Objet Petit A - Vertigo (1958)

Žižek through
Hitchcock
Laurence Simmons
Žižek through Hitchcock
Laurence Simmons
Žižek through
Hitchcock
Laurence Simmons
Media and Communication
University of Auckland
Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand
ISBN 978-3-030-62435-4 ISBN 978-3-030-62436-1 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62436-1
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for Nick Perry, who kept reminding me
Acknowledgements
Lacan claimed that every subject is in debt to the Symbolic. This book
emerged over several years out of a graduate film course, MEDIA 746
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Slavoj Žižek (But Were
Afraid to Ask Alfred Hitchcock). I am grateful to my students in this
course, for, even if they may not recognize it in this form, much of the
material set out in this book was first pursued in my classes with them, and
much of their feedback has been incorporated here. The Hitchcock films
discussed in different chapters seemed to choose me or they were the trap
that I willingly fell into.
Many others also influenced and contributed the course of this project
with their intellectual and personal support. First of all, Vivienne Leung
for living with Žižek and Hitchcock, as well as myself, for so long. Among
others whose stimulus and work have nourished this project, I am indebted
to fellow presenters at conferences where some of these ideas were initially
tested, Dany Nobus, Leonardo Rodriguez, Mark Jackson and Irene Hee-
sung Lee; and to Lee Wallace, Misha Kavka and Rex Butler for their
feedback on different occasions. This book could not have been written
without a panoply of great critics of Hitchcock with whom I have had
many imaginary discussions: Richard Allen, Raymond Bellour, Charles
Barr, D.A Miller, Tania Modleski, Camille Paglia, Murray Pomerance,
William Rothman, Susan Smith and Robin Wood, to name but a few.
Without their writing and intellectual example, this volume would have
struggled to succeed, and I hope I have lived up to their close observations
and precise descriptions of so many incidents and episodes in Hitchcock’s
films. I would also like to thank the staff of the interloans department of
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
the University of Auckland Library for their doggedness in tracking down

many obscure articles and references.
And finally to Slavoj Žižek, in particular for his ‘cameo appearance’ in
Auckland in 2001, and a rousing series of lectures at Birkbeck College in
2006, that inspired this obsession with his work and who, hopefully, may
still see parts of himself in this ‘remake’.
Contents
1 Introduction: From H to Z 1

The Elvis of Cultural Theory on Bodega Bay 2
The Parallax View 5
Why Are There Always Two (Three?) Fathers? 7
We Can Never Know Enough About Hitchcock/Žižek 14
Less Suture More Jouissance 15
The Hegelian Counterbook—Hitchcock as a Žižekian Heretic 17
References 21
2 The Objet petit a: Vertigo (1958) 25

Back to the Suture—Interface and the Hitchcockian Fantasmatic
Gaze 26
Getting it Wrong—Point of View at Ernie’s Restaurant 27
Petite Histoire of the Objet petit a 33
Ideology—The Invisible Frame of the Objet petit a 35
Niederkommenlassen—Falling in Love 39
Suspense—A Constituent or Constituted Anxiety? 44
Idealism or Materialism?—‘The Fury of the Deceived Platonist’ 48
The Double-Entendre of Underwear on the Signifying Bar 51
The Fright of Real Love—Mistaking Fiction for Reality 55
The Mimetic Desire of the Double 57
Why Is the Ending Always Multiple? 60
References 66
ix
x Contents
3 The Real: The Birds (1963) 71

What Do the Birds Mean? 72
Three Varieties of the Real 74
The Real Is Not Reality 76
Ding or Sache? 77
Kern unseres Wesen—The Answer of the Real 80
The Birds as Psychotic Stain or Vorstellungsreprasentanz? 84
General Semantics at Berkeley 87
The Hitchcockian House: Haven or Trap? 90
The Couple on the Hill 94
Acousmère—The Bone Gets Stuck in the Throat 95
Shots 33 and 57: La Doublure, The Spectre That Haunts Reality 100
Self-anaesthetizing Denial—No ‘The End’ 104
References 110
4 The Sinthome: The Lady Vanishes (1938)115

A (M)Other for Iris 116
A Symptom Is What Is a Bit ‘Fishy’, or Doesn’t Quite ‘Fit In’ 116
Topologically Speaking—The Borromean Clinic 120
The Roar of the Real and the Sidetracked Train 121
The Harriman’s Herbal Teapacket Label as Lamella 125
The Vanishing Lady Act—‘A Symptomal Torsion’ 129
An Aesthetic of Emptiness—The Hitchcockian Cut 130
Foreclosure—The Woman Does(n’t) Exist 132
The Jouis-sens of Noise 135
Bandrika, Land of Bands 137
The Objet petit a, Other of the Other 140
Aufhebung-ed (Sublation Not Sublimation) 141
Eastern European Totalitarianism? No Thanks! 143
References 149
5 Metastases: Spellbound (1945)153

‘Psychoanalysis. It Bores the Pants Off Me!’ 154
Retroactivity of Meaning—A Message from the Future 158
Transference and Countertransference 160
The Loop of Writing and Reading 162
Flitting Figures or Parallel Lines 163
Contents xi
‘Vorrei e Non Vorrei’—Edwardes or Edwards? Ballyntine or

Ballantine? Petersen or Peterson? 166
Structures of Sexuation—‘Any Husband of Constance Is a
Husband of Mine, So to Speak’ 169
‘Le Père ou Pire’—‘The Father or Worse’ 174
Les Non-dupes Errent 177
La Mère ou La Mort—‘You’re Not His Mama, You’re an
Analyst’ 179
Zwangsvorstellungen, a Paranoiac Vision—Lacan avec Dalí 180
The Light Under the Door and the Last Freudian Slip 187
Epigraph—Cassius avec Constance 189
References 195
6 Enjoyment: Marnie (1964)201

A Detail That Sticks Out—The Lady with the Yellow Alligator
Purse 202
Jouissance as Clinamen—From Nothing to Something 206
When the Other Comes Too Close—Angst vor Etwas (Fear of
Something) 208
Phallic Jouissance—Virtually a Rape 211
‘We Don’t Need Men, Mama’—Tippi Hedren as Santa Teresa 214
La Femme à Postiche: The Fake, Phony Woman 217
Thunder and Lightning—Hysteron Proteron 221
Plus-de-jouir—‘Money Answereth All Things’ 225
‘Tonight the Door Stays Open’—Jouissance and the
Femme Fatale 226
Talking Smart About the Bible—The Acousmatic Voice 228
‘Would Rather’ or ‘Had Rather’?—Mental Health Week 231
References 235
7 Fantasy: Che vuoi? Rope (1948)241

‘Le style est l’homme même’: Le Trait Unaire 242
Interpassivity: A Fetishism of Technique 246
Twisted Words: The Counter-Voice of Humour 248
Act or ‘Acting-Out’ or Passage à l’acte: Aphanisis of the Subject 251
The Canting Candle: Takes or Mis-Takes? 255
Le Sujet Supposé Savoir: Rupert as Detective or Analyst? 258
The Purloined Corpse: Cassone or Closet? 260
xii Contents
Masters or Servants?: The Minotaur of Conscience 266

Prime Movers and Second Handers 270
Ethics of the Real: ‘Kant avec Cadell’ 273
From the Big Window to ‘The Night of the World’ 275
References 283
8 The Fragile Absolute: I Confess (1953)289

‘Are You Given to Understatement Father?’: Hitchcock’s
Catholicism 290
The Cahiers’ Take, or, Murder Always Implies a Third Party 292
Žižek’s ‘Turn’ to Christianity 293
Badiou and the ‘Vanishing Mediator’ 294
Christianity Is the Religion of Confession 297
A Knowledge Beyond Perception: Faith 302
Father Logan as Bartelby: Jumping Too Suddenly 304
Die Versagung: Perdition 307
Hiding Grime 310
Cupidinous Weltschmerz, or, ‘Love Is Whatever You Can Still
Betray’ 311
It’s About (Homosexual) Love Not Murder 316
Dans La R(r)ue 318
On Belief: ‘Je sais bien, mais quand même…’ 321
Surplus-Enjoyment: ‘An Accessory after The Fact’ 323
References 327
9 Coda: Does Hitchcock Remake Žižek?331

Double Takes: Hitchcock Remakes Himself 332
Creating Your Own Precursor: Van Sant Remakes Hitchcock 334
How to Talk About Films You Haven’t Seen: Žižek Remakes
Hitchcock 339
Plagiarizing from the Future: Hitchcock Remakes Žižek 342
References 349
Index353
List of Figures
Fig. 2.1 Madeleine at Ernie’s Restaurant 29

Fig. 2.2 Scottie looking away at Ernie’s Restaurant 30
Fig. 2.3 Madeleine in profile at Ernie’s Restaurant 30
Fig. 2.4 Žižek: Objet a as ‘obstacle that interrupts the closed circuit of
the pleasure principle’ (EYS 48) 42
Fig. 2.5 Madeleine’s clothing on the bar in Scottie’s kitchen 52
Fig. 2.6 Judy’s face half in shadow 59
Fig. 3.1 Lacan: the triangulated schema from Encore (S20 90) 82
Fig. 3.2 The God’s-eye-view over Bodega Bay 86
Fig. 3.3 The school jungle gym full of crows 89
Fig. 3.4 Shot 33, Melanie leaves the letter 102
Fig. 3.5 Shot 57, Mitch looks through the binoculars 102
Fig. 4.1 Lacan: the Borromean rings linked by the fourth ring, the
symptom (S23, 12, 77) 120
Fig. 4.2 Miss Froy’s name on the train window 125
Fig. 4.3 Harriman’s Herbal teapacket stuck to the train window 126
Fig. 4.4 Miss Froy’s face seen multiplied by the semi-conscious Iris 135
Fig. 5.1 Constance scratches a fork on the tablecloth 165
Fig. 5.2 The young Ballyntine views his brother on the balustrade 168
Fig. 5.3 Dalí’s drawing of eyes repainted for the film set of Spellbound184
Fig. 6.1 Marnie’s yellow purse 202
Fig. 6.2 Lacan: Schema of the Two Mirrors (S10, 39) 210
Fig. 6.3 Lacan: cover page of French edition of Encore with Bernini’s
Ecstasy of Saint Teresa215
Fig. 6.4 Sanders Street, Baltimore with painted ship in background 219
Fig. 7.1 Brandon and Philip strangle David Kentley 252
xiii
xiv List of Figures
Fig. 7.2 The canting candle 256

Fig. 7.3 Brandon and Philip stand too close 265
Fig. 7.4 The panoramic window 276
Fig. 8.1 Father Logan in the confessional 299
Fig. 8.2 Flashback of Ruth descending the stairs 301
Fig. 8.3 Prosecutor Willie Robertson balances forks on a glass of wine 312
Fig. 8.4 Direction sign in opening sequence 319
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: From H to Z
Abstract Taking its inspiration from Žižek’s essay ‘Why are there always
two fathers?’ the introduction explores antecedents for Hitchcock (Fritz
Lang and F.W. Murnau) and Žižek (Hegel and Lacan). It is argued that
Žižek reads the dialectical process of Hegel in a more radical way such that
the dialectic does not produce a resolution or a synthesized viewpoint,
rather it points out that contradiction is an internal condition of every
identity. Like Žižek, Hitchcock’s early influences were German: he worked
briefly on one German film and directed two of his own. He had a relation-
ship with several key German directors including Fritz Lang and
F.W. Murnau, and German filmmaking was the early source for many of his
ideas about filmmaking. This introduction outlines the main features of
Žižek’s revitalization of film theory and the questions of influence and tra-
dition, innovation and influence that are explored in the book as a whole.
Watching a well-made film, we don’t sit by as spectators; we participate.

—Alfred Hitchcock, ‘Why “Thrillers” Thrive’ (1936)
And is not Alfred Hitchcock in such a position of exception with regard
to this standard Hollywood narrative? Is he not the very embodiment of
Hollywood ‘as such’ precisely insofar as he occupies the place of exception
with regard to it.
—Slavoj Žižek, The Fright of Real Tears
In this matter of the visible, everything is a trap.
—Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2021
L. Simmons, Žižek through Hitchcock,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62436-1_1
2 L. SIMMONS
The Elvis of Cultural Theory on Bodega Bay

One of the early sequences of Sophie Fiennes’ The Pervert’s Guide to
Cinema (2006) opens with Slovenian cultural analyst and philosopher
Slavoj Žižek, dressed in a yellow shirt sitting a little uncomfortably at the
helm of a motorized dingy which, he declares, is floating in the middle of
Bodega Bay, the location for Alfred Hitchcock’s film The Birds (1963).
The sequence then cuts back and forth between scenes from The Birds and
Žižek’s animated explanations of how the Oedipal tensions between the
central character Mitch and his mother underpin an explanation of why
the birds in the film inexplicably attack; they are, he suggests, ‘raw incestu-
ous energy’. A little later, with the outboard engine now running and
relaxing into his role, Žižek turns to the camera and declares: ‘You know
what I am thinking now? I am thinking like Melanie, I am thinking I want
to fuck Mitch’. This sequence of Fiennes’ film illustrates the almost perfect
conflation of ‘Žižek the person’ with ‘Žižek the scholar’ and now ‘Žižek
the filmstar’. The characteristic frenzy of his tics and spasms, the wild ges-
ticulations of his hands and tugging at his unkempt beard, his rumpled
shirt, the ever-increasing circles of sweat widening under his arms, his
strong Central European accent in English and above all his outrageous
and unselfconscious bad taste in jokes and examples, scatological as well as
sexual, all translate directly into print and now onto screen. On screen we
have a sense of the unrestrained energy of Žižek’s published ideas, which
rush ahead of themselves and frenetically dissipate into a web of dissemi-
nated connections, of what Robert Boynton calls a ‘trademark synthesis of
philosophical verve and rhetorical playfulness’ (1998, 42). Žižek the film-
star also plays to the byline puffery on the back covers of his books: ‘The
Elvis of Cultural Theory’ and ‘An academic rock star’.1 And Žižek the
global academic who is feted on the international academic conference
circuit has run for the office of President of Slovenia, written copy for the
catalogue of American outfitters Abercrombie and Fitch, collaborated
with experimental punk rock band Laibach, participated in ‘the debate of
the century’ with Jordan Peterson and has featured in no fewer than
five films.
However, among many film theorists, Žižek’s status as film critic (and
film star) is that of a clown—the Charlie Chaplin of film theory! This is not
only the result of his distinctive personality but also the product of his
prolific writing which employs the thrust of ‘cut and paste’, where articles,
essays, chapters, bad jokes and film examples get re-used time and time
1 INTRODUCTION: FROM H TO Z 3
again, forcing his reader to tease out a philosophical argument from

among the asides and at times dubious vignettes.2 Indeed, in the introduc-
tion to The Žižek Reader (1999), Žižek acknowledges that the surface of
entertainment, anecdotes and bizarre examples in his work acts as a ‘sym-
bolic lure’, but he also insists how ‘this “witty” texture serves as the enve-
lope of a fundamental coldness, of a “machinic” deployment of thought
which follows its path with utter indifference towards the pathology of
so-called human considerations’ (ZR viii). And towards the end of another
documentary, Žižek! (Dir. Astra Taylor, 2005), in which he also stars,
Žižek himself wonders in a psychoanalytic vein whether the attempts to
turn him into a figure of fun may represent in fact a deep resistance to tak-
ing him seriously. It will be the conceit of this book that we do take Žižek’s
pretensions to cinephilia and film criticism seriously and, adopting Žižek’s
own tactic of counterintuitive observation, that we read the corpus of
Alfred Hitchcock’s films (‘one of the great achievements of Western civili-
zation’3), and Žižek’s idiosyncratic citation of them, in order to arrive at a
position where we can identify the core commitments that inform Žižek’s
own work. From the practice of Hitchcock, we shall (hopefully) arrive at a
theory of Žižek. This process in which the form of the (Žižekian) philo-
sophical concept is allowed to emerge from the content of the
(Hitchcockian) example is Hegelian in its dialectical operation: indeed,
the inherent conceptual richness of the Hitchcockian examples may be
more fertile than the concepts distilled and teased out in a reflective pro-
cess from them. And, as Žižek’s insistence upon reiteration may insinuate,
a Hitchcock film, even a scene from one of his films, might require repeated
theoretical parsing for its full significance to emerge. To achieve this goal,
each chapter of Žižek through Hitchcock looks at a specific film by Hitchcock
and through it elaborates specific key concepts crucial to the formulation
and core of Žižek’s ideas: Chap. 2 explores the importance for Žižek of the
Lacanian objet petit a through Vertigo (1954); Chap. 3 attempts to answer
the question ‘Why do the birds attack?’ through Žižek’s encounter with
the Lacanian Real in The Birds (1963); in Chap. 4, the Lacanian sinthome
derives from a key reading of The Lady Vanishes (1938); Chap. 5 uses the
overt address to psychoanalysis in Spellbound (1945) to unpack the enig-
matic declaration by Lacan that ‘there is no such thing as a sexual relation-
ship’ and in so doing underlines the recurrent figure of metastasis in
Žižek’s work; Chap. 6 provides a re-reading of the Lacanian figure of jouis-
sance through the exploration of the femme fatale character in Marnie
(1964); in Chap. 7, the processes by which fantasy structures reality and
4 L. SIMMONS
determines the contours of desire are uncovered in Rope (1948); Chap. 8

addresses Žižek’s recent ‘turn’ to a Pauline Christianity through
Hitchcock’s subversive relationship to religion in I Confess (1953). The
series of books Žižek edits entitled Short Circuits has also provided me
with a model. A ‘short circuit’ ‘confronts a classic text, author, or notion
with its own hidden propositions, and thus reveals its disavowed truth’
and, as a result, Žižek claims, ‘the reader should not simply have learned
something new: the point is, rather, to make him or her aware of another—
disturbing—side of something he or she knew all the time’.4 The underly-
ing presumption is that films, particularly films such as those of Hitchcock
that explore the limits and possibilities of the medium, pose the philo-
sophical questions about the world(s) we view as well as what the experi-
ence and responsibility of viewing (that world) entails.
However, most film critics have been scathing of what they see as
Žižek’s utilitarian plundering in his own ‘machinic’ fashion of, in the main,
Hollywood feature films to advance and illustrate aspects of his Marxist
and psychoanalytical theoretical project. His references to film, it is consis-
tently argued, are merely incidental illustrations, which show little concern
for, or interest in, the fundamental basics of film study.5 As a case in point,
we might cite the only one of Žižek’s monographs, The Art of the Ridiculous
Sublime (2000), dedicated to an individual film as such, David Lynch’s
Lost Highway (1997), since it fails to address significant aspects of the
filmtext in favour of an extended exploration of the Lacanian position on
fantasy. About one-third into Lost Highway, the protagonist (Fred) who
has been sentenced to death for the murder of his unfaithful wife (Renee)
inexplicably transforms into another person (Pete) in his prison cell. It is a
transformation from dull, drab existence of impotent husband and a
mousy non-communicative wife to the exciting and dangerous life of the
young virile Pete who is seduced by the sexually aggressive femme fatale
blond reincarnation of Renee named Alice and uncannily played by the
same actress (Patricia Arquette). The problem of the film is how are we to
understand this inexplicable (‘unreal’) transformation? We can, suggests
Žižek, not through any exploration of a formal distinctiveness but by
understanding the film as an illustration of the Lacanian notion of ‘travers-
ing the fantasy’, the re-avowal of subjective responsibility that comes at
the end of the psychoanalytic cure. Traversing the fantasy means the rec-
ognition that in the long term, Žižek argues, in order to avoid a clash of
fantasies, we have to acknowledge that fantasy merely functions to screen
the abyss or inconsistency in the Other, and we must cease positing that
the Other has stolen the ‘lost’ object of our desire. In ‘traversing’ or ‘going
through’ the fantasy, all we have to do is experience how there is nothing
‘behind’ it, and how fantasy masks precisely this ‘nothing’ (ARS 45ff.). In
Lost Highway, Lynch achieves resolution of the contradiction by staging
two solutions one after the other on the same level: Renee is destroyed,
killed, punished; Alice eludes the control of the male protagonist and dis-
appears triumphantly along the lost highway.
The Parallax View

One of the most sustained criticisms of Žižek’s (lack of) film criticism has
come from veteran cognitivist and post-theorist, David Bordwell, who
attacks Žižek with the charge of a fundamental lack of responsibility to
scholarly process and serious engagement with the nuts and bolts of film
studies.6 This attack is prompted in no small part by Žižek’s scathing, and
far wittier, dismantling of post-theory in the opening pages of his only
complete ‘filmbook’, The Fright of Real Tears (2001), before he offers,
through analysis of the films of Krzysztof Kieślowski, the alternative of a
later Lacanian reading of the filmtext’s organization of enjoyment. Of
course, such oppositions, deconstructionists versus cognitivists or
Lacanians versus post-theorists, are dialectical and Žižek’s understanding
and exploitation of dialectics underpins his entire project. However, Žižek
re-reads the traditional dialectical process of Hegel in a more radical fash-
ion. In Žižek’s version, the dialectic does not produce a resolution or a
synthesized viewpoint, rather it points out that contradiction is an internal
condition of every identity. An idea about something is always disrupted
by a discrepancy, but that discrepancy is necessary for the idea to exist in
the first place. For Žižek, the truth is always found not in the compromise
or middle way but in the contradiction rather than the smoothing out of
differences.
The importance of the revised dialectic is paralleled by the Žižekian
notion of ‘the parallax view’, which he defines as follows:
The standard definition of parallax is: the apparent displacement of an object

(the shift of its position against a background), caused by a change in obser-
vational position that provides a new line of sight. The philosophical twist to
be added, of course, is that the observed difference is not simply ‘subjective’,
due to the fact that the same object which exists ‘out there’ is seen from two
different stances, or points of view. It is rather that, as Hegel would have put
6 L. SIMMONS
it, subject and object are inherently ‘mediated’, so that an ‘epistemological’

shift in the subject’s point of view always reflects an ‘ontological’ shift in the
object itself. Or—to put it in Lacanese—the subject’s gaze is always-already
inscribed into the perceived object itself, in the guise of its ‘blind spot’, that
which is ‘in the object more than the object itself’, the point from which the
object returns the gaze. (PV 17)
Žižek is interested in the ‘parallax gap’ separating two points between

which no synthesis or mediation is possible, a gap linked by an ‘impossible
short circuit’ of levels that can never meet. At the root of this category is
the gap or split (béance) within human subjectivity identified by Lacan
where the split or barred subject (symbolized by the matheme $) denotes
the impossibility of a fully present self-consciousness. How can one read a
book like The Parallax View (2006), indeed Žižek’s oeuvre as a whole,
except with a parallax view; by reading that is what seems to be there but
is never there? The early responses to Žižek’s book, and several bloggers’
sites, have lamented the fact that, in this very lengthy tome, there is not
one mention of the film, Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View (1974), which
is obviously the source of Žižek’s title. How might we explain the perver-
sity of Žižek naming a monumental book, that he describes as his magnum
opus, after a film and then not discussing it? And, also, the odd fact that,
given it is an optical phenomenon under discussion, the film references in
The Parallax View are also minimal. But it would seem that the parallax in
Žižek’s sense is present in the film, and the book, in the gap between
explanations that account for the immediacy of an event and explanations
that account for the totality of forces behind them; or, perhaps, better, in
the way that investigating a crime or matter shifts imperceptibly into
becoming part of the very crime or matter. Warren Beatty’s character in
Pakula’s film moves from being a reporter on to being part of the situa-
tion, to being involved, hence suggesting the presence of the observer
within the frame. Similarly, for Žižek, the shift is from cognitive responses
to the moving image (what the screen places in our heads) to an interest
in cinema as the screen onto which we project our desires.
A similar ‘parallax view’ marks Žižek’s ambivalent relationship to
Cultural Studies. It might seem that Žižek’s interests in mass-cultural
objects such as Titanic (Dir. James Cameron, 1997), or the novels of
Stephen King, are merely part of a recent ‘turn’ to the study of popular
culture. By locating his theorizing within popular culture, Žižek would
seem to share this approach and the assertion that, in Raymond Williams’s
words, ‘culture is ordinary’.7 Indeed, the charge of Bordwell and others is

that with Žižek we have an emphasis of context above text, and that the
filmtext for Žižek is significant not for its own sake, its aesthetic greatness,
but for what it might reveal to us about the cultural context from whence
it came. However, Cultural Studies is the object of some of Žižek’s most
scathing criticism (IR 87–117). Žižek approaches the ‘popular’ from the
opposite (parallax) angle; rather than treating high works of art as if they
were popular Žižek treats the popular work of art as if it were ‘high’, the
popular texts in some way transcend their context and testify to some
truth that the ‘ordinariness’ of their context obscures. Take his response
to the liberal claim that the film Fight Club (Dir. David Fincher, 1999) is
pro-violence and proto-fascist. Žižek counters that the message of the film
is not about ‘liberating violence’ and that it is the reality of the appearance
that ‘violence hurts’ that is its true message after all. The fights are ‘part of
a potentially redemptive disciplinary drive … an indication that fighting
brings the participants close to the excess-of-life over and above the simple
run of life’ (OwB 174).
Why Are There Always Two (Three?) Fathers?

Alfred Hitchcock, too, appears in a boat, not on Bodega Bay but in his
film Lifeboat (1944), however, this time he is there at one remove, in a
newspaper advertisement for ‘Reduco, The Sensational New Obesity
Slayer’. The cameo appearance in this advertisement features two
Hitchcocks, the fat and the thin—the self-parodying before and the after
of a dieting advertisement—but also the presence (indeed, he is there on
Bodega Bay…) and absence of authorial self-consciousness. It at once
confirms, as John Orr suggests, Hitchcock as ‘a matrix-figure’ who was
‘not only at the centre of his own cinema but of cinema as such’ and
through whose films ‘much of the entire life of Western cinema has been
nurtured and dispersed’. But, like his many other cameo appearances, it is
also representative of how Hitchcock mediates ‘between a system of cine-
phile authorship and a Hollywood genre system’ (2005, 8).
The reference to Hegel and the Žižekian revision of the dialectic in the
previous section raises the question of Žižek’s, but also Hitchcock’s, ante-
cedents. Let us start with Hitchcock first. Like Žižek, Hitchcock’s early
influences were German: he worked briefly on one German film and
directed two of his own.8 The influence was both stylistic and associated
with the work of two key directors but also tied to a specific German
8 L. SIMMONS
production model and its associated aesthetics.9 Francois Truffaut

described him as ‘the most German of all directors on the other side of the
Atlantic’ (1990, 179).10 While working on a British-German co-production
The Blackguard (Die Prinzessin und der Geiger) in 1924 at the Ufa studios
in Neubabelsberg, he observed Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau at work. The
experience was pivotal, and his biographer Donald Spoto quotes
Hitchcock: ‘my models were forever after the German filmmakers of 1924
and 1925’ (1984, 74). F.W. Murnau’s The Last Laugh (Der Letzte Mann,
1924), which he watched being filmed in Berlin, was often cited by
Hitchcock as a great influence upon him. The Last Laugh, which tells the
spiralling downfall of a hotel doorman, is representative of one of the
major strains of Weimar cinema, the intimate Kammerspiel (chamber play)
categorized by its focus on character psychology, lack of intricate set design
and its frequent depiction of the working class. Also, unlike German
Expressionism films, films of the Kammerspiel movement very seldom
used intertitles to create spoken dialogue or narrate the film, instead con-
veying their narratives through a visual logic. The great technical innova-
tion of the Kammerspiel was the ‘unchained camera’ (entfesselte Kamera)
where an unfettered, inquisitive and even voyeuristic camera moves across
great expenses of screen space and employs unusual angles. In The Last
Laugh the unchained camera, together with dissolves and superimposi-
tions, is employed to convey a sense of disorientation and drunkenness of
the protagonist as well as his hallucinatory dreams. But Hitchcock’s debt
to Murnau became much more than a tour-de-force of cinematic tech-
nique; it was Murnau’s attempt to find a universal language for the cin-
ema, ‘to express ideas in purely visual terms’ (Spoto 1984, 68) and to
expand the expressive qualities of the camera that inspired Hitchcock. In a
later interview, Hitchcock declared: ‘The Germans in those times placed
great emphasis on telling the story visually; if possible with no titles or at
least very few … I’ve always believed that you can tell as much visually as
you can with words. That’s what I learned from the Germans’ (cited in
Gottlieb 1999–2000, 102). When we think of the early German influence
on film, we immediately think of expressionism with its exaggerated
images, melodramatic action, shadows and camera angles. Indeed, film
expressionism gets most of the attention as distinctive feature of German
cinema of the 1920s, and, certainly, Hitchcock was to incorporate some of
the camera techniques and style: shadows, chiaroscuro lighting effects,
micro-subjective camera shots. But, with directors like Murnau,
Kammerspiel film’s meticulous attention to detail, shooting of interior,
often claustrophobic, environments using tight shot sizes, medium close-

ups and low-key-lighting was being amalgamated with the social realism of
documentary ‘new objectivity’ and ‘streetfilms’ (Strassenfilm). For French
film directors Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol, the mixture of the
abstract and the concrete in Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946) reminded them
expressly of Murnau (1980, 86). The German influence on Hitchcock was
not only confined to aspects of visual narration but is also reflected in the
model of the director as star and auteur who became the central creative
force behind the German films and a significant element in their marketing.
Hitchcock, though, has a second ‘father’. In his interviews with
Truffaut, Hitchcock speaks of himself as ‘deeply entrenched in American
cinema’ (1984, 124). In a review written in 1931, Hitchcock identifies
D.W. Griffith as ‘the first in his line who really mattered’ and ‘the man
who contributed more than any other’, and he singles out a film of Griffith,
The Avenging Conscience (1914), as ‘the forerunner and inspiration of
most of the modern German films’ (Hitchcock 2005–2006, 46–49).
Sidney Gottlieb notes the significance of ‘Hitchcock’s hint that Griffith
influenced him in a refracted and mediated way, via German films, as well
as directly’ (2005–2006, 41). Like the German directors, Hitchcock’s
deep kinship with the work of Griffith relates to his status as (the first)
auteur defined by singularity and innovation, and stylistically revolution-
ary. Griffith contributed to the technique of filmmaking more than almost
any other single individual with his adoption and refinement of the track-
ing shot, close-up, reaction-shot and, in particular, the parallel editing
crosscut to produce the popular form of the suspense chase. All of which
contribute to Hitchcock’s idea of pure cinema contrasted with what he
disparaged as ‘pictures of people talking’ (in Gottlieb 1995, 158). For film
historian Tom Gunning, Hitchcock’s brand of suspense marks him as ‘one
of Griffith’s most important heirs in the realm of filmic discourse’ (1991,
296). And Sidney Gottlieb concludes that Griffith is ‘a major contributor
to Hitchcock’s increasingly adventurous visualizations of the mysterious,
the invisible and the uncanny’ (2005–2006, 43). Such was the influence
of D.W. Griffith, combined with the fact that his early work was in an
American-operated studio, Hitchcock himself was to comment that he felt
he was ‘an American filmmaker even before he moved to America’ (in
Gottlieb 1995, 100).
How, then, might Hitchcock’s work bridge the gap between these two
national film traditions? The term ‘vanishing mediator’ is borrowed by
Žižek from Fredric Jameson (from his essay ‘The Vanishing Mediator; or,
10 L. SIMMONS
Max Weber as Storyteller’) (1988 [1973]). Jameson’s essay represents an

attempt to historicize the overlooked or invisible moments in large-scale
historical processes: the role of Protestantism within the rise of capitalism
(TK 182; MI 14); the part played by opposition socialist parties in the fall
of communism (TK 187; TN 230). On several occasions, Žižek develops
and expands the concept beyond the purely political to encompass ‘the
vanishing mediator’ as a kind of necessary gap or absence in any historical
record, for example, Protestantism as the vanishing mediator between feu-
dalism and capitalism. As Rex Butler observes, the vanishing media-
tor is not
simply to be written back into the historical record, because it is also what
must be left out for this record to be constituted. And if it testifies to a cer-
tain moment of ‘undecidability’ in the unfolding of events, a moment when
things hung in the balance and could have turned out differently, it is an
‘undecidability’ that is only thinkable against the background of how events
actually did turn out, an ‘undecidability’ that is not to be realized but that
haunts and makes possible every reality. (2006, 22)
The vanishing mediator thus mediates the transition between two

