Seeing, Sensing, Saying: Holding Patterns in the Homesman (2014)

Seeing, Sensing, Saying: Holding Patterns in The Homesman (2014)

Scott Krzych

Intertexts, Volume 21, Issues 1-2, Spring-Fall 2017, pp. 67-88 (Article)

Published by University of Nebraska Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/itx.2017.0003

For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/721366

[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ] Seeing, Sensing, Saying Holding Patt erns in The Homesman (2014)

sCOTT KRZYCH

As we well know, early psychoanalytic fi lm theorists sought to draw attention to the deceptive quality of cinematic narratives and their corre- sponding images. Authors from Jean-Louis Baudry to Christian Metz to Laura Mulvey, among many others, relied on a range of psychoanalytic concepts, fi rst, to identify how the cinematic screen seduces viewers with fantasmatic lures, and, second, to conceive alternative paths that might rescue viewers from the lies projected before them. More recently, however, Lacanian thinkers have off ered a revised—and signifi cantly more complex— account of cinematic spectatorship and its relation to fantasy. As Todd McGowan has argued, for instance, deception does not always inhibit the truth but rather may function as the very fi ctive means by which truth, as such, becomes accessible to speaking beings in the fi rst place. “When we lie,” McGowan writes, “we create a distinction between how we appear to others and how we appear to ourselves, and we thereby establish an interior space of freedom from the demands of the external world. In this way, lying functions as an assertion of one’s subjectivity.”1 In the essay that follows, I similarly contend that fantasy may provide the means for a subject’s access to freedom and that cinematic style can off er precise formulations to illustrate and enact this curious feature of subjectivity. More specifi cally, and rather than taking for granted the function of fantasy— as if the experience of self- deception is a given or a capacity possessed by any and all subjects— I want to consider how the very capacity for fantasy may emerge through the creative exchanges 68 intertexts 21.1–2 · spring–fall 2017

Fig. 1. that occasionally occur between subjects and thereby provide the positive means for intersubjective care. Before going further, let me draw from a relatively recognizable cinematic example to off er a point of clarifi cation in advance. In an iconic shot from Unforgiven (Dir. Clint Eastwood, 1992), William Munny (Eastwood) sits behind Delilah (Annah Th omson) and lies to her (Figure 1). She has just off ered him a “free one”; that is, she has volunteered her body to him at no charge as an advance on the bounty she and her fellow prostitutes have off ered to avenge her assault at the hands of a drunken cowboy earlier in the fi lm. Munny declines, but he realizes immediately that his refusal comes at an emotional cost for Delilah, who suspects he is repulsed by the conspicuous scars on her face in the aft ermath of the assault. Positioned in a manner not unlike an analytic setting, Munny off ers an explanation: “I can’t on account of my wife . . . She’s watching over my young ones.” Th e story he tells has its intended eff ect: Delilah is relieved to learn his abstinence is not a rejection of her but an act of loyalty to his wife. At the same time, the cinematic audience realizes that Munny’s gesture of matrimonial commitment is metaphorical; his wife died several years ago, and his reference to her “watching over” his children carries a generically religious connotation of the dead looking down on the living from heaven. To be sure, Munny’s lie works in the service of intersubjective care— it makes Delilah feel better— but it likewise maintains the Krzych: Seeing, Sensing, Saying 69

Fig. 2. deceiver in a privileged place of authority. In other words, Delilah recov- ers emotionally from the perceived rejection but only because her ego receives validation from an outside source. Unforgiven, like several other contemporary fi lms directed by Eastwood, positions the white masculine hero as the only character with the strength to hold the emotional excesses of the characters around them.2 Here, even though the lie is off ered with the intent to mend the woman’s wounds, and perhaps even does so immediately, it also maintains the status quo of the intersubjective hierarchy, preserving the established power dynamic; the character positioned in the place of the analyst remains the (only) one able to appropriate the creative power of the signifi er. In other words, fantasy, as it is deployed here, preserves the status quo, maintains a safe distance between subjects, and thereby lacks the more radical potential of a deception that calls attention to the inherently fantasmatic qualities of all communication (as suggested by McGowan). In another contemporary Western fi lm, one that concerns me for the remainder of this essay, Th e Homesman (Dir. Tommy Lee Jones, 2014), an adaptation of a novel of the same name by Glendon Swarthout, we fi nd a diff erent and more properly Lacanian account of the construction of fantasy, particularly fantasy as something shared, and even constituted, between subjects. More specifi cally, throughout Th e Homesman we fi nd that a capacity for fantasy emerges from a transference relation between its primary characters, that is, from intimate exchanges between people 70 intertexts 21.1–2 · spring–fall 2017 productive of eventual psychic change. As we will see, the staging of fantasy in the fi lm, rather than preserving the status quo and maintaining existing social relations, instead introduces just enough ambiguity into the characters’ image of self and world to promote the possibility for something new to emerge in response.

