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1
00:00:05,966 --> 00:00:10,133
The problem for us is not,
"Are our desires satisfied or not?"

2
00:00:12,699 --> 00:00:15,533
The problem is,
"How do we know what we desire?"

3
00:00:15,599 --> 00:00:20,466
There is nothing spontaneous,
nothing natural, about human desires.

4
00:00:22,433 --> 00:00:24,533
Our desires are artificial.

5
00:00:25,066 --> 00:00:27,499
We have to be taught to desire.

6
00:00:28,433 --> 00:00:31,099
Cinema is the ultimate pervert art.

7
00:00:32,166 --> 00:00:36,266
It doesn't give you what you desire,
it tells you how to desire.

8
00:00:38,966 --> 00:00:43,766
THE PERVERT'S
GUIDE TO CINEMA

9
00:00:46,066 --> 00:00:48,766
PRESENTED BY
PHILOSOPHER AND PSYCHOANALYST

10
00:00:48,866 --> 00:00:50,966
SLAVOJ �I�EK

11
00:00:55,265 --> 00:01:00,099
Oh, I do like you, but it just isn't good enough.

12
00:01:05,999 --> 00:01:09,499
Oh, I forgot.
Your mother asked me up for supper.

13
00:01:09,565 --> 00:01:12,832
Okay. Bring some ice cream with you, will you?

14
00:01:12,932 --> 00:01:15,432
Sure. What kind do you want,
chocolate or vanilla?

15
00:01:15,532 --> 00:01:17,032
-Chocolate.
-Okay.

16
00:01:17,132 --> 00:01:20,799
What we get
in this wonderful clip from Possessed

17
00:01:20,865 --> 00:01:25,765
is commentary on the magic art of cinema
within a movie.

18
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We have an ordinary working-class girl,
living in a drab, small provincial town.

19
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All of a sudden she finds herself
in a situation where reality itself

20
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reproduces the magic cinematic experience.

21
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She approaches the rail,
the train is passing, and it is as if

22
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what in reality is just a person
standing near a slowly passing train

23
00:01:51,665 --> 00:01:57,232
turns into a viewer
observing the magic of the screen.

24
00:02:38,964 --> 00:02:40,398
Have a drink?

25
00:02:42,698 --> 00:02:45,064
Oh, don't go away. Looking in?

26
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Wrong way. Get in and look out.

27
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We get a very real, ordinary scene

28
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onto which the heroine's inner space, as it were,

29
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her fantasy space is projected,

30
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so that, although all reality is simply there,
the train, the girl,

31
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part of reality in her perception
and in our viewer's perception

32
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is, as it were, elevated to the magic level,
becomes the screen of her dreams.

33
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This is cinematic art at its purest.

34
00:03:22,364 --> 00:03:26,597
This is your last chance.
After this there is no turning back.

35
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You take the blue pill, the story ends.

36
00:03:30,864 --> 00:03:34,097
You wake up in your bed
and believe whatever you want to believe.

37
00:03:34,197 --> 00:03:37,164
You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland

38
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and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.

39
00:03:45,830 --> 00:03:49,397
But the choice between the blue and the red pill

40
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is not really a choice between illusion and reality.

41
00:03:53,697 --> 00:03:57,297
Of course, the matrix is a machine for fictions,

42
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but these are fictions
which already structure our reality.

43
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If you take away from our reality
the symbolic fictions that regulate it,

44
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you lose reality itself.

45
00:04:10,630 --> 00:04:14,797
I want a third pill. So what is the third pill?

46
00:04:16,230 --> 00:04:20,830
Definitely not some kind of
transcendental pill which enables a fake,

47
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fast-food religious experience,
but a pill that would enable me

48
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to perceive not the reality behind the illusion

49
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but the reality in illusion itself.

50
00:04:34,797 --> 00:04:41,363
If something gets too traumatic, too violent,
even too filled with enjoyment,

51
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it shatters the coordinates of our reality.
We have to fictionalise it.

52
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The first key to horror films is to say,

53
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"Let's imagine the same story
but without the horror element."

54
00:05:13,030 --> 00:05:15,763
This gives us, I think, the background.

55
00:05:19,196 --> 00:05:21,263
We're in the middle of Bodega Bay,

56
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where the action of Hitchcock's Birds takes place.

57
00:05:32,463 --> 00:05:38,763
Birds is a film about a young, rich, socialite girl

58
00:05:38,863 --> 00:05:41,996
from San Francisco who falls in love with a guy,

59
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goes after him to Bodega Bay,

60
00:05:44,929 --> 00:05:48,363
where she discovers
that he lives with his mother.

61
00:05:48,796 --> 00:05:51,762
Of course, it's none of my business,
but when you bring a girl like that...

62
00:05:51,829 --> 00:05:53,529
-Darling?
-Yes?

63
00:05:53,829 --> 00:05:56,929
I think I can handle Melanie Daniels by myself.

64
00:05:57,429 --> 00:06:00,962
Well, as long as you know what you want, Mitch.

65
00:06:02,862 --> 00:06:04,229
I know exactly what I want.

66
00:06:04,296 --> 00:06:08,029
And then, there is the standard oedipal imbroglio

67
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of incestuous tension between mother and son,

68
00:06:10,862 --> 00:06:15,096
the son split between
his possessive mother and the intrusive girl.

69
00:06:15,462 --> 00:06:18,429
-What's the matter with them?
-What's the matter with all the birds?

70
00:06:18,529 --> 00:06:21,696
-Where do you want this coffee?
-Here on the table, honey.

71
00:06:21,762 --> 00:06:23,396
Hurry up with yours, Mitch.

72
00:06:23,496 --> 00:06:26,029
I'm sure Miss Daniels wants to be on her way.

73
00:06:26,129 --> 00:06:28,462
I think you ought to stay the night, Melanie.

74
00:06:28,595 --> 00:06:30,595
We have an extra room upstairs and everything.

75
00:06:30,795 --> 00:06:34,862
The big question about The Birds,
of course, is the stupid, obvious one,

76
00:06:34,995 --> 00:06:37,229
"Why do the birds attack?"

77
00:06:38,662 --> 00:06:39,929
Mitch...

78
00:06:45,495 --> 00:06:51,362
It is not enough to say that the birds
are part of the natural set-up of reality.

79
00:06:51,529 --> 00:06:55,429
It is rather as if a foreign dimension intrudes

80
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that literally tears apart reality.

81
00:07:01,895 --> 00:07:05,795
We humans are not naturally born into reality.

82
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In order for us to act as normal people
who interact with other people

83
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who live in the space of social reality,

84
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many things should happen.
Like, we should be properly installed

85
00:07:15,662 --> 00:07:17,662
within the symbolic order and so on.

86
00:07:17,728 --> 00:07:22,995
When this, our proper dwelling
within a symbolic space, is disturbed,

87
00:07:23,095 --> 00:07:24,595
reality disintegrates.

88
00:07:28,295 --> 00:07:31,161
So, to propose the psychoanalytic formula,

89
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the violent attacks of the birds
are obviously explosive outbursts

90
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of maternal superego,
of the maternal figure preventing,

91
00:07:40,428 --> 00:07:43,361
trying to prevent sexual relationship.

92
00:07:44,261 --> 00:07:47,495
So the birds are raw, incestuous energy.

93
00:07:50,061 --> 00:07:52,861
What am I doing? I'm sorry, now I got it.

94
00:07:59,495 --> 00:08:03,595
My God, I'm thinking like Melanie.
You know what I'm thinking now?

95
00:08:04,461 --> 00:08:06,928
"I want to fuck Mitch."
That's what she was thinking.

96
00:08:06,994 --> 00:08:09,661
No. Sorry, sorry, sorry.

97
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I meant that I got this spontaneous
confusion of directions.

98
00:08:23,828 --> 00:08:25,028
Mrs Bates.

99
00:08:38,527 --> 00:08:42,994
We are in the cellar of the mother's house
from Psycho.

100
00:08:43,661 --> 00:08:48,061
What's so interesting is that
the very disposition of mother's house...

101
00:08:49,427 --> 00:08:53,427
Events took place in it at three levels,

102
00:08:54,527 --> 00:08:57,861
first floor, ground floor, basement.

103
00:08:58,594 --> 00:09:03,994
It is as if they reproduce the three levels
of human subjectivity.

104
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Ground floor is ego.

105
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Norman behaves there as a normal son,

106
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whatever remains of his normal ego taking over.

107
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Up there, it's the superego.

108
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Maternal superego, because the dead mother

109
00:09:22,927 --> 00:09:25,260
is basically a figure of superego.

110
00:09:25,327 --> 00:09:29,194
No, Mother. I'm gonna bring something up.

111
00:09:30,094 --> 00:09:33,694
I am sorry, boy,
but you do manage to look ludicrous

112
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-when you give me orders.
-Please, Mother.

113
00:09:36,694 --> 00:09:39,527
No, I will not hide in the fruit cellar.

114
00:09:40,794 --> 00:09:42,827
You think I'm fruity, huh?

115
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And down in the cellar, it's the id,

116
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the reservoir of these illicit drives.

117
00:09:53,060 --> 00:09:58,293
So we can then interpret the event
in the middle of the film,

118
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when Norman carries the mother

119
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or, as we learn at the end,
mother's mummy, corpse, skeleton,

120
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from the first floor to the cellar.

121
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You won't do it again. Not ever again.
Now get out.

122
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-I told you to get out, boy.
-I'll carry you, Mother.

123
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It's as if he is transposing her in his own mind

124
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as the psychic agency from superego to id.

125
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Put me down. Put me down.
I can walk on my own...

126
00:10:32,226 --> 00:10:36,760
Of course, the lesson of it is the old lesson
elaborated already by Freud,

127
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that superego and id are deeply connected.

128
00:10:40,960 --> 00:10:43,960
The mother complains first,
as a figure of authority,

129
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"How can you be doing this to me?
Aren't you ashamed?

130
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"This is a fruit cellar." And then,
mother immediately turns into obscenity,

131
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"Do you think I'm fruity?"

132
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Superego is not an ethical agency.
Superego is an obscene agency,

133
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bombarding us with impossible orders,
laughing at us,

134
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when, of course, we cannot ever fulfil its demand.

135
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The more we obey it, the more it makes us guilty.

136
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There is always some aspect
of an obscene madman

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in the agency of the superego.

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We often find references to psychoanalysis

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embodied in the very relations between persons.

140
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For example, the three Marx Brothers,

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Groucho, Chico, Harpo.

142
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It's clear that Groucho, the most popular one,

143
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with his nervous hyper-activity, is superego.

144
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Well, that covers a lot of ground.
Say, you cover a lot of ground yourself.

145
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You better beat it.
I hear they're gonna tear you down

146
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and put up an office building
where you're standing.

147
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You can leave in a taxi. If you can't get
a taxi, you can leave in a huff.

148
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If that's too soon,
you can leave in a minute and a half.

149
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You know you haven't stopped talking
since I came here?

150
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Chico, the rational guy, egotistic,
calculating all the time, is ego.

151
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Chicolini, you're charged with high treason,
and if found guilty, you'll be shot.

152
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-I object.
-Oh, you object?

153
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-On what grounds?
-I couldn't think of anything else to say.

154
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Objection sustained.

155
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And, the weirdest of them all, Harpo,
the mute guy, he doesn't talk.

156
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Freud said that drives are silent.
He doesn't talk. He, of course, is id.

157
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Who are you guys?

158
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What are you doing in my room?

159
00:12:37,892 --> 00:12:40,625
That's my partner.
But he no speak. He's dumb and deaf.

160
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The id in all its radical ambiguity.

161
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Namely, what is so weird
about the Harpo character

162
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is that he's childishly innocent,
just striving for pleasure,

163
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likes children, plays with children and so on.

164
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But, at the same time,
possessed by some kind of

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primordial evil, aggressive all the time.

166
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And this unique combination
of utter corruption and innocence

167
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is what the id is about.

168
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Get off there. Get off that table.

169
00:13:24,691 --> 00:13:26,691
What do you think this is here, anyway?

170
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Put that down.

171
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-Lunatic!
-Stop it.

172
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Stop that, here!

173
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-Hey, you want to break that?
-Get him out of here.

174
00:13:34,658 --> 00:13:35,791
Here, let it alone.

175
00:13:36,791 --> 00:13:39,658
-Dr Klein?
-Yes, I'm Dr Klein. This is Dr Taney.

176
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-How do you do?
-I'm Sharon. Things have gotten worse

177
00:13:41,291 --> 00:13:42,858
since I phoned you.
I think you better come upstairs.

178
00:13:42,958 --> 00:13:45,191
-Is she having spasms again?
-Yeah, but they've gotten violent.

179
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Did you give her the medication?

180
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Voice is not an organic part of a human body.

181
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It's coming from somewhere
in between your body.

182
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-Mother, please!
-Mrs MacNeil, this is Dr Taney.

183
00:13:58,691 --> 00:14:00,824
-Please, Mother, make it stop!
-What is it? What's happening?

184
00:14:00,924 --> 00:14:04,524
-It's burning! It's burning!
-Do something, Doctor. Please, help her!

185
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Whenever we talk to another person,

186
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there is always this minimum
of ventriloquist effect,

187
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as if some foreign power took possession.

188
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Let the enemy have no power over her.

189
00:14:16,691 --> 00:14:18,524
And the son of iniquity be powerless to harm her.

190
00:14:18,624 --> 00:14:21,924
You mother sucks cocks in hell,
Karras, you faithless swine!

191
00:14:22,457 --> 00:14:27,824
Remember that at the beginning of the film,
this was a beautiful young girl.

192
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How did she become a monster that we see?

193
00:14:30,924 --> 00:14:35,424
By being possessed, but who possessed her?

194
00:14:39,757 --> 00:14:43,890
A voice. A voice in its obscene dimensions.

195
00:14:45,957 --> 00:14:49,524
See the cross of the Lord.
Begone, you hostile powers.

196
00:14:50,024 --> 00:14:54,757
The first big film
about this traumatic dimension of the voice,

197
00:14:55,224 --> 00:15:00,124
the voice which freely floats around
and is a traumatic presence, feared,

198
00:15:00,224 --> 00:15:04,890
the ultimate moment or object of anxiety
which distorts reality,

199
00:15:05,224 --> 00:15:11,657
was in '31 , in Germany,
Fritz Lang's The Testament of Dr Mabuse.

200
00:15:12,124 --> 00:15:14,390
You and the woman

201
00:15:14,490 --> 00:15:18,523
will not leave this room alive.

202
00:15:18,757 --> 00:15:19,823
Monster!

203
00:15:21,223 --> 00:15:22,823
Stop, please!

204
00:15:32,523 --> 00:15:35,523
We do not see Mabuse till the end of the film.

205
00:15:35,990 --> 00:15:37,757
He is just a voice.

206
00:15:42,323 --> 00:15:47,423
You will not leave this room alive.

207
00:15:49,223 --> 00:15:53,056
And to redeem through your son,
who lives and reigns with you

208
00:15:53,156 --> 00:15:57,256
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
God, forever and ever.

209
00:15:57,590 --> 00:15:59,456
-Amen.
-Good Lord, hear my prayer.

210
00:15:59,023 --> 00:16:03,223
So, the problem is, which is why
we have the two priests at her side,

211
00:16:03,290 --> 00:16:07,690
how to get rid of this intruder,
of this alien intruder.

212
00:16:08,423 --> 00:16:13,323
It is as if we are expecting
the famous scene from Ridley Scott's Alien

213
00:16:13,423 --> 00:16:15,090
to repeat itself.

214
00:16:27,023 --> 00:16:32,789
As if we just wait for some terrifying, alien,

215
00:16:32,856 --> 00:16:35,989
evil-looking, small animal to jump out.

216
00:16:41,656 --> 00:16:47,256
There is a fundamental imbalance,
gap, between our psychic energy,

217
00:16:47,323 --> 00:16:52,556
called by Freud "libido", this endless undead

218
00:16:53,556 --> 00:16:56,522
energy which persists beyond life and death,

219
00:16:56,589 --> 00:17:02,056
and the poor, finite, mortal reality of our bodies.

220
00:17:10,289 --> 00:17:14,689
This is not just the pathology
of being possessed by ghosts.

221
00:17:17,489 --> 00:17:22,522
The lesson that we should learn
and that the movies try to avoid

222
00:17:22,689 --> 00:17:27,322
is that we ourselves are the aliens.

223
00:17:30,989 --> 00:17:36,622
Our ego, our psychic agency, is an alien force,

224
00:17:36,689 --> 00:17:39,189
distorting, controlling our body.

225
00:17:40,855 --> 00:17:47,155
Nobody was as fully aware of the properly
traumatic dimension of the human voice,

226
00:17:47,455 --> 00:17:51,955
the human voice
not as the sublime, ethereal medium

227
00:17:52,055 --> 00:17:54,755
for expressing the depth of human subjectivity,

228
00:17:54,822 --> 00:17:57,988
but the human voice as a foreign intruder.

229
00:17:58,322 --> 00:18:01,588
Nobody was more aware
of this than Charlie Chaplin.

230
00:18:23,388 --> 00:18:27,522
Chaplin himself plays in the film two persons,

231
00:18:27,788 --> 00:18:30,321
the good, small, Jewish barber

232
00:18:33,588 --> 00:18:35,555
and his evil double,

233
00:18:38,055 --> 00:18:41,288
Hynkel, dictator. Hitler, of course.

234
00:18:41,988 --> 00:18:44,221
-Come on. Leave me alone.
-Why, you...

235
00:18:48,521 --> 00:18:49,755
He bit my finger.

236
00:18:51,421 --> 00:18:56,155
The Jewish barber, the tramp figure,
is of course the figure of silent cinema.

237
00:18:56,555 --> 00:18:59,621
Silent figures are basically
like figures in the cartoon.

238
00:18:59,721 --> 00:19:02,988
They don't know death.
They don't know sexuality even.

239
00:19:03,088 --> 00:19:04,521
They don't know suffering.

240
00:19:04,588 --> 00:19:08,821
They just go on in their oral, egotistic striving,

241
00:19:08,954 --> 00:19:11,921
like cats and mice in a cartoon.

242
00:19:12,021 --> 00:19:14,554
You cut them into pieces, they're reconstituted.

243
00:19:14,654 --> 00:19:17,521
There is no finitude, no mortality here.

244
00:19:17,621 --> 00:19:21,688
There is evil, but a kind of naive, good evil.

245
00:19:21,754 --> 00:19:25,354
You're just egotistic, you want to eat,
you want to hit the other,

246
00:19:25,454 --> 00:19:27,688
but there is no guilt proper.