seemingly opposite traditions and then ‘vanishes’, as Protestantism, and
religion in general, has done under capitalism. For Hitchcock, the oppo-
site, and often opposing, traditions of German and American cinema are
mediated by a figure who worked in both, but for the most part remains
unspoken and unacknowledged, Fritz Lang. Hitchcock is reported to have
visited the set of Lang’s Metropolis (1927) while working on The Blackguard
(Elsaesser 2003–2004, 2), and, in his conversations with Truffaut,
Hitchcock singles out one picture that had impressed him most of all dur-
ing his German sojourn, Fritz Lang’s Der müde Tod (‘Tired Death’ known
as Destiny (1921)) (1985, 26). John Orr, who points out the career paral-
lels—both directors left Europe for Hollywood in the 1930s; they shared
key themes of ‘suspicion, flight, dissembling madness and betrayal’ (2005,
60); both linked the modern city to thematics of ‘social unease’; both
found fascism repellent and produced propaganda films for the Allied war
effort; both were constrained in different ways by studio demands—argues
that the deepest influence of the German Kammerspiel did not begin to
manifest itself until Hitchcock came to America. It was Hitchcock who
took over and developed Lang’s tropism for enclosed spaces, in particular
on his one-set films like Rope. ‘It is Hitchcock, not Lang’, Orr maintains,
‘who renews the European Kammerspiel tradition in the age of sound and
Hollywood colour … Compared with the monotony of Lang’s office and
home interiors, Hitchcock’s Kammerspiel aesthetic would give his single
interior an identity of its own, turn it in effect into a leading character in
the film’ (63). Thomas Elsaesser speaks of ‘a curious relation of haunting
and echoing, surpassing and competing, mirroring and inverting’ between
the careers and films of the two directors (2003–2004, 7). Lang’s biogra-
pher, Patrick McGilligan, writes of evidence of jealousy and rivalry between
the two, and notes that Lang detested the comparison between himself
and Hitchcock. He felt that Hitchcock borrowed shamelessly from him,
but admitted that he was, nevertheless, influenced by Hitchcock’s films
like Rebecca (1997, 122; 353). So, we might conclude, Hitchcock pro-
duced his ‘pure cinema’ from the sources of Murnau and Griffith through
Lang as a vanishing mediator.11
Let us turn now to Žižek and his antecedents. According to Adrian
Johnston, the core of Žižek’s project ‘consists in the redeployment of a
German idealist theory of subjectivity revised in being passed through the
lens of Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalytic metapsychology’ (2008, 125).
Simply put, Žižek employs Lacanian psychoanalysis to update German ide-
alism. But the process, of course, is not a simple one. Johnston notes how,
in his debt to Hegel, Žižek offers a revision of the orthodox rendition of
Hegel’s ideas, and provides a re-evaluation of negativity in Hegel against
the lure of traditionally-conceived Hegelian dialectical synthesis:
Žižek’s Hegel is the exact opposite of what he is usually conceived to be—

not an idealist metaphysician of the all-consuming conceptual synthesis of a
thereby totalized reality but, instead, a materialist thinker of (in Lacanese) a
not-All Real shot through with antagonisms, cracks, fissures and ten-
sions. (2007, 5)
Here it is the reference to Lacanian materialism that points us to Žižek’s

second ‘father’, Jacques Lacan. Indeed, one of the aims of Žižek through
Hitchcock is to reformulate the Hitchcock/Žižek relationship in terms of
the Lacanian inscription in the field of psychoanalysis of the struggle for
recognition encapsulated in the Hegelian master and slave dialectic.12
How, then, do we explain the centrality of the figure of Lacan for Žižek
and for this book? Žižek writes,
12 L. SIMMONS
… the first thing that strikes the eye is the philosophical tenor of Lacan’s
theory. For Lacan, psychoanalysis at its most fundamental is not a theory
and technique of treating psychic disturbances, but a theory and practice
that confronts individuals with the most radical dimension of human exis-
tence. It does not show an individual the way to accommodate him- or
herself to the demands of social reality; instead it explains how something
like ‘reality’ constitutes itself in the first place. It does not merely enable a
human being to accept the repressed truth about him- or herself; it explains
how the dimension of truth emerges in human reality. (HRL 3)
For Lacan, who in the early 1930s closely followed the influential re-
reading of Hegel’s system by Alexandre Kojève and Jean Hyppolite, the
master, despite having symbolic authority and a correlative control of the
thing, is always dependent on the slave. Indeed, in the words of Hyppolite,
the master ‘may become the slave of the slave, and the slave, the master of
the master’ (1979, 163 fn25). So, for Kojève and Lacan, the master–slave
dialectic contains within it the logic of its own reversal, for the master is
already locked into a relationship with the slave, and, for Lacan, the battle
for recognition is necessary for the formation of self-consciousness and is
unending. As Žižek observes:
Lacan’s fundamental thesis is that the Master is by definition an impostor …

yet the place occupied by him—the place of the lack in the structure—can-
not be abolished, since the very finitude of every discursive field imposes its
structural necessity. The unmasking of the Master’s imposture does not
abolish the place he occupies, it just renders it visible in its original empti-
ness. (EYS 103)
As with Hitchcock, so with Žižek we have the introduction of a ‘third

man’, Schelling. Žižek reads Hegel and Lacan through the more marginal
figure of F.W.J. Schelling (1775–1854) as a ‘vanishing mediator’ who
plays a pivotal role in reconciling transcendentalism and idealism of Hegel
(and Kant) with the materialism of Freud (and Lacan) and Marx. Tony
Myers notes:
For Žižek, Schelling functions as a kind of vanishing mediator in the history

of philosophy. His work is the invisible connection between idealism and
materialism, maintaining the form of the idealism of previous philosophers
while introducing the content of a materialism that is later taken up by
Marx … and Freud. (2003, 39)
Through an analysis of the successive drafts of Schelling’s The Ages of

the World (Weltalter) (1811–1815), whose very unfinishedness he takes to
be a sign of Schelling’s intrinsic materialism, Žižek argues that Schelling’s
account of the passage from chaos to creation, of how the world came into
being, anticipates Lacan’s account of the passage from the Real to the
Symbolic. As Rex Butler observes:
Rather, if Schelling relates to Hegel, it is not in opposing him but in bring-

ing out something that is already in him. That is, after Schelling, it is possi-
ble to read … the dialectic not as the reconciliation of opposites or the
negation of the world but as the ‘negation of negation’. (2005, 79)
In Enjoy Your Symptom! Žižek asks, ‘Why are there always two fathers?’
He presents a picture of two fathers fighting over the symbolic law. These
are the traditional Oedipal father guarantor of the Law and symbolic
authority, and an excessively present father whose power cannot be
reduced to the bearer of a symbolic function, a shadowy double of the
former, elsewhere known as the superego or the perverse father (Lacan’s
père-vers) (S23 11). In the last chapter of The Ticklish Subject, however,
Žižek adds a third father, the primordial father. This is the father from
Freud’s late work Moses and Monotheism, the dead father who returns as
his name. For Lacan, it is the paternal metaphor, the Name-of-the-Father,
which determines the place of the subject within the Symbolic network.
Indeed, in ‘Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis’,
Lacan distinguishes between the real father, the imaginary father and the
symbolic father (E 230). The first of these is the biological flesh and blood
father, although the question of paternity always remains uncertain; the
second is the father the son dreams of becoming, a composite of imaginary
constructs that the subject builds up in fantasy; and the third, the father as
representative of the Law and regulator of desire. Together, these figures
constitute a ‘paternal function’ that nobody can ever occupy completely.
The symbolic father is also the dead father, the father of the primal horde
who has been murdered by his own sons. This explains why Freud returned
to obsessively to the myth of parricide in his late writings, imputing more
and more truth value to it, of the primordial father who, after his violent
death, returns in the guise of his name as Symbolic authority. The implica-
tion being that if the father is to assert paternal authority, he must in some
way ‘die alive’.
14 L. SIMMONS
We Can Never Know Enough About

Hitchcock/Žižek
Žižek also pursues the difference between the early structuralist Lacan of
the 1950s and the late Lacan of the fundamental recalcitrance of the Real
of the 1960s.13 The Lacanian concept of the Real—the most under-
represented component of the triad of the Real, the Symbolic and the
Imaginary14—provides another way to approach that which cannot be
spoken (drawn into the Symbolic), because it eludes the ability of the
ontological subject to signify it. The Real is the hidden/traumatic under-
side of our existence or sense of reality, whose disturbing effects are felt in
strange and unexpected places. For Žižek, material contained within the
pre-ontological, like abject material, can and does emerge into the onto-
logical sphere and once there, however troubling or traumatic, it is made
meaning of. Žižek’s Hitchcock examples are the Mother Superior who
emerges at the close of Vertigo who ‘functions as a kind of negative deus ex
machina, a sudden intrusion in no way properly grounded in the narrative
logic, which prevents the happy ending’ (‘Is there a way to remake a
Hitchcock film?’ 270); and the swamp that Norman sinks Marion’s car
into in Psycho ‘is another in the series of entrance points to the preonto-
logical netherworld’ (ibid. 269). Nevertheless, despite its irruption into
the filmtext like this, the Real resists every attempt to render it meaningful
and those elements that inhabit it continually elude signification.
Associated with the Real is what Lacan terms ‘the Thing’ (das Ding)
(Seminar 7), a point that lies outside the Symbolic and Imaginary orders,
where the weight and menace of the Real are sensed. With regard to sci-
ence fiction film Žižek talks about the Thing, ‘used by Freud to designate
the ultimate object of our desires in its unbearable intensity and impene-
trability’ (HRL 43), as a mechanism that directly materializes the impen-
etrability of our unacknowledged fantasies. In the film Solaris (Dir. Andrei
Tarkovsky, 1972), for example, it relates to ‘the deadlocks of sexual rela-
tionship’ (‘The Thing from Inner Space’ 222). A space agency psycholo-
gist is sent to an abandoned spaceship above a newly discovered planet.
Solaris is a planet with a fluid surface that imitates recognizable forms.
Scientists in the film hypothesize that Solaris is a gigantic brain that some-
how reads our minds. Soon after his arrival, Kelvin, the psychologist, finds
his dead wife at his side in bed. In fact, his wife had committed suicide
years ago on Earth after Kelvin deserted her. The dead wife pops up every-
where, sticks around and finally Kelvin grasps that she is a materialization
of his own innermost traumatic fantasies. He discovers that she doesn’t

have human chemical composition. The dead wife because she has no
material identity of her own thus acquires the status of the Real. However,
the wife then becomes aware of the tragedy of her own status, that she
only exists in the Other’s dream and has no innermost substance, and her
only option is to commit suicide a second time by swallowing a chemical
that will prevent her recomposition. The planet Solaris here, Žižek argues,
is the Lacanian Thing (das Ding), a sort of obscene jelly, the traumatic
Real where Symbolic distance collapses, ‘it provides—or rather imposes on
us—the answer before we even raise the question, directly materialising
our innermost fantasies which support our desire’ (‘The Thing from Inner
Space’ 223).
Less Suture More Jouissance

Žižek can be credited with a revival of interest in specifically Lacanian psy-
choanalytical film criticism, but, as we have seen, his approach also repre-
sents a decisive shift from the traditional psychoanalytical film focus of
Laura Mulvey’s analysis of the gaze of mastery (1975) and Jean-Pierre
Oudart’s notion of suture and cinematic identification (1977–1978), to
concentrate on questions of fantasy and spectator enjoyment. Thus, con-
cepts of the gaze and identification in Žižek’s film commentary are linked
to issues of desire and the fantasmatic support of reality as a defence against
the Real.15 A case in point is Žižek’s repeated analysis of the sexual assault
scene from Lynch’s Wild at Heart (1990).16 In this scene, Bobby Peru
(William Dafoe) invades the motel room of Lula Fortune (Laura Dern)
and after repeated verbal and physical harassment coerces her into saying
to him, ‘Fuck me!’. As soon as the exhausted Dern utters the barely audi-
ble words that would signal her consent to the sexual act, Dafoe with-
draws, puts on a pleasant face and politely retorts: ‘No thanks, I don’t
have time today, I’ve got to go; but on another occasion I would do it
gladly….’ Our uneasiness with this scene, suggests Žižek, lies in the fact
that Dafoe’s ‘unexpected rejection is his ultimate triumph and, in a way,
humiliates her more than direct rape’ but also that ‘just prior to her “Fuck
me!”, the camera focuses on [Dern’s] right hand, which she slowly spreads
out—the sign of her acquiescence, the proof that he has stirred her fan-
tasy’ (PV 69).
A keystone to Žižek’s edifice is the Lacanian notion of jouissance, which,
characteristically, he simply translates as ‘enjoyment’.17 For Žižek,
16 L. SIMMONS
jouissance is both a feature of individual subjectivity, an explanation of our

individual obsessions and investments, and a phenomenon that best
describes the political dynamics of collective violence, for example, it is the
envy of the jouissance of the Other (as neighbour) that accounts for racism
and extreme forms of nationalism. What gets on our nerves about the
Other is his or her enjoyment (smelly food, noisy conversation in another
language, strange customs and clothing (chador), attitudes to work (he or
she is either a workaholic stealing our jobs or a bludger living off our ben-
efits)) (see TN 200–205). One of Žižek’s central concerns is the status of
enjoyment within ideological discourse where, in our so-called permissive
society, there is an obscene command to enjoy that marks the return of the
Freudian superego. For example, there is a paradox between the greater
possibilities of sexual pleasure in more open societies such as ours and the
pursuit of such pleasure, which turns into a duty. The superego stands
between these two—the command to enjoy and the duty to enjoy. The
law is a renunciation of enjoyment that manifests itself by telling you what
you cannot do; in contrast, the superego orders you to enjoy what you can
do: permitted enjoyment becomes an obligation to enjoy. But of course,
Žižek notes, when enjoyment becomes compulsory, it is no longer
enjoyment.
It is the relational and paradoxical understanding of enjoyment that
renders it important for an understanding of film spectatorship. Again,
one detects Žižek’s interpretive revision of the stereotypical Hegelian dia-
lectical progression from thesis, through antithesis to synthesis at work
here. Žižek explores how the Lacanian concept of jouissance provides for a
re-reading of the femme fatale (see Chap. 6 on Marnie) of film noir. In the
traditional reading, the femme fatale is the embodiment of the fear of
emancipated femininity perceived as a threat to male identity. But this,
Žižek proposes, misses the point. All the features denounced as the result
of male paranoia (woman as inherently evil, as the seductress whose hate
and destruction of men express, in a perverted way, her awareness of how
her identity depends on the male gaze, and who therefore longs for her
own annihilation) account for the figure’s charm, as if the theorizing pro-
vides an alibi for our enjoyment of the femme fatale. And this in turn, for
Žižek, makes sense of Lacan’s pun jouis-sens (enjoy-meant).18
The Hegelian Counterbook—Hitchcock

as a Žižekian Heretic
In recent afterword to a book on his ‘theological turn’, entitled ‘The

Counterbook of Christianity’, Žižek, drawing on Hitchcock’s penchant
for the double or divided narrative, asks: What if Vertigo were to end with
Madeleine’s suicide? What if Psycho were to end just before Marion’s mur-
der? In both cases, the result would be a consistent, and consistently
moral, short film. With Hitchcock what one is first lured into taking as the
complete story (Marion’s story in Psycho or Madeleine’s story in Vertigo)
is suddenly displaced, reframed relocated into or supplemented by another
account (Norman’s story or Judy’s story). ‘What joins these two stories’,
Žižek argues, ‘is that the elements, the events, are inscribed in two narra-
tive registers that are at the same time distinct, simultaneous, and antago-
nistic, and the construction itself of the story is supported by the junction
between the two stories’ (‘Afterword: The Counterbook of Christianity’
146). We thus have a double/counter structure along the lines of the
opening story of Borges’ Fictions, which, notes Žižek, ‘culminates in the
claim: “Un libro que no encierra su contra-libro es considerado incomplete”
[A book which does not contain its counterbook is considered incom-
plete]’ (149). Žižek through Hitchcock is a ‘counterbook’ in this sense. It
aims to subvert the standard self-enclosed linear narrative, by means of
redoubling it in a hidden counternarrative. The narratives of Hitchcock
and Žižek are not symmetrical nor simply reflective, indeed while it is
Žižek’s story, because it is consequent upon Hitchcock, that renders the
gap, the antagonism that separates them, at the same time this opposing
‘junction’ encompasses the Hitchcockian truth of the entire Žižekian field.
The process follows, as we have already seen, Žižek’s perception of the
Hegelian dialectic: the second story, the supplement that would appear to
displace the first account, is not merely a negation in the formal Hegelian
sense, and it creates a split in order to then bring about a synthesis of
opposites. What happens in the passage from thesis to antithesis is not that
another story is introduced to the mix that brings together the two (in a
synthesis—this book) or that we can return to the first (either Žižek or,
even, Hitchcock in the form of an après-coup) with a richer and more
nuanced background but ‘all that happens is a purely formal shift by which
we realize that the “antithesis” ALREADY IS “synthesis”’ (‘Afterword:
The Counterbook of Christianity’ 156).
18 L. SIMMONS
The employment of the structure of the counternarrative on the part of

Hitchcock, in particular within a Hollywood studio system, was openly
heretical. In On Belief (2001), Žižek discusses the way in which heresy can
be usefully understood in relation to the dominant structure that has out-
lawed it. He notes that: ‘in order for an ideological edifice to occupy the
hegemonic place and legitimize existing power relations, it HAS to com-
promise its founding radical message—and the ultimate ‘heretics’ are
those who simply reject this compromise, sticking to the original mes-
sage’ (OB 8).
For Žižek, the heretic’s mistake (the action which, once performed,
requires that it be labelled heretical) is to take too seriously and ‘overcon-
form’ to the original interdiction and thus to reveal the dangerous absur-
dity inherent within it; second, the distance that exists between the
‘founding radical message’ and the manner with which it is practiced by
those who claim to serve and uphold it; and third the essentially arbitrary
nature of the law (as emerging from the ‘founding radical message’) and
thus of the ideological edifice that is supported and consolidated by the
law’s existence. Thus, as Žižek explains, much more subversive than actu-
ally breaking the law is to ‘Simply […] do what is allowed, that is, what the
existing order explicitly allows, although it prohibits it at the level of
unwritten prohibitions’ (RFT 147). ‘And’, suggests Žižek, ‘is not Alfred
Hitchcock in such a position of exception with regard to this standard
Hollywood narrative? Is he not the very embodiment of Hollywood “as
such” precisely insofar as he occupies the place of exception with regard to
it’ (FRT 27).
Returning to Bodega Bay, we might ask whether what is at stake in
Žižekian film criticism is a pervert’s guide to cinema or a cinema guide for
perverts? There is the fact or possibility of Žižek’s cinematic perversion
which, as we have seen, is a mainstay of many responses from within film
studies to his texts, but what if it were possible for this perversion to be
more complex than might initially appear, and, second, for it to serve a
critical and heretical function? Here Žižek’s own thoughts on the relation-
ship between cinema and perversion prove illuminating. Žižek’s use of
Lacan’s definition of perversion hinges on the structural aspect of perver-
sion: what is perverse in film viewing is the subject’s identification with the
gaze of an other, a moment that represents a shift in subjective position
within the interplay of gazes articulated by the cinematic text. Utilizing an
example from Michael Mann’s Manhunter (1986), Žižek comments that
the moment Will Graham, the FBI profiler, recognizes that the victims’
home movies which he is watching are the same films that provided the
sadistic killer with vital information, his ‘obsessive gaze, surveying every
detail of the scenery, coincides with the gaze of the murderer’ (LA 108).
This identification, Žižek continues, ‘is extremely unpleasant and
obscene … [because] such a coincidence of gazes defines the position of
the pervert’ (ibid.).
But is such perverse spectatorship more than simply a rupture in the old
psychoanalytical suture of conventional film narrative? Since the pervert
for Lacan and Žižek ‘does not pursue pleasure for his own pleasure, but for
the enjoyment of the Other’ (LA 109), the perversely-situated spectator is
forced suddenly to recognize that the drive to satisfaction, ordinarily ren-
dered possible through the standard conduit of narrative and spectator-
ship, is actually oriented towards the service and satisfaction of an ‘Other’
that remains forever beyond the ability of the spectator (or the film, for
that matter) to conceptualize and, hence, contain. To conclude we might
turn to Žižek’s own commentary on the importance and general objective
of his work. In The Fright of Real Tears, he suggests his aim is not so much
to argue for the reality of fictions as to ‘make us experience reality as a fic-
tion’. To adapt another of his book titles, it is because film keeps us ‘look-
ing awry’ on reality, that
if our social reality itself is sustained by a symbolic fiction or fantasy, then the
ultimate achievement of film art is not to recreate reality within a narrative
fiction, to seduce us into (mis)taking a fiction for reality, but, on the con-
trary, to make us discern the fictional aspect of reality itself, to experience
reality itself as a fiction. (FRT 77)
Notes
1. See, for example, the back cover of his Violence: Six Sideways
Reflections (2008).
2. For example, it is with characteristic perversity that in Zizek! Žižek cites The
Fountainhead (Dir. King Vidor, 1949) as the best American movie of
all time.
3. A statement made by Žižek in a public lecture at The University of Auckland
in 2002.
4. These sentences come from the Series Introduction, written presumably by
Žižek and reprinted at the beginning of each Short Circuit edition.
20 L. SIMMONS
5. Stephen Heath expresses concern that Žižek has, in fact, ‘little to say about
“institution”, “apparatus”, and so on, all the concerns of the immediately
preceding attempts to think cinema and psychoanalysis’ (1999, 44). Vicky
Lebeau argues that ‘it is the specificity of cinema that seems to go missing
in Žižek’s account’ (2001, 59). Tania Modleski criticizes ‘three reduction-
ist tendencies’ in Žižek’s analyses of Hitchcock: ‘he generalizes, sometimes
with wild inaccuracy, about the various “stages” of Hitchcock’s career; he
psychologizes the films’ characters with bits and pieces of out of date, not
to say long-discredited, pop psychology and sociology; and he recycles
nuggets of received wisdom from the various films, announcing them with
an éclat that suggests he believes these ideas originate with him’ (2005,
132). Some of these points have been made and summarized by Todd
McGowan (2007a) and are reiterated by Matthew Flisfeder (2012, 15ff).
First McGowan and then Flisfeder have provided the most sustained and
positive responses to Žižek’s excursion into film analysis. See also McGowan
(2007b) and Barrowman (2012) who provide an account of Hitchcock as
Žižek’s ‘Lacanian ally’.
6. See David Bordwell, ‘Slavoj Žižek: Say Anything’ (2005).
7. This phrase, which Williams was to repeat many times, first appears in an
early essay of the same title (see Williams 1958, 5–14).
8. Hitchcock worked as the screenwriter and set designer on The Blackguard
(Die Prinzessin und der Geiger) in 1924 for Ufa studios in Berlin, and
between 1925 and 1926, he directed The Pleasure Garden (Irrgarten der
Leidenshaft) and The Mountain Eagle (Der Bergalder) for Emelka studios
in Munich.
9. Thomas Elsaesser defines these as: ‘filming in totally controlled environ-
ments, surrounded by highly trained professionals, an emphasis on wholly
visual storytelling (“no intertitles”), and a mastery of complex camera
movements (those, for instance, devised by Karl Freund for Murnau’s film,
and generically referred to as the German’s “unchained cinema”’
(2003–2004, 1).
10. Joseph Garncarz also reports that ‘In a German television interview
Hitchcock … maintained that this period [in Germany] represented the
only external formative influence in his entire career’ (2000–2001, 74).
11. Elsaesser defines Hitchcock’s ‘pure cinema’ as a concern with ‘the primacy
of vision and the deceptiveness of appearances’ and a reflexivity that ‘indi-
cates a deep commitment to the expressive as well as semantic possibilities
of the medium, to such an extent that the films ultimately has one topic
only: the cinema itself’ (2003–2004, 13). He notes the paradox whereby
the critical re-evaluation of both Hitchcock’s and Lang’s work in the 1960s
occurred not in their home countries nor in America but in France (12–15)
and is associated with the rise of auteur theory (13).
12. However, as Rex Butler shrewdly points out, ‘even when Žižek is not
directly speaking about Lacan, he is speaking about Lacan. Lacan, is not so
much being translated as he is the very medium of translation itself. The
second impression we have is that the total presence of Lacan in Žižek’s
work means that his actual authority disappears’ (2005, 14).
13. Žižek has stated: ‘My thesis is that what passes in American cultural criti-
cism for “Lacanian theory” presents a very limited and distorted reception
of Lacan’s work. I want to challenge this established picture and render
palpable another dimension of Lacan, far more productive for social the-
ory’ (‘Re-visioning Lacanian Social Criticism’ 15).
14. Žižek explains these three levels as follows: ‘This triad can be nicely illus-
trated by the game of chess. The rules one has to follow in order to play it
are its symbolic dimension: from the purely formal symbolic standpoint,
“knight” is defined only by the moves this figure can make. This level is
clearly different from the imaginary one, namely the way in which different
pieces are shaped and characterized by their names (king, queen, knight),
and it is easy to envision a game with the same rules, but with a different
imaginary, in which this figure would be called “messenger” or “runner”
or whatever. Finally, real is the entire complex set of contingent circum-
stances that affect the course of the game’ (HRL 8–9).
15. Todd McGowan (2007a, 4) maintains that Žižek ‘elaborates an entirely
new concept of suture’.
16. Analysis of this scene occurs in The Plague of Fantasies (1997, 186–187),
The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime (2000, 11), The Fright of Real Tears
(2001, 131), and The Parallax View (2006, 69–70), as well as The Pervert’s
Guide to Cinema (2006).
17. Dylan Evans notes: ‘The French word jouissance means basically “enjoy-
ment”, but it has a sexual connotation (i.e. “orgasm”) lacking in the
English word “enjoyment”, and is therefore left untranslated in most
English editions of Lacan’ (2003, 91).
18. Jouis-sens (‘enjoy-meant’) relates to the demand of the superego to enjoy,
a demand that the subject will never be able to satisfy. According to Lacan,
jouis-sens, the jouissance of meaning, is located at the intersection of the
Imaginary and the Symbolic.
References
Works by Žižek
ARS. The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch’s Lost Highway. London:
Verso, 2000.
CZ. Conversations with Žižek, with Glyn Daly. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004.
22 L. SIMMONS
EYS. Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. New York and
London: Routledge, 2nd edition, 2002.
FRT. The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kies ́lowski between Theory and Post-Theory.
London: British Film Institute, 2001.
HRL. How to Read Lacan. London: Granta, 2006.
IR. The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters. London:
Verso, 1996.
LA. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994.
MI. Mapping Ideology. London: Verso, 1995.
OB. On Belief. London: Routledge, 2001.
OwB. Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences. London:
Routledge, 2004.
PV. The Parallax View. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.
TK. For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor. London:
Verso, 2002.
TN. Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 1993.
TUE. The Universal Exception: Slavoj Žižek, edited by Rex Butler and Scott
Stephens. London: Continuum, 2006.
V. Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. London: Picador, 2008.
ZR. The Žižek Reader, edited by Elizabeth and Edmond Wright. Oxford:
Blackwell, 1999.
‘Afterword: The Counterbook of Christianity’ in Marcus Pound, A (Very) Critical
Introduction to Žižek. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2008: 145–156.
‘Is there a proper way to remake a Hitchcock film?’ in Hitchcock: Past and Future,
edited by Richard Allen and Sam Ishii-Gonzales. London and New York:
Routledge, 2004: 257–274.
‘Re-visioning “Lacanian” Social Criticism: The Law and its Obscene Double,’
Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society 1:1 (1996): 15–26.
‘The Thing from Inner Space’ in Sexuation, sic 3, edited by Renata Salecl. Durham
and London: Duke University Press, 2000: 216–260.
Works by Lacan
E. Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English, translated by Bruce Fink. New York
and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006.
E1977. Ecrits: A Selection, translated by Alan Sheridan. London: Tavistock
Publications, 1977.
S2. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the
Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954–1955, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, trans-
lated by Sylvana Tomaselli with notes by John Forrester. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1988.
S7. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960,
edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated with notes by Dennis Porter.
New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1992.
S11. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of
Psychoanalysis, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by Alan Sheridan.
S23. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book XXIII: The Sinthome, edited by Jacques-
Alain Miller, translated by A. R. Price. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018.
Other Works
Barrowman, Kyle. 2012. The Sublime Stupidity of Alfred Hitchcock. International
Journal of Žižek Studies 6:3.
Bordwell, David. 2005. “Slavoj Žižek: Say Anything”. http://www.davidbor-
dwell.net/essays/zizek.php
Boynton, Robert S. 1998. Enjoy Your Žižek: A Profile of Slavoj Žižek. Lingua
Franca 8, no. 7: 42–43.
Butler, Rex. 2005. Slavoj Zizek: Live Theory. New York and London: Continuum.
Elsaesser, Thomas. 2003–2004. Too Big and Too Close: Alfred Hitchcock and
Fritz Lang. Hitchcock Annual 12: 1–41; reprinted in The Hitchcock Annual
Anthology, ed. Sidney Gottlieb and Richard Allen. London: Wallflower Press,
2009: 146–170.
Evans, Dylan. 2003. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis.
New York: Routledge.
Flisfeder, Matthew. 2012. The Symbolic, the Sublime, and Slavoj Žižek’s Theory of
Film. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Garncarz, Joseph. 2000–2001. German Hitchcock. Hitchcock Annual 9: 73–99.
Gottlieb, Sidney. 1995. Hitchcock on Hitchcock: Selected Writings and Interviews.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Gottlieb, Sidney. 1999–2000. Early Hitchcock: The German Influence. Hitchcock
Annual 8: 100–130.
Gottlieb, Sidney. 2005–2006. Hitchcock on Griffith. Hitchcock Annual 14: 32–45.
Gunning, Tom. 1991. D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film:
The Early Years at Biograph. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Heath, Stephen. 1999. Cinema and Psychoanalysis. In Endless Night: Cinema and
Psychoanalysis, Parallel Histories, ed. Janet Bergstrom, 25–26. Berkeley, Los
Angeles and London: University of California Press.
Hitchcock, Alfred. 2005–2006. A Columbus of the Screen. Hitchcock Annual 14:
46–9. Reprinted from Film Weekly, February 21, 1931, p. 9.
24 L. SIMMONS
Hyppolite, Jean. 1979. Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.

Trans. Samuel Chernick. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Jameson, Fredric. 1988. The Vanishing Mediator; or, Max Weber as Storyteller. In
The Ideologies of Theory, Essays 1971–1986. Volume 2: The Syntax of History,
3–34. London: Routledge.
Johnston, Adrian. 2008. Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of
Subjectivity. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Lebeau, Vicky. 2001. Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Play of Shadows. London:
Wallflower.
McGilligan, Patrick. 2013. Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
McGowan, Todd. 2007a. The Real Gaze: Film Theory after Lacan. Albany: State
University of New York Press.
McGowan, Todd. 2007b. Introduction: Enjoying the Cinema. International
Journal of Žižek Studies 1:3.
Modleski, Tania. 2005. The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist
Theory. New York and London: Routledge, second edition.
Mulvey, Laura. 1975. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Screen 16:3: 6–18.
Reprinted in her Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1989.
Myers, Tony. 2003. Slavoj Žižek. New York and London: Routledge.
Orr, John. 2005. Hitchcock and Twentieth-Century Cinema. London:
Wallflower Press.
Oudart, Jean-Pierre. 1977–1978. Cinema and Suture. Screen 18:4: 35–47.
Rohmer, Eric and Claude Chabrol. 1980. Hitchcock: The First Forty-Four Films.
Trans. Stanley Hochman. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co.
Spoto, Donald. 1984. The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock.
New York: Ballantine Books.
Truffaut, François with Helen G. Scott. 1985. Hitchcock. New York: Simon &
Schuster, revised edition.
Truffaut, François. 1990. Correspondence, 1945–1984. Eds. Gilles Jacob and
Claude de Givray. Trans. Gilbert Adair. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Williams, Raymond. 1958. Culture is Ordinary. In Convictions, ed. Norman
McKenzie, 5–14. London: MacGibbon and Kee.
CHAPTER 2
The Objet petit a: Vertigo (1958)
Abstract According to Žižek, Hitchcock’s film Vertigo illustrates the basic

Lacanian lesson that the status of the subject is that of a ‘virtual image’
constituted by means of double reflection, and what we call ‘subjectivity’
is at its most elementary this self-referential ‘short circuit’. For Žižek, the
lesson of Hitchcock’s Vertigo is that the moment of truth arrives for the
film’s hero Scottie when he discovers that the copy he was trying to create
(Judy, whom he was trying to remodel into a perfect copy of Madeline, his
lost love) ‘actually is the girl whom he knew as Madeline, and that he was
therefore busy at making a copy of a copy’. Vertigo thus illustrates that there
is always a gap between the object of desire itself and its cause. This chap-
ter will explore what Lacan considered to be his most fundamental con-
cept l’objet petit a.
Commenting on a text is like doing an analysis.