Fantasy, Mise-en- scène, and Missing Affects

Th e confl ict of Th e Homesman centers on the mental breakdowns of three women living through impossibly harsh circumstances in the Ne- braska territory. Mary Bee Cuddy (Hilary Swank), who lives and works her farm by herself (Figure 2), volunteers to transport the women via horse-drawn wagon across barren landscape to a church in Iowa where the women can receive appropriate care. Th ough Mary Bee is resolute in her commitment to these women and their survival, she is also clearly taxed by the diffi culty of the journey, by the horrors she encounters along the way, and by her struggle to fi nd a companion with whom she can share her burdens. In the fi lm’s opening moments, we fi nd Mary Bee farming a dry plot of land. Her life is a struggle, but she is surviving well enough on her own. She does not need a husband; nevertheless, she wants a husband, but not because she maintains a romantic ideal or commitment to the institution of marriage as such. Rather, in her eminent pragmatism, she recognizes the material benefi ts such a partnership could bring— a shared work- load, combined resources, possible off spring, and so on. In the fi rst of what will be two failed marriage proposals made by Mary Bee throughout the narrative, she interrupts a meal she has prepared for her younger neighbor, Bob Giffi n (Evan Jones), with an abrupt, rhetorical question: “Why not marry?” As she goes on to explain, she can think of no reasons against their marriage as she sees it: “Land, animals, implements, lives— the whole ball of wax. We could use my capital and knowhow to improve your claim and mine. And if the union produces children, then so much the better. Looked at from any angle, it works” (emphasis added). As it turns out, though, there is at least one other angle from which to judge the speculative picture Mary Bee attempts to paint. Bob refuses her off er, Krzych: Seeing, Sensing, Saying 71

Fig. 3. explaining his intention to “go back East” in search of a more suitable, or desirable, wife. Mary Bee fails to align Bob’s vision of his future with hers. Impor- tantly, this failure marks a divergence on the characters’ part concerning their aff ective connection to the domestic mise-en- scène. Prior to her proposal of marriage, Mary Bee cooks for Bob an elaborate meal of fried chicken and peach pie; she ends the meal with entertainment, “playing” the piano and singing for her companion (who nods off to sleep during the performance). Lacking an actual piano, Mary Bee fi ngers an embroi- dered cloth mat she has laid on a table to simulate where a piano might eventually be placed (Figure 3). Nevertheless, the evening’s simulation of domestic tranquility, like the absent piano, will continue to lack its most important object—the husband for whom Mary Bee constructs the con- jugal mise-en- scène in the fi rst place. Her image of the future, though appropriately described and eff ectively simulated, nevertheless fails in its intended goal. Bob cannot picture himself in the scene she has arranged for him. On its face, this early scene from Th e Homesman provides a helpful illustration of fantasy, particularly as the concept has been developed and applied in psychoanalytic fi lm criticism. In Elizabeth Cowie’s early and infl uential account, fantasy should not be understood simply as wish-fulfi llment by which a subject imagines the solution to a problem. 72 intertexts 21.1–2 · spring–fall 2017

Instead, fantasy concerns a certain (re)staging of a problem in a manner that imaginatively reconstructs the world surrounding the subject while also leaving the subject relatively intact. As Cowie puts it, “Fantasy involves, is characterized by, not the achievement of desired objects, but the arranging of, a setting out of, desire; a veritable mise en scène of desire . . . Fantasy as a mise en scène of desire is more a setting out of lack, of what is absent, than a presentation of a having, a being present.”3 Richard Rushton and Gary Bettinson off er a helpful gloss of Cowie on this topic. As they describe it, fantasy imagines a certain, improved position for the subject within the intersubjective fi eld of the Other. Fantasy, they write, is a matter of imagining oneself to be in a situation–a “scene”– which maps out the possibility of pleasure. What such fantasies typically entail is a change in one’s social circumstances; that is to say, what is typically at stake in fantasizing is a change in one’s relations to other people. If one fantasizes about obtaining a new job, for example, then such a fantasy is not simply about having a better job. It will also usually mean imagining one has more money, and that one will be better able to provide for oneself or one’s family– thus, raising one’s profi le in the eyes of family members– or that one will be more respected by virtue of having a better job, and so on.4

To be sure, the fantasmatic image Mary Bee stages, both through description and simulation, imagines a series of relations around a constitutive absence— the missing husband. Unfortunately for her, Bob’s rejection ensures her fantasy must continue on unrevised for the foreseeable future. In addition to the fi lm’s eff ective illustration of fantasy in Cowie’s (Lacanian) sense of the term, I am also interested in how this scene, and the rest of the fi lm, raises the issue of fantasy as a problem of intersubjective aff ect.5 As we have seen already, Mary Bee off ers a strategic and relatively convincing account of an imaginary future and this future’s attendant benefi ts for her intended partner. Bob’s rejection of the scene is not a rejection of the relations Mary Bee draws— he still intends to marry— but of Mary Bee’s place in the scene. Th ough they Krzych: Seeing, Sensing, Saying 73 see the same, or a similar, image, Bob feels diff erently about it. What the scene is missing, even more than Bob’s willing participation, I argue, is an emotional connection that might lead Bob to reconceive his image of the future to align with the one off ered to him, or to suppose that Mary Bee might indeed have something desirable to off er him. Th e interaction lacks transference, in other words. I want to suggest, then, a divergent path to the examination of fantasy in fi lm, one that begins with Lacan and then passes briefl y through the object- relations theories of Christopher Bollas.6 What follows is neither a critique of cultural fantasy nor a proposal for how we might imagine fantasy’s fundamental breakdown, as has been done so oft en before by psychoanalytic thinkers in the theoretical humanities. Instead, I want to consider how the very capacity to fantasize, where that capacity did not exist previously, may serve as a positive and necessary step for a subject as he or she comes to terms with the excesses of their desire. Along the way, I will off er a brief suggestion for how a consideration transference and countertransference within the structure of fantasy may also suggest new approaches to the always frought issue of cinematic spectatorship.

