Master Thesis
Graduate Institute of Translation and Interpretation
National Taiwan Normal University
Translating Psychoanalysis:
The Interpretation of Dreams in Mulholland Drive and Inception
Advisor: Dr. Hsiu-chuan Lee
Hsin-yi Tsai
July 2018
）
interdisciplinary translation intermedium translation 、
Sigmund Freud ！ The Interpretation of Dreams 》 David Lynch 「 Mulholland Drive （」 Christopher Nolan Inception ） ） ！ ； ！ ！ ：
、 double psychoanalytic film theory 、
「 latent dream-thought manifest dream-content the dream-work ） condensation displacement representation secondary revision 「 」 、 」 。
」
i ii
《 、 、 、 、 ）
；
iii
Abstract
With further development in the field of translation, recent studies have discovered that the act of translation appears in various forms. In this thesis, I propose the ideas of “interdisciplinary translation” and “intermedium translation” and discuss these two types of translation by examining how film texts translate psychoanalytic concepts. Based on my research on Sigmund Freud’s dream theory in The Interpretation of Dreams and examining two contemporary films—David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive and Christopher Nolan’s Inception, this thesis aims to study the process of translating dream concepts from psychoanalysis into cinema. This thesis is divided into five chapters. Chapter One sets up the framework of this thesis by discussing the relationship between translation, psychoanalysis and cinema. I point out that psychoanalysis is a form of translation process and cinema is a medium for translation. The process of psychoanalysis is similar to that of translation: just as translators aim to translate the source text into the target text, psychoanalysts attempt to translate one’s unconscious and dreams into a narrative. During the translation process, translators must first understand the language and meaning of the source text, and then re-express the source text using a language that is comprehensible to their readers. Psychoanalysts often use spoken or written words to express their interpretation of dreams while cinema can imitate the workings of the mind. Thus, I propose that cinema should be considered as a more appropriate form of media for translating psychoanalytic concepts, such as dreams. Chapter Two reviews the interplay of psychoanalysis and cinema in history. Inspired by the techniques of cinema, some psychoanalysts further explore certain psychoanalytic concepts, such as the double. Meanwhile, cinema is also indebted to psychoanalysis. For example, some theorists examine how psychoanalytic thoughts are incorporated into cinematic studies, forming a new field of study known as psychoanalytic film theory. In addition, many film directors are interested in incorporating psychoanalytic concepts and portraying psychoanalytic treatment process in their works. Chapter Three introduces Freudian dream theory and analyzes the ways Lynch translated dream theory in Mulholland Drive. Freud conceived that dreams consist of latent dream-thoughts and manifest dream-content; the former is transformed into the latter through “dream-work,” which includes condensation, displacement, representation and secondary revision. In Mulholland Drive, Lynch created the protagonist’s dream and her waking life. His iv translat ion of the protagonist’s waking life into dreams can be understood through a comparison of the elements that appear in both the dream and the waking life. I observe that Lynch’s translation of dream-work complies with Freudian dream theory. Chapter Four analyzes the ways Nolan translated Freud’s dream theory in Inception as well as his exploration of innovative dream concepts, such as the influence between different dream layers in dreams-within-dreams. I also analyze Nolan’s cinematic techniques, such as the use of a simple cut to imitate the entry and exit of a dream. Based on these analyses, I conclude that Mulholland Drive and Inception are good examples of interdisciplinary translation and intermedium translation. “Interdisciplinary translation” refers to the translation from discipline A to discipline B; and “intermedium translation” refers to the translation from medium A into medium B. Investigating the translation of dreams from psychoanalysis to cinema, this thesis expands the scope of “translation” by shedding light on both interdisciplinary and intermedium translations.
Keywords: interdisciplinary translation, intermedium translation, psychoanalysis, dream, Keywords: film text, contemporary cinema
v
Table of Contents
Chapter One Introduction: Translation, Psychoanalysis, and Cinema ...... 1 Definitions of Translation Psychoanalysis as Translation Cinema as Translation Chapters
Chapter Two Psychoanalysis and Cinema: A Historical Survey ...... 15 Early Developments Psychoanalytic Film Theory Contemporary Psychoanalytic Films
Chapter Three Between Waking Life and Dreams: David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive ...... 35 The Formation of Dreams Translating Waking Life into Dreams in Mulholland Drive
Chapter Four Between Established Dream Theories and Innovative Dream Concepts: Christopher Nolan’s Inception ...... 53 Examples from Inception New Concepts of Dreams
Chapter Five Conclusion ...... 73
Works Cited ...... 77
Films Cited ...... 85 vi
Acknowledgements
First and foremost, I would like to thank my thesis advisor, Professor Hsiu-chuan Lee, with all my heart. Professor Lee has always been there giving me invaluable guidance and suggestions, ensuring that I stay on course and do not deviate from the core of my research. I have also learned from her that “it is essential to learn to clarify and organize my thoughts through the process of writing and rewriting.” During the process of research, I have learned from her not only methods for conducting academic researches but also approaches to life. Thank you, Professor Lee, for your continuous support, patience, motivation and immense knowledge that help me carry through this research and complete it satisfactorily. I take immense pleasure in thanking Professor Ken-fang Lee, a thesis committee member and an encouraging teacher. It is Professor Lee’s course Film and Translation that triggered my interest in academic research and opened my eyes to see a broadening field of translation studies. Throughout the time of our discussions, Professor Lee has given me many stimulating and constructive ideas; and after each discussion, my mind has become clearer. Therefore, I owe my sincere thanks to Professor Lee. I would like to express my gratitude to my thesis committee member, Professor Chi- wen Liu at Fu Jen University. Professor Liu has provided detailed and insightful comments that are very helpful to perfecting my thesis. It is such a great honor to be able to have Professor Liu as my thesis committee member. I also take this opportunity to extend my gratitude to the teachers at Graduate Institute of Translation and Interpretation (GITI) at National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU): Bijou Chen, Daniel Hu, Sharon Lai, Posen Liao and Carlos G. Tee. Each and every course that I took at GITI has greatly motivated me to further explore issues related to not just translation but also many others. I have received enormous benefits from the curriculum at NTNU, and I am obliged to all my teachers for their instruction and encouragement. I would like to thank my dear friends: Chloe and Evon, thank you for exchanging useful thoughts and keeping company with me during the writing process; Katie and Margaret, thank you for lending a helping hand to “translate” my thoughts and make my words more comprehensible to the readers. Furthermore, my thanks to Kirsten, Scott, Jessi, Chloe, Meixin, Ingrid, Rita and many others for giving substantial help as well as emotional support.
vii
Last but not least, I would like to thank my parents for supporting me unconditionally through my life. Thank you for your wholehearted parenting and caring, allowing me to fully concentrate on my studies. My parents are my think tank—each time after talks with them, I am greatly inspired and I have learned so much from them. Without my beloved parents, this work would not have been possible and I shall eternally be grateful to them for their support.
。 ，
Chapter One
Introduction: Translation, Psychoanalysis, and Cinema
Translation studies is an emerging interdiscipline that tends to draw on thoughts from various fields. Early development of translation studies in the 1950s drew on theories from linguistics and comparative literature; and translation studies at that time mainly focused on textual analysis. In the late 20th century, the Cultural Turn in translation made the focus of research shift from language and text to the context of works and the subjectivity of translators; influences from other domains such as hermeneutics, post-colonialism, and feminism were also obvious. In recent years, various forms of translation have been discovered and discussed. For example, in the thesis “‘Letter Correspondence’ in the Mini-
Series Pride and Prejudice: The Analysis of Semiotics Translation from the Perspective of A
Theory of Adaptation” (2018), Ning Shan started from the point of view of intersemiotic translation and utilized Linda Hutcheon’s argument of “adaptation is regarded as translation” to discuss how letter correspondence in novels are “translated” into television series. As forms of translation become diversified, the outlook on translation has been expanded.
Up to now, translation theorists have gathered and put forward many valuable studies and theories. Translation studies has grown rapidly, and also has brought new questions. For example, scholars like Rainer Guldin pointed out the similarities between the process of translation and that of psychoanalysis (78-81). Could we see psychoanalysis as a form of translation then? Besides different forms of translation, there are also different types of texts.
In the past, translation studies is mostly concerned with verbal texts; but nowadays, along with the development of technology, multimedia is often viewed as a type of text. Therefore, some translation researches such as Shan’s treat films and TV series as translated texts and analyze their “translations” of novels, stories or other forms of publications.
1 2
The goal of this thesis is to look into the obscure and unexplored types of translation.
Based on the idea of psychoanalysis as a method of translation and cinema as a medium to translate, this thesis will investigate how cinema translates psychoanalytic materials—dreams in particular. More generally, this thesis is an attempt to contribute to the investigation of two types of translation which I call “interdisciplinary translation” and “intermedium translation,” which are different from the conventional translation between written or spoken texts of two languages.1 Having said this, there is no adequate theory at the moment to account for
“interdisciplinary translation” and “intermedium translation.” Therefore, in this thesis, I endeavor to establish a theoretical framework and provide examples to elaborate on the practice of cinema’s translation of psychoanalytic materials. In what follows, I will first review the development of translation studies and discuss the gradually widening definition of translation. Secondly, I will discuss the resemblances between translation and psychoanalysis. Finally, I will explain how cinema works as a medium for translation.
Definitions of Translation
“The definition of translation determines the scope of translation studies” (35), pointed out by Long Jixing in the essay “Changes of Translation Definition and Turns of
Translation Studies” (2012). Traditionally, translation is understood as “the transfer of meaning from a text in one language into a text in another language” (Bell 8), and the
“language” here refers to natural languages such as English and Chinese. A translator has one text written in one language, the source language, and thus this text is called the source text.
But the reader of another language does not understand the meaning of the source text because he/she does not know the source language. In order to introduce the source text to the
1 The concept of “intermedium translation” may sound similar to adaptation in transferring texts from one medium (such as novel) into another medium (such as film). However, while studies of adaptation often focus on comparing the representations of the same text on two apparatus, by “intermedium translation” I mean to draw into my concern the nature and theories of two media: psychoanalysis and cinema. 3 reader, a translator needs to use the language that is comprehensible to the reader, which is the target language. Then, the source text is translated into the target text and this process is translation.
Since the 1950s, theorists such as Eugene Nida, J. C. Catford, and Peter Newmark brought theories of linguistics to the field of translation. For example, Catford defined translation as “a process of substituting a text in one language for a text in another” (1), while
Newmark shared a similar view by saying that translation is “rendering the meaning of a text into another language in the way that the author intended the text” (5). These scholars considered translation as “the substitution of texts from one language to another” and “the meaning exchanges between languages” (Long 37). Furthermore, in an influential essay “On
Linguistic Aspects of Translation” (1959), Roman Jakobson divided translation into three categories from the linguistic perspective. The first type is the intralingual translation (or rewording) which refers to “an interpretation of verbal signs by means of other signs of the same language” (Jakobson 233). For example, rendering classic literatures into versions with simpler word choices (using the same language) for children to read is a form of intralingual translation. The second type is the interlingual translation (or translation proper) which refers to “an interpretation of verbal signs by means of some other language” (Jakobson 233). The most common translation practices belong to this category, such as translating a Chinese text into an English text. And the third type is the intersemiotic translation (or transmutation) which refers to “an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems” (Jakobson 233). In other words, intersemiotic translation is the transposition from one sign system (for example, words) to another (for example, images); for example, adapting a novel into a film. All these three types of translation adopt a linguistic paradigm, and translation studies at that time tend to focus on textual analysis and emphasize the equivalence between the original and translated texts. 4
In the 1990s, due to the Cultural Turn in translation, the focus of translation studies shifted from linguistics to culture. The Cultural Turn in translation studies was put forward by Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere in the anthology Translation, History and Culture
(1990). Bassnett and Lefevere believed that “there is always a context in which the translation takes place, always a history from which a text emerges and into which a text is transposed” (11). Therefore, they contended that when conducting translation studies, one should not only examine the texts, but also take the context of the work and the subjectivity of translator into consideration. Bassnett and Lefevere also pointed out that “translation as an activity is always doubly contextualized, since the text has a place in two cultures” (11).
Translation studies under the influence of the Cultural Turn pay attention to cultural aspects, particularly the cultural influences on the target text, instead of the equivalence between the source and target texts. They are not only about studying translated texts between languages but also about studying the interactions between cultures.
Since the Cultural Turn, many theories from other fields, including hermeneutics, have been introduced into the field of translation. The term “hermeneutics” is derived from
Greek, meaning “to translate, to interpret.” Hermeneutics is a theory and methodology of understanding and interpretation. Because the initial step in the act of translation is to understand source texts, it is very useful to introduce hermeneutics into translation studies.
Traditionally, translation studies puts emphasis on the ability of the target language to express ideas in the source language; but with hermeneutic theory, scholars began to pay attention to how the source language is perceived and understood. Based on hermeneutic theory, George Steiner proposed the notion of “understanding as translation” in his book
After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (1975). According to Steiner, “a human being performs an act of translation, in the full sense of the word, when receiving a speech- message from any other human being” (48). When communicating with another person, the 5 speaker says a sentence and you hear it. Then, you need to “understand” what that sentence means. So, you start to make judgments in your brain. You must depend on various factors, such as the things you know about the speaker and the environment where you two are communicating, to know the meaning of the sentence. To Steiner, from the moment you receive that sentence to the moment you figure out the meaning, this process of understanding is a translation process. This is why Steiner said: “To understand is to decipher. To hear significance is to translate” (xii).
Following Steiner’s statement of “understanding as translation,” Paul Ricoeur proposed that there are two paradigms of translation in his essay “The Paradigm of
Translation” published in 1998 and later translated and collected in the book On Translation
(2006). One is the linguistic paradigm which refers to the transfer of meaning within a language or between languages. The other is the ontological paradigm, inspired by Steiner’s
After Babel, which refers to the way of understanding oneself and another. Based on
Ricoeur’s arguments, in his introduction of On Translation, Richard Kearney suggested that the first paradigm talks about translation in a specific sense while the second paradigm discusses translation in a general sense. Kearney gave special attention to the second model.
He argued: “it indicates the everyday act of speaking as a way not only of translating oneself to oneself (inner to outer, private to public, unconscious to conscious, etc.) but also and more explicitly of translating oneself to others” (xiv-xv). Here, the acts of translation appear in all kinds of human activities, and one of which is psychoanalysis. Noteworthily, the work of a psychoanalyst is to understand an other, namely the analysand. In that sense, a psychoanalyst can be seen as a translator, attempting to translate a person’s unconscious.
6
Psychoanalysis as Translation
The idea of psychoanalysis first received serious consideration under Sigmund Freud
(1856-1939) who had developed his own psychoanalytic theory since the 1890s. Freud’s several works have made great contribution to lay the foundations for psychoanalytic theory, for example, Studies on Hysteria (1895) which he and Josef Breuer coauthored, introducing case studies of patients with hysteria as well as setting out theories and therapies for hysteria; and The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) in which Freud provided detailed interpretations of his own and his patients’ dreams according to the “dream-work” operated by our psychical apparatus, setting out his theory of “a dream is the fulfilment of a wish” (147). On this basis,
Freud further developed his theory of the unconscious and formulated a model of psychic structure comprising id, ego, and super-ego. Freud’s theories contribute enormously to our understanding of the human mind, specifically the unconscious; and thus, Freud is often recognized as the founding father of psychoanalysis.
Besides making contributions to the discipline of psychoanalysis, Freud also received credits from the field of translation. In the essay “Toward the Understanding of Translation in
Psychoanalysis” (1980), Patrick Mahony proposed that “Freud should be ranked among the world’s major theoreticians of translation, for he ascribes to the concept a scope and depth that appeared nowhere before in history” (472). Based on his discussion over the use of the
German word Übersetzung, which is often translated as “translation” in English, in Freud’s works, Mahony suggested that there are many elements that could be considered as translations in Freudian psychoanalysis:
… neurotic symptoms as in the case of hysteria might be translations of unconscious
material; and the manifest or pictorial dream is nothing but a kind of internalized
intersemiotic translation of the previous verbal latent dream. Many of the
psychoanalyst’s interventions are also translations, and even more than this, the very 7
movement of material in the psychic apparatus as such is understood as translation,
whereas repression is a failure in translation. (466)
According to Mahony, the literal use of the German word Übersetzung “as translation and transposition” (473) in Freud’s works indicates that Freud regarded the transfer of psychic materials from the unconscious to the conscious levels as a form of translation. On that account, Freud expanded the definition of translation. The investigation on the mental process in Freud’s works reminds us of the studies of translation. Indeed, Freud should be considered as one of the great thinkers and innovators in the domain of translation.