—Jacques Lacan, Seminar 1
The dividing in two, the differentiation of the two images, actual and
virtual, does not go to the limit, because the resulting circuit repeatedly
takes us back from one kind to the other. There is only vertigo, an
oscillation.
—Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image
We need the excuse of a fiction to stage what we really are.
—Slavoj Žižek, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema

Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62436-1_2
26 L. SIMMONS
Back to the Suture—Interface

and the Hitchcockian Fantasmatic Gaze
Žižek’s The Fright of Real Tears contains the following explication of the
function of the standard account of cinematic suture:
Firstly, the spectator is confronted with a shot, finds pleasure in it in an

immediate, imaginary way, and is absorbed by it.
Then, this full immersion is undermined by the awareness of the frame as
such: what I see is only a part, and I do not master what I see. I am in a pas-
sive position, the show is run by the Absent One (or, rather, Other) who
manipulates images behind my back.
What then follows is a complementary shot which renders the place from
which the Absent One is looking, allocating this place to its fictional owner,
one of the protagonists. In short, one passes thereby from imaginary to
symbolic, to a sign: the second shot does not simply follow the first one, it
is signified by it. (FRT 32)
But according to Žižek, the standard theory of suture assigns too much
power to film, or, in Laura Mulvey’s case, the male protagonist and star, as
the interpellator of the subject/spectator. In contrast, the notion of ‘inter-
face’ is how Žižek prefers to account for the functioning of cinema beyond
the standard account of the reversal of subjective and objective shots, and
the assigning of subjective shots to one of the characters through an objec-
tive shot that conveys the character’s point-of-view. ‘Interface thus oper-
ates at a more radical level than the standard suture procedure: it takes
place when suturing no longer works’, it adds ‘a spectral dimension, evok-
ing the idea that there is no cosmos, that our universe is not in itself fully
ontologically constituted’ (FRT 52–53).
In Lacanian terms, standard suture, as it is elaborated by Oudart
(1977–1978, 35–47),1 ‘follows the logic of signifying representation (the
second shot represents the absent subject—$—for the first shot’ (FRT 54)
which then becomes the passage from S1-S2 and so on. However, the fully
elaborated Lacanian notion of the gaze, beyond simply that of the mirror
stage, involves the reversal of the relationship between the subject and the
object. Lacan’s Seminar 11, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-
analysis, proposes that the gaze is on the side of the object and stands for
the blind spot in the field of the visible from which the picture, as Lacan
says, ‘photo-graphs’ the spectator. There Lacan writes:
2 THE OBJET PETIT A: VERTIGO (1958) 27
What determines me, at the most profound level, in the visible, is the gaze that
is outside. It is through the gaze that I enter light and it is from the gaze that
I receive its effects. Hence it comes about that the gaze is the instrument
through which light is embodied and through which—if you allow me to use
a word, as I often do, in a fragmented form—I am photo-graphed. (S11 106)
The Lacanian objet petit a, which lies beyond the signifier, would thus
be ‘the blind spot without which nothing would really be visible’ (FRT
34). It is at this point, suggests Žižek, ‘when the gap can no longer be
filled by an additional signifier, it is filled by a spectral object, in a shot,
which in the guise of the spectral scene, includes its own counter-shot …
Here then we pass from S1-S2 to $ … it is only the objet petit a which can
be directly included in the picture’ (FRT 54). This moment of lack of the
appeasement of suture is exemplified for Žižek in the Hitchcockian objec-
tive external shot, where the object (Thing) seems to return the gaze from
a fantasmatic (missing) position, and where ‘the spectator is all of a sudden
compelled to acknowledge that there is no possible subject within the space of
diegetic reality who can occupy the point of view of this shot’ (FRT 36).
Among Žižek’s examples, to which we will return, are the ‘subjective-
objective’ shot from above of the soon-to-be attacked detective Arbogast
in Psycho, the God’s eye point of view of the burning Bodega Bay town-
ship in The Birds and a scene from Vertigo set in Ernie’s restaurant.
Getting it Wrong—Point of View at Ernie’s

Restaurant
As Žižek has argued on several occasions, it is interesting how the critical
books on Hitchcock’s films, even the acknowledged masterpieces of
Hitchcockian criticism, get things wrong.2 Take Raymond Durgnat, the
author of A Long Hard Look at Psycho (2002), a magisterial 250-page
shot-by-shot analysis that explores all the minutiae of Psycho (1960).
Durgnat has also written a twenty-page analysis of Hitchcock’s Vertigo
(1958) in his earlier book The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock (1974) in
which he insists, relentlessly, that the film takes place in Los Angeles
whereas everyone knows it was filmed and set in San Francisco.3 A ‘strange
case’ indeed, for a tourist visitor to San Francisco today can take a special
guided tour of Vertigo locations, and if you can’t afford to travel ‘on loca-
tion’, you can compensate for the nostalgia by visiting the ‘Vertigo Then
and Now’ website.4 In some way, mistakes such as Durgnat’s simply
28 L. SIMMONS
imitate aspects of the Hitchcockian universe itself. The hero in a Hitchcock

film also projects in an unrelenting, blinkered fashion his own fantasies on
to the world that surrounds him. He, like the critic who misreads the film-
text, blurs the line between what effectively happens on screen with their
libidinal investment in it, an investment that then finds its outlet in hallu-
cinatory supplements or distortions. Thus, the very excess of these mis-
takes in the case of Hitchcock is symptomatic and calls for a fully developed
Freudian theory of ‘critical misrepresentation’ (perhaps something
Freudian like A Psychopathology of Everyday Viewing…). If anything, far
from devaluing the critical analyses proposed, these ‘misreadings’ bear
witness to the excessive subjective engagement with Hitchcock on the part
of the critic in question. And, as you begin to notice them, it is interesting
how often these ‘critical mistakes’ are not only about the content of
Hitchcock’s films but also about aspects of their formal qualities—the
types of shot employed, aspects of the characters’ gaze, the editing and so
on. In an analysis that belies the frequent complaint that his own film criti-
cism remains indifferent to formal effects,5 Žižek provides an extended
reading of the famous scene in Ernie’s Restaurant in Vertigo that initiates
Scottie Ferguson’s (James Stewart’s) pursuit of Madeleine Elster (played
by Kim Novak).6 The scene at Ernie’s Restaurant begins outside with a
camera movement towards a doorway of radiant red glass, which has the
force at once of a barrier and a lure. The next shot consists of a languid,
fluid camera movement that tracks back from Scottie at the bar through a
partition that both separates and connects the bar and the dining area, as
he glances screen-left to the back of the restaurant. The camera pauses
momentarily to take in the dining room with its glorious deep-saturated
red tapestry walls and formal white floral arrangements. The soundtrack
reproduces the clatter and chatter of a busy restaurant. It is clear, Žižek
insists, that this is not the character Scottie’s point of view. All of a sudden,
the camera’s (and thus our) attention is caught by a focal point of attrac-
tion: a bright dazzling stain (Roland Barthes would have called it a punc-
tum)7 that we soon identify as the naked back of a beautiful woman shining
out among all the black and grey suits of the diners (Fig. 2.1). The camera
then begins to move forward from this establishing shot towards the
object that the gaze seeks out, Judy Barton as Madeleine Elster, shimmer-
ing resplendently in an emerald green gown. Bernard Herrmann’s rising
score soon drowns out the background restaurant noise as it accompanies
the advancing camera. While this is not Scottie’s point of view, it has, of
course, ‘subjective’ qualities. As many critics have pointed out, much of
Fig. 2.1 Madeleine at Ernie’s Restaurant
Vertigo is structured as an alternation between a forward-tracking shot and

a backward-tracking reaction shot, employed both when Scottie follows
Madeleine on foot and when his car follows hers through the streets of San
Francisco.8 The forward-tracking movement in Ernie’s Restaurant sug-
gests the forward-tracking shot that will be used throughout the film. The
backward-tracking movement in this scene evokes the backward-tracking
shot used throughout the film to register the manner in which Scottie is
bonded to his object of desire. Intercut together, they evoke the sense of
the character at once pursuing and being drawn towards his object. After
this long shot, there is a cut to Scottie gazing at Madeleine’s table from
another ‘objective’ point of view and then a further cut to a point-of-view
shot of what Scottie sees, that is, Madeleine covering her back with her
jacket and preparing to leave. After Madeleine and Elster leave their table
and approach Scottie on their way out, Scottie sees that the couple is get-
ting close and, in order not to betray himself, he looks away towards the
glass partition of the bar (Fig. 2.2). When Madeleine comes close to him,
and has to stop while Elster pays the waiter, we see her in profile. Žižek
calls it ‘her mysterious profile (and, the profile is always mysterious—we
see only the half, while the other half can be a disgusting, disfigured face—
or, as a matter of fact, the ‘true’, common face of Judy)’ (OwB 153). This
shot is again not Scottie’s point-of-view shot (Fig. 2.3).
30 L. SIMMONS
Fig. 2.2 Scottie looking away at Ernie’s Restaurant
Fig. 2.3 Madeleine in profile at Ernie’s Restaurant
However, almost all the criticism of this scene you read speaks of the
point-of-view shot that Scottie has of Madeline’s profile as she leaves the
restaurant. ‘Then, in a subjective shot from Scottie’s viewpoint’, writes
pioneering Hitchcock critic Robin Wood, ‘we watch her [Madeleine]
cross the restaurant with an easy gliding motion, and pause near him so
that her face is clearly visible, beautiful, smooth, without definable expres-
sion’ (2002, 113). ‘We see Madeleine through his [Scottie’s] narrative
position exclusively … [and] we are swept away by her style and radiance’,
insists Murray Pomerance in his An Eye for Hitchcock (2004, 224). Nöel
Carroll asserts that ‘Hitchcock has the actress Kim Novak, in profile,
freeze in a portrait-like pose for Scottie’s first close-up glimpse of her.
Remember that this is Scottie’s subjective point of view. To him, she
appears to have the perfection of a work of art’ (in Baggett and Drumin
(eds): 2007, 107). And it is not by chance that Laura Mulvey used Vertigo
as the prime illustration of her thesis that the mechanism of the point-of-
view shot allows the director and the spectator to enjoy the same voyeuris-
tic gaze at the woman character as the male hero does. ‘In Hitchcock’, she
writes, ‘the male hero does see precisely what the audience sees … In
Vertigo, subjective camera predominates. Apart from one flashback from
Judy’s point of view, the narrative is woven around what Scottie sees or
fails to see’ ([1975] 1989, 23, 24). But when you look at the scene closely,
Žižek insists, there is no point-of-view shot, or to put it more accurately,
the shots that the critics have read as point-of-view shots are very clearly
not that. True Scottie’s desire is there—what we might call his hallucina-
tory inner vision—but he was not looking directly at Madeleine.
Indeed, we could argue that the ambiguity of the subjective/objective
shots and the absence of a conventional point of view are crucial to the
working of the scene. Scottie in fact dares not to look at Madeleine—we
see his face in profile as we have seen hers. It is only when she moves, or
goes to move, that we get a point-of-view shot: when Madeleine puts on
her jacket in order to leave her table, and when, after Elster has joined her,
they finally approach the exit of the restaurant. Only then, as a counter to
the shot of Scottie behind the bar, do we get his point of view of the
departing couple who, significantly, are reflected in a full-length mirror
near the exit. What is important in this sequence is not what Scottie sees
but what he imagines—that is, the hallucinatory aspects of his desire. The
two shots are given in profile, and Scottie acts as if he is captivated by
Madeleine’s profile. We should remember, suggests Žižek, that any profile
will fascinate because it is always mysterious in that all we ever see is ‘the
one half’ of the face.9 Indeed, when we do see Madeleine’s profile, the red
background of the restaurant wall seems to explode with intense red heat,
as if Scottie’s passion is somehow inscribed in the very backdrop.10
32 L. SIMMONS
However, to insist, although this is a ‘fascinating’ shot that is subjectiv-

ized it is not subjective, that is, it is not a point-of-view shot. In some
ways, Žižek declares, it is ‘too “subjective”, too intense’, a shot of pure
appearance, a ‘pure pre-subjective phenomenon’ (OwB 153). The camera
movement does not straightforwardly articulate a point of view. Instead,
Hitchcock self-consciously sets up the relationship between the elements
of the point-of-view structure that the rest of the film will enact. To put
this another way, he traces objectively the structure that the rest of the film
narrative will trace subjectively. Scottie does not actually see Madeleine
directly; instead, it is the camera itself that traces the connection between
Scottie and the object of his allure. But, as Žižek keeps insisting, since
Scottie does not literally see Madeleine, the camera does not occupy his
point of view. Instead, the camera stages the relationship between the
looker and the object of his look, creating a subjective shot structure but
with the subjectivity removed. (This affirms, of course, the truth that at a
radical level a fantasy cannot be subjectivized precisely because it is always
already too subjective.)
Through their misreadings, these critics suggest that the presence of a
woman, Madeleine, in this scene is domesticated, controlled for a subjec-
tive shot but, in reality, in this sequence something crucially escapes con-
trol. We have phenomena which are phenomena (we the spectators can see
the situation objectively) but which don’t appear as phenomena for the
subject—we might say they appear behind his back. What is the status of
this something imagined but behind your back? In this microcosm of
Ernie’s Restaurant, the shimmering allure of Madeleine is equated with
the allure of the film itself as an idealized, aestheticized, hyperbolic reality.
Vertigo thus illustrates that there is always a gap between the object of
desire itself and its cause, thus confirming the basic Lacanian lesson that
the status of the subject is that of a ‘virtual image’ constituted by means of
double reflection, and what we call ‘subjectivity’ is at its most elementary
this self-referential ‘short circuit’. Madeleine’s shimmering back or the red
stain of the wall-covering that appears to ‘look back’ at the onlooker
within the film, or the onlooker of the film, is a case of what Žižek has
described as the ‘Hitchcockian Blot’ (LA 88–106). This term designates
how a place in the visual field, usually at the central, vanishing point of the
image, ‘contains a privileged ‘object’ that functions as a kind of stain or
blot that cues the spectator to the disruptive, threatening presence of the
shadow or chaos world that subtends the everyday world of appearances
and social respectability’ (Allen 2017, 205).11
Petite Histoire of the Objet petit a

Given the importance for Žižek of its function within Vertigo, let us explore
the conceptual neologism objet petit a and its overlapping functions, espe-
cially given that Lacan repeatedly referred to it as his most important con-
tribution to psychoanalytic theory.12 First of all, objet petit a is understood
as a part-object that can be imagined as separate from the rest of the body
and which the subject takes for the object of desire. This is a concept that,
as Lacan acknowledged, can be traced back to Freud who speaks of partial
drives to the breast, the faeces and the penis. In Freud’s fort/da game,
recounted in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), the mother is a lost
object of which objet petit a (the cotton reel on a string the child throws
out of his cot and retrieves) is just such a fragment or part-object. Is this
not the function played by the curl in Carlotta and Madeleine’s hair or the
bouquet of flowers in Vertigo? Secondly, in Lacan’s early work, objet petit
a is spoken of as the agalma (a term derived from Plato’s Symposium). A
hidden, precious object, a golden ornament, an offering to the gods, the
object of desire. It is the missing object that is sought in the Other, which
is in the Other more than in the subject himself (S8 177). It is the object
that renders possible the transferential structuring of the relation between
subjects. As Lorenzo Chiesa expresses it, ‘the subject, in desiring agalma
as object a, desires nothing but the Other’s desire as void/lack’ (2007,
162). By identifying with a signifier and identifying this signifier as that
which is desired by the Other (objet a), a subject is able to configure itself
as something that ultimately conforms to what he or she imagines the
Other wants. Again, is this not what Judy does in Hitchcock’s Vertigo in
conforming or succumbing first to Gavin Elster’s then to Scottie’s
makeover?
Thirdly, although the objet petit a is the result of the signifier, it never-
theless avoids capture by signifiers, appears as the unsayable or ineffable,
and falls outside signification. It is not symbolizable and thus not a signi-
fier, it is an object but always a lost non-recuperable object. In Lacan’s
Seminar 7, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, it becomes das Ding (the Thing).
Das Ding is outside language and outside the unconscious. It is no longer
just secret for ‘the thing is characterized by the fact that it is impossible for
us to imagine it’, says Lacan (S7 125). Das Ding is the object of desire; the
thing we want but can never have because lack is at the heart of desire. It
is the lost object that must be continually refound. The Freudian pleasure
principle is the law that keeps the subject at a certain distance from the
34 L. SIMMONS
thing, making the subject circle around it without ever attaining it (like
the fort/da cotton reel). Das Ding is thus a sort of pressure point that lies
outside the Symbolic and the Imaginary where the weight of Lacan’s third
stage, the Real, is sensed. As already noted, another concomitant meta-
phor for objet petit a that Lacan uses is the blind spot: the point that exists
at the centre of our vision, but outside our vision so we cannot see it, at
the same time we constantly cover it up or cover it over. This structure of
‘covering up’ is, as we will see, at the heart of Scottie’s infatuation with
Madeleine.
Fourthly, the objet petit a is the object that can never be attained and is
the cause of desire rather than simply the end towards which desire tends:
Lacan calls it an ‘object-cause’. As such it is a concept that comprises itself
and its own opposite or dissimulation. Objet petit a is simultaneously the
pure lack, the void around which desire turns and the imaginary element
which conceals the void, renders it invisible by filling it out. It is some-
thing that fascinates us and operates as a cause of our desire. Žižek’s famous
example of this operation is the Kinder egg:
Kinder Surprise, one of the most popular confectionery products on sale in

Europe, are empty chocolate eggshells wrapped in brightly colored paper;
when you unwrap the egg and crack the chocolate shell open, you find
inside a small plastic toy (or small parts from which a toy can be put
together). A child who buys this chocolate egg of unwraps it nervously and
just breaks the chocolate, not bothering to eat it, worrying only about the
toy in the center—is not such a chocolate-lover a perfect case of Lacan’s
motto ‘I love you, but, inexplicably, I love something in you more than
yourself, and, therefore I destroy you’? And, in effect, is this toy not l’objet
petit a at its purest, the small object filling in the central void of our desire,
the hidden treasure, agalma, at the center of the thing we desire? (PD 145)
Finally, in the later Lacan, objet petit a is the remainder (French ‘reste’)
from the operation of being constituted as a speaking being. It is what is
left behind by the introduction of the Symbolic in the Real. A residue that
stems from the desire of the Other, a surplus meaning that cannot be
assimilated and is always produced by symbolization.
We will see how Scottie in Hitchcock’s Vertigo illustrates almost per-
fectly the power of fascination exerted by the Lacanian objet petit a in all
its guises and how Madeleine is
an object that is, in a way, posited by desire itself. The paradox of desire is
that it posits retroactively its own cause, i.e., the object a is an object that
can be perceived only by a gaze ‘distorted’ by desire, an object that does not
exist for an ‘objective’ gaze. In other words, the object a is always, by defini-
tion, perceived in a distorted way, because outside this distortion, ‘in itself’,
it does not exist, since it is nothing but the embodiment, the materialization
of this very distortion, of this surplus of confusion and perturbation intro-
duced by desire into so-called ‘objective reality’. (LA 12)
Ideology—The Invisible Frame of the Objet petit a

In the late 1960s Lacan elaborated four interlocking types of social bond,
or articulations of the symbolic network that regulate intersubjective rela-
tions: the discourse of the master, the discourse of the university, the dis-
course of the hysteric and the discourse of the analyst (S20 21). This is a
structure Žižek draws upon frequently in his attempts to theorize the ways
in which ideological formations organize enjoyment (see e.g. LA
130–132).13 The discourse of the master is the basic discourse from which
the other discourses are derived, and it describes the process of represent-
ing the subject ($) by a specific signifier (S1) for other signifiers (S2). This
process of representation never succeeds without producing a surplus or
remainder which, as we have seen, is one of the forms of the objet petit a.
Lacan’s other discourses, notes Žižek, are attempts to ‘“come to terms”
with this remnant (the famous objet petit a), to “cope” with it’ (LA 130).
The aim of ideological analysis is to bring out the ambivalent or double
status of the objet petit a ‘as both what completes the symbolic circle of
authority, acting as the guarantee or Other of its Other’, and, as excess or
remainder, ‘what cannot be accounted for within it’ (IR 373). It is what
cannot be accounted for in the system and yet it is what produces this
system as the attempt to represent it. It remains ‘the object on account of
which ‘objective reality’ is forever inaccessible to the subject’ (FRT 65).
What Žižek adds to the Lacanian elaboration of the term is a discussion of
forms of the objet petit a within ideology: transgressive enjoyment, racism,
paranoia, conspiracy theory. He insists that ‘[t]he aim of the “critique of
ideology,” of the analysis of an ideological edifice, is to extract this symp-
tomatic kernel which the official public, ideological text simultaneously
disavows and needs for its undisturbed functioning’ (IR 292). According
to Žižek, ideology functions both at a Symbolic level, that is, using his film
examples, at the level of the filmtext itself, and at a level of fantasy. To
36 L. SIMMONS
criticize the ideological content of film at the Symbolic level is not enough,
we must consider the level that Žižek refers to as the ‘objectively subjec-
tive’ (PV 170): this is the level of the object in the subject, which subjec-
tivizes the objective world for the subject. Contrary to the theory of
subject positions, utilized by Bordwell and Mulvey in their film criticism,
which claims that subjectivity is constructed in a uniform fashion through
the representational systems of cinema, it is clear that not every subject (or
spectator) subjectivizes the external Symbolic order in the same way for
that subject. Ideology is the invisible frame which structures the way the
subject perceives the visible Symbolic frame, and the invisible frame of
ideology is the Lacanian objet petit a, what Žižek refers to, in his first vol-
ume in English, as ‘the sublime object of ideology’, an ambiguous element
that ‘consists in detecting a point of breakdown heterogeneous to a given
ideological field to achieve its closure, its accomplished form’ (SOI 21). To
explain this, Žižek offers the example of Scottie’s maternal ex-girlfriend
Midge’s copy of the portrait of Carlotta Valdes with the white lace dress
and bunch of red flowers in her lap, but instead of Carlotta’s ‘fatally beau-
tiful face she puts her own common face with spectacles … the effect is
terrifying: depressive, broken and disgusted, [Scottie] leaves her’
(SOI 120).
In a section of The Parallax View entitled ‘Toward a New Science of
Appearances’, Žižek presents the conditions for going beyond the film
theory of Bordwell and Mulvey by practising a dialectical critique at the
textual level (uncovering universality by locating its exception), and by
examining (at the level of spectatorship) how the filmtext subjectivizes the
spectator through fetishism disavowal. He insists that because,
the ontological paradox, even scandal, of the notion of fantasy lies in the fact
that it subverts the standard opposition of ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’: of
course, fantasy is by definition not ‘objective’ (in the naïve sense of ‘existing
independently of the subject’s perceptions’); however, it is not ‘subjective’
(in the sense of being reducible to the subject’s consciously experienced
intuitions either). Fantasy, rather, belongs to the ‘bizarre category of the
objectively subjective—the way things actually, objectively seem to you even
if they don’t seem that way to you’. (PV 170)14
Following Žižek’s reading of Lacan’s discourses how might we now

understand the function of ideology?15 Ideology is not simply ideas that
dominate, nor a certain naïve false-consciousness, or even the account of
reality that best matches the facts, rather, it has to do with the fetishistic
attachment to a particular kind of avowed supplement (the Master
Signifier) and its disavowal, sustained by attachment to some supplemental
underside (the fantasy object, objet petit a). As Rex Butler argues, ‘the
same element that sutures the ideological field also desutures it’ and this
defines ‘the ambiguity of object a as at once what indicates that void at the
origin of the symbolic constitution of society and what stands in for it’
(2005, 37).
Vertigo subverts the subjective/objective opposition. What are we to
do when confronted with a film that, at the last minute when the action
reaches its catastrophic peak, introduces a radical change of perspective
that frames the preceding events as illusion, an illusion or bad dream for
the hero? Judy/Madeleine puts on the necklace inherited by Madeleine
from Carlotta Valdes. For Scottie, the jewels belong to the real Madeleine
not just the image of Madeleine (although they were present in the image
of Carlotta Valdes) so they cannot belong to the real Judy. He now must
ask himself how he got what he thought he wanted: the perfect image,
agalma. The answer can only instruct him that his desire has been exploited
to write an entirely different narrative, that of Gavin Elster’s criminal
intentions. And, upon seeing this revelation, is it simply a case that the
spectator with the final twist of the film feels that s/he has been tricked all
along? Is this final dramatic turnaround a case of a classical Hollywood
narrative that attempts, unsuccessfully, to avoid the unhappy ending? Is it
thus both an act of ideological conformism and an accommodation to
Hollywood’s Production Code, its imposed request for a safe outcome?
So, is this final turn a retroactive deconstruction of the position of naïve
reality and a confrontation of the common everyday world of desires with
a certain objective hard reality? This kind of retroactive displacement of
what appeared as ‘real events’ into illusion appears as a compromise, an act
of ideological conformism, only if we hold to the naïve ideological opposi-
tion between ‘hard reality’ and the ‘world of illusion’. As soon as we take
into account that it is precisely and only in illusions that we encounter the
real of our desire, the accent shifts: the common everyday reality of our
social world in which we assume safe (even nurturing) roles turns out to
be an illusion based on the repression of the Real of our desire. As Žižek
concludes, ‘[t]his social reality is then nothing but a fragile, symbolic cob-
web that can at any moment be torn aside by an intrusion of the real’ (LA
17) and since ‘fantasy is on the side of reality: it is, as Lacan once said, the
support that gives consistency to what we call “reality”’ (MI 322).
38 L. SIMMONS
There is another answer to what appears to be, on the surface of things,

Judy’s ‘mistake’. It is William Rothman who first asks the question:
How can Judy make Scottie love her ‘for herself’ if, even now, she lies to
him, denying who she is? The deepest interpretation for Judy’s motivation
for ‘staying and lying’ is that she wishes for Scottie to bring Madeleine back
(which means that it is no accident when she puts on the incriminating
necklace). Judy wishes for Scottie to lead her to the point at which she can
reveal who she is—but without losing his love. (2004, 230)
But then later as he comes to reflect on Judy’s (Freudian) ‘slip’—fol-

lowing what he calls ‘a fundamental Hitchcockian principle: on film there
is no inherent difference between what is objectively real and what is real
only subjectively’ (2013, 47)—he realizes that she (and Hitchcock) have
deceived him regarding ‘the border separating what is real from what is
not’ (58). Judy ‘happens’ to walk by the flower shop which Scottie is
haunting, she turns her face so he ‘happens’ to see her profile as he had
done at Ernie’s, she ‘happens’ to come to the window of her hotel so he
knows where to find her. ‘Everything has unfolded as she had scripted it.
All is fulfilled’ (65). Why would Judy do this to Scottie, and why would
Hitchcock do it to his viewer (Rothman)? Rothman is forced to conclude:
‘I am not claiming that in the world of Vertigo the reality is that Judy is
always acting, never “being herself,” that there is nothing she is “for her-
self.” My claim is that Hitchcock designs the film so that every movement
sustains this as a possible way of viewing her, a possible way of interpreting
what reality is’ (61).
What has Rothman undergone here? In Seminar 11, speaking of the
goal of the psychoanalytical cure, Lacan introduces the idea of a subject
who has ‘traversed the radical fantasy’ (S11 273). In an expression that
resonates for Hitchcock’s Vertigo and the character of Scottie (and for
Rothman, Hitchcock’s viewer), Lacan would also later describe the sub-
ject as ‘falling out of its fantasy’ (Autres écrits 252). In its ideological
dimension this is not, however, the commonsense understanding of psy-
choanalysis: that it should liberate us from the hold of our fantasies and
help us confront a ‘hard reality’. In fact, what Lacan has in mind is the
opposite. As Žižek notes:
To ‘traverse the fantasy’ therefore paradoxically means fully identifying one-

self with the fantasy—namely with the fantasy which structures the excess
resisting our immersion into daily reality. … a fantasy is simultaneously paci-

fying, disarming (providing an imaginary scenario which enables us to
endure the abyss of the Other’s desire) and shattering, disturbing, inassimi-
lable into our reality. (IDLC 329)
Žižek quotes the succinct formulation of Richard Boothby:
‘Traversing the fantasy’ thus does not mean that the subject somehow aban-
dons its involvement with fanciful caprices and accommodates itself to a
pragmatic ‘reality’, but precisely the opposite: the subject is submitted to
that effect of the symbolic lack that reveals the limit of everyday reality. To
traverse the fantasy in the Lacanian sense is to be more profoundly claimed
by the fantasy than ever, in the sense of being brought into an ever more
intimate relation with that real core of the fantasy that transcends imaging.
(quoted in IDLC 329)
This describes the position of Scottie in the closing moments of Vertigo,

