that readers produce meaning by working within the codes of the text. Reception studies are also influenced by ideas drawn from sociology, such as Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital. For Bourdieu, a spectator’s ability to interact with and make sense of a text is related to her level of power within society, with some types of spectatorship (such as understanding avant-garde film) requiring greater levels of cultural capital than others.

Other important questions that reception theory poses include:

• How do individual spectators respond to real texts? Early film theory presented a model of a passive spectator who believed everything she saw. In contrast, cultural theorist Stuart Hall argues that spectators can read a film in many possible ways, including in an oppositional mode where the viewer rejects prescribed meaning and creates her own.
• What’s the role of viewing context in understanding a film? Major currents of film theory, such as structuralism (see ‘Taking Films to Bits: Structuralism’ later in this chapter), remove spectators from their historical context. Film theorist Janet Staiger argues instead for a focus on context as the fertile middle ground between the text and spectator, and for historical rigour when collecting evidence.
• How do people remember their viewing experiences? Research on memories of cinema-going suggests that people remember snippets rather than entire films, and that where you see films and with whom can dominate your recall. Annette Kuhn’s work on cinema memory combines autobiographical and historical approaches.

Janet Staiger’s study of The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and its effects on audiences is a great example of how reception theory can explain what spectators do with a film. This multiple Oscar-winning horror film provoked intense debate upon its release, mostly around issues of gender and sexuality. For example, gay rights groups actively picketed the film’s screenings, claiming that it depicted gay men as monstrous. Staiger analyses the written and spoken responses to the film as evidence that spectators produce many responses to a film depending on their social positioning, gender identity and historical context.

Janet Staiger and Annette Kuhn make use of their own personal responses to particular films or images in their work on reception. So using yourself as a guinea pig for a reception study is quite appropriate. However, you need to think of your memories only as raw data that isn’t necessarily meaningful in itself. You have to analyse this data in order for it to be useful.

So you can think through your responses in relation to Stuart Hall’s reading strategies – or follow Bourdieu and consider your levels of cultural capital at different points in your life.

Shaping Society with Film: Marxism

American president John F Kennedy was apparently fond of an anecdote about the revolutionary philosopher Karl Marx. Marx struggled financially for most of his life, working mainly as a journalist, and while employed by the New York Herald Tribune as a foreign correspondent he repeatedly complained about his meagre salary. When his complaints fell on deaf ears, Marx quit journalism to write books including Das Kapital (1867–1894), which, directly or indirectly, led to the Russian Revolution, Stalinism and the Cold War. If only the editor of the newspaper had been a little more generous, the 20th century may have turned out a little differently.

This section comes over all radical, as I describe how film theorists have employed Marx’s ideas, fortunately to less violent ends.

Meeting Marx (Karl, not Groucho)

You don’t have to be a revolutionary communist in order to make use of Marx’s theories of civilisation, which are based on a model of human society that considers what you produce and how (see Figure 13-1). Marxism holds that under capitalism, a minority of wealthy capitalists control the means of production (the base) and they exploit the workers’ labour. The workers put up with this situation because of systems of thought (the superstructure) such as religion, education and culture – including the movies. Marx argues that the base shapes the superstructure, rather than the other way round. As a result, structural reform is necessary to reshape society, and not just new ideas.

The most important implication of Marx’s model of society when studying culture is that you have to consider any practice or text in terms of the historical conditions that produce it. This idea is particularly relevant for film studies, because film is a large-scale industry, which requires raw materials, technology and workers in order to function (see Chapter 2). Film is clearly not only about economics, however, and so you need to try to maintain a balance between the creative freedom of artists and producers and the structure that enables or frustrates them.

For Marx, Hegel’s model of history was used to explain the development from medieval feudalism (where lords and kings controlled serfs) to capitalism, and to predict that capitalism would eventually give way to communism.

