folks and welcome to our third and final
installment on beaudry we're gonna be talking about rear window and that last part of
his essay which is about identification so the title of that last part of his essay is the screen
mirror specularization and double identification specular is just an adjective that
means of a mirror or of reflections and double identification refers to the
fact that for beaudry there are two forms of identification ways we identify with
narrative movies so i want
to look at this passage he says the arrangement of the different
elements uh projection dark and tall screen in addition from reproducing in a striking way
the mise-en-scene of plato's cave reconstructs the situation necessary to the release of the
mirror stage discovered by la khan so we're going to get to the mirror stage in a bit because
that's more foundational to what's going on here but i want us to first look at this reference
to plato's cave because i think it's incredibly useful fo
r understanding what beaudry is trying to
do and also reflect the general suspicion that uh permeates 1968 and after film theory in france the
united states so what is plato's cave and a lot of you probably know what plato's cave is but let me
just kind of rehearse what it's all about plato being the ancient greek philosopher who writes
an allegory of the cave that he thinks is a good reflection of how he thinks reality and perception
happen in the real world so in the in the allegory that
he writes we have these prisoners who are
chained up in a cave and the entire reality that they think exists is constituted by these shadows
that are cast on the wall they think that this is a representation of the real world but really
what this is is just shadows cast by objects produced by people that they never see people that
are out of their perceptual view and moreover they have no idea that the real reality is the thing
outside the cave so why would plato write this and why is this
an allegory in an allegory for what
well it's an allegory for the fact that for plato humans perceptual access to the world is in some
sense false plato thinks that actual things in the world are merely reflections of the true
world of the forms that exist beyond our perhaps perceptual comprehension of what we think of as
material things plato is an idealist philosopher that's what beaudry means by topological model
of idealism it's a broad school of thought and philosophy that privileges a
bstractions over
our perception of material reality plato is suspicious of perception as giving us an access to
truth he thinks the table in front of me is just a reflection or a copy of the true form of
the table that exists in this other realm in many ways beaudry's theory of the apparatus of
film is analogous to plato's allegory of the cave because bodhi's trying to remind us about all the
ways in which what we see on screen just like the shadows for the prisoners is not reality but a
t
ransformation of it okay so that's plato's cave let's move on to the more important and really
more influential part of this part of beaudry's essay which is about the mirror stage discovered
by la khan so who is la khan he's jacques khan is a famous and influential french philosopher who
bases his work on the workings of sigmund freud in a nutshell lacan is reworking a lot of freud's
ideas but infusing the importance of language and language acquisition into freud's ideas we don't
have to
get into that but i want us to just look at this one theory that was really influential
on film theory for obvious reasons it's called the mirror stage it's basically lacan's
theory of how we as human beings come to form this idea of our subjectivity or our sense of self
as subjects and well when lacan says subject he's very much saying it in the same way that beaudry
and his pal louis altaser are saying it that is lacan wants to maintain that subject hood is
partly a fiction that it's part
ly a falsehood so lukan tells us that at a certain point in
a child or an infant's development it looks at itself in the mirror and it recognizes itself in
the mirror and then it identifies with that image in the mirror beaudry will say quote this phase
this mirror phase generates via the mirror image of a unified body the constitution or at least the
first sketches of the eye as an imaginary function the image in the mirror is not necessarily a
true image of who you are as a self but rathe
r as a infant you are trying to grasp your sense of
self your attachment to your image in the mirror is importantly an idealized image of the self and
this is important to realize that a mirror image is not necessarily a good representation of a
truthful or accurate image after all a mirror image is always a distortion of ourselves and
of course even a picture of our bodies is not the same thing as ourselves so what lacan will say
is that this mirror stage is setting off a process that will
happen all throughout your life that is
your sense of self that i that you have in your head is formed by continually looking for selves
or pictures of yourself in the exterior world and what's a great example of this for beaudry it's
cinema so beaudry is saying that cinema looking at the screen often with people is another way
of continually looking for a sense of self or subjectivity in the exterior world and again it's
idealized it's not true and more than that one of beaudry's most int
eresting points is that on top
of this there are two complementary conditions that lead to this sense of self in the mirror
immature powers of mobility and a precocious maturation of visual organization in other words
he's saying that just as an infant does not have a mastery of its mobility and that its visual
faculties are more advanced than its ability to move around it's similar to how in movies
we are forced to sit still and we are engaging with all with this world primarily through ou
r
eyes and what's really nice about rear window is it allegorizes this very condition because
what is the thing that sets the entire narrative in motion well the fact that jimmy stewart's
character is rendered immobile through an accident and this condition intensifies a faculty
of his selfhood that has already been in place he is a photographer he engages with the world
visually not only that as a photographer he approaches the world as a subject and the
contents of the world are an objec
t for his visual comprehension so for beaudry there
are two levels of identification in movies the first level is that of a character identifying
with characters in movies the second level being the camera or whatever it is that is responsible
for the images that you see you somehow identify with that force that is picturing a world in
front of you don't forget this it'll be important later because laura mulvey is going to make a lot
of identification in her feminist theory of film so let's
look at what beaudry says he says first
attach the image itself derives from the character portrayed as a center of secondary identifications
carrying an identity which constantly must be seized and re-established what does he mean
here well he's pointing out the fact that one convention of classical hollywood storytelling