moments which involve not an analytical interpretation of his symptoms of
vertigo but a fundamental traversal or crossing over of the traumatic
nucleus of enjoyment that has constituted his very being up until this
point. It involves a reconfiguration of the entire field of his desire. His
fantasy of Judy/Madeleine is not to be interpreted only traversed: all he
has to experience is how there is nothing behind it, and how indeed fan-
tasy always masks precisely this nothing.
Niederkommenlassen—Falling in Love
It is in Vertigo that the visual motif of falling (threatened or actual falling
from a height), which imposes itself throughout Hitchcock’s oeuvre with
uncanny compulsion and is repeated from film to film across different nar-
rative contexts, receives its most elaborate development.16 It is a motif that
Freud called ‘Niederkommenlassen, “letting oneself fall down,” with all the
undertones of melancholic suicidal fall’ (EYS revised edition, 224).17 In
Vertigo the motif is associated with the figure of the spiral that first appears
in Saul Bass’s opening credits and resonates at different levels in the film
as it progressively draws us as spectators into its abyssal structure:
first as a purely formal motif of the abstract form emerging out of the close-
up of the eye in the credits sequence; then as the curl of Carlotta Valdes’ hair
in her portrait, repeated in Madeleine’s haircut; then as the abyssal circle of
40 L. SIMMONS
the staircase of the church tower; and, finally, in the famous 360 degrees
shot around Scottie and Judy/Madeleine who are passionately embracing in
the decrepit hotel room, and during which the background changes to the
stable of the Juan Battista Mission and then back to the hotel room. (EYS
rev. ed. 226)
Although the term ‘vertigo’ is not used by Scottie when he describes his
condition to Midge—his doctors have diagnosed ‘acrophobia’, he
declares—it is clear that he and Hitchcock confuse the two states. Vertigo
(a sensation of spinning that occurs when one is not spinning—the film’s
famous 360-degree embrace is a perfect example of this) is not necessarily
associated with an extreme or irrational fear of heights (acrophobia).
Vertigo may be triggered by looking down from a high place, but it can be
initiated by almost any kind of movement or change in visual perspective.18
At a literal level Scottie’s vertigo is represented in three scenes in the film:
the first is Scottie’s unsuccessful attempt to catch a fleeing criminal when he
fails to make a leap across two buildings. Scottie, left hanging perilously
from a rooftop gutter, experiences his first bout of vertigo while a police
officer falls to his death trying to help him. As if to signal that this is not a
merely fortuitous, accidental fall, the space beneath Scottie is filmed as
simultaneously moving away and drawing closer, an effect that is achieved
by the camera tracking back but zooming forward at the same time.19
The second scene is when, as if trying to cure himself (and indeed
deliberate exposure to heights was one of the early cures proposed for
acrophobia—although it is now generally discounted), Scottie deliberately
attempts to overcome his vertigo in Midge’s apartment by climbing a
stepladder. Just as he begins to claim that he must be cured he catches
sight of the street far below the apartment window and he falls dramati-
cally into Midge’s arms. Scottie’s vertigo would appear to be a classic
Freudian phobia: extreme fear of a situation which when the patient is
placed within it causes anxiety accompanied by the development of avoid-
ance strategies. Lacan in his Seminar 4, The Object Relation and Freudian
Structures (1956–1957), re-reads the classic Freudian case study of Little
Hans whose phobia of horses (his fear of punishment by his father who
they represent) masks his sexual attraction to his mother (his unconscious
wish). Lacan follows Freud in stressing the difference between anxiety and
phobia insisting that anxiety manifests first and is then turned into fear by
focusing it on a specific object or situation. For Scottie, the anguished
anticipation of fatal falling is associated with the pleasure of being caught
by the mother (hence the overtly pietà-like ‘catch’ of Midge in this scene).
The presence of the mother is marked elsewhere in the film, Midge when
she arrives at the hospital to visit him greets Scottie with ‘Don’t worry
Mother is here!’ The first half of the film, of course, turns upon another
mother, or at least ‘great-grandmother’, Carlotta Valdes. In Scottie’s case,
the hidden (sexual) wish is grafted onto the perceived punishment, and
the ‘excitation’ of falling recoups the frustrated sexual excitement. Both
cases (Little Hans and Scottie) exhibit the function of guilt within the
structure: guilt for the desire unleashes the punishment, and, in Vertigo,
this is redoubled with the fact that the police officer falls and dies, and
then ‘Madeleine’ appears to suicide. In classical Freudian terms both cases,
Little Hans and Scottie, would appear to involve an unresolved oedipal
conflict in which the symptom (fear of horses or vertigo) is a displaced
repression of the desire for the mother.
Thirdly, Scottie experiences vertigo, as Gavin Elster knows he will,
when he tries to follow Madeleine up the tower stairs, but looks down at
the enclosed space of the stairwell that again appears to lengthen and
come closer, as the camera tracks back but zooms closer. And finally, at the
end of the film as he violently drags Judy up the tower stairs, after an initial
bout, he no longer experiences the vertigo that has plagued him previ-
ously. What causes Scottie’s vertigo and what connects the incidences of it
he suffers? Is it really a classical Freudian phobia like that of Little Hans?
On one level, paradoxically for Žižek, the structure of vertigo in Vertigo
demonstrates that ‘the phobia of heights is actually the phobia of depths’
(OwB 162). The subject who suffers from vertigo perceives a call to throw
himself (or herself, since Judy also suffers anxiety from a form of vertigi-
nous ‘falling into Madeleine’) into the very void that threatens to swallow
it up.20 In the economy of the film, the objet petit a is the pure cause of
attraction to this abyss of the subject, ‘the pure form of a curve … discern-
ible in multiple guises that are echoed in each other’ (OwB 162–163): the
curved Lissajous spirals of the film credits; the curve in the knot of, first,
Carlotta’s and, then, Madeleine’s hair; the negotiation of the curving hill
streets of San Francisco when Scottie is tailing Madeleine; the spiral stair-
case of the San Juan Bautista Mission; the 360-degree movement of the
camera around the embracing couple.
On a second level, the moments of vertigo and its motif of the spiral are
associated with the thematic of time in Vertigo, what Žižek identifies as ‘a
self-enclosed temporal loop in which past and present are condensed into
two aspects of the same endlessly repeated circular movement’ (EYS rev.
42 L. SIMMONS
ed. 226). While it is ‘true, the objet a prevents the circle of pleasure from
closing, it introduces an irreducible displeasure, but the psychic apparatus
finds a sort of perverse pleasure in this displeasure itself, in the neverend-
ing, repeated circulation around the unattainable, always missed object’
(EYS rev. ed. 56). In Vertigo, Scottie’s desire always returns to the same
impasse, it always curves around to rediscover the very obstacle that it has
created itself. Madeleine is the objet petit a in the Lacanian scheme of
things, a pure semblance that materializes the curvature of the space of
desire. When we write or draw this time of the film as a circle, it includes
a cut that prevents the full closure of the circle. This is exactly the same
way that Lacan draws the circle of desire with the petit objet a (Fig. 2.4).
To grasp the impediment to closure in its positive dimension we need
to break out of a historical notion of temporality and introduce a new
notion of time. This, suggests Žižek, would be what Jean-Pierre Dupuy
calls the time the ‘time of a project’, and it consists, he explains, ‘of a
closed circuit between past and future: the future is casually produced by
our acts in the past, while the way we act is determined by our anticipation
of the future, and our reaction to this anticipation’ (PD 160–161). This
temporality of Vertigo is that of Scottie’s perspective and, at a certain
point, becomes that of the film’s spectator. For Scottie, Madeleine exists
up until the point that he discovers she is Judy, and from that moment not
only does Madeleine not exist but she will have never existed as such. How
does this paradoxical temporality sit with the question of obsessional love?
What Scottie falls in love with in Madeleine is her sublimity; what he
reproaches Judy for is her banality or vulgarity. Madeleine is all that Judy
can never be: elegant, noble, mysterious, inaccessible. Madeleine’s beauty
depends on her fashion and movement, the way she holds herself and
walks. It is as if they are not only different but completely opposed in all
Fig. 2.4 Žižek: Objet a

as ‘obstacle that
interrupts the closed
circuit of the pleasure
principle’ (EYS 48)
aspects except for one: they are the same woman! The only thing they
truly share is their being, and it is this ‘ontology’ that seems so important
to the film in that Madeleine would no longer exist at the moment one
discovers she is Judy.21
The problem for the two characters is of a different order: Judy knows
that there is a relation of identity between herself and Madeleine whose
role she has played, so well in fact that Scottie thinks that there cannot be
a relation of resemblance, up until the fatal moment when he notices
Carlotta’s necklace. Madeleine exists for Judy as if she were another
woman while all Judy wants, as she continually advises Scottie, is to be
loved for who she really is. In the letter that she writes and then, on second
thoughts, destroys, she writes: ‘I want you to love me as I am’. Judy is
afraid that Scottie will discover that the sublime Madeleine that he loves is
nothing but the simple person standing in front of him. It is for this reason
that she destroys her letter, as well, of course, to bury her culpability in the
murder of Madeleine Elster. She decides to try a new tack: she wants to
discover if true love is possible between Judy and Scottie just as it was pos-
sible between Madeleine and Scottie. She will now outshine her rival and
become a better Madeleine than ‘Madeleine’ ever was. Now this is exactly
what Scottie does not want. He only wants to see in her the face of the
sublime and inaccessible person whom he has lost and is therefore obsessed
with. What Scottie really wants is that the gap between Madeleine and
Judy becomes for him a guarantee of the inaccessibility that nourishes his
obsession. Once the gap is bridged or broken, Scottie is cured of his obses-
sion, so that he can no longer love Judy any more than he can love Midge.
Scottie, it seems, would be content to live in the gap between the two
(the gap of the objet petit a), to love Madeleine through Judy. He would
like Judy to play the role of Madeleine so well that he would no longer
know that Madeleine was only a role that was played for him. Scottie sees
that Judy becomes Madeleine, but he doesn’t see that she is Madeleine, or,
more precisely, he does not see that she has been Madeleine. This point in
fact is doubly paradoxical, on the one hand Scottie wants to revive
Madeleine, but to make her really come to life again will mean losing her
once again, that is, it will mean that he realizes that everything was an illu-
sion. It is necessary that Madeleine dies in order to sacralize Scottie’s pas-
sion. In coming back Madeleine becomes nothing, she will only live in the
memories of Scottie or she will never exist. Whether he wants to be or not,
Scottie is cured of his obsession at the end of the film. The realization that
44 L. SIMMONS
Madeleine has never existed as such obliges him to live in the present and
to renounce a past that has been nothing more than a simulacrum.
Suspense—A Constituent or Constituted Anxiety?

What does it mean when we declare, as countless commentators have,
Hitchcock to be ‘the master of suspense’.22 Curiously, despite the ubiquity
of the idiom, suspense in Hitchcock’s films is not a topic that has been
widely discussed.23 Hitchcock himself did discuss it. In a lecture delivered
for a film course at Columbia University in 1939, he develops the distinc-
tion between ‘objective suspense’ (where the time is broken into smaller
and smaller units as the catastrophe becomes more imminent), which he
associates with the classic editing of chase scenes by D.W. Griffith, and
‘subjective suspense’ (achieved by letting the audience experience through
the point of view of a character and also presenting the audience with lim-
ited knowledge of the situation) (Gottlieb 1995, 272ff). He comes down
on the side of subjective suspense, and we can think of Vertigo as an ideal
illustration of Hitchcock’s combination of the two aspects of subjective
suspense, where suspense is built from the focussed uncertainty that char-
acterizes the plot and the uncertainty about the characters’ motivations or
intentions. Pascal Bonitzer notes that the distinctive feature of Hitchcockian
suspense, as opposed to the accelerated editing of Griffith, is that it derives
from ‘an intimate mixture of movement and immobility, a viscosity and
slow motion’. Instead of a narrative of linear acceleration that moves rap-
idly towards a conclusion, ‘suspense is therefore a kind of perversion, a
form of sickness affecting not only cinematic duration (with its compres-
sion and dilation) but also objects and modes of behaviour’ (EYAW 27;
153). Suspense suspends normality, it arises from a contamination that
progresses steadily in its perverse relationship to the world from within
which it grows and to which it belongs.24
Richard Allen defines suspense simply as ‘anxious uncertainty about
what is going to happen next’ and, following Hitchcock, suggests ‘the
character himself is placed in the position of experiencing anxiety and the
audience is aligned with him’ (2002, 39; 41). The suspended suspense of
Vertigo is thus, in part at least, the result of the anxiety of Hitchcock’s
characters. It is Scottie’s anxiety that causes Elster to hire him; Midge to
mother him; his flustering at Madeleine’s attempted suicide. And then
there is Madeleine’s anxiety (or rather the anxiety and unease of Judy play-
ing Madeleine) at what she might be getting herself into, which, of course
as Charles Barr notes, is an anxiety that is ‘absolutely in character for a

woman struggling against ghosts and demons’ (2002, 61). Judy Barton’s
anxiety (now being made over into Madeleine again) as she submits to
Scottie’s brutal insistence when he relentlessly and imperiously overrides
her resistance to the purchase of the same grey suit. Towards the end of
the ‘Elster plot’, Madeleine/Judy was overcome by two forms of anxiety,
acted and real, and so again she is here, although both anxieties, acted and
real, now appear real. Perhaps the main depiction of anxiety in the film is
Scottie’s dream sequence which Barr describes as ‘an eruption of memory
and anxiety’ (63). The sequence begins with a frame of Scottie’s head toss-
ing and turning on his pillow. Suddenly, without reason the image turns
blue and then purple and begins pulsating with colour. While we may
understand that the pulsating colours ‘stand in for what Scottie is dream-
ing’, William Rothman insists that this is ‘partly because they are anxiety-
producing to view, they convey the sense that Scottie is being assaulted by
them, as if they originate from outside, not inside, his subjectivity’ (2013,
48). Let us see if we can account for these ‘anxieties’—Scottie’s,
Madeleine/Judy’s, the audience’s—within psychoanalytical theory.
Freud proposed two theories of anxiety. Up until 1925, he argued that
anxiety was simply the transformation of sexual libido that had not been
adequately discharged. It is hard, using this theory, to account for Vertigo’s
‘anxieties’. Not surprisingly, Freud abandoned this theory and replaced it
with the suggestion that anxiety was a reaction to a traumatic situation,
the result of a sense of ‘helplessness’ (Hilflosigkeit) precipitated by ‘situa-
tions of danger’ (Gefahrensituationen): he provided some examples of
these situations such as loss of the mother, loss of the love object and fear
of castration. Certainly, Vertigo opens with Scottie ‘helpless’ hanging over
the abyss, gripped by anxiety, with no conceivable way of being rescued,
and there have been some commentators who have concluded that his
‘obsession’ with Madeleine/Judy relates to an unresolved obsession with
his mother.25 Lacan, too, seems to have developed theories of anxiety that
shifted over time. He initially associated anxiety with the threat of bodily
fragmentation with which the subject is confronted at the mirror stage, as
well as the threat of being engulfed by the mother. As Žižek clarifies,
‘Lacan here turns Freud around: anxiety is not the anxiety of separation
from the object, but the anxiety of the object(-cause of desire) coming too
close to the subject’ (LET 309). If we ask the question—what is the object
we have come too close too when we experience anxiety?—the answer
provides the clue to the fact that increasingly in the 1950s Lacan comes to
46 L. SIMMONS
articulate anxiety with his concept of the Real. The Real is ‘the essential
object which isn’t an object any longer, but this something faced with
which all words cease and all categories fail, the object of anxiety par excel-
lence’ (S2 164). And Žižek clarifies again, ‘As Freud put it, anxiety is the
only affect which does not deceive; by means of which we encounter the
real; the real of a lost object which cannot be absorbed into a circular
movement of symbolization’ (FTKN 125–126). Lacan develops his the-
ory of anxiety in the context of a discussion of phobia, which is obviously
relevant to Scottie’s acrophobia. Lacan’s point is that a phobia rather than
causing anxiety is actually what saves the subject from anxiety because it
revolves around absence. In his Seminar of 1962–1963, Anxiety, Lacan
argues that anxiety is not without an object, but its object cannot be sym-
bolized. This object, then, is the petit objet a, the object-cause of desire,
which causes anxiety when the subject is confronted by the desire of the
Other. Jacques-Alain Miller, Žižek’s teacher and for a while analyst, pro-
poses a further ‘distinction between “constituted anxiety” and “constitu-
ent anxiety,” … while the first designates the standard notion of the
terrifying and fascinating abyss of anxiety which haunts us, its infernal
circle which threatens to draw us in, the second stands for the “pure”
confrontation with the objet petit a as is constituted in its very loss’ (IDLC
327). The difference between the two types of anxiety, according to Žižek,
concerns the status of the object in fantasy. ‘In a case of constituted anxi-
ety, the object dwells within the confines of a fantasy, whereas we get the
constituent anxiety only when the subject “traverses the fantasy” and con-
fronts the void, the gap filled up by the fantasmatic object’ (ibid.).
Now let us return to Vertigo and explore ramifications of anxiety as a
phobia of ‘coming to close’, of becoming engulfed by the Real, of con-
fronting the void and traversing the fantasy. Let us move to a moment
towards the end of Scottie’s dream: Scottie, looking searchingly, against a
black background, walks towards the camera but never seems to be get-
ting closer.26 The black background changes to one that now places him in
Carlotta’s graveyard. Hitchcock now ‘cuts to a shot in which the camera is
moving toward an open grave. The darkness within the grave looms larger
until the frame is again engulfed by blackness’ (Rothman 2013, 54). The
shot of the open grave and becoming ‘engulfed’ like this causes us to ask
whose vision are we sharing here. Is it simply Hitchcock’s camera and our
shared vision? Is it the reverse shot of Scottie’s preceding point of view?
Was he advancing towards the grave? Or does it have its origin in an earlier
moment of the dream when a Madeleine look-alike appears in the frame

with Gavin Elster and Scottie. Is this the gaze of the real Madeleine Elster
back from the dead asking for retribution? Or is it a flashback to the vision
that ‘Madeleine’ described to Scottie when she came out of one of her
trances:
MADELEINE: A grave…
SCOTTIE: Where?
MADELEINE: I don’t know. An open grave. I stand by the gravestone
looking down into it. And it’s my grave.
SCOTTIE: How do you know?
MADELEINE: I know.
William Rothman believes so, ‘In the present view of the open grave,
Scottie’s vision fuses with the scene he believes she believed she remem-
bered’ (55). The next shot that emerges from the blackness is Scottie’s
cut-out face, no longer looking quizzical, his eyes open, against a reced-
ing, vertiginous spiral motif. Scottie’s face now disappears leaving only the
spiralling background, and then reappears now filling the screen, and this
time his penetrating eyes seem to acknowledge he has seen and under-
stood something. In the next shot, we and the screen are again engulfed
in momentary blackness. One way of explaining these shifts is that Scottie
has moved from a constituted to constituent anxiety and in so doing has
‘traversed’ his fantasy. To traverse the fantasy therefore, Žižek maintains,
‘means fully identifying oneself with the fantasy—namely with the fantasy
that structures the excess resisting our immersion into daily reality’ (IDLC
329). ‘Anxiety arises when the objet a falls directly into reality, appears in
it’ (LTN 674). Is not this also what Judy experiences, after she tears up her
letter to Scottie, she traverses her fantasy in the sense that she falls into
Scottie’s reality, the imaginary scenario that allows her to endure the abyss
of the Other’s desire, and she introduces something disturbing, shattering
into her own reality. She, too, experiences both constituent and consti-
tuted anxiety.
The logic of projection in Vertigo is not that of a subjective operation
whereby pre-existing feelings of the subject are projected onto or attrib-
uted to others (the displacement of one’s own unacknowledged anxiety
onto the person one feels anxious about) but rather designates the objec-
tive mechanism by which the affect emerges. Thus, it is not accurate to say
that Scottie externalizes his anxiety as an established condition
48 L. SIMMONS
(acrophobia), or that he locates it in other subjects, rather the case is that

his anxiety is this dislocating and externalizing function and, as such, this
emerges as the film’s dominant representational economy. Scottie does
not project his anxiety as such; his anxiety is precisely the signifying logic
that emerges through projection. Scottie’s anxiety is an affect containing
its own formative principle, and projection here is not something that hap-
pens but is the justification of its own occurrence.
Idealism or Materialism?—‘The Fury

of the Deceived Platonist’
French film critic (and then film director), Eric Rohmer, in an early
response to the film argues that Vertigo is immersed in a Platonic problem-
atic (1959, 28–50).27 Indeed, at first sight, the schema proposed by Vertigo
would appear to be truly Platonic: Scottie’s Madeleine is a copy of Elster’s
Madeleine who is a copy of an ideal woman without concrete reality and
who will never have one. She is justly beyond this world, a pure transcen-
dent Idea, the model to which every real appearance (for Scottie at least)
must aspire. Here lies the difference between Madeleine Elster and the
Madeleine created by Elster. For the plot of Vertigo to succeed, it is not
necessary that the ‘false’ Madeleine resembles point for point the real
Madeleine Elster (Elster’s wife). What is essential is that she represents the
type of woman Scottie would easily fall in love with, and Elster as an old
friend of Scottie would be well placed to know this. That is, in being a
‘type’ like this she is already a sublime form, a Platonic Ideal. It is more
important for the plot that Madeleine be desirable than she resembles
characteristic for characteristic a real figure, the wife Madeleine Elster,
who we never encounter in the film, alive at least. This is why, says Žižek,
‘Scottie’s fury at the end is an authentic Platonic fury: he is furious at dis-
covering that he was imitating the imitation’ (FTKN 16).
However, Žižek in a characteristic counterintuitive turn rejects this
attribution of Platonism to Vertigo declaring:
this link is a negative one: Vertigo is, in a sense, the ultimate anti-Platonic
film, a systematic materialist undermining of the Platonic project … The
murderous fury that seizes Scottie when he finally discovers that Judy, whom
he tried to make into Madeleine, is (the woman he knew as) Madeleine, is
the fury of the deceived Platonist when he perceives that the original he
wants to remake in a perfect copy is already, in itself, a copy. The shock here
is not that the original turns out to be merely a copy—a standard deception
against which Platonism warns us all the time—but that (what we took to
be) the copy turns out to be the original. (OwB 157)
What Scottie doesn’t understand in his ‘Platonic fury’ but what

Hitchcock manages to explore in his ‘anti-Platonic film’ is Žižek’s para-
doxical claim that a genuine materialism must base itself on the notion of
‘the disappearance of matter’ (OwB 24–25). This time, suggests Žižek,
Raymond Durgnat gets it right when he remarks: ‘One may see Vertigo
either as a perversion of Platonism … or as an exposure of the perversion
implicit in Platonism’ (1974, 288).
Žižek notes how Lacan points out in Seminar 11 that art (as the copy of
a copy) ‘does not compete with material objects as ‘direct’, first-level cop-
ies of the Idea; rather, it competes with the supra-sensible Idea itself’
(MML 133). In Enjoy Your Symptom Žižek argues that both Hegelian
philosophy and Lacanian psychoanalysis is idealist in the sense that they
accept that what we see as reality in fact reflects the workings of the mind.
However, it is through an elaboration of the Lacanian matheme of objet
petit a that Žižek reconsiders the idealism of psychoanalysis and is able to
propose that all entities including the mind are to be understood in terms
of material processes. For Žižek, in spite of his apparent idealism, Lacan
identifies himself as a materialist; he stresses the materiality of the signifier
in Seminar 11. At the end of The Indivisible Remainder, Žižek resolves the
opposition between idealism and materialism by asserting the identity of
its two terms: ‘idealism carried to extremes’ (IR 109) converts into dialec-
tical materialism, and it is through his reading of Schelling that Žižek can
come to characterize Lacan as a ‘dialectical materialist’. In Žižek’s view, an
authentic materialist position must be based on the contention that mate-
rial being (body, nature, the world) is not organically integrated but inter-
nally inconsistent, shot through with fissures gaps and tensions. This
process is exemplified and worked out in Hitchcock’s Vertigo: the problem
is not how we get from the appearance of Madeleine to reality but rather
‘how can something like appearance emerge within reality? How can real-
ity redouble itself into an appearance? … Appearance is not secondary;
rather, it emerges through the space of that which is missing from reality’
(CZ 95).28
Let us take the scene of Scottie and Judy’s initial date half way through
the film (again at Ernie’s Restaurant as was the first encounter with
Madeleine). They sit opposite each other but fail to engage in
50 L. SIMMONS
conversation and their encounter fails to spark. Then suddenly Scottie’s

gaze becomes fixed on a point behind Judy, and we see that what he gazes
intently at is an elegant woman vaguely similar to Madeleine in appearance
and similarly dressed in grey. When Judy realizes what attracted Scottie’s
attention, she is hurt. Žižek writes:
The crucial moment here is when we see, from Scottie’s point-of-view, the
two of them in the same shot: Judy on the right side, close to him, the gray
woman to the left, in the background. Again, we get the vulgar reality side-
by-side with the ethereal apparition of the ideal. … The brief moment when
Scottie is deluded into thinking that what he sees is Madeleine is the moment
at which the Absolute appears: it appears ‘as such’ in the very domain of
appearances, in those sublime moments when a supra-sensible dimension
‘shines through’ in our ordinary reality. (MML 133)
Or there is the celebrated scene of mirroring in the flower shop. Scottie,

who has been following her, observes Madeleine through a crack in a half-
open back door of a florist’s shop next to a large mirror. For a brief
moment, Madeleine watches herself in the mirror close to this door. Most
of the screen is occupied by the mirror-image of Madeleine, but on the
right side of the screen, between two vertical framing lines of the doors, in
the dark band (the crack of the half-opened door), there is a sliver of
Scottie his gaze transfixed on the original Madeleine who we only see
reflected in the mirror. In this scene, writes Žižek, ‘A truly “Magrittean”
quality clings to this unique shot’ (TN 106). Elsewhere he confirms:
Although we see only the image of Madeleine, while Scottie is there in real-
ity, the effect of the shot is nonetheless that it is Madeleine who is really
there, part of our common reality, while Scottie is observing her from a
crack in our reality, from the pre-ontological shadowy realm of the hellish
underworld. (FRT 131)
The scene is like the uncanny moment when we catch sight of our own
image, and this image is not looking back at us. In such experiences,
we catch
what Lacan called gaze as objet petit a, part of our image that eludes the mir-
rorlike symmetrical relationship. When we see ourselves ‘from outside,’ from
this impossible point, the traumatic feature is not that I am objectivized,
reduced to an external object for the gaze, but, rather, that it is my gaze itself
that is objectivized, which observes me from the outside, which, precisely,

means that my gaze is no longer mine, that it is stolen from me. (OwB 155)
One of the earliest examples of this experience is that of Freud’s horri-

fied, narcissistic moment of delayed self-recognition ‘meeting [his] own
image unbidden and unexpected’ when he catches sight of himself in a
train-door mirror as reported in his essay ‘The Uncanny’. When a jolt
forces open the washroom door of Freud’s compartment, ‘an elderly gen-
tleman in a dressing gown and a travelling cap came in’. Believing the old
man had mistakenly wandered from the other compartment into which
the washroom opens, Freud rises to show the man his mistake: ‘I at once
realized to my dismay that the intruder was nothing but my own reflection
in the looking-glass on the open door. I can still recollect that I thor-
oughly disliked his appearance’ (SE XVII 247).
The Double-Entendre of Underwear

on the Signifying Bar
Let us take another example of the critics getting it wrong from Vertigo:
the scene after Madeleine’s fake suicide attempt in the cold waters under
Golden Gate bridge when Scottie who has been trailing her rescues her.
At Fort Point, at the edge of the bay under the bridge, Madeleine stands
by the water’s edge and appears to deliberate, she scatters the petals of
her bouquet on the swirling water and then unexpectedly jumps in her-
self. Casting off his hat and coat and descending some steps to the edge
of the water, Scottie quickly dives in after her. Madeleine, her gloved
hands and arms out-splayed, struggles and appears to flounder and sink
in the water, but Scottie reaches her and drags her back through the
floating petals to the steps. Carrying her out of the water like a true
Romantic hero, he lays her comatose body down in the passenger seat
of her car and, in an attempt to revive her, speaks to her for the first
time. Scottie then drives the unconscious Madeleine back to his apart-
ment. Inside we see Scottie putting wood on the fire, drinking a cup of
coffee and an elaborate camera movement, right to left, measures out
the space of his apartment in an echo of the establishing shot of Ernie’s
restaurant analysed earlier.
It seems that one of the big questions for the Hitchcock critics here is:
Did he undress her? To put it bluntly, does Scottie Ferguson see Madeleine
52 L. SIMMONS
naked? Replying in the affirmative, a number of critics say the evidence lies
in Madeleine’s underwear that ‘we’ see suspended on a bar drying above
Scottie’s sink; proof that on bringing her home, Scottie undressed her and
saw her naked. We automatically assume that we see Madeleine’s under-
wear, such is the inexorable narrative logic of the scene (Fig. 2.5). Here is
Murray Pomerance:
Scottie has showered and is now comfortably dry, sedate, upon his sofa, in a
dark teal sweater that connotes the alluring distance of the sea without
implying the direct irritation of wetness. His quietness and the line of
Madeleine’s clothes hanging to dry in his distinctively modest kitchenette
inform us not only that Madeleine is presently sleeping but also that
Scottie … has undressed her. There is no sexuality directly implicit in his
action under these circumstances, only kindness and consideration. Yet the
construction of the scene implies an acute sexuality: she is beautiful, she has
begun to intrigue him, and we have ourselves already fallen for the
entrancement of her grace. The surface rationale that she is recuperating in
his apartment is thus at odds with the underlying provocation of her naked-
ness in his bed … We are desirous as we watch her, yet uncomfortable and
uncertain in our desire. She is the focus and cause of our vertiginous plea-
sure. (2004, 232)
Fig. 2.5 Madeleine’s clothing on the bar in Scottie’s kitchen

Charles Barr is not so lyrical, but he is no less certain: ‘Between them

hovers the unspoken knowledge that Scottie has undressed her and put
her to bed’ (2002, 57). David Sterritt’s The Films of Alfred Hitchcock in
the Cambridge Film Classics series is equally dogmatic: ‘Next we find
Scottie stoking the fire and having a drink in his living room. Madeleine’s
clothes are hung up to dry in his kitchen, and she (presumably nude) is
unconscious in his bed’ (1993, 90). P. Adams Sitney, arguing for the exis-
tence of a ‘Catholic subtext’ to the film, comments: ‘The telephone has
awakened Madeleine from a nightmare. She shows wonder and alarm to
find herself in Scottie’s bed, apparently naked. A pan past the kitchen has
revealed her dress and underclothes drying there’ (2003, 256). But, argues
Žižek, if we actually look at the shot and freeze-frame it, there is no display
of feminine underwear as such. Suspended on a thin wooden bar are just
a dress, socks and two or three unspecified bits of cloth, but no intimate
underwear.29 Dan Aulier records that Paramount Studios’ legal depart-
ment recommended the elimination of ‘intimate garments hanging on the
cord in Scottie’s kitchen after Madeleine’s suicide attempt’ and added the
rider that ‘[i]f the present indication is to be approved that Scottie has
completely undressed Madeleine and put her to bed, the evidence of
embarrassment on her part will have to be played down’ (2000, 68).
Indeed, the Hays Office at the time would probably not have allowed the
display of underwear since this would have implied that Scottie would have
seen Madeleine naked. In terms of later plot revelations, we need to
remember, too, that Madeleine would supposedly have been conscious
and actively aware while Scottie ‘rescued’ her and carried out all of this
undressing, she was simply feigning unconsciousness. Nevertheless, ‘we’
all assume that the underwear is there and that the moment of narrative
voyeurism occurred.
We might think of the wooden bar and its contents above the sink as a
sort of double-entendre. A little further on in that scene the conversation
between Scottie and Madeleine also occurs on two levels: on the one level,
it is about a character falling in love; on another, it is about the projected
fantasies and desire of the protagonists. It is a conversation full of double-
entendres. The magic moments of the film are those moments when these
two levels intersect: ‘falling into San Francisco Bay’ becomes ‘falling
in love’.
SCOTTIE: Will you tell me something? Has this ever happened to

you before?
54 L. SIMMONS
MADELEINE (startled): What?

SCOTTIE: …Falling… into San Francisco Bay? ( S h e
laughs with relief, for it seemed to her, for a
quick moment, that he was going to say
‘falling in love’.)
MADELEINE: No, never before. I’ve fallen into lakes, out
of rowboats, when I was a little girl. And I
fell into a river, once, trying to leap from one
stone to another. But I’ve never fallen into
San Francisco Bay. Have you? Ever before?
SCOTTIE (grinning): No… this is the first time for me, too.
For example, in this scene the conversation between Scottie and

Madeleine becomes more and more eroticized—the tension between the
two characters is building, glances between them are exchanged, double
meanings proliferate—but then Elster, Madeleine’s husband, phones: the
Real intervenes, as Žižek would say. Exactly at the right moment the pater-
nal prohibition intervenes and the (erotic) excess is controlled. Charles
Barr describes the sequence as follows:
As their talk grows more intimate, Scottie offers to get her more coffee, and
reaches for her cup; their hands touch, and we can see, within a two-shot,
that for both of them, this is a moment of erotic tension and possibility.
Immediately, the phone rings, the tension is broken, and Scottie leaves the
room to answer it…. The call is, of course, from Elster, and its timing is
uncannily precise, to the second, allowing them to get so far but no further.
(2012, 59)
While Scottie is on the phone in the bedroom, Madeleine quickly

dresses and leaves his apartment. The ‘underwear’ is removed and now all
we are left with is the empty bar (the bar between signifier and signified?)
above the kitchen sink. It is in order to control this excess, to reduce it
through the standard procedure of suture and its mechanism of voyeur-
ism, that the majority of interpreters strangely insist that Scottie must have
seen Madeleine naked. But in this sequence the gaze—to which again it
should be made clear that there is no underwear hanging above the sink—
is not the voyeuristic gaze attributed to any subject but the nameless
object gaze of ‘subjectivity without a subject-agent’. In the scene of
Madeleine’s fake suicide, we have just analysed there are a pair of further
examples of the uncanny point-of-view shot without a bearer. Within the

diegetic space, there are two mysterious shots from above the swirling
seawater. After we see Madeleine throwing petals from her bouquet of
flowers into the sea, we then view from above (but not from her view-
point) the petals floating on the dark surface of the sea; a little bit later
after Madeleine herself has jumped, we see her from the same standpoint
floating in the sea. In both cases, the shot somehow feels subjectivized,
although there is no diegetic subject who can adopt its point of view.
The Fright of Real Love—Mistaking Fiction

for Reality
For Žižek, the cinema—as Symbolic reality—is a fake, a fiction. However,

in its very form as appearance, fiction, film may become more real than
reality itself. Whereas Symbolic reality, the fiction that structures our
everyday reality is misrecognized as ‘the real thing’, film manages to
approach the Real as a fiction. There is more truth in cinematic fiction
because we admit it to be such, a fiction, whereas we habitually refuse to
accept Symbolic reality as mere fiction. As Žižek insists:
if our social reality itself is sustained by a symbolic fiction or fantasy, then the
ultimate achievement of film art is not to recreate reality within the narrative
fiction, to seduce us into (mis)taking a fiction for reality, but on the con-
trary, to make us discern the fictional aspect of reality itself, to experience
reality itself as a fiction. (FRT 77)
This ‘fidelity to the Real’ he suggests, of Polish filmmaker Krzysztof

Kieślowski, was the reason for his ‘ethical’ transition from documentary to
fiction film. For Kieślowski, documentary was too Real, and, consequently,
he could not develop an emotional response in his viewers. As Kieślowski
declared: ‘I’m frightened of real tears’ (FRT 72).
There are three moments in which Madeleine/Judy merge into a single
physique and a single emotional, spiritual, even metaphysical, entity. These
are three moments when she is seen walking towards Scottie. The first is
the scene of Ernie’s restaurant we have already examined. The second is in
Scottie’s apartment after Madeleine’s false suicide attempt. Madeleine
advances slowly walking towards him entering into his life. She is no lon-
ger simply a creation of Elster and nor is she simply the object of a voyeur.
Madeleine embodies the tension between life and death and associated
56 L. SIMMONS
with elemental images: the water of the bay, the fire blazing in the apart-
ment, the supposed nakedness of her body under the dressing gown. The
third moment is again an ‘appearance’ of Judy/Madeleine. Judy, com-
pletely remodelled as Madeleine apart from one detail, her hair, is urged
by Scottie to make this final transformation. She goes back into the bath-
room of her apartment, the tempo of the music rises, the door is lit by a
green light emanating from a neon sign in front of the apartment window,
everything becomes illuminated with green through a filter on the camera.
Judy crosses through the threshold of the bathroom door now resurrected
as Madeleine and accompanied by sumptuous romantic music. As Scottie
and Madeleine now embrace, the camera turns 360 degrees around the
couple and as ‘interface’ the spectator is placed in the subjective position
of Scottie.
MADELEINE: You believe that I love you?