247
00:19:28,788 --> 00:19:31,088
What we get with sound is

248
00:19:31,721 --> 00:19:35,021
interiority, depth, guilt,

249
00:19:37,887 --> 00:19:39,254
culpability,

250
00:19:40,121 --> 00:19:43,987
in other words, the complex oedipal universe.

251
00:19:44,187 --> 00:19:46,121
Here you are.
Get a Hynkel button. Get a Hynkel button.

252
00:19:46,221 --> 00:19:48,421
A fine sculpture with a hooey
on each and every button.

253
00:19:54,721 --> 00:19:59,054
The problem of the film
is not only the political problem,

254
00:19:59,121 --> 00:20:01,754
how to get rid of totalitarianism,

255
00:20:02,521 --> 00:20:07,421
of its terrible seductive power,
but it's also this more formal problem,

256
00:20:07,521 --> 00:20:11,420
how to get rid of this
terrifying dimension of the voice.

257
00:20:22,654 --> 00:20:27,087
Or, since we cannot simply get rid of it,
how to domesticate it,

258
00:20:28,687 --> 00:20:31,520
how to transform this voice nonetheless

259
00:20:31,620 --> 00:20:36,254
into the means of expressing humanity,
love and so on.

260
00:20:39,220 --> 00:20:43,120
German police grabs the poor tramp
thinking this is Hitler

261
00:20:43,220 --> 00:20:46,520
and he has to address a large gathering.

262
00:20:54,053 --> 00:20:58,853
I'm sorry, but I don't want to be an emperor.
That's not my business.

263
00:20:59,720 --> 00:21:03,987
I don't want to rule or conquer anyone.
I should like to help everyone, if possible.

264
00:21:04,087 --> 00:21:08,786
Jew, gentile, black man, white,
we all want to help one another.

265
00:21:09,053 --> 00:21:10,353
Human beings are like that.

266
00:21:10,553 --> 00:21:14,253
There, of course, he delivers his big speech
about the need for love,

267
00:21:14,320 --> 00:21:17,820
understanding between people.
But there is a catch,

268
00:21:18,886 --> 00:21:20,220
even a double catch.

269
00:21:20,286 --> 00:21:24,120
Soldiers, in the name of democracy,
let us all unite!

270
00:21:28,686 --> 00:21:32,820
People applaud exactly in the same way
as they were applauding Hitler.

271
00:21:35,220 --> 00:21:39,253
The music that accompanies
this great humanist finale,

272
00:21:39,353 --> 00:21:42,219
the overture to Wagner's opera, Lohengrin,

273
00:21:42,319 --> 00:21:47,419
is the same music as the one we hear
when Hitler is daydreaming

274
00:21:47,519 --> 00:21:49,819
about conquering the entire world

275
00:21:49,886 --> 00:21:52,919
and where he has a balloon
in the shape of the globe.

276
00:21:53,853 --> 00:21:55,653
The music is the same.

277
00:22:12,053 --> 00:22:15,386
This can be read
as the ultimate redemption of music,

278
00:22:16,152 --> 00:22:18,786
that the same music which served evil purposes

279
00:22:18,886 --> 00:22:22,486
can be redeemed to serve the good.
Or it can be read,

280
00:22:22,619 --> 00:22:25,652
and I think it should be read,
in a much more ambiguous way,

281
00:22:25,752 --> 00:22:29,219
that with music, we cannot ever be sure.

282
00:22:33,719 --> 00:22:38,586
Insofar as it externalises our inner passion,

283
00:22:38,686 --> 00:22:41,919
music is potentially always a threat.

284
00:23:06,352 --> 00:23:11,519
There is a short scene
in David Lynch's Mulholland Drive,

285
00:23:11,785 --> 00:23:15,285
which takes place in the theatre
where we are now,

286
00:23:15,352 --> 00:23:18,619
where behind the microphone
a woman is singing,

287
00:23:18,852 --> 00:23:22,152
then out of exhaustion or whatever,
she drops down.

288
00:23:22,585 --> 00:23:25,885
Surprisingly, the singing goes on.

289
00:23:29,585 --> 00:23:33,452
Immediately afterwards, it is explained.
It was a playback.

290
00:23:34,018 --> 00:23:37,652
But for that couple of seconds
when we are confused,

291
00:23:37,718 --> 00:23:43,585
we confront this nightmarish dimension
of an autonomous partial object.

292
00:23:47,618 --> 00:23:51,918
Like in the well-known adventure
of Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland,

293
00:23:51,985 --> 00:23:55,318
where the cat disappears, the smile remains.

294
00:23:56,585 --> 00:24:03,451
You may have noticed
that I'm not all there myself.

295
00:24:06,751 --> 00:24:10,051
And the mome raths outgrabe.

296
00:24:14,451 --> 00:24:20,185
The fascinating thing about partial objects,
in the sense of organs without bodies,

297
00:24:20,285 --> 00:24:26,184
is that they embody
what Freud called "death drive".

298
00:24:26,418 --> 00:24:28,518
Here, we have to be very careful.

299
00:24:28,584 --> 00:24:33,684
Death drive is not kind of a Buddhist
striving for annihilation.

300
00:24:33,818 --> 00:24:38,251
"I want to find eternal peace. I want..."
No. Death drive is almost the opposite.

301
00:24:38,351 --> 00:24:42,851
Death drive is the dimension of what
in the Stephen King-like horror fiction

302
00:24:42,918 --> 00:24:46,518
is called the dimension of the undead,
of living dead,

303
00:24:46,584 --> 00:24:50,184
of something which remains alive
even after it is dead.

304
00:24:50,284 --> 00:24:54,518
And it's, in a way, immortal in its deadness itself.

305
00:24:54,584 --> 00:24:56,784
It goes on, insists. You cannot destroy it.

306
00:24:56,851 --> 00:25:00,217
The more you cut it,
the more it insists, it goes on.

307
00:25:00,351 --> 00:25:04,217
This dimension,
of a kind of diabolical undeadness,

308
00:25:04,451 --> 00:25:07,284
is what partial objects are about.

309
00:25:21,384 --> 00:25:25,517
The nicest example here for me,
I think, is Michael Powell's Red Shoes,

310
00:25:25,617 --> 00:25:27,417
about a ballerina.

311
00:25:36,350 --> 00:25:41,250
Her passion for dancing
is materialised in her shoes taking over.

312
00:25:41,350 --> 00:25:43,817
The shoes are literally the undead object.

313
00:26:18,817 --> 00:26:20,983
Perhaps the ultimate bodily part

314
00:26:21,050 --> 00:26:24,617
which fits this role
of the autonomous partial object

315
00:26:24,683 --> 00:26:27,183
is the fist, or rather, the hand.

316
00:26:43,183 --> 00:26:46,616
This hand, raising up,
that's the whole point of the film.

317
00:26:46,716 --> 00:26:49,183
It's not simply something foreign to him.

318
00:26:49,250 --> 00:26:51,916
It's the very core of his personality out there.

319
00:26:53,583 --> 00:26:54,816
Security?

320
00:26:54,883 --> 00:26:58,350
I am Jack's smirking revenge.

321
00:27:06,183 --> 00:27:08,316
What the hell are you doing?

322
00:27:16,683 --> 00:27:18,083
That hurt.

323
00:27:18,416 --> 00:27:22,749
Far from standing
for some kind of perverted masochism

324
00:27:22,816 --> 00:27:25,816
or reactionary fantasy of violence,

325
00:27:25,949 --> 00:27:30,216
this scene is deeply liberating.

326
00:27:30,283 --> 00:27:33,349
I am here, as it were, on the side of the fist.

327
00:27:33,416 --> 00:27:36,016
I think this is what liberation means.

328
00:27:36,116 --> 00:27:41,849
In order to attack the enemy, you first
have to beat the shit out of yourself.

329
00:27:41,916 --> 00:27:48,349
To get rid, in yourself, of that which
in yourself attaches you to the leader,

330
00:27:48,449 --> 00:27:50,882
to the conditions of slavery, and so on and so on.

331
00:27:50,982 --> 00:27:52,549
No, please stop!

332
00:28:02,216 --> 00:28:03,882
What are you doing?

333
00:28:04,482 --> 00:28:06,316
Oh, God, no, please! No!

334
00:28:06,416 --> 00:28:09,982
For some reason,
I thought of my first fight, with Tyler.

335
00:28:13,116 --> 00:28:17,016
There is always this conflict
between me and my double.

336
00:28:19,515 --> 00:28:20,949
Motherfucker!

337
00:28:22,482 --> 00:28:25,949
-You hit me in the ear.
-Well, Jesus. I'm sorry.

338
00:28:26,215 --> 00:28:29,682
-Christ! Why the ear, man?
-I fucked it up, kind of.

339
00:28:29,782 --> 00:28:31,582
No, that was perfect.

340
00:28:32,715 --> 00:28:36,149
It is as if the double embodies myself,

341
00:28:36,215 --> 00:28:39,582
but without the castrated dimension of myself.

342
00:28:53,915 --> 00:28:57,115
There is an episode
in the wonderful British horror classic,

343
00:28:57,182 --> 00:28:58,582
Dead of Night...

344
00:28:58,715 --> 00:29:01,182
I knew you wouldn't leave me, Hugo.

345
00:29:01,915 --> 00:29:03,382
I knew you'd come back.

346
00:29:03,448 --> 00:29:05,982
...in which Michael Redgrave plays a ventriloquist

347
00:29:06,082 --> 00:29:09,348
who gets jealous of his puppet.

348
00:29:09,648 --> 00:29:12,482
Now don't get excited, I was only joking.

349
00:29:13,115 --> 00:29:15,315
You know me. Maxwell!

350
00:29:15,882 --> 00:29:17,448
Maxwell.

351
00:29:17,515 --> 00:29:20,082
Maxwell! Take your hands off me!

352
00:29:20,448 --> 00:29:22,615
-Stop playing!
-Maxwell!

353
00:29:26,448 --> 00:29:27,981
Here, you fool!

354
00:29:29,115 --> 00:29:31,548
Officer, quickly, open this door.

355
00:29:32,548 --> 00:29:33,781
Quickly.

356
00:29:35,781 --> 00:29:41,348
In an outburst of violence,
he destroys the puppet, breaks down,

357
00:29:41,415 --> 00:29:44,615
then in the very last scene of the film
we see him in the hospital,

358
00:29:44,681 --> 00:29:48,215
slowly regaining consciousness,
coming back to himself.

359
00:29:48,715 --> 00:29:52,115
First his voice is stuck in the throat.

360
00:29:52,381 --> 00:29:57,581
Then, with great difficulty, finally,
he is able to talk,

361
00:29:59,548 --> 00:30:04,381
but he talks
with the distorted voice of the dummy.

362
00:30:05,981 --> 00:30:09,481
Why, hello, Sylvester.

363
00:30:09,748 --> 00:30:11,781
I've been waiting for you.

364
00:30:12,648 --> 00:30:14,614
And the lesson is clear.

365
00:30:14,681 --> 00:30:19,514
The only way for me
to get rid of this autonomous partial object

366
00:30:19,614 --> 00:30:21,914
is to become this object.

367
00:30:23,481 --> 00:30:25,448
-Any time you are ready, tell me.
-Okay, I'm ready.

368
00:30:25,514 --> 00:30:28,348
Wait a minute. So that I don't confuse them...

369
00:30:28,448 --> 00:30:30,448
Where is my key? My key is here.
This one is here.

370
00:30:30,514 --> 00:30:32,781
Okay, any... You shout when.

371
00:30:34,847 --> 00:30:38,747
I'm standing on the very balcony
where the murder,

372
00:30:38,847 --> 00:30:42,314
the traumatic murder scene,
occurs in Conversation.

373
00:30:43,047 --> 00:30:45,014
The murder of the husband,

374
00:30:45,147 --> 00:30:48,081
observed through the stained glass in front of me

375
00:30:48,181 --> 00:30:50,847
by the private detective, Gene Hackman.

376
00:30:55,914 --> 00:30:58,481
The detective is in the nearby room.

377
00:30:59,314 --> 00:31:03,314
Significantly, just before he sees the murder,

378
00:31:03,414 --> 00:31:07,847
he observes the balcony
through a crack in the glass wall.

379
00:31:11,447 --> 00:31:15,380
Whenever we have this famous,
proverbial peeping Tom scene

380
00:31:15,447 --> 00:31:19,680
of somebody observing traumatic events
through a crack,

381
00:31:19,780 --> 00:31:23,214
it's never as if we are dealing with two parts

382
00:31:23,347 --> 00:31:26,980
on both sides of the wall of the same reality.

383
00:31:31,947 --> 00:31:36,347
Before seeing anything
or imagining to see something,

384
00:31:37,214 --> 00:31:40,880
he tries to listen. He behaves as an eavesdropper,

385
00:31:41,580 --> 00:31:44,713
with all his private detective gadgets.

386
00:31:47,047 --> 00:31:49,013
What does this make him?

387
00:31:49,380 --> 00:31:51,247
Potentially, at least,

388
00:31:51,647 --> 00:31:55,680
it makes him into a fantasised, imagined entity.

389
00:31:58,113 --> 00:31:59,813
I can't stand it.

390
00:32:00,613 --> 00:32:02,647
I can't stand it anymore.

391
00:32:02,847 --> 00:32:04,847
You're going to make me cry.

392
00:32:05,413 --> 00:32:07,313
I know, honey. I know. Me, too.

393
00:32:07,413 --> 00:32:10,113
-No, don't.
-I have no idea what you're talking about.

394
00:32:10,213 --> 00:32:12,980
He doesn't fantasise the scene of the murder.

395
00:32:13,080 --> 00:32:16,480
He fantasises himself as a witness to the murder.

396
00:32:17,713 --> 00:32:19,146
I love you.

397
00:32:20,613 --> 00:32:24,746
What he sees on that blurred window glass,

398
00:32:24,813 --> 00:32:28,580
which effectively functions
as a kind of elementary screen,

399
00:32:29,046 --> 00:32:32,113
cinematic screen even, that should be perceived

400
00:32:32,213 --> 00:32:37,280
as a desperate attempt to visualise,
hallucinate even,

401
00:32:37,346 --> 00:32:40,946
the bodily, material support of what he hears.

402
00:33:03,879 --> 00:33:05,779
-Hello, baby.
-Shut up!

403
00:33:06,213 --> 00:33:09,113
It's "Daddy", you shithead! Where's my bourbon?

404
00:33:17,713 --> 00:33:22,112
Dorothy's apartment
is one of those hellish places

405
00:33:22,179 --> 00:33:25,179
which abound in David Lynch's films.

406
00:33:25,579 --> 00:33:29,846
A places where all moral or social inhibitions

407
00:33:29,946 --> 00:33:34,212
seem to be suspended,
where everything is possible.

408
00:33:35,746 --> 00:33:39,512
The lowest, masochistic sex, obscenities,

409
00:33:40,279 --> 00:33:42,946
the deepest level of our desires

410
00:33:43,046 --> 00:33:46,912
that we are not even ready to admit to ourselves,

411
00:33:47,012 --> 00:33:50,846
we are confronted with them in such places.

412
00:33:52,579 --> 00:33:54,279
Spread your legs.

413
00:34:05,012 --> 00:34:06,212
Wider.

414
00:34:09,012 --> 00:34:10,712
Now show it to me.

415
00:34:30,512 --> 00:34:32,745
Don't you fucking look at me.

416
00:34:40,412 --> 00:34:44,312
From what perspective
should we observe this scene?

417
00:34:52,645 --> 00:34:55,912
Imagine the scene as that of a small child,

418
00:34:56,578 --> 00:34:59,145
hidden in a closet or behind a door...

419
00:35:00,045 --> 00:35:01,078
Mommy.

420
00:35:01,145 --> 00:35:03,811
...witnessing the parental intercourse.

421
00:35:04,411 --> 00:35:08,345
He doesn't yet know what sexuality is,
how we do it.

422
00:35:08,411 --> 00:35:12,911
All he knows is what he hears,
this strange deep breathing sound,

423
00:35:13,011 --> 00:35:16,378
and then he tries to imagine what goes on.

424
00:35:16,978 --> 00:35:21,178
At the very beginning of Blue Velvet,
we see Jeffrey's father

425
00:35:21,245 --> 00:35:23,678
having a heart attack, falling down.

426
00:35:23,745 --> 00:35:28,445
We have the eclipse of the normal,
paternal authority.

427
00:35:28,578 --> 00:35:29,778
Mommy.

428
00:35:30,378 --> 00:35:33,678
-Mommy loves you.
-Baby wants to fuck!

429
00:35:33,778 --> 00:35:36,911
It is as if Jeffrey fantasises

430
00:35:37,011 --> 00:35:41,511
this wild parental couple of Dorothy and Frank

431
00:35:41,611 --> 00:35:47,444
as kind of a fantasmatic supplement
to the lack of the real paternal authority.

432
00:35:49,878 --> 00:35:53,644
Get ready to fuck, you fucker's fucker! You fucker!

433
00:35:56,077 --> 00:35:58,311
Don't you fucking look at me!

434
00:35:58,944 --> 00:36:03,977
Frank, not only obviously acts, but even overacts.

435
00:36:04,444 --> 00:36:09,044
It is as if his ridiculously excessive gesticulating,

436
00:36:10,077 --> 00:36:15,111
shouting and so on,
are here to cover up something.

437
00:36:15,211 --> 00:36:18,077
The point is, of course, the elementary one,

438
00:36:18,144 --> 00:36:24,277
to convince the invisible observer
that father is potent,

439
00:36:24,344 --> 00:36:26,444
to cover up father's impotence.

440
00:36:26,510 --> 00:36:30,510
So the second way to read the scene
would have been as a spectacle,

441
00:36:30,577 --> 00:36:32,910
a ridiculously violent spectacle,

442
00:36:33,010 --> 00:36:37,444
set up by the father
to convince the son of his power,

443
00:36:37,544 --> 00:36:39,577
of his over-potency.

444
00:36:50,944 --> 00:36:55,677
The third way would have been
to focus on Dorothy herself.

445
00:36:56,077 --> 00:37:02,510
Many feminists, of course, emphasise
the brutality against women in this scene,

446
00:37:02,577 --> 00:37:05,610
the abuse, how the Dorothy character is abused.

447
00:37:06,677 --> 00:37:09,210
There is obviously this dimension in it.

448
00:37:09,343 --> 00:37:15,643
But I think one should risk a more shocking
and obverse interpretation.