For example, a classic Marxist analysis of Warner’s successful talking picture The Jazz Singer (1927) needs to take into account:

• The structure of the Hollywood studio system during the 1920s, including the dominance of Paramount, against which new competitors such as Warner Bros. were forced to take risks with new technology.
• The amount of leisure time and disposable income of the film’s large urban audiences.
• The celebrity of Al Jolson, a Broadway star who drew on long traditions of Jewish theatrical performance that pre-date US society.
• The tension between family and fame that drives the narrative, including the importance of family within Jewish immigrant populations.

Spending time with the Frankfurt School: Fun is bad

As part of doing film studies, you may be required to watch lots of so-called bad films. Say, Adam Sandler rom-coms or action movies starring Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson. While you’re engaged in this serious research, your friends or parents may say, ‘What are you doing watching that rubbish? Don’t you know that bad movies rot your brain!’ Here’s a possible response: ‘That was indeed the assumption of the Frankfurt School of Marxists who were influential in the establishment of cultural theory, but their pessimistic view of popular culture has since been debunked by cultural relativism.’ You may get a slap, but at least you can demonstrate your intellectual superiority in the process.

Take a look at Marx’s model of society for a moment (in the preceding section and Figure 13-1). Concentrate on the idea that the superstructure ‘maintains and legitimises’ the base. One possible extension of this notion is to suggest that culture, as an important element of the superstructure, basically exists to keep the workers in their place. In a nutshell, this was the main argument of the Frankfurt School of Marxist thinkers, established in (duh) Frankfurt in 1923 and moved to New York’s Columbia University during the rise of Hitler in the 1930s and the war-ravaged 1940s. The writers and academics of the Frankfurt school developed a system of critical theory, which combined Marxism with psychoanalysis, but in this section I just focus on the Marxism aspect.

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer described popular entertainment forms as a product of the culture industry. These products were basically all the same and entirely predictable. So you can choose to read a superhero serial in a comic book or watch it at the cinema, but either way you have the same experience and you know exactly what you’re getting. Most importantly, the products of the culture industry reflect and impose social conformity. For example, the backstage musical Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933) presents a team of sparky, likeable chorus girls. But they’re all in essence subservient to a millionaire’s ambitions to become a writer. The songs are just an entertaining distraction from the girls’ powerless economic position.

Here’s another important element of the Frankfurt School’s critique: high art is okay. These critics see opera, serious literature and classical music as full of genuine imagination and encouraging of audiences to be active participants rather than passive consumers. You can see how avant-garde or art cinema is defendable along similar lines. This position is clearly elitist and reveals a major flaw within the Frankfurt crowd’s thesis. Intellectuals – who are arguably complicit with the superstructure’s elite – are basically telling the proletariat (in Marxist terms, the poorest of the classes) that what they enjoy is rubbish.

The Frankfurt Marxists’ account of culture also suffers from a disregard for the individual spectator and what she may do with a text. The Frankfort critique of mass media assumes that people simply accept what they’re told at face value and then go about their proletariat business. This approach is sometimes called a hypodermic needle model of the audience, because they remain passive while being injected with culture, to which, as with an illegal drug, they may become addicted.

Subsequent Marxists maintained their belief in Marx’s model of society, but sought to correct this imbalance by paying greater attention to how the spectator engages with the text.

Negotiating between culture and behaviour: Ideology

If James Brown is the Godfather of Soul, Louis Althusser is the Godfather of film studies (though with less sweating!). Althusser recast the Marxist critique of culture with an absolutely essential additional concept: ideology.

You need to get a grip on the notion of ideology, otherwise 90 per cent of film theory makes no sense whatsoever. So if you digest and remember only one part of this chapter, please make it this section.

Althusser rejected Marx’s idea that the base of society (its forms and means of production) shapes its superstructure (its laws, culture, politics and so on). (Check out the earlier section ‘Shaping Society with Film: Marxism’ for more detail.) Instead Althusser saw the relationship between the two as a practice, a system through which people understand their lives. This practice is ideology. In a broader sense, ideology is behaviour – rituals, customs and so on – prescribed by the ideological state apparatus of education, religion and the media.