SCOTTIE: Yes.
MADELEINE: And if you lose me, you’ll know that I loved you and
wanted to go on loving you.
SCOTTIE: I won’t lose you.
Judy declares her real love while she plays the role of Madeleine, but
Scottie cannot comprehend it. He is unable to make the Lacanian distinc-
tion between the object of desire and surplus enjoyment which is its cause:
… the lock of curly blonde hair, that fatal detail of Madeleine in Hitchcock’s
Vertigo. When, in the love scene in the barn towards the end of the film,
Scottie passionately embraces Judy refashioned into the dead Madeleine,
during their famous 360-degree kiss, he stops kissing her and withdraws just
long enough to steal a look at her newly blonde hair, as if to reassure himself
that the particular feature which transforms her into the object of desire is
still there. … This curl is the objet petit a which condenses the impossible
deadly Thing, serving as its stand-in and thus enabling us to entertain a live-
able relationship with it, without being swallowed up by it. (FA 20)
Scottie declares his real love for Madeleine, but Judy knows full well
that this declaration of love is not destined for her. There exists a reci-
procity here, but it is not what we might call a ‘simultaneous reciprocity’.
At the top of the tower at the end of the film, the kiss shared is a real kiss.
Nevertheless, these two identities can exist at the same moment in time
because of an epistemological separation. Once Scottie knows the truth,
and Judy knows that Scottie knows, we are faced with a new situation and
a new problem. Who does Scottie embrace at the top of the tower at the
end of the film? Following this logic, it can neither be Judy nor Madeleine.
It cannot be Judy because Scottie has no feeling or concern for her. It
cannot be Madeleine because Scottie now knows that Madeleine never
really existed as such. We have to return to the film for an answer to this
troubling question. In this final scene, Scottie addresses this figure (for
obvious reasons I hesitate to even call her Judy/Madeleine) we cannot
name, oscillating between the names of Madeleine and Judy. It is clear
that he sees Madeleine in Judy and Judy in Madeleine and that he cannot
arrive at the point of separating the two identities. Judy/Madeleine is not
therefore an entity with two identities, she is by this stage a true double.
Scottie’s kiss is an invitation to madness. What he obliges Judy to do is
incorporate her rival Madeleine into her being; he obliges her to be pos-
sessed by Madeleine, just as Madeleine was seemingly possessed by
Carlotta. There is at this point no further threshold to cross. In throwing
herself from the tower, Judy liberates herself once and for all from her
terrible rival given birth by Scottie’s passion. Scottie starts to come to
terms with Judy’s love, despite his comprehension of her collusion with
Elster. His rage is displaced by grief, and he chokes, ‘I loved you so,
Maddie’. The past tense suggests he is liberated, but the name ‘Maddie’
(a diminutive like ‘Scottie’) used here for the only time is neither
Madeleine nor Judy, perhaps a new amalgam of them both (‘Mad(eleine)-
(Ju)dy’—‘Maddy’).
The Mimetic Desire of the Double

In Vertigo, as we have seen, simulation, doubling, mirroring and resem-
blance are Hitchcock’s central concerns. In Vertigo, we have also seen
how the process of simulation is not just depicted, as in most films, but
is generative; how it is the characters themselves (Elster, Scottie, even
Judy) who fashion and fabricate the narrative we watch as spectators, a
narrative that then doubles back upon us and them. As Sam Rohdie has
written,
The subject of the Hitchcock narrative is the creation of a narrative internal

to it, like a double of itself. … Hitchcock works upon appearances, placing
58 L. SIMMONS
reality and the images of it in doubt and to such an extent and so skilfully
that the apparent opposition between them becomes blurred and porous. In
so doing, and by formalising the system by which it is constructed, the spec-
tator is simultaneously placed within the film, identified with a character or
a situation, quite literally ‘taken in’, and yet also placed without the film in
an exterior, observing it, observing oneself, seeing the system. (2010, np)
As Žižek insists, Hitchcock’s films explode ‘the form of the linear, cen-
tred narrative’ and render ‘life as a multiform flow … experienced as a
series of multiple parallel destinies that interact’ (EYS rev. ed., 233).
Scottie wants to possess Madeleine who is doubly possessed by Elster
and by Carlotta. Judy wants to possess Scottie who is possessed by
Madeleine. Judy imitates her own image, she wants to be loved as
Madeleine has been loved not as Judy. Scottie imitates Elster’s presumed
desire and the desire of Madeleine herself. Thus, we could speak of a chain
of unreciprocated desire: Judy desires Scottie who desires Madeleine who
desires Carlotta but for the fact that Judy and Madeleine are the ‘same’
person. The most flagrant and destructive desire is the desire of Scottie to
recreate Madeleine in the person of Judy. This desire is doubly mimetic so
that eventually Scottie discovers his ‘imitation’ is an imitation realized by
Elster to deceive him, only that Elster succeeded where he (Scottie) has
failed. As he says: ‘You played his wife so well, Judy! He made you over
didn’t he? Just as I’ve done. But better!’ Scottie’s Madeleine is a copy of a
copy, a copy of Elster’s Madeleine who is a copy of Madeleine Elster (who
never appears in the film except when Elster throws her dead body from
the tower); Elster’s Madeleine is a simulacrum, of no intrinsic interest
apart from the acting out of a presumed suicide. One could not express
with more force and irony the devastating inanity of desire.
Let us return again to Žižek’s reading of the scene where, after yet
another dinner at Ernie’s, Scottie takes Judy/Madeleine back to the
Empire Hotel. In this scene, the externalized split between an ethereal
apparition of Madeleine (or at least the woman who is similar to her) and
the vulgar reality of Judy from the scene at Ernie’s analysed above is now
projected back on to Judy in a literal form. We have here another profile
(and another mystery of the profile), but this time, in contrast to
Madeleine’s original ‘dazzling profile’ at Ernie’s, Judy’s face is in half
black shadow and, then when we view it from the front, also half green
from the neon light of the hotel sign (Fig. 2.6). ‘In other words’, says
Žižek, ‘we get here literally the other side of the magnificent profile shot
Fig. 2.6 Judy’s face half in shadow
of Madeleine at Ernie’s, its negative: the previously unseen dark half of

Madeleine (the green anguished face of Judy) plus the dark half to be filled
in by Madeleine’s dazzling profile’ (OwB 160). This is a crucial shot, and
the ontological ambiguity suggests that Judy is a proto-entity not fully
constituted (a formula of ghostly greenish plasm plus darkness). She is a
pure receptacle for the sublime idea of Madeleine. To put it literally, the
dark half of Judy needs to be filled in with the ethereal image of Madeleine,
the other half is a deathly artificial green which has its source in the neon
light outside the window. Judy is, says Žižek, ‘a formless pre-ontological
stain’, and her anguished half-face indicates the birth of the subject (OwB
160). She is but a version of the Lacanian divided or barred subject ($),
which is always a gap or a hole in the positive order of being. At the point
you see Judy as a green monster, a person can only emerge when you fill
in the other dark half. This anguished half-face, unsure of itself, designates
the birth of the subject. This nothing is the subject, the subject is nothing.
In order to fully grasp another subject, there must be something in the
dark, and the problem is that we always want to see too much, more by
half of what is there. This returns us, of course, to Žižek’s theme of the
critics who see what is not there in Hitchcock’s films and why they see
insist on seeing it. Hitchcock’s Vertigo might be taken as an exemplar of
an Aristotelian model that is undone and then redone by its own uncanny
60 L. SIMMONS
images. Hitchcock’s films are representatives of cinematic genres, and they

obey all the fictional needs dictated by narrative cinema but they are
inhabited by an essential (visual) gap. A gap that supplements and thwarts
narrative continuity and the rationality, the stability, of ethical values that
normally give meaning to action. Contrary to the critics who insist on see-
ing the lineaments of a full story in Vertigo, but at the same time acknowl-
edging the importance of their insistent misreading, Žižek suggests, in
fact, that the object is to see what isn’t there—the void—to see only the
half (face).30 For this, he argues, would be the true representation of sub-
jectivity at its purest.
Why Is the Ending Always Multiple?

Vertigo owes its power at least in part to the ambiguity of its own ending
and the fact that at least two other outcomes resonate in it as alternate
histories.31 Žižek notes
the radical ambiguity of the film’s final shot in which Scottie looks down
from the brink of the bell tower into the abyss that has just engulfed Judy.
This ending is at the same time ‘happy’ (Scottie is cured, he can look down
into the precipice) and ‘unhappy’ (he is finally broken, losing the support
that gave consistency to his being). … The abyss Scottie is finally able to
look into is the very abyss of the hole in the Other (the symbolic order)
concealed by the fascinating presence of the fantasy object. (LA 87)
Exploring the film’s structure of double articulation, Žižek writes of the

resonance of multiple endings in Hitchcock’s work in general arguing that
with each ending in a Hitchcock film: ‘other possible outcomes are not
simply cancelled but continue to haunt our ‘true’ reality as a spectre of
what might have happened’ (‘Is there a proper way to remake a Hitchcock
film?’ 267). Indeed, Dan Aulier, in his account of the making of Vertigo,
records that the final shooting script of September 12, 1957, contains a
scene in Midge’s apartment with a broken Scottie listening to a radio
report on Gavin Elster’s arrest for murdering his wife. It is a scene that was
never used in the final released version of the film despite the insistence of
the Studio’s legal team on the importance of showing that Elster would be
brought to trial.32 Without this scene, Elster’s efforts at control and ‘direc-
tion’ are successful, and he remains free. James Vest concludes that, ‘[t]he
fact that Hitchcock planned, then cut the scene of Elster’s apprehension
may reflect his own ambivalent, but ultimately hopeful, view of himself as
controller’ (1999–2000, 90). As is also well-known, Hitchcock appeared
in short cameo roles in many of his films. Hitchcock generally appears at
the beginning of his films, in an open public space, as unobserved fellow
traveller or passerby and at a significant moment in the action when his
protagonist prepares to move from the light into a world of shadows.33
The cameos are also highly self-conscious as if acknowledging Hitchcock’s
role as director and orchestrator of the action and controller of the narra-
tive. A Hitchcock ‘in control’ appears at the beginning of Vertigo, when in
a cameo performance he walks across the entranceway of Elster’s shipyard
left to right passing Scottie, who is entering for his meeting with Elster,
and who pauses to speak to the Gateman. As Hitchcock passes Scottie,
their shadows appear to meld momentarily on screen. The themes of shad-
owing and overshadowing—Madeleine as a shadow of a shadow, Judy as a
shadow of Madeleine, not to speak of the ghost or shadow of Carlotta—
mark the film.34 Hitchcock in his cameo appearance crosses from the
directorial world of control into the area of proximity with the characters
in the filmed story. The direction of the story will be the dark alleyway that
Scottie accesses on his way to Elster’s office. It is a space that Hitchcock
‘maps’ by walking across it. The lateral crossing of the screen, as we will
see in Chap. 8, is also reminiscent of Hitchcock’s cameo in I Confess. Like
it does in that film, the appearance of Hitchcock sets the narrative in
motion and is the first half of a narrative bracket that was to have been
matched and balanced by a final scene then never used. With its inconclu-
sive ending where ‘Madeleine’s “second death” functions as the “loss of
loss”: by obtaining the object, we lose the fascinating dimension of loss as
that which captivates our desire’ (LA 86), in Vertigo the film narrative lit-
erally enacts what happens to its spectator at the conclusion of its viewing.
It is this feature of the Hitchcockian text doubling back on itself that Žižek
believes ‘allows us to insert Hitchcock into the series of artists whose work
forecasts today’s digital universe’ (EYS rev. ed. 233). In the experimenta-
tion with old linear narrative forms, such as that engaged in by Hitchcock’s
cinema, Žižek argues, lie the origins of the new medium of the cyberspace
hypertext that will provide us with a
perception of our reality as one of the possible—often even not the most
probable—outcomes of an ‘open’ situation, this notion that other possible
outcomes are not simply cancelled out but continue to haunt our ‘true’ real-
62 L. SIMMONS
ity as a spectre of what might have happened, conferring on our reality the
status of extreme fragility and contingency. (EYS rev. ed. 234)
Notes
1. See also Stephen Heath (1977–1978, 48–76).
2. Žižek on several occasions refers to these factual errors in Hitchcock stud-
ies and cites the case of Raymond Durgnat (see, for example, ‘Vertigo: The
Drama of a Deceived Platonist’, 67–82).
3. See Raymond Durgnat (1974, 278–298). For an extended discussion of
this and other ‘factual mistakes’, including the sequences at Ernie’s restau-
rant and Scottie’s apartment, see Žižek (OwB 153 ff.). Curiously, early on
in The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock, Durgnat remarks, ‘how easy it is to
read into a film meanings which were not intended and which have as little,
and as much, place there as a variety of other meanings’ (1974, 159).
4. See http://www.basichip.com/vertigo/main.htm. For a critical reflection
on cinematic pilgrimage, cinephilia and Vertigo, see Cunningham (2008).
5. The most notorious example being David Bordwell (2005).
6. The actual Ernie’s Restaurant closed in 1999 and today has become, in one
of those typical excesses of American capitalism, an up-market condo—so
maybe it is true that chic San Francisco has transmogrified into investor Los
Angeles? And perhaps this tragic fact also confers some authenticity to
Durgnat’s perverse misreading of San Francisco as Los Angeles?
7. See Barthes (1981). Žižek describes this point of attraction as ‘a fascinum
that fixes our gaze, a bright dazzling stain which we soon identify as the
naked back of a beautiful woman’ (OwB 152).
8. See, for example, Charles Barr (2002, 40–44).
9. Richard Allen suggests that Hitchcock’s recurrent division of the face in
two, and his emphatic use of the profile shot, may have been inspired by
F.W. Murnau’s adaptation of Robert-Louis Stevenson’s novella Dr. Jekyll
and Mr. Hyde in his now lost film Janus-Faced (Der Janus-kopff)
(2007, 193).
10. On closer examination, the isolated profile shot of Madeleine has a peculiar
quality. The red background of the restaurant wall ‘seems to get more
intense, almost threatening to explode in red heat turning into a yellow
blaze’, notes Žižek, who concludes that it is as if Hitchcock wished to
inscribe Scottie’s passion into the background (OwB 153). As Dan Aulier
records, the profile shot was redone after the set of Ernie’s Restaurant had
been dismantled and Herbert Coleman, who was in charge of filming it,
was forced to use a smaller lens than the rest of the sequence. This meant
that there was literally much less background visible and may have caused
the throbbing effect when intercut with the earlier sequence shot on set
(2000, 151–152).
11. The other Hitchcockian blot in Vertigo is, of course, the forward zoom and
backward track of the ‘vertigo shot’ in the stairwell of the San Juan Bautista
Mission that creates the sense of the implosion of visual space.
12. The term might be literally translated into English as ‘object little a’, but
Lacan insisted that it should be left untranslated (see the note by Alan
Sheridan, the first translator of the Ecrits (E 1977 xi)). Lacan’s insistence
on non-translation was designed so that the term would acquire ‘the status
of an algebraic sign’. The symbol ‘a’ (the first letter of the French word
autre or ‘other’) appears early on in Lacan’s work as always lower case and
italicized denoting the little other, which ‘isn’t another at all, since it is
essentially coupled with the ego’ (S2, 321), as opposed to the big Other
Autre which is an irreducible alterity. Justin Clemens, following sugges-
tions of Geoff Boucher, distinguishes the following different ways in which
objet petit a is conceived by Lacan: ‘a) objet a as the eternally lost object that
is also the object-cause of desire; b) objet a as the gaze and voice of the
Other; c) objet a as the Thing in my neighbour; d) objet a as the cause of
desire and its extinction in anxiety; e) objet a as discriminator between Ego
Ideal and Superego; f) objet a as the extimate agalma of my being; g) objet
a as plug for the lack in the Other’ (2005, 18 fn1). Sarah Kay notes: ‘Of all
the objects about which Žižek writes, the objet a is the one which preoc-
cupies him most; and it features in numerous figures and mathemes which
he takes from Lacan’ (2003, 57).
13. For a detailed account of the importance and persistence of ideology in
Žižek’s writings, as well as his revision of Althusser’s conceptualization of
ideology as a process of interpellation that is linked to imaginary subjectiv-
ity, see Robert Pfaller (2005).
14. Žižek here at the end is quoting Daniel Dennett (1991, 132).
15. For a full account of Lacan’s ‘four discourses’ by Žižek, see his ‘Four
Discourses, Four Subjects’ (1998).
16. For a full account of this motif across Hitchcock’s work, see Michael
Walker (2005, 239–247).
17. Žižek provides a list with the following examples: ‘a person desperately
clinging by his hand onto another person’s hand, as in the Nazi saboteur
clinging from the good American hero’s hand from the torch of the Statue
of Liberty in Saboteur; the final confrontation of Rear Window, the crip-
pled James Stewart hanging from the window, trying to grab the hand of
his pursuer who, instead of helping him, tries to make him fall; in The Man
Who Knew Too Much (remake 1955), at the sunny Casablanca market, the
dying Western agent, dressed as an Arab, stretches his hand to the innocent
64 L. SIMMONS
American tourist (James Stewart), pulling him down toward himself; the
finally unmasked thief clinging from Cary Grant’s hand in To Catch a Thief;
James Stewart clinging from the roof funnel and desperately trying to
grasp the policeman’s hand stretching toward him at the beginning of
Vertigo; Eva Marie-Saint clinging from Cary Grant’s hand at the edge of
the precipice (with the immediate jump to her clinging to his hand in
the sleeping car’s berth) at the end of North by Northwest’ (EYS rev.
ed., 224–225). For the more specific motif of hands in Hitchcock with
film stills, see https://the.hitchcock.zone/wiki/Hitchcock_themes_and_
motifs_-_hands. Accessed 21 November 2020.
18. Scottie’s acrophobia has been interpreted by critics in a number of different
ways: Tania Modleski associates it with his ‘femininity’ (2005, 90); Theodore
Price sees it as an indication of Scottie’s ‘impotence’ (1992, 140); while Thomas
Leitch understands it as ‘a fear of falling love’ (1991, 202).
19. Hitchcock explains this in his interview with Truffaut: ‘The viewpoint
must be fixed, you see, while the perspective is changed as it stretches
lengthwise. I thought about the problem for fifteen years. By the time we
got to Vertigo, we solved it by using the dolly and the zoom simultane-
ously’ (Truffaut 1985, 246).
20. Elsewhere Žižek states, ‘In Vertigo, Scottie does NOT love Madeleine—
the proof is that he tries to recreate her in Judy, changing Judy’s properties
to make her resemble Madeleine… Love is not love for the properties of
the object, but for the abyssal x, the je ne sais quoi in the object’ (‘Legal
Luck’ np).
21. It is a fragile ontology we are reminded of when Madeleine ‘disappears’ in
the McKittrick Hotel.
22. As Patrick McGilligan notes, this was a phrase assigned to him by an adman
for a proposed radio series (2003, 276).
23. For exceptions, see Richard Allen (2007, 38–71), Susan Smith (2000),
Christopher Morris (2002), Deborah Knight and George McKnight
(1999) and Pascal Bonitzer (EYAW 2010, 15–30).
24. Nöel Carroll, who provides an alternative theory of suspense, rejects char-
acter identification as a cause of suspense and argues for the spectator
observing fictional events from a position that is not identical to any of the
characters in the narrative. Instead, he proposes that suspense follows from
a profound sense of ‘moral empathy’ between audience and characters
(1996, 138).
25. See, for example, Hollinger (1987) and Gordon (2008).
26. There is a masterful full analysis of the complete dream by William
Rothman (2013, 46–57) which I have drawn upon here.
27. Rohmer’s article concludes: ‘c’est parce que la forme est pure, belle, rigou-
reuse, étonnament riche et libre qu’on peut dire que les films di Hitchcock
et Vertigo au premier chef, ont pour objets—outré ceux don’t ils savent
captiver nos sens—les Idées au sens noble, platonicien, du terme’ (1959, 50).
28. See also the following assertion: Lenin ‘tried to be a materialist: he was
obsessed with the notion of the mind reflecting on an objective reality
existing outside. However, such a notion relies on a hidden idealism,
because the idea that outside of our reflections there is objective reality
presupposes that our mind, which reflects reality, functions as a gaze some-
how external to this reality’ (CZ 96–97).
29. Indeed, I would claim that the missing underwear does in fact surface in
other parts of the film: we first encounter Scottie wearing what he calls a
‘corset’ while his friend Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes) works at her job as a
ladies’ undergarment designer. At one point, Scottie’s speech provides a
voiceover for a close-up of her drawing, which features a female torso in a
bra. Later we see him fascinated in Midge’s design of a brassiere that ‘works
on the principle of a cantilever bridge’.
30. Such a procedure has much in common with Žižek’s unmasking of the
‘parallax view’ (PV). As Fredric Jameson in his review of Žižek’s book
argues, ‘To discover that neither the code of the subject nor the code of the
object offers in itself an adequate representation of the unrepresentable
object it designates means to rediscover each of these codes as sheer repre-
sentation, to come to the conviction that it is both necessary and incom-
plete, that each is so to speak a necessary error, an indispensable appearance’
(Jameson 2006, 8).
31. Multiple endings, often profoundly different in character, exist for a num-
ber of Hitchcock films: the end of The Pleasure Garden (1925) exists in
two versions, and he shot three endings for Suspicion (1941). In each case,
Hitchcock appears to have opted for the more ambiguous or unresolved
version. Perhaps more radically than simply noting ambiguous endings,
Robin Wood questions the entire narrative trajectory of Vertigo on the
basis that we never see Scottie get down from the roof gutter from which
he hangs so precariously in the opening scene. He writes: ‘We do not see,
and are never told, how he got down from the gutter: there seems to be no
possible way he could have got down. The effect is of having him, through-
out the film, metaphorically suspended over a great abyss’ (2002,
110–111).
32. See Dan Aulier (2000, 50; 60–61; 69) and Donald Spoto (1983, 426–427).
33. See Michael Walker’s analysis of the common characteristics of these cameo
performances (2005, 88 ff). See also the discussion of Raymond Bellour’s
analysis of Hitchcock’s cameo in Marnie in Chap. 6.
34. As Dan Aulier notes, ‘Face in the Shadow’ was one of the proposed titles
for the film (1999, 69).
66 L. SIMMONS
References
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Ask Hitchcock). London: Verso, new updated edition, 2010.
FA. The Fragile Absolute, or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For?
London: Verso, 2000.
FRT. The Fright of Real Tears: Krzystof Kieslowski between Theory and Post-theory.
FTKN. For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor. London:
Verso, 2002.
IDLC. In Defence of Lost Causes. London: Verso, 2008.
Verso, 1996.
LET. Living in the End Times. London: Verso, 2010.
LTN. Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism.
MI. Mapping Ideology. London: Verso, 1995.
MML. Mythology, Madness, and Laughter: Subjectivity in German Idealism, with
Markus Gabriel. London: Continuum, 2009.
Routledge, 2004.
PD. The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2003.
PV. The Parallax View. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2006.
SOI. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1989.
‘Four Discourses, Four Subjects,’ Cogito and the Unconscious, edited by Slavoj
Žižek. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998: 74–103.
Routledge, 2004: 257–274.
‘Legal Luck,’ International Journal of Žižek Studies 3:1 (2009): https://zizek-
studies.org/index.php/IJZS/article/view/155
‘Vertigo: The Drama of a Deceived Platonist,’ Hitchcock Annual
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E1977. Ecrits: A Selection, translated by Alan Sheridan. London: Tavistock
Publications, 1977.
S4. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book IV: The Object Relation 1956–1957, edited
by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by A.R. Price. New York: Polity, 2014.
S8. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book VIII: Transference 1960–1961, edited by
Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by Bruce Fink. New York: Polity, 2014.
S10. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book X: Anxiety 1962–1963, edited by Jacques-
Alain Miller, translated by A.R. Price. New York: Polity, 2014.
S11. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book II: The Four Fundamental Concepts of
Psycho-analysis, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by Alan Sheridan.
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of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Translated from the
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Leitch, Thomas. 1991. Find the Director and Other Hitchcock Games. Athens:
University of Georgia Press.
McGilligan, Patrick. 2003. Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light.
New York: Regan Books.
Theory. New York and London, Routledge, second edition.
Morris, Christopher D. 2002. The Hanging Figure: On Suspense and the Films of
Alfred Hitchcock. London and Westport, CT: Praeger.
Press, 1989.
Pfaller, Robert. 2005. Where Is Your Hamster? The Concept of Ideology in
Žižek’s Cultural Theory. In Traversing the Fantasy: Critical Responses to Slavoj
Žižek, ed. Geoff Boucher, Jason Glynos and Matthew Sharpe, 105–124.
Aldershot: Ashgate.
Pomerance, Murray. 2004. An Eye for Hitchcock. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press.
Price, Theodore. 1992. Hitchcock and Homosexuality. Metuchen, NJ:
Scarecrow Press.
Rohdie, Sam. 2010. Hitchcock Fabrics. Screening the Past 27:1. http://www.
latrobe.edu.au/screeningthe past/current/current.html. Accessed 21
November 2020.
Rohmer, Eric. 1959. L’hélice et l’Idée. Cahiers du cinema 93: 48–50.
Rothman, William. 2004. Vertigo: The Unknown Woman in Hitchcock. In The “I”
of the Camera: Essays in Film Criticism, History and Aesthetics, 121–140.
New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rothman, William. 2013. Scottie’s Dream, Judy’s Plan, Madeleine’s Revenge. In
Vertigo, ed. Katalin Makkai, 45–70. Abingdon and New York: Routledge.
Sitney, P. Adams. 2003. Let Me Go into the Church Alone: The Roman Catholic
Subtext of Vertigo. In The Hidden God: Film and Faith, ed. Mary Lea Brandy
and Antonio Monda, 249–259. New York: The Museum of Modern Art.
Smith, Susan. 2000. Hitchcock: Suspense, Humour and Tone. London: Palgrave
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Sterritt, David. 1993. The Films of Alfred Hitchcock. Cambridge: Cambridge
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70 L. SIMMONS
Vest, James M. 1999–2000. Hitchcock’s Cameo in Vertigo. Hitchcock
Annual: 84–92.
Walker, Michael. 2005. Hitchcock’s Motifs. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Wood, Robin. 2002. Hitchcock’s Films Revisited. New York: Columbia University
Press, revised edition.
CHAPTER 3
The Real: The Birds (1963)
Abstract Why do the birds attack? The characters in Hitchcock’s film

constantly ask this question. Melanie’s question after the first attack is
‘What do you suppose made it do that?’ Are the birds sent by God to pun-
ish humankind? Are they taking revenge for man’s persecution of them?
Are they simply reflections of the (Oedipal) tensions that exist between the
human characters? Žižek questions the traditional ‘understanding’ of the
birds that there is no meaning and they can’t be explained. Much of
Žižek’s writing is based on the Lacanian notion of the Real as that which
resists symbolization absolutely. The Real is a certain limit, a pure negativ-
ity which prevents the final totalization of the social-ideological field with
which the subject must grapple, inevitably unsuccessfully. According to
Žižek, Hitchcock’s films perform the work of analysis, as they expose their
own mechanisms; they make visible the relation of our Symbolic and
Imaginary reality to the Real.
There’s an answer for everything.

—Scottie Ferguson in Vertigo
The point is not that the Real is impossible but rather that the
impossible is Real.
—Slavoj Žižek, ‘The Madness of Reason’
MITCH: That’s the damndest thing I ever saw!
—The Birds

Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62436-1_3
72 L. SIMMONS
What Do the Birds Mean?

