The Navel of the Film: On the Abject and the Masquerade

Abstract

At the centre of the black and white fiction film The Virgin Machine (Die Jungfrauenmaschine, Monika Treut 1988)3 a fantastic sequence unfolds that seems to defy interpretation by conventional standards. To paraphrase Sigmund Freud, it is the navel of a film, ‘the spot where it reaches down into the unknown’; a tangle that resists interpretation and ‘which cannot be unravelled’ (SE, V: 525). It is precisely the unknown that Dorothee, the protagonist of The Virgin Machine, wants to explore: in the opening monologue of the film she introduces herself in voice-over as ‘Dorothee Muller’, who has suffered from the ‘illness’ of romantic love, this ‘fantastic illusion’ in which she has strongly believed and which she still desperately desires to understand. The film thus introduces the riddle of love, of sexuality, as the narrative’s leading question; as the domain to which the ‘navel’ of the film text gives access. What that navel is, where it is situated, will become clear in the course of my analysis.