As the Lights Go On

Abstract

The credits roll; lights go on; spectators rise to their feet and file out of cinema. Film endings are an important part of spectator's experience, but phenomenology of film endings is rarely discussed in film theory. Roland Barthes' brief essay Upon Leaving Movie Theater is a rare exception.(1) In following essay I undertake an examination of some features of spectator's experience of film endings. Psychoanalytic film theory supposes that film spectators passively identify with point of view of camera. This identification is said to provide a false but comforting illusion of having a secure and integrated experience. If we assume that, despite its overly universalized claims, psychoanalytic film theory has captured something important about filmgoers experience, we are left with a puzzle. What happens to spectator when film ends? In beginning to answer this question, I examine parallels between Martin Heidegger's concept of inauthenticity, and psychoanalytic account of spectator's passive identification with camera. Heidegger's account of achieving authentic unity provides a model for one way a study of film endings may proceed. Ultimately, however, both psychoanalytically influenced film theory and Heidegger will be criticized for eliding issues about spectator's social location and network of relationships. The Look, The Mirror-Stage, Suture: Psychoanalytic Film Theory After Metz and Baudry, it is a commonplace of film theory to regard spectator's identification with camera, or the look, as primary cinematic identification, that which is presupposed by any further identification with characters, objects in film, or actors. The allure of the look is said to lie in spectator's identification with a more complete and capable self(2) or with a unified and coherent ego.(3) What is source of this appeal? Why should identification with a camera provide a sense of coherence and completeness? Christian Metz writes that spectator's identification with camera is simultaneously an identification with himself as a pure act of perception . . . as possibility of perceived and hence as a kind of transcendental subject which comes before everything there is.(4) Just as Kantian transcendental subject is condition for possibility of experience (and is itself not found within experience), camera is condition for possibility of experience for duration of film. Like transcendental subject, camera is that which accompanies and makes possible every particular experience, without appearing within that experience. Jean-Louis Baudry will also liken identification with camera to an identification with transcendental self.(5) In seeking to explain appeal of this identification, Baudry and Metz liken identification with camera to Lacan's analysis of mirror-stage. According to Lacan (who offers three different analyses of this stage) at some point between six and eighteen months of age infant enters into mirror-stage. The child is still relatively physically immobile but perceptually advanced. It first obtains a sense of itself as a separate entity by recognizing another person in act of recognizing (an image of) child. Typically this is presented as occurring when child is in arms of its mother. The infant looks in mirror and sees mother looking at child. In Feminism and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Dictionary, following account is offered: The mirror stage introduces a sense of identity and of separateness from maternal body and world of others. It provides a border or boundary defined by child's skin. But identity and unity offered by mirror stage and Imaginary identifications (in which self is defined through its identifications with image of others) are precarious: identity of subject is always modeled on an other with whom it confuses itself, ego being set up as an alter ego. …