In Hitchcock’s Films Revisited, Robin Wood asks the vexing question that
inevitably lingers on the lips of everyone who watches The Birds: ‘What do
the birds mean?’ (2002, 153). By extension, it is the question that the
characters in Hitchcock’s film constantly ask: Why do the birds attack?
Melanie’s question after the first gull lacerates her forehead in the run-
about on Bodega Bay is ‘What do you suppose made it do that?’ ‘What’s
the matter with all the birds?’ asks Lydia Brenner after the full-scale attack
on the children who are guests at her daughter’s birthday party. Cathy, the
daughter, is forced to ask her brother Mitch, ‘Why are they doing this, the
birds?’ ‘Why are they doing this? Why are they doing this?’ is the repeated
challenge hurled at Melanie by a frantically overwrought mother at The
Tides restaurant. Various characters in the film offer different, conflicting,
explanations for the bird attacks and nearly every character speculates on
the reasons for their arrival: for Mrs MacGruder in the pet shop, the
weather at sea has driven them inland; Annie Hayward looking at the
flocks in the sky asks whether they ever stop migrating and then when a
gull crashes into her front door suggests that it must have lost its way in
the dark; deputy Malone, called to investigate the first invasion of the
Brenners’ living room, suggests the birds might have just panicked and,
equally unsatisfactorily, his investigation of Dan Fawcett’s death con-
cludes, despite the conclusive evidence to the contrary, that he was killed
by a burglar and not birds; after the two attacks on the school grounds and
at the Brenner home, the investigating officer insists on a rational explana-
tion: lights must have attracted the sparrows and the schoolgirls must have
‘bothered’ the gulls that disrupted their party; Mrs Bundy, the tweedy
amateur ornithologist, argues that bird’s brains are not large enough for
them to act collectively, and she insists that birds of different species would
never flock together; a drunk at The Tides restaurant argues that they
portend the end of the world; and, finally, a panicked mother claims that
Melanie Daniels must be the cause of the bird attacks since they com-
menced only after her arrival in Bodega Bay.1
Are the birds sent by God to punish humankind? Are they taking
revenge for man’s persecution of them (and by implication the animal
kingdom in general)? In that case, are they an illustration of theodicy, the
explanation why a good, almighty and all-knowing God permits evil? Are
they simply reflections of the (Oedipal and therefore incestual) tensions
that exist between the human characters?2 Wood comes up short of an
3 THE REAL: THE BIRDS (1963) 73
answer, although he proposes three possible readings: cosmological, eco-

logical and familial. The first, cosmological reading depicts a world that,
while peaceful in its quotidian existence, can at any moment be thrown
into chaos by the eruption of some traumatic Real that destroys the every-
day symbolic circuit. In this case, suggests Žižek, the birds might reflect
‘the theological dimension in Hitchcock’s work, the vision of a cruel, arbi-
trary, and impenetrable God who can bring down catastrophe at any
moment’ (LA 97). The ecological argument makes a case for a concen-
trated backlash of exploited nature (and accumulated animal cruelty) that
rises up against the human race. On reflection, Wood is forced to reject
both the popular cosmological and ecological readings of Hitchcock’s film
as patently absurd. The third reading ‘sees the key to the film in the inter-
subjective relations between the main characters’ (LA 98). For Hitchcock’s
biographer, Donald Spoto, ‘the birds operate as markers of the chaos
unleashed by shallow human relations … the bird attacks are poetic repre-
sentations of everything shallow and undermining in human relationships’
(1992, 334–335). But for Richard Allen, ‘the deeper significance of the
birds’ attack lies not in an Oedipal jealousy’, and they ‘represent the per-
verse alternative to a patriarchal social order that temporarily failed to sus-
tain itself through the male line’ (1997, 43; 48). However, Wood also
rejects the psychological interpretation that the birds reflect tensions
among the characters on the grounds that this explanation does not
account for the attack of the birds on farmer Dan Fawcett, or on the inno-
cent schoolchildren. Eventually in exasperation, Wood is forced to drop
the issue altogether, and he decides that the birds don’t mean but simply
are: they present ‘a concrete embodiment of the arbitrary and the unpre-
dictable, of whatever makes human life and human relations precarious, a
reminder of the fragility and instability that cannot be ignored or evaded
and, beyond that, of the possibility that life is meaningless and absurd’
(2002, 154). Thomas Leitch, who does not have much more luck, notes
the ‘disproportion between the relatively inconsequential behavior of the
characters and the magnitude of the threat’. He, too, is forced to come to
the grumpy conclusion that the birds are ‘a gag and nothing more’ (1991,
229). The interpretive stalemate forces Christopher Morris to posit the
critical paradox that ‘the birds are an instance of a visual effect which must
be interpreted and given a human construction, despite the evidence that
no such construction can be true’ (2000, 256) and so he is forced to con-
clude ‘contemporary interpretation of the birds has arrived at a point at
which some explanation of the birds seems both essential and impossible,
74 L. SIMMONS
both necessary and arbitrary’ (2002, 227). Neil Badmington, in the latest
attempt to understand the enigma of Hitchcock’s birds, wants to read ‘the
birds of The Birds as birds’, that is, to ‘uncage’ them from any of the meta-
phors, codes and figures that analyse them as ‘signs of something else’
(2011, 131; 133).
Characteristically, Žižek turns this impossibility or failure to locate the
meaning of the birds at the core of the film around to provide a persuasive
account that, as an index of the Lacanian Real, Hitchcock’s birds are pre-
cisely ‘something inexplicable … something outside the rational chain of
events … a lawless impossible real’ (Glowinski et al. 2001, 155). Or, as
Lacan first declared of the Real, ‘something faced with which all words
cease and all categories fail, the object of anxiety par excellence’ (S2 164).
As the above quotations indicate, the Lacanian Real is characterized by an
‘impossibility’: ‘it is impossible to imagine, impossible to integrate into the
symbolic order, and impossible to attain in any way’ (Fink 1997, 27).
Approachable only asymptotically, the Real is most often defined by way
of paradoxes: it lies beyond the realm of signifiers yet causes an uncontrol-
lable upheaval within that realm; it seems more obdurate and forceful than
anything else yet it is also phantasmal, unanticipated and fortuitous; it is
inward and outward at the same time. Never present to our experience but
makes itself felt in its contingent effects. As Žižek, for whom the birds
represent the irruption of the lawless Real into the social order, insists in
thinking about the Real, we cannot engage with it directly but ‘only as a
cause which in itself does not exist—which is present only in a series of
effects, but always in a distorted, displaced way’ (SOI 163).
The terrifying figure of the birds is … the incarnation of a fundamental dis-

order in family relationships—the father is absent, the paternal function (the
function of pacifying law, the Name-of-the-Father) is suspended and that
vacuum is filled by the irrational maternal superego, arbitrary, wicked,
blocking ‘normal’ sexual relationship (only possible under the sign of the
paternal metaphor). (LA 99)
Three Varieties of the Real

Žižek has been characterized by several commentators as the philosopher
of the Real, and a collection of Žižek’s shorter published articles is titled
Interrogating the Real (2005).3 Indeed, Sarah Kay argues that the central
topic over which Žižek obsesses, the Lacanian register of the Real, compels
him to adopt characteristic (and frequently criticized) non-systematic,

fragmentary procedures. For his interventions may be understood as a
series of ‘failed’ or ‘missed’ encounters with the forever-elusive Real as he
attempts to engage with this interminably insistent-yet-inaccessible theo-
retical ‘object’. The Real, on Kay’s reading, shatters the Žižekian oeuvre
into a multitude of partial, ‘awry’ perspectives on an infinitely receding
vanishing point that can only ever be approached in an indirect, tangential
manner (Kay 2003, 48ff). As Žižek makes clear: ‘At the level of the gaze,
the Real is not so much the invisible Beyond, eluding our gazes which can
perceive only delusive appearances, but, rather, the very stain or spot
which disturbs and blurs our ‘direct’ perception of reality’ (PF 214).
Žižek maps the shift from the Lacanian Real of the 1950s—‘a brute,
pre-symbolic reality which always returns to its place’ (SOI 162)—to the
Lacanian Real of the 1960s which paradoxically ‘is an entity which
although it does not exist … has a series of properties—it exercises a cer-
tain structural causality, it can produce a series of effects in the symbolic
reality of subjects’ (SOI 163). In his conversations with Glyn Daly, Žižek
makes it clear that the Real is not simply the impossible Thing, unattain-
able object, something that we cannot confront, the traumatic other to
which you cannot ever answer properly. Rather, he suggests,
there are at least three notions of the Real. I would say that the very triad of
real, symbolic and imaginary is in a way mapped onto or projected into the
Real itself. So we have to put it in brutal terms: real Real, imaginary Real and
symbolic Real. First real Real would be the horrible Thing, the Medusa’s
head; the alien from the movie; the abyss; a monster. … There is symbolic
Real, which is simply meaningless scientific formulae. For example, quan-
tum physics can be understood as symbolic Real. … The category of the
imaginary Real I think, is, in a way, the crucial one because it points out that
for Lacan, the Real can also appear as something fragile … The Real is not
necessarily or always the ‘hard real’. It can also have this totally fragile
appearance: the Real can be something that transpires or shines through. …
The result of all this is that, for Lacan, the Real is not impossible in the sense
that it can never happen—a traumatic kernel which forever eludes our grasp.
No, the problem with the Real is that it happens and that’s the trauma. The
point is not that the Real is impossible but rather that the impossible is Real.
(CZ 68–70)
The usual reading of the Lacanian Real is that of a contingent external

obstacle which can only be apprehended anamorphically through partial
76 L. SIMMONS
approaches and secondary approximations but never directly: ‘This per-

spective on the Real presents Lacanian theory as a kind of elevation of
failure: all we can do is fail in an authentic way and then we can never get
the Thing itself’ (CZ 165). But Žižek, who at first employed this perspec-
tive on the Real, now wants to argue that the very notion of the Real-as-
something-impossible means that it can be grasped, and that it does
happen: ‘the Lacanian Real is not Real-as-impossible in the sense that it
cannot happen or we can never encounter it … No, it happens, but it’s too
traumatic to assume’ (CZ 165).
The Real Is Not Reality

One important distinction that is vital to understanding the Real, and
which the discussion above raises, is that between the Real and reality.
Žižek insists on the difference between the Lacanian Real and reality, the
latter being a symbolic construct that reflects a cultural consensus as to
what counts as reality: while the Real is material that resists conceptualiza-
tion but can nevertheless be ‘grasped’. It is by cancelling out the Real that
the Symbolic creates reality, the order and organization imposed upon the
phenomenal world. This very difficulty is, of course, the entire point of the
Real, and the difficulties that arise from trying to define the Real point
directly to its nature. Any attempt to think the Real is always already
defeated in its perverse effort to make the Real conform to the standards
of the Symbolic (the conceptual and linguistic apparatus by which we con-
sciously perceive and configure reality). Nonetheless, it exists without
existing, and some attempt to conceive it must be made if we are to under-
stand its role in Lacanian psychoanalysis. For Malcolm Bowie, in this way,
The undecidability of the concept ‘real’ is scrupulously preserved. The real

is an uncrossable threshold for the subject, and not one that can be side-
stepped in the analytic encounter. … It lies beyond the network of signifiers,
yet causes an uncontrollable upheaval within it. It is firm and obdurate, yet
its intrusions upon the subject cannot be anticipated or forestalled. For the
subject the real is more forcible than anything else in the world, yet it is
phantasmal, shallow and fortuitous. … The real is inward and outward at
once, and belongs indifferently to sanity and to madness. In all its modes, it
successfully resists the intercessions of language. (1991, 106; 110)
Furthermore, Lacan suggests that the intrusion of the Real may induce
psychosis and threaten the fabric of the symbolic order by obliterating
meaningful reality. As Žižek explains:
What happens in psychosis is that this empty point in the other, in what we
see and/or hear, is actualized, becomes part of effective reality: in psychosis,
we effectively hear the voice of the primordial Other addressing us, we effec-
tively know that we are being observed all the time. Usually, psychosis is
conceived as a form of lack with reference to the ‘normal’ state of things: in
psychosis something is missing, the key signifier (the paternal metaphor) is
rejected, foreclosed, excluded from the symbolic universe and thence returns
in the real in the guise of psychotic apparitions. (‘I Hear You with My Eyes:
or, The Invisible Master’ 90–91)
The menacing birds take on a life of their own, and seem to look back
at those who see them, spreading like blots on the screen, just as they
arrive amassing as sinister objects on the school jungle gym, and often
inducing psychosis in the screen characters.
Ding or Sache?
Lacan’s discussion of das Ding (the Thing) is one of the central themes
of his Seminar 7, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. Lacan separates das Ding
from die Sache, as present in the term Sachvorstellungen, which Freud uses
to denote what in English which has been rendered ‘thing-presentations’.4
Lacan draws the distinction between die Sache as the representation of a
thing in the Symbolic order, ‘things of the human world’ that are domi-
nated by language and ‘symbolic processes’, while das Ding is the thing in
the Real, that which escapes signification, ‘the beyond-of-the-signified’.
The Sache is clearly the thing, a product of industry and human action as
governed by language. However implicit they may first be in the genesis of
that action, things are always on the surface, always within range of an expla-
nation. … The word is there in a reciprocal position to the extent that it
articulates itself, that it comes to explain itself beside the thing, to the extent
also that an action—which is itself dominated by language, indeed by com-
mand—will have separated out this object and given it birth, Sache and Wort
are, therefore, closely linked; they form a couple. Das Ding is found some-
where else. … This Ding is not in the relationship—which is to some extent
78 L. SIMMONS
a calculated one insofar as it is explicable—that causes man to question his

words as referring to things which they have moreover created. There is
something different in das Ding. (S7 45–46)
Žižek reads this difference and opposition as part of his reinstatement

of Hegel as a Lacanian guide to the Real. ‘Hegel’, he insists, ‘distinguishes
between reality and actuality (Wirklichkeit): reality is contingent external
reality, not fully rational, while actuality is a reality which actualizes a
notion’ (D 67). The implications of this for the development of the
Lacanian Real are that
The Real is thus simultaneously the Thing to which direct access is not pos-
sible and the obstacle that prevents this direct access; the thing that eludes
our grasp and the distorting screen that makes us miss the Thing. More
precisely, the Real is ultimately the very shift of perspective from the first
standpoint to the second. … what prevents us from accessing the Thing
directly is the Thing itself. (PD 77)
The first standpoint Žižek refers to here is that of Kant for whom things
divide into their knowable phenomenal manifestations and unknowable
noumenal cores. The second shift occurs with Hegel, and now the Kantian
gap between phenomena and noumena becomes transposed onto things
themselves which are now self-splitting, so that ‘the thing in itself essen-
tially possesses this external reflection within itself’ (Hegel 1969, 490). It
was Lacan’s Hegelianism, Žižek concludes, that caused him to go beyond
Kant and read the distinction between the Real and reality.
When in his seminar on the Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Lacan dwells on the

subtle difference between Ding and Sache in German, he resists the obvious
solution that Ding is a brutal raw Real outside of or preceding the Symbolic,
while Sache is already a thing symbolized … So we should not oppose Ding
and Sache as real and symbolic … For Lacan, the Real qua das Ding is not
only definitely not the same as reality-in-itself, things out there indepen-
dently of us, with no relation to us … In other words, das Ding as radically
external to the Symbolic is simultaneously radically internal to it, it is a
spectre of absolute Otherness generated by the distance from the Real intro-
duced by the Symbolic. The only things ‘out there’ independent of us are
particular material things (if we can construct how they are independently of
us); das Ding as the absolute point of reference behind and beneath these
things is precisely what the subject adds to things, its fantasmatic projec-
tion/construction. (D 66–67)
Desire is only perceptible through the failure of signifiers to represent

the Thing. That is not to suggest that the Thing finally finds its signifier:
there is no signifier of the Thing, but there is the possibility of an object
coming to represent this very lack of the signifier. Such an object becomes
an incarnation of the Thing. It is, Lacan says, ‘raised to the dignity of the
Thing’ (S7 112). It can be present in its very absence as the point from
which some invisible menace threatens. Lacan’s example of an object that
can represent das Ding is a vase which gives body to the emptiness or void
at its centre: ‘an object made to represent the existence of the emptiness at
the centre of the real that is called the Thing, this emptiness as represented
in the representation presents itself as a nihil, as nothing’ (S7 121).
Are the birds in The Birds Ding or Sache, or perhaps both? Is the differ-
ence simply that between the wild, feral birds that cloud the skies (Ding)
and the birds found in Davidson’s pet shop (Sache), the speaking or
‘swearing’ mynah bird Melanie wishes to gift her respectable aunt, or the
canary Mitch deliberately releases from its cage to fluster Melanie and then
captures again, or the ever-present lovebirds brought by Melanie to
Bodega Bay. The difference, that is, between the birds’ uncontrollable,
frenzied animality and what humans do to birds when they put them
behind bars as pets, or serve them up at the dinner table. Actions, of
course, highlighted by the caged lovebirds and in The Tides restaurant
where the shouted order for three portions of ‘Southern Fried Chicken’
interrupts amateur ornithologist Mrs Bundy’s disquisition on human–bird
relations and the non-aggressive nature of birds. We skip the actual dinner
with Melanie at the Brenner home but might it have been chicken? One
of those chickens that wouldn’t eat the Brinkmeyer feed? And is meaning,
or its lack, fixed momentarily by Hitchcock with the striking images of its
birds settled, on the jungle gym, or amassed along the roadside at the end
of his film? For at these moments, his birds are no longer in flight from
meaning or a signified. And did Hitchcock choose birds because they
exemplify this, the migration of meaning? When asked, first by Melanie
and then by Cathy, what is happening all Mitch can reply, stuttering the
first time, is ‘I, I, I don’t know’ and ‘I wish I could say’. Is, then, Neil
Badmington’s claim that the ‘birds have no single, clear, graspable mean-
ing in the text’ (2011, 144) the very point?
80 L. SIMMONS
Kern unseres Wesen—The Answer of the Real

The idea of the Real as some sort of impossible to get at kernel evokes the
‘Kern unseres Wesen’—the ‘kernel of our being’—that Freud refers to in
his The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) (SE IV 145). Lacan coins the
neologism ‘ex-istence’ to express the idea that the heart of our being (Kern
unseres Wesen) is also radically Other, strange, somehow outside. As Bruce
Fink explains, the term ‘ex-istence’ was first introduced in French in trans-
lations of Heidegger’s Being and Time: ‘Lacan uses it to talk about an
existence that stands apart, which insists as it were from the outside, some-
thing not included on the inside. Rather than being intimate it is “exti-
mate”’ (S20 22 fn24). By breaking the word in two like this, Lacan makes
its claims felt with insistence from the outside and, as Žižek claims of this
decentred subject, points to ‘the ex-timate kernel, what is in the subject
more than subject, at the object in subject which is constitutive for the sub-
ject’ where ‘the subject is an answer of the Real (of the object, of the
traumatic kernel) to the question of the Other’ (SOI 180).
What is this ‘object in subject’? For Žižek, in Lacan’s teaching there are
three kinds of object and we can map this triad of objects onto Hitchcock’s
The Birds (SOI 182–185). First of all, the birds as MacGuffin.5 The
MacGuffin is the first of the three types of object: ‘“nothing at all”, an
empty place, a pure pretext for setting the action in motion’ (SOI 182). It
has no value in itself as Hitchcock himself declared: ‘people are wrong in
trying to figure out the truth of a MacGuffin, since it’s beside the point’
(Truffaut 1985, 138). The only signification of the MacGuffin lies in the
fact that it has some meaning for the characters in the film, and it must
seem of vital importance to them. ‘Needless to add’, Žižek details, ‘that
the MacGuffin is the purest case of what Lacan calls objet petit a: a pure
void which functions as the object-cause of desire’ (SOI 163). Secondly,
the object as ‘leftover’. Not an absent object but a fragment that cannot
be reduced to a network of formal relations and, nonetheless, circulates
among subjects as an object of exchange, serving as a kind of guarantee on
their symbolic relationship. For Žižek
what matters here is precisely its presence, the material presence of a frag-
ment of reality—it is a leftover, remnants which cannot be reduced to a
network of formal relations proper to the symbolic structure, but it is para-
doxically, at the same time, the positive condition for the effectuation of the
formal structure. … The paradox of its role is that although it is a leftover of
the Real, an ‘excrement’, it functions as a positive condition of the restora-

tion of a symbolic structure: the structure of symbolic exchanges between
subjects can take place only in so far as it is embodied in this pure material
element which acts as its guarantee. (SOI 182)
In The Birds, we could point to the role of the caged lovebirds: they are
double but have no double, that is no exact mirror-relation. Yet they func-
tion in restoring the symbolic structure: the structure of exchanges
between subjects: Melanie and Cathy; Melanie and Annie; Melanie and
Mitch. As Žižek claims:
That is the basic situation in a whole series of Hitchcock’s films: at the

beginning we have a non-structured, pre-symbolic imaginary, homeostatic
state of things, an indifferent balance in which the relations between sub-
jects are not yet structured in a strict sense—that is, through the lack circu-
lating between them. And the paradox is that this symbolic pact, this
structural network of relations, can establish itself only in so far as it is
embodied in a totally contingent material element, a little-bit-of-Real which,
by its sudden irruption, disrupts the homeostatic indifference of relations
between subjects. (SOI 183).
Thirdly, and here Žižek cites as his example the birds in The Birds, an
object with ‘a massive, oppressive material presence; it is not an indifferent
void like the MacGuffin, but at the same time it does not circulate between
the subjects’ (SOI 184). What sort of thing (object) is ‘the birds’? The
fractured grammar here is deliberate, and Camille Paglia notes that
Hitchcock wrote the ad-line for his film: ‘The Birds is coming!’—and it
was a line that confused the studio hacks (1988, 88). Žižek notes: ‘it is not
an object of exchange, it is just a mute embodiment of an impossible jouis-
sance’ (EYAW 7).
Žižek then asks how we might redraw Lacan’s diagram from the begin-
ning of Chap. 7 of his seminar Encore (S20 90) to help explain the consis-
tency of these three objects in The Birds (Fig. 3.1). The three angles of the
triangle stand for the three fundamental dimensions which, according to
Lacan, structure the human universe: the Real (the hard traumatic reality
which resists symbolization), the Symbolic (the field of language, of sym-
bolic structure and communication) and the Imaginary (the domain of
images which capture our attention and with which we identify). ‘J’ in the
middle of the triangle stands for jouissance, the excessive enjoyment which
threatens to swallow us up, ‘the whirlpool of enjoyment threatening to
82 L. SIMMONS
Fig. 3.1 Lacan: the

triangulated schema
from Encore (S20 90)
swallow us all’ (LA 135), but towards which we are attracted while we
endeavour to maintain a proper distance. The three objects on the sides of
the triangle specify the different ways we maintain a distance towards,
normalize or control the threatening Thing in the middle. We could repeat
Lacan’s schema by inserting the names of the objects in Hitchcock’s film:
a = the birds as MacGuffin, as the leftover of the Real that sets in motion
the symbolic movement of interpretation: ‘Why are they doing this?’
Φ = the birds as impassive imaginary objectification of the Real; a terrifying
image that materializes enjoyment.
S(Ⱥ) = the circulating fragment of the Real, an object of exchange (in this
case the lovebirds), which is contingent but at the same time embodies
‘the lack in the Other, the impossibility around which the symbolic
order is structured’ (SOI 185). It marks the inherent inconsistency of
the Symbolic order, the fact that there is something (jouissance) which
resists symbolization and causes gaps and ruptures in the Symbolic.
The whirlpool or abyss in the centre, with its balloon circling the letter
J—jouissance, is, of course, the ‘whirpool’ of flocking birds that emerges
from the chimney and threatens to engulf Melanie and the family in the
Brenner home.
For Žižek,
The real functions here not as something that resists symbolization, as a

meaningless leftover that cannot be integrated into the symbolic universe,
but, on the contrary, as its last support. For things to have meaning, this
meaning must be confirmed by some contingent piece of the real that can
be read as a ‘sign’. The very word sign, in opposition to the arbitrary mark,
pertains to the ‘answer of the real’: the ‘sign’ is given by the thing itself, it
indicates that at least at a certain point, the abyss separating the real from the
symbolic network has been crossed. (LA 31–32)
What is meant here by ‘the answer of the real’? While it is true to say
that in this film any of these objects can occupy the empty place of das
Ding, an object does so through virtue of the semblance that it appears it
was already there, that is, it was not placed there by the director but found
as an ‘answer of the real’. It is in this sense that the subject for Lacan is
itself a failed ‘answer of the real’; the subject wants to say something but
fails, and this failure is the subject, the failure to become itself. And this,
according to Žižek, is the difference between the so-called ‘post-
structuralist’ position on the subject and Lacan’s position: The former
describes the subject as being the result of subjectivating processes (assu-
jetissement), while the latter conceives of the subject as an ‘answer of the
Real’—because the signified can never find a signifier that would fully rep-
resent it, this void we call a subject is created (see SOI 174–175).6 As Žižek
concludes, ‘The role of the Lacanian real is, however, radically ambiguous:
true, it erupts in the form of a traumatic return, derailing the balance of
our daily lives, but it serves at the same time as a support of this very bal-
ance. What would our daily life be without some support in an answer of
the real?’ (LA 29).
So in The Birds, the birds are not ‘symbols’ of the intersubjective rela-
tionships and tensions of a domestic family drama at all: ‘they play a direct
part in the story as something inexplicable, as something outside the ratio-
nal chain of events, as a lawless impossible real. The diegetic action of the
film is so influenced by the birds that their massive presence completely
overshadows the domestic drama: the drama—literally loses its signifi-
cance’ (LA 105). While The Birds may seem to be about a signification
that can be detected—the dead end of the modern American family with
its deficient paternal ego-ideal and regression towards a merciless maternal
superego—for the film’s spectator on the contrary, the birds ‘block, mask,
by their massive presence, the film’s “signification” their function being to
make us forget, during their vertiginous and dazzling attacks, with what,
in the end, we are dealing: the triangle of a mother, her son, and the
woman he loves’ (LA 105–106).
84 L. SIMMONS
The Birds as Psychotic Stain

or Vorstellungsreprasentanz?
‘If one were to name one central issue that distinguishes the rise of mod-
ern thought’, suggests Alenka Zupanc ̌ic ̌, ‘it is perhaps no other than pre-
cisely the issue of representation, its profound interrogation, and the
whole consequent turn against the logic of representation’ (2004, 197).
According to Sarah Kay, this is reflected in the fact that Žižek
produces a psychoanalytical account of what we would call ‘representation’

which completely dismantles a conventional understanding of it. Any per-
ception of reality, Zizek argues, relies upon its point of inherent failure.
Unless there is a remainder of the real to spoil the picture, we cannot see it;
if the lack of fit between reality and the real is eliminated, we lose all sense
of reality; this applies equally to works of culture and our everyday percep-
tions. (2003, 72)
Žižek takes up Lacan’s contribution to the question of representation

which he reframes in terms of the logic of signification, whereby a signifier
represents a subject for another signifier, not in terms of a closed circle but
more an elliptical movement around a void:
The field of representation [Vorstellung] is the field of what is positively

depicted, but the problem is that everything cannot be depicted … now we
can also understand why the signifier as such has the status of the
Vorstellungsrepräsentanz in Lacan. It is no longer the simple Saussurean
material representative of the signified, of the mental representation-idea,
but the substitute filling out of the void of some originally missing represen-
tation: it does not bring to mind any representation, it represents its lack.
(SOI 159–160)
In their dictionary, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, Laplanche and

Pontalis discuss the importance of this complex term in Freud:
Vorstellungsrepräsentanz translated in the Standard Edition as ‘ideational
representative’ and elaborated by Freud in two texts, on Repression (1915)
and on ‘The Unconscious’ (1915) (1974, 223). Freud understands and
uses this term in two distinct ways: the conventional term Vorstellung
which literally means ‘presentation’ (or ‘placing before’) of an object or
experience; and Repräsentanz meaning representative or delegate, and
designates the fact that any drive does not pertain to the biological as such
but that it is always articulated through psychic representatives (the repre-

sentation of objects and scenes in fantasy that stage a ‘satisfaction’ of
desire). The first term is predominant in Freud’s early work on the inter-
pretation of dreams in which he outlines the conditions for dream thoughts
to be re-presented as images. Dreams demand that all meanings, even
abstract thoughts, be expressed through images. The second meaning,
representation as relegation, refers to the way in which an unconscious
drive attaches itself to a representation, fixing its energy in the form of a
trace. Freud’s term thus characterizes the drive’s ‘representative’ within
the psychic apparatus. In Seminar 7, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960,
Lacan notes that Freud ‘turns Vorstellung into an associative and combina-
tory element … It is a matter of that which in the unconscious represents,
in the form of a sign, representation as a function of apprehending—of the
way in which every representation is represented’ (S7 61; 71). Thus, at the
level of the unconscious, there already exists an organization according to
the possibilities of the signifier, and Lacan’s contribution to the question
of representation was to reframe it in terms of the logic of signification.
For Žižek, now ‘it is a representative (a place-holder [le tenant-lieu]) of
what the representational field excludes, it stands in for the missing (“pri-
mordially repressed”) representation’ (EYAW 268 fn37).7
It is no longer the simple Saussurean material representative of the signified,

of the mental representation-idea, but the substitute filling out the void of
some originally missing representation: it does not bring to mind any repre-
sentation, it represents its lack. … the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz is no longer
connected to this hole in the other, to the falling out of the object … First
we have the paradox of a signifier which is part of the representation of reality
(filling out a void, a hole in it). Then we have the inverse paradox of an object
which must be included in the signifying texture. (SOI 160–161)
For Lacan, the unique contribution of the Symbolic consists in its

capacity to give absence a name, a capacity that is founded upon the func-
tioning of the binary signifier as an alternation of presence and absence.
Signification is possible only by virtue of the fact that the signifier couples
with an element from which it is different. If the signifier (the birds) holds
the place of what lacks representation (the Real), that is, if the birds func-
tion as Vorstellungsrepräsentanz to represent the unrepresented, they do so
by virtue of the function of absence that constitutes its own binary
86 L. SIMMONS
structure. As Zupanc ̌ic ̌ argues, ‘Here representation as such is a wandering

excess over itself, from its own inherent crack or inconsistency. The Real is
not something outside or beyond representation, but it is the very crack of
representation’ (2004, 199–200). Žižek illustrates this time and time again
by returning to examine one scene of Hitchcock’s The Birds.8 A case of
impossible subjectivity, it is the God’s-eye-view of the burning Bodega
Bay where the birds enter the frame as if seen from behind the viewer’s
back and the point of view shifts from that of the objective view from
above and no specific location of the town to the view of the birds them-
selves (Fig. 3.2). The point, Žižek says, is ‘to take into account how our
“objective” view of reality is already subjectivised, how it functions as the
view from the standpoint of the impossible/monstrous Thing—the task is
not to erase my subjective point-of-view but to relocate it in the Thing
itself’ (SFA 266). The scene works on the implicit assumption that before
they enter the frame, the birds are ‘not there’, not part of the diegetic real-
ity. It ‘mobilises the feeling of threat which sets in when the distance
Fig. 3.2 The God’s-eye-view over Bodega Bay

separating the viewer—his/her safe position of pure gaze—from the

diegetic reality is lost: the stains blur the frontier outside/inside which
provides our sense of security’ (EYAW 236–237).9
General Semantics at Berkeley

In the kitchen, Mitch, who is helping his mother clean up, is told what she
has gleaned from the gossip columns about Melanie: ‘She is the one who
jumped into a fountain in Rome last summer, isn’t she? I suppose I’m old-
fashioned. I know it was supposed to be very warm there, but—well, actu-
ally, the newspaper said she was naked’. Melanie later claims that she was
fully clothed and that she was pushed into the fountain, and despite
Lydia’s reservations, Melanie’s character is presented as having risen above
her previous, wild playgirl self. She tells Mitch how she now works for
Travelers’ Aid at the airport, studies General Semantics at Berkeley and
raises funds to send ‘a little Korean boy’ through school.
The reference to the study of General Semantics at Berkeley provides
the opportunity to discuss Žižek’s critique of Judith Butler. Butler’s Bodies
that Matter contains a chapter entitled ‘Arguing with the Real’ in which
she accuses Žižek of confusion in that he is unclear as to whether the Real
is to be understood as a pre-discursive material realm, a hard kernel located
outside symbolization, or whether it is to be understood as a product of
the Symbolic order, that is a lack. Butler writes, ‘the real that is a “rock”
or “kernel” or sometimes substance is also and sometimes within the same
sentence, ‘a loss’ or negativity’ (1993, 198). For if the Real is outside
symbolization, as Žižek following Lacan believes, then we are left with the
following dilemma: ‘the rhetorical difficulty of circumscribing within sym-
bolic discourse the limits of what is and is not symbolizable’ (1993, 190).
In a later joint volume with Žižek and Ernesto Laclau in which each
debates the other’s position, Butler argues for the parodic resignification
of the Symbolic that would bring out its constructedness. Žižek, who, in
turn, counters this in favour of an understanding of the Real as unthink-
able act that would completely break with the Symbolic, accuses Butler of
ahistoricism, her position undoes the emphasis she places on performative
self-transformation. Butler, he maintains, ‘limits the subject’s interven-
tions to multiple resignifications/displacements of the basic ‘passionate
attachment’, which therefore persists at the very limit/condition of sub-
jectivity’ (CHU 221). She does not, he believes, make a necessary distinc-
tion between the contingency of a historical horizon and the more
88 L. SIMMONS
fundamental foreclosure that grounds this horizon. Butler, in her turn,

criticizes Žižek of almost the same thing: an ahistoricism since he suggests
that the Real is understood to simply lie outside the Symbolic. In this to-
and-fro exchange, Žižek responds that Butler’s criticism radically misun-
derstands the Real. Not only is the Real not ahistorical, it is what produces
history, history arises as the incessant attempt to come to terms with a
certain traumatic Real. The Real is not a remainder left over from histori-
cization; it is the point at which to mark this historicization. For Žižek, the
ahistorical is at the heart of all historicity. Because of this misunderstand-
ing, Žižek believes that Butler gets caught up in the results of a reductive
reading of Lacan, imposing the ideal versus material distinction on Lacan.
The Real is understood by Butler as prior to the Symbolic when in fact is
produced by a failure in the Symbolic. In contrast to Butler, Žižek insists,
Lacan ‘grounds historicity in a different way … in the resistant kernel
within the symbolic process itself … the Real is neither pre-social nor a
social effect—the point is rather that the Social is itself constituted by the
exclusion of some traumatic Real’ (CHU 311).
In one of the film’s most memorable scenes, waiting for school to come
out, Melanie wanders through the playground and sits down on a bench
with the jungle gym behind her. She takes out and proceeds to smoke a
cigarette in ‘a combination of boredom, impatience and anxiety’ (Paglia
1988, 65). Periodically, she turns to look over her left shoulder at the
sounds of the children coming from the schoolhouse. Her cigarette ‘burns
down like the lighted fuse of a bomb’ (Edelman 1999, 251). Over her
right shoulder, and seen only by the audience, crow after crow arrives to
alight on the frame, incrementally filling its empty structure (Fig. 3.3).
The archetypal ‘excess of a third space which gets lost in the division into
outside and inside’ (LET 259) is to be found in the iron frame of the
jungle gym, like a house frame, that takes on the cladding of live birds.
Camille Paglia writes that the jungle gym, ‘represents social structure and,
in The Birds, fate or Necessity. The jungle gym is where children clamber
like monkeys as they practise for adulthood’ (1988, 66). Hitchcock creates
suspense by showing the silent accumulation of the birds on the jungle
gym behind Melanie Daniels, but he also cuts to the interior of Annie
Hayward’s classroom where the arrangement of the children into perfect
rows, singing together in unison, creates a visual parallel with the play-
ground equipment. The children’s song ‘perversely veers from sense to
nonsense’ focussing on a version of ‘failed heterosexual domesticity’
(Edelman 1999, 251).
Fig. 3.3 The school jungle gym full of crows
I asked my wife to wash the floor.

Ristle-tee, rostle-tee, mo, mo, mo!
She gave me my hat and showed me the door!
Ristle-tee, rostle-tee, hey
bombosity, knickety-knackety,
Retro-quo-quality, Willoby-wallaby,
mmmmmmmo, mmmmmmmoo, Mo!
It reflects the imposition of social order on a world that may simply be

pure chaos, the attempt to come to terms with the resistant kernel that is
the Real. Richard Allen suggests that Hitchcock reinforces this parallel by
matching the rhythmic sound of the birds’ wings with the children’s
stamping feet and the birds’ screeches with the children’s screams (1997,
293–294).10 Thus in this sequence, we shift from psychic to social space
and back again, but, as Žižek insists, it is a social space that is already
marked by the trauma of the Real and constituted by its exclusion. It is not
that the birds have caused this trauma, rather that they are its charged
90 L. SIMMONS
textual representatives. ‘The loaded jungle gym’, Paglia contends, ‘seems

like a single monstrous being, a mammoth skeleton rippling with mould-
ering flesh from the grave’ (1988, 66).
The Hitchcockian House: Haven or Trap?