449
00:37:16,477 --> 00:37:20,710
What if the central, as it were, problem,

450
00:37:20,810 --> 00:37:24,710
of this entire scene is Dorothy's passivity?

451
00:37:24,943 --> 00:37:27,177
Don't you fucking look at me!

452
00:37:33,010 --> 00:37:38,676
So what if what Frank is doing
is a kind of a desperate, ridiculous,

453
00:37:38,776 --> 00:37:43,010
but nonetheless effective attempt
of trying to help Dorothy,

454
00:37:43,143 --> 00:37:47,710
to awaken her out of her lethargy,
to bring her into life?

455
00:37:56,010 --> 00:38:02,876
So if Frank is anybody's fantasy,
maybe he is Dorothy's fantasy.

456
00:38:05,476 --> 00:38:09,309
There is kind of a strange,
mutual interlocking of fantasies.

457
00:38:17,343 --> 00:38:19,443
You stay alive, baby.

458
00:38:20,409 --> 00:38:26,109
It's not only ambiguity,
but oscillation between three focal points.

459
00:38:26,209 --> 00:38:30,943
This, I think, is what accounts
for the strange reverberations of this scene.

460
00:38:43,009 --> 00:38:46,542
This brings us to our third
and maybe crucial example,

461
00:38:46,642 --> 00:38:51,076
what is for me the most beautiful
shot in the entire Vertigo.

462
00:39:03,542 --> 00:39:08,742
The shot in which we see Scottie
in a position of a peeping Tom,

463
00:39:08,842 --> 00:39:11,042
observing through a crack.

464
00:39:21,075 --> 00:39:25,209
It is as if Madeleine is really there
in common reality,

465
00:39:25,275 --> 00:39:31,309
while Scottie is peeping at her
from some mysterious inter-space,

466
00:39:33,209 --> 00:39:35,409
from some obscure netherworld.

467
00:39:37,942 --> 00:39:41,709
This is the location of the imagined,
fantasised gaze.

468
00:39:48,808 --> 00:39:52,775
Gaze is that obscure point, the blind spot,

469
00:39:52,842 --> 00:39:57,775
from which the object looked upon
returns the gaze.

470
00:40:04,342 --> 00:40:09,608
After suspecting that a murder
is taking place in the nearby hotel room,

471
00:40:09,708 --> 00:40:11,842
Gene Hackman, playing the private detective,

472
00:40:11,942 --> 00:40:15,642
enters this room and inspects the toilet.

473
00:40:16,342 --> 00:40:19,808
The moment he approaches
the toilet in the bathroom,

474
00:40:19,875 --> 00:40:22,441
it is clear that we are in Hitchcock territory.

475
00:40:22,508 --> 00:40:28,441
It is clear that some kind of intense,
implicit dialogue with Psycho is going on.

476
00:40:32,208 --> 00:40:33,741
In a very violent gesture,

477
00:40:33,875 --> 00:40:38,175
as if adopting the role of Norman Bates'
mother, the murderer in Psycho,

478
00:40:38,241 --> 00:40:41,408
he opens up the curtain, inspects it in detail,

479
00:40:41,508 --> 00:40:43,975
looking for traces of blood there,

480
00:40:46,575 --> 00:40:50,775
even inspecting the gap, the hole,
at the bottom of the sink.

481
00:40:52,441 --> 00:40:55,774
Which is precisely another of these focal objects,

482
00:40:55,841 --> 00:41:00,308
because in Psycho, the hole, through fade-out,

483
00:41:00,374 --> 00:41:04,574
the hole is morphed into the eye,
returning the gaze.

484
00:41:25,407 --> 00:41:28,774
We say the eye is the window of the soul.

485
00:41:28,841 --> 00:41:31,841
But what if there is no soul behind the eye?

486
00:41:33,707 --> 00:41:36,707
What if the eye is a crack

487
00:41:36,841 --> 00:41:41,674
through which we can perceive
just the abyss of a netherworld?

488
00:41:50,374 --> 00:41:55,441
When we look through these cracks,

489
00:41:55,374 --> 00:41:58,141
we see the dark, other side,

490
00:41:58,541 --> 00:42:00,574
where hidden forces run the show.

491
00:42:05,674 --> 00:42:09,774
It is as if Gene Hackman establishes,
"No, we are nonetheless not in Psycho.

492
00:42:09,874 --> 00:42:14,574
"Let's return to my first object
of fascination, the toilet bowl."

493
00:42:14,674 --> 00:42:18,174
He flushes it,
and then the terrible thing happens.

494
00:42:47,773 --> 00:42:50,940
In our most elementary experience,

495
00:42:52,207 --> 00:42:54,107
when we flush the toilet,

496
00:42:54,173 --> 00:42:59,873
excrements simply disappear
out of our reality into another space,

497
00:42:59,973 --> 00:43:05,007
which we phenomenologically perceive
as a kind of a netherworld,

498
00:43:05,073 --> 00:43:08,573
another reality, a chaotic, primordial reality.

499
00:43:08,640 --> 00:43:14,906
And the ultimate horror, of course,
is if the flushing doesn't work,

500
00:43:15,040 --> 00:43:20,473
if objects return,
if remainders, excremental remainders,

501
00:43:20,573 --> 00:43:22,773
return from that dimension.

502
00:43:23,206 --> 00:43:24,706
The bathroom.

503
00:43:25,173 --> 00:43:29,406
Hitchcock is all the time playing
with this threshold.

504
00:43:30,606 --> 00:43:35,073
Well, they've cleaned all this up now.
Big difference.

505
00:43:36,306 --> 00:43:38,573
You should've seen the blood.

506
00:43:38,906 --> 00:43:41,573
The whole place was...

507
00:43:41,639 --> 00:43:44,873
Well, it's too horrible to describe. Dreadful!

508
00:43:45,439 --> 00:43:47,906
The most effective for me

509
00:43:47,973 --> 00:43:51,673
and even the most touching scene
of the entire Psycho,

510
00:43:51,739 --> 00:43:54,006
is after the shower murder,

511
00:43:54,106 --> 00:43:59,306
when Norman Bates tries to clean the bathroom.

512
00:44:10,873 --> 00:44:14,106
I remember clearly when in my adolescence
I first saw the film,

513
00:44:14,206 --> 00:44:19,739
how deeply I was impressed
not only by the length of the scene,

514
00:44:19,972 --> 00:44:24,406
it goes on almost for 10 minutes,
details of cleansing and so on and so on,

515
00:44:24,506 --> 00:44:28,772
but also by the care, meticulousness,
how it is done,

516
00:44:28,839 --> 00:44:32,106
and also by our spectator's identification with it.

517
00:44:40,639 --> 00:44:45,572
I think that this tells us a lot
about the satisfaction of work,

518
00:44:45,639 --> 00:44:47,239
of a job well done.

519
00:44:47,305 --> 00:44:50,705
Which is not so much
to construct something new,

520
00:44:50,805 --> 00:44:54,705
but maybe human work at its most elementary,

521
00:44:54,772 --> 00:44:56,772
work, as it were, at the zero level,

522
00:44:56,905 --> 00:45:01,672
is the work of cleaning the traces of a stain.

523
00:45:08,972 --> 00:45:14,172
The work of erasing the stains,
keeping at bay this chaotic netherworld,

524
00:45:14,805 --> 00:45:19,505
which threatens to explode at any time
and engulf us.

525
00:45:22,638 --> 00:45:27,438
I think this is the fine sentiment
that Hitchcock's films evoke.

526
00:45:27,538 --> 00:45:32,738
It's not simply that something
horrible happens in reality.

527
00:45:32,805 --> 00:45:36,972
Something worse can happen
which undermines the very fabric

528
00:45:37,038 --> 00:45:39,838
of what we experience as reality.

529
00:45:40,438 --> 00:45:45,638
I think it's very important how the
first attack of the birds occurs in the film.

530
00:45:45,738 --> 00:45:47,938
Precisely when Melanie crosses this bay.

531
00:45:48,038 --> 00:45:51,138
At first, we even don't perceive it as a bird.

532
00:45:51,238 --> 00:45:54,338
As if some stain appeared
within the frame.

533
00:46:02,272 --> 00:46:07,838
When a fantasy object, something imagined,
an object from inner space,

534
00:46:07,938 --> 00:46:14,871
enters our ordinary realty,
the texture of reality is twisted, distorted.

535
00:46:16,005 --> 00:46:20,938
This is how desire inscribes itself into reality,

536
00:46:21,038 --> 00:46:22,705
by distorting it.

537
00:46:25,405 --> 00:46:29,071
Desire is a wound of reality.

538
00:46:30,438 --> 00:46:34,771
The art of cinema consists in arousing desire,

539
00:46:36,005 --> 00:46:38,405
to play with desire.

540
00:46:39,571 --> 00:46:44,138
But, at the same time,
keeping it at a safe distance,

541
00:46:45,638 --> 00:46:48,938
domesticating it, rendering it palpable.

542
00:46:50,371 --> 00:46:53,171
When we spectators are sitting
in a movie theatre,

543
00:46:53,238 --> 00:46:56,038
looking at the screen...
You remember, at the very beginning,

544
00:46:56,138 --> 00:46:59,038
before the picture is on, it's a black, dark screen,

545
00:46:59,138 --> 00:47:00,971
and then light thrown on.

546
00:47:01,038 --> 00:47:04,438
Are we basically not staring into a toilet bowl

547
00:47:04,504 --> 00:47:08,238
and waiting for things
to reappear out of the toilet?

548
00:47:10,104 --> 00:47:16,071
And is the entire magic of a spectacle
shown on the screen

549
00:47:16,171 --> 00:47:19,071
not a kind of a deceptive lure,

550
00:47:19,137 --> 00:47:22,404
trying to conceal the fact

551
00:47:22,504 --> 00:47:24,937
that we are basically watching shit, as it were?

552
00:47:31,036 --> 00:47:36,570
There was a young lady of Ongar
Who had an affair with a conger

553
00:47:36,703 --> 00:47:40,203
They said, "How does it feel
To sleep with an eel?"

554
00:47:40,303 --> 00:47:43,936
"Well," she said, "just like a man, only longer"

555
00:47:50,836 --> 00:47:56,403
Usually, people read the lesson
of Freudian psychoanalysis

556
00:47:56,470 --> 00:47:59,970
as if the secret meaning of everything
is sexuality.

557
00:48:00,036 --> 00:48:02,503
But this is not what Freud wants to say.

558
00:48:02,603 --> 00:48:05,203
I think Freud wants to say the exact opposite.

559
00:48:05,269 --> 00:48:08,936
It's not that everything
is a metaphor for sexuality,

560
00:48:09,069 --> 00:48:12,903
that whatever we are doing,
we are always thinking about that.

561
00:48:13,303 --> 00:48:17,269
The Freudian question is, but what are
we thinking when we are doing that?

562
00:48:17,136 --> 00:48:22,069
If I may be a little bit impertinent
and relate to an unfortunate experience,

563
00:48:22,135 --> 00:48:23,702
probably known to most of us,

564
00:48:23,769 --> 00:48:27,935
how it happens that while one is engaged
in sexual activity,

565
00:48:28,035 --> 00:48:31,369
all of a sudden one feels stupid.

566
00:48:31,435 --> 00:48:33,002
One loses contact with it.

567
00:48:33,102 --> 00:48:36,935
As if, "My God, what am I doing here,
doing these stupid repetitive movements?"

568
00:48:37,035 --> 00:48:38,402
And so on and so on.

569
00:48:38,469 --> 00:48:40,135
Nothing changes in reality,

570
00:48:40,235 --> 00:48:44,302
in these strange moments
where I, as it were, disconnect.

571
00:48:44,369 --> 00:48:47,769
It's just that I lose the fantasmatic support.

572
00:48:48,269 --> 00:48:52,819
In sexuality, it's never only me and my partner,

573
00:48:52,969 --> 00:48:54,870
or more partners, whatever you are doing.

574
00:48:54,969 --> 00:48:59,170
It's always... There has to be
always some fantasmatic element.

575
00:48:59,269 --> 00:49:02,670
There has to be some third
imagined element

576
00:49:02,769 --> 00:49:06,070
which enables me, to engage in sexuality.

577
00:49:07,102 --> 00:49:10,635
There is an irresistible power of fascination,

578
00:49:10,735 --> 00:49:15,168
at least for me, in this terrifying scene

579
00:49:15,302 --> 00:49:20,902
when Neo awakens from his sleep
within the matrix

580
00:49:20,968 --> 00:49:25,702
and becomes aware of what he really is
in that foetal container,

581
00:49:25,768 --> 00:49:29,602
floating in liquid, connected to virtual reality,

582
00:49:29,668 --> 00:49:33,735
where you are reduced to a totally passive object

583
00:49:33,802 --> 00:49:37,568
with your energy being sucked out of you.

584
00:49:43,435 --> 00:49:47,768
So why does the Matrix need our energy?

585
00:49:53,968 --> 00:49:58,901
I think the proper way to ask this question
is to turn it around.

586
00:49:59,835 --> 00:50:04,868
Not why does the matrix need the energy,
but why does the energy need the matrix?

587
00:50:04,968 --> 00:50:08,401
That is to say, since I think that the energy

588
00:50:08,468 --> 00:50:12,468
we are talking about is libido, is our pleasure,

589
00:50:13,201 --> 00:50:19,034
why does our libido
need the virtual universe of fantasies?

590
00:50:19,101 --> 00:50:24,934
Why can't we simply enjoy it directly,
a sexual partner and so on?

591
00:50:25,134 --> 00:50:29,534
That's the fundamental question.
Why do we need this virtual supplement?

592
00:50:30,134 --> 00:50:34,734
Our libido needs an illusion
in order to sustain itself.

593
00:50:39,234 --> 00:50:45,034
One of the most interesting motifs
in science fiction is that of the id machine,

594
00:50:45,101 --> 00:50:49,201
an object which has the magic capacity

595
00:50:49,301 --> 00:50:54,301
of directly materialising, realising in front of us,

596
00:50:54,367 --> 00:50:59,301
our innermost dreams,
desires, even guilt feelings.

597
00:51:00,234 --> 00:51:03,267
There is a long tradition of this
in science fiction films,

598
00:51:03,367 --> 00:51:09,434
but of course the film about id machine
is Andrei Tarkovsky's, Solaris.

599
00:51:11,634 --> 00:51:18,500
Solaris is the story of Kelvin,
a psychologist, who is sent by a rocket

600
00:51:18,567 --> 00:51:23,900
to a spaceship circulating around Solaris,
a newly discovered planet.

601
00:51:26,267 --> 00:51:29,167
Strange things are reported from the spaceship.

602
00:51:29,267 --> 00:51:31,300
All the scientists there are going crazy,

603
00:51:31,367 --> 00:51:35,167
and then Kelvin discovers what is going on there.

604
00:51:38,567 --> 00:51:43,900
This planet has the magic ability
to directly realise

605
00:51:44,000 --> 00:51:47,933
your deepest traumas, dreams, fears, desires.

606
00:51:50,333 --> 00:51:52,767
The innermost of your inner space.

607
00:51:59,300 --> 00:52:03,200
The hero of the film finds one morning

608
00:52:03,300 --> 00:52:08,633
his deceased wife, who made suicide years ago.

609
00:52:10,833 --> 00:52:16,266
So he realises not so much his desire,
as his guilt feeling.

610
00:52:19,900 --> 00:52:23,600
When the hero is confronted
with the spectral clone, as it were,

611
00:52:23,666 --> 00:52:25,500
of his deceased wife,

612
00:52:28,366 --> 00:52:31,100
although he appears to be deeply sympathetic,

613
00:52:31,166 --> 00:52:33,933
spiritual, reflecting and so on,

614
00:52:34,033 --> 00:52:38,100
his basic problem is how to get rid of her.

615
00:52:53,199 --> 00:52:59,133
What makes Solaris so touching
is that, at least potentially,

616
00:52:59,233 --> 00:53:03,733
it confronts us with this tragic
subjective position of the woman,

617
00:53:04,366 --> 00:53:07,133
his wife, who is aware

618
00:53:07,966 --> 00:53:13,399
that she has no consistency,
no full being of her own.

619
00:53:13,499 --> 00:53:18,632
I don't even know my own self.
Who am I?

620
00:53:20,099 --> 00:53:24,399
As soon as I close my eyes I can't
recall what my face is like.

621
00:53:24,666 --> 00:53:27,166
For example, she has gaps in her memory

622
00:53:27,266 --> 00:53:31,199
because she knows only
what he knows that she knows.

623
00:53:32,266 --> 00:53:34,266
Do you know who you are?

624
00:53:34,332 --> 00:53:36,632
All humans do.

625
00:53:43,666 --> 00:53:46,999
She is just his dream realised.

626
00:53:48,066 --> 00:53:52,665
And her true love for him is expressed

627
00:53:52,732 --> 00:53:56,032
in her desperate attempts to erase herself,

628
00:53:56,165 --> 00:54:00,299
to swallow poison or whatever,
just to clear the space,

629
00:54:00,399 --> 00:54:03,065
because she guesses that he wants this.

630
00:54:07,865 --> 00:54:10,465
It's horrifying, isn't it?

631
00:54:11,232 --> 00:54:16,432
I'll never get used
to these constant resurrections!

632
00:54:16,532 --> 00:54:20,532
It's relatively easy to get rid of a real person.

633
00:54:20,632 --> 00:54:24,165
You can abandon him or her,
kill him or her, whatever.

634
00:54:24,265 --> 00:54:30,665
But a ghost, a spectral presence,
is much more difficult to get rid of.

635
00:54:30,765 --> 00:54:34,065
It sticks to you as a kind of a shadowy presence.

636
00:54:35,232 --> 00:54:37,865
-Do I disgust you?
-No.

637
00:54:37,965 --> 00:54:40,032
-You're lying!
-Stop it!

638
00:54:40,298 --> 00:54:42,398
I must be looking disgusting!

639
00:54:42,465 --> 00:54:47,598
What we get here is the lowest male mythology.

640
00:54:47,865 --> 00:54:51,632
This idea that woman doesn't exist on her own.

641
00:54:51,698 --> 00:54:55,432
That a woman is merely a man's dream realised

642
00:54:55,498 --> 00:55:00,765
or even, as radical, anti-feminists claim,
the man's guilt realised.

643
00:55:00,898 --> 00:55:04,131
Women exist because male desire got impure.

644
00:55:04,231 --> 00:55:10,165
If man cleanses his desire,
gets rid of dirty material,

645
00:55:11,431 --> 00:55:15,231
fantasies, woman ceases to exist.