Transfers of Feeling

For Lacan, transference describes the repetition in the analytic setting of the patient’s unconscious desire. “Th e reality of transference,” Lacan notes in his seminar devoted to the subject, “is thus the presence of the past.”7 Transference provides an aff ective connection between analyst and analysand through which the pair may identify and reorient the latter’s relationship to desire. Interestingly, then, the emergence of a new form of desire occurs when the analysand, through his or her transferential relationship to the analyst, submits to a certain manner of self- objectifi cation within language. Th is is how Lacan puts it early in his career, in Seminar I: “[I]f the subject commits himself to searching aft er truth as such, it is because he places himself in the dimension of ignorance–it doesn’t matter whether he knows it or not . . . Th ere is a readiness to the transference in the patient solely by virtue of his placing himself in the position of acknowledging himself in speech, and searching out his truth to the end, the end which is there, in the analyst.”8 74 intertexts 21.1–2 · spring–fall 2017

Lacan emphasizes here the patient’s acceptance of ignorance within the context of the analytic setting. Th rough free association, at least in part, a subject may come to acknowledge “himself in speech.” Th e subject’s unconscious is aff orded greater freedom to demonstrate itself through speech and thereby crystallize the areas of symptomatic repetition in the subject’s discourse. Such an acknowledgment of one’s subjection to language, however, also carries with it dangerous psychic byproducts, most notably, for Lacan, the rising prominence and authority of the analyst for the analysand. As the analyst gains esteem and importance in the patient’s life, becoming incorporated as a key point of reference into the patient’s idio- syncratic desire, the analyst must refuse, Lacan maintains, to respond as merely one more authority fi gure among others in the patient’s life. Instead, and in order to bring the analysis to a successful conclusion, the analyst must function as nothing more than a formal operator, the means by which the patient’s particular language—the discourse of desire— demonstrates itself. Th e transference, therefore, provides the very means by which the analysis may begin in earnest, and likewise entails a fundamental risk: the re- inscription of the patient’s fantasy in a new form, namely, one that privileges the analyst as the new organizing locus of the patient’s fantasy. As Lacan will reiterate throughout his career, and especially following Seminar VII: Th e Ethics of Psychoanalysis, the most fundamental ethical gesture available to an analyst is to embrace their own destruction within the analytic setting, to become nothing more than an object cause of desire (objet petit a) for the analysand, a stain that leads the patient to come into a more direct self- relation. Th e analyst accomplishes this act of self-erasure, moreover, by refusing to condone, moralize, judge, or even interpret the subject’s desire.9 It is important to note that we have thus far only touched on the transference as it relates to the beginning and ending of an analysis. I want to consider a bit more how transference occurs throughout an analysis. Im- portantly, both for this discussion and for my reading of Th e Homesman, Lacan addresses some of the challenges associated with transference in Seminar VIII, and helpfully, for my purposes, he does so by direct reference to a fantasmatic mise- en-scène . Relatively late in the seminar, Lacan makes a key distinction between Krzych: Seeing, Sensing, Saying 75 the ego-ideal and the ideal ego, treating the former as an imaginary identity, a fantasy of the subject’s seemingly coherent self-image as he or she conceives it within the world. Th e ego- ideal, by contrast, functions as a more constitutive, symbolic point of reference by which a subject establishes a sense of intersubjective stability, a base upon which the fantasmatic details of an imaginary self (or ideal ego) can be constructed. To clarify the point, Lacan off ers the following analogy: “Th e ideal ego is a boy from a good family sitting at the wheel of his little sports car. With it, he’s going to take you for a ride. He’s going to show off . He’s going to take some risks, which is not a bad thing, he’s going to be a bit reckless . . . [I]f the kid gives himself over to scabrous deeds, why is that? In order to catch a girl’s eye.”10 Lacan describes the ideal ego as both a performance and a staging of relations to produce an intended eff ect. “Th e ego-ideal, which is closely related to the play and function of the ideal ego,” Lacan continues, “is truly constituted by the fact that at the outset, if he has his little sports car, it is because he is from a fi ne family, because he is a rich man’s son, and because– to change registers– if Marie- Chantal, as you know, joins the Communist Party, it’s to piss off her father.”11 Th e fantasmatic scene constructed by the ideal-ego, then, requires a more fundamental starting point, the symbolic means by which the subject produces the scene, or in Lacan’s more fundamental sense, the means by which the subject conceives of him- or herself as a subject in the fi rst place. In both examples Lacan off ers— the boy with the sports car who draws from the father’s wealth to represent himself in a positive light, or the daughter who acts out in rebellion against the father— such performances demonstrate what Lacan calls the introjection of the paternal signifi er.12 Separate and distinct from the child’s biographical interactions with their parents, Lacan treats the paternal order of language as that which gives us the capacity to perform an image of our identity in the fi rst place, as that which allows us to pursue whatever we deem to be an ideal. Or, as he