Lost Angels: Psychoanalysis and Cinema/Vicky Lebeau

Lost Angels In Lost Angels, Vicky Lebeau re-reads Freudian theories of femininity to develop a remarkable contribution to spectatorship theory. Lebeau discusses Freud’s distinctive preoccupations with female fantasy and femininity—from his studies on hysteria and the ‘family romance’ at the origins of psychoanalysis to the analysis of mass psychology in the 1920s and 1930s. Lost Angels exposes how Freud’s accounting of femininity is intimately tied to his changing representation of the paternal, and explores his ensuing differentiation between masculine and feminine fantasy through critical and feminist theories of spectatorship and cinema. Discussing three popular ‘youth’ films of the 1980s—John Hughes’s Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Francis Ford Coppola’s Rumble Fish and Tim Hunter’s River’s Edge—Lebeau works through issues of sexual difference and social identification and creates a dialogue between feminism, psychoanalysis and the critical theory of the Frankfurt school. Intervening in current debates on femininity, fantasy and identification, Lebeau suggests that, for Freud, femininity is always both a sexed and a social category which cannot be understood outside of its relation to the father. Lost Angels is a ground-breaking addition to current feminist film theory and essential reading for all students of film, gender and cultural studies. Vicky Lebeau is Lecturer in English in the School of Cultural and Community Studies at the University of Sussex. Frontispiece: production still from Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919). Courtesy BFI. Lost Angels Psychoanalysis and cinema Vicky Lebeau London and New York First published 1995 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1995 Vicky Lebeau All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Lebeau, Vicky. Lost Angels: psychoanalysis and cinema/Vicky Lebeau. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Psychoanalysis and motion pictures. 2. Motion pictures-psychological aspects. I. Title. PN1995.9.P783L43 1994 791.43′′01 9-dc20 94–11706 ISBN 0-203-99253-9 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-415-10720-2 (Print Edition) 0-415-10721-0 (pbk) For my family—especially DOREEN and GARY LEBEAU and To the memory of my father, TERRY LEBEAU 1939–1994 Contents Acknowledgements vii 1 Introduction: ‘one can learn nothing from them’ 1 2 Daddy’s cinema: femininity and mass spectatorship 19 3 Femininity, fantasy and the collective (or Ferris 57 Bueller’s Day Off—take two) 4 Rumble Fish: Francis Coppola, Susan Hinton and 87 Narcissus 5 Lost Angels: River’s Edge and social spectatorship 121 6 Afterword: ‘beyond all shadow of doubt’ 153 Notes 157 Bibliography 163 Index 169 Acknowledgements I would like to thank the following journals for permission to reprint (in revised form): ‘“You’re my friend”: River’s Edge and social spectatorship’, Camera Obscura and Indiana University Press; ‘Daddy’s Cinema’, Screen and Oxford University Press. Acknowledgements also for permission to reprint from the following: Less Than Zero © 1985 by Bret Easton Ellis, reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc. and Pan Macmillan; Rumble Fish by S.E.Hinton, by permission of Victor Gollancz; The Culture of Narcissism, American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations, by Christopher Lasch, by permission of W.W.Norton & Company, Inc. copyright © 1979 by Christopher Lasch; Future Shock, by Alvin Toffler, by permission of The Bodley Head. My thanks to Jacqueline Rose and Rachel Bowlby for their commentary and support throughout the writing of this book, to John Shire for his friendship and for staying with the many different versions of these chapters and to Christine Blake for her generous reading at the critical moments. Thanks also to the women of the ‘Sexual Difference: Women and Writing’ seminar (Sussex, 1991) for their interest in S.E.Hinton and the ‘masquerade’; and to Gary Lebeau for a fraternal gloss on Rumble Fish. For invaluable help, in different forms, my thanks to: the Graduate Colloquium, University of Sussex, Constance Penley, Nancy Wood, Doreen Lebeau, Terry Lebeau, Anne Crane, Peter Urpeth, Gwen Holmden, Vic Holmden, Paul Myerscough, Jo Croft, Richard Fuller and, for her (much appreciated) attempts to solve the enigma of ‘the computer’, Jane Phillips. My special thanks, finally, to D.S.Marriott. viii Chapter 1 Introduction ‘One can learn nothing from them’ In ‘Hysterical Phantasies and their Relation to Bisexuality’, first published in 1908, Freud gave the following