646
00:55:19,731 --> 00:55:23,631
At the end of the film,
we get a kind of a Holy Communion,

647
00:55:23,698 --> 00:55:29,265
a reconciliation of him not with his wife,
but with his father.

648
00:55:52,064 --> 00:55:55,731
-Did you see Hitchcock's Vertigo?
-Sorry, I don't understand.

649
00:55:55,831 --> 00:55:58,464
Sorry. Hitchcock's Vertigo, the film.

650
00:55:58,531 --> 00:56:01,631
Alfred Hitchcock.
I think it happened here, you know.

651
00:56:01,698 --> 00:56:04,231
-Oh, you don't know the scene, okay.
-Probably.

652
00:56:16,797 --> 00:56:21,564
Often things begin as a fake,
inauthentic, artificial,

653
00:56:21,831 --> 00:56:24,997
but you get caught into your own game.

654
00:56:28,264 --> 00:56:31,431
And that is the true tragedy of Vertigo.

655
00:56:31,731 --> 00:56:36,930
It's a story about two people who,
each in his or her own way,

656
00:56:37,030 --> 00:56:40,364
get caught into their own game of appearances.

657
00:56:41,464 --> 00:56:44,797
For both of them, for Madeleine and for Scottie,

658
00:56:44,897 --> 00:56:47,764
appearances win over reality.

659
00:56:50,397 --> 00:56:52,330
What is the story of Vertigo?

660
00:56:52,397 --> 00:56:56,930
It's a story about a retired policeman
who has a pathological fear of heights

661
00:56:56,997 --> 00:56:59,130
because of an incident in his career,

662
00:56:59,197 --> 00:57:03,997
and then an old friend hires him
to follow his beautiful wife,

663
00:57:04,064 --> 00:57:05,364
played by Kim Novak.

664
00:57:05,430 --> 00:57:07,997
The wife mysteriously possessed

665
00:57:08,097 --> 00:57:12,330
by the ghost of a past deceased
Spanish beauty, Carlotta Valdes.

666
00:57:24,830 --> 00:57:26,097
The two fall in love.

667
00:57:26,830 --> 00:57:29,430
The wife kills herself.

668
00:57:47,530 --> 00:57:50,296
The first part of Vertigo,
with Madeleine's suicide,

669
00:57:50,396 --> 00:57:54,096
is not as shattering as it could have been,

670
00:57:54,196 --> 00:58:00,630
because it's really a terrifying loss,
but in this very loss, the ideal survives.

671
00:58:02,763 --> 00:58:06,363
The idea of the fatal woman
possesses you totally.

672
00:58:14,663 --> 00:58:18,363
What, ultimately, this image,

673
00:58:18,429 --> 00:58:21,896
fascinating image of the fatal woman
stands for is death.

674
00:58:26,963 --> 00:58:32,563
The fascination of beauty is always
the veil which covers up a nightmare.

675
00:58:32,663 --> 00:58:35,296
Like the idea of a fascinating creature,

676
00:58:35,363 --> 00:58:38,363
but if you come too close to her,

677
00:58:39,596 --> 00:58:45,596
you see shit, decay,
you see worms crawling everywhere.

678
00:58:47,529 --> 00:58:50,662
The ultimate abyss is not a physical abyss,

679
00:58:50,729 --> 00:58:54,462
but the abyss of the depth of another person.

680
00:58:58,129 --> 00:59:01,862
It's what philosophers describe
as the night of the world.

681
00:59:01,929 --> 00:59:07,096
Like when you see another person,
into his or her eyes, you see the abyss.

682
00:59:07,162 --> 00:59:10,429
That's the true spiral which is drawing us in.

683
00:59:21,062 --> 00:59:24,929
Scottie alone, broken down, cannot forget her,

684
00:59:24,995 --> 00:59:30,029
wanders around the city
looking for a woman, a similar woman,

685
00:59:30,129 --> 00:59:31,595
something like the deceased woman,

686
00:59:31,729 --> 00:59:35,429
discovers an ordinary, rather vulgar, common girl.

687
00:59:35,529 --> 00:59:40,329
The d�nouement of the story, of course,
is along the lines of the Marx Brothers' joke,

688
00:59:40,395 --> 00:59:43,329
"This man looks like an idiot, acts like an idiot.

689
00:59:43,395 --> 00:59:45,995
"This shouldn't deceive you.
This man is an idiot."

690
00:59:46,062 --> 00:59:49,062
The newly found woman looks like Madeleine,

691
00:59:49,162 --> 00:59:51,829
acts like Madeleine, the fatal beauty.

692
00:59:57,462 --> 00:59:59,728
We discover she is Madeleine.

693
01:00:11,762 --> 01:00:14,662
What we learn is that Scottie's friend,

694
01:00:14,762 --> 01:00:19,262
who hired Scottie, also hired this woman, Judy,

695
01:00:19,362 --> 01:00:22,395
to impersonate Madeleine in a devilish plot

696
01:00:22,462 --> 01:00:26,462
to kill the real Madeleine, his wife,
and get her fortune.

697
01:00:34,261 --> 01:00:38,495
We could just see a lot of each other.

698
01:00:38,861 --> 01:00:43,361
Why? 'Cause I remind you of her?

699
01:00:48,461 --> 01:00:50,628
It's not very complimentary.

700
01:00:52,295 --> 01:00:56,295
The profile shot in Vertigo is perhaps
the key shot of the entire film.

701
01:00:56,361 --> 01:00:59,661
We have there Madeleine's, or rather Judy's,

702
01:00:59,761 --> 01:01:03,794
identity in all its tragic tension.

703
01:01:05,061 --> 01:01:10,961
It provides the dark background
for the fascinating other profile

704
01:01:11,061 --> 01:01:14,628
of Madeleine in Ernie's restaurant.

705
01:01:20,294 --> 01:01:24,594
Scottie is too ashamed,
afraid to look at her directly.

706
01:01:27,128 --> 01:01:31,861
It is as if what he sees is the stuff of his dreams,

707
01:01:31,961 --> 01:01:33,694
more real in a way for him

708
01:01:33,794 --> 01:01:37,861
than the reality of the woman behind his back.

709
01:01:39,627 --> 01:01:41,694
That's not very complimentary, either.

710
01:01:41,827 --> 01:01:44,894
I just want to be with you as much as I can, Judy.

711
01:01:45,994 --> 01:01:50,894
When we see a face,
it's basically always the half of it.

712
01:01:54,027 --> 01:01:56,527
A subject is a partial something,

713
01:01:57,561 --> 01:02:03,194
a face, something we see.
Behind it, there is a void, a nothingness.

714
01:02:03,927 --> 01:02:08,627
And of course, we spontaneously tend
to fill in that nothingness

715
01:02:08,694 --> 01:02:12,860
with our fantasies about the wealth
of human personality, and so on.

716
01:02:15,960 --> 01:02:18,660
To see what is lacking in reality,

717
01:02:18,760 --> 01:02:22,694
to see it as that, there you see subjectivity.

718
01:02:25,194 --> 01:02:30,560
To confront subjectivity means
to confront femininity.

719
01:02:31,394 --> 01:02:34,994
Woman is the subject. Masculinity is a fake.

720
01:02:35,994 --> 01:02:39,527
Masculinity is an escape from the most radical,

721
01:02:39,594 --> 01:02:42,560
nightmarish dimension of subjectivity.

722
01:02:42,660 --> 01:02:45,060
-Scottie, what are you doing?
-I'm trying to buy you a suit.

723
01:02:45,160 --> 01:02:49,027
But I love the second one she wore.

724
01:02:49,727 --> 01:02:53,527
-And this one, it's beautiful.
-No, no. They're none of them right.

725
01:02:53,827 --> 01:02:57,093
I think I know the suit you mean.
We had it some time ago.

726
01:02:57,160 --> 01:02:59,293
Let me go and see. We may still have that model.

727
01:02:59,360 --> 01:03:00,727
Thank you.

728
01:03:02,793 --> 01:03:05,793
You're looking for the suit that she wore, for me.

729
01:03:05,893 --> 01:03:08,560
-You want me to be dressed like her.
-Judy, I just want you to look nice.

730
01:03:08,627 --> 01:03:10,227
I know the kind of suit
that would look well on you.

731
01:03:10,327 --> 01:03:11,727
No, I won't do it!

732
01:03:15,427 --> 01:03:16,660
Judy.

733
01:03:18,060 --> 01:03:20,426
It can't make that much difference
to you. I just want to see what...

734
01:03:20,493 --> 01:03:22,626
No, I don't want any clothes.
I don't want anything.

735
01:03:22,726 --> 01:03:25,360
-I want to get out of here.
-Judy, do this for me.

736
01:03:25,460 --> 01:03:26,926
Here we are.

737
01:03:27,060 --> 01:03:28,760
-Yes, that's it.
-I thought so.

738
01:03:58,393 --> 01:04:01,359
When Judy, refashioned as Madeleine,

739
01:04:01,459 --> 01:04:05,893
steps out of the door, it's like fantasy realised.

740
01:04:05,959 --> 01:04:10,693
And, of course, we have
a perfect name for fantasy realised.

741
01:04:10,759 --> 01:04:12,893
It's called "nightmare".

742
01:04:13,659 --> 01:04:16,759
Fantasy realised. What does this mean?

743
01:04:16,826 --> 01:04:21,993
Of course, it is always sustained
by an extreme violence.

744
01:04:22,093 --> 01:04:29,026
The violence in this case of Scottie's
brutal refashioning of Judy,

745
01:04:29,492 --> 01:04:33,092
a real, common girl, into Madeleine.

746
01:04:33,126 --> 01:04:36,226
It's truly a process of mortification,

747
01:04:36,326 --> 01:04:41,059
which also is the mortification of woman's desire.

748
01:04:41,126 --> 01:04:44,992
It is as if in order to have her, to desire her,

749
01:04:45,092 --> 01:04:48,059
to have sexual intercourse with her,
with the woman,

750
01:04:48,126 --> 01:04:52,426
Scottie has to mortify her,
to change her into a dead woman.

751
01:04:52,526 --> 01:04:57,325
It's as if, again, for the male libidinal economy,

752
01:04:58,859 --> 01:05:02,759
to paraphrase a well-known old saying,
the only good woman is a dead woman.

753
01:05:12,525 --> 01:05:18,359
Scottie is not really fascinated by her,
but by the entire scene, the staging.

754
01:05:18,459 --> 01:05:23,759
He is looking around, checking up,
are the fantasmatic co-ordinates really here?

755
01:05:23,859 --> 01:05:28,825
At that point when the reality fully fits fantasy,

756
01:05:28,925 --> 01:05:35,125
Scottie is finally able to realise
the long-postponed sexual intercourse.

757
01:06:01,792 --> 01:06:08,125
So the result of this violence
is a perfect co-ordination

758
01:06:08,625 --> 01:06:11,025
between fantasy and reality.

759
01:06:11,991 --> 01:06:14,491
A kind of direct short-circuit.

760
01:06:26,525 --> 01:06:30,158
In Lynch's films, darkness is really dark.

761
01:06:30,258 --> 01:06:34,124
Light is really unbearable, blinding light.

762
01:06:34,191 --> 01:06:36,958
Fire really hurts, it's so hot.

763
01:06:43,824 --> 01:06:48,224
At those moments of sensual over-intensity,

764
01:06:48,291 --> 01:06:51,991
it is as if events on screen itself,

765
01:06:52,058 --> 01:06:56,324
threatens to overflow the screen
and to grab us into it,

766
01:06:56,424 --> 01:06:57,924
to reach towards us.

767
01:06:58,024 --> 01:07:01,658
It's again as if the fantasy-space,

768
01:07:01,724 --> 01:07:05,191
the fictional, narrative space, gets too intense

769
01:07:05,291 --> 01:07:12,024
and reaches out towards us spectators
so that we lose our safe distance.

770
01:07:17,524 --> 01:07:20,491
This is the proper tension
of the Lynchian universe.

771
01:07:26,291 --> 01:07:30,491
The beauty of Lynch, if you look closely,
it's never clear.

772
01:07:30,591 --> 01:07:37,524
Is it really the brutal real out there
which disturbs us, or is it our fantasy?

773
01:07:53,857 --> 01:07:56,890
At the very beginning
of David Lynch's Blue Velvet,

774
01:07:56,957 --> 01:08:00,923
we see an idyllic, American small town.

775
01:08:03,290 --> 01:08:05,557
What can be more normal
than father of the family,

776
01:08:05,623 --> 01:08:09,523
in front of a white clean house,
watering the lawn?

777
01:08:15,323 --> 01:08:19,456
But all of a sudden, father has a heart seizure,

778
01:08:19,523 --> 01:08:21,523
falls down to the grass.

779
01:08:25,356 --> 01:08:28,556
And then, instead of showing
the family confused,

780
01:08:28,623 --> 01:08:30,123
calling for an ambulance, whatever,

781
01:08:30,223 --> 01:08:32,790
Lynch does something typically Lynchian.

782
01:08:32,856 --> 01:08:35,990
The camera moves extremely close to the grass,

783
01:08:36,056 --> 01:08:37,690
even penetrates the grass,

784
01:08:37,790 --> 01:08:44,023
and we see what is the real
of this idyllic green lawn.

785
01:08:50,356 --> 01:08:51,523
We should not forget this,

786
01:08:51,623 --> 01:08:55,589
how this happens precisely
when father has a seizure.

787
01:08:55,723 --> 01:08:59,989
That is to say when, symbolically,
the paternal authority breaks down.

788
01:09:07,689 --> 01:09:10,456
I'll send you straight to hell, fucker!

789
01:09:13,656 --> 01:09:18,256
In dreams, I walk with you.

790
01:09:20,123 --> 01:09:24,789
In dreams, I talk to you.

791
01:09:26,656 --> 01:09:29,056
The logic here is strictly Freudian,

792
01:09:29,122 --> 01:09:32,989
that is to say we escape into dream

793
01:09:33,222 --> 01:09:37,289
to avoid a deadlock in our real life.

794
01:09:37,356 --> 01:09:41,989
But then, what we encounter in the dream
is even more horrible,

795
01:09:42,089 --> 01:09:46,955
so that at the end,
we literally escape from the dream,

796
01:09:47,022 --> 01:09:48,889
back into reality.

797
01:09:48,889 --> 01:09:52,922
It starts with, dreams are for those
who cannot endure,

798
01:09:53,022 --> 01:09:54,989
who are not strong enough for reality.

799
01:09:54,989 --> 01:10:00,489
It ends with, reality is for those
who are not strong enough to endure,

800
01:10:00,555 --> 01:10:02,589
to confront their dreams.

801
01:10:06,389 --> 01:10:12,189
Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive
are two versions of the same film.

802
01:10:15,222 --> 01:10:20,188
What makes both films,
especially Lost Highway, so interesting

803
01:10:20,255 --> 01:10:24,955
is how they posit the two dimensions,

804
01:10:25,088 --> 01:10:30,755
reality and fantasy, side by side,
horizontally, as it were.

805
01:10:37,988 --> 01:10:40,222
It must be from a real estate agent.

806
01:10:40,855 --> 01:10:43,355
What we get in Lost Highway

807
01:10:43,588 --> 01:10:48,022
is the drab, grey,
upper-middle-class suburban reality.

808
01:10:48,288 --> 01:10:52,088
Hero, married to Patricia Arquette,

809
01:10:52,888 --> 01:10:57,788
obviously terrorised by the enigma of his wife,

810
01:10:57,888 --> 01:11:01,755
who doesn't respond properly to his advances.

811
01:11:04,455 --> 01:11:08,821
When they have sexual intercourse,
he miserably fails.

812
01:11:12,355 --> 01:11:17,021
What he gets from her is a kind
of a patronising pat on the shoulder.

813
01:11:21,321 --> 01:11:22,521
It's okay.

814
01:11:23,754 --> 01:11:24,821
It's okay.

815
01:11:24,921 --> 01:11:26,521
Total humiliation.

816
01:11:26,921 --> 01:11:27,988
It's okay.

817
01:11:30,588 --> 01:11:36,888
After killing her in an act of frustration,
the hero enters his fantasy-space,

818
01:11:43,088 --> 01:11:47,621
where he, as it were, reinvents not only himself,

819
01:11:47,721 --> 01:11:51,321
but his entire social environs.

820
01:11:52,188 --> 01:11:56,054
Captain, this is some spooky shit we got here.

821
01:12:02,087 --> 01:12:07,521
In what? In a kind of a universe
which we usually found in film noir.

822
01:12:18,021 --> 01:12:21,587
The hero's wife, who is a brunette,
becomes a blonde.

823
01:12:22,021 --> 01:12:25,154
In reality, she's restrained.

824
01:12:29,054 --> 01:12:32,887
Here, she praises the hero
within the fantasy-space all the time

825
01:12:32,954 --> 01:12:36,020
for his sexual capacities and so on.

826
01:12:41,087 --> 01:12:48,020
So it seems as if the dream
is the realisation of what he was looking for.

827
01:12:48,920 --> 01:12:54,654
In reality, the obstacle was inherent.
Their sexual liaison simply didn't function.

828
01:12:55,420 --> 01:12:58,887
Within the fantasy-space,
the obstacle is externalised.

829
01:12:59,220 --> 01:13:00,720
It's a beautiful day.

830
01:13:07,320 --> 01:13:11,953
Mr Eddy is the master of Patricia Arquette

831
01:13:12,587 --> 01:13:14,587
within the fantasy-space.

832
01:13:14,753 --> 01:13:17,353
He is the obstacle to sexual intercourse.

833
01:13:17,420 --> 01:13:21,353
If I ever found out
somebody was making out with her,

834
01:13:24,053 --> 01:13:27,087
I'd take this and I'd shove it so far up his ass,

835
01:13:27,187 --> 01:13:29,020
it would come out his mouth.

836
01:13:30,220 --> 01:13:36,386
The properly uncanny moments
are those when the second shift occurs,

837
01:13:36,486 --> 01:13:42,520
when the fantasy-space, the dreamscape,
as it were, is already disintegrating,

838
01:13:43,120 --> 01:13:46,753
but we are not yet back into reality.

839
01:13:58,086 --> 01:14:00,020
This intermediate space,

840
01:14:00,086 --> 01:14:03,653
neither fantasy-space nor reality,

841
01:14:04,253 --> 01:14:08,653
this space of a kind of primordial violence,

842
01:14:08,719 --> 01:14:11,419
dispersion, ontological confusion...

