Page iii The Acoustic Mirror The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema Theories of Representation and Difference KAJA SILVERMAN General Editor: Teresa de Lauretis INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS Bloomington and Indianapolis Page iv Portions of chapters 1, 2, and 5 have appeared in somewhat different form in Wide Angle 8, nos. 1 and 2 (1985), Iris 3, no. 1 (1985), and Mary Ann Doane, Patricia Mellencamp, and Linda Williams, eds., Re-vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism (Los Angeles: AFI, 1984). © 1988 by Kaja Silverman All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses' Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Silverman, Kaja. The acoustic mirror. (Theories of representation and difference) Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Women in motion pictures. 2. Moving-pictures—Psychological aspects. 3. Psychoanalysis. 4. Voice. I. Title. II. Series. PN1995.9.W6S57 1988 791.43'09'09352042 87-45834 ISBN 0-253-30284-6 ISBN 0-253-20474-7 (pbk.) 4 5 6 7 8 00 99 98 97 96 95 94 Page v Contents Acknowledgments vii Preface viii [1] Lost Objects and Mistaken Subjects: A Prologue 1 [2] Body Talk 42 [3] The Fantasy of the Maternal Voice: Paranoia and Compensation 72 [4] The Fantasy of the Maternal Voice: Female Subjectivity and the Negative Oedipus Complex 101 [5] Disembodying the Female Voice: Irigaray, Experimental Feminist Cinema, and Femininity 141 [6] The Female Authorial Voice 187 Notes 235 Index 254 Page vi For Michael and Philosophy on the Telephone. Page vii Acknowledgments Anne Friedberg, Barbara Miller, Tania Modleski, Elizabeth Weed, Anne Norton, Joan Scott, Stephen Heath, Mahara Ranger, Karen Newman, Roswitha Mueller, Margaret Mchugh, Laura Mulvey, Lorette Clement, Jackie Rose, Rey Chow, Mary Ann Doane, Elena Feder, and my colleagues in the Women's Studies Program at Simon Fraser University all contributed in some vital way to the intellectual and social milieu in which I wrote this book, and have taught me to think in new ways about feminist theory and practice. The generous support of the Brown University Pembroke Center made it possible for me to write chapters 1 and 2. Judith Mayne read The Acoustic Mirror in manuscript, and offered wonderfully helpful suggestions for improving upon it. I also owe particular thanks to Peter Wollen and Naomi Schor, with whom I talked over crucial parts of this book, and to whose friendship it is a small tribute. Teresa de Lauretis helped to pull me through many a conceptual impasse, and has been a constant source of intellectual, political, and emotional support. Mary Russo is, quite simply, the best of everything that a friend can be, and most of the thoughts in this book have been in some way filtered through her. But above all I want to thank Michael Silverman, who has always "been there," even when he couldn't actually be in the same country, and who always knows how to make even a good thing better. Providence April 1987 Page viii Preface "No matter how many times I do this, I still get the same thrill," confides one of the doctors in Curtis Bernhardt's Possessed (1947), as he injects a woman played by Joan Crawford with a drug which will induce her to "confess" her past upon demand, and without her conscious participation. He waits with ardent anticipation for each new installment of his patient's story, repeating the injections whenever her voice falters. The scene is strikingly— indeed uncannily—reminiscent of a scene from George Cukor's A Woman's Face, a film made six years earlier by another director and for a different studio, but which also takes place in a hospital room, also theatricalizes the exchange between a male doctor and his female patient, and also casts Joan Crawford in the role of a patient: the scene, that is, where the doctor removes the bandages from the female face which he has surgically reconstituted. However, the uncanny similarity is undermined from within by a critical difference— whereas A Woman's Face stages its drama at the surface of the female body, Possessed derives its narrative coherence from the female voice. In the later of those two films, the doctor's desire is engaged not by the possibility of constituting woman as spectacle, but by the possibility of extracting speech from her. Possessed is by no means an isolated moment in the history of Hollywood. Films as historically diverse as Johnny Belinda (1948), Singin' in the Rain (1952), Marnie (1964), and Blow-Out (1981) testify to its continual fascination with the sounds and meanings generated by the female voice. Like the doctor in Possessed, classic cinema could be said to "get the same thrill" each time that voice is produced. It is curious in light of this institutional obsession that the feminist critique of classic cinema has focused primarily