puts it, “[T]his [paternal] signifi er allows us, as it were, to extract ourselves from that world [of actual kinship relations] in order to imagine that we are pissing him off and to sometimes even succeed in doing so.”13 Th ere is an important link, therefore, between transference and the ego-ideal. If an analyst follows Lacan’s suggestion and refuses to become 76 intertexts 21.1–2 · spring–fall 2017 a substitute authority fi gure, then, as a consequence, the analysis will provide no satisfaction for the patient, at least not in any typical sense of the word, because the analysis will lead the patient to become his or her own point of reference, his or her own ego ideal, a transformation conducive to a radical, and necessarily precarious, experience of freedom.14 Indeed, Lacan clearly states in Seminar VIII, and will reiterate throughout his career, his intention to lead patients to such a point of radical freedom in which they become their own arbiters of their desire, guarantors of their own truth and unencumbered by any external point of reference, or authority, to guide them. It is here, though, that I want to point to another moment in Seminar VIII, when Lacan describes an experience with one of his own patients where he does not refuse her transference, it seems, but rather allows himself to be incorporated into her fantasy precisely as an external authority, even as a moral judge. In the same session I have already cited, Lacan ends the lecture with a brief anecdote. He describes a female patient, “someone who knows how to sustain and deploy the positions of her desire admirably.” According to his account, the woman has been engaged in a series of extra- marital aff airs while also maintaining the image, among her peers, of a presumably happy marriage and familial life. Nevertheless, Lacan notes, she has entered into analysis; her appar- ent “success” reveals at least a minimal unconscious disturbance by the mere fact that she has come to him for help. In Lacan’s interpretation, she seeks in the analyst an external vantage point by which her secret behavior can be seen and judged: “I was her ego-ideal, inasmuch as I was the ideal point at which order was maintained.” As Lacan continues, not only does she use the analysis as an opportunity to share her secret with at least one person; she also wants her analyst to judge her, deem her immoral, and thereby anchor, from an external reference point, her sense of guilt. “[I]t was essential at that point in time that her analyst not be immoral,” Lacan off ers. “Had I been so tactless as to approve of any of her excesses, the result would not, I suspect, have been pretty to be- hold.”15 Th is comment is instructive and perhaps even counterintuitive, given how oft en Lacan’s cautioned analysts to resist the countertransference, to resist, namely, giving the patient what they want. Nevertheless, Lacan here allows his patient to maintain a false image of him as a moral Krzych: Seeing, Sensing, Saying 77 authority in order that the analysis may continue; though Lacan-the- individual makes no judgment of her moral behavior, Lacan-the- analyst withholds his amorality so as to hold the analysis in suspension until the moment when she no longer demands he function as the arbiter of her desire— that is, the point at which his judgment no longer matters to her whatsoever. As Kaja Silverman puts it, “psychoanalysis can only achieve its end by bringing us to ourselves—by making us the speakers of the word which is our own.”16 As I return to Th e Homesman, it is important to note that no character achieves the kind of self-refl exive agency that Silverman, aft er Lacan, describes and promotes. However, what we do fi nd in the fi lm is a certain development whereby the characters begin to demonstrate a basic capacity for fantasy, where the slightest tinge of ambiguity begins to break the characters’ utter sense of self- certainty. Like Lacan’s anecdote above, I argue, such psychic developments occur through Mary Bee’s commitment to avoid disagreements that would bring the confl ict between her and her companion to a breaking point, to hold the excess aff ects of another until he is more psychically prepared to do so himself.

At Home in Language

Th e relationship between Th e Homesman’s two protagonists begins as a transactional one. Setting the narrative’s confl ict in motion, and following soon aft er the failed marriage proposal to her neighbor, Mary Bee volunteers to transport three mentally disturbed women across the Nebraska territory on her own. Along the way, she stumbles across George (Tommy Lee Jones), who has been left to die by vigilantes for claim jumping; she off ers him money and alcohol in exchange for his help on the diffi cult journey ahead. In the fi lm’s conventional development of characters, the relationship between the two will develop from this initial, pragmatic exchange into a more intimate partnership illustrative, I suggest, of the transference relationship described by Lacan. By the fi lm’s conclusion, Mary Bee’s commitment to the care of others produces a defi nitive change in George, who otherwise presents himself throughout most of the fi lm as entirely self- absorbed and self- interested. An early disagreement between the characters indicates the radical Fig. 4.

Fig. 5.

Fig. 6. Krzych: Seeing, Sensing, Saying 79 diff erence between them as it concerns their competing conceptions of self, other, and world. Before embarking on their journey, and stopping briefl y at George’s home to collect his belongings, Mary Bee is confused when George leads her to a house she knows belongs to someone else (Figure 4). Mary Bee: Th at’s Bob Giffi n’s place. George: It’s abandoned . . . Th at’s abandonment– just look at it (Figure 5). Mary Bee: He didn’t abandon nothing. He just went back east to fi nd himself a wife (Figure 6). George: It’s abandoned. It sure is.