843
01:14:17,386 --> 01:14:20,953
This is the most subversive moment,
the true horror of these films.

844
01:14:21,986 --> 01:14:27,186
Towards the end of this fantasy episode,
when we get the sexual act,

845
01:14:27,253 --> 01:14:33,219
there the woman also avoids the hero.

846
01:14:40,419 --> 01:14:43,152
You'll never have me.

847
01:14:44,152 --> 01:14:46,486
Whispering, "You will never have me."

848
01:14:47,152 --> 01:14:51,986
And at that traumatic point,
we are drawn back to reality,

849
01:14:52,119 --> 01:14:55,619
when the hero encounters
exactly the same deadlock.

850
01:15:00,252 --> 01:15:03,286
What the film truly is about, its focal point,

851
01:15:03,386 --> 01:15:08,119
it's not the hero, it's of course
the enigma of feminine desire.

852
01:15:08,219 --> 01:15:11,752
-You like mysteries that much?
-Yeah.

853
01:15:15,319 --> 01:15:16,985
You're a mystery.

854
01:15:18,185 --> 01:15:19,585
I like you

855
01:15:21,019 --> 01:15:22,352
very much.

856
01:15:22,952 --> 01:15:26,985
The enigma of feminine subjectivity
in David Lynch's films,

857
01:15:27,519 --> 01:15:31,219
it's a gap between cause and effect.

858
01:15:32,119 --> 01:15:34,019
You do something to a woman,

859
01:15:34,119 --> 01:15:37,085
but you never know what the reaction will be.

860
01:15:41,685 --> 01:15:44,418
Jeffrey, don't, please.

861
01:15:52,785 --> 01:15:57,785
My relationship towards tulips
is inherently Lynchian.

862
01:15:57,885 --> 01:16:02,152
I think they are disgusting.
Just imagine. Aren't these some kind of,

863
01:16:02,218 --> 01:16:07,052
how do you call it, vagina dentata,
dental vaginas threatening to swallow you?

864
01:16:07,052 --> 01:16:10,751
I think that flowers are something
inherently disgusting.

865
01:16:10,885 --> 01:16:15,118
I mean, are people aware
what a horrible thing these flowers are?

866
01:16:15,851 --> 01:16:18,051
I mean, basically it's an open invitation

867
01:16:18,185 --> 01:16:22,185
to all the insects and bees,
"Come and screw me", you know?

868
01:16:22,818 --> 01:16:26,185
I think that flowers
should be forbidden to children.

869
01:16:35,318 --> 01:16:40,451
Suddenly I saw two figures jumping
about on the rocks above us.

870
01:16:41,351 --> 01:16:44,618
They hid and peeped out occasionally.

871
01:16:44,951 --> 01:16:50,551
"There are two boys looking at us",
I said to her. Her name was Katarina.

872
01:16:50,818 --> 01:16:55,018
"Well, let them look", she said,
and turned on her back.

873
01:16:55,984 --> 01:16:59,018
It was such a strange feeling.

874
01:16:59,184 --> 01:17:03,551
I wanted to run out and put on
my costume, but I just lay still...

875
01:17:03,684 --> 01:17:10,084
On my belly with my bum in the air,
totally unembarrassed, totally calm.

876
01:17:12,451 --> 01:17:17,717
We men, at least in our standard
phallogocentric mode of sexuality,

877
01:17:17,784 --> 01:17:20,184
even when we are doing it with the real woman,

878
01:17:20,251 --> 01:17:22,651
we are effectively doing it with our fantasy.

879
01:17:22,784 --> 01:17:25,317
Woman is reduced to a masturbatory prop.

880
01:17:25,417 --> 01:17:29,851
Woman arouses us in so far as
she enters our fantasy frame.

881
01:17:30,317 --> 01:17:32,451
With women, it's different.

882
01:17:32,684 --> 01:17:39,517
The true enjoyment is not in doing it
but in telling about it afterwards.

883
01:17:39,751 --> 01:17:43,384
Of course, women do enjoy sex immediately,

884
01:17:44,317 --> 01:17:48,817
but I hope I'm permitted as a man
to propose a daring hypothesis,

885
01:17:48,917 --> 01:17:51,850
that maybe, while they are doing it,

886
01:17:51,950 --> 01:17:56,917
they already enact or incorporate
this minimal narrative distance,

887
01:17:57,050 --> 01:17:59,850
so that they are already observing themselves

888
01:17:59,917 --> 01:18:01,717
and narrativising it.

889
01:18:03,484 --> 01:18:07,517
There is in Ingmar Bergman's Persona
a wonderful scene where

890
01:18:07,617 --> 01:18:11,850
Bibi Andersson tells to mute Liv Ullmann,

891
01:18:12,684 --> 01:18:17,384
a story about small orgy on a beach
which took place years ago.

892
01:18:17,784 --> 01:18:19,550
This scene is so erotic

893
01:18:19,617 --> 01:18:23,217
precisely because Bergman successfully resisted

894
01:18:23,317 --> 01:18:25,250
the temptation of a flashback.

895
01:18:25,350 --> 01:18:27,517
No flashback. Just words.

896
01:18:27,950 --> 01:18:32,883
Probably one of the most erotic scenes
in the entire history of cinema.

897
01:18:34,517 --> 01:18:38,117
Katarina unbuttoned his trousers
and started playing with him.

898
01:18:39,250 --> 01:18:42,517
When he came she took him in her mouth.

899
01:18:43,317 --> 01:18:46,550
He bent down and started kissing her on the back

900
01:18:46,650 --> 01:18:50,950
She turned around, took his head in
both hands and gave him her breast.

901
01:18:51,083 --> 01:18:54,916
The other boy got so excited,
so he and I started again.

902
01:18:56,583 --> 01:18:59,183
It was as nice as the first time.

903
01:19:01,150 --> 01:19:06,450
Then we swam and parted. When I
came back, Karl-Henrik had returned.

904
01:19:09,816 --> 01:19:14,516
We had dinner together and drank
the red wine he had with him.

905
01:19:16,050 --> 01:19:18,850
Then we slept together.

906
01:19:19,050 --> 01:19:23,950
It's never been as good, before or since.
Can you understand that?

907
01:19:24,216 --> 01:19:28,316
Although sexuality seems to be about bodies,

908
01:19:28,649 --> 01:19:30,749
it's not really about bodies.

909
01:19:30,816 --> 01:19:35,049
It is how bodily activity is reported in words.

910
01:19:38,415 --> 01:19:39,848
Well...

911
01:19:41,648 --> 01:19:44,682
I first saw him that morning in the lobby.

912
01:19:46,215 --> 01:19:49,148
He was... He was checking into the hotel

913
01:19:49,248 --> 01:19:52,481
and he was following the bellboy with his luggage

914
01:19:53,015 --> 01:19:54,681
to the elevator.

915
01:19:57,148 --> 01:19:58,148
He...

916
01:19:59,281 --> 01:20:03,081
He glanced at me as he walked past.
Just a glance.

917
01:20:04,648 --> 01:20:06,115
Nothing more.

918
01:20:13,415 --> 01:20:16,215
But I could hardly

919
01:20:17,948 --> 01:20:19,115
move.

920
01:20:21,514 --> 01:20:27,214
Eyes Wide Shut is a film which has
an incredibly precise lesson about fantasy.

921
01:20:29,781 --> 01:20:35,481
She tells him,
not about herself effectively cheating him,

922
01:20:35,614 --> 01:20:38,614
but about fantasising about cheating him

923
01:20:38,681 --> 01:20:42,714
with some naval officer
they met in a hotel and so on and so on.

924
01:20:49,581 --> 01:20:54,981
The entire film is his desperate attempt
to catch up with her fantasy,

925
01:20:55,047 --> 01:20:57,014
which ends in a failure.

926
01:21:04,547 --> 01:21:09,347
Many people don't like, in that
mysterious rich people's castle

927
01:21:09,414 --> 01:21:11,514
where they meet for their orgies, the big orgy.

928
01:21:11,481 --> 01:21:17,247
They complain, this orgy is aseptic,
totally non-attractive, without erotic tension.

929
01:21:17,314 --> 01:21:19,547
But I think that's the point.

930
01:21:21,114 --> 01:21:25,747
This utter impotence of male fantasising.

931
01:21:32,680 --> 01:21:35,380
The film is the story of how

932
01:21:35,980 --> 01:21:40,180
the male fantasy cannot catch up
with the feminine fantasy,

933
01:21:40,247 --> 01:21:44,414
of how there is too much of desire
in feminine fantasy

934
01:21:44,580 --> 01:21:47,514
and how this is the threat to male identity.

935
01:21:47,614 --> 01:21:52,847
Isn't it that in Vertigo, on the contrary,
all of the activity is on the side of Scottie?

936
01:21:53,180 --> 01:22:00,180
But I think that precisely because of this,
his activity is extremely brutal, mortifying.

937
01:22:00,480 --> 01:22:03,513
He has totally to erase

938
01:22:04,880 --> 01:22:07,580
the woman as a desiring entity.

939
01:22:07,680 --> 01:22:09,847
That's for him the condition to desire.

940
01:22:09,980 --> 01:22:11,480
"Let's annihilate the woman,

941
01:22:11,613 --> 01:22:16,013
"let's mortify her so that my fantasy alone rules."

942
01:22:16,680 --> 01:22:20,813
The other solution is, of course,
the masochist solution, which is,

943
01:22:21,447 --> 01:22:26,880
"Let me maintain the appearance
of the woman, domina, as the boss.

944
01:22:26,947 --> 01:22:28,780
"I accept my inferior role

945
01:22:28,980 --> 01:22:30,713
"but secretly I am the master

946
01:22:30,780 --> 01:22:35,046
"because I write the very scenario
of my inferiority."

947
01:22:38,780 --> 01:22:39,946
But

948
01:22:41,513 --> 01:22:44,080
I do love you.

949
01:22:47,546 --> 01:22:49,013
And you know

950
01:22:50,413 --> 01:22:54,946
there is something very important
that we need to do as soon as possible.

951
01:22:56,546 --> 01:22:57,846
What's that?

952
01:23:00,980 --> 01:23:02,013
Fuck.

953
01:23:03,613 --> 01:23:09,346
It's as if our inner psychic space is too wild
and sometimes we have to make love,

954
01:23:09,413 --> 01:23:13,013
not to get the real thing
but to escape from the real,

955
01:23:13,113 --> 01:23:17,179
from the excessive real
that we encounter in our fantasising.

956
01:23:31,645 --> 01:23:33,078
The point is

957
01:23:33,745 --> 01:23:39,511
the fragile balance
between reality and fantasy dimension

958
01:23:39,578 --> 01:23:42,045
in our sexual activity.

959
01:23:50,444 --> 01:23:56,244
Michael Haneke's Piano Teacher
is the story of an impossible love affair

960
01:23:56,344 --> 01:24:01,078
between a middle-aged,
deeply traumatised woman

961
01:24:01,144 --> 01:24:03,111
and her young student.

962
01:24:04,511 --> 01:24:09,211
She's in a way a person
who is not yet sexually subjectivised.

963
01:24:09,678 --> 01:24:13,111
She lacks the fantasmatic co-ordinates
of her desire.

964
01:24:13,611 --> 01:24:17,144
This accounts for a couple of
very strange scenes in the film,

965
01:24:17,311 --> 01:24:19,811
like when she goes to a pornographic store

966
01:24:19,877 --> 01:24:24,644
and then watches in a closed, small room
a scene from a hardcore film.

967
01:24:32,511 --> 01:24:35,544
The way she watches it, it's not to get aroused,

968
01:24:35,677 --> 01:24:38,677
but she watches it as a pupil in a school.

969
01:24:38,744 --> 01:24:42,311
She simply watches it
to get the co-ordinates of desiring,

970
01:24:42,377 --> 01:24:45,211
to learn how to do it, how to get excited.

971
01:24:46,544 --> 01:24:49,211
"...next take off the blindfold, please,

972
01:24:49,444 --> 01:24:52,244
"and sit down on my face

973
01:24:53,610 --> 01:24:56,244
"and punch me in the stomach

974
01:24:56,444 --> 01:24:59,244
"to force me to thrust my tongue in your behind."

975
01:24:59,310 --> 01:25:02,977
The notion of fantasy in psychoanalysis
is very ambiguous.

976
01:25:03,477 --> 01:25:07,310
On the one hand,
we have the pacifying aspect of fantasy.

977
01:25:07,844 --> 01:25:12,144
Piano Teacher plays with the opposite
aspect of fantasy.

978
01:25:14,077 --> 01:25:17,844
Fantasy as the explosion of wild,
unbearable desires.

979
01:25:19,310 --> 01:25:23,577
What we found in the middle of the film
is probably, arguably,

980
01:25:23,677 --> 01:25:28,443
the most depressive sexual act
in the entire history of cinema.

981
01:25:34,210 --> 01:25:35,677
As if to punish her

982
01:25:35,777 --> 01:25:40,110
for disclosing the fantasy in her letter to him,

983
01:25:40,177 --> 01:25:46,977
he literally enacts her fantasy
in the way he makes love to her,

984
01:25:47,077 --> 01:25:50,010
which of course means
that fantasy is lost for her.

985
01:25:55,577 --> 01:25:58,777
When fantasy disintegrates, you don't get reality,

986
01:25:59,776 --> 01:26:02,843
you get some nightmarish real

987
01:26:02,910 --> 01:26:07,376
too traumatic to be experienced
as ordinary reality.

988
01:26:07,776 --> 01:26:10,810
That would be another definition of nightmare.

989
01:26:18,476 --> 01:26:19,743
Hell is here.

990
01:26:19,810 --> 01:26:24,410
Paradise, at least this perverse paradise, is hell.

991
01:26:25,576 --> 01:26:27,343
Stop, please.

992
01:26:27,743 --> 01:26:32,143
One cannot here just throw out the dirty water,

993
01:26:32,310 --> 01:26:35,809
all these excessive, perverse fantasies and so on,

994
01:26:35,909 --> 01:26:39,243
and just keep the healthy, clean baby,

995
01:26:39,409 --> 01:26:42,443
normal, straight or even homosexual, whatever,

996
01:26:42,576 --> 01:26:45,643
but some kind of normal, politically correct sex.

997
01:26:45,809 --> 01:26:47,643
You cannot do that.

998
01:26:47,943 --> 01:26:51,776
What if we throw out the baby
and keep just the dirty water?

999
01:26:52,409 --> 01:26:56,609
And put it as a problem:
how to deal with dirty water.

1000
01:26:56,709 --> 01:27:00,643
And put some order
in the dirty water of fantasies.

1001
01:27:00,743 --> 01:27:06,076
This is I think precisely what happens
for example in Kieslowski's Blue.

1002
01:27:12,509 --> 01:27:15,242
During the ... were you conscious?

1003
01:27:17,376 --> 01:27:19,909
I'm sorry to have inform you...

1004
01:27:21,109 --> 01:27:22,276
Do you know?

1005
01:27:25,409 --> 01:27:27,142
Your husband...

1006
01:27:27,509 --> 01:27:29,442
died in the accident.

1007
01:27:36,276 --> 01:27:38,709
You must have been unconscious.

1008
01:27:42,042 --> 01:27:43,409
Anna?

1009
01:27:46,309 --> 01:27:48,509
Yes, your daughter, too.

1010
01:27:50,775 --> 01:27:55,242
You can organise, people do it,
your life in mourning the lost object.

1011
01:27:55,809 --> 01:27:58,009
Julie, in Blue, discovers that

1012
01:27:58,709 --> 01:28:01,575
her husband wasn't what she thought he was.

1013
01:28:02,142 --> 01:28:06,142
That he was cheating her,
that he had a mistress who is pregnant.

1014
01:28:09,309 --> 01:28:11,075
This is the most terrifying loss,

1015
01:28:11,142 --> 01:28:15,508
where all the co-ordinates of your reality
disintegrate.

1016
01:28:22,708 --> 01:28:26,142
The problem is how to reconstitute yourself.

1017
01:28:26,242 --> 01:28:31,242
In a wonderful short scene,
the heroine of Blue, after returning home,

1018
01:28:32,375 --> 01:28:34,375
finds there on the floor

1019
01:28:35,275 --> 01:28:39,675
a group of newly-born mice,
crawling around their mother.

1020
01:28:43,808 --> 01:28:45,808
This scene terrifies her.

1021
01:28:46,208 --> 01:28:52,975
She is too excessively exposed
to life in its brutal meaninglessness.

1022
01:29:02,608 --> 01:29:05,475
What she is able to do at the end

1023
01:29:05,575 --> 01:29:08,875
is to acquire a proper distance towards reality.

1024
01:29:18,141 --> 01:29:22,208
This is what happens in the famous circular shot

1025
01:29:22,408 --> 01:29:26,841
where we pass from Julie's face,
while she is making love.

1026
01:29:29,274 --> 01:29:34,074
This magical suspension
of temporal and spatial limitations,

1027
01:29:34,141 --> 01:29:37,374
this free floating in a fantasy-space,

1028
01:29:37,674 --> 01:29:40,808
far from distancing us from reality...

1029
01:29:41,141 --> 01:29:42,841
If I have not love

1030
01:29:42,941 --> 01:29:46,407
...enables us to approach reality.

1031
01:29:46,507 --> 01:29:50,474
I am nothing

1032
01:29:50,641 --> 01:29:53,441
She is putting together the co-ordinates

1033
01:29:54,007 --> 01:29:59,007
which enable her to experience her reality
as meaningful again.

1034
01:30:03,974 --> 01:30:07,840
As if the lesson is,
not only for men but also for women,

1035
01:30:07,940 --> 01:30:13,140
that you can sustain sexual intercourse,
sexual relationship,

1036
01:30:13,374 --> 01:30:15,874
only through the support of fantasy.

1037
01:31:03,873 --> 01:31:08,173
The problem of course is,
is this fantasy reconstituted?

1038
01:31:08,373 --> 01:31:12,106
Is this the ultimate horizon of our experience?

1039
01:31:19,040 --> 01:31:24,073
The function of music here
is precisely that of a fetish,

1040
01:31:24,173 --> 01:31:26,640
of some fascinating presence

1041
01:31:27,240 --> 01:31:31,806
whose function it is
to conceal the abyss of anxiety.

1042
01:31:35,340 --> 01:31:39,073
Music is here what, according to Marx, religion is,

1043
01:31:39,139 --> 01:31:41,473
a kind of opium for the people.