Living under capitalism, people constantly encounter logical contradictions or tensions between opposing ideas. Ideology works by dispelling these tensions with false but convincing solutions. For example, managers often find that the needs of their business conflict with their workers’ personal lives, but they can rely on the ideology of ‘competitiveness’, which is encouraged by government policy, to help them sleep at night.

Cultural texts are complicit in this process of offering false solutions to irresolvable contradictions. The most obvious examples in narrative cinema tend to arrive at the end of a film, when closure demands that film-makers ‘paper over the cracks’ of the dangerous ideas that they may have been exploring. Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940) is a steamy tale of adultery, sexual intrigue and murder, all extremely damaging to the social superstructure of the family. But all this nasty mess is stuffed back into its box at the end as the protagonists’ house burns down and the couple are reunited. How exactly does this solve all the real issues? It doesn’t.

One important effect of the climactic fire in Rebecca is that the housekeeper Mrs Danvers (Judith Anderson) is destroyed in the blaze. Why was this necessary? What big problem is the film attempting to resolve? Althusser suggests that when a film offers a solution to a problem that it doesn’t name, the problem is a symptom of ideological practice at work. Thus a symptomatic reading of a text looks for the gaps, the looming subtext that’s never mentioned. In Rebecca, the missing problem, or structuring absence, is lesbianism. Mrs Danvers is coded as masculine and domineering, and is clearly in love with her former mistress, the murdered Rebecca. Under the Production Code (see Chapter 9), homosexuality could only ever function as an unnamed problem; the result was often unconvincing solutions.

Taking Films to Bits: Structuralism

The formalists (see ‘Formalism: what is a film?’ earlier in this chapter) tried to understand how films work by thinking about the techniques and choices film-makers make when constructing texts. In doing so, they often concluded that texts tend to work in similar ways within a given context. For example, the formalist Vladimir Propp analysed Russian folk tales and found that the same characters cropped up again and again and had similar functions within the narratives. You can think of this common narrative form as a structure, which is embedded within a particular culture – or is even universal throughout human society.

Structuralism grew out of formalism, but instead of studying individual texts it takes groups of films to bits to discover their underlying commonalities. The following sections break apart the pieces.

Linking linguistics and film: Saussure

Here’s a word: ‘cinema’. When you read this word, you probably conjure up an image in your mind of a large, dark room where people go to watch films together in public. But why? Nothing about the word ‘cinema’ directly links it to that darkened room. In itself, ‘cinema’ is just a sequence of six letters, a collection of individual sounds that join together to form the word. If you’re an English speaker, at an early age you connect the large dark room with the sequence of sounds that is cinema, and then later you discover how to read and write the word. This process becomes instinctive.

The science of linguistics breaks down the instinctive behaviours of language to expose its structure. The influential Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure developed a theory of linguistics that is known as semiotics (after the Greek for sign: semos), which argues that words are signs that are made up of two elements:

• The signifier is the set of letters on a page or the sounds made when the word is spoken.
• The signified is their meaning.

The relationship between the signifier and signified is arbitrary. The word ‘cinema’ contains nothing inherently cinema-like about it. Other languages use different signifiers for the same sign (for example, kino in German). Language also creates meaning through difference, and so ‘cinema’ isn’t ‘theatre’ or ‘museum’.

So what does all this talk about language have to do with film? Well, a sign doesn’t have to be a written or spoken word – it can also be an image. If a film opens with a shot of the Empire State Building, you probably assume that the story is set in New York City. Here the image of the famous building functions as a signifier for the larger sign of New York. If the following shots are streets filled with yellow cabs, you know that you were correct in your assumption. But if, on the other hand, the Empire State is followed by shots of Big Ben in London and the Eiffel Tower in Paris, you guess that the story is international in setting, such as a James Bond film.

This example illustrates that meaning isn’t only produced by individual signs, but also by signs linked together, as with a sentence on a page or a sequence within a film. Saussure pointed out that these meanings can be changed in two ways (see Figure 13-2). Meaning and, in this case, narrative accumulates through the combinations on the syntagmatic axis (derived from the more familiar term ‘syntax’, meaning sentence structure), whereas different choices made on the paradigmatic (from ‘paradigm’, or pattern of thought) axis can create very different narrative outcomes.