In Living in the End Times while confessing to the limitations of his knowl-
edge of architecture, Žižek describes his dreamhouse, ‘composed only of
secondary spaces and places of passage—stairs corridors, toilets, store-
rooms, kitchen’. He justifies his entry into the world of architecture
through his philosophical exploration of the notion of parallax. With
architecture, he continues, this does not merely mean shifting from one
viewpoint of a building to another, but rather involves how the parallax
gap is inscribed in a building, ‘as if the building, in its very material exis-
tence, bears the imprint of different and mutually exclusive perspectives’
(LET 244–245). The gap between these two perspectives in a building
opens up the place for ‘a third virtual building’. This is the creative
moment of architecture, not the actual building but the ‘virtual space of
new possibilities that are opened up’ by the building. This parallax view
also contains the further implication that architecture cannot be under-
stood without reference to the temporal dimension, ‘the inscription of our
changing temporal experience when we approach and enter a building’
(LET 245). Žižek then proceeds to map the processes and results of archi-
tecture on to the Lacanian triad of the Real, the Symbolic and the
Imaginary: first, the reality of physical building laws; the symbolic level of
the ideological meanings a building embodies; the imaginary experience
of those who live in the building (LET 246). He moves on to explore ‘the
expressive correspondence between the inside and the outside of a building’
which explains why ‘when we enter the closed space of a house, we are
often surprised: the inside volume seems larger than the outside frame, as
if the house were larger from the inside than from the outside’ and that
ultimately ‘inside and outside never cover the entire space: there is always
the excess of a third space which gets lost in the division into outside and
inside’ (LET 258–259).
‘With profound feeling for architecture’, writes Camille Paglia,
‘Hitchcock sees the house in historical terms as both safe haven and female
trap’ (1988, 7). In the light of Žižek’s reflections, let us explore the two
houses of the film: Annie Hayworth’s small family house with its front
porch, ‘recreating the cozy atmosphere of the local community’ (LET
257), and the Brenner mansion where ‘traditional architecture is the

attempt to enclose the inside from the outside’ (LET 267). Robert Boyle,
the production designer on the film, reveals that Annie Hayworth’s house,
with its picket fence and colonial-style protruding gable and pediment
above the entrance, was specially built for the film: ‘a façade was erected to
serve as Annie Hayworth’s home, and was dismantled once filming was
complete’ (quoted in Counts 1989, 17). Thus, its main visible feature was
the porch on which, near the film’s end, Annie had stepped out for a ciga-
rette only to be cut down by attacking birds, and now her ‘lifeless body
appears like a dropped doll or fallen mannequin, her legs twisted up on the
steps’ (Paglia 1988, 74). Earlier, as Melanie is about to enter Annie’s
house for the first time, we hear the distant cries of birds. ‘Don’t they ever
stop migrating?’ Annie asks in a tone of disgust as if to underline her own
role as homebody (‘This tilling of the soil can become compulsive!’ are her
world-weary first lines to Melanie from her garden). The interior of her
house has been curated equally compulsively as a ‘safe haven’. Hitchcock’s
production memorandum to Boyle and set decorator George Milo speci-
fies the following: a large number of books including paperbacks, prints on
the walls including Braque and Grant Wood (a large Modigliani is also
recognizable), some pre-Columbian pieces on the mantel, chintzy fur-
nishings, a record player with piles of records (see Jacobs 2007, 154).
Annie is, suggests Paglia, ‘a romantic at heart, as evidenced by the promi-
nent album of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, with its theme of self-
immolation through doomed love’ (1988, 46). Later on, when Melanie
returns from dinner at the Brenners, inside the closed space of Annie’s
house Melanie and Annie, though rivals for Mitch, discover a genuine rap-
port. Although, on first encounter, Annie’s initial attitude towards Melanie
was a wary suspicion, now, however, we register the subtle changes of
expression, the shared banter that masks the underlying currents of their
conversation. Paglia describes it as two women ‘swapping tales of misad-
venture on the field of love’ (1988, 46).
MELANIE: Annie—there’s nothing between Mitch and me.

ANNIE: Isn’t there? (she shrugs) Maybe there isn’t. Maybe there’s
never anything between Mitch and any girl.
On Lydia’s seeming distance and indifference:
MELANIE: Then why did she object to you?

92 L. SIMMONS
ANNIE: Because she was afraid.

MELANIE: Afraid you’d take Mitch?
ANNIE: Afraid I’d give Mitch.
MELANIE: I don’t understand.
ANNIE: Afraid of any woman who’d give Mitch the only thing
Lydia can give him—love.
But then when Mitch rings Melanie to check she has made her way
back to Annie’s safely the tone and what was Melanie’s apparent ‘non-
interest’ changes, and we share the sense of Annie’s entrapment in her
own home. She sits hunched over on her chair, her legs drawn up under
her. Margaret Horwitz interprets the physical resemblance between Lydia
and Melanie, which Hitchcock emphasizes by often framing them in pro-
file in the same shot, and giving them similar hair styles, in terms of rivalry
(1982, 45). But it is possible, as Paul Gordon proposes, to think of them
as a single projection of Mitch (the son). If Mitch chooses Melanie
‘because she is closer to the more idealized (and repressed) image of his
mother, this means that Lydia must recognize in Melanie a figure who
both resembles her as well as being meant to replace her’ (2008, 154).
The Brenner House: According to Robert Boyle, the Brenner house
that Melanie sights from her runabout on Bodega Bay
was nothing but a shack when I first saw it … We had to literally make a new
house out of it by building over it. Additionally, the out buildings and barn
in the back were considered too far from the house for filming purposes, so
an extra barn was put up to group the reconstructed structures closer
together. A small pier was added to the front of the property, a gazebo built
for the party sequence and the overgrown grounds and trees generously
trimmed. (cited in Counts 1989, 17)
Thus remodelled, the house consisted of a living room, dining room

and kitchen on the ground floor with a staircase connecting to the upper
floor containing three bedrooms including the guest bedroom where
Melanie is staying, and Cathy’s attic bedroom where the climactic bird
attack at the end of the film takes place. During Melanie’s first intrusion
into the Brenners’ domestic sphere, she moves on tip-toes through the
house with the lovebirds in their cage, and her movements presage the
silent build-up and more explosive intrusion by the birds to follow.
According to Camille Paglia, Melanie ‘glamorously cuts through the
modest, stuffy, early American interior like the lord of the manor at a serf’s
cottage’ (1988, 34).
Steven Jacobs in The Wrong House reproduces the Hitchcock’s memo-
randum that was sent to the production designer and set decorator to
enable the construction of the Brenner house interior on a Hollywood
sound stage. It specifies in detail the paintings, inventory of interior fur-
nishings and objects from piano to hi-fi and writing desk all associated
with ‘reasonably educated and literary people’ to produce an ‘atmosphere
of taste and character’ (2007, 146). The portrait of the deceased hus-
band/father that hangs over the piano was to be placed, Hitchcock
instructed, in ‘the place of honor’. It hangs crooked after the first bird
attack and a dead bird falls from behind when it is straightened.11 The
vulnerability of the house is emphasized by its isolation, its lack of cover
and exposure to the sky, and we discover that its wooden walls and doors
are not thick enough to keep out the hostile pecking birds. At the end all
boarded up with jagged, weathered planks, it is like a cage or dark box, a
version of the lovebirds’ cage with the towel thrown over it. The threat
comes not merely from the outside with the birds exploding down the
chimney and through the fireplace, the family hearth that is the house’s
centre. It is as if the house were also threatened in some way from inside.
The chimney represents what Žižek calls
the excess of a third space which gets lost in the division into outside and
inside. In human dwellings, there is an intermediate space which is dis-
avowed: we all know it exists, but we do not readily accept its existence—it
remains ignored and (mostly) unsayable … We rely on this space but ignore
it—no wonder then that, in science-fiction, horror films and techno-thrillers,
this dark space between the walls is where horrible threats lurk.
(LET 259–260)
Jacobs notes how ‘by means of carefully selected camera positions, the
ceilings seem to weigh down on the besieged inhabitants, who press them-
selves anxiously against the walls and furniture’ (2007, 144). ‘The dead
end The Birds is really about is, of course, that of the modern American
family: the deficient paternal ego-ideal makes the law “regress” toward a
ferocious maternal superego, affecting sexual enjoyment’ (LA 99). From
Melanie’s first sight of the house from Bodega Bay when she visits
Brinkmeyer’s hardware store, and the clerk points it out across the bay
between ‘them two big trees’, to the moment she approaches in the
94 L. SIMMONS
runabout to deliver the lovebirds, the Brenner house is distinguished by a

subjective view. That is, Hitchcock alternates the objective shot of Melanie
looking towards the house with the subjective view of the house as if it
were ‘looking back’. Žižek describes the procedure as follows:
when Melanie, after crossing the bay in a small rented boat, approaches the
house where Mitch’s mother and sister live … [Hitchcock] alternates an
objective shot of the uneasy Melanie aware of intruding on the privacy of a
home, with her subjective view of the mysteriously silent house …
Hitchcockian montage elevates an everyday, trivial object into a sublime
Thing. By purely formal manipulation, it succeeds in bestowing on an ordi-
nary object the aura of anxiety and uneasiness. (LA 117)
The Couple on the Hill

Melanie and Mitch carrying martini glasses are climbing a high windy hill
that overlooks the salt flats of Bodega Bay at low tide. We see the children
and their birthday party (safely) enclosed within a white fence on the
Brenner lawn below, and the town and mountains in the distance.12 The
couple engage in a rapid exchange and interaction, and three times Mitch
focuses on Melanie’s neck and hair. Melanie’s past is raised: he has heard
that she has bathed naked in a public fountain, was abandoned by her
mother at the age of 11 and gone to live with her father. Melanie explains
her current life working for Travelers’ Aid at the airport, taking a course in
General Semantics at the University of Berkeley and fund raising to send a
Korean Boy through school. In response to Mitch’s probing, she reveals
how her mother ‘ditched us when I was eleven and ran off with some hotel
man in the East’.13 As the couple descend the slope of the hill, the children
are shown playing blindman’s buff around a table of white cake. Annie
and Lydia out of earshot stare at the descending couple. Just as they reach
the bottom of the hill, the gulls leash their first attack on the schoolchil-
dren starting with the blindfolded Cathy.
Žižek cites this episode as an example of a key recurring Hitchcockian
motif: ‘that of a couple arguing on a small hill, half-barren, with a few trees
and bushes, usually windy, just outside the scope of the public place popu-
lated by a group of ignorant observers’ (OwB 164). For French cineaste
Alain Bergala, this scene is a case of Hitchcock restaging the moment of
Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, just prior to being chased from it,
and in the process of tasting the forbidden fruit (2001, 111–125). Žižek
gives three main instances of this motif in Hitchcock: in Suspicion, Grant

and Fontaine struggle on a windy hill near a church, and are observed
from the entrance to the church by Fontaine’s friend; in The Birds, it is the
scene with Melanie and Mitch watched by Annie and Lydia prior to the
first bird attack on the group of schoolchildren; in Torn Curtain, he refers
to the scene in which Newman and Andrews withdraw to a small hillside
out of the earshot of the East German secret police who are observing
them, and Newman explains the truth about his mission.
What links all these cases is that the couple on the hill is observed by an
onlooker who may be ignorant, innocent or threatening—in the case of
The Birds Mitch’s ex-lover Annie and his mother—who sees the meeting
but is unable to fully comprehend the meaning of the intense exchange
that is going on. The excess of the Real of this scene pertains to the gaze,
and it is from the standpoint of this exterior gaze that the scene is per-
ceived as traumatic. When the camera moves closer to the couple, it is as if
the situation is normalized. Bergala also emphasizes how this particular
set-up reproduces the basic coordinates of the primal scene: the child wit-
nessing the parents’ lovemaking and unable to decide whether what s/he
sees is violence or affection. In The Birds, the scene on the hill occurs at a
particularly crucial moment that precedes the first collective attack of the
birds on the schoolchildren at the garden party. Are we to understand that
after the reconciliation of the couple on the hill, and the confession of a
child once abandoned, evil is turned towards the innocent children? At the
very moment Melanie and Mitch descend, observed from below by the
two women who have for a long time loved Mitch (Annie and his mother),
the birds launch their first offensive. At the very moment when Melanie is
given an opportunity to justify her wayward past, to convince us (and
Mitch) of her honest intentions and her reformed behaviour, it is as if her
culpability is confirmed (she is rich, idle and intends to seduce an hon-
est man).
Acousmère—The Bone Gets Stuck in the Throat

Lydia arrives at Dan Fawcett’s house, and as she moves hesitantly through
its rooms, she stops by a row of shattered teacups still hanging on their
hooks,14 and she walks down a long unlit hallway into a room that is full
of the signs of a frenzied devastation: pictures askew, window blinds shred-
ded, books tossed to the floor, lamps tipped over and the signs of invasion:
a dead gull caught in the window pane, a dead crow on the bed. On the
96 L. SIMMONS
floor, protruding past an open door Lydia sees a man’s bloody feet pro-
truding from ripped pyjama legs. As she moves in, cuts that come closer
and closer, reveal the farmer, Dan Fawcett, propped against the wall in the
corner. We focus on his face and the blood that has dripped down from his
pecked-out eye-sockets. Lydia now breaks the eerie silence of the scene.
She hurtles towards us on the front path to the house. ‘Eyes half-deranged
and mouth gaping, she is utterly mute, the syllables strangled in her gur-
gling throat’, suggests Camille Paglia (1988, 63), and pushing past the
nonplussed farmer’s assistant she jumps into her truck and roars off. The
screech of the truck engine at once seems like that of a bird, and it also
conveys Lydia’s mental anguish.15
Lydia is an example of what Michel Chion calls acousmère, ‘the acous-
matic mother’ (see EYAW 196–197). Speaking of Norman Bates’ mother
in Psycho, and of Norman’s ventriloquizing of her voice, Chion notes it is
‘[a] sound one hears without seeing what causes it’ (EYAW 205 fn1). It
involves a sense of disembodiment since embodiment is realized through
the simultaneous assembly of a visible body and an audible voice. According
to Chion, the acousmatic voice is simply a voice whose source we cannot
see, one that ‘arouses, simply through its acousmatic position, a desire to
go and see who is speaking’ (EYAW 197),16 but here with Lydia’s silent
scream, we see a body (open mouth) whose voice we cannot hear. The
former is a voice in search of a body, the latter is a body in search of a
voice. In both cases, the search is incomplete or frustrated; even when it
finds its body, the voice doesn’t stick or match perfectly. As Mladen Dolar
writes, ‘the voice without a body is inherently uncanny, and that the body
to which it is assigned does not dissipate its haunting effect’ (2006, 61). If
disacousmatization involves the problem of identifying the hidden source
of a voice that is heard, here we would seem to have the opposite situation:
a source of the voice to which no voice can be attributed, but which
because of that inability represents the voice all the more. A sort of anti-
voice, or voiceless-voice, an extreme attempt to reach those who no longer
hear. As Žižek insists, there is no such thing as complete
disacousmatization:
An unbridgeable gap separates forever a human body from ‘its’ voice. The
voice displays a spectral autonomy, it never quite belongs to the body we
see, so that even when we see a living person talking, there is always a mini-
mum of ventriloquism at work: it is as if the speaker’s own voice hollows him
out and in a sense speaks ‘by itself’, through him. (OB 58)
To use a French pun we could say that Lydia’s scream is a plus-de-voix:

both the surplus or more than the voice and no longer the voice.17
Clinically, Lydia’s silent scream is a case of aphonia, a hysterical symptom
marked by a sudden inability to use one’s voice, and, as such, an enforced
silence which makes the object voice appear all the more important and
manifests it in its pure form. This aphonic voice is the Lacanian objet petit
a—that does not coincide with any existing thing, although it is always
evoked by bits of materiality (the horrible Real of Dan Fawcett’s body),
attached to them as an invisible, inaudible appendage.
The visual paradigm for Lydia’s silent scream would appear to be
Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1893), a painting discussed by both Lacan
and Žižek.18 The Scream reproduces the obvious fact that while paintings
may be resonant of or recall sound, they cannot be heard and do not
speak. Mladen Dolar writes:
Many interpreters (including Munch himself) have seen the distorted land-
scape in the background as the effect of the scream spreading through
nature, but we could also read it in the opposite direction: as the landscape
which eddies into the black hole of the mouth, as if the scream would suck
the background into the orifice, contract it instead of expanding through it.
The painted scream is by definition mute, stuck in the throat; the black
opening is without the voice which would mollify it, fill it, endow it with
sense, hence its resonance is all the greater. (2006, 69)
Žižek notes that the painting has the anamorphic shape or ‘stain’ of the
ear and that the right half is more anamorphically distorted than the left,
that is, ‘the painting is sucked towards a centre of gravity on the right and
the spiral lines of this distorted reality suggest a new shape that reminds us
of a giant ear, a kind of paranoiac activity that hears all’ (EYS 136).
Lacan refers to Munch’s scream in his Seminar 12, Crucial Problems for
Psychoanalysis (1964–1965), where he asks
What is this scream? Who will hear it, this scream that we do not hear? …
And nevertheless, what is tangible, is that this silence is not the ground of
the scream … here the scream literally seems to provoke the silence and in
abolishing itself in it, it is tangible that it causes it. It gives rise to it, it allows
it to hold its note, it is the scream which sustains it and not the silence the
scream, the scream in a way makes the silence curl up in the very impasse
from which it springs, in order that the silence may escape from it. But it has
already happened when we see Munch’s image. The scream is traversed by
98 L. SIMMONS
the space of the silence without dwelling in it; they are not linked either by
being together or by succeeding one another, the scream creates the abyss
into which silence rushes. (S12 185)
That is to say, the crucial feature of the painting is the fact that the
scream is not heard. Žižek argues, ‘one could say that the scream “got
stuck in the throat”: the voice qua object is precisely what is “stuck in the
throat”, what cannot burst out, unchain itself and thus enter the dimen-
sion of subjectivity’ (EYS 117). By being stuck, the black opening of the
mouth, ‘the abyss into which silence rushes’, is without voice and there-
fore sense, but this gives it greater resonance and for that reason allows it
to represent the voice all the more, ‘allows it to hold its note’. Lydia’s
silent scream reminds us of the pun Lacan makes between cri pur, a pure
scream, that becomes a cri pour, a scream for someone. It would appear
that her scream epitomizes the signifying gesture precisely by not signify-
ing anything in particular. The scream is notoriously the first sign of life,
and its blocked representation here thus represents a moment of regres-
sion to the infans, which Lacan tells us means ‘before speech’, encompass-
ing a pure process of enunciation before the infant is capable of any
statement. Lydia thus regresses in this scene back to the Imaginary as the
smooth functioning of the Symbolic collapses for her, and her retreat into
her bedroom to be ‘nursed’ by Melanie is a sign of that. Nevertheless, it is
also true to say that she remains the ‘acousmère’ of the film, creating the
simple desire to see who is speaking (and in control), and the first acous-
matic voice proper which we hear as infants and cannot locate the origin
of is, of course, the mother’s voice (see Dolar 2006, 66).
What is the relationship of Lydia’s silent scream to the overall sound
aesthetic of The Birds? Elizabeth Weis characterizes Hitchcock’s sound
aesthetic in this period as an attempt to move beyond the subjectivity of
the earlier films, using the soundtrack to break apart the system of specta-
torial positioning constructed through point-of-view shots so that the
sound can seize the spectator more viscerally (1982). The unusual musical
score for the film is a reflection of the fact that Hitchcock displays the
strongest interest in controlling sound in all of his work and also, at this
point in his career, demonstrates the greatest technical capacity to do so
with the constant interplay between natural sounds and electronically-
generated bird noises. Hitchcock indicated to Truffaut that working with
electronic sound allowed him to manipulate the style and nature of each
sound, and the flapping of bird wings could be orchestrated in waves of
crescendo and decrescendo: ‘The bird sounds are worked out like a real
musical score’ (Truffaut 1985, 225). The processed sounds of the birds
thus take the place of an absent musical score. For the final scene,
Hitchcock declared that he wanted an ‘electronic silence, a sort of monot-
onous low hum’ to suggest the distant sea but also ‘the language of the
birds’.19 As he reported to Truffaut:
For the final scene, in which Rod Taylor opens the door of the house for the
first time and finds the birds assembled there, as far as the eye can see, I
asked for a silence, but not just any kind of silence. I wanted an electronic
silence, a sort of monotonous low hum that might suggest the sound of the
sea in the distance. It was a strange, artificial sound, which in the language
of the birds might be saying, ‘We’re not ready to attack you yet, but we’re
getting ready. We’re like an engine that’s purring and we may start off at any
moment.’ All of this was suggested by a sound that’s so low that you can’t
be sure whether you’re actually hearing it or only imagining it. (1985, 225)
We can now link Lydia’s silent scream to the wider acousmatic sound
aesthetic of The Birds and its source in traumatic silence. Angelo Restivo
believes
We can thus argue that with The Birds, Hitchcock is finally able to spread the
acousmatic voice … out across the soundscape, by displacing the acousmatic
onto the birds. In fact, the opening scene of the film announces this dis-
placement: Melanie hears a disembodied whistle while walking in Union
Square, turns to see that a young boy is teasing her, but is quickly directed
by the soundtrack to attend not to him, but to the cloud of birds in the
distance. (2004, 175)
And when Lydia emerges screaming silently from the Fawcett farm-
house, her scream is similarly displaced, as Hitchcock acknowledged, to
the squealing of her truck on the road. It is both from the acousmère and
acousmatic.20 The pulsating electronic soundtrack that lies beyond the
diegesis, and may well be hallucinatory, has its organic origins in some-
thing that remains unutterable, stuck in the throat of the humans in
the film.21
100 L. SIMMONS
Shots 33 and 57: La Doublure, The Spectre That

Haunts Reality
In a famous and masterful shot-by-shot analysis of the sequence where
Melanie delivers the lovebirds to the Brenner house, Raymond Bellour
demonstrates that, up until Melanie’s arrival in the house, the sequence
works on a principle of alternation between ‘Melanie seeing’ and ‘what
Melanie sees’. This continuity is disturbed in the shots inside the house
where, according to Bellour, ‘Melanie ceases to be the seer and becomes
the seen, explicitly so, although not by a character but by the camera
and the cameraman’ (2000, 51). As we have already argued, pushing
the disjuncture further, it is the subjective point of view of the house
looking back (not simply the ‘camera’) that unnerves. Melanie caught
by the camera, or more properly viewed by the house like this, will
soon become an element of discord inside the interior of the house,
just as the assaulting birds will disturb the relations within the security
of its domestic realm. This, of course, exemplifies Lacan’s theory of the
gaze, which he develops from objects (a sardine can floating in the
ocean, Holbein’s painting of The Ambassadors) that might include the
Brenner house, objects that, he argues, are not merely the passive
recipients of looking. Rather, in a reversal of the commonsense view of
vision, it is objects that look at us:
On the side of things, there is the gaze, that is to say, things look at me, and
yet I see them. This is how one should understand those words, so strongly
stressed, in the Gospel, They have eyes that they might not see. That they
might not see what? Precisely, that things are looking at them. (S11 109)
The sequence is worth following through again in detail. Melanie,

dressed in ‘lovebird green’, is seen in profile as her runabout cuts across
the water, then in full face with the distant town behind her. She arrives
within sight of the Brenner homestead, cuts the motor and waits while
Mitch, after saying goodbye to his mother and sister who drive towards
town in their pick-up truck, walks towards and then enters the barn.
Melanie paddles ashore, ties the boat to a stanchion on the dock and
carries the cage of lovebirds towards the house. She tears up her previ-
ously written note to Mitch and leaves another one this time to Cathy.
This is playfully nipped at by one of the birds. She runs back down the
dock and in the boat again pushes off with her paddle. Taking the boat
out a distance, she then lies down flat to observe what happens. Mitch
who has by now found the lovebirds runs back and forth on the shore.
When he catches sight of Melanie’s boat, she sits up and with some dif-
ficulty starts the outboard motor. Mitch rushes back into the house and
emerges with a pair of binoculars. He now recognizes her with pleasure,
and she smiles in triumph and self-satisfaction (at the task she has just
completed, or the recognition she has evoked?). Leaping into his car,
Mitch now speeds along the road that follows the arc of the bay, and he
beats her to the wharf where he stands with his hand on his hip. Just as
Melanie cocks her head bird-like to one side in a gesture of provocation,
a gull dives down and slams into her head. Melanie gasps, her right
hand flies up to her forehead and her left is raised awkwardly. She then
inspects her palm, and we see a close-up of her bloodied suede gloves.
Mitch now leaps off the wharf into the boat to pull it into the side of
the wharf, and he then helps her out and up the ladder. With blood
trickling down the side of Melanie’s head, they move towards the marina
office which, however, they find locked.
Bellour notes that Melanie’s trip on Bodega Bay to deliver the lovebirds
to the Brenners’ farm is broken neatly in two: the progression towards and
into the house by Melanie and the return journey by both Melanie and
Mitch. This doubleness is enhanced by a strict binary alternation that
expands throughout the sequence developed through the division between
Melanie seeing and what Melanie sees.22 In that elaboration Shot 33, the
insert of Melanie’s hands and the two envelopes beside the cage of the
lovebirds is not part of her vision and is a detail of her action (Fig. 3.4).
This close-up breaks the alternation of the gaze, rather it duplicates and
details the previous shot so that the alternation formula of seeing/seen-
close/distant is transformed into non-seeing/seeing-close distant, non-
seeing includes seen but without the mediation of the character. Shot 33
introduces a displacement. That is, midway through the sequence, the
organization of vision around one character (Melanie) is replaced by a
dual vision (that also of Mitch who discovers her presence). The centre of
vision is then displaced. The important change in framing is then marked
again in Shot 57 by the double circles of Mitch’s binoculars which are
trained on and capture Melanie (Fig. 3.5).
On the return journey of Melanie in the boat and Mitch in the car, it is
the double smile which unites them in ‘the ironic and ravishing complicity
of an exchange’ (Bellour 2000, 53). Now the alternation is between a close-
up of Melanie on the boat and a longshot of complex of buildings on the
Fig. 3.4 Shot 33, Melanie leaves the letter
Fig. 3.5 Shot 57, Mitch looks through the binoculars

shore. Then, in this boat–car duet, there is the contradiction of Mitch at a

distance in his car and Melanie facing the camera. The kinds of framing used
for Melanie on the outward journey are the ones used for Mitch on his
return journey. The dominance of the gaze, that is normally marked by the
equivalence seeing/seeing close/distant shot, is here inverted as Mitch is
framed in a full shot and Melanie in a close shot. The final close-up of the
bloodied glove is given as a parallel to the earlier close-up of the hands and
letters and, suggests Bellour, ‘The end and beginning of the sequence fold
back on one another as the centers slide beneath one another’ (57). Thus,
he concludes, we can say that ‘Mitch and Melanie, through the structure of
the set and of the detail, are obliged to act in one another’s places’ (60) and
they take the initiative in turn. What Bellour describes as ‘a double opposi-
tion’ marks the two shots: they both displace the alternation of the look.
‘Melanie replaces Mitch as the object of her own look at the same instant
she becomes an object for Mitch’s look. The relinquishment of dominance
is expressed at the level of vision itself’ (61).
As we have seen, for Bellour, it is shot 33 of Melanie’s hands and the
letters that breaks the alternation of the look, and this, in turn, is linked to
shot 57 in which Mitch discovers Melanie with the assistance of his bin-
oculars that in their glass reflect back to us a smaller version of the scene
he sees. A series of substitutional implications that reduces the seeing to
the seen. Shot 33 shows Melanie where it ought to show Mitch, but it
shows metaphorically what Mitch would see if he was in the house when
Melanie was there. ‘It is impossible for Mitch and Melanie to see each
other as seen without opening up a dual and murderous relationship’
(63). The advantage is with Melanie, but this is compensated for by Mitch
when Hitchcock provides him with an instrument of vision, the binoculars
which are also a form of camera. Hitchcock is to be found at the point of
a double gaze, a point of ‘contradiction between symmetrical constraint
and asymmetrical openness’. Bellour continues, ‘There is no doubt that
Hitchcock identifies with Mitch, who interrogates Melanie’s look and
allows himself to be bewitched by it; but there is even less doubt that
Hitchcock identifies with Melanie, whose eyes bear the phantasm whose
effects Hitchcock narrates and analyzes in that purely narcissistic art that
mise-en-scène is for him’ (67). At the very moment that the Symbolic
order ‘doubles itself’ like this, and thus names its own difference from
itself, there is also something that doubles it, but cannot be named.
What we are encountering here in this sequence that ‘doubles’ the liv-
ing body, and ‘doubles back’, is the Lacanian concept of la doublure which
104 L. SIMMONS
Žižek describes as ‘the redoubling, twist or curvature in the order of being

which opens up the space for event’ (CZ 137).23 Lacan’s doublure is sug-
gestive of the doubling of enveloped-enveloping spheres, and the word
also translates as the ‘lining’ of, say, a coat.24 (The lining, for instance, of
Melanie’s incongruous fur coat on board a runabout.) We have already
noted the tendency of Žižek’s own thought to reverse and double itself, to
identify its own differences and to turn them into the same. Doubling,
Rex Butler argues, is ‘the particular rhythm that characterises Žižek’s
work’ and
At the very moment the Symbolic order ‘doubles’, names its own difference
from itself, there is also something that ‘doubles’ it, which cannot be
named … What is radically posed by Žižek’s work—both as a theme within
it and by the very existence of the work itself—is the relationship of thought
to the Other, to the subject who knows. Objects of the drive are somehow
double in themselves. … This ‘doubling’, as Žižek so brilliantly brings out,
is what is at stake in Hegel’s notion of dialectics and not any reconciliation
with the world. (Butler 2005, 25; 26; 16)
Self-anaesthetizing Denial—No ‘The End’