In spite of the fact that Freud did not directly discuss the relation between psychoanalysis and translation when developing his own psychoanalytic theory, Freud’s own words somehow imply the ideas of translation in psychoanalysis. Take his discussions of dreams for example. In the chapter “Psychoanalysis and Translation” of his book Translation and the Nature of Philosophy (1989), Andrew Benjamin pointed out that translation exists on two levels in Freud’s theories of dreams: First, “the manifest content is a translation of the latent content [dream-thoughts]” (145). In the formation of dreams, the latent dream-thoughts are turned into the manifest dream-content. The process of dream formation thus resembles a translation process. Second, “the interpretation of the manifest content involves its translation into the language of consciousness” (145). When a psychoanalyst interprets dreams, he/she turns the manifest dream-content into everyday language. The process of dream interpretation is therefore also a translation process.
In elaboration according to Freud, dreams are composed of the manifest dream- content and the latent dream-thoughts. The manifest dream-content refers to the literal image and/or the storyline that one can grasp after waking up. For example, one dreamed about a dog—that is the literal image in the dream; and in this dream, the dog is chasing someone— that is the plot of the dream. But what does this chasing dog mean in this dream? The 8 underlying meaning of dreams is related to the latent dream-thoughts. Freud himself employed a “translation” metaphor to describe the relationship between dream-content and dream-thoughts in The Interpretation of Dreams:
The dream-thoughts and the dream-content are presented to us like two versions of
the same subject-matter in two different languages. Or, more properly, the dream-
content seems like a transcript of the dream-thoughts into another mode of
expression[;] … it is our business to discover by comparing the original and the
translation. (295)
Freud compared the dream-content and dream-thoughts as two languages and the latter can be translated to the former. Freud further wrote:
A dream-thought is unusable so long as it is expressed in an abstract form; but when
once it has been transformed into pictorial language, … [it] can be established more
easily than before between the new form of expression and the remainder of the
material underlying the dream. (354)
Here, Freud pointed out that the latent dream-thoughts is too abstract to be perceivable, and therefore it must be transformed into some “pictorial language,” namely the manifest dream- content, for becoming accessible. The “dream-work,” including condensation and displacement, of our psychical apparatus is essential in transforming the latent dream- thoughts into manifest dream-content. Accordingly, dreams are formed through a translation process.
The second argument proposed by Benjamin—psychoanalyst’s interpretation is also a translation process—can be explained with Freud’s comparison dreams to rebuses. Because the manifest dream-content “is expressed as it were in a pictographic script” (296), Freud used a rebus as a metaphor for dreams to explain the task of dream interpretation. A rebus is a picture-puzzle which contains illustrated pictures and individual letters to depict words and/or 9 phrases. If one wants to solve a rebus, he/she needs to know how to replace each element by a syllable or word and form a meaningful word and/or phrase. For example, if one wants to solve an English rebus, he/she needs the knowledge of English language. In the same sense, if one wants to solve a “dream rebus” (i.e. to interpret a dream), he/she is required to have
“the knowledge of dreams” (i.e. the dream-work). But the task of dream interpretation is not yet finished after solving the rebus. In addition to understanding the dream-work and figuring out the meaning of dreams, psychoanalysts also need to present the meaning in languages that are understandable to the analysands. And such a presentation, as pointed out by Benjamin,
“involves a ‘translation’ into the language of consciousness” (136). In the interpretation of dreams, the “language of consciousness” that psychoanalysts use is usually in verbal forms, namely spoken or written words. Briefly, in the process of interpreting dreams, psychoanalysts have to first understand the operations of the dream-work in dreams, and then to express the meaning of the dreams by using languages that are comprehensible to the analysands. This process is similar to the process of translation: translators need to first understand the text in the source language, and then to express the meaning of the source text by using the target language (i.e. language that is understandable to the target reader).
10
This parallel structure between the process of translation and that of psychoanalysis can be put into a figure (see Fig. 1).
to make sense of the latent dream
latent dream manifest dream interpretation ------translation (1) ------translation (2) ------source text target text reading
to make sense of the source text
Fig. 1 Parallel structure between translation and psychoanalysis
In the process of psychoanalysis, the latent dream thoughts are “translated” into the manifest dream-content, which is further “translated” into psychoanalyst’s interpretation. The intention of psychoanalyst’s interpretation is to make sense of the latent dream-thoughts; likewise, in the process of translation, the source text is translated into the target text, which is then
“translated” through reader’s reading. The intention of reader’s reading is also to make sense of the source text. Therefore, we can say that the psychoanalyst serves as a translator and the psychoanalyst’s interpreting process is similar to a translation process.
Cinema as Translation
In the essay “Image and Language in Psychoanalysis,” Paul Ricoeur contended that
“the universe of discourse appropriate to the analytic experience is not that of language, but that of the image” (94). Ricoeur illustrated his argument with examples drawn from the formation of dreams. According to Freud, dreams are made of psychical material. And
Ricoeur suggested that this psychical material is made primarily of “images” that figurize dream-ideas. One has to note that the term “image” employed by Ricoeur does not simply refer to static images but also to a figurizing process—“a general procedure for obtaining an 11 image for a concept” (“Image and Language” 114). Using Freud’s term, one would argue that this “imaging” process is the dream-work.
Since our psychical life is functioning primarily at a pictorial level, using written or spoken languages to express dreams and the unconscious is inadequate. Both Ricoeur and
Freud compared dreams to plastic arts of painting and sculpture, arguing that human psyche has the ability “to express or indicate plastically the dream ideas” in images (“Image and
Language” 110). In this thesis, I would like to extend their thoughts and recommend another medium that has similar capacity to that of human psyches—cinema. Several scholars pointed out that cinema can function like the human mind. For example, in the essay
“Cinema and Psychoanalysis: Parallel Histories” (1993/1994), Stephen Heath described cinema “as an analogy for mental processes—cinema [is] regarded as a good way of imaging the workings of the mind” (26). Likewise, Vicky Lebeau said in her book Psychoanalysis and
Cinema: The Play of Shadows (2006) that “cinema has a special tie to the life of the mind: approximate, imitative, it is a type of mime of both mind and world” (3). These thoughts provide a point of departure for considering cinema as a suitable tool to translate psychoanalytic materials, such as dreams and the unconscious.
Cinema, as a medium and a language, can translate psychoanalytical materials on two levels. First, cinema offers a figured language. When interpreting one’s dreams into narratives, psychoanalysts usually turn the visual into words. But as Ricoeur pointed out, dreams as well as the unconscious work at the pictorial level. Thus, by using cinema as a medium to translate dreams, one’s dreams can be translated (back) into visual codes, very much resembling the visual experiences in dreams. Second, cinema offers a language that is accessible to the public. Cinematic language can explicate psychoanalysis and make the difficult psychoanalytic thoughts understandable to the general public. For example, Slavoj
Žižek declared in the introduction of his book Enjoy Your Symptom: Jacques Lacan in 12
Hollywood and Out (1992) that his understanding of Lacan can be “explained by way of examples from Hollywood or popular culture in general” (xi). Using cinema as a medium to translate the filmmakers’ thoughts is similar to the way translators/psychoanalysts use languages/narratives to translate the source texts/dreams. As mentioned before, the process of translation and that of psychoanalysis share a parallel structure; and now, I would like to add the process of filmmaking to this parallel structure (see Fig. 2). In figure 2, the source text in the first box is something abstract (patients’ dreams, filmmakers’ thoughts and the unconscious), and the target text in the second box is something visible (narrative words and cinematic images). The process of translation is turning something abstract into something figured and visible for easier perception.
source text translator target text reader ------dreams analyst narratives patient thoughts filmmaker films viewer
Fig. 2 The parallel structure between translation, psychoanalysis, and cinema
Among all kinds of cinema, it is the psychoanalytic films that feature the most apparent intention of cinema makers to translate psychoanalysis to the public. By psychoanalytic films, I refer to films that try to portray the process of psychoanalytic treatment, as well as films that try to elaborate or draw on psychoanalytic ideas into their creations. An early example of psychoanalytic film that portrays the process of psychoanalytic treatment is Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945). This film is about a man, who forgot his identity, encounters a female psychoanalyst. Together they try to retrieve the identity of the man. The relationship between these two characters is complicated—they are in a doctor-patient relationship, but at the same time, they are also in a romantic relationship.
Besides such a plot arrangement, Hitchcock also introduced dream interpretation as an important method of psychic treatment by working with the surrealist artist Salvador Dalí to 13 construc t the dream scenes in the film. In recent years, more films about the process of psychoanalysis hit the screen, including Rodrigo García’s Passengers (2008). This film tells the story of a man starts to see a female psychotherapist after a plane crash, and he tries to recover from the trauma. Passengers too is concerned with the intricate relationship between the psychotherapist and the patient, but the storyline has a different emphasis on the relationship between the living and the dead.
Many recent films also draw on psychoanalytic thoughts. One of the concepts that appears frequently in films is multiple personality disorder and schizophrenia. One example is David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999). At the beginning of the film, the leading character (as well as the audience) thinks that he meets a person and befriends that person. However, in the latter half of the film, the leading character realizes that this “new friend” is actually not another individual, but another personality of the leading character himself. Also dealing with the problem of self-splitting, Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan (2010) tells a story about the schizophrenia of a ballet dancer. In this film, the ballet company is about to perform
Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. Being cast as both the White Swan and the Black Swan, the ballet dancer suffers from splitting personalities. One may also note that both Fight Club and Black
Sawn portray the multiple personality disorder in a unique way: instead of using the same actor and actress to play the splitting selves, both films cast two actors and actresses.
Chapters
Given the rich materials yielded from cinema’s attempting to “translate” psychoanalysis, this thesis would not be to offer an exhausting studies in this field. To make my project manageable, I will focus on the concept of dreams and choose only two contemporary films for close analysis. In order to understand the concept of dreams, I draw on Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. The two contemporary films under my 14 consideration are David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001) and Christopher Nolan’s Inception
(2010). I will discuss how Lynch and Nolan are indebted to Freud’s dream theories while presenting dreams in their films. The theories of dreams offer the source text and source language for the directors to create the dreams in their cinematic works. For me, both films offer examples of “interdisciplinary translation”: they translate psychoanalytic thoughts into their cinematic contents.
After this opening chapter, the second chapter of this thesis reviews the interplay of psychoanalysis and cinema in history. Starting from the early development of the two disciplines, I study how psychoanalysis and cinema influences and enrich each other.
The third and the fourth chapters are devoted to analyses of specific cinematic examples. In Chapter Three, I examine how David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive employs
Freud’s theory on dream-work to produce the dreams of its protagonists based on her waking life. By teasing out the linkage between the protagonists’ dreams and waking life, I demonstrate not only the formation of dreams as a translation process but also Lynch’s efforts to translate Freud’s dream theories into his cinematic production.
In Chapter Four, I analyze Christopher Nolan’s Inception. In addition to pointing out
Nolan’s indebtedness to the Freudian theories, I would also attend to his innovative ideas about dreams. A comparison between Freudian and Nolan’s concepts of dreams will help reveal Nolan’s creativity in his “translation” of Freud’s dream theories.
In Chapter Five, I conclude the thesis by reviewing my discovery in each chapter.
This thesis attempts to investigate how the concepts of dreams are being translated into cinematic language, which is exemplary of “interdisciplinary translation” and “intermedium translation.” Through the analyses of two films, I hope to formulate my own theory of the
“interdisciplinary translation” and “intermedium translation” proposed in this thesis.
Chapter Two
Psychoanalysis and Cinema: A Historical Survey
In “Cinema and Psychoanalysis: Parallel Histories,” Stephen Heath considered that cinema and psychoanalysis have parallel histories—starting from the early development in which the two fields brought influences to each other, to the later formation of psychoanalytic film theory. In 1993, a conference under the same title of Heath’s essay was held at the
University of California, Los Angeles, bringing together practicing psychoanalysts and film theorists. The purpose of this conference is to celebrate the centenary anniversaries of both fields and encourage communication among scholars of cinema and psychoanalysis.
However, even though the two fields have developed such an intertwining relationship, as pointed out by Janet Bergstrom in the book Endless Night: Cinema and Psychoanalysis,
Parallel Histories (1999), “the reasons that psychoanalysts reflect on the cinema are not the same as those that motivate film theorists to draw on psychoanalysis” (1). This chapter combs through the interplay between cinema and psychoanalysis in history and lays the groundwork for the examination of how cinema may translate psychoanalytic concepts.
Early Developments
The close connection between psychoanalysis and cinema can trace to the birth of the two disciplines. In her book, Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Play of Shadows, Vicky
Lebeau pointed out that 1895 is a significant year for both disciplines (1). On December 28,
1895, the first public screening of Auguste and Louis Lumière’s cinematic creation was held in the basement of the Grand Café in Paris. The Lumière brothers demonstrated a new device, the Cinématographe, which is a type of camera that can project moving pictures on a screen.
This successful screening is often considered the beginning of cinema. In the same year,
15 16
Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer published their book Studies on Hysteria (German: Studien
über Hysterie). In this book, Freud and Breuer introduced five case studies of women afflicted with hysteria, followed by theoretical reflections and the introduction of therapeutic methods. This book can be seen as the starting point of psychoanalysis which laid the foundation for modern psychoanalytic knowledge.
Introducing as new ways of “seeing and knowing the world” (Lebeau 2), both cinema and psychoanalysis in their early stage brought huge impact on the world. When the audiences at the Grand Café watched Lumière brothers’ silent film The Arrival of a Train at
La Ciotat Station (French: L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat, 1896), they did not sit still in the seat as we modern audience normally do; instead, they started panicking because they thought the locomotive on the screen was barreling straight towards them. Cinema could create a powerful illusion through camera’s ability to capture the reality of material world and projector’s ability to turn still photographs into moving images. Therefore, while sitting in the basement of a café, the spectators were able to see the “same scene” of a train coming into the station as those passengers who were waiting at the train station did. Such a confusion between the reality and illusions, according to Lebeau, gives the spectators a feeling “as if in a dream” (1). And while the early cinema brought a sense of shock to the audience, the emergence of psychoanalysis prompted similar sentiments and reactions.
Before the publication of Studies on Hysteria, no one had ever thought of hysteria as a mental illness nor of its relation to the unconscious mind. Most medical professionals considered hysteria “a ‘false,’ or simulated, condition unworthy of serious attention” (Lebeau 15). One of the reasons why doctors in the past did not understand hysteria is that they could not “see” what’s going on inside the patients’ mind. Despite such a prevalent view of not considering hysteria as an illness, Freud, inspired by Jean-Martin Charcot, managed to discover the causes and treatments for hysteria. With psychotherapies proposed by Breuer and Freud, such 17 as the talking cure and free association, people for the first time were able to “look into” the human mind. As James Strachey pointed out in the editor’s introduction to his English translation of Studies on Hysteria, one of Freud’s greatest achievements would be “his invention of the first instrument for the scientific examination of the human mind” (Breuer and Freud xvi), which opened the door to new ways of understanding the internal world of man.