Whereas in theory Harry could choose to kiss either Hermione or Voldemort, we know that these choices have already been set by JK Rowling and the film’s screenwriters. Nonetheless, less conventional possibilities exist, thanks to the variety and flexibility of language and storytelling. Consider the phenomenon of internet fan or slash fiction, which takes well-known characters in unpredictable directions.

Sampling film semiotics: Metz

Saussure’s theories of semiotics were designed to be applied to written and spoken language. Applying the theories to other types of communication presents exciting possibilities for new critical interpretations – but also highlights the differences between language and other cultural forms.

French theorist Christian Metz was the first to think through the complex implications of applying semiotics to film. His work is driven by two central questions:

• Is film really a language?
• If so, how do you map the constituent elements of the two systems (language and film) onto each other?

Metz’s first attempts to apply semiotics to film produced mixed results:

• With Saussure’s sign, the relationship between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary. Metz argued that the mechanical reproduction of reality found in the photograph and hence cinema image meant that this relationship wasn’t down to chance. Cinema directly reflects reality instead of recreating it in symbolic fashion as language does.
• Saussure’s rules of language (which he called la langue) depend on difference between a limited number of options (for instance, cinema isn’t theatre). But cinema images are potentially infinite in variety, meaning that the paradigmatic axis is open, not closed as with la langue. In other words, we can’t define an image of a dog by saying that it isn’t a cat, or a pig, or a hamster, because this process could potentially go on forever.
• Metz argued that an image of a revolver in cinema means not just ‘revolver’ but ‘here is a revolver!’, which raises the question: does this make an image more like a sentence than a single sign or word? The problem here is that an individual image can’t be broken down into smaller units of meaning.

Despite the complicating issues, Metz concluded that the syntagmatic axis of language, where meaning accumulates sequentially, is applicable to narrative cinema, because it constructs time and space using shots that produce meaning in relation to one another (again, consider the New York City establishing sequence).

By focusing on the syntagmatic axis of cinema, Metz came up with a detailed classification of filmic structure called la grande syntagmatique. This hierarchy of eight different levels has ‘autonomous shots’ at the top and ‘ordinary sequences’ at the bottom. In between come parallel intercutting, scenes and episodes. It’s an impressive model, but even film theorists have struggled to apply it to actual texts. For example, John Ellis’s attempt to apply the system to Passport to Pimlico (1949) concludes that the categories are too broad or too similar to each other to be easily separated. Even though the results are complex and challenging, Metz did found an entirely new way to think about film – which is pretty amazing.

Meeting mythic structures: Lévi-Strauss

As well as producing hard-wearing jeans (no, not really), the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss was so impressed with Saussure’s linguistic structuralism that he decided to apply it to entire cultures. He claimed that you can discuss anything from cooking to clothing as a language in terms of its use of signs and structure.

But here I’m most concerned with Lévi-Strauss’s structural analysis of mythology, because it examines the status of stories within culture. His argument is pretty straightforward:

• Myths and legends told across the globe are hugely diverse but can all be boiled down to similar structures in their essence.
• Myths work like language in that they’re comprised of individual units of meaning, or mythemes, combined into particular patterns.
• The underlying structures of myths are organised as binary oppositions, such as culture/nature, man/woman, good/bad and so on.
• The purpose of myths is to solve magically all the tensions and oppositions that you observe in the world and make you feel better.

Although culture has moved on a little since the days of myths and legends, clearly people still tell stories to make themselves feel better. Therefore, suggesting that film-making has taken on this function within society isn’t much of a leap, particularly when you consider that film genres exhibit remarkably similar basic structures over time and across different cultures.

As Table 13-1 illustrates, fundamental (that is, defining) binary oppositions exist in any genre, but each one also develops its own variations on these themes. With the three examples in the table, each genre has a clear focus on one particular set of oppositions: for example, westerns are often about the tension between nature and civilisation with issues of gender being much less important, whereas rom-coms focus on the battle of the sexes and have weak or absent antagonists to represent evil.