Th e confi dence by which George describes the humble, stone dwell- ing is manifestly self- serving. His description of the home as abandoned serves to erase the home’s owner and thereby obscure his act of appropriation. If no one lives there and there is no chance of their return, then, by George’s logic, there is no fault in his occupying it. Language, as George deploys it here, materializes and enacts desire, as if the object before him could be possessed simply through an act of naming it as his own. Accordingly, we could say that George’s attempt to take possession of a home that does not belong to him works to the exact opposite end that Heidegger intends when the philosopher famously writes, “Language is the house of being.”17 In Heidegger’s ontology, language maintains its own being separate from any person who speaks it; language’s independent status, then, means we may fi nd ourselves appropriated by language, en- snared in its particular ways of revealing the world. By contrast, George treats language as a tool to enforce his desire, to remake the world in the narrowest of images, and he likewise relies on mere reiteration (“It’s abandoned. It sure is.”) to dismiss Mary Bee’s statement to the contrary. In this light, we can better understand the force and eff ect of Mary Bee’s disagreement. Hers is the more factual one, to be sure—the home belongs to Bob Giffi n, who is away and plans to return— but there is an excess of aff ect contained in her retort. Th is excess of emotion, however, reveals something much more complex than the gendered divisions, oft en manifest in Western fi lms, between masculine will- to- power and 80 intertexts 21.1–2 · spring–fall 2017 feminine care.18 Her voice cracks, ever so slightly, when she notes that Bob has left for the period of time necessary to fi nd a wife. Th e cinematic audience knows in this moment that Mary Bee’s assessment is correct because, in the fi lm’s fi rst scene, as I have noted, we hear Bob tell her of his intention to do just that. We also know that this statement comes at an emotional cost for Mary Bee; Bob tells her his plan in the very act of rejecting her proposal of marriage to him.19 I am interested, then, not simply in the diff erence of opinion expressed by George and Mary Bee but in a certain aff ective persistence located in the latter’s enunciation. Th e crack in her voice, we should note, marks a point of excess in her ut- terance, the very point at which a description of the world meets with the desire of the one who speaks about it. Her wavering voice demonstrates the inexorable link between one and the other. Mary Bee shows herself to be a subject of enunciation—a subject spoken by language as well as a speaker of language—and thereby distin- guishes herself from George’s forceful attempt at linguistic theft . At the same time, interestingly, the fi lm’s narration demonstrates its own enunciative status, drawing our attention to the impact of the past scene (of marital rejection) on the present one. Aft er all, the crack in Mary Bee’s voice goes unnoticed by George, and there is likewise no other character on scene to mark this embodied excess for what it is— though the audience certainly may notice it. As Cowie has argued, “the process of narrating [may imply] an enunciating subject, an intentional force which is guiding our understanding, a storyteller who unfolds the tale for us.”20 For an attentive viewer aff ected by Mary Bee’s emotional response, this connection between past and present invites the viewer into a mode of countertransference, to feel what the character feels, or, more specifi - cally, to hold the excess feeling expressed in the statement even if the character does not explicitly acknowledge it herself. For now, I simply want to emphasize the structural relation that subtends the characters’ disagreement about the mise-en- scène before them. Simply put, Mary Bee’s explicitly aff ective reaction to the scene demonstrates a fantasmatic coordination of what the scene presents, what it excludes, and what returns. In contrast to George’s description, which hinges on the simple declaration of absence or presence, Mary Bee sees (and feels) what is lacking in the scene. Her enunciative slip, furthermore, demonstrates the Krzych: Seeing, Sensing, Saying 81 emotional cost of her appropriation by language, which speaks her desire independently of her own intentions, beyond her conscious control. Th e antagonism between the two characters will continue throughout their journey. One fi nal disagreement occurs when, despite their ongo- ing confl ict, Mary Bee proposes marriage, emphasizing, as she did with Bob, the practical benefi ts should George join her on the farm. George: I’m no farmer. Mary Bee: Well, you could try. You could try. George: I tried it once with a widow woman north of Womego. Up and down them damned rows, daylight to dark. Th ere’s pretti- er things to look at than the ass end of an ox. One morning I just rode off . Mary Bee: You deserted her. George: When I left , I was sorry, but I never did look back. Mary Bee: I see.