During the early years of their development, cinema and psychoanalysis expressed interest in and sought inspirations from each other. Since the 1910s, film directors have intended to integrate psychoanalysis into cinema. The first psychoanalytic film was the 1912
French silent film The Mystery of the Rocks of Kador (French: Le Mystère des roches de
Kador), directed by Léonce Perret (Bergstrom 15). The film is about a young woman named
Suzanne. After her father (some recorded as uncle) passed away, according to the deceased’s will, Suzanne will inherit his fortune when she reaches adulthood. However, her guardian who covets the legacy tries to kill her. When Suzanne and her lover Jean d’Erquy meet at the beach near the Rocks of Kador, the guardian plots to kill both of them by poisoning Suzanne and shooting d’Erquy from the back. Neither one is dead; but d’Erquy is injured and Suzanne becomes catatonic. D’Erquy then turns to Professor Williams, whose treatment includes “the application of the Cinematographe to psychotherapy” (qtd. in Bergstrom 16). By filming the beach scene which causes Suzanne’s trauma and presenting the film to her, Professor
Williams successfully cures Suzanne. Perret’s film made a twofold demonstration of how cinema could relate to psychoanalysis: representing psychoanalytic treatment process in films as well as utilizing cinema as a psychotherapeutic instrument. The film portrays the treatment process of Suzanne, starting from the cause of her illness to her full recovery; and the film- within-the-film is a manifestation of the effective use of cinema in psychoanalytic treatment. 18
Another example which embodies the mutually enriching relationship between cinema and psychoanalysis is the 1913 German silent film The Student of Prague (German:
Der Student von Prag), directed by Stellan Rye and Paul Wegener. The film, also known as A
Bargain with Satan, is the story of an impoverished student named Balduin, who made a deal with a sorcerer named Scapinelli. The sorcerer promised to give Balduin 100,000 pieces of gold in exchange for any item to be found in the student’s room. The poor student agreed to the deal for he thought there was nothing valuable in his room; but astonishingly, the sorcerer called forth Balduin’s reflection from the mirror. Shortly afterwards, Balduin decided to pursue Countess Margit, but he was haunted by the appearance of his double. When Baron
Waldis-Schwarzenberg, cousin of the Countess and a rival wooer, challenged Balduin to fight in a duel, the double showed up and killed the Baron. Balduin then decided to kill the double so as to end the chaos caused by his double. Balduin got a pistol and fired at the double, but it turned out that the bullet shot at his double killed Balduin himself. The Student of Prague touches on the idea of the doppelgänger.2 In order to create the effect of the double, cinematographer Guido Seeber employed innovative cinematic techniques, such as “doubling the actor on the divided screen, superimposing other images” (qtd. in Brown 99). This film not only brought into cinematic presence the concept of the double but also influenced the development of psychoanalysis. It is The Student of Prague that inspired Austrian psychoanalyst Otto Rank (1884-1939) to explore further into the concept of the double and later publish his famous work The Double (German: Der Doppelgänger) in German in 1925
(and was translated into English in 1971). Rank was aware of the capability of cinematic
2 The term doppelgänger is a loanword from German, which refers to a look-alike or double of a person; it is sometimes seen as a paranormal phenomenon. The first known use of doppelgänger (in a slightly different form doppeltgänger) appeared in the late 1790s in German writer Jean Paul’s novel Siebenkäs (1796); later on, in the 19th century, many writers such as Percy Bysshe Shelley and Fyodor Dostoyevsky used this concept in literature. The 1913 The Student of Prague is one of the first films to draw on the concept of the double in films. 19 techniques to “convey the presence of a ‘double personality’ in a way that literature could not” (Packer, Dreams in Myth 38).
In the 1920s and 1930s, a cultural movement in Europe heightened the interaction between cinema and psychoanalysis: Surrealism. The aim of Surrealism, according to The
Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists, was to “release the creative powers of the unconscious mind” and express through all kinds of art forms (Chilvers 611). Surrealism was under the influence of Freudian theories of dreams and the unconscious (Creed 77). In Manifesto of
Surrealism (1924), the founder of Surrealism André Breton borrowed the concept of “the depths of mind” from Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams and stretched out to discuss “the depth of dream”: “What I most enjoy contemplating about a dream is everything that sinks back below the surface in a waking state… In ‘reality,’ likewise, I prefer to fall” (qtd. in
Finkelstein 2). Surrealists saw the resemblance between cinema and dream. In 1925, the
Surrealist poet Robert Desnos published a short article in the Journal Littéraire in which he described his childhood cinema experience: “The perfect night of the cinema does not offer us merely the miracle of the screen, a neutral ground on which dreams are projected, but, more than that, it offers us the most enjoyable form of modern adventure” (qtd. in Finkelstein
1). Indeed, the connection between cinema screen and dream had later become a topic which caught the interest of psychoanalysts.
In addition to artists and filmmakers’ interests in exploring psychoanalytic concepts through films, certain psychoanalysts also took notice of the capability of cinematic techniques to imitate human mind. The Russian-born psychoanalyst Lou Andreas-Salomé
(1861-1937) explained this capability. Though seemingly sneering at cinema for it offered only “superficial pleasure” (qtd. in Heath 49), Salomé still made a note of her reflections on cinema as she wrote: “cinematic technique is the only one which allows a rapid succession of images approximating to our own imaginative activity, even imitating its volatility” (qtd. in 20
Heath 26). This attention to the resemblance between cinema and mental process could also be seen by Rank in his book The Double in which he wrote: “cinematography reminds us in numerous ways of the working of dreams” (Rank 4). Rank’s increasing interest in cinema led him to examine the motifs of the double in art and literature. Later on, moreover, he published Art and Artists (German: Kunst und Künstler, 1932). According to Packer, because
Rank referenced The Student of Prague in this book, this film became part of the study materials and “was shown to students of psychiatry from then on” (“Movies and the Modern
Psyche” 144).
Although his contemporary psychoanalysts such as Rank (who was a member of
Freud’s inner circle) had a positive attitude towards films, Freud himself kept a distance from the cinema. In 1925, Austrian director Georg Wilhelm Pabst (1885-1967) wanted to make a film about psychoanalysis which was later known as Secrets of a Soul (1926). Pabst intended to present real psychoanalytic case histories in the film, so he reached out to Freud for cooperation, yet got rejected. The director then turned to Freud’s disciples, Karl Abraham and Hanns Sachs. The two gladly accepted the offer to collaborate and became the “scientific advisors” of the film (Heath 26). Though never participating in the production of the film,
Freud still felt the need to declare his stance, stating that “there is no avoiding the film, any more than one can avoid the fashion for hair cut in a bob; I, however, will not let my hair be cut and will personally have nothing to do with this film” (qtd. in Heath 27). Freud’s main concern was with the representability of psychoanalysis. He did not believe that cinema could truthfully represent psychoanalysis. In a letter to Abraham to object to the film project, Freud explained: “I do not believe that satisfactory plastic representation of our abstractions is at all possible” (qtd. in Lebeau 34). To Freud, as pointed out by Heath, “psychoanalysis is more than film can show and film’s showing troubles psychoanalysis” (29). 21
Despite the psychoanalytic founding father’s objection, filmmakers still attempted to portray psychoanalysis. In the late 1950s, twenty years after Freud passed away, American director John Huston (1906-1987) wanted to make a film about Freud, focusing on his
“heroic period of discovery when he abandoned hypnosis and gradually invented psychoanalysis” (Lebeau 62). Therefore, Huston turned to the French philosopher and playwright Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980). Despite the dispute between Huston and Sartre during the production,3 the film Freud: The Secret Passion finally came out in 1962.
Though being a “commercial failure” at that time (Lebeau 62), Freud: The Secret
Passion made quite a few contributions to both psychoanalysis and cinema. Firstly, during the process of treating a hysteria patient Cäcilie Körtner, Freud was portrayed as a “metteur en scène” (Walker 174)—a director. When Cäcilie was talking about her childhood experience (or dream) with her father, Freud, by asking questions like “What happened to you?”, tried to evoke the patient’s (usually traumatized) memories. By using his voice, as pointed out by Lebeau, Freud “is able to conduct the image: to undo, or re-do, the past” (68), which is similar to a director’s role to orchestrate images. And after recalling those memories, the patient is “cured.” This plot of “sudden and dramatic recovery from mental illness” (Gabbard and Gabbard 28) reminds us of Suzanne in the Le Mystère des roches de
Kador. Secondly, by using techniques such as flashback and voice-off—“tools of memory and narrative in film” (Lebeau 69)—this film reconstructed the analytic process in Freud’s consulting room. When Cäcilie was describing her dream, for example, what the audience see on the screen is the image of Cäcilie’s dream and what they hear is the voice-off of Freud and
3 In 1958, Huston invited Sartre to write a screenplay on Freud. After Sartre sent out his screenplay, Huston asked for alterations and cuts. Eventually, the screenplay was transformed considerably by two film professionals closed to Huston, Charles Kaufmann and Wolfgang Reinhardt; and thus, Sartre insisted that his name should not be listed among the film credits. Through this incident, it is clear that there was a lack of consensus between the two. Sartre asserted in an interview that “Huston did not understand what the unconscious was,” whereas Huston said that Sartre “has no idea of what the film medium actually requires” (qtd. in Lebeau 62). 22
Cäcilie talking in the analytic room. In this way, when watching this scene, the audience is actually experiencing Cäcilie’s situation during the analytic process. The third contribution made by the film is that it sheds light on the analogy between cinema and dream. Because cinema can create illusions, films can actually “mime the experience of the dream” (Lebeau
65). In Freud: The Secret Passion, when Cäcilie was describing her dream, the audience is watching from the point of view of the dreaming Cäcilie. Sartre also wrote in the script, “as she describes her dream, we see it as she describes it”—“we see what she dreams” (Lebeau
65).
Cinema’s ability to represent dreams accounts for the concept of “the dream screen.”
The concept of dream screen was introduced by American psychoanalyst Bertram Lewin
(1896-1971). In his article “Sleep, the Mouth, and the Dream Screen” (1946), Lewin defined the dream screen as “the surface on which a dream appears to be projected. It is the blank background, present in the dream though not necessarily seen, and the visually perceived action of ordinary manifest dream contents takes place on it or before it” (420). Lewin described that when the infant falls asleep during breastfeeding, on his/her dream screen could be the hallucinatory representation of the mother’s breast as “the representative of the wish to sleep” (421). The concept of “dream screen” was later expanded in the psychoanalytic film theory in the 1970s, as theorists brought in Lacanian theory and comprehended cinema screen as a mirror.
Judging from these films and events occurring in the early interactions of psychoanalysis and cinema, we can say that, to use Lebeau’s words, “psychoanalysis and cinema are already together” (8); and the later establishment of psychoanalytic film theory could be described as the “culmination of a long flirtation” (Stam 159).
23
Psychoanalytic Film Theory
Starting from the 1970s, the development of psychoanalytic film theory bore witness to yet another wave of interactions between cinema and psychoanalysis. Different from the earlier attempts by filmmakers such as Pabst and Huston, whose efforts aimed primarily to capture the process of psychoanalysis in cinematic productions, psychoanalytic film theorists in the 1970s such as Jean-Louis Baudry, Christian Metz, and Laura Mulvey, tended to draw on psychoanalytic concepts to comprehend the production and reception of films.
The early 1970s saw the publication of two essays on cinematic apparatus:
“Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus” (French: “Effets idéologiques produits par l’appareil de base”) and “The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the
Impression of Reality in Cinema” (French: “Le dispositif: approches métapsychologiques de l’impression de réalité”) which were published in Cinéthique in 1970 and in Communications in 1975 respectively, both written by the French author Jean-Louis Baudry (1930-2015).
Though both being translated into English as “apparatus,” the two French terms are in fact different: “l’appareil de base” in the first article refers to the mechanisms during recording, editing and projecting a film while “le dispositif” in the second article refers to the screening situation which includes the film and the viewer (Quendler 15). These two articles laid the groundwork for the development of the apparatus theory.
Baudry introduced the concept of cinema as an apparatus which consists of camera, projector, and screen. In “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,”
Baudry compared the functioning between cinema and ideology and proposed that cinema can appear as a “psychic apparatus of substitution, corresponding to the model defined by the dominant ideology” (“Ideological Effects” 364). Although the article, as the title suggests, mostly put emphasis on discussing the ideological effects of cinema, Baudry also attended to psychical aspects, such as transformations, in the examination of cinematic apparatus. For 24 example, Baudry discussed the transformations which cannot be perceived by viewers but take place in the cinematic apparatus. First, the cinematic apparatus transforms the raw material (“objective reality”) into the finished product (a film), and camera takes up “an intermediate position” in the production process (“Ideological Effects” 356). Camera transforms the objective reality in which the actors and actresses perform into a series of images that the audience see on the screen. Second, in a film, each frame needs to be different in order to generate a continuous action. However, when putting all these different frames together and projecting them as a unity, the cinematic apparatus has to efface differences between frames so as to make meaning possible. Thus, film, to quote Baudry’s words, “lives on the denial of difference: difference is necessary for it to live, but it lives on its negation” (“Ideological Effects” 359). In addition, to create the impression of movement and continuity relies on a projector’s ability to show several frames per second (fps) and the persistence of vision, which is an optical illusion of the human eyes. Therefore, a projector and screen can create an illusion of movement, transforming still photographs into moving pictures.
After introducing the cinematic apparatus, Baudry continued the examination of cinema in his second article: “The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the
Impression of Reality in Cinema.” This time, he concentrated on the impression of reality in cinema and compared the resemblances and differences between cinema and dream. The similarities between the two are that both offer visual experiences, including the projection of images on a “screen” (cinema screen and dream screen), and both are hallucinatory by nature.
Although having much likeness, dream and cinema are different, first, in terms of the participants’ ability to withdraw. In cinema, if the spectator wants to exit the cinematic world, he “has always the choice to close his eyes, to withdraw from the spectacle, or to leave”
(“The Apparatus” 220); however, in a dream, the dreamer cannot exit the dream world by 25 choice. Secondly, though both herald in hallucinatory states, dream according to Freud is a
“normal hallucinatory psychosis,” yet cinema is an “artificial” one (“The Apparatus” 221).
Thirdly, the dreamer can “perceive” the representations in dreams as the reality without actually “perceiving”; however, the viewer “require[s] the mediation of perception” so as to actually “perceive” the representations in cinema as the reality (“The Apparatus” 222).
Baudry concluded that “cinema is not [a] dream,” but the impression of reality created in the cinematic apparatus is “comparable” to the impression of reality produced by dreams (“The
Apparatus” 222).
In his two essays on the cinematic apparatus, Baudry also discussed the concept of the screen, which encouraged the development of mirror-screen theory. Following Lewin’s theory of dream screen, Baudry extended the discussion to the screen’s function to engage the spectator. Borrowing the mirror stage theory from the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan
(1901-1981), Baudry compared the cinema screen to a mirror. Lacan described how an infant from the age of six months could be attracted by its reflection in the mirror, and eventually identify itself with the mirror-image. According to Baudry, for both film viewing and the mirror stage experiences, there is a “suspension of mobility” on the side of the viewer
(“Ideological Effects” 363). When watching a film, the spectator usually sits still in front of a screen, just as the infant is immobile in front of the mirror. Secondly, in both film-viewing and mirror stage experience is the “predominance of the visual function” (“Ideological
Effects” 363). Both the cinema spectator and the infant are attracted to visual images. Indeed,
Baudry pointed out that the cinematic screen serves a similar function to that of a mirror. As the reflection in a mirror gives the infant an integrated self-image, the cinema spectator identifies himself as the omnipotent camera that sees everything. However, the two are not exactly the same for the image in the mirror is the reflection of the infant’s body, yet the images on the screen are products of cinema-making. Baudry described the difference 26 between the cinema screen and the mirror by saying that “the paradoxical nature of the cinematic mirror-screen is without [a] doubt that it reflects images but not “reality””
(“Ideological Effects” 362).
Baudry’s point was further developed by Christian Metz (1931-1993). In 1975, Metz published a long essay, “The Imaginary Signifier” (French: “Le signifiant imaginaire”), in an issue of Communications devoted to the theme of psychoanalysis and cinema in which
Baudry’s second article on apparatus also appeared. In 1982, Metz’s essay was translated into
English and published as a book titled The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the
Cinema. Building upon Baudry’s analogy between the cinema screen and the mirror of the mirror stage, Metz made a turn and brought in the theory of semiotics. Metz introduced the concept of “cinematic signifier” by comparing the meaning-making abilities between written or spoken language and cinema. As suggested by the title of his book, Metz conceived cinematic signifiers as imaginary, which refers to cinema’s “ability to invoke absence, i.e. the capacity to image a thing is there where it ostensibly is not there” (Bettinson and Rushton
43). For Metz, not only the images presented by cinema (cinematic signifier) are imaginary, but the ways cinema presents these images are also imaginary: “What is characteristic of the cinema is not the imaginary that it may happen to represent, but the imaginary that it is from the start, the imaginary that constitutes it as a signifier” (Metz 44). Based on cinema’s imaginary nature, Metz compared the imaginary effects taking place in cinema and in that of the mirror stage. In the mirror stage, the infant takes the reflected mirror image as his imaginary body; likewise, in cinema, the images and sounds also generate an imaginary effect: if a spectator believes that the story is “real” and immerses him/herself in the cinematic world, he/she is engrossed in the cinema’s imaginary effect. As pointed out by
Metz, the spectator experiences “a series of mirror-effects” (51). The cinema screen is not a mirror, but it can produce imaginary effects similar to that of the mirror at the mirror stage. 27
In the mid-1970s, British filmmaker and scholar Laura Mulvey published a provocative essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975), which became the foundational text of the gaze theory. In this essay, Mulvey utilized psychoanalytic theory as a
“political weapon” to demonstrate how the patriarchal unconscious of our society has structured film form and shaped our film watching experience (14). Mulvey pointed out that the pleasure of film-viewing is usually shaped by an “active/men passive/women” dichotomy: men assume an active role and gain pleasure in looking, while women take a passive position and connote “to-be-looked-at-ness” (“Visual Pleasure” 19). Mulvey believed that such a gender inequality is not only portrayed in cinema but also reinforced by cinema, especially the Hollywood cinema. She then drew on two psychoanalytic theories to specify that Hollywood films consolidate this gender imbalance. First, cinema supports scopophilia, and second, cinema encourages spectators’ identification with male characters. Scopophilia refers to gaining pleasure in looking at another person as an object of sexual stimulation. In films, women are often displayed as sexual objects, either as erotic objects for the characters within the diegesis, or as erotic objects for the spectator in a theater (Mulvey, “Visual
Pleasure” 19). Moreover, due to the male dominant narrative structure, by identifying with the male protagonists, spectators can also gain control of the film narrative and receive a satisfying sense of omnipotence. Mulvey thus came to a conclusion that “male gaze” is to view female figures as sexual objects and gain pleasure from the act of looking.