1044
01:31:41,539 --> 01:31:47,939
Opium which should put us asleep,
put us into a kind of a false beatitude,

1045
01:31:48,006 --> 01:31:53,206
which allows us to avoid
the abyss of unbearable anxiety.

1046
01:32:08,306 --> 01:32:12,106
We see Julie crying, but through a glass.

1047
01:32:12,672 --> 01:32:16,106
This glass stands for, I think,
fantasy reconstituted.

1048
01:32:20,539 --> 01:32:23,772
These are, I'm tempted to say,
the tears of happiness.

1049
01:32:23,839 --> 01:32:28,239
"I can mourn now because
it no longer immediately affects me."

1050
01:32:29,406 --> 01:32:33,672
Blue proposes this mystical communion,

1051
01:32:33,739 --> 01:32:37,406
reconstituted fantasy,
as sustaining our relation to the world.

1052
01:32:37,472 --> 01:32:39,672
But the price we pay is that

1053
01:32:40,306 --> 01:32:45,672
some radically authentic moment
of accepting the anxiety

1054
01:32:45,972 --> 01:32:50,405
at the very foundation of human condition
is lost there.

1055
01:32:53,272 --> 01:32:56,705
If anything, anxiety at the vocal level

1056
01:32:56,872 --> 01:32:58,972
is silence.

1057
01:32:59,505 --> 01:33:01,972
It's silence. It's a silent scream.

1058
01:33:06,505 --> 01:33:08,439
In Hitchcock's The Birds,

1059
01:33:08,505 --> 01:33:11,605
when the mother, of course who but the mother,

1060
01:33:11,772 --> 01:33:16,172
finds the neighbour dead,
his eyes picked out by the birds,

1061
01:33:19,238 --> 01:33:24,405
she shouts, but the shout
literally remains stuck in her throat.

1062
01:33:35,105 --> 01:33:40,705
To return from cinema to so-called real life,
the ultimate lesson of psychoanalysis

1063
01:33:40,772 --> 01:33:45,938
is that exactly the same
goes for our real life experience,

1064
01:33:46,805 --> 01:33:50,405
that emotions as such are deceiving.

1065
01:33:51,505 --> 01:33:57,938
There are no specifically fake emotions
because, as Freud puts it literally,

1066
01:33:58,371 --> 01:34:02,238
the only emotion which doesn't deceive
is anxiety.

1067
01:34:02,471 --> 01:34:04,705
All other emotions are fake.

1068
01:34:06,738 --> 01:34:12,505
So, of course, the problem here is, are we able to

1069
01:34:13,171 --> 01:34:18,371
encounter in cinema the emotion of anxiety,

1070
01:34:18,505 --> 01:34:22,338
or is cinema as such a fake?

1071
01:34:28,103 --> 01:34:33,970
Cinema, as the art of appearances,
tells us something about reality itself.

1072
01:34:36,070 --> 01:34:41,137
It tells us something
about how reality constitutes itself.

1073
01:34:41,803 --> 01:34:43,137
Ripley.

1074
01:34:49,937 --> 01:34:51,603
Ripley, come on.

1075
01:34:54,036 --> 01:34:57,236
Ripley, we've got no time for sightseeing here.

1076
01:35:01,470 --> 01:35:03,003
Ripley, don't.

1077
01:35:03,103 --> 01:35:07,970
There is an old Gnostic theory
that our world was not perfectly created,

1078
01:35:08,170 --> 01:35:12,503
that the god who created our world
was an idiot who bungled the job,

1079
01:35:12,636 --> 01:35:17,403
so that our world is a half-finished creation.

1080
01:35:17,736 --> 01:35:20,670
There are voids, openings, gaps.

1081
01:35:22,036 --> 01:35:25,503
It's not fully real, fully constituted.

1082
01:35:32,703 --> 01:35:37,803
In the wonderful scene
in the last instalment of the Alien saga,

1083
01:35:37,969 --> 01:35:40,803
Alien Resurrection, when Ripley,

1084
01:35:40,903 --> 01:35:45,103
the cloned Ripley, enters a mysterious room,

1085
01:35:45,169 --> 01:35:51,203
she encounters
the previous failed version of herself,

1086
01:35:52,003 --> 01:35:53,969
of cloning herself.

1087
01:35:56,803 --> 01:35:58,702
Just a horrified creature,

1088
01:35:58,802 --> 01:36:02,269
a small foetus-like entity,
then more developed forms.

1089
01:36:06,702 --> 01:36:09,236
Finally, a creature which almost looks like her,

1090
01:36:09,336 --> 01:36:12,169
but her limbs are like that of the monster.

1091
01:36:17,169 --> 01:36:19,002
Kill me.

1092
01:36:20,402 --> 01:36:25,469
This means that all the time
our previous alternate embodiments,

1093
01:36:26,769 --> 01:36:29,869
what we might have been but are not,

1094
01:36:30,202 --> 01:36:34,035
that these alternate versions of ourselves
are haunting us.

1095
01:36:36,769 --> 01:36:42,702
That's the ontological view of reality
that we get here,

1096
01:36:43,602 --> 01:36:46,135
as if it's an unfinished universe.

1097
01:36:48,935 --> 01:36:51,135
This is, I think, a very modern feeling.

1098
01:36:51,202 --> 01:36:54,502
It is through such ontology of unfinished reality

1099
01:36:54,602 --> 01:36:57,735
that cinema became a truly modern art.

1100
01:36:57,968 --> 01:37:00,868
All modern films are ultimately films about

1101
01:37:00,968 --> 01:37:04,102
the possibility or impossibility to make a film.

1102
01:37:05,768 --> 01:37:09,501
Dogville was in the Rocky Mountains
in the US of A,

1103
01:37:09,701 --> 01:37:12,535
up here where the road came to its definitive end

1104
01:37:12,601 --> 01:37:16,001
near the entrance to the old,
abandoned silver mine.

1105
01:37:16,235 --> 01:37:21,168
The residents of Dogville were good,
honest folks and they liked their township.

1106
01:37:21,468 --> 01:37:24,368
With von Trier, it's not only the problem of belief

1107
01:37:24,435 --> 01:37:27,335
in the sense of,
do people generally still believe today

1108
01:37:27,435 --> 01:37:29,601
the place of religion today, and so on.

1109
01:37:29,668 --> 01:37:33,468
It's also reflectively or allegorically

1110
01:37:33,535 --> 01:37:36,701
the question of believing in cinema itself.

1111
01:37:36,768 --> 01:37:43,468
How to make today people still believe
in the magic of cinema?

1112
01:37:45,101 --> 01:37:48,868
In Dogville, all of it is staged on a set.

1113
01:37:48,934 --> 01:37:54,701
Okay, this is often the case in cinema,
but here the set is seen as the set.

1114
01:37:55,301 --> 01:37:57,768
The action takes place in Dogville, a small town,

1115
01:37:57,834 --> 01:38:02,334
but there are no houses.
There are just lines on the floor,

1116
01:38:02,401 --> 01:38:05,768
signalling that this is the house,
this is the street.

1117
01:38:07,934 --> 01:38:11,967
The mysterious thing is
that this does not prevent our identification.

1118
01:38:12,067 --> 01:38:18,434
If anything, it makes us even more thrown
into the tensions of the inner life.

1119
01:38:21,867 --> 01:38:23,767
Have you seen Grace?

1120
01:38:24,001 --> 01:38:25,734
She's at my place.

1121
01:38:26,201 --> 01:38:29,601
-Is she busy?
-Not any more. Go right in.

1122
01:38:39,434 --> 01:38:44,434
It's not that naive belief is undermined,
deconstructed through irony.

1123
01:38:44,567 --> 01:38:47,934
Von Trier wants to be serious with the magic.

1124
01:38:48,234 --> 01:38:51,334
Irony is put into service to make us believe.

1125
01:38:53,500 --> 01:38:57,467
Yet again, Grace had made
a miraculous escape from her pursuers

1126
01:38:57,534 --> 01:39:00,200
with the aid of the people of Dogville.

1127
01:39:00,300 --> 01:39:04,567
Everyone had covered up for her,
including Chuck, who had to admit

1128
01:39:04,634 --> 01:39:09,400
that it was probably Tom's hat
he'd mistakenly considered so suspicious.

1129
01:39:13,800 --> 01:39:17,800
The mystery is that even if we know
that it's only staged, that it's a fiction,

1130
01:39:17,867 --> 01:39:19,233
it still fascinates us.

1131
01:39:19,333 --> 01:39:21,800
That's the fundamental magic of it.

1132
01:39:21,967 --> 01:39:25,167
You witness a certain seductive scene,

1133
01:39:25,267 --> 01:39:29,700
then you are shown that it's just a fake,
stage machinery behind,

1134
01:39:29,800 --> 01:39:33,733
but you are still fascinated by it. Illusion persists.

1135
01:39:33,800 --> 01:39:38,567
There is something real in the illusion,
more real than in the reality behind it.

1136
01:39:38,900 --> 01:39:42,833
Do not arouse the wrath
of the great and powerful Oz!

1137
01:39:42,900 --> 01:39:45,600
I said come back tomorrow!

1138
01:39:45,667 --> 01:39:49,000
If you were really great and powerful,
you'd keep your promises.

1139
01:39:49,066 --> 01:39:52,633
Do you presume to criticise the great Oz?

1140
01:39:52,733 --> 01:39:55,133
You ungrateful creatures!

1141
01:39:55,200 --> 01:39:59,166
Think yourselves lucky
that I'm giving you audience tomorrow

1142
01:39:59,300 --> 01:40:01,733
instead of 20 years from now!

1143
01:40:03,500 --> 01:40:06,433
The great Oz has spoken.

1144
01:40:07,866 --> 01:40:11,166
Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.

1145
01:40:11,566 --> 01:40:14,900
The great and... Oz has spoken.

1146
01:40:15,100 --> 01:40:17,266
-Who are you?
-Well, I...

1147
01:40:17,333 --> 01:40:20,700
I am the great and powerful Wizard of Oz.

1148
01:40:20,866 --> 01:40:24,099
What we can learn from a film like Wizard of Oz

1149
01:40:24,166 --> 01:40:29,966
is how the logic of de-mystification
is not enough.

1150
01:40:30,033 --> 01:40:34,499
It's not enough to say, "Okay, it's just
a big show spectacle to impress the people.

1151
01:40:34,599 --> 01:40:38,599
"What is behind is just a modest old guy,"
and so on and so on.

1152
01:40:38,666 --> 01:40:43,466
It is that rather, in a way,
there is more truth in this appearance.

1153
01:40:43,566 --> 01:40:47,233
Appearance has an effectivity, a truth of its own.

1154
01:40:47,299 --> 01:40:49,333
What about the heart that you promised Tin Man?

1155
01:40:49,433 --> 01:40:50,433
Well...

1156
01:40:50,499 --> 01:40:52,233
And the courage
that you promised Cowardly Lion?

1157
01:40:52,299 --> 01:40:53,899
-And Scarecrow's brain?
-And Scarecrow's brain?

1158
01:40:53,999 --> 01:40:57,532
Why, anybody can have a brain.
That's a very mediocre commodity.

1159
01:40:57,632 --> 01:41:00,466
Every pusillanimous creature
that crawls on the earth

1160
01:41:00,566 --> 01:41:03,666
or slinks through slimy seas has a brain.

1161
01:41:03,766 --> 01:41:07,566
Back where I come from,
we have universities, seats of great learning

1162
01:41:07,632 --> 01:41:09,599
where men go to become great thinkers.

1163
01:41:09,732 --> 01:41:11,999
And when they come out,
they think deep thoughts

1164
01:41:12,066 --> 01:41:13,832
and with no more brains than you have.

1165
01:41:13,899 --> 01:41:17,566
But they have one thing you haven't got.
A diploma!

1166
01:41:17,666 --> 01:41:21,732
Therefore, by virtue of the authority vested in me

1167
01:41:21,832 --> 01:41:25,666
by the Universitatus Committeeatum
e plurbis unum,

1168
01:41:25,732 --> 01:41:30,932
I hereby confer upon you
the honorary degree of Th.D.

1169
01:41:31,532 --> 01:41:35,232
-Th.D.?
-That's Doctor of Thinkology.

1170
01:41:35,365 --> 01:41:38,199
The sum of the square roots
of any two sides of an isosceles triangle

1171
01:41:38,265 --> 01:41:41,065
is equal to the square root of the remaining side.

1172
01:41:42,199 --> 01:41:45,699
Oh, joy, rapture! I've got a brain!

1173
01:41:45,832 --> 01:41:49,665
And that's the paradox of cinema,
the paradox of belief.

1174
01:41:49,799 --> 01:41:53,532
We don't simply believe or do not believe.

1175
01:41:53,665 --> 01:41:57,632
We always believe
in a kind of a conditional mode.

1176
01:41:57,732 --> 01:42:02,832
I know very well it's a fake but, nonetheless,
I let myself be emotionally affected.

1177
01:42:03,832 --> 01:42:06,632
This strange status of belief

1178
01:42:07,432 --> 01:42:13,732
accounts for the efficiency
of one of the most interesting characters,

1179
01:42:14,332 --> 01:42:18,435
not only in cinema, but also in theatre,
in staging as such,

1180
01:42:19,032 --> 01:42:21,035
the character of prologue.

1181
01:42:21,898 --> 01:42:23,132
How do you do?

1182
01:42:26,232 --> 01:42:29,765
Mr Carl Laemmle feels it would be
a little unkind to present this picture

1183
01:42:29,865 --> 01:42:32,965
without just a word of friendly warning.

1184
01:42:33,198 --> 01:42:36,465
We are about to unfold the story of Frankenstein,

1185
01:42:36,832 --> 01:42:41,865
a man of science, who sought to create
a man after his own image

1186
01:42:42,332 --> 01:42:45,032
without reckoning upon God.

1187
01:42:45,565 --> 01:42:51,298
Somebody tells us
you have to experience horror, we do it.

1188
01:42:52,665 --> 01:42:57,131
So if any of you feel that you do not care
to subject your nerves to such a strain,

1189
01:42:57,231 --> 01:43:01,765
now is your chance to... Well, we've warned you.

1190
01:43:08,798 --> 01:43:11,931
Ladies and gentlemen, young and old,

1191
01:43:12,631 --> 01:43:18,331
this may seem an unusual procedure,
speaking to you before the picture begins.

1192
01:43:18,931 --> 01:43:21,265
But we have an unusual subject.

1193
01:43:22,265 --> 01:43:25,798
Behind, not red, this is Hollywood,
but black curtain,

1194
01:43:25,898 --> 01:43:27,898
Cecil DeMille himself appears,

1195
01:43:27,964 --> 01:43:31,964
giving us a lesson of how
the story of Ten Commandments and Moses

1196
01:43:32,064 --> 01:43:34,531
has great relevance today where we are fighting

1197
01:43:34,631 --> 01:43:38,898
Communist, totalitarian danger
and so on, giving us all the clues.

1198
01:43:39,864 --> 01:43:42,431
Are men the property of the state?

1199
01:43:43,231 --> 01:43:45,664
Or are they free souls under God?

1200
01:43:46,098 --> 01:43:50,931
This same battle continues
throughout the world today.

1201
01:43:51,264 --> 01:43:55,131
This hidden master who controls the events

1202
01:43:55,298 --> 01:43:59,598
can also be defined as ideology embodied,

1203
01:43:59,698 --> 01:44:05,531
in the sense of the space
which organises our desires.

1204
01:44:07,264 --> 01:44:11,197
And your name? What the fuck is your name?

1205
01:44:15,397 --> 01:44:19,064
In David Lynch's Lost Highway,
we have the Mystery Man,

1206
01:44:19,131 --> 01:44:23,364
who stands for the very cinematographer,
even director.

1207
01:44:28,797 --> 01:44:34,697
Imagine somebody who has
a direct access to your inner life,

1208
01:44:35,764 --> 01:44:37,964
to your innermost fantasies,

1209
01:44:38,064 --> 01:44:42,530
to what even you don't want to know
about yourself.

1210
01:44:43,430 --> 01:44:45,764
We've met before, haven't we?

1211
01:44:49,297 --> 01:44:50,997
I don't think so.

1212
01:44:53,897 --> 01:44:56,430
Where was it that you think we met?

1213
01:44:57,330 --> 01:44:59,430
At your house, don't you remember?

1214
01:44:59,830 --> 01:45:02,697
The best way to imagine what Mystery Man is,

1215
01:45:02,764 --> 01:45:06,330
is to imagine somebody
who doesn't want anything from us.

1216
01:45:06,397 --> 01:45:09,297
What do you mean? You're where right now?

1217
01:45:11,330 --> 01:45:12,797
At your house.

1218
01:45:17,497 --> 01:45:19,663
That's fucking crazy, man.

1219
01:45:27,930 --> 01:45:29,497
Call me.

1220
01:45:32,030 --> 01:45:34,563
That's the true horror of this Mystery Man.

1221
01:45:34,663 --> 01:45:38,730
Not any evil, demoniac intentions and so on.

1222
01:45:38,797 --> 01:45:44,563
Just the fact that when he is in front of you,
he, as it were, sees through you.

1223
01:45:51,063 --> 01:45:53,396
I told you I was here.

1224
01:45:56,830 --> 01:45:58,596
How'd you do that?

1225
01:46:02,130 --> 01:46:03,863
Ask me.

1226
01:46:09,663 --> 01:46:12,930
-How'd you get inside my house?
-You invited me.

1227
01:46:12,996 --> 01:46:16,296
It is not my custom to go where I'm not wanted.

1228
01:46:16,363 --> 01:46:19,229
It's like the court in Kafka's novels,

1229
01:46:19,363 --> 01:46:22,929
where the court, or the Law,
only comes when you ask for it.

1230
01:46:23,963 --> 01:46:26,929
Oh! Now, why would he do that?

1231
01:46:29,196 --> 01:46:31,863
Most peculiar. What on Earth?

1232
01:46:32,129 --> 01:46:36,629
Hitchcock was obsessed
with this topic of manipulating emotions.

1233
01:46:36,763 --> 01:46:39,263
His dream was even that once in the future,

1234
01:46:39,329 --> 01:46:42,663
we would no longer have to shoot narratives,

1235
01:46:43,129 --> 01:46:46,363
our brains will be directly connected
to some machine

1236
01:46:46,429 --> 01:46:50,529
and the director would only have to press
different buttons there

1237
01:46:50,596 --> 01:46:54,362
and the appropriate emotions
will be awakened in our mind.

1238
01:46:56,762 --> 01:46:58,696
They're coming. They're coming!