Much like their fi rst disagreement, Mary Bee holds the emotional bur- den wrought by their diff ering opinions; here, she registers the aff ective force of his abandonment of the “widow woman,” whereas George insists he “never looked back.” As in their earlier disagreement, each describes the same scene or event in very diff erent ways, but Mary Bee nevertheless off ers a fi nal phatic response— I see—thereby ending the disagreement about the past and returning the conversation to the present. Th is is not the fi rst time that Mary Bee utters the phrase, “I see.” When she learns the details surrounding the mental breakdown of a nineteen- year-old girl (one of three mentally ill women she volunteers to help), I see signals her aff ective reaction to trauma. When she later listens to George describe his army unit’s massacre of an indigenous tribe, includ- ing women and children, she off ers the same reply—I see. Neither a literal statement about vision nor a claim of understanding, I see, as Mary Bee off ers it, marks a point of aff ective exchange. Troubled or overwhelmed by what she encounters, the statement fi lls a gap in the conversation. It adds nothing descriptive or affi rmative to what she hears and amounts to little more than an acknowledgment that the other speaker has been 82 intertexts 21.1–2 · spring–fall 2017 heard. I see maintains a link between Mary Bee and the other with whom she is in dialogue, like Lacan’s willingness to hold without commentary his patient’s false projections onto him, and sutures the intersubjective connection to which the brief statement responds. I see holds the conversation, and thus the relation between the speakers, in abeyance; it maintains an aff ective link between interlocutors where to say more could very well mean the collapse of communication. What Mary Bee sees but does not say, moreover, is not an impasse, as if, overwhelmed by what she hears, she lacks the words to express her excess of feeling. Th ere does indeed seem to be an excess of feeling, but this overwhelming presence, which threatens to install a divide between speakers, is rendered somehow less debilitating and more productive for the purposes of the social bond because she holds this excess at bay. In other words, the act of care, and the shared space of creativity it promotes, demonstrates the similarly creative possibilities of fantasy.

Holding Patterns

Like Lacan, contemporary psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas conceives of psychoanalytic treatment as an opportunity for patients to reorient desire according to an internal rather than an external point of reference. Also like Lacan, Bollas holds that such a productive psychic shift in perspective means that the analysand, in becoming her own point of reference or ego ideal, must eventually depose the analyst of his or her place of presumed authority. But whereas Lacan describes this shift as a symbolic one, occurring through a reorganization of the paternal logic of the signifi er, Bollas emphasizes the pre- Oedipal, maternal function of what D. W. Winnicott terms holding. In infancy, holding provides the child with an early sense of care prior to the violence of castration, when, as Lacan sees it, the subject is psychically split by his or her entrance into language. As Bollas puts it, “Th rough the experience of being the other’s object, which we internalize, we establish a sense of two-ness in our being, and this subject- object paradigm further allows us to address our inherited disposition, or true self, as other.”21 Th us, if an analysis progresses positively, the subject may regain this sense of two-ness and begin to relate to themselves as both subject and object, to care and hold Krzych: Seeing, Sensing, Saying 83 themselves, rather than projecting their singular desires into the world in the hope that the Other (ego ideal) will affi rm them.22 Before the patient can experience this internal dialectic, however, the analyst must fi rst provide the support for the patient who remains otherwise oblivious to their own unconscious discourse. In this clinical exchange, for Bollas, the analyst must be used by the patient and thereby become the medium by which the patient’s unconscious traumata are brought to light. Th e interpretations Bollas off ers in the analytic setting are not intended to off er fi nal insight into the truth of the patient’s unconscious; he maintains, along with Lacan, that the unconscious remains forever a mystery, even for the patient and especially for the analyst. Instead, Bollas conceives of the analysis, aft er Winnicott, as a holding environment, a place in which the patient may begin to treat him- or herself as an object of study. In other words, the dynamic play between transference and countertranference is a formal activity, modeled by the analyst for the patient so the patient may eventually internalize the process and leave the analyst behind. By the end of the analysis, the patient will have gained nothing concrete from the analyst other than a capacity for analysis: “Th e discourse of character is no longer emptied into the external object world where its representation is enigmatic and its recep- tion fosters bewilderment . . . Th e discourse is now uttered to an internal other, that other constituted in the patient through identifi cation with the function and psychosomatic trace of the analyst.”23 By the conclusion of Th e Homesman, it is clear that Mary Bee has had an impact on George, and her infl uence continues to demonstrate itself even aft er her untimely death. While she is still living, George never treats her kindly, even when she begs him to “say something nice” to her; yet, aft er her death he describes her to a stranger as being “as fi ne a woman as ever walked.” A trace of Mary Bee, we might say, persists within George as he lives on without her, a memorial to her particular way of being made possible by her willingness to hold her desires and per- spectives in reserve in order to maintain their friendship.24 In the fi lm’s concluding scene, the evidence of Mary Bee’s impact on George shows itself, importantly, not through any direct correspondence, as if he now shares her moral compass. Instead, George demonstrates a newfound capacity to produce ambiguity (or lack) into the world that he previously 84 intertexts 21.1–2 · spring–fall 2017 treated as always already given in advance. In other words, George’s desire is included within the scene rather than imposed on it from without. George eventually delivers the ill women to a church in Hebron, Iowa. He then purchases a tombstone for Mary Bee and begins the journey back to the burial site where he laid her body. Th e simple fact that he attempts to provide Mary Bee with a proper gravesite demonstrates a signifi cant change on George’s part, given how, earlier in the fi lm, he shows no qualms about desecrating graves when it suits him. In the fi lm’s concluding scene, beginning the trek back to Mary Bee’s gravesite, George dances drunkenly on a wooden ferry as it transports him across a river. In his drunken reverie, George pays no mind to the ferry worker who kicks the recently purchased tombstone into the water. Th e loss of the grave marker, which immediately sinks into the dark water, renders George’s river crossing moot. Th e Homesman thereby concludes with what may appear to be a regression on George’s part—the scene is a literal repetition of an earlier one, where he performs the same song and dance in similar state of intoxication. I submit, however, that the formal ambiguity of the conclusion’s mise- en- scène suggests something else. No explanation for the tombstone’s quick disposal is off ered to viewers; we see in close- up only a pair of unidentifi ed boots kick the grave marker into the dark water. To be sure, we could say that George bears some responsibility for this act; in his drunken distraction, he does not stage the scene in a manner that would protect the object from its eventual fate. To put it diff erently, and in a stunning intersection of form and narrative content, George’s action introduces an instance of ambiguity into the scene, a stark contrast from his previous refusal to admit even the small- est shred of lack in his world. Just as any memorialization for the dead carries with it a fantasmatic form—the staging of scene around something missing—George’s intention to mourn and remember Mary Bee demonstrates the function of an ego- ideal, a capacity to view and judge oneself from an external perspective. Th is is a minimal but signifi cant development on George’s part: from declaring the world to be exactly what he wants it to be (“It is abandoned.”) to his intention, even if he fails, to memorialize his departed friend. When the fi lm concludes, the object relations he enacts are constituted by lack or ambiguity (Who knocks Krzych: Seeing, Sensing, Saying 85 the gravestone into the water and why?), such that, as Th e Homesman’s audience, we are left unclear and unsure about what we are seeing. In other words, the fi lm concludes by asking the audience to hold the very confusion that the transference between the characters has enacted for the character (George) who has experienced a psychic change but is not entirely able to reproduce this newly developed sense of self on his own. Fantasy may function as an alibi in service of the status quo. Like Munny’s off er of care made to Delilah in Unforgiven, fantasy— because it covers over rather than addresses the root cause of our anxieties or frustrations—may distract us from psychic pain in a manner that en- courages the continuation of what is rather than the emergence of what might be otherwise. Indeed, the risk of fantasy, and the core of its ideo- logical appeal, is precisely its capacity to hold two contradictory ideas at once: an idealized future and the troubled present from which the ideal distracts us. Transference also involves a simultaneous experience of contradictions when the patient’s past manifests in a new relationship. Countertransference, to be clear, does not describe merely the refl ection back to the patient of the analyst’s desires. Rather, as both Lacan and Bollas demonstrate, countertransference involves the diffi cult absorp- tion of the other’s excessive aff ects and the sacrifi cial refusal to demand a reciprocal or equal exchange in return. Indeed, by refusing to substitute a new fantasy for an old one, a transferential relationship (whether it occurs in analysis or elsewhere) may draw from the structure of fantasy the creative force to restage one’s desire in less debilitating arrangements, to see anew one’s place in the world, or at the very least, like George, to introduce a minimal distinction between desire and desire’s object.