Lévi-Strauss’s mythic structures operate at an unconscious level, and so bear in mind that storytellers aren’t necessarily aware of why they use them or why audiences enjoy them.

Getting into Your Head: Psychoanalysis and Film

Psychoanalytic film theory is a way to uncover the hidden meaning from a text and a means of understanding the complex processes of film spectatorship. It doesn’t aim to psychoanalyse film characters in order to work out why they behave the way they do – that would be crazy: characters aren’t real people.

As a method of criticism, psychoanalysis works for all films, not just those that use the therapeutic process as a storytelling device or seek to explain the behaviours of heroes or villains through reference to traumatic childhoods. Also, a film doesn’t need to be explicitly surreal in visual style or dreamlike in structure. If psychoanalytic film theory works, it works universally. In this section I discuss the connections between dreaming and cinema, and how films may help to create our sense of ourselves. I also trace the importance of psychoanalysis within feminist film theory.

Delving into dreams: Freud and film

Sigmund Freud is credited with creating the practice of psychoanalysis, and his ideas on how the mind works are so influential that many of them have seeped into common usage. If someone unwittingly says something revealing, you attribute the slip to Freud. If a middle-aged man pulls up next to you in a bright red sports car, you roll your eyes and conclude that he’s overcompensating for a lack of sexual prowess.

Pop psychology is fun. So why ruin it by trying to apply Freud’s ideas to films? What’s the logical connection between the study of human behaviour and understanding a movie? Consider these basic ideas of psychoanalysis:

• The human condition is an eternal conflict between your own drives and desires and the requirements that civilisation and culture impose.
• This conflict helps to create the three-part structure of your psyche: the id, the ego and the superego. You’re born with your id, which is a seething mass of unregulated desire. Becoming an adult means developing a conscious and rational ego to moderate the id, as well as a strict superego, which is the internalised voice of authority.
• The poor, overworked ego spends its days negotiating between the chaotic, unruly id and the dry, authoritarian superego in order to keep just about sane. In the process, much of what your id desires is repressed into your psyche. But repression doesn’t destroy desire, it merely delays it or converts it into other drives.
• While your rational ego is asleep, your dark, repressed desires escape into your dreams, typically in disguised, symbolic forms. Therefore, interpreting dreams can provide the key to understanding your psyche.
• Cinema can be viewed as a kind of collective dream, and so applying Freud’s methods of interpretation to films can reveal the hidden desires of the author, or, more interestingly, those of the audience, who use the film as a fantasy space to play out their own desires.

Freud started this work by analysing myths, most famously the story of Oedipus from Greek legend. Oedipus is a tragic figure who, due to a long sequence of events, ends up killing his father and marrying his own mother. Freud claimed that this narrative was an analogy for psychological development in children, with all people going through phases of desiring their mothers and wanting to kill their fathers. As disturbing and bizarre as this sounds, you can easily find similar structures in mainstream cinema when you choose to look for them: Luke, I am your father… .

Leaping through the looking glass: Lacan

Okay, take a deep breath, because in this section things start to get complicated. Jacques Lacan was a French psychoanalyst who picked up Freud’s ideas about how human consciousness develops (such as the Oedipus analogy) and reformed them into a much more complex system. Why bother with it? Well, because a great deal of film theory already does.

Lacan, rather than Freud, was in vogue in the 1960s and 1970s, during the formative stage of much modern film theory. If you read classic film theory from that period, you almost certainly come across Lacan or his ideas. These discussions become incredibly annoying unless you can grasp the basics beforehand.

The most important element of Lacan for the purposes of film studies is his discussion of the mirror stage of psychological development. At this moment, an infant aged around 12 months first recognises her own image in a mirror. Just think for a second how profound this change is. Before you recognise your image, you just exist with no concept of self or the exterior world. Lacan calls this earlier state of pure existence the real. After the mirror stage, you understand that you have a body and are separate from the world. He calls this new phase of development the imaginary. You have yet to acquire language by entering the symbolic, and so you relate to the world primarily through images.