“Visual Pleasure” became a very influential essay in psychoanalytic film theories, but some scholars questioned that Mulvey “only used the male third person singular to stand in for the spectator” (Mulvey, “Afterthoughts” 29) and overlooked the position of female spectators. In order to clarify her position, Mulvey published in 1981 another essay titled
“Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ inspired by King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1946).” Mulvey clarified that “Visual Pleasure” was to discuss “the relationship 28 between the image of woman on the screen and the ‘masculinisation’ of the spectator position, regardless of the actual sex (or possible deviance) of any real live movie-goer”
(“Afterthoughts” 29). In “Afterthoughts,” Mulvey then moved on to examine the female spectatorship, especially the ones who “may find herself secretly, unconsciously almost, enjoying the freedom of action and control over the diegetic world that identification with a hero provides” (29).
Following Mulvey’s two articles, scholars including E. Ann Kaplan and bell hooks started studying the plurality of gazes. Kaplan discussed the concept of female gaze in her essay “Is the Gaze Male?” (1983). As pointed out by Kaplan, “our culture is deeply committed to myths of demarcated sex differences, called “masculine” and “feminine,” which in turn revolve first on a complex gaze apparatus and second on dominance- submission patterns” (29). To exercise gaze in the films, “the woman takes on the
“masculine” role as bearer of the gaze and initiator of the action” (29). Kaplan concluded that to own and gain control of the gaze, which is not necessarily male, female spectator have to be in the “masculine” position.
Along with the consideration for female gaze, the African-American feminist bell hooks discussed the oppositional gaze in the chapter “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female
Spectators” of her book Black Looks: Race and Representation (1992). bell hooks criticized the early feminist gaze theory for failing to notice the black female spectatorship. She pointed out that
Looking at films with an oppositional gaze, black women were able to critically
assess the cinema’s construction of white womanhood as object of phallocentric gaze
and choose not to identify with either the victim or the perpetrator. Black female
spectators, who refused to identify with white womanhood, who would not take on
the phallocentric gaze of desire and possession, created a critical space where the 29
binary opposition Mulvey posits of “woman as image, man as bearer of the look” was
continually deconstructed. (122-23)
With more attention being given to female figures and female spectatorship, the feminist film theory flourished in the 1980s and 1990s. Some film theorists turned to different aspects of psychoanalytic theory. For example, the British feminist scholar
Elizabeth Cowie wrote an essay “Fantasia” (1984) in which she drew on the Freudian notion of fantasy. As described by Cowie, fantasy sets up one’s desire and entails a change in one’s relations with other people. When identifying in the cinema, according to Cowie, “we [the spectators] do not take the character’s desire as our own, but identify with the character’s position of desire in relation to other characters” (140).
Besides drawing on feminist thoughts, psychoanalytic film theory continues to expand with influences from other disciplines such as queer theory and post-colonialism. Some queer film theorists criticized the heterosexual assumptions in the feminist film theory. In How Do I
Look? Queer Film and Video (1991) edited by Bad Object-Choices, for example, Judith
Mayne discussed the lesbian spectatorship in her article “Lesbian Looks: Dorothy Arzner and
Female Authorship” (1991). Also, Valerie Traub analyzed lesbian’s pleasure in looking in her essay “The Ambiguities of “Lesbian” Viewing Pleasure: The (Dis)articulations of Black
Widow” (1991). As film theorist Barbara Creed pointed out, unlike early film theorists who focused on “praising ‘positive’ and decrying ‘negative’ images of homosexual men and lesbians in film” (88), queer film theorists, by reinterpreting psychoanalysis, expanded their discussion to the assumptions of abnormality, perversion, and pathology.
In a similar way, post-colonial theorists also made a methodological shift by introducing psychoanalysis into post-colonial theories. Built on earlier scholars’ attention to racism and stereotypes in relation to narrative credibility (Creed 87), post-colonial theorists moved a step further to discuss the process of subjectification and representation of otherness 30 in films. For example, in his essay “The Other Question: The Stereotype and Colonial
Discourse” published in Screen in 1983, Homi Bhabha analyzed racial stereotypes in colonial discourse by drawing analogy between fetishism and racial stereotype. According to Freud, a fetish is a substitute for penis. A boy’s realization of his mother’s and other women’s “lack” of a penis evokes his fear of castration. In order to relieve his castration anxiety, the boy finds in a fetish (such as a piece of cloth or a woman’ feet or legs) to cover up the lack and hence avoid anxiety. Similarly, in the colonial discourse, skin colors and racial stereotypes are often drawn up by the colonizers as fetishes to consolidate their differences from the colonized and hence shed off anxiety.
While Homi Bhabha attempted to “bring together the social and the psychic” (Creed
87), Slavoj Žižek linked cinema and psychoanalysis by using “films as the material with which to explicate psychoanalysis” (Heath 36). For instance, Žižek stated that his book Enjoy
Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out is “an attempt to introduce the doctrine of Jacques Lacan to the American public via Hollywood cinema” (vii). Žižek made use of the presentation form of cinema to elucidate the inarticulate psychoanalytic concepts, which further consolidated the practicability of using cinema as a medium to translate psychoanalysis.
Contemporary Psychoanalytic Films
The interaction between psychoanalysis and cinema has continued into the 21st century. In fact, the prevalence of psychoanalytic films and TV dramas in the current market
2005- ,בטיפול :is remarkable. One example is the Israeli television drama BeTipul (Hebrew
2008). This TV series depicts the life of a psychologist, including his weekly sessions with patients and also the sessions with his own therapist at the end of the week. The drama series has been adapted for audiences in over fourteen countries such as the United States, Russia, 31
Argentina, Brazil, Portugal, Italy and Japan; and its great success has indicated audience’s interest in psychoanalytic treatment.
Contemporary American films incline towards reviewing and rethinking the relationship of psychoanalysts and their patients. For example, in Martin Scorsese’s Shutter
Island (2010),4 the main character, Edward “Teddy” Daniels, whom was assumed to be a detective at the beginning of the film turned out to be the “most dangerous patient.” Brad
Anderson’s Stonehearst Asylum (2014)5 is another film that questions the psychoanalytic medical system. Due to a revolt led by patients, the roles of doctors and patients are reversed in the Stonehearst Asylum. Compared with earlier psychoanalytic films that usually focus on the treatment process in analytic rooms, contemporary films tend to question and criticize psychoanalytic system and question the roles of psychoanalysts in modern health care system.
In addition to making films that comment on psychoanalytic methods and the medical structure, filmmakers also endeavor to translate psychoanalytic concepts into films. In 2013, two films touched upon the concept of the double: Denis Villeneuve’s Enemy6 and Richard
Ayoade’s The Double.7 In Enemy, a college professor named Adam watches a movie and finds that the actor, Anthony, looks exactly like himself. The encounter between Adam and
Anthony creates serious disturbance to their initially separate and independent lives. The topic of the doppelgänger is also explored in The Double. Simon James is a downtrodden office worker, and one day, a new employee named James Simon arrives. These two men have absolutely identical appearance but completely different personalities. One intriguing point advanced in the film is that the two characters live and work in the same environment
4 Shutter Island is based on Dennis Lehane’s 2003 novel of the same title. 5 Stonehearst Asylum is loosely based on the short story “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether” by Edgar Allan Poe. 6 Enemy is loosely adapted from José Saramago’s 2002 novel The Double (Portuguese: O Homem Duplicado). 7 The Double is based on the novella The Double (Russian: Двойник, Dvoynik) by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. 32 yet people around them do not seem to notice their resemblance to each other. Like the 1913 film The Student of Prague, Enemy and The Double feature a single actor playing dual roles.
However, the two contemporary films focus more on the differences in characters’ personalities despite their identical appearances.
Another group of filmmakers attempted to imitate dreaming experience in cinema.
For example, both David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive and Richard Linklater’s Waking Life were released in 2001. Mulholland Drive, in my interpretation, is concerned about dreams’ connection to waking life, which I will discuss in details in Chapter Three. Also dealing with the relationship between dreams and reality, Waking Life tells the story of a young man who wanders through a continuous series of dreams wherein he meets various people and engages in philosophical discussions. The film translates how we perceive dreams as corresponding to the reality by applying the animation technique called rotoscoping.8 which provides a fresh way to recreate dream experience in filmic representation.
Another widely-discussed film about dreams in recent years is Christopher Nolan’s
Inception (2010). The film is about a group of professionals hired to infiltrate the subconscious of the heir to a business empire. More about the film will be discussed in
Chapter Four. Another film about dreams with a plot similar to that of Inception, is Satoshi
Kon’s Paprika (2006).9 In this film, a machine allows users to view and even enter others’ dreams, and thus, dreams become a platform where psychiatrists treat their patients. After the machine is stolen, chaos dominates both dreams and the reality until Dr. Atsuko Chiba, a psychiatrist and researcher, and her alter ego Paprika that appears in the dream world, work together to restore order. Being an anime, Paprika presents how dreams might mingle with
8 Rotoscoping is a cinematic technique of drawing animation over live-action film. By turning real life images acted out by real actors and actresses into animation images, rotoscoping creates effects that are realistic and fictional at the same time. 9 Paprika is based on Yasutaka Tsutsui’s 1993 novel of the same name. 33 the reality in an absurdly irrational way, hence giving a new perspective on the possible relationships of dream and reality.
Due to the limited space of this thesis, I would choose only two films to analyze closely in the following two chapters: Mulholland Drive in Chapter Three and Inception in
Chapter Four.
34
Chapter Three
Between Waking Life and Dreams: David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive
Written and directed by David Lynch, Mulholland Drive stars Naomi Watts and Laura
Harring. The film was originally conceived as a television pilot,10 and the major parts of the film were shot in 1999; however, the project was rejected by television executives because they thought that the film was “too dark, slow and confusing” (Taubin 51). Later, a French company showed interest in the project and financed the shooting of additional footage to expand the pilot episode into a feature film. Mulholland Drive was finally released in 2001.
Since its premiere at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, Mulholland Drive has generated a great deal of discussion. At the time of its release, the film received mostly positive reviews. For example, the Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert—previously not a fan of Lynch’s works—gave Mulholland Drive four stars and commented that “the movie is a surrealist dreamscape in the form of a Hollywood film noir, and the less sense it makes, the more we can’t stop watching it.” This film won Lynch the Best Director Award (Prix de la mise en scène) at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, as well as the nomination for Best Director at the Oscars in the same year. In 2016, BBC Culture compiled a list of the 100 greatest films of the 21st century, and Mulholland Drive (fifteen years after its release) was ranked number one. Needless to say, Mulholland Drive has made a tremendous contribution to the world of cinema. However, not everyone enjoys this dreamlike and confusing film. In the year of its release, some critics such as Eric Lurio of Greenwich Village Gazette described it as “an infuriating film,” and William Arnold of Seattle Post-Intelligencer wrote that “it’s just too
10 A television pilot is an individual episode of a television series that is used to test whether the series will be successful or not. In other words, a television pilot is a test episode of an intended television series.
35 36 annoyingly incomprehensible to recommend.” These negative comments are mostly about how the film is too difficult to understand.
Indeed, Mulholland Drive is known for its ambiguity, as many seemingly unrelated plotlines are intertwined in the film. On that account, all kinds of analyses and interpretations have been put forth in journals, news articles, published books and videos that examine the film from different perspectives and theories.11 Lynch is known for not willing to talk about the themes of his films, and thus it is even more difficult for the viewers to settle down with a definite answer. However, in an interview carried out by Scott Macaulay of Filmmaker
Magazine, Lynch is “forced” to give a tagline of Mulholland Drive, which is “a love story in the city of dreams.” Lynch brought his audience’s attention to the “love story” and where this love story takes place: “the city of dreams,” namely, the Hollywood industry. In a way taking cue from Lynch, I choose to focus in this thesis on how dreams appropriate elements from the waking life (reality).
As the film begins, a perky blonde named Betty Elms (Naomi Watts) who is an aspiring actress has just arrived in Los Angeles. She meets an amnesiac woman who calls herself “Rita” (Laura Harring). Betty tries to help Rita retrieve her memories and recover her identity. Elsewhere, a director named Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux) is looking for a leading actress for his new film, but some mafia thugs force him to cast an unknown actress named
Camilla Rhodes (Melissa George) instead. The vibe in the first two-thirds of the film is bright
11 For example, critics have different interpretations about the significance of the old couple in Mulholland Drive. Andy Klein, Max Garrone and Bill Wyman of Salon suggested that the old couple “may be the judges of the [jitterbug] contest she [Diane] won, or her parents”; Neil Roberts thought that they are “a kind of avenging fury of her former self” (qtd. in Lewis); and Tom Charity proposed that the old couple are not really specific characters in Diane’s waking life, but more like “a classic anxiety dream projection – people who are nice to your face but laugh about you behind your back” (qtd. in Lewis). Also, although the most popular theory of the storyline is to divide the film into two halves—one is the dream and the other is the reality—certain critics do not agree with this interpretation. For example, Jane Douglas of BBC Online says, “I’m not a subscriber to the theory that the first half of the film is a dream and the second half reality because I think it’s too easy. There was much more to it than that. … It isn’t a conventional narrative, but then who is to say that a story has to go from beginning to end? It was almost as if it were on some kind of loop where the narrative could on go forever” (qtd. in Lewis). 37 and upbeat; however, one night, Betty and Rita watch a performance at a place called Club
Silencio, and afterwards, everything changes.
In the last third of the film, the atmosphere becomes dark and gloomy. This part starts, bizarrely, with a woman named Diane Selwyn (Naomi Watts)—who looks exactly like
Betty—waking up in bed. Unlike Betty, Diane is a failed actress who suffers deep depression caused by her broken relationship with Camilla Rhodes (this time, played by Laura Harring), a successful actress who looks exactly like Rita, the amnesiac. After her breakup with Diane,
Camilla soon announces her engagement to a movie director (Justin Theroux), who looks exactly like the director who is forced by the mafia to cast Camilla Rhodes in the first section of the film. Diane is distraught after hearing the news of the engagement and decides to hire a hitman to kill Camilla. The most common interpretation of the film is that the first section represents Diane’s dreams and the latter section, her real life.12
Mulholland Drive is often considered to be one of the most perplexing films in the
21st century (or of all time).13 However, in an interview about Mulholland Drive, Lynch stated that this film is “not that difficult to understand” (“David Lynch Talks Mulholland
Drive”). He compared the experience of watching Mulholland Drive to that of listening to a friend describing his/her dreams—or, conversely, of trying to tell a dream to a friend. He pointed out that “sometimes, you tell your friend a dream and you can see in the face they don’t understand” (“David Lynch Talks Mulholland Drive”).