brief account of the ‘favourable circumstances’ in which a female patient was able to ‘capture’ an unconscious fantasy in the process of making its way into her conscious fantasy life or daydream: After I had drawn the attention of one of my patients to her phantasies, she told me that on one occasion she had suddenly found herself in tears in the street and that, rapidly considering what it was she was actually crying about, she had got hold of a phantasy to the following effect. In her imagination she had formed a tender attachment to a pianist who was well known in the town (though she was not personally acquainted with him); she had had a child by him (she was in fact childless); and he had then deserted her and her child and left them in poverty. It was at this point in her romance that she had burst into tears. (Pelican Freud Library, hereafter PFL 10:88) Curiously, however difficult it is for the daydreamer to become aware of and to reflect on the fantasmatic scenes which absorb her, it is only too obvious to others what she is doing—at least according to the description of the daydreamer’s abstracted appearance in public that Freud gives just before this passage: ‘It is easy to recognize a person who is absorbed in day-dreaming in the street, however, by his sudden, as it were absent-minded, smile, his way of talking to himself, or by the hastening of his steps which marks the climax of the imagined situation’ (ibid.). We can compare this with the famous passage from the case history of Anna O. in Studies on Hysteria (1895) in which Joseph Breuer describes his patient’s invisible participation in a ‘private theatre’: 2 LOST ANGELS This girl [Anna O.], who was bubbling over with intellectual vitality, led an extremely monotonous existence in her puritanically-minded family. She embellished her life in a manner which probably influenced her decisively in the direction of her illness, by indulging in systematic day-dreaming, which she described as her ‘private theatre’. While everyone thought she was attending, she was living through fairy tales in her imagination; but she was always on the spot when she was spoken to, so that no one was aware of it. She pursued this activity almost continuously while she was engaged on her household duties, which she discharged unexceptionably. I shall presently have to describe the way in which this habitual day-dreaming while she was well passed over into illness without a break. (PFL 3:74) Unlike the daydreamer walking through the streets, then, the woman at home, living out her life between the routine of household duties and the ennui of domestic leisure, gives no sign of her activity within—or, at least, not until daydreaming slides imperceptibly into illness. Everyone ‘thought she was attending’ while Anna O. ran through the scenes that, Breuer seems to imply, made the tedium of her life more tolerable. Because she was ‘always on the spot when she was spoken to’, no one could tell the difference, no one could tell that she was, in fact, not ‘all there’. It is as if Anna O. really was in two places at once, responding to the voices that came at her from the outside at the same time as she was engaged in a self-to-self intimacy which, once revealed by what she was the first to describe as Breuer’s ‘talking cure’, would be used as evidence of her double consciousness, of the difference within, whose effects psychoanalysis goes on to explain in terms of the unconscious. In Studies on Hysteria the appearance of that difference, the point at which the unconscious makes its presence felt or manifest through the symptom, is intimately associated with the monotony stressed by both Freud and Breuer as a decisive element in the development of their patients’ symptoms. In effect, and however variable the circumstances of these women’s lives and histories, the hysteric daydreams because she is overtaken by the banality of her life—a link between fantasy and impoverishment which Freud continues to make throughout his work. ‘We have nothing new to say on the question of the origin of these dispositional hypnoid states’, he comments in the ‘Preliminary Communication’ of 1893, but ‘[t]hey often, it would seem, grow out of INTRODUCTION 3 the day-dreams which are so common even to healthy people and to which needlework and similar occupations render women especially prone’ (ibid.: 64). Though distraction is not its only form, as distraction fantasy works as something like a defence against reality by securing relief from boredom—in particular, it seems, for women.

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