is that there are protagonists yes we know that you can tell a narrative story without having a
protagonist our friend eisenstein made battleship potemkin in which there
is barely a protagonist
partly because he thinks protagonist is a function of bourgeois ideology and especially individualism
but rear window is very much a classical hollywood story that has a protagonist not only that it
exaggerates the role of a protagonist or a locus of primary identification because the world very
much revolves around the way that jimmy stewart sees and thinks and feels and fears things
his goals matter more than anyone else's the second kind of identification is with
the
camera boatery will say the second level permits the appearance of the first and places it in
action that is the transcendental subject whose place is taken by the camera which constitutes
and rules the objects in this world so in other words he's saying that the previous section the
transitional subject is in a full account of what it feels like to identify with the picturing thing
the thing that pictures the images on screen he'll say thus the spectator identifies less with what
is
represented the spectacle itself then with what stage is the spectacle makes it seem obliging him
to see what it sees so beaudry's making this kind of claim here he thinks that this identification
is more important or has a more central role in uh fostering or entrenching uh subjectivity than does
identifying with characters do you agree with that that's an interesting place to maybe respond to
beaudry so remember the film begins with a moving camera that kind of occupies the position of jef
f
but he is sleeping and it is kind of giving us an image of the world outside of jeff's apartment
but it is not actually allied with jeff and not only that there are other moments in rear
window which is famously a film that tries to identify the storytelling point of view centrally
with a character there are points in this film in which it breaks away from this habit this is
one of those events notice at this point in the film that jeff is falling asleep he is trying to
watch the suspici
ous behaviors of his neighbors in particular one neighbor thorwald remember at this
moment in the film thorwald mysteriously has been going out into the night with uh with a big
suitcase um he is a salesman but this is in the middle of the night and it's raining why
is he doing so jeff really wants to watch him but note the camera will show jeff right here he's
getting sleepy and so if this film rear window is really as attached to jeff's subjectivity as
people think it is we might say move
on to the next scene but that doesn't exactly happen the
camera returns notice what happens right here jeff is shown sleeping but the camera says no i'm
going to show you more than jeff knows by panning to the right and showing an event that we should
think is extremely important we can see that thorwald exits his apartment in the morning with a
woman a woman who very well could be his wife but jeff didn't see it because he's sleeping thus the
film is actually showing us the difference bet
ween the first level of identification and the second
level of identification and almost reinforcing in some way what beaudry is saying about the
primacy of second level identification in the classical hollywood storytelling the camera or the
unseen narrator or whoever is responsible for the image itself always knows more than the characters
within the world or at least this is a tendency and it's a tendency that beaudry might think is
a particularly satisfying one for establishing a sense
of dominant self-transparent subjectivity so
here we might ask a question just to do this work of reading rear window through the film theory
of jean-louis beaudry we might ask if our primary identification is with jeff and our secondary
identification is with the camera or with whoever or whatever is responsible for the images that we
see what functions as jeff's primary and secondary identification given that jeff is often
understood in film criticism as an allegory for the cinematic spec
tator we'll remember that
throughout the film jeff in some sense identifies with the people that he sees across from his
apartment on some level jeff even identifies with the quote unquote antagonist thorwald
because after all if this film is about anything it's about marriage and a certain view of marriage
that pits it against the freedom and individualism of a rugged independent lifestyle so notice
that throughout the film jeff is going to view his neighbors as in some sense reflecting hi
s own
values and reinforcing his own worldview in this in this moment he's talking about the composer
who and he says he lives alone probably had a very unhappy marriage he has no grounding for that kind
of claim but but he is projecting his own sense of self onto the people that he's seeing and famously
of course the neighbors have different versions of marital relations there's miss lonely hearts who
has a vision of what happens when you can be alone there is there's the newlyweds there's
thorwald
there's unhappy marriage there's the funny little couple with the dog these are all different
versions that are mirroring in some sense jeff's primary narrative conflict which is about what to
do with his relationship well what about secondary identification would it make sense to say that
jeff in some way identifies with the images that he produces by looking at this fantasy world
outside of his apartment well in some ways yes think of the story that's being told jeff begins
by
explaining that he doesn't feel whole right he says gunnison you got to get me out of here he's
defined by his work which is about action and exploration and visual primacy but he's confined
to his apartment so he needs a way to become a subject again somebody who enacts their will on
the world somebody who has agency who isn't merely a product of their environment he could of course
look for meaning in his relationship with lisa but he doesn't want that because he believes
that the develop
ment of that relationship which means marriage is another imposition
of stasis something that would hamper his own subjectivity his selfhood he wants to keep
things status quo in his relationship that is he wants to hamper the development of his of
the actual world so that he can dive into the fantasy of the world outside of his apartment
which is in effect a movie something that is constituted purely by his visual spectation of it
so he picks up his camera and his telephoto lens as a way o
f finding a sense of self he completely
throws himself into a world of spectatorship you might say jeff's active looking which is
reinforced by his apparatus specific condition that is being immobile constitutes his selfhood
and his subjectivity which the film presents us as in crisis this is one way of seeing the film
as an allegory for what beaudry says about cinema in general quote the reality mimed by
the cinema is thus first of all that of a self that what we're searching for in cinema
and what
senefa gives us is a solid but illusory and false sense of subjectivity or selfhood okay that's
it for beaudry and i'll see you next time
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