Obviously, the storyline of the film is hard to grasp, but as Lynch suggested, all dreams are difficult to understand. By their very nature, dreams are usually vague and non-
12 In the ending of the film, Lynch portrayed not only Diane’s waking life but also the illusion and confusion between Diane’s memories and her dreams which lead to her suicide. Here in this thesis, I do not discuss the relation between Diane’s illusion and confusion in the waking life and her dreams; I simply focus on analyzing the elements appearing in Diane’s dream and her waking life. However, it is worth further exploration into how Diane’s dreams affect her waking life and why Lynch made such an arrangement. 13 Several film critics and filmmakers include Mulholland Drive on their most confusing movies lists, such as Spencer Coriaty’s “The 15 Most Confusing Movies of All Time”; Donald Deane’s “The 10 Most Confusing Movies of All Time”; Cassam Looch’s “The Most Confusing Films Ever Made”; and Ranker Film’s poll on “The Most Confusing Movies Ever Made.” 38 linear. Thus, in a dreamlike film, the plotline is neither clear-cut nor linear. The elements in
Mulholland Drive, as those in a dream, are open to interpretation. As for the feeling of dreaming, everyone has had that experience. Thus, when watching a dreamlike film, it is not difficult for the audience to understand the feeling of a dream. However, there is still an important difference between watching films and dreaming: dreaming is a private act, whereas watching films is an experience of “dreaming in public” (Lebeau 4).
Because Lynch tried to capture the nature of dreams and express it through cinema,
Mulholland Drive allows the audience to experience the feeling of dreaming. As The New
York Times film critic A. O. Scott pointed out, “Its tangled story will be experienced by some as an offense against narrative order, but the film is an intoxicating liberation from sense”
(“Critic’s Notebook”). That is why Lynch claimed that his film is “not that difficult to understand if you trust your inner feeling” (emphasis added). Mulholland Drive not only presents dream-contents but also mimics the formation of dreams. In short, it attempts to recreate the experience of dreaming.
In Mulholland Drive, Lynch attempted to “translate” oneiric (or dream) language into cinematic language. In order to examine this translation process, I will first introduce the theory of dream formation, proposed by Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams. Then, using examples from Mulholland Drive, I will analyze how Lynch “translated” dream-work into cinematic language.
The Formation of Dreams
In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud suggested that our psychical apparatus exercises censorship in the formation of dreams. Latent dream-thoughts appear in dreams and enter the consciousness only after passing censorship. In order to pass the censorship, the latent dream-thoughts take on disguises and are usually distorted (168-69). The process of 39 disguising and distortion is called dream-work. Latent dream-thoughts are transformed into manifest dream-contents via dream-work. According to Freud, there are four main types of dream-work: condensation, displacement, representation and secondary revision.
1. Condensation
The relationship between latent dream-thoughts and manifest dream-contents is not a one-to-one relationship. A manifest dream-content does not come from merely a single latent dream-thought. Instead, several latent dream-thoughts with the same or similar features are integrated into a single element, which then passes censorship to become a manifest dream- content. This process is called condensation.
Some elements are more easily brought into the dream-contents because they are closely associated with the dream-thoughts. In fact, each element in the dream-content is determined by several dream-thoughts; in Freud’s term, these elements are “overdetermined.”
At the same time, a dream-thought can also be presented through multiple elements in the dreams. Therefore, Freud argued that “not only are the elements of a dream determined by the dream-thoughts many times over, but the individual dream-thoughts are represented in the dream by several elements” (301).
Condensation in dreams, as pointed out by Freud, “is seen at its clearest when it handles words and names” (313). In dreams, words are treated as concrete objects; thus, they can be combined in the same way that concrete objects are combined in daily life. For example, Freud once dreamt of this sentence: “It’s written in a positively norekdal style.” At first, Freud thought that the word norekdal was a parody of the German superlatives
“kolossal” and “pyramidal.” But then, Freud figured out that this dream word is composed of two names—Nora and Ekdal—which are characters in Ibsen’s famous plays. Freud had read an article on Ibsen a few days earlier, so it made sense that these names appeared in his 40 dream (313). Furthermore, through the work of condensation, the two names were combined into one word.
2. Displacement
The elements appearing in manifest dream-contents are not always the most critical elements in latent dream-thoughts; instead, they are usually those that are easier to pass censorship. Moreover, what is important in the latent dream-thoughts might become less important in the manifest dream-content; and conversely, an unimportant element in the latent dream-thoughts might become important in the manifest dream-content. Usually, the psychic emphasis is shifted from a critical thought in the latent dream to a relatively trivial element in the manifest dream-content due to the operation of psychical force. In the process of dream formation, the psychical force will cause “a transference and displacement of psychical intensities” (324). Freud named this process of transferring and displacing as dream-displacement.
In some cases, the elements that are displaced in dream-formation are our affects, a psychological term for experiences of feeling or emotion. According to Freud, “the ideational material has undergone displacements and substitutions, whereas the affects have remained unaltered” (467). In manifest dreams, we sometimes attach affects to certain elements; however, the same affects were originally attached to different elements in latent dreams. As an example of the displacement of affects, Freud described the dream of a young girl (469).
In her dream, the young girl sees her older sister’s little son lying dead in a coffin; surprisingly, she does not feel sad. In reality, this young girl fell in love with a man that she saw at the funeral of her sister’s elder son and she wishes to see him again. So, in her dream, her affect of wishing to see the man she loves is displaced by her lack of sadness at the funeral.
41
3. Representation
Freud defined the work of representation as “the process of transforming a thought into a visual image” (374). Elements that can be visualized into dream-thoughts serve as the most convenient materials for manifest dream-contents.
The most common example is the symbolism in dreams. It is not difficult for us to understand the function of symbolism because, according to Freud, symbols already exist in our daily lives—in folklore, mythology, legends, idioms, proverbs and jokes (365). Dream- work uses symbols to transform thoughts into visual images. It is worth noting that dream- work does not create new symbols. Instead, it uses symbols that already exist in the unconscious because, according to Freud, “they fit in better with the requirements of dream- construction on account of their representability and also because as a rule they escape censorship” (363). Freud suggested that dreams use symbolism to represent sexual parts of the body (364). For example, many animals such as fish, snails, cats, mice and snakes that are used as symbols for genitals in mythology and folklore serve the same function in dreams
(370). Another symbol for the genitals is a child. So, playing with a little child or beating the child can represent masturbation in dreams (370).
4. Secondary revision
Through the process of condensation, displacement and representation, latent dream- thoughts become distorted and disguised into elements that constitute manifest dream- contents. But these elements remain disconnected. In order to smooth out these incoherent elements, Freud proposed that our psychical apparatus conducts a secondary revision to reorganize the dream-contents. Secondary revision not only connects elements but also enhances the clarity of dreams. If the secondary revision works effectively, the dreams become clearer; if not, the dreams become more confusing. Freud thus concluded that “the 42 secondary dream-work” is “held responsible for a contribution to the plastic intensity of the different dream-elements” (504).
Although the secondary revision attempts to smooth out the disconnections, Freud thought that the work of secondary revision is at most “fill[ing] up the gaps in the dream- structure with shreds and patches” (495). After secondary revision, dreams may seem, at first glance, “faultlessly logical and reasonable…, and they appear to have a meaning” (495).
However, when the details in those dreams are examined more closely, one may notice a paradox–specifically, the “meaning” on the surface does not reflect the underlying meaning and significance of the dream. Uncertain as to what extent the secondary revision might contribute to the formation of dreams, Freud later dismissed the theory of secondary revision.
In his 1922 essay “Two Encyclopaedia Articles,” he included condensation, displacement and representation in his discussion of dream-work, but not the theory of secondary revision.
Translating Waking Life into Dreams in Mulholland Drive
The theory of dream-work explains how dreams are formed and the nature of the oneiric language. As previously noted, many critics consider that Mulholland Drive can be viewed as having two parts: the first two-thirds of the film (which presents Diane’s dreams) and the last third (which presents Diane’s waking life). Diane’s dreams are artificial constructs, written and created by David Lynch. In this section, I will examine how Lynch incorporated Freud’s theory of dream-work when translating Diane’s waking life into dreams. Since Freud argued that “all the material making up the content of a dream is in some way derived from experience” (44), I will first describe the elements—characters, objects and speeches—that appear in Diane’s waking life and then discuss how these elements are transformed into her dreams. I will also examine why Lynch chose to present 43 dreams in specific ways. Did he follow Freudian dream theory? Or did he add in his own interpretation of dreams?
1. Casting and plot arrangement
Diane in her waking life Betty in the dream (Naomi Watts) (Naomi Watts)
In Mulholland Drive, both Diane and Betty are played by Naomi Watts. By using the same actress to play these two women, Lynch prepared the audience to make the connection between these two characters—seeing Betty as the projection of Diane’s self in the dream.
Moreover, in her waking life, Diane is a depressed woman with a pallid complexion, whereas in the dream Betty is a cheerful woman with an energetic vibe. Based on Freud’s theory of
“dream as wish-fulfilment,” we can speculate that Diane might wish to live a life like Betty’s.
Camilla in the waking life (Laura Harring)
Rita in the dream Camilla in the dream (Laura Harring) (Melissa George)
44
While the connection between Diane and Betty is clear, the character Camilla in
Diane’s waking life is split into two separate personages—Rita and Camilla—in her dream.
The actress who plays Camilla in the waking life (Laura Harring) also portrays the character
Rita in the dream. By using the same actress to play these two roles, Lynch makes the connection between Camilla and Rita clear. Also, because Rita has the same appearance as
Camilla in the waking life, she replaces Camilla as Diane’s lover in the dream. In the waking life, Camilla betrays Diane by choosing to marry a film director; but in an odd twist, in the dream, Rita relies on Betty to help her regain memories. The plot arrangement for Rita to suffer from amnesia and then rely on Betty/Diane to help her retrieve her identity further consolidates the relationship between Betty/Diane and Rita.
Camilla in the dream is played by a different actress (Melissa George), and looks very different from Camilla in the waking life (Laura Harring). Even so, in both storylines— dream and reality—Camilla receives the leading role in a film, which signifies a success that
Diane craves. In the waking life, the director favors Camilla over Diane and gives Camilla
(instead of Diane) the leading role. In the dream, the director prefers Diane when he sees her, but due to threats from the mafia, he is forced to give the leading role to Camilla. The plot arrangement for Camilla to receive the role only after the mafia threatens the director signifies Diane’s wish fulfilment of not only proving her own value but also taking revenge on her rival.
2. Short blonde hair
In the waking life, Diane has short blonde hair. Similarly, several characters in her dream also have short blonde hair: Betty, Camilla Rhodes, a waitress named Diane and an unnamed prostitute. I argue that Lynch used the short blonde hair as an object of condensation to symbolize Diane’s multiple identities in her dream. 45
Betty in the dream Camilla in the dream
In Diane’s dream, Betty and Camilla have the same hair color as Diane’s, but both of them have more stylish hair than Diane, whose hair is basically unstyled. Betty’s neat bob symbolizes a better quality of living, which is what Diane wishes for, while Camilla’s glamorous hair symbolizes a success in career, which is also Diane’s wish. Lynch apparently used the more attractive hair styles for Betty and Camilla in the dream as a symbol for
Diane’s desire for success.
a waitress in the dream a prostitute in the dream
In addition to Betty and Camilla, a waitress and a prostitute in Diane’s dream also have short blonde hair. However, unlike Betty and Camilla, they have a similar messy hairstyle to Diane’s, which may indicate that their dream situations are similar to Diane’s in her waking life. Judging from some clues in her waking life, one could guess that Diane has worked as a waitress, possibly at the restaurant Winkie’s. For example, Diane has a cup which is exactly the same as those at Winkie’s, and there is a shot of a waitress’s name tag with Diane written on it. Other clues from her waking life indicate that Diane has also worked as a prostitute after failing to become a successful actress. For example, there is a scene in which The Cowboy, who is actually a pimp, tells Diane to wake up and get to work 46
(as a street prostitute). Since the characters of a waitress and a prostitute are embodiments of
Diane’s past, this is perhaps why Lynch gave these two characters in the dream hairstyles that are similar to Diane’s own.
It’s clear that some of the characters that appear in the dream share certain parts of
Diane’s self. According to Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams, “every dream deals with the dreamer himself” and “dreams are completely egoistical” (388); thus, the characters appearing in dreams are usually projections of the dreamer himself/herself. Lynch’s use of the short blonde hair as a condensation symbol for Diane’s multiple identities is a manifestation of Freudian dream theory—specifically the dream’s relationship to the dreamer.
3. Diane and Dan
In Diane’s dreams, the character Dan is another projection of Diane. Though the two characters share no resemblance in appearance, Lynch still created certain connections between Diane and Dan by giving them similar names and a similar sequence of shots.
Diane in her waking life Dan in the dream
In her waking life, Diane is sitting at Winkie’s and meeting with a hitman to discuss the killing of Camilla. When Diane is talking to the hitman, she sees another man (Patrick 47
Fischler) standing next to the cashier’s desk. When discussing the killing of Camilla with the hitman, Diane is both afraid and nervous—afraid of possessing the idea of killing someone and nervous that the task might fail.
In one episode within the dream, a man named Dan (also played by Patrick Fischler) has the appearance of the man whom Diane sees at Winkie’s. Dan is also meeting a man at
Winkie’s, and he also turns to look at a man standing next to the cashier’s desk. In the dream,
Dan is discussing his nightmares with that man and, like Diane, feeling afraid and nervous— afraid of his nightmares and nervous that they might come true.
This plot arrangement pushes one to interpret that Diane’s unconscious borrows the image of Dan (Fischler’s appearance) from her waking life, attaching her fear onto that image and then presenting it in her dream. Dan’s face becomes the embodiment of fear in her dream. By giving him the name “Dan” which is similar to “Diane,” Lynch created a link between the two: the fear that Dan embodies is actually Diane’s fear. Lynch used the appearance of Dan and the setting at Winkie’s to illustrate how one’s unconscious borrows elements from the waking life and incorporates them into dreams.
4. Coffee cup
The appearance of the white coffee cup in Diane’s waking life and also in her dream illustrates Lynch’s use of displacement and wish fulfilment—two important elements in dream-work—in his construction of Diane’s dreams.
Diane drinks coffee in her waking life the mafia man spits out coffee in the dream
48
In the waking life, while Diane is drinking coffee from the white coffee cup, she witnesses the announcement of Camilla and the director’s engagement. To Diane, this is awful news: her loved one is going to marry another person. In Diane’s dreams, the person who drinks coffee from the same white coffee cup becomes the mafia man. While the mafia man is drinking his coffee, the director, who is sitting right across the table, says that he refuses to agree to the mafia man’s request to cast Camilla Rhodes in his film. To the mafia guy, this is very unfortunate, for the director has disobeyed his order.
In both the waking life and the dream, the coffee cup is an embodiment of the feelings of disappointment and anger. Yet, none of Diane’s projected figures in the dream drink the coffee, which signifies that Diane is able to avoid the coffee in the dream, as if she is able to avoid the awful news and the anger in her waking life. This is Diane’s wish fulfilment.
Indeed, the person who drinks the coffee in the dream becomes another person, so the affect of disappointment and anger is transferred from one person (Diane) to another (the mafia man). By making a different person drink coffee in the dream, Lynch portrays the displacement of affects in the formation of dreams.
5. “What are you doing? We don’t stop here.”
This line—“What are you doing? We don’t stop here.”—is uttered twice in the film: once by Diane in her waking life and also by Rita in Diane’s dream. In both cases, after the speaker says this line, something bad happens. Thus, this line is a symbol of forthcoming tragedy. By letting both Diane and Camilla say this line, Lynch employed the dream-work of displacement.
Diane’s words in her waking life Rita’s words in the dream 49
In her waking life, Diane is riding in the back of a limousine as it travels along
Mulholland Drive. Suddenly, the driver pulls over the car, Diane asks, “What are you doing?
We don’t stop here.” Then, the car door opens. Coming out from a path, Camilla leads Diane through a shortcut to a party held at the director’s house. It is at this party that the director and Camilla announce their engagement, which upsets Diane.
In Diane’s dream, it is Rita who is sitting at the back of a limousine. When the driver suddenly pulls over, Rita asks, “What are you doing? We don’t stop here.” The driver pulls out a gun and orders Rita to get out of the car. In the next moment, two cars driven by drunken teenagers crash into the limousine. Everyone is killed except Rita. Although still alive, Rita becomes amnesiac, losing all memory of her identity.
By switching the speaker of this line, “What are you doing? We don’t stop here” from herself to Rita, Diane is able to escape the tragic incident in her dream. This is her wish fulfilment. Moreover, that fact that Rita becomes amnesiac after the car accident makes Rita a dependent on Betty (Diane’s projected self in the dream) for the recovery of Rita’s memories and identity. In her waking life, Diane is jilted when Camilla marries a director, whereas the wish fulfilment of her dream strengthens up her relationship with Rita.