Scott Krzych is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at Colorado College. His articles have appeared in such journals as Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, Discourse, Cultural Critique, and World Picture, among others. His current research considers the intersections among feminism, political theory, and psychoanalysis; drawing specifi cally from this work, Scott is completing a manuscript on conservative political documentary fi lm, tentatively titled Beyond Bias: Conservative Media and the Politics of Hysteria. 86 intertexts 21.1–2 · spring–fall 2017

Notes 1. Todd McGowan, Th e Fictional Christopher Nolan (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012), 12. Jennifer Friedlander takes a similarly productive tack in her recent account of fantasy. See Friedlander, Real Deceptions: Th e Contemporary Reinvention of Realism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 2. For an illuminating analysis of the privileged position maintained by the white masculine characters in Eastwood’s late works, even, or especially, in a “revisionist Western” such as Unforgiven, see Tania Modleski, “Clint Eastwood and Male Weep- ies,” American Literary History 22, no. 1 (2010): 136– 58. 3. Elizabeth Cowie, Representing the Woman: Cinema and Psychoanalysis (Minne- apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 133. 4. Richard Rushton and Gary Bettinson, What Is Film Th eory? An Introduction to Contemporary Debates (New York: Open University Press, 2010), 77. 5. Adrian Johnston has made a compelling argument for the centrality of aff ect in Lacan’s work, even if Lacan himself did not always address the matter directly or suffi ciently. Just as Lacan did emphasize how the unconscious thinks without us knowing what it thinks, Johnston similarly claims that aff ects, in the Lacanian sense, could be understood as “feeling [that is] not transparent to itself.” Adrian Johnston and Catherine Malabou, Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 149. 6. I readily admit that some readers of Lacan may bristle at my intention to link Bollas, or Winnicott (who fi gures prominently in much of Bollas’s work), with Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. Nevertheless, and apart from the more conceptual commonalities I mention in the essay, I would also note that I am not the fi rst to off er such comparisons. Mari Ruti has already suggested links between Lacan, Bollas, and Winnicott. See Ruti, Th e Call of Character (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 159; and “Winnicott with Lacan,” in Between Winnicott and Lacan: A Clinical Engagement, ed. Lewis A. Kirshner (New York: Routledge, 2011): 133– 50. 7. Jacques Lacan, Seminar of Jacques Lacan, vol. 8: Transference, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015),174. 8. Jacques Lacan, Seminar of Jacques Lacan, vol. 1: Freud’s Papers on Technique 1953–54 , ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. John Forrester (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1991), 277– 78. 9. Lacan, Th e Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Th e Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Book VII, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1997). Joan Copjec similarly claims that Lacan’s seminars “never stopped being an analysis of the transference.” Copjec, “Transference Letters and the Unknown Woman,” October 28 (1984): 61– 90, 68. 10. Lacan, Transference, 340. Th e analogy parallels the link Cowie proposes between fantasy and mise- en- scène, an idea that is also indebted to the work of Jean Krzych: Seeing, Sensing, Saying 87