upon the image track and the construction of woman as the object of the male gaze—upon the spectacle which is revealed, as it were, when the bandages are removed from Joan Crawford's face, rather than upon the "confession" which is medically extracted from her. It has somehow escaped theoretical attention that sexual difference is the effect of dominant cinema's sound regime as well as its visual regime, and that the female voice is as relentlessly held to normative representations and functions as is the female body. Page ix This book derived its initial impetus from my desire to extend the feminist critique of Hollywood into the area of the voice. However, as I wrote, that latter concept became increasingly flexible and commodious, capable of subsuming not only a wide variety of recorded vocalizations, but the whole problematic of authorship. My theoretical investigation of the female voice also opened decisively onto a range of "subjective" issues, from castration, projection, disavowal, and fantasy to narcissim, melancholia, and the negative Oedipus complex. My target of study underwent a similar expansion. It proved impossible to limit the category of classic (sound) cinema to a fixed period of Hollywood history, since the auditory regime I uncovered in films from the 1940s and 1950s is still operative in films as late as Klute (1971) and Blow-Out, and can be detected in non-American films such as Darling (1965) and Diva (1981). (Within the context of this book, classic cinema designates less a formal system of the sort exhaustively codified by David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson 1 than a textual model which holds the female voice and body insistently to the interior of the diegesis, while relegating the male subject to a position of apparent discursive exteriority by identifying him with mastering speech, vision, or hearing. The psychic and ideological underpinnings of this model are discussed at some length in chapter 1. Its sonorous dimensions are outlined in chapter 2. I should add that while the system of classic [sound] cinema is an abstraction gleaned from repeated viewings of numerous films, all individual films exceed that system in at least some respects, and often in many. No film, in other words, is reducible to the category of classic cinema, no matter how that category is conceived.) But even stretching the category of classic cinema in this way left it too restrictive for my purposes. I wanted to include a discussion of two films which exceed its paradigm in a number of very striking ways, but which are in some sense "about" it—Peeping Tom (1960) and The Conversation (1974). I also wanted to look closely at a Hollywood film—Three Women (1977)—and an avant-garde British film—Riddles of the Sphinx (1976)—which are libidinally unassimilable to classic cinema. Finally, I wanted to examine authorship in the work of the Italian director Liliana Cavani, and to include in my larger analysis of the voice a group of experimental films by women which have effectively dismantled Hollywood's sound/image regime. As a result, only the first three chapters deal with classic cinema. The remaining three address films which challenge that model, particularly at the level of voice. The investigative field of The Acoustic Mirror also expanded to include a range of texts drawn from psychoanalysis, film theory, and Page x feminism. At times these texts are given a metacritical function, but more often they too are read "symptomatically," shown to be motivated at least in part by the same psychic and ideological forces as the films with which they are grouped. Chapter 1, for instance, is predicated on the assumption that Freud's essays on anatomical difference and fetishism enact a similar projection to that effected by classic cinema, and are part of the same undertaking—the construction of an "adequate" male subject. Chapter 3 attempts to show that Michel Chion's theoretical account of the maternal voice is structured by an identical fantasy to that which informs Sorry, Wrong Number (1948), a fantasy which is very different from the one which informs Guy Rosolato's account of the maternal voice, or Diva (1983). And chapter 4 pursues the libidinal traces of the negative Oedipus complex not only in Riddles of the Sphinx, but in Kristeva's writings on motherhood. A number of chapters— 1, 4, and 6—are indeed primarily organized around theoretical texts, the first of these seeking through a "diagnostic" reading of Freud and film theory to redefine what is generally understood to be the castration crisis, the second mounting an exhaustive search within key essays from Polylogue and Histories d'amour for the libidinal economy of feminism, and the third tracking authorial subjectivity in a wide range of essays dating from the 1960s through the 1980s.