6. “This is the girl.”
This line appears four times in the film: it is spoken once by Diane in her waking life; the other three times it appears in her dream, each time spoken by a different person (the mafia guy, The Cowboy, and the director). I argue that the recurring line “this is the girl” in the dream illustrates Lynch’s use of the dream-work of condensation and displacement as well as wish fulfilment in his construction of Diane’s dreams. 50
Diane’s words in her waking life the mafia man’s words in the dream
The Cowboy’s words in the dream the director’s words in the dream
In Diane’s waking life, after hearing of Camilla and the director’s engagement, Diane is heartbroken and devastated. In a reckless moment, she decides to hire a hitman to kill
Camilla. Diane meets a man at Winkie’s to discuss the plan. She takes out a picture of
Camilla and says to the man, “this is the girl,” indicating her target to the hitman. Even though this is the only time when this sentence is spoken in Diane’s waking life, this line may have other significance to her. Based on the storyline of Mulholland Drive, Diane might have heard this line before, such as during her audition for movie roles. Perhaps during one of her auditions, a director said this sentence “this is the girl.” But instead of referring to Diane, the
“girl” referred to another actress (perhaps Camilla). In her mind, Diane might be hoping that whenever someone says “this is the girl,” the “girl” could be referring to her. Therefore, this sentence haunts and becomes significant to Diane.
In Diane’s dream, “this is the girl” appears three times. The first time is when the mafia man is meeting with the director. The mafia man asks the director to cast Camilla
Rhodes as the leading actress in his film by saying “this is the girl.” However, the director rejects the mafia man’s request. The second time is when the director is meeting with The 51
Cowboy. Because the director refuses to follow the mafia man’s order, the mafia exerts its influence to make the director’s life miserable. After a time, the director is nearly bankrupt.
In order to find a way out of this misfortune, he goes to meet The Cowboy. When they meet,
The Cowboy says to the director:
I want you to go back to work tomorrow. You were recasting the lead actress anyway.
Audition many girls for the part. When you see the girl that was shown to you earlier
today, you will say, “This is the girl.”
The line “this is the girl” appears the third time in the dream when the director is recasting the leading role on the set. When the director sees Camilla Rhodes, he tells an executive that
“this is the girl.”
This repeated line (“this is the girl”) is an example of Lynch’s manifestation of the dream-work of condensation and displacement, as well as wish fulfilment. “This is the girl” is associated with several thoughts in Diane’s waking life—for example, the thought of referring the “girl” to Camilla Rhodes and the thought of suspecting the reason why Camilla receives the leading role is because of the interference from the mafia. That is why these words recur in her dreams.
In addition to being used as a symbol of condensation, “this is the girl” serves as a symbol of displacement. In Diane’s waking life, “this is the girl” is an order to kill Camilla, but in her dream, “this is the girl” is an order to give Camilla the leading role in a movie.
Furthermore, in Diane’s dream, when the director eventually says, “this is the girl” (instead of specifically saying “Camilla Rhodes”), the “girl” refers to an actress with short blonde hair, which is also a symbol for Diane’s self in her dreams. In this sense, this sentence “this is the girl” also features Diane’s wish fulfilment.
52
In this chapter, I have discussed how Lynch used Freud’s dream theory to create the connection between Diane’s waking life and her dream in Mulholland Drive. By employing
Freud’s theory of dream-work, such as condensation, displacement and symbolic representation, Lynch translated Diane’s waking life into a dream with hidden meanings. The condensation in Diane’s dream appears in various forms with borrowed elements from her waking life, such as an object or a sentence. The displacement occurring in Diane’s dreams is mainly the displacement of affects. Lynch portrayed the displacement of affects by using a certain object or sentence as the embodiment of affects and then letting a different person use that object or say that sentence in the dream. As for the dream-work of symbolic representation, Lynch used certain objects in the dream to symbolize abstract thoughts and affects in Diane’s waking life. In a broader sense, Mulholland Drive excellently translates
Freud’s theory of dream-work and presents the theory through a cinematic form.
Usually, when a psychoanalyst tries to interpret one’s dreams, he/she needs to know what happened in that person’s waking life. The cinema audience does not know the waking life of Diane before watching the film, and because Mulholland Drive presents Diane’s dreams before presenting her waking life, it is difficult for audience members to understand the plotline or to grasp the meaning of her dream the first time they watch the film.
Mulholland Drive has to be watched at least twice so that the viewer can figure out how certain elements in Diane’s waking life are carefully related to her dream, and find clues to understand the film.
Chapter Four
Between Established Dream Theories and Innovative Dream Concepts:
Christopher Nolan’s Inception
Written and directed by Christopher Nolan, Inception features a strong cast including
Leonardo DiCaprio and other Oscar-winning and Oscar-nominated actors and actresses.14 In
2002, Nolan wrote an 80-page film treatment15 that told a story about “dream stealers.” At the time, Nolan thought that he “wasn’t ready to develop it” because he did not have enough experience or skills to deal with such challenging material, nor did he know how to emotionally engage with the story (qtd. in Weintraub). Thus, he decided to shoot other films first: Batman Begins (2005), The Prestige (2006), and The Dark Knight (2008). After finishing these films, Nolan had acquired a much greater repository of experience and
“cinematic sleights of hand” (qtd. in Hiscock), and he decided that it was the right time to make Inception. In 2009, the movie rights were purchased by Warner Bros. Originally envisioned to be a horror film, Inception was revised into a heist film and released in July
2010.
Marketed as a summer blockbuster, Inception successfully hit the box office and became the fourth highest-grossing film of 2010. Inception received mostly positive reviews, which praised the film as being both intellectual and entertaining. As Mark Kermode at BBC
Radio 5 Live said, “Inception is proof that people are not stupid, that cinema is not trash, and that it is possible for blockbusters and art to be the same thing.” Agreeing with this comment,
14 The ensemble cast includes Ken Watanabe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard, Ellen Page, Tom Hardy, Dileep Rao, Cillian Murphy, Tom Berenger, and Michael Caine. 15 A film treatment is a short document written in prose form and in the present tense, and it is usually the step between scene cards and the first draft of a screenplay. A film treatments are usually about 20 pages long. Nolan’s film treatment of Inception is longer than average film treatments.
53 54 the Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan wrote, “If you’re searching for smart and nervy popular entertainment, this is what it looks like.”
Inception has also been praised for its innovation in cinematic techniques. The production team not only built the actual set, such as a 100-foot hotel corridor which could rotate 360 degrees to mimic zero-gravity, but also utilized CGI (computer-generated imagery) effects to create, for example, the mind-altering scene in which a Paris street is rolled up and over itself. Among its many honors, Inception won four Oscars—for Best
Cinematography, Best Visual Effects, Best Sound Editing, and Best Sound Mixing.
The narration of Inception is clearer than Mulholland Drive’s. Dom Cobb (Leonardo
DiCaprio) and his partner Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) are dream thieves. They engage in corporate espionage by using technology to enter a shared dream world in which they infiltrate the subconscious16 of their targets and extract valuable information. A Japanese businessman Saito (Ken Watanabe) wants to break up a rival company. The owner of that company, Maurice Fischer (Pete Postlethwaite), is an ailing old man, and his son, Robert
Fischer (Cillian Murphy), will soon inherit the company. Saito needs Dom to implant the idea of “breaking up the company” into Robert Fischer’s mind.17 So, for this job, instead of practicing “extraction,” Dom needs to perform “inception,” which is a more difficult task. In order to perform “inception,” Dom needs to enter dreams-within-dreams. Dom assembles a group of specialists: an identity forger Eames (Tom Hardy) who can impersonate others in dreams; a pharmacologist Yusuf (Dileep Rao) who formulates a powerful sedative for the team so that they can remain stable in dreams-within-dreams; and a dream architect Ariadne
(Ellen Page) who designs the structure of the dream world.
16 In Inception, the word “unconscious” is never used. When the characters refer to the unconscious, they use the word “subconscious.” 17 Here the father-son relationship is also an issue of concern in the film, which is likely inspired by the Freudian theory of Oedipus complex. Though not a topic to be further explored in this thesis, the relationship between Robert Fischer and his father can make another great example of Inception’s translation of psychoanalytic theory. 55
In this “inception” mission, Dom and the team must bring Robert Fischer into three layers of dreams. In the first layer, the team and Fischer are in Yusuf’s dream, which is set in a city inspired by New York and Los Angeles. In the second layer, they are in Arthur’s dream, which is set in a hotel. In the third layer, they are in Eames’ dream, set in snow- covered mountains. However, a projection of Dom’s late wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard), keeps emerging across these three layers of dream to sabotage the mission, for Dom can never get rid of his subconscious memory of Mal. The ending of the film is open to the viewer’s interpretation and has stimulated heated debate concerning whether all the dreamers come back to the reality and the mission is accomplished.
Inception provides a narration which is fairly straightforward. However, some film critics argue that the way Nolan dealt with the concepts of dreams deviates from the true essence of dreams. “Mr. Nolan’s idea of the mind is too literal,” as A. O. Scott wrote, “too logical, too rule-bound to allow the full measure of madness—the risk of real confusion, of delirium, of ineffable ambiguity—that this subject requires” (“This Time”). Scott provided a hilarious but true description of the repetition of the plot:
Most of the time, one group of guys with guns chases another, in cars across the rain-
soaked streets of Los Angeles, on foot through the corridors of a retro-elegant hotel,
and on skis and snowmobiles through an icy Alpine landscape. (“This Time”)
Andrew O’Hehir shared a similar view by saying that the images in the film are “always ordered and organized with anal precision. They don’t look or feel anything like dreams.” In addition, O’Hehir pointed out that the film is “shorn of imagination, libido, spirituality or emotional depth.”
Despite certain critiques of the “mis-translation” of dream concepts in Inception, the film introduces some innovative thoughts about dreams that deserve our attention. Among these innovative thoughts, the ideas of dream-sharing and dreams-within-dreams are not 56 discussed by Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams. Inception is set in a time when people can enter others’ dreams through a surreal technology that does not exist today. The technology is presented as a device in a metal briefcase. Everyone who is going to enter the same dream must attach himself/herself to the device with a cord. In addition to imagining this technology of sharing others’ dreams, Nolan also explores the idea of dreams-within- dreams by imagining the influences between dreams of different layers. For example, the car movement in the first dream layer has an impact on the second and even the third dream layer.
Another innovative concept introduced by Inception is the idea of dream manipulation. In the dream world portrayed in the film, except for the uncontrollable projection of one’s subconscious, people have control over the dream environment and their own appearance within it. Free from any restriction (including the laws of physics), people who enter the dream world can create the world the way they want and possess appearances according to their wish.
Inception not only challenges established dream theories but also integrates Nolan’s own thoughts about dreams into the film. In what follows, I will first analyze examples from
Inception to show the film’s indebtedness to Freud’s dream theories. Then, I will discuss the similarity and differences between the new and traditional concepts of dreams, as they are developed in this film.
Examples from Inception
As in the analysis of Mulholland Drive, I also draw connections between the waking life and dreams of the protagonist, Dom Cobb. Freud’s idea that dreams attribute their elements to the waking life is reiterated in Inception, for example, through the images of Mal and their children that Dom carries and projects into his dreams. 57
before Mal committed suicide Mal decided to commit suicide
Dom’s ambivalence towards Mal in his real life is brought into the dream world by his subconscious. In Dom’s real life, Mal’s image changes from a lovely wife to a mad wife who framed Dom with her suicidal plot. Dom and Mal were a beautiful couple that explored the possibility of dreams-within-dreams together. As they went into deeper dream levels,
Dom and Mal reached a place called “limbo,”18 which is an “unconstructed dream space” with “infinite raw subconscious.” After staying in limbo for over fifty years, Mal had confused limbo with reality. In order to convince her that they are still dreaming and need to wake up and return to their real life, Dom implants an idea in Mal’s mind that “her world isn’t real. That death is the only escape.”
After Dom and Mal committed suicide in limbo, they finally woke up from their dreams and returned to the waking life. However, after waking up, Mal started acting weird, because the idea that Dom had implanted in her mind continued to affect her, making her believe that “her world isn’t real. That death is the only escape.”
Finally, on the night of their wedding anniversary, Mal decided to commit suicide (in order to wake up) by jumping off a high building. She wanted Dom to join her; however, she knew that Dom considered their current reality as their real life (which indeed it was their
18 According to the definition on Inception Wiki, “Limbo exists as a space that is not dreamt by any one individual but is a shared space where any mind can make drastic alterations of any kind without limits or obstacles. Because of the apparent lack of limitations, limbo is a dimension that can allow dreamers to manifest their deepest desires, but also unwittingly trap themselves in a world where they lose their awareness that the world created is not reality.”
58 real life) and thus would not commit suicide with her. So Mal came up with a plan. She had herself declared sane by three psychiatrists and then filed a letter with an attorney explaining that Dom had threatened to kill her and that she feared for her safety. After explaining her intention to Dom on the ledge of a building, Mal jumped off the building right in front of him. From then on, Mal in Dom’s mind symbolizes trauma and a sense of guilt.
Mal’s projection as a loving wife Mal’s projection shoots at Arthur
Mal’s projection stabs Ariadne Mal’s projection shoots at Fischer
Dom’s mixed feelings towards Mal are presented through the projections of Mal in the dream world. Sometimes, the projection of Mal is the loving wife that Dom used to know.
She is gentle and pleasant. Other times, the projection of Mal becomes a vicious femme fatale who tries to sabotage Dom’s missions. In the mission of extracting confidential information from Saito, Mal’s projection betrays Dom and has Arthur arrested. She even shoots Arthur in the leg to cause him pain. When Dom is training Ariadne for designing the dream world,
Mal’s projection also appears. She has Ariadne get caught and stabs her in the stomach with a knife. Even at the final step of incepting an idea into Fischer’s mind, the projection of Mal appears again. She shoots at Fischer and disrupts the team’s mission. Apparently Mal’s projections in the dream world are much indebted to Dom’s ambivalent relationship with Mal in the waking life. 59
last time Dom saw their children in reality Children’s projection in dreams
Children’s projection in limbo
The recurring images of children in Dom’s dream also derive from Dom’s last impression of his children in his waking life. Soon after the death of Mal, Dom is charged with the murder of his wife and has to flee from home, leaving his children behind. Dom’s last sight of his children is of them playing in the yard, their backs turning to him. This image is deeply imprinted on Dom’s mind. When he is performing espionage tasks, the image of his children’s backs recurs in the dream world. In the second dream layer, for example, when
Dom is talking to Fischer, he suddenly sees the image of his children playing nearby. Later, when he and Ariadne enter limbo, the projection of his children appears again on the street.
Indeed, the image of the children left behind becomes a symbol of condensation in
Dom’s dreams. On the one hand, the image of his children in the dream world reminds Dom of his regret for not being able to stay with his children after their mother’s death. But on the other hand, the image of his children symbolizes his goal to reunite with them. After finishing his job of “inception,” Dom is able to finally go home and return to his children.
60
New Concepts of Dreams
Some of the Freudian theories are intact in Nolan’s presentation of dreams, but Nolan also introduced innovative thoughts about dreams in Inception: the influence of one dream layer on other dream layers; the human manipulation of dream spaces and personages; the ability to share or intervene others’ dreams; and the possibility of being stuck in dreams
(limbo) and not able to wake up. In this section, I will discuss some of these innovative concepts by comparing them to the Freudian ways of understanding dreams.
1. Influence between dream layers
According to Freud, “the sensory stimuli that reach us during sleep may very well become sources of dreams” (55). Freud divided the stimuli of dreams into four types: (1) external (objective) sensory excitations, including unavoidable ones (a bright light or a noise) and unintentional movements (stung by a gnat); (2) internal (subjective) sensory excitations, which are determined by “hypnagogic hallucinations” including mostly visual and auditory hallucinations; (3) internal (organic) somatic stimuli, which derive from our internal organs when they are in states of excitation or during illnesses; and (4) purely psychical sources of stimulation, which Freud did not discuss much in The Interpretation of Dreams for “those factors are so hard to come at” and he did not acquire enough knowledge to study them (71).
