Tuesday 17 February 2009

Lacanian analysis of film


I recently watched Slavoj Zizek's 'The Pervert's Guide to Cinema' which is a witty and interesting account and interpretation of a number of seminal films (lots of Hitchcock and Lynch as well as many earlier classics like The Red Shoes and The Possessed) using Lacanian / Freudian analysis. Although tenuous at times, it offers explanations for broken and multiplied storyline structures (Lynch) as well as the symbolic nature of elements (e.g the flocks of birds as representational of the heroine's desire and sexuality in Hitchcock's The Birds) and even explains the representation of the 3 elements of a personality as the levels of the house in Hitchcock's Psycho: Basement - the base Id, harbourer of our deepest and irrational fears and desires, obscene and out of control, where Norman Bates houses his dead mother, the Ground Floor, the ego - the rational and normal, on this level of the house Norman still clings to some semblance of normal behaivour and then the first floor - the super ego, the maternal ego - striving for control and perfection. It is from this level that we see and hear Norman talking to his endlessly nagging mother, always trying to please her but never succeeding.

The use of the house as metaphor for the structuring of the personality elements is of interest to my project. Is there a translation that I can use to make it work in the context of brain architecture within neuroscience? I wonder...

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