1239
01:47:01,929 --> 01:47:06,462
What do directors like Hitchcock,
Tarkovsky, Kieslowski, Lynch

1240
01:47:06,529 --> 01:47:07,862
have in common?

1241
01:47:08,029 --> 01:47:11,929
A certain autonomy of cinematic form.

1242
01:47:12,862 --> 01:47:16,462
Form is not here simply
to express, articulate content.

1243
01:47:16,529 --> 01:47:19,229
It has a message of its own.

1244
01:47:20,429 --> 01:47:26,595
In Hitchcock, we have
the motif of a person hanging from an abyss

1245
01:47:26,695 --> 01:47:28,562
by the hand of another person.

1246
01:47:29,162 --> 01:47:31,829
The first example, Saboteur.

1247
01:47:33,062 --> 01:47:34,595
Rear Window.

1248
01:47:37,795 --> 01:47:39,662
Then we have in To Catch a Thief.

1249
01:47:39,729 --> 01:47:42,129
You've got a full house down there.
Begin the performance.

1250
01:47:42,229 --> 01:47:43,962
Then in North by Northwest.

1251
01:47:46,329 --> 01:47:48,895
Then, of course, in Vertigo.

1252
01:47:51,095 --> 01:47:55,962
So we see here
the same visual motif repeating itself.

1253
01:48:00,795 --> 01:48:05,362
I think it's wrong to look
for a common, deeper meaning.

1254
01:48:05,462 --> 01:48:08,528
Some French theorists claimed that

1255
01:48:08,628 --> 01:48:11,928
what we are dealing here with
is the motif of fall and redemption.

1256
01:48:12,028 --> 01:48:14,762
I think this is already saying too much.

1257
01:48:14,862 --> 01:48:19,595
I think that what we are dealing with
is with a kind of a cinematic materialism,

1258
01:48:19,695 --> 01:48:22,995
that beneath the level of meaning,

1259
01:48:23,095 --> 01:48:26,595
spiritual meaning
but also simple narrative meaning,

1260
01:48:26,828 --> 01:48:32,428
we get a more elementary level
of forms themselves,

1261
01:48:32,561 --> 01:48:37,895
communicating with each other,
interacting, reverberating, echoing,

1262
01:48:38,028 --> 01:48:40,728
morphing, transforming one into the other.

1263
01:48:40,828 --> 01:48:46,861
And it is this background,
this background of proto-reality,

1264
01:48:46,928 --> 01:48:52,695
a real which is more dense,
more fundamental than the narrative reality,

1265
01:48:53,061 --> 01:48:54,361
the story that we observe.

1266
01:48:54,461 --> 01:49:00,194
It is this that provides the proper density
of the cinematic experience.

1267
01:49:05,361 --> 01:49:10,628
It's the gigantic tree where, in Vertigo,
Madeleine and Scottie get together,

1268
01:49:10,861 --> 01:49:15,628
almost embrace, where their erotic tension
becomes unbearable.

1269
01:49:16,028 --> 01:49:17,628
What is this tree?

1270
01:49:17,694 --> 01:49:22,428
I think it's another
in the series of "Hitchcockian Big Things",

1271
01:49:22,494 --> 01:49:27,794
like the Mount Rushmore statues,
or take another example, like Moby Dick.

1272
01:49:28,261 --> 01:49:30,894
This tree is not simply a natural object.

1273
01:49:30,961 --> 01:49:33,561
It is, within our mental space,

1274
01:49:33,627 --> 01:49:36,794
what in psychoanalysis is called "the Thing".

1275
01:49:36,994 --> 01:49:43,394
It's effectively as if this tree,
in its very extra-large distortion,

1276
01:49:43,894 --> 01:49:47,827
embodies something
that comes out of our inner space,

1277
01:49:48,427 --> 01:49:52,827
libido, the excessive energy of our mind.

1278
01:49:53,527 --> 01:49:56,594
So here I think

1279
01:49:57,994 --> 01:50:03,327
we can see how films and philosophy
are coming together.

1280
01:50:03,427 --> 01:50:09,094
How great cinematographers really
enable us to think in visual terms.

1281
01:50:15,794 --> 01:50:17,327
After the birds attack the city,

1282
01:50:17,427 --> 01:50:20,327
there is a fire which breaks out
at a gasoline station,

1283
01:50:20,394 --> 01:50:23,394
where a guy throws a match on the gasoline.

1284
01:50:23,594 --> 01:50:27,227
Hey, you! Look out! Don't drop that match!
Look out! Get out of there!

1285
01:50:27,394 --> 01:50:29,227
-Mister, run!
-Watch out!

1286
01:50:29,294 --> 01:50:32,194
The first part of this short scene
is the standard one.

1287
01:50:32,260 --> 01:50:35,660
We get the standard exchange of shots of the fire

1288
01:50:35,727 --> 01:50:40,593
and shots of the person,
Melanie in this case, who looks at it.

1289
01:50:44,160 --> 01:50:46,627
Then something strange happens.

1290
01:50:46,760 --> 01:50:51,360
We cut to way above the city.
We see the entire town.

1291
01:50:52,027 --> 01:50:57,593
We automatically take this shot
as a standard establishing shot.

1292
01:50:57,660 --> 01:50:59,660
Like after details which perplex you,

1293
01:50:59,760 --> 01:51:02,160
which prevent you
from getting a clear orientation,

1294
01:51:02,227 --> 01:51:06,793
you need a shot which enables you
some kind of a cognitive mapping,

1295
01:51:06,860 --> 01:51:08,393
that you know what's going on.

1296
01:51:08,460 --> 01:51:12,993
But then, precisely following that logic
of the Thing from inner space

1297
01:51:13,060 --> 01:51:15,693
which emerges from within you,

1298
01:51:17,160 --> 01:51:20,260
first we hear these ominous sounds,
which are sounds of the birds,

1299
01:51:20,360 --> 01:51:23,760
then one bird enters, another bird enters...

1300
01:51:23,826 --> 01:51:28,760
The shot which was taken as a neutral,
God's view shot,

1301
01:51:28,860 --> 01:51:32,760
all of a sudden changes into an evil gaze.

1302
01:51:34,960 --> 01:51:37,626
The gaze of the very birds attacking.

1303
01:51:39,293 --> 01:51:41,993
And we are thrown into that position.

1304
01:51:42,093 --> 01:51:46,593
And again, we can use here
The Birds as the final instalment

1305
01:51:46,693 --> 01:51:50,993
and read backwards other classical
Hitchcock scenes in the same way.

1306
01:51:53,259 --> 01:51:56,093
Isn't exactly the same thing happening

1307
01:51:56,193 --> 01:51:59,593
in what I consider the ultimate scene in Psycho,

1308
01:51:59,659 --> 01:52:02,726
the second murder,
the murder of the detective Arbogast?

1309
01:52:04,726 --> 01:52:08,493
Hitchcock manipulates here in a very refined way

1310
01:52:08,559 --> 01:52:11,726
the logic of so-called fetishist disavowal.

1311
01:52:11,793 --> 01:52:15,126
The logic of, "I know very well, but..."

1312
01:52:15,426 --> 01:52:19,159
We know very well some things,
but we don't really believe in them,

1313
01:52:19,226 --> 01:52:24,459
so although we know they will happen,
we are no less surprised when they happen.

1314
01:52:27,092 --> 01:52:30,559
In this case,
everything points towards the murder

1315
01:52:30,626 --> 01:52:35,826
and, nonetheless, when it happens,
the surprise is, if anything, stronger.

1316
01:52:40,059 --> 01:52:43,192
It begins in a standard Hitchcockian way.

1317
01:52:45,692 --> 01:52:48,292
He looks up the stairs.

1318
01:52:48,826 --> 01:52:52,825
This exchange creates the Hitchcockian tension

1319
01:52:53,025 --> 01:52:55,559
between the subject's look

1320
01:52:56,259 --> 01:53:00,859
and the stairs themselves,
or rather the void on the top of the stairs

1321
01:53:00,959 --> 01:53:02,459
returning the gaze,

1322
01:53:02,559 --> 01:53:06,825
emanating some kind of
a weird unfathomable threat.

1323
01:53:23,425 --> 01:53:25,825
The camera then provides

1324
01:53:26,125 --> 01:53:31,258
a kind of a geometrically clear
God's point of view shot image

1325
01:53:31,358 --> 01:53:33,392
of the entire scene.

1326
01:53:37,992 --> 01:53:42,625
It is as if here we pass
from God as neutral creator,

1327
01:53:42,725 --> 01:53:46,658
to God in his unbearable divine rage.

1328
01:53:47,958 --> 01:53:52,025
This murderer is for us an unfathomable monster.

1329
01:53:52,092 --> 01:53:54,492
We don't know who he is,

1330
01:53:54,592 --> 01:53:59,458
but because we are forced
to assume the murderer's position,

1331
01:53:59,525 --> 01:54:01,458
in a way we don't know who we are.

1332
01:54:01,525 --> 01:54:04,591
As if we discover
a terrifying dimension in ourselves.

1333
01:54:04,725 --> 01:54:07,858
As if we are forced to act as a doll,

1334
01:54:07,958 --> 01:54:12,225
as a tool of another evil divinity's will.

1335
01:54:20,625 --> 01:54:23,525
It's not as classical metaphysics thinks,

1336
01:54:24,325 --> 01:54:27,991
"We are too terrified to accept
the fact that we are mortal beings,

1337
01:54:28,058 --> 01:54:30,125
"we would like to be immortal." No.

1338
01:54:30,225 --> 01:54:33,158
The truly horrible thing is to be immortal.

1339
01:54:36,291 --> 01:54:38,758
Immortality is the true nightmare, not death.

1340
01:54:38,824 --> 01:54:39,958
Lord Vader,

1341
01:54:41,491 --> 01:54:42,924
can you hear me?

1342
01:54:46,524 --> 01:54:52,458
We should remember the exact moment
when the normal, everyday person,

1343
01:54:52,558 --> 01:54:56,491
okay not quite everyday,
but ordinary person of Anakin Skywalker

1344
01:54:56,591 --> 01:54:58,791
changes into Darth Vader.

1345
01:55:01,324 --> 01:55:04,624
This scene when the Emperor's doctors

1346
01:55:04,691 --> 01:55:09,391
are reconstituting him after heavy wounds
into Darth Vader,

1347
01:55:09,491 --> 01:55:12,424
that these scenes are inter-cut

1348
01:55:12,524 --> 01:55:16,857
with the scenes of Princess Padm�,
Anakin's wife, giving birth.

1349
01:55:21,424 --> 01:55:22,557
Luke.

1350
01:55:23,224 --> 01:55:28,924
So it is as if we are witnessing
the transformation of Anakin into father.

1351
01:55:32,457 --> 01:55:34,491
But what kind of father?

1352
01:55:36,091 --> 01:55:40,524
A monster of a father
who doesn't want to be dead.

1353
01:55:58,190 --> 01:56:02,824
His deep breathing is the sound of the father,

1354
01:56:02,890 --> 01:56:07,924
the Freudian, primordial father,
this obscene over-potent father,

1355
01:56:08,057 --> 01:56:10,557
the father who doesn't want to die.

1356
01:56:10,657 --> 01:56:14,257
This, I think, is for all of us the most

1357
01:56:15,923 --> 01:56:18,190
obscene threat that we witness.

1358
01:56:18,323 --> 01:56:22,657
We don't want our fathers alive.
We want them dead.

1359
01:56:23,623 --> 01:56:29,157
The ultimate object of anxiety is a living father.

1360
01:56:29,223 --> 01:56:34,423
This brings us to what we should really
be attentive about in David Lynch's film.

1361
01:56:34,490 --> 01:56:39,190
Namely, what is to be taken seriously
and not seriously in his films.

1362
01:56:39,657 --> 01:56:42,223
-We love Ben.
-We love Ben.

1363
01:56:42,290 --> 01:56:44,657
-Here's to Ben.
-Here's to Ben.

1364
01:56:48,490 --> 01:56:50,290
Here's to Ben.

1365
01:56:51,956 --> 01:56:54,323
-Here's to Ben.
-Be polite!

1366
01:56:55,756 --> 01:56:56,823
Here's to Ben.

1367
01:56:56,956 --> 01:57:02,590
Frank is one of these terrifying,
ridiculously obscene paternal figures.

1368
01:57:03,590 --> 01:57:07,423
Apart from Frank in Blue Velvet,
we have Baron Harkonnen in Dune,

1369
01:57:07,490 --> 01:57:10,223
we have William Dafoe in Wild at Heart,

1370
01:57:10,290 --> 01:57:12,723
we have Mr Eddy in Lost Highway.

1371
01:57:14,356 --> 01:57:18,989
Don't you ever fucking tailgate! Ever!

1372
01:57:19,089 --> 01:57:21,256
-Tell him you won't tailgate.
-Ever!

1373
01:57:21,323 --> 01:57:22,856
I won't ever tailgate...

1374
01:57:22,956 --> 01:57:27,856
Do you know how many fucking car lengths
it takes to stop a car at 35 miles an hour?

1375
01:57:27,956 --> 01:57:32,189
Six fucking car lengths!
That's 1 06 fucking feet, mister!

1376
01:57:32,256 --> 01:57:34,989
If I had to stop suddenly, you would have hit me!

1377
01:57:35,056 --> 01:57:39,456
I want you to get a fucking driver's manual
and I want you to study that motherfucker!

1378
01:57:39,923 --> 01:57:42,123
I want to spit once on your head.

1379
01:57:43,023 --> 01:57:45,323
Just some spittle in your face.

1380
01:57:49,089 --> 01:57:50,423
What a luxury.

1381
01:57:50,589 --> 01:57:57,322
But I think that this very appearance
of ridiculously violent comedy is deceiving.

1382
01:57:57,622 --> 01:58:03,089
I think that these ridiculous paternal figures
are the ethical focus,

1383
01:58:03,889 --> 01:58:07,856
the topic of practically all David Lynch's films.

1384
01:58:11,222 --> 01:58:12,922
Let's fuck!

1385
01:58:13,622 --> 01:58:16,822
I'll fuck anything that moves!

1386
01:58:28,589 --> 01:58:32,222
A normal, paternal authority is an ordinary man

1387
01:58:33,489 --> 01:58:37,122
who, as it were, wears phallus as an insignia.

1388
01:58:37,222 --> 01:58:38,855
He has something

1389
01:58:40,389 --> 01:58:44,255
which provides his symbolic authority.

1390
01:58:45,855 --> 01:58:48,255
This is, in psychoanalytic theory, phallus.

1391
01:58:48,322 --> 01:58:52,055
You are not phallus. You possess phallus.

1392
01:58:52,122 --> 01:58:57,622
Phallus is something attached to you,
like the King's crown is his phallus.

1393
01:58:57,755 --> 01:59:02,755
Something you put on
and this gives you authority.

1394
01:59:02,855 --> 01:59:06,555
So that when you talk it's not simply
you as a common person who is talking,

1395
01:59:06,622 --> 01:59:11,022
it's symbolic authority itself,
the Law, the state, talking through you.

1396
01:59:11,088 --> 01:59:14,755
So these excessively ridiculous paternal figures,

1397
01:59:16,622 --> 01:59:20,222
it's not simply that they possess phallus,

1398
01:59:20,422 --> 01:59:23,988
that they have phallus
as the insignia of their authority,

1399
01:59:24,155 --> 01:59:28,221
in a way, they immediately are phallus.

1400
01:59:28,621 --> 01:59:32,821
This is for, if they still exist,
a normal male subject...

1401
01:59:33,221 --> 01:59:37,721
This is the most terrorising experience
you can imagine,

1402
01:59:37,821 --> 01:59:42,921
to directly being the thing itself,
to assume that I am a phallus.

1403
01:59:43,021 --> 01:59:45,255
And the provocative greatness

1404
01:59:45,321 --> 01:59:49,055
of these Lynchian, obscene, paternal figures,

1405
01:59:49,121 --> 01:59:54,688
is that not only they don't have any anxiety,
not only they are not afraid of it,

1406
01:59:54,921 --> 01:59:57,588
they fully enjoy being it.

1407
01:59:57,688 --> 02:00:01,721
They are truly fearless entities
beyond life and death,

1408
02:00:02,121 --> 02:00:05,388
gladly assuming, as it were, their immortality,

1409
02:00:05,521 --> 02:00:09,454
their non-castrated life energy.

1410
02:00:12,654 --> 02:00:13,688
Okay.

1411
02:00:13,788 --> 02:00:16,721
This is indicated in a very nice way

1412
02:00:16,821 --> 02:00:18,888
in the scene towards the end of Wild at Heart

1413
02:00:18,988 --> 02:00:21,054
where Bobby Peru is killed.

1414
02:00:21,154 --> 02:00:23,354
Stop, you sons of bitches!

1415
02:00:23,454 --> 02:00:25,021
This is the police!

1416
02:00:25,221 --> 02:00:29,954
He accepts the mortal danger he is in
with, kind of, exuberant vitality,

1417
02:00:30,054 --> 02:00:32,721
and it's truly that when his head explodes,

1418
02:00:32,787 --> 02:00:36,621
it's as if we see the head of the penis
being torn apart.

1419
02:00:39,687 --> 02:00:41,354
Oh, for Christ sakes.

1420
02:00:43,754 --> 02:00:45,154
That poor bastard.

1421
02:00:46,154 --> 02:00:49,321
And then at the end, these figures are sacrificed.

1422
02:01:05,954 --> 02:01:07,120
Oh, Jeffrey.

1423
02:01:16,020 --> 02:01:17,687
It's all over, Jeffrey.

1424
02:01:52,853 --> 02:01:58,387
Joseph Stalin's favourite cinematic genre
were musicals.

1425
02:01:58,453 --> 02:02:01,820
Not only Hollywood musicals,
but also Soviet musicals.

1426
02:02:01,887 --> 02:02:05,353
There was a whole series
of so-called kolkhoz musicals.

1427
02:02:12,353 --> 02:02:14,253
Why? We should find this strange,

1428
02:02:14,320 --> 02:02:19,186
Stalin who personifies communist austerity,
terror and musicals.

1429
02:02:24,053 --> 02:02:28,086
The answer again is
the psychoanalytic notion of superego.

1430
02:02:28,186 --> 02:02:31,320
Superego is not only excessive terror,

1431
02:02:31,720 --> 02:02:35,653
unconditional injunction,
demand of utter sacrifice,

1432
02:02:35,720 --> 02:02:38,820
but at the same time, obscenity, laughter.

1433
02:02:39,053 --> 02:02:44,653
And it is Sergei Eisenstein's genius
to guess at this link.