Yusuf drinks champagne in the waking life The first dream layer is raining
In Inception, the influence of organic somatic stimulus upon the formation of dreams is rendered visible in the first dream layer. Before entering the first dream layer, Yusuf gulps down a glass of free champagne on the airplane. At the next moment, when the team enter the first dream layer, which is Yusuf’s dream, it is raining in the dream world. After Yusuf gets 61 into a car and meets with other team members, Arthur asks Yusuf why he did not urinate before dreaming, suggesting that it is Yusuf’s urge to urinate that causes the pouring rain in the first dream layer. According to the rule of organic stimuli’s influence over dreams, “if during sleep an organ is in a state of activity, excitation or disturbance,” such as the urge to urinate, “the dream will produce images related to the performance of the function which is discharged by the organ concerned” (Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams 69)—which in this case is the pouring rain.
In the first dream layer, In the second dream layer, the van tumbles down an incline the hotel starts spinning
While following Freud’s theory about the stimuli of dreams by portraying the influence of organic stimulus upon dreams, Nolan added a new type of stimuli: the influence from other dream layers. In the first dream layer, Yusuf is driving the van which carries the team members and Fischer and they are trying to get rid of Fischer’s projections. For a moment, Yusuf loses control of the van, which causes the van to tumble down a slope. As the van rolls down the slope in the first dream layer, the gravity starts shifting in the second dream layer. While Arthur is fighting against Fischer’s projections in the hotel corridor in the second dream layer, the whole environment is spinning as the van in the first dream layer tumbles down.
62
The van hits the rail in the first layer A loss of gravity in the second layer
An avalanche in the third layer
The van falls off a bridge in the first later Zero gravity in the second layer
Later, in order to create a “kick,”19 Yusuf attempts to drive the van off a bridge. When the van hits the rail of the bridge, the impact creates a kick and affects both the second and the third dream layers—causing a loss of gravity in the second dream layer and an avalanche in the third. As the van is falling, the second dream layer takes on zero gravity. Nolan attempted to portray the influence between dreams-within-dreams by synchronizing the movements of one dream layer with another one.
2. Dream manipulation
In Inception, one’s subconscious—which functions exactly like the unconscious in
Freud’s theories—gives rise to projections, including projections of people or objects, into the dreams. Indeed, just as the Freudian dreamer who cannot control the work their unconscious, the dreamers in Inception cannot control projections, either. Nolan portrayed this uncontrollability of projections in the film.
19 According to Inception Wiki, a “kick” is a method to wake someone up from dreams, referring to the sensation of falling or hitting water that can jolt the dreamer awake. 63
A freight train appears on the road People on the street seize Dom
For example, a freight train appears on the city streets in the first dream layer. When
Dom is driving a car on the streets, looking for Fischer, a freight train suddenly comes out of nowhere and shoves away the cars on the streets. The dream world was designed by Ariadne, but she immediately clarifies that the train is not part of her design. Later, she realizes that the train is actually a projection inserted by Dom’s subconscious. It is the train that Dom and Mal used to commit suicide in limbo (in order to escape limbo, wake up and return to the waking life.) But Dom does not know why or when the train will appear; this is a train projection inserted by Dom’s subconscious “unconsciously.”
Another obvious example of the uncontrollable projection is Dom’s projection of Mal.
Dom does not know in what images Mal will appear in the dream world, and he cannot control her actions, either. Dom describes the projections of humans in dreams as the “white blood cells” of one’s subconscious. He explains that a projection will try to find and attack any intruder in the dream, just like while blood cells “fighting an infection.” When designing
Dom’s dream, Ariadne adds numerous elements that are not derived from Dom’s waking life.
As a result, Dom’s subconscious recognizes Ariadne as an intruder and sends projections to seize hold of her. Even though these projections come from Dom’s subconscious, because the dreamer has no control over projections (or the subconscious), it is useless for him to order the projections to let go of Ariadne.
While the uncontrollability of projections bears strong echo to Freud’s theory about the unconscious, Nolan moves beyond Freud by imagining the possibility of human 64
20 manipulations over dreams through two characters: an architect and a forger. In Inception, not just the dreamer but anyone in the dream could modify dream characters, narrative, or environment.
Dom and Mal build the world in limbo Ariadne rolls over the streets
Ariadne pulls out two mirrors Then Ariadne creates a bridge
People in the dream world can change the environment without any restriction. When
Dom and Mal were in limbo, they built the environment together. In one scene Dom pushed over a pile of sand, and then a huge building behind them fell down. Nolan attempted to portray how Dom and Mal “built” the dream environment by having them build sand castles on the beach. Another example is when Ariadne changes the design in Dom’s dream. In order to test Ariadne’s designing ability, Dom brings her into his dream. She defies the laws of physics and makes the city fold over itself to form a “cube city.” Then, she even creates a bridge by pulling out two big mirrors and shattering the mirrors. This plot arrangement makes manifest one’s controllability over the environment in dreams.
20 The idea of being able to manipulate dreams may be inspired by the concept of “lucid dream,” which was coined by Dutch psychiatrist Frederik van Eeden in 1913. In a “lucid dream,” the dreamer is aware that he/she is dreaming, and he/she has certain control over the characters or environment in a dream (Haque; Spencer). 65
Eames impersonates Browning
sequence 1 sequence 2
sequence 3 sequence 4
People in the dream world can also change their appearance at will. The clearest manifestation of this is the character Eames whose job in the mission is a forger. In the first dream layer, Eames impersonates Browning. At first, when sitting in front of a dressing table,
Eames appears as himself (Tom Hardy’s face), and the reflections in the mirror also reflect his image. But then, some of the reflections in the mirror become Browning’s face (Tom
Berenger’s face). Finally, as Eames turns around, his appearance has completely changed: now the person sitting in front of the dressing table has the appearance of Browning and the reflection in the mirror has the appearance of Eames.
66
Eames impersonates the Blonde
sequence 1 sequence 2
sequence 3 sequence 4
In the second dream layer, Eames impersonates a blonde woman. When the “woman” enters the elevator, “she” meets Saito, who thinks that the woman is someone else instead of
Eames. But through the mirror in the elevator, we can see that the reflection reveals the woman’s true face as Eames. At the next moment, the “woman” in the elevator turns back to
Eames. Nolan used mirrors to present the difference between the person in front of the mirror and his/her reflection in the mirror. By doing so, Nolan distinguished the real characters
(Eames himself) from the disguised characters (Browning and the Blonde disguised by
Eames). Even though in our reality, humans have not yet developed the ability to manipulate dreams (as far as I know), Nolan imagined this possibility through his construction of the dream world in Inception.
3. Figurization of psychical apparatus
Nolan used concrete objects to figuratively represent the invisible psychical apparatus, which is possibly influenced by Freud’s discussion about the symbols in dreams. In The
Interpretation of Dreams, Freud discussed the house-symbolism in dreams by saying that
“the human body as a whole is pictured by the dream-imagination as a house and the separate organs of the body by portions of a house” (245); for example, “the heart will be represented 67 by hollow boxes or baskets” (246). Here in Inception, Nolan employed a safe to symbolize the human unconscious. In real life, the function of a safe is to secure valuable objects against damage or theft. In the dream world of Inception, the safe gives concrete image to the invisible space where people place and store important information in their mind.
What makes Nolan’s approach of using a safe as a symbol for the psychical apparatus different from Freud’s is that: Freud only pointed out that concrete objects can serve as symbols in dreams, whereas Nolan extended the concept of symbolism and further explored the functions of symbolic objects. In this case, the safe serves specific functions in the film— it makes the act of “extraction” and “inception” concrete and vivid. The conversation between Dom and Ariadne explains the function of a safe in the dream world:
Dom: “By creating something secure, like a bank vault or a jail, the mind
automatically fills it with information it’s trying to protect. Understand?”
Ariadne: “Then you break in and steal it?”
Ariadne’s response explains only half of the safe’s usage—taking something out of the safe represents extracting information from one’s mind (“extraction”). What Ariadne does not bring up is that putting something in the safe represents implanting ideas (“inception”) into one’s mind.
68
Saito’s safe Saito’s safe with an envelope
Fischer’s safe Fischer’s safe with a will and a pinwheel
Mal’s safe Mal’s safe with her totem
The film shows three characters’ safes: Saito’s, Fischer’s and Mal’s. In the beginning of the film, Dom finds Saito’s safe and successfully opens it. Inside, he finds an envelope containing important documents. However, it is not enough to simply get the envelope. One must read through the document inside the envelope to actually acquire the information. The second safe belongs to Fischer. In the first dream layer, Dom pretends to be a kidnapper and he tells Fischer that there is a safe next to his father’s deathbed and he knows the combination. In the real life, there is probably no such a safe at all; by asking for the combination of a safe, Dom instills in Fischer’s subconscious the concept of a safe and makes
Fischer believes that he knows the combination. Finally, in the third dream layer, Fischer’s subconscious indeed projects a safe. Then, Fischer walks straight to the safe and enters the combination without a doubt. Inside the safe he finds an alternative will and a pinwheel. By this time, Dom has been successful in his mission of “inception.” Another safe in the film is
Mal’s safe. When Mal was lost in limbo, in order to change her thoughts on reality, Dom 69 found her safe and implanted an idea in her mind by changing the setting of a spinning top that was locked inside that safe by Mal.
Dom’s memory elevator Ariadne tries to enter the lowest floor
The 12th floor The basement Mal and the children playing at the beach Mal’s suicide on their anniversary night
And if “a safe” could represent one’s unconscious, “an elevator” is used in Inception to figuratively represent Dom’s memory repository. By taking the elevator to different floors,
Dom can retrieve his memories of different moments in life. After Ariadne enters his dream,
Dom explains to her that the elevator is built from the moments of his life that he regrets the most. On the top floor (the 12th floor), Dom and Ariadne see the scene of Mal and the children playing at the beach. As they descend in the elevator, the lower the floor they visit, the deeper the regret they see. Finally, in the basement, Ariadne enters the scene of the night
Mal committed suicide, which is Dom’s greatest regret.
4. Transition between states of mind
Although Freud describes the nature and the formation of dreams, he did not pay attention to how one enters or exits dreams. Nolan was nonetheless interested in enacting the transitions between states of human mind. He used cinematic techniques, such as simple cuts, to imitate the transition between the waking life and dreams—and also between different dream layers. For example, Nolan believed that a simple cut from one shot to another resembles the shift of a person’s mind from waking life to dreams. During the interview in 70 the documentary film “Dreams: Cinema of the Subconscious” included in the DVD special features, Nolan said:
Over the years, people have tried dissolves, or they’ve tried more surreal transitions.
But, I think the simple cut in film grammar is one of the closet film tricks to the way
the brain actually thinks, to the way you actually perceive the world. … We’ve tried
to really push the limits of how you can use the cuts, how you can use the most simple
cinematic transition, to take the audience from literally one state of mind into another
state of mind.
Interested in the transition between states of mind, Nolan paid close attention to portraying the moment that each dream begins and the moment that a person awakes from dreams.
Based on his own experience, Nolan said that a person is often not aware of how he/she enters a dream. Usually, one’s dream starts from the middle of an event. Therefore, the way
Nolan portrayed the entry of dreams in Inception is by “throw[ing] the audience into the middle of an experience, and then they become oriented through and coming out of the dream” (“Dreams: Cinema of the Subconscious”). For example, when Ariadne is first introduced into Dom’s dream, both Ariadne and Dom are sitting at a sidewalk café. Dom asks if she remembers how they got there, but Ariadne cannot recall. That is when Ariadne realizes that they are actually dreaming, instead of sitting at a sidewalk café in the waking life. This scene is introduced only by a simple cut, so the audience might also think that
Ariadne and Dom are talking in waking life until the moment that Ariadne cannot recall how they got there. Similarly, Nolan usually brought in the beginning of a person’s waking life after he/she exits the dreams with a simple cut in the film. And this usually occurs with a character opening his/her eyes.
71
In this chapter, I have discussed Nolan’s conception of dreams—both his indebtedness to Freudian theories and his departure from these theories. I have focused in particular on Nolan’s innovative ideas to show the possibilities to understand and imagine dreams beyond Freudian psychoanalysis. In fact, besides those I have presented, there are many other interesting examples that deserve attention, such as the design of a totem (which is used to distinguish whether one is in other’s dream or not); the various speed of time in different dream layers (according to the film, ten seconds in the first dream layer are equal to three minutes in the second dream layer, which is then equal to one hour in the third dream layer); and the concept of limbo (the possibility of being stuck in dream space and not able to wake up). In brief, Nolan not only borrowed established dream theories to build the story in
Inception but also introduced new ideas. He is a “translator” with obvious creativity of his own, not to mention that his cinema successfully expresses rich thoughts about dreams with a language that is comprehensible to the audience.
After analyzing Mulholland Drive and Inception, I have found some similarities and differences between the two films. First, both films follow Freudian dream concepts in translating protagonists’ waking lives into dreams, yet the extent they rely on Freudian theories is different: the translations of dreams in Mulholland Drive is much closer to Freud’s theories than that of Inception, which draws on many other concepts of dreams, including other psychoanalytic theorists’ and Nolan’s own thoughts. One reason of this difference is perhaps the time of their production: Mulholland Drive was released in 2001 while Inception was released nine years later. The difference between these two films could indicate the evolvement of the thoughts about dreams as well as that of cinema.
Second, both films portray their protagonists’ relationship with their loved ones and how this relationship affects their judgement in dreams and reality, yet the two protagonists’ final attitudes are different: the protagonist in Mulholland Drive continues retaining (the 72 image of) her lover while the protagonist in Inception finally decides to let go of (the image of) his lover. In Mulholland Drive, Diane is woken up from her dream by The Cowboy, but then her dream and memory begin to muddle up. After waking up, Diane wishes to stay in her dream—because in her dream, her lover depends on her, whereas in the waking life, her lover betrays and leaves her. Diane’s obsession with her lover eventually leads to her suicide.
On the other hand, in Inception, Dom finally returns to the waking life after the mission is completed. Though Dom also feels the attraction of his dream—in his dream, his wife is alive, whereas in the waking life, his wife is gone—Dom accepts the truth that his wife is dead and he is happy to be able to reunite with his children in the waking life. Chapter Five
Conclusion
I began this thesis by pondering over the connection between translation, psychoanalysis, and cinema. First, I considered the idea that the process of translation is similar to that of psychoanalysis. For a “translation” to be successful, the translator must first understand the source language and the meaning of the source text and then restate the same text using a language that is comprehensible to the reader. Similarly, psychoanalysis also introduces a process of translation in that the psychoanalyst must first understand the source language (i.e. psychoanalytical knowledge) and the meaning of the source text (for example, the dream content), and then interpret the dream content by using a language (i.e. narrative) that is comprehensible to the patient. In the field of psychoanalysis, I have chosen to study the interpretation of dreams. Usually, psychoanalysts “translate” patients’ dreams into narratives in written or spoken words; however, I suggest that cinema could offer a stronger medium to interpret or translate dreams, for its visual nature mimics the functioning of human mind and dreams.
To discuss further the close relation between cinema and psychoanalysis, I have conducted a historical survey of the interactions between the two disciplines in Chapter Two.
Psychoanalysis and cinema have much in common. Both disciplines were developed in the late 19th century and introduced innovative and powerful ways to view the world. The development of psychoanalysis and that of cinema have influenced each other. The domain of cinema has received great benefits from psychoanalysis, including employing psychoanalytic theories and concepts in analyzing cinema and further forming psychoanalytic film theory. Similarly, the domain of psychoanalysis has benefited from the powerful medium of cinema which dramatically conveys psychoanalytic thoughts to the general
73 74 public. Many films have adopted the process of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic thoughts as their subject matter. Many scholars and theorists, such as Lou Andreas-Salomé and
Stephen Heath, indicate that cinema is able to imitate human mind and also represent dreams.
In this thesis, in addition to studying the interactions between psychoanalysis and cinema, I have analyzed two contemporary films to demonstrate how cinema could engage with the psychoanalytic dream theories.
In Chapter Three, I introduced the Freudian theory of dream formation and analyzed examples from David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. The process of dream formation turns latent dream-thoughts into manifest dream-content. Dream-works includes four types: condensation, displacement, representation and secondary revision. Through dream-work, elements presented in the manifest dream go through a certain degree of distortion.
Mulholland Drive is a contemporary film that showcases the distortion in dreams. Based on
Lynch’s creation of the waking life and dreams in the film, I selected elements that appear in the waking life and then compared them with relevant elements that appear in the dream. I discovered that the way Lynch portrayed dreams correlates with the Freudian theories on dream-work and the idea of “dream as wish fulfilment.” Lynch faithfully “translated” the
Freudian dream theory in his cinematic creation and Mulholland Drive could be deemed a great example of interdisciplinary translation.