You can probably see some tempting connections to draw between Lacan’s notion of the imaginary and the experience of cinema. Christian Metz (see ‘Sampling film semiotics: Metz’ earlier in this chapter) is responsible for opening this particular can of worms:

• Metz drew on Lacan’s notion of the mirror phase with one important qualification: what you see in the mirror isn’t yourself but an idealised notion of what you may be. As a baby, you can’t yet control your own body. So the image is a fiction, and babies soon realise and accept that images are different to themselves.
• Metz proposed that the cinema screen operates as a kind of mirror, reflecting idealised versions of yourself. This idea is one possible explanation for the process of identification with fictional characters that you experience when involved with a film.
• Alternatively, Metz suggested that you identify not only with people on screen, but also with the cinematic apparatus itself. Sitting in the cinema watching a film, you feel as if you somehow create the images on screen, functioning as camera and projector. Yet you also know that this is an illusion, just like babies misrecognising themselves in mirrors.

All these ideas may sound sweet and innocent – babies and mirrors, how adorable! But don’t worry, Lacan also gives plenty of messy ideas about sex and death to come to terms with. He follows Freud by discussing the Oedipus complex as the encounter with sexual difference that turns you into an adult. Lacan states that after you make it through this stage, you’re forever in a state of lack, wanting subconsciously to go back to being baby, united with your mother’s body. This impossible desire defines your entire life, leading you into relationships that can never fully satisfy. Cheery, huh? But just think about Hollywood’s version of romance – such as Jerry Maguire proclaiming ‘You complete me!’ in the 1996 film named after him – and tell me that Lacan doesn’t have a point. Even if it’s buried beneath layers of interminable psychobabble.

Rejecting the male gaze: Mulvey

Film theorist Laura Mulvey investigates what she calls the male gaze at work in mainstream narrative cinema. Mulvey’s work is vital to feminist film theory, partly because it formalises and explores a self-evident problem with film: male characters tend to act and female characters are passive, just there to look pretty. The concept of the male gaze draws on elements from Freud and Lacan’s models of sexual pleasure (see the preceding two sections) to help explain women’s ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’, the cinematic treatment of their bodies as display. Mulvey argues that this system of visual pleasure needs to be destroyed if women are ever to be considered equal in society.

The first of the Transformers movies (2007) contains a great example of the male gaze at work. Hapless hero Sam (Shia LaBeouf) picks up the gorgeous Mikaela (Megan Fox) in his car, only to find that it breaks down on the dusty highway. Sam is reduced to a gabbling wreck by the presence of Mikaela, who takes the initiative by tying her hair back, stepping out of the car and taking a look at the engine. Leaning her arms on the open bonnet she describes how the carburettor ‘squirts the fuel in so you can go faster’. This pose displays her well-toned figure so perfectly that Sam is rendered almost speechless. The camera lingers on her midriff as he gazes uncontrollably at her.

The pleasure of the male gaze comprises two elements:

• Scopophilia: The pleasure of looking at a sexual object, which according to Freud is associated with power, because doing so subjects the object to a controlling gaze.
• Narcissism: The pleasure of looking at an image of oneself, drawing on Lacan’s mirror stage (see the preceding section) to imply identification between male audience members and male characters on screen.

These two looks are magnified as men in the audience look at men on screen looking at women.

But here’s a twist in the tale for the male bearer of the look. The image of the woman being looked at means sexual difference, which creates a primal fear in the male viewer – that of castration. No, seriously. Fear of castration is a big deal in psychoanalytic theory. It’s important because the castration fear helps to explain the common and unsettling link between sex and violence on cinema screens, such as in slasher movies. Even if this fear doesn’t manifest in real violence, it can justify the narrative ‘punishment’ of sexuality that crops up in most films noir, where the femme fatale has to die. Alternatively, women are fetishised and turned into abstract objects, for example in those famous Busby Berkeley dance routines of the 1930s.