1434
02:02:53,319 --> 02:02:58,686
In his last film,
which is a coded portrait of the Stalin era,

1435
02:02:59,153 --> 02:03:00,886
Ivan the Terrible: Part 2,

1436
02:03:00,986 --> 02:03:04,319
which because of all this
was immediately prohibited.

1437
02:03:05,119 --> 02:03:08,286
In the unique scene towards the end of the film,

1438
02:03:08,386 --> 02:03:11,019
we see the Czar, Ivan,

1439
02:03:12,019 --> 02:03:16,786
throwing a party, amusing himself,
with his so-called Oprichniki,

1440
02:03:17,453 --> 02:03:22,186
his private guards, who were used
to torture and kill his enemies,

1441
02:03:22,286 --> 02:03:27,819
his, if you want, KGB, secret police,
are seen performing a musical.

1442
02:03:30,586 --> 02:03:36,019
An obscene musical,
which tells precisely the story

1443
02:03:36,086 --> 02:03:41,019
about killing the rich boyars,
Ivan's main enemies.

1444
02:03:41,086 --> 02:03:42,486
Let the axes drop!

1445
02:03:45,052 --> 02:03:48,419
So terror itself is staged as a musical.

1446
02:03:51,586 --> 02:03:55,852
And the gates fell to the ground

1447
02:03:57,519 --> 02:04:01,985
Now, what has all this
to do with the reality of political terror?

1448
02:04:02,119 --> 02:04:05,119
Isn't this just art, imagination? No.

1449
02:04:05,352 --> 02:04:11,852
Not only were the political show trials
in Moscow in the mid- and late-1930s

1450
02:04:12,652 --> 02:04:15,519
theatrical performances,
we should not forget this,

1451
02:04:15,619 --> 02:04:18,485
they were well staged, rehearsed and so on.

1452
02:04:19,052 --> 02:04:22,685
Even more, there is, horrible as it may sound,

1453
02:04:22,752 --> 02:04:24,919
something comical about them.

1454
02:04:24,985 --> 02:04:28,385
The horror was so ruthless that the victims,

1455
02:04:28,485 --> 02:04:32,452
those who had to confess and demand
death penalty for themselves and so on,

1456
02:04:32,552 --> 02:04:35,952
were deprived of the minimum of their dignity,

1457
02:04:36,018 --> 02:04:39,985
so that they behaved as puppets,
they engaged in dialogues

1458
02:04:40,085 --> 02:04:43,618
which really sound like
out of Alice in Wonderland.

1459
02:04:44,452 --> 02:04:47,685
They behaved as persons from a cartoon.

1460
02:04:54,118 --> 02:04:56,485
Public enemy number one.

1461
02:04:58,585 --> 02:05:02,051
You're on trial today
for the crimes that you've committed.

1462
02:05:02,118 --> 02:05:04,051
We're gonna prove you're guilty.

1463
02:05:04,151 --> 02:05:06,185
Just try and get acquitted.

1464
02:05:08,851 --> 02:05:10,485
In the mid-'30s,

1465
02:05:10,585 --> 02:05:15,285
Walt Disney Studios produced
an unbelievable cartoon

1466
02:05:15,551 --> 02:05:17,885
called Pluto's Judgement Day...

1467
02:05:18,351 --> 02:05:19,385
Shut up!

1468
02:05:19,485 --> 02:05:25,318
...in which the dog, well-known Pluto,
falls asleep, and in his sleep

1469
02:05:25,951 --> 02:05:29,818
is persecuted by, haunted by the dream

1470
02:05:30,885 --> 02:05:35,784
of cats who were all in the past
his victims, molested by him,

1471
02:05:35,884 --> 02:05:41,351
dragging him to the court,
where a proper, truly Stalinist political trial

1472
02:05:41,418 --> 02:05:43,318
is in process against him.

1473
02:05:43,518 --> 02:05:45,018
We've seen and heard enough.

1474
02:05:45,151 --> 02:05:46,851
Jury, do your duty.

1475
02:05:47,051 --> 02:05:48,518
Just watch us do our stuff

1476
02:06:00,751 --> 02:06:04,884
We find the defendant guilty
He's guilty, he's guilty

1477
02:06:08,517 --> 02:06:09,917
Hooray!

1478
02:06:09,984 --> 02:06:13,617
The Law is not only severe, ruthless, blind,

1479
02:06:13,984 --> 02:06:16,351
at the same time, it mocks us.

1480
02:06:17,617 --> 02:06:21,751
There is an obscene pleasure
in practising the Law.

1481
02:06:26,084 --> 02:06:30,817
Our fundamental delusion today is not to believe

1482
02:06:31,484 --> 02:06:35,151
in what is only a fiction,
to take fictions too seriously.

1483
02:06:35,517 --> 02:06:40,117
It's, on the contrary,
not to take fictions seriously enough.

1484
02:06:40,417 --> 02:06:45,584
You think it's just a game? It's reality.
It's more real than it appears to you.

1485
02:06:46,350 --> 02:06:49,750
For example, people who play video games,

1486
02:06:49,817 --> 02:06:54,684
they adopt a screen persona
of a sadist, rapist, whatever.

1487
02:06:55,017 --> 02:06:58,017
The idea is, in reality I'm a weak person,

1488
02:06:59,184 --> 02:07:00,650
so in order to

1489
02:07:01,884 --> 02:07:07,717
supplement my real life weakness,
I adopt the false image

1490
02:07:07,817 --> 02:07:12,650
of a strong, sexually promiscuous person,
and so on and so on.

1491
02:07:13,817 --> 02:07:15,983
So this would be the naive reading.

1492
02:07:16,083 --> 02:07:20,317
I want to appear stronger, more active,
because in real life, I'm a weak person.

1493
02:07:20,417 --> 02:07:22,950
But what if we read it in the opposite way?

1494
02:07:23,050 --> 02:07:29,283
That this strong, brutal rapist,
whatever, identity is my true self.

1495
02:07:29,383 --> 02:07:32,783
In the sense that this is
the psychic truth of myself

1496
02:07:33,017 --> 02:07:36,883
and that in real life,
because of social constraints and so on,

1497
02:07:36,983 --> 02:07:39,050
I'm not able to enact it.

1498
02:07:39,117 --> 02:07:42,483
So that, precisely because I think
it's only a game,

1499
02:07:42,750 --> 02:07:46,516
it's only a persona,
a self-image I adopt in virtual space,

1500
02:07:46,616 --> 02:07:50,316
I can be there much more truthful.

1501
02:07:50,883 --> 02:07:56,716
I can enact there an identity
which is much closer to my true self.

1502
02:07:59,383 --> 02:08:04,650
We need the excuse of a fiction
to stage what we truly are.

1503
02:08:14,816 --> 02:08:17,883
Stalker is a film about a zone,

1504
02:08:17,950 --> 02:08:24,549
a prohibited space where there are debris,
remainders of aliens visiting us.

1505
02:08:24,816 --> 02:08:26,783
And stalkers are people

1506
02:08:27,016 --> 02:08:31,749
who specialised in smuggling foreigners
who want to visit into this space

1507
02:08:31,816 --> 02:08:34,049
where you get many magical objects.

1508
02:08:34,149 --> 02:08:38,549
But the main among them
is the room in the middle of this space,

1509
02:08:38,616 --> 02:08:43,283
where it is claimed your desires will be realised.

1510
02:08:43,383 --> 02:08:45,449
I know you're going to get mad.

1511
02:08:48,416 --> 02:08:50,449
Anyway, I must tell you...

1512
02:08:56,982 --> 02:09:01,649
We are now...on the threshold...

1513
02:09:09,182 --> 02:09:13,816
This is the most important moment in your life.

1514
02:09:17,249 --> 02:09:18,649
You must know that.

1515
02:09:20,449 --> 02:09:25,149
Your innermost wishes will be made real here.

1516
02:09:27,015 --> 02:09:32,382
Your most sincere wish. Born of suffering.

1517
02:09:34,749 --> 02:09:37,749
The contrast between Solaris and Stalker is clear.

1518
02:09:37,849 --> 02:09:40,415
In Solaris, we get id-machine

1519
02:09:40,515 --> 02:09:45,215
as an object which realises
your nightmares, desires, fears,

1520
02:09:45,549 --> 02:09:48,249
even before you ask for it, as it were.

1521
02:09:50,949 --> 02:09:53,649
In Stalker it's the opposite,

1522
02:09:53,882 --> 02:09:59,915
a zone where your desires,
deepest wishes get realised

1523
02:10:00,015 --> 02:10:04,148
on condition that you are able to formulate them.

1524
02:10:04,248 --> 02:10:06,348
Which, of course, you are never able,

1525
02:10:06,482 --> 02:10:11,882
which is why everybody fails
once you get there in the centre of the zone.

1526
02:10:12,948 --> 02:10:18,215
You just make money, using our... anguish!

1527
02:10:18,582 --> 02:10:19,848
It's not even the money.

1528
02:10:20,148 --> 02:10:23,048
You're enjoying yourself here.
You're like God Almighty here.

1529
02:10:23,682 --> 02:10:27,315
You, a hypocritical louse, decide
who is to live and who is to die

1530
02:10:28,182 --> 02:10:30,115
He deliberates!

1531
02:10:31,782 --> 02:10:35,715
Now I see why you stalkers
never enter the room yourselves.

1532
02:10:36,081 --> 02:10:41,015
You revel in all that power,
that mystery, your authority!

1533
02:10:41,381 --> 02:10:42,948
What else is there to wish for?

1534
02:10:43,315 --> 02:10:46,348
It's not true! You... you're mistaken

1535
02:10:48,181 --> 02:10:53,981
Tarkovsky's solution to this tension
is that of religious obscurantism.

1536
02:10:55,081 --> 02:10:58,948
...for the great day of His wrath has come,

1537
02:10:59,281 --> 02:11:03,381
and who is able to stand?

1538
02:11:07,614 --> 02:11:11,114
But I don't think this is
what makes Tarkovsky interesting.

1539
02:11:11,181 --> 02:11:15,681
What makes him interesting
is the very form of his films.

1540
02:11:19,148 --> 02:11:24,014
Tarkovsky uses as this material element

1541
02:11:24,181 --> 02:11:26,848
of pre-narrative density, time itself.

1542
02:11:29,014 --> 02:11:35,981
All of a sudden we are made to feel
this inertia, drabness of time.

1543
02:11:36,181 --> 02:11:41,347
Time is not just a neutral, light medium
within which things happen.

1544
02:11:41,414 --> 02:11:43,947
We feel the density of time itself.

1545
02:11:48,347 --> 02:11:51,881
Things that we see are more markers of time.

1546
02:11:58,447 --> 02:12:01,180
He treats even humans in this way.

1547
02:12:01,247 --> 02:12:04,747
If we look at the unique face of Stalker himself,

1548
02:12:04,847 --> 02:12:08,347
it's a face of somebody
exposed to too much radiation

1549
02:12:08,480 --> 02:12:11,447
and, as it were, rotting, falling apart alive.

1550
02:12:12,680 --> 02:12:18,047
It is this disintegration
of the very material texture of reality

1551
02:12:18,147 --> 02:12:21,847
which provides the spiritual depth.

1552
02:12:22,247 --> 02:12:27,080
Tarkovskian subjects, when they pray,
they don't look up, they look down.

1553
02:12:27,180 --> 02:12:32,514
They even sometimes, as in Stalker,
put their head directly onto the earth.

1554
02:12:43,547 --> 02:12:47,380
Here, I think, Tarkovsky affects us at a level

1555
02:12:47,480 --> 02:12:51,947
which is much deeper,
much more crucial for our experience

1556
02:12:52,147 --> 02:12:55,113
than all the standard, spiritual motives

1557
02:12:55,180 --> 02:12:58,780
of elevating ourselves
above material reality and so on.

1558
02:13:16,780 --> 02:13:19,746
There is nothing specific about the zone.

1559
02:13:20,146 --> 02:13:23,513
It's purely a place where a certain limit is set.

1560
02:13:24,313 --> 02:13:28,546
You set a limit, you put a certain zone off-limit,

1561
02:13:28,613 --> 02:13:32,413
and although things remain
exactly the way they were,

1562
02:13:32,580 --> 02:13:35,346
it's perceived as another place.

1563
02:13:38,313 --> 02:13:42,113
Precisely as the place onto which you can project

1564
02:13:42,213 --> 02:13:46,679
your beliefs, your fears,
things from your inner space.

1565
02:13:52,779 --> 02:13:56,413
In other words, the zone is ultimately

1566
02:13:56,513 --> 02:14:00,713
the very whiteness of the cinematic screen.

1567
02:14:00,713 --> 02:14:11,813
"To the people of this city we donate
this monument; 'Peace and Prosperity'."

1568
02:14:26,279 --> 02:14:29,912
Chaplin's City Lights is one of those masterpieces

1569
02:14:29,979 --> 02:14:33,712
which are really too sophisticated
for the sophisticated.

1570
02:14:33,779 --> 02:14:36,579
It's a deceptively simple movie.

1571
02:14:36,646 --> 02:14:39,046
When we are enraptured by it,

1572
02:14:39,179 --> 02:14:43,479
we tend to miss
its complexity and extreme finesse.

1573
02:14:52,079 --> 02:14:56,512
Already, the first scene of the movie
provides the co-ordinates.

1574
02:14:56,579 --> 02:14:59,512
It's kind of a microcosm of Chaplin's entire art.

1575
02:14:59,579 --> 02:15:02,712
What's the source of Chaplin's comic genius?

1576
02:15:02,779 --> 02:15:06,445
What's the archetypal
comic situation in Chaplin's films?

1577
02:15:08,012 --> 02:15:14,812
It's being mistaken for somebody
or functioning as a disturbing spot,

1578
02:15:16,179 --> 02:15:18,012
as a disturbing stain.

1579
02:15:22,112 --> 02:15:24,045
He distorts the vision.

1580
02:15:36,778 --> 02:15:40,712
So he wants to erase himself,
to get out of the picture.

1581
02:15:49,878 --> 02:15:53,178
Or people don't even note him, take note of him,

1582
02:15:53,245 --> 02:15:55,445
so he wants to be noted.

1583
02:15:55,511 --> 02:16:01,611
Or, if they perceive him, he's misperceived,
identified for what he is not.

1584
02:16:18,911 --> 02:16:22,045
The tramp is wrongly identified,

1585
02:16:22,145 --> 02:16:26,678
by a beautiful blind girl
who is selling flowers on a street corner,

1586
02:16:27,544 --> 02:16:29,211
as a millionaire.

1587
02:16:50,778 --> 02:16:54,011
He accepts the game, helps her,

1588
02:16:54,111 --> 02:16:58,578
even steals money to pay for her operation
to restore her sight,

1589
02:16:58,644 --> 02:17:04,211
then after he serves the punishment
and returns, he tries to find her.

1590
02:17:34,477 --> 02:17:38,677
And I think that this is the metaphor
of our predicament.

1591
02:17:40,444 --> 02:17:43,077
All too often, when we love somebody,

1592
02:17:43,177 --> 02:17:48,844
we don't accept him or her
as what the person effectively is.

1593
02:17:49,077 --> 02:17:55,544
We accept him or her insofar as this person
fits the co-ordinates of our fantasy.

1594
02:17:55,777 --> 02:18:00,044
We misidentify, wrongly identify him or her,

1595
02:18:00,144 --> 02:18:02,610
which is why, when we discover
that we were wrong,

1596
02:18:02,710 --> 02:18:05,277
love can quickly turn into violence.

1597
02:18:05,877 --> 02:18:09,743
There is nothing more dangerous,

1598
02:18:09,810 --> 02:18:13,043
more lethal for the loved person

1599
02:18:13,210 --> 02:18:17,310
than to be loved, as it were,
for not what he or she is,

1600
02:18:17,443 --> 02:18:20,143
but for fitting the ideal.

1601
02:18:20,343 --> 02:18:23,310
In this case, love is always mortifying love.

1602
02:18:30,143 --> 02:18:35,010
Here it's not only the tramp
as the figure within the film's narrative

1603
02:18:35,110 --> 02:18:37,743
exposing himself to his beloved girl,

1604
02:18:37,810 --> 02:18:41,443
it's at the same time Chaplin as actor/director

1605
02:18:42,010 --> 02:18:44,876
exposing himself to us, the public.

1606
02:18:45,543 --> 02:18:48,243
"I am shameless. I am offering myself to you,

1607
02:18:48,343 --> 02:18:50,876
"but at the same time, I am afraid."

1608
02:18:55,176 --> 02:18:58,610
The true genius of Chaplin

1609
02:18:59,110 --> 02:19:03,276
resides in the way he was able to stage

1610
02:19:03,343 --> 02:19:06,643
this psychological moment of recognition

1611
02:19:07,643 --> 02:19:12,343
at the level of form, music, visual aspect,

1612
02:19:12,743 --> 02:19:15,743
and at the same time, at the level of acting.

1613
02:19:22,076 --> 02:19:23,909
When the two hands meet,

1614
02:19:24,009 --> 02:19:28,643
the girl finally recognises him for what he is.

1615
02:19:38,176 --> 02:19:42,709
This moment
is always extremely dangerous, pathetic.

1616
02:19:47,942 --> 02:19:52,442
The beloved falls out of the frame
of the idealised co-ordinates,

1617
02:19:52,942 --> 02:19:57,576
finally there
exposed in his psychological nakedness.

1618
02:19:58,742 --> 02:20:01,242
"Here I am as what I really am."

1619
02:20:05,076 --> 02:20:08,009
And I don't think we have to read it
as a happy ending.

1620
02:20:08,109 --> 02:20:10,576
We don't know what will happen.

1621
02:20:14,542 --> 02:20:17,709
We have the letters, "the end", the black screen,

1622
02:20:17,776 --> 02:20:19,775
but the singing goes on.

1623
02:20:21,375 --> 02:20:24,575
As if the emotion is now too strong,

1624
02:20:25,075 --> 02:20:28,109
it spills over the very frame.

1625
02:20:43,775 --> 02:20:49,942
In order to understand today's world,
we need cinema, literally.

1626
02:20:50,442 --> 02:20:53,142
It's only in cinema that we get

1627
02:20:53,708 --> 02:20:58,575
that crucial dimension which
we are not ready to confront in our reality.

1628
02:20:59,042 --> 02:21:05,008
If you are looking for what is in reality
more real than reality itself,

1629
02:21:05,842 --> 02:21:08,242
look into the cinematic fiction.