In Chapter Four, I analyzed Christopher Nolan’s conception of dreams in Inception.
Unlike Mulholland Drive, Inception brings to the fore the confusion between the waking life and dreams. From my analysis, I have discovered that Nolan also respected Freud’s dream theory. At the same time, Nolan explored the possibility of innovative concepts, such as dreams-within-dreams and dream manipulation. In addition, Nolan was interested in the possible blurring line between dreams and reality. He thus used simple cuts in films to 75 portray the quick transitions between waking life and dreams. Like Mulholland Drive,
Inception could also be considered a successful interdisciplinary translation.
To wrap up my discussion in this thesis, I would return to my definitions of
“interdisciplinary translation” and “intermedium translation.” First, “interdisciplinary translation” literally refers to translating contents or concepts from one domain into another domain; it is to use the concepts and language in domain B to interpret the concepts and language in domain A. This thesis studies the translation of dream theories from the field of psychoanalysis into the field of cinema, hence offering an example of interdisciplinary translation.
Secondly, “intermedium translation” refers to translating contents from one medium into another medium. Different from “intersemiotic translation,” “intermedium translation” is an expansion of intersemiotic translation; it occurs not only within sign systems but also between other systems, such as psychical apparatus. This thesis studies the translation of oneiric language into cinematic language. Cinematic language bears resemblance to oneiric language in that both appeal to visual sensibilities. However, dreams are primarily individual and subjective while cinema enacts mostly public dreams. Dreams take place within our mind, while cinema can actually “translate” dreams and project them unto screens. Hence, translating dreams into cinema is a great example of “intermedium translation.”
This thesis investigates the process of translating dreams in films, and such translation can achieve certain results: (1) transforming something invisible into perceivable, (2) turning abstruse psychoanalytic thoughts about dreams into contents that are easier to understand for the audience, (3) reminding the viewers of their own dreaming experiences, and (4) drawing the public’s attention to thoughts about dreams and psychoanalysis. I hope that my study of
“interdisciplinary translation” and “intermedium translation” in this thesis could expand the view of “translation” and enrich the current translation studies. 76
Certainly, due to limited time and space, I had to focus my study on Freud’s The
Interpretation of Dreams and two films that engage with Freud’s dream theories. I am aware that, in addition to Freud, many other psychoanalytic theorists have proposed theories of dreams. For example, Carl Jung proposed the concept of “collective unconscious,”21 which may help us understand the shared dreams and the concept of limbo in Inception; and Fritz
Perls developed his dream theory of projection, which may shed further light on my interpretations of dream projections in both films. Moreover, with advanced technologies in neuroscience, it is even more possible to examine and develop the concepts of lucid dream, which greatly shape the thoughts about dream manipulation in Inception.
Like psychoanalytic theory, cinematic theory is rich and diverse. Future development of my project on the translation of psychoanalysis in cinema could also rely on more studies on cinematic theories and the exploration of films dealing with other psychoanalytic topics such as multiple personality and schizophrenia, as well as the study of films produced from non-Hollywood contexts.
21 According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, the term “collective unconscious” was coined by Carl Jung and refers to a form of the unconscious that belongs not to an individual but to mankind as a whole and contains archetypes or universal images and ideas. Works Cited
Arnold, William. “Lynch Returns with Stylish Mulholland Drive.” Seattle Post-Intelligencer,
11 Oct. 2001, https://www.seattlepi.com/ae/movies/article/Lynch-returns-with-stylish-
Mulholland-Drive-1068471.php.
Bassnett, Susan and André Lefevere, editors. Translation, History and Culture. Pinter, 1990.
Baudry, Jean-Louis. “The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of
Reality in Cinema.” 1975. Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, 6th ed.,
edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, Oxford University Press, 2004, pp. 206-23.
---. “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus.” 1970. Film Theory and
Criticism: Introductory Readings, 6th ed., edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen,
Oxford University Press, 2004, pp. 355-65.
BBC Culture. “The 21st Century’s 100 Greatest Films.” BBC Culture, 23 Aug. 2016,
http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20160819-the-21st-centurys-100-greatest-films.
Bell, Roger T. Translation and Translating: Theory and Practice. Longman, 1991.
Benjamin, Andrew. “Psychoanalysis and Translation.” Translation and the Nature of
Philosophy: A New Theory of Words, Routledge, 1989, pp. 109-49.
Bergstrom, Janet. “Introduction: Parallel Lines.” Endless Night: Cinema and Psychoanalysis,
Parallel Histories, edited by Janet Bergstrom, University of California Press, 1999, pp.
1-23.
Bettinson, Gary and Richard Rushton. What is Film Theory? An Introduction to
Contemporary Debates. Open University Press, 2010.
Bhabha, Homi. “The Other Question: The Stereotype and Colonial Discourse.” 1983. The
Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in Sexuality, edited by Mandy Merck, Routledge, 1992,
pp. 312-31.
77 78
Breton, André. Manifestoes of Surrealism. 1924. Translated by Richard Seaver and Helen R.
Lane, University of Michigan Press, 1972.
Breuer, Josef and Sigmund Freud. Studies on Hysteria. 1895. Translated and edited by James
Strachey, Basic Books, 2013.
Brown, Steven T. Japanese Horror and the Transnational Cinema of Sensations. Palgrave
Macmillan, 2018.
Catford, J. C. A Linguistic Theory of Translation: An Essay in Applied Linguistics. Oxford
University Press, 1965.
Chilvers, Ian. The Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists, 4th ed. Oxford University Press,
2009.
Coriaty, Spencer. “The 15 Most Confusing Movies of All Time.” Screen Rant, 06 Jul. 2016,
https://screenrant.com/15-Most-Confusing-Movies-Of-All-Time/.
Cowie, Elizabeth. “Fantasia.” 1984. Representing the Woman: Cinema and Psychoanalysis,
Palgrave Macmillan, 1997, pp. 123-65.
Creed, Barbara. “Film and Psychoanalysis.” The Oxford Guide to Film Studies, edited by
John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson, Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 77-90.
Deane, Donald. “The 10 Most Confusing Movies of All Time.” Screen Crush, 30 May 2013,
http://screencrush.com/confusing-movies/.
Ebert, Roger. “Mulholland Drive Movie Review.” RogerEbert.com, 12 Oct. 2001,
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/mulholland-drive-2001.
Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Collective Unconscious.” Encyclopaedia Britannica,
19 Sep. 2007, https://www.britannica.com/science/collective-unconscious.
Finkelstein, Haim. The Screen in Surrealist Art and Thought. Ashgate, 2007.
Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. 1899. Translated and edited by James
Strachey, Basic Books, 2010. 79
---. “Two Encyclopaedia Articles.” 1922. The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XVIII, translated and edited by James
Strachey, Hogarth Press, 1920-1922, pp. 235-59.
Gabbard, Glen O. and Krin Gabbard. Psychiatry and the Cinema. The University of Chicago
Press, 1987.
Guldin, Rainer. “Translation as Metaphor in Psychoanalysis, Anthropology and Ethnography,
Postcolonial Theory, History and Literature.” Translation as Metaphor, Rainer Guldin,
Routledge, 2016, pp. 69-93.
Haque, Nasfim. “Lucid Dreaming: Rise of a Nocturnal Hobby.” BBC News, 31 May 2012,
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-18277074.
Heath, Stephen. “Cinema and Psychoanalysis: Parallel Histories.” 1993/1994. Endless Night:
Cinema and Psychoanalysis, Parallel Histories, edited by Janet Bergstrom, University of
California Press, 1999, pp. 25-56.
Hiscock, John. “Inception: Christopher Nolan Interview.” The Telegraph, 01 Jul. 2010,
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/filmmakersonfilm/7866677/Inception-
Christopher-Nolan-interview.html. hooks, bell. “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators.” Black Looks: Race and
Representation, South End Press, 1992, pp. 115-31.
Jakobson, Roman. “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation.” On Translation, edited by Reuben
A. Brower, Harvard University Press, 1959, pp. 232-39.
Kaplan, E. Ann. “Is the Gaze Male?” 1983. Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera, E.
Ann Kaplan, Routledge, 1996, pp. 23-35.
Kermode, Mark. “My Top Five Films of the Year.” BBC – Mark Kermode’s Film Blog, 24
Dec. 2010, 80
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/markkermode/2010/12/my_top_five_films_of_the_year.htm
l.
“Kick.” Inception Wiki, 10 May 2018, http://inception.wikia.com/wiki/Kick.
Klein, Andy, Max Garrone and Bill Wyman. “Everything You were Afraid to Ask about
Mulholland Drive.” Salon, 24 Oct. 2001,
https://www.salon.com/2001/10/24/mulholland_drive_analysis/.
Lebeau, Vicky. Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Play of Shadows. Wallflower Press, 2006.
Lewin, Bertram. “Sleep, the Mouth, and the Dream Screen.” The Psychoanalytic Quarterly,
vol. 15, no. 4, 1946, pp. 419-34.
Lewis, Robyn. “Nice Film – If You Can Get It.” The Guardian, 17 Jan. 2002,
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2002/jan/17/artsfeatures.davidlynch.
“Limbo.” Inception Wiki, 10 May 2018, http://inception.wikia.com/wiki/Limbo#.
Long, Jixing. “Changes of Translation Definitions and Turns of Translation Studies.” Cross-
Cultural Communication, vol. 8, no. 5, 2012, pp. 35-43.
Looch, Cassam. “The Most Confusing Films Ever Made.” Culture Trip, 21 Mar. 2018,
https://theculturetrip.com/europe/united-kingdom/articles/the-most-confusing-films-ever-
made/.
Lurio, Eric. “Mulholland Drive Movie Comment.” Greenwich Village Gazette, 12 Oct. 2001,
https://www.rottomat.site/source-493?page=20.
Macaulay, Scott. “The Dream Factory.” Filmmaker Magazine, vol. 1, no. 10, 2001, pp.64-67.
Mahony, Patrick. “Toward the Understanding of Translation in Psychoanalysis.” Journal of
the American Psychoanalytic Association, vol. 28, no. 2, 1980, pp. 461-75.
Mayne, Judith. “Lesbian Looks: Dorothy Arzner and Female Authorship.” How Do I Look?
Queer Film and Video, edited by Bad Object-Choices, Bay Press, 1991, pp. 103-35. 81
Metz, Christian. “Part I: The Imaginary Signifier.” 1975. Translated by Ben Brewster. The
Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, translated by Celia Britton,
Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster and Alfred Guzzetti, Indiana University Press, 1982,
pp. 1-87.
Mulvey, Laura. “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ inspired by King
Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1946).” 1981. Visual and Other Pleasures, Laura Mulvey,
Indiana University Press, 1989, pp. 29-38.
---. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” 1975. Visual and Other Pleasures, Laura
Mulvey, Indiana University Press, 1989, pp. 14-26.
Newmark, Peter. A Textbook of Translation. Prentice-Hall International, 1988.
O’Hehir, Andrew. “Inception: A Clunky, Overblown Disappointment.” Salon, 15 Jul. 2010,
https://www.salon.com/2010/07/15/inception.
Packer, Sharon. Dreams in Myth, Medicine, and Movies. Praeger, 2002.
---. Movies and the Modern Psyche. Praeger, 2007.
Quendler, Christian. “Apparatus Theory (Baudry).” The Routledge Encyclopedia of Film
Theory, edited by Branigan, Edward, and Warren Buckland, Routledge, 2014, pp. 14-20.
Rank, Otto. Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development. 1932. Translated by
Charles Francis Atkinson, W. W. Norton Company, 1989.
---. The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study. 1925. Translated and edited by Harry Tucker Jr.,
The University of North Carolina Press, 2012.
Ranker Film. “The Most Confusing Movies Ever Made.” Rank, 12 Jun. 2018,
https://www.ranker.com/list/most-confusing-movies-ever-made/ranker-film.
Ricoeur, Paul. “Image and Language in Psychoanalysis.” 1978. On Psychoanalysis: Writings
and Lectures, vol. 1, Paul Ricoeur and translated by David Pellauer, Polity Press, 2012,
pp. 94-118. 82
---. On Translation. Translated by Eileen Brennan, Routledge, 2006.
Scott, A. O. “Critic’s Notebook; Shoving through the Crowd to Taste Lyrical Nostalgia.” The
New York Times, 17 May 2001, https://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/17/movies/critic-s-
notebook-shoving-through-the-crowd-to-taste-lyrical-nostalgia.html.
---. “This Time the Dream’s on Me.” The New York Times, 15 Jul. 2010,
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/16/movies/16inception.html.
Shan, Ning. “‘Letter Correspondence’ in the Mini-Series Pride and Prejudice: The Analysis
of Semiotics Translation from the Perspective of A Theory of Adaptation.” MA Thesis,
National Taiwan Normal University, 2018.
Spencer, Barbara. “Conscious in Dreamland: The Neuroscience of Lucid Dreaming.”
Neuwrite, 22 Feb. 2018, https://neuwritesd.org/2018/02/22/conscious-in-dreamland-the-
neuroscience-of-lucid-dreaming/.
Stam, Robert. Film Theory: An Introduction. Blackwell, 2000.
Steiner, George. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, 3rd ed. Oxford
University Press, 1998.
Taubin, Amy. “In Dreams.” Film Comment Magazine, vol. 37, no. 5, 2001, pp. 51-54.
Traub, Valerie. “The Ambiguities of “Lesbian” Viewing Pleasure: The (Dis)articulations of
Black Widow.” Out in Culture: Gay, Lesbian and Queer Essays on Popular Culture,
edited by Corey K. Creekmur and Alexander Doty, Duke University Press, 1995, pp.
115-36.
Turan, Kenneth. “Movie Review: Inception.” Los Angeles Times, 16 Jul. 2010,
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jul/16/entertainment/la-et-inception-20100716.
Walker, Janet. “Textual Trauma in Kings Row and Freud.” Endless Night: Cinema and
Psychoanalysis, Parallel Histories, edited by Janet Bergstrom, University of California
Press, 1999, pp. 171-87. 83
Weintraub, Steve. “Christopher Nolan and Emma Thomas Interview Inception – They Talk
3D, What Kind of Cameras They Used, Pre-Viz, WB, and a Lot More!” Collider, 25
Mar. 2010, http://collider.com/director-christopher-nolan-and-producer-emma-thomas-
interview-inception-they-talk-3d-what-kind-of-cameras-they-used-pre-viz-wb-and-a-lot-
more/.
Žižek, Slavoj. Enjoy Your Symptom!: Jacques Lacan In Hollywood and Out, Revised ed.,
Routledge, 2001.
84
Films Cited
Anderson, Brad, director. Stonehearst Asylum. Millennium Films, 2014.
Aronofsky, Darren, director. Black Swan. Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2010.
Ayoade, Richard, director. The Double. StudioCanal, 2013.
“David Lynch Talks Mulholland Drive.” Youtube, uploaded by roomroom6, 12 May 2011,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gf1sfVpw9OY.
“Dreams: Cinema of the Subconscious.” Special Features. Inception DVD 2-Disc Special
Edition, Warner Bros. Pictures, 2010.
Fincher, David, director. Fight Club. 20th Century Fox, 1999.
García, Rodrigo, director. Passengers. TriStar Pictures, 2008.
Hitchcock, Alfred, director. Spellbound. United Artists, 1945.
Huston, John, director. Freud: The Secret Passion. Universal Pictures, 1962.
Kon, Satoshi, director. Paprika. Sony Pictures Entertainment Japan, 2006.
Linklater, Richard, director. Waking Life. Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2001.
Lumière, Auguste and Louis Lumière, directors. L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat.
Société Lumière, 1896.
Lynch, David, director. Mulholland Drive. Universal Pictures, 2001.
Nolan, Christopher, director. Batman Begins. Warner Bros. Pictures, 2005.
---. The Dark Knight. Warner Bros. Pictures, 2008.
---. Inception. Warner Bros. Pictures, 2010.
---. The Prestige. Warner Bros. Pictures, 2006.
Pabst, Georg Wilhelm, director. Secrets of a Soul. UFA, 1926.
Perret, Léonce, director. Le Mystère des roches de Kador. Société des Etablissements L.
Gaumont, 1912.
Rye, Stellan and Paul Wegener, directors. The Student of Prague. DBG, 1913.
85 86
Scorsese, Martin, director. Shutter Island. Paramount Pictures, 2010.
Sivan, Ori, head writer. BeTipul. HOT3, 2005-08.
Villeneuve, Denis, director. Enemy. Pathé, 2013.