Laplanche and Jean- Bertrand Pontalis, “Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality,” in For- mations of Fantasy, ed. Victor Burgin, James Donald, and Cora Kaplan (New York: Routledge, 1989). 11. Lacan, Transference, 340. 12. See also Bruce Fink, Lacan on Love: An Exploration of Lacan’s Seminar VIII, Transference (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015), 74; and Kaja Silverman, Th e Th reshold of the Visible World (New York: Routledge, 1996), 70–78, for further discussion of the ego- ideal and ideal ego. 13. Lacan, Transference, 341. 14. Colette Soler, for instance, describes the beginning of analysis as a necessarily misguided search, on the patient’s part, for truth. Th e end of analysis is an embrace of disappointment, the realization that no truth will be forthcoming. As she puts it, “psychoanalysis allows us to isolate our horror of castration– in other words, to dis- cover it.” Soler, Lacanian Aff ects: Th e Function of Aff ect in Lacan’s Work (New York: Routledge, 2016), 124. 15. Lacan, Transference, 342. 16. Kaja Silverman, World Spectators (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 73. 17. Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (New York: HarperCollins, 1971), 135. In a helpful gloss of Heidegger on this point, Mark A. Wrathall notes that appropriation, as Heidegger conceives it, must be understood as a reciprocal relationship: “Heidegger’s name for the process of mutual condition is Ereignis, probably best translated as ‘appropriation,’ where this is heard not as saying that we take over as our own something that does not belong to us, but rather as the mutual conditioning through which we and the things around us ‘come into our own’– that is, become what each can be when conditioned by the other.” Wrathall, Wrathall, Heidegger and Unconcealment: Truth, Language, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 206; emphasis added. In stark contrast to the relational exchange Heidegger locates between speaker and spoken, George attempts to utter into existence a home in the absence of rec- iprocity. As such, his statement— “It is abandoned.”— works to shape the world in his image, not unlike the modern industrial machines, and the enframed mindset behind them, would reshape the world in a manner that Heidegger would so ada- mantly oppose. 18. Gaylyn Studlar off ers a helpful overview of scholarship on the Western concerned with the representations of masculinity and femininity, and she likewise locates in the fi lms of John Ford a tendency to complicate such gender binaries. See Studlar, “Sacred Duties, Poetic Passions: John Ford and the Issue of Femininity in the Western,” in John Ford Made Westerns: Film the Legend in the Sound Era, ed. 88 intertexts 21.1–2 · spring–fall 2017

Gaylyn Studlar and Matthew Bernstein (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001): 43– 74. 19. If we were to keep to a more explicitly Heideggerian reading, Mary Bee’s contradictory statement, though factually accurate, also assumes too much stability about the world she describes, even if her statement is relatively more disclosive, more relationally grounded in worldly experience, and similarly less inclined to the more instrumental attempt at appropriation demonstrated by George. Th at is to say, her assumption that the home remains Bob’s because of a stated intention by him to return perhaps forecloses too quickly on the emergence of new relations of being-in- the-world as yet unforeseen and unpredictable. Brian Price has pointed specifi cally to Heidegger’s concern that thinking leave room for the unthought, the new, as a particularly useful link between Heidegger’s existential phenomenology and fi lm theory. See Price, “Heidegger and Cinema,” in European Film Th eory, ed. Temenuga Trifonova (New York: Routledge, 2009): 108– 21. 20. Cowie, Representing the Woman, 42. 21. Christopher Bollas. Th e Shadow of the Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 51. See also D. W. Winnicott, “Th e Th eory of the Parent- Child Relation- ships,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 41 (1960): 585– 595. 22. Th is idea likewise resonates with an early statement by Lacan in which he describes the end of analysis as occurring at the point of a self-analysis separate from the analyst: “I used to say schematically, in the archaic period of these seminars, that the subject begins by talking about himself, he doesn’t talk to you– then, he talks to you but he doesn’t talk about himself– when he talks about himself, who will have noticeably changed in the interval, to you, we will have got to the end of the analysis.” Jacques Lacan, Seminar of Jacques Lacan, vol. 3: Th e Pyschoses 1955– 56, ed. Jacques- Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1993), 161; emphasis added. 23. Bollas, Shadow of the Object, 62; emphasis added. 24. Relatedly, Kennan Ferguson has considered the role of silence in familial dy- namics as a means for maintaining confl iction relationships and as an instructive analogy for political dialogue. See Ferguson, All in the Family: On Community and Incommensurability (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).