Cinema Canada (Jun 1983)

BAXTER par excellence, in that they typify the repetitive nature of instinct in generai.”® Despite the primary place thatthe death instinct came to occupy in Freud's thought, it has remained a disputed concept in psychoanalytic theory and practice. Part of the difficulty lies in the problem of seizing the death instinct in action, as it were. Eros, says Freud in An Outline of Psycho-Analysis (1940), aims “to establish ever greater unities and to preserve them thus— in short, to bind together’, whereas the activities of Thanatos are inclined “to undo connections and soto destroy things.”’ This is to say that the libidinal impulses of the life force are directed toward fantasy representations, the imaginary unities in which self and other are constituted. The death instincts:-do not themselves counter with representations of destruction, but are manifested in the destructive dissolution of representational structures, in an apparent return to a state empty of significance. That particular pleasure of the text called jouissance by Barthes, which “brings to a crisis [one’s] relation with language”®, is thus the effect of a pleasure principle which, says Freud in the last section of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, “seems actually to serve the death instincts.””. Nevertheless, it is exactly on the side of “representation” that! should like to begin a consideration of the death instinct as a component of film fantasy. | want to consider the apparent compulsion of the popular cinema to mount the spectacles of violence, destruction, and death that have marked it since Edison had the execution of Mary Stuart reenacted for the patrons of his kinetoscope parlours. | wantto consider the insertion of this agression into the signification of sexual difference. | assume that these spectacles are not simply the reflections of a calamitous and iniquitous world, but respond to a specific organisation of the imaginary. | assume that they signify more than their immediate narrative contexts would make obvious. | assume that whatever pleasure we might take in them is to some degree offset by the anxieties they arouse, anxieties that do not prevent them from being made, but merely make more problematic the compelling reasons for which they are produced. Freud : “itis possible to recognise the dominance in the unconscious mind ofa‘compulsion to repeat’ proceeding from the inStinctual impulses and probably inherent in the very nature of the instincts a compulsion powerful enough to overrule the pleasure principle, lending to certain aspects of the mind their daemonic character.” '° The unconscious, Freud tells us, does not admit the possiblity of Our own death. The cinema, on the other hand, has made a specialty of spectacularising death in images in which our identification processes have invested a considerable stake. A sentence from “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” (1915) specifies this extraordinary phenomenon that has become ever more commonplace since Freud wrote about it, ever more a constituent of fantasy experience: “In the realm of fiction we find the plurality of lives which we need. We die with the hero with whom we have identified ourselves ; yet we survive him, and are ready to die again just as safely with another hero.” |! lfon the side of desire we find that the “primal scene” of Oedipal sexuality is of particular insistance in the cinema, we might begin to ponder as well the spectators imaginary place at the scene of violent death, or simply of violence on character or text. We might consider as a peculiar manifestation of this phenomenon the destructive violence attending the images of women that Mulvey has described and defined in terms of libidinal cathexis, of masculine sexual desire. Beyond the concepts of “desire” and “pleasure” lie the aggressive and selfdestructive instincts which seem also served by the cinema. A consideration of the cinema in terms of the death instinct is needed to grapple with what Robin Wood calls “a spirit of negativity, an undifferentiated Just for destruction, thatseems to lie not far below the surface of the modern collective consciousness.” ' The erotic function of the images provoking this “lust for destruction” is sensed in Wood's description of the audience “who cheered and applauded every one of [the] out rages"'? committed in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. What | think needs analysis is the extent to which the destructive satisfaction which is often or almost always combined with the erotic is primarily unconsciously — experienced as self-destruction, as a limit to the constitution of the spectatorial subject. In the words of Jean Laplanche in Vie et mort en psychanalyse, one of the most important reconsiderations of the death instinct: “To fantasise aggression is to turn it into oneself, to commit aggression against oneself. The recent West German film Christiane F., directed by Ulrich Edel, provides a focus for thinking this problematic process. It is expose filmmaking of the most sordid kind, purporting to document a problem of modern life while spectacularising the degradation of a young girl involved with drugs and prostitution. Christiane’s body and face are the scene of the process, the pages on which her suffering is written. A componentof identification lies in assuming the pain to which she is subject, and which ends inexorably in an overdose of heroin in a railway-station toilet. There is virtually nothing in the film to set back and explain — sociologically, economically, or psychologically — the downward spiral of Christiane’s life. What is provided for is the grim imagination of Christiane’s pain, culminating in the astonishing moment of her apparent suicide. Christiane’s overdose is portrayed in a series of enormous closeups of the apparatus as she prepares it, and of the needle puncturing her skin. The sequence leads to a moment of disoriented confusion as the girl who has been the object of our identification sinks out of frame and we are left without attachment in this harrowing, if imaginary, world. This full stop to the drama is succeeded by along shot from the air of a peaceful German village surrounded by a wintry, rural landscape. This shotis accompanied by Christiane’s voice off, telling us that she survived, was taken by her mother to her grandmother's house, and has been rebuilding her life far from the urban hell that is Berlin. The fantasy of self-destruction culminating in an impossibility that cannot be fantasised —identification with death— is swiftly, sentimentally recuperated as both idealised future and the nostalgic past of infancy. In a note in The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud says, “the belief in survival after death... merely repre 36