Apparently, Hitchcock toyed with the idea of ending the film with a shot
of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge covered in birds (Bogdanovich
1963, 44), and in the opening scene, Melanie Daniels passes a newsstand
with a poster of Golden Gate Bridge, so it may have been a neat return (of
the repressed). Apparently, Hitchcock also wanted his film to be what
Umberto Eco describes as an ‘open text’ (1984). He did not want it to
end with the frame ‘THE END’ so he could thus leave his audience won-
dering. However, his studio would not comply, and it is only the current
video/DVD version that honours his wishes. According to Camille Paglia,
the psychodynamics of the ending of The Birds can be read in two ways. As
Robin Wood suggests: ‘Lydia has become the mother Melanie never had’
but then he equivocates asking whether Lydia’s cradling of Melanie is ‘a
gesture of acceptance … or a new maternal possessiveness’ and if the
moment marks Melanie’s ‘development into true womanhood, or a final
relapse into infantile dependence’ (2002, 172). Margaret Horwitz
advances the view that Lydia remains ‘victorious’ and that she and the
birds have ‘achieved dominance’ (1986, 286). Paul Gordon, too, believes
‘one should interpret Lydia’s smile as she cradles the bloodied Melanie on
her lap as part and parcel of the cackling crows and other birds that have
proved victorious in the end’ (2008, 159). George Toles finds some hope
in the mother–daughter embrace: ‘At the end of The Birds, a somehow
suspect, becalmed mother and traumatized “almost” daughter effect a
dazed reconciling embrace as the vehicle which contains them slowly
moves through a bird-covered, spectral landscape’ (2001, 228). Cathy’s
ability to bring the lovebirds along on the final journey (‘They haven’t
hurt anybody’) is also generally interpreted as a sign of hope for humani-
ty’s recovery, perhaps endorsed by the early morning rainbow beams that
arch in the sky. Will the ominous audience of birds lining the roadway turn
into ‘doves of peace? asks Camille Paglia (1988, 86).
Why does The Birds end in such an open and unresolved way? David
Sterritt believes it does so because of Hitchcock’s ‘distrust of language’ in
a film in which ‘spoken communication is of little use’ (1993, 142). The
more the characters of The Birds talk, the more their problems become
compounded, yet the birds who cannot talk, or use language in a fashion
we may identify, become ever more unified and organized throughout the
narrative. This lack of the power of words, and therefore screenwriting
and story-telling, implicates Hitchcock in its abjuration and causes the film
to pivot on the equation: ‘Mitch = Hitch’ (143).25 But this seems, to say
the least, somewhat specious. Ian Buchanan believes that the ‘unresolved-
ness’ is there from the beginning: how can Lydia be blamed since at the
time of the first bird strike she is unaware of Melanie and so there is no
reason for Lydia’s maternal superego to be inflamed (2002, 107).26 Annie
Hayworth, too, suggests ‘with all due respect to Oedipus’ that Lydia is
not a ‘jealous woman’ or a ‘clinging, possessive mother’ but merely fears
‘being abandoned’. But Camille Paglia questions Annie’s conclusions as
being those of the film itself. ‘Annie is in self-anaesthetising denial’, she
says (1988, 47). The question ‘why do the birds attack?’, which as we have
seen is at the centre of every reading of the film, is in fact the fundamental
expectation that the film thwarts until and beyond the very end. Hitchcock
offers us the possibility of turning the birds into symbols, or providing
some rational or semi-rational explanation for their behaviour, but he also
makes it clear that to take either path is to short circuit the enigma pro-
posed by his film’s narrative.
Is Lydia victorious at the end? She cleans and bandages a fragile, cata-
tonic Melanie’s wounds and helps Mitch escort her to the car. Inside the
car, she cradles Melanie in her lap. Melanie squeezes Lydia’s wrist, and she
looks down. Lydia looks down tenderly and hugs Melanie a little closer.
106 L. SIMMONS
Žižek interprets this as Mitch’s mother now accepting Melanie, thus aban-
doning her superego role, which also explains why the birds stop and are
silent, because their role in the Oedipal drama is now finished. Žižek
asserts that ‘at the very end of the film, Mitch’s mother “accepts” Melanie
as her son’s wife, gives her consent, and abandons her super-ego role (as
indicated by the fleeting smile she and Melanie exchange in the car)’ (LA
106). This explains, for Žižek, why the birds seemingly stop attacking for
their role as embodiment of maternal superego is finished. We are seem-
ingly thrown back on a boring family drama of small-town America about
a boy who brings home a girl who threatens his mother. But do the birds
really ‘stop’ and are they silent? Is the superego role overcome, or is it
simply in abeyance, on hold? Žižek stops, doubles back on himself and
gives an alternative reading where the final outcome remains open: Melanie
the heroine—who at the outset is an active, self-assertive young woman who

exerts a hold on her life (albeit in a ‘superficial’ or ‘pathological’ way …)—is
reduced at the end to a paralysed, numbed mummy: now after her ‘non-
authentic’ hold on her own life has been violently crushed, she is ready to
enter the matrimonial link… the self-evidence of such a feminist reading is
to be put in question: true, what we are witnessing here is the heroine’s
symbolic death; however, the question remains open as to what the final
outcome of her confrontation with the traumatic Thing will be—that is, in
what guise she will be ‘reborn’. (PF 225)
Do not the arrival and the persistence of the birds illustrate, almost
seamlessly, Žižek’s notion of the ‘act’ that breaks with or resituates the
ideological field, breaks with existing symbolic conventions and does not
remain within the range of commonly accepted possibilities? The act is not
something that is accomplished but nor is it something endlessly deferred,
it is something always coming into being or taking place, it is not only
what actually occurs but what allows all else to take place. As Rex Butler
comments: ‘There is always an element of the unexpected and unpredict-
able associated with the act, of something not foreseeable within the cur-
rent conceptual horizons. And this means that if the act arises from within
the old symbolic order it cannot entirely be named or judged within this
order. Its very aim is to redefine what is possible, to change the criteria by
which it will be understood’ (2004, 66–67). For Žižek, the ‘act’ (as
opposed to action) is an intervention that changes the ‘reality principle’ of
a given situation. The act, he insists, is
a gesture which by definition, touches the dimension of some impossible

Real. This notion of the act must be conceived of against the background …
of the more radical gesture of subverting the very structuring of this field.
An act does not simply occur within the given horizon of what appears to be
‘possible’—it redefines the very contours of what is possible. (CHU 121)
Notes
1. Birds, of course, are an important subtheme in Hitchcock’s work. To cite
some of the important examples: the chirping from a bird cage above the
heroine’s bed in Blackmail; the bird shop in Sabotage; birds that escape
from a crate in the boxcar in The Lady Vanishes; the resident of Rear Window
who keeps a caged bird outside her window; the woman with a cage of
fighting finches in To Catch a Thief; Norman Bates’ stuffed birds in Psycho.
2. Note that while in an interview with Peter Bogdanovich, Hitchcock
describes Lydia as ‘substituting her son for her husband’ (1963, 44), his
character Annie Hayworth tempers the Oedipal interpretation with her
throwaway line, ‘With all due respect to Oedipus’, and she claims Lydia is
neither possessive nor jealous but merely afraid of ‘being abandoned’.
3. Žižek himself writes ‘Alain Badiou identified the “passion for the Real [la
passion du reel]” as the key feature of the twentieth century. … The ulti-
mate and defining experience of the twentieth century was the direct expe-
rience of the Real as opposed to everyday social reality’ (TUE 267).
4. See Freud, ‘The Unconscious’ (1915) (SE XIV 161).
5. A MacGuffin is generally understood as an object, device or event that is
necessary to the plot and the motivation of the characters, but insignifi-
cant, unimportant or irrelevant in itself. Sidney Gottlieb cites an early
explanation of the term in a lecture Hitchcock delivered in 1939: ‘It might
be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men on a train’. One
man says, ‘What’s that package up there in the baggage rack?’ And the
other answers, ‘Oh, that’s a MacGuffin’. The first one asks, ‘What’s a
MacGuffin?’ ‘Well’, the other man says, ‘it’s an apparatus for trapping lions
in the Scottish Highlands’. The first man says, ‘But there are no lions in the
Scottish Highlands’, and the other one answers, ‘Well then, that’s no
MacGuffin!’ ‘So you see that a MacGuffin is actually nothing at all’
(Gottlieb 1995, 267).
6. Rex Butler argues that it is around ‘the subject as split and the subject as
introducing a kind of split—that the originality of Žižek’s philosophy is to
be found’ (2005, 17).
7. Elsewhere Lacan translates Vorstellungsrepräsentanz as ‘representative of
the representation’ [représentant de la représentation] (S11 218).
108 L. SIMMONS
8. See the following: LA 178 fn9; EYS 9; EYAW 236–237; FTK 77; IR 82;
SFA 266.
9. In the same passage, Žižek clarifies that the intrusion of the birds is not
simply of a psychotic nature and distinguishes between
Vorstellungsrepräsentanz and psychosis: ‘Vorstellungs-Repräsentanz desig-
nates a signifier which fills out the void of the excluded representation,
whereas a psychotic stain is a representation which fills out a hole in the
Symbolic, giving body to the “unspeakable”—its inert presence testifies
that we are in a domain where “words fail”. The surplus–signifier “hysteri-
cizes” the subject, whereas the effect of the non-signifying stain is psy-
chotic “hysteria-psychosis”’ (EYAW 239).
10. In a subsequent article on sound in The Birds, Allen pushes this even fur-
ther: ‘Cutting between Melanie’s agitation and the gathering of the birds,
the sound of the children’s voices appears to express her fear to the point
where we might imagine that what is being represented here is a mental
landscape, as if the song is in Melanie’s head and that in her anxiety … she
is actually conjuring the birds into being as an external projection of that
anxiety’ (2013, 115).
11. Robin Wood describes the interior of the Brenner house as ‘heavily mascu-
line’ (2002, 163).
12. Scriptwriter Evan Hunter insists that he did not write this scene which he
regards as ‘totally inept and devoid of any craftsmanship’. Instead, he pro-
poses that Hitchcock wrote it and has also suggested, in an attempt to
explain its hamfistedness, that Tippi Hedren merely ‘ad libbed her way
through it’. See Kyle B. Counts (1989, 18).
13. However, we need to treat these revelations with some circumspection.
Later in a scene at The Tides restaurant, Hitchcock will seat Melanie
directly under a sign, ‘Absolutely No Credit’, which would seem to allude
to her history of lying.
14. Robin Wood understands the teacups to be a leitmotif of human fragility
(2002, 165), whereas Angelo Restivo regards the ‘taking of coffee (or
occasionally tea or brandy)’ as ‘central to the forging of social links’ and
hence why the birds ‘zero in’ on cups in their various attacks (2004, 173).
15. To François Truffaut, Hitchcock described the end of the scene as follows:
‘The screech of the truck engine starting off conveys her anguish … It is
not only the sound of the engine you hear, but something that’s like a cry.
It’s as though the truck were shrieking’ (1985, 224). Elizabeth Weis notes
that Lydia resembles Melanie, in both appearance and coldness of demean-
our, and adds that ‘Insofar as the women are doubles, there has been an
aural reversal. Earlier when Melanie was still untouched by a deeply felt
experience, she was identified as something less than human by being asso-
ciated with her car motor. Now the mother is indeed suffering, and the
motor is taking on human qualities. As first a person sounds like a machine;

now a machine sounds like a person’ (1982, 309). And, we might note, the
machine also sounds like a bird.
16. ‘Acousmatique’, Chion explains in his The Voice in Cinema (1999), is an
old French word for a sound whose cause is invisible and goes back to
Pythagorean philosophy and the practice of veiling the teacher so that his
physical appearance would not distract from the spoken word he was deliv-
ering. The acousmatic voice blurs the distinction between what lies within
the diegetic space of the film and what lies outside of it, it occupies a kind
of liminal, indefinable space that has the potential to undo or render unreal
the comfortable world of the diegesis.
17. Mladen Dolar writes: ‘One could use a French pun, and say that the voice
is plus-de-corps: both the surplus of the body, a bodily excess, and the no-
more-body, the end of the corporeal, so that it embodies the very coinci-
dence of the quintessential corporeality and the soul’ (2006, 71).
18. Camille Paglia also records that ‘The first sketches Robert Boyle did for
The Birds, when it was still set in du Maurier’s Cornwall, were based on
Edvard Munch’s 1893 symbolist painting, “The Scream”’ (1988, 18).
19. In his interview with Truffaut, Hitchcock reveals that the electronic effects
for this scene and the rest of the film were produced by a Trautonium, an
atonal keyboard designed by electronic engineer Friedrich Trautwein in
1929 and developed by composers Remi Gassmann and Oskar Sala. The
Original Trautonium had a fingerboard consisting of a resistance wire
stretched over a metal rail marked with a chromatic scale and coupled to a
neon tube oscillator. The performer on pressing the wire touches the rail
and completes the circuit, and the oscillator is amplified via a loudspeaker.
The position of the finger on the wire determines the resistance controlling
the frequency and therefore controls the pitch of the oscillator. The
Trautonium had a three-octave range that could be transposed by means of
a switch (Truffaut 1985, 224). For a full treatment of sound in The Birds
see Allen (2013).
20. As Weis concludes, birds sound like machines, humans sound like birds and
machines sound like both birds and people (1982, 143).
21. Elisabeth Weis notes how Hitchcock describes the low hum of the bird’s
menacing silence as an ‘engine that is purring’, and she explores the mix-
ture of bird sounds with motor noises throughout the film, particularly on
San Francisco streets (1985, 308). Richard Allen notes that the same
slowly pulsing low frequency hum that we find that the conclusion of the
film also accompanies the scene of the bird’s-eye view (2013, 108–110).
22. Indeed, the entire scene is marked by doubles: two lovebirds; two cards
that are switched; two modes of transport (boat and car); travel by land
and sea; distant view and close-up.
110 L. SIMMONS
23. Elsewhere Žižek refers to la doublure as ‘the inconsistency or crack in the

surface of phenomenal immanence’ (OwB 67).
24. In his ‘Seminar on “The Purloined Letter”’, Lacan makes a comparison
with double parentheses (a parenthesis enclosing another parenthesis) and
says ‘I intend to use this redoubled parenthesis to cover the structure of the
subject … insofar as it implies a redoubling or rather the sort of division
that involves a lining [doublure] function’ (E 41).
25. Curiously, as Tania Modleski (2005, second edition, 131–132) notes,
Susan Smith, despite her stated feminist interpretation, reads the ending of
the film like this, and thus reinstates Hitchcock as master, le sujet supposé
savoir. Smith writes: ‘The Birds ultimately constructs not the woman but
M/Hitch as its final, most irresolvable enigma, its underlying mystery that
can’t be known’ (2000, 149).
26. What Buchanan implicitly argues for is another way of conceiving the bird
attacks that lies outside of signification. Margaret Horwitz was the first to
advance the thesis that the birds represent a mother’s wrath and a mother’s
vengeance on the woman she fears will steal her son (1986, 279). Lee
Edelman coins the term ‘sinthome-osexuality’ which he defines as that
which ‘threatens meaning insofar as meaning is invested in reproduction’s
promise of coming’. Edelman insists, somewhat implausibly, that the fig-
ures singled out for attack by the birds are children which in turn supports
his general claim that birds savage the reproductive imperative underlying
the meaning of life (1999, 240).
References
Works by Žižek
CHU. Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left
(with Ernesto Laclau and Judith Butler). London: Verso, 2000.
D. Disparities. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016.
London: Routledge, second edition, 2002.
Verso, 2002.
Verso, 1996.
ITR. Interrogating the Real: Slavoj Žižek, Rex Butler and Scott Stephens editors.
London and New York: Continuum, 2005.

LET. Living in the End Times. London: Verso, 2010.
Routledge, 2004.
PD. The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2003.
PF. The Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso, 1997.
SFA. Sex and the Failed Absolute. London and New York: Bloomsbury
Academic, 2020.
TUE. The Universal Exception: Slavoj Žižek, edited by Rex Butler and Scott
Stephens. London: Continuum, 2006.
‘“I Hear You With My Eyes”; or The Invisible Master’ in Gaze and Voice as Love
Objects, Renata Salecl and Slavoj Žižek editors. Durham and London: Duke
University Press, 1996: 90–126.
Works by Lacan
Psycho-analysis, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by Alan Sheridan.
London: Hogarth Press, 1977.
S12. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book XII: Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis
1964–1965, translated by Cormac Gallagher, 17 March 1965 (unpublished).
S20. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book XX: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of
Love and Knowledge, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated with notes by
Bruce Fink. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1991.
Works by Freud
SE XIV. ‘Repression’ (1915), vol. 14, The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Translated from the German under the
General Editorship of James Strachey. In collaboration with Anna Freud.
112 L. SIMMONS
Assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson, 24 volumes. London: The Hogarth
Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1955a–: 141–158.
SE XIV. ‘The Unconscious’ (1915), vol. 14, The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Translated from the German under the
General Editorship of James Strachey. In collaboration with Anna Freud.
Assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson, 24 volumes. London: The Hogarth
Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1955b–: 159–215.
Other Works
Allen, Richard. 1997–1998. Avian Metaphor in The Birds. Hitchcock Annual
6: 40–67.
Allen, Richard. 2013. The Sound of The Birds. October 146: 97–120.
Badmington, Neil. 2011. Hitchcock’s Magic. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.
Bellour, Raymond. 2000. The Analysis of Film. Trans. Constance Penley.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Bergala, Alain. 2001. Alfred, Adam and Eve. In Hitchcock and Art: Fatal
Coincidences, ed. Dominique Paini and Guy Cogeval, 111–125. Paris: Centre
Pompidou and Mazzotta.
Bogdanovich, Peter. 1963. The Cinema of Alfred Hitchcock. New York: Museum
of Modern Art Film Library.
Bowie, Malcolm. 1991. Lacan. London: Fontana.
Buchanan, Ian. 2002. Schizoanalysis and Hitchcock: Deleuze and The Birds.
Strategies: Journal of Theory, Culture & Politics 15:1: 105–118.
Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”.
New York: Routledge.
Chion, Michel. 1999. The Voice in Cinema. Ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Counts, Kyle B. 1989. The Making of The Birds. Cinefantastique 10:2: 14–35.
Dolar, Mladen. 2006. A Voice and Nothing More. London and Cambridge:
MIT Press.
Eco, Umberto. 1984. The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts.
Edelman, Lee. 1999. Hitchcock’s Future. In Alfred Hitchcock Centenary Essays,
ed. Richard Allen and S. Ishii Gonzales, 239–258. London: British Film
Institute.
Fink, Bruce. 1997. The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Glowinski, Hughette et al. 2001. A Compendium of Lacanian Terms. London:
Free Association Books.
Gordon, Paul. 2008. Dial ‘M’ for Mother: A Freudian Hitchcock. Madison, NJ:
Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
Hegel, G.W.F. 1969. Science of Logic. Trans. A.V. Miller. Amherst, MA:
Humanity Books.
Horwitz, Margaret. 1982. A Mother’s Love. Wide Angle 5:1: 42–48. Reprinted as
‘The Birds: A Mother’s Love’ in A Hitchcock Reader, ed. Marshall Deutelbaum
and Leland Poague, 279–288. Ames, IA: Iowa State Press, 1986.
Jacobs, Steven. 2007. The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock.
Amsterdam: 010 Publishers.
Kay, Sarah. 2003. Žižek: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Laplanche, Jean and J.B. Pontalis. 1974. The Language of Psychoanalysis. Trans.
Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
Leitch, Thomas. 1991. Find the Director and Other Hitchcock Games. Athens:
University of Georgia Press.
Theory. New York and London, Routledge, second edition.
Morris, Christopher D. 2000. Reading the Birds and The Birds. Literature/Film
Quarterly 28:4: 250–558.
Paglia, Camille. 1988. The Birds. London: British Film Institute.
Restivo, Angelo. 2004. The Silence of The Birds: Sound Aesthetics and Public
Space in Later Hitchcock. In Hitchcock Past and Future, ed. Richard Allen and
Sam Ishii-Gonzáles, 164–178. London and New York: Routledge.
Macmillan.
Spoto, Donald. 1992. The Art of Alfred Hitchcock: Fifty Years of His Motion
Pictures. New York: Anchor/Doubleday, second edition.
Sterritt, David. 1993. The Films of Alfred Hitchcock. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Toles, George. 2001. Mother Calls the Shots: Hitchcock’s Female Gaze. In A
House Made of Light. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
Weis, Elisabeth. 1982. The Silent Scream: Alfred Hitchcock’s Soundtrack. Teaneck,
NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
Weis, Elisabeth. 1985. Style and Sound in The Birds. In Film Sound, ed. Elizabeth
Weis and John Belton, 298–311. New York: Columbia University Press.
Zupančič, Alenka. 2004. The Fifth Condition. In Think Again: Alain Badiou and
the Future of Philosophy, ed. Peter Hallward, 191–201. London: Continuum.
CHAPTER 4
The Sinthome: The Lady Vanishes (1938)
Abstract The existence of an old lady is understood, or made to pass, as

a hallucination of the central character Iris. The old woman Miss Froy is a
mother-figure to, but also a counterpart/mirror of, the young woman.
Hitchcock’s films are full of ‘the woman who knows too much’ (intellec-
tually superior but sexually unattractive, bespectacled but someone who
can see into what remains hidden from others). How can we interpret this
motif? Žižek’s answer is that they are sinthomes. They designate the limit of
interpretation; they fix or tie together a certain core of enjoyment.
Sinthome is the term used by Lacan to differentiate understanding from
the earlier usage of symptom as a message to be deciphered. The sinthome
is not a symbol, but it is an attempt to answer the question why does the
symptom persist? The reason is enjoyment—the sinthome is a way for the
subject to organize his or her enjoyment.
CALDICOTT: Hello! The old girl’s back again.

—The Lady Vanishes.
…the symptom is no longer the problem but the solution.
—Colette Soler, ‘The Paradoxes of the Symptom in Psychoanalysis’.
…the symptom can not only be interpreted but is, so to speak, already
formed with an eye to its interpretation.
—Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology.

Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62436-1_4
116 L. SIMMONS
A (M)Other for Iris

The existence of a little-old-lady English governess she has just met is
assumed to be a hallucination of the central character of the film Iris, or
others try to make her believe it is one. In a short time, the older woman,
Miss Froy, has become a mother-figure to—but also a counterpart/mirror
of—the young woman (Iris) who appears feisty and determined, and has
no fear of confronting the patriarchal symbolic order. Nevertheless, Iris
seems to be ‘the ideal woman’, the ideal partner in the sexual relation, and
is returning to London to be married to a boring father figure whom she
doesn’t love, the chinless Lord Charles Fotheringale. Perhaps Iris in fact is
the woman who, according to Lacanian theory, does not exist. The lure of
the plot is that through the disappearance of her double (mOther), Miss
Froy, Iris is ‘made to exist’. Žižek suggests that the woman who disappears
is always ‘the woman with whom the sexual relationship would be possi-
ble, the elusive shadow of a Woman who would not just be another
woman’ (LA, 92). At the end, Iris falls for Gilbert, an ethnomusicologist,
who is charming and raffish but has never grown up, and throughout the
film has played the role of naughty child (without a Father). Hitchcock’s
films are full of ‘the woman who knows too much’ (intellectually superior
but sexually unattractive, often bespectacled but someone who can see
into what remains hidden from others: Ingrid Bergman as Alicia in
Spellbound; Roman’s sister Ruth in Strangers on a Train; Scottie’s friend
Midge in Vertigo) (EYAW, 125). How can we interpret this motif? Žižek
asks. These figures are not symbols but, on the other hand, they are not
insignificant details of individual films, they persist across a number of
Hitchcock films. Žižek’s answer is that they are sinthomes. They designate
the limit of interpretation, they resist interpretation; they fix or tie together
a certain core of enjoyment (EYAW, 126).1
A Symptom Is What Is a Bit ‘Fishy’, or Doesn’t Quite

‘Fit In’
The word sinthome in French is a fifteenth and sixteenth century way of
writing the modern word symptôme (symptom). He has, Lacan explains,
taken it from an ‘old way of spelling what was subsequently spelt symptôme’
in order to ‘Hellenize’ his discourse (S23, 3). By suggesting a word that is
derived from an archaic form of writing, Lacan also shifts the inflection of
the term to the letter rather than the signifier (as message to be deciphered).
4 THE SINTHOME: THE LADY VANISHES (1938) 117
The letter as the site where meaning becomes undone is, for Lacan, a pri-
mary inscription of subjectivity. The pronunciation sinthome in French pro-
duces the associations of saint homme (holy man) and synth-homme
(synthetic [artificial] man), and it also includes the French word tome or
volume (written work). Left in the original, and pronounced in French,
among English discourse we hear the English words ‘sin’ and ‘home’—the
‘home’ of the symptom, we might say, emerges at the point of ‘sin’.
From Freud to Lacan, there is an important shift from seeing the symp-
tom as a message to be deciphered, a signifier, to viewing it as a trace of
the subject’s mode of enjoyment, a signified, a condition (an apparition of
the Real). In medicine, symptoms are perceptible manifestations of an
underlying illness that might otherwise remain undetected. They are based
on the notion of surface and depth, between phenomena and the hidden
causes of those phenomena, which cannot be experienced but must be
inferred. Hitchcock’s film is immediately psychoanalytical on this point:
IRIS: Yes, but who can we trust?

GILBERT: That’s the snag.
IRIS: There’s that Dr Hartz person.
GILBERT: Yes, you’re right. He might help. Come on, let’s tell him
the symptoms.
Thus, the symptom is understood traditionally as a sign of disease, or

psychoanalytically as the result of conflict between unconscious desire and
ego ideal. The symptom arises because of a failure, because somehow the
circuit of Symbolic communication was broken; the repressed world
comes to the surface in a coded form. The symptom is already coded for
interpretation, it is addressed to the big Other which contains its mean-
ing—the Freudian symptom is a signifier. The aim of psychoanalysis is to
re-establish the broken network of communication by allowing the patient
to verbalize the meaning of his or her symptom. Through this verbaliza-
tion, it is argued that the symptom is automatically dissolved, it goes away.
Thus, Freud viewed the symptom as neurotic, but also ‘correctable’
through a remembering which would release repressed material.
Whereas Freud referred to the symptom as indicative of a psychic effort
to attain equilibrium (pleasure), Lacan asks why the symptom returns as
suffering, why the nervous system cannot succeed in living pleasurably on
a sustained basis? Beyond the pleasure principle, the Lacanian symptom
insists as a principle of repetition that is identity itself. Thus, Lacan’s idea
118 L. SIMMONS
of the symptom is of a living metaphor of any person’s unconscious truth,

a symbolic displacement of his or her accommodation to the psychic struc-
tures of desire and law as the latter elaborate messages from the Other.
Not an isolated meaning but related to a signifying chain. The symptom is
a signifier present in conscious life as if excluded from it. Even if a symp-
tom has a bodily or behavioural manifestation, the symptom is always con-
nected to language. If we accept Lacan’s idea that a symptom is a duplicity
of meaning where at least two conflicts are in play: an actual one and a
former one, we can see how secondary repression and the symptom really
amount to the same thing. The symptom as a metaphor allows meaning to
exist enigmatically in conscious life and truthfully in an unconscious dis-
course. So, the specificity of a symptom appears in a person’s language and
not in some form of universal meaning.2
However, Lacan argues that symptoms are in fact meaningless traces;
their meaning is not discovered but constructed retroactively. Knowledge
of our symptoms is an illusion, constructed afterwards, and it comes to us
from the future. With Lacan there is an eventual shift from seeing the
symptom as a message to be deciphered, a signifier, to seeing it as a trace
of the subject’s mode of enjoyment, a signified. Sinthome, the term Lacan
uses to differentiate understanding from the earlier usage, is not a symbol
nor does it conceal meaning. The sinthome is an attempt to answer the
question why does the symptom persist, even beyond its interpretation?
The reason is enjoyment—the sinthome is the organizing principle by
which a subject organizes its relationship to enjoyment (jouissance). It is a
sort of fourth order of pleasure beyond pleasure. One of Žižek’s examples
is the wound, or rather the enjoyment we receive from picking at a fester-
ing wound. There is a prohibited enjoyment in the sinthome and, as
Colette Soler remarks, ‘a symptom is what is a bit “fishy”, or doesn’t quite
“fit in”’ (Soler 1991, 215).
Treatment is not strictly speaking directed towards the symptom. The
symptom is what the subject must cling to since it is what uniquely char-
acterizes him or her. For Tim Dean, “The notion of the symptom is cen-
tral to Žižek’s thinking about politics and culture. Although in his work
and in psychoanalytic theory more generally the term symptom carries a
range of conceptual meanings, symptomatology remains the governing
trope of Žižek’s oeuvre” (2002, 22). And as Žižek has recently explained,
drawing on a statement not by Freud or Lacan but by Jung, we do not
cure the symptom, it cures us:
The goal of therapy is therefore not to eliminate these symptoms, but to

integrate them into a wider self that transcends the narrow confines of the
ego … The true illness is that of the ego itself, and the neurotic symptoms
are desperate attempts at a cure, attempts to re-establish the balance dis-
turbed by the ego’s narrow frame which has excluded crucial parts of the
Self’s contents. (LTN, 301)3
Žižek’s film example is from Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979): the figure of
the alien while it is external to the crew on board the spaceship is also
what, by virtue of its threat to them, confers unity on the spaceship crew.
Indeed, the ambiguous relationship we have to our sinthomes—one in
which we enjoy our suffering and suffer our enjoyments—is like the rela-
tionship of Ripley to the alien, which she fears but progressively identifies
with (we need only think of the famous scene at the end of the film where
she ‘undresses’ for the alien). The polyp-like parasite that bursts out of
John Hurt’s body and clings to his face is a leftover of the maternal, it is a
threat, but also, says Žižek, “a sprout of enjoyment” (SOI, 79). This is why
the alien in Alien incessantly changes form, why it is anamorphic, because
it is something, which on a Symbolic level does not exist, yet it is the only
thing in the film that actually exists, “the thing against which the whole
reality is utterly defenceless” (ibid.).
For Lacan, there are two steps of the psychoanalytic process: interpreta-
tions of symptoms and traversing fantasy. When we are confronted with
the patient’s symptoms, we must first interpret them, and penetrate
through them to the fundamental fantasy, as the kernel of enjoyment,
which is blocking the further movement of interpretation. Then we must
accomplish the crucial step of going through the fantasy, of obtaining
distance from it, of experiencing how the fantasy–formation is just mask-
ing, filling out a certain void, lack, an empty place in the Other. But even
so there were patients who had traversed the fantasy and obtained distance
from the fantasy-framework of their reality but whose key symptom still
persisted. Lacan tried to answer this challenge with the concept of the
sinthome. When it occurs, a symptom causes discomfort and displeasure;
nevertheless, we embrace its interpretation with pleasure. But why, in spite
of its interpretation, does the symptom not dissolve itself? Why does it
persist? The answer, of course, is enjoyment, jouissance. The symptom is
not only an encrypted message; it is a way for the subject to organize his
or her enjoyment. That is why, even after a completed interpretation, the
120 L. SIMMONS
subject is not prepared to renounce his or her symptom; it is why, to para-

phrase Žižek, ‘I love my symptom more than myself’.
Topologically Speaking—The Borromean Clinic

The Borromean knot was a topological figure borrowed by Lacan that
allowed him conceptualize how the three registers of the Imaginary,
Symbolic and Real are bound together in such a way that if one is undone
or interrupted, all three collapse and become separated. The figure derives
from the heraldic crest of the sixteenth-century Milanese Borromeo fam-
ily, its three intertwined rings reflecting the triple alliance of three branches
of the family. The appeal to topology on Lacan’s part was not to produce
neat summaries of positions but ongoing engagements (essais de formali-
sation) with theoretical problems. Lacan’s late shift of many of his terms
from the Symbolic to the Real, paralleled by a shift from a topology of
surfaces to one of knots, leads him in Seminar 23 to revise and reconcep-
tualize this Borromean alliance of three by adding a fourth loop to the
knot, which is at once part of the knot, preventing the other loops from
unravelling, and paradoxically beyond it. When the three rings are badly
knotted together, he says, this necessitates a fourth ring that holds the
other three together (Fig. 4.1). This fourth term is the sinthome as correc-
tive repair (marked as the black ring in the diagram).
In Seminar 23, Lacan turns to the writing of James Joyce—Lacan’s
saint homme—whose work he reads as an extended sinthome. In this case,
Fig. 4.1 Lacan: the

Borromean rings linked R I
by the fourth ring, the
symptom (S23, 12, 77)
S
the sinthome is a complex artifice that helps an artist escape the

neurosis/psychosis that he or she embodies. It does not heal, just prevents
the triggering of psychosis. For, argues Lacan, Joyce had to supply in his
work the Name-of-the-Father (the father as signifier, representing the law
and its prohibition) that was absent in his childhood, and that he had
rejected along with Ireland. In the case of Joyce, writing (as suppléance)
was the sinthome that held together the Real, Symbolic and Imaginary;
writing was the supplementary cord that repaired the original fault; it was
Joyce’s way of supporting his relation to enjoyment (through epiphany)
and avoiding psychosis. For Lacan, the ‘modernism’ of Joyce resides in the
fact that his works, at least Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, are not simply
external to their interpretation but, as it were, in advance take into account
their possible interpretations and enter into dialogue with them. They
reinvent language to organize enjoyment. Insofar as an interpretation or
theoretical explanation of a work of art endeavours to ‘frame’ its object,
one can say that this modernist dialectics provides another example of how
the frame is always included in, is a part of, the framed content: in mod-
ernism, theory about the work is comprised in the work, the work is a kind
of pre-emptive strike at possible theories about itself. In the course of his
writing, “Joyce deciphers his own enigma’ (S23, 54). Can we not say the
same of the films of Hitchcock? And is not Žižek’s relation to Hitchcock
on a par with Lacan’s fascination with Joyce?
The Roar of the Real and the Sidetracked Train

The plot of the film, its pacing and editing proceed like a train pulling out
of a station: a leisurely opening in terms of plot development but then
gradually building in intensity and speed until it appears to roll thunder-
ously like a runaway engine. The train, like Iris, is relentlessly heading
towards a destination from which it is repeatedly sidetracked. Stopping the
train appears to be the only solution for Iris who repeatedly feels her sanity
is threatened by the crew members and fellow passengers who relentlessly
deny Miss Froy’s existence. But perhaps her real reasons for wanting to
stop the train are deeper and lie in the fact that it is carrying her closer and
closer to her fiancé and a marriage that threatens to end her life as she
knows it? The most serious diversion of the film’s plot—the removal of a
woman (Miss Froy/Iris) from the train—is therefore linked to Iris’s (and
the audience’s) hidden desire that she be rescued from marriage to her
prospective husband.
122 L. SIMMONS
Noel King and Toby Miller observe that ‘Hitchcock was fascinated by
the railway experience, its bizarre amalgam of imprisonment and mobility’
and that train travel features in many of his most famous features from The
39 Steps to North by Northwest (2001, 110).4 Cinema’s attachment to
trains was forged at the medium’s birth when the Lumière brothers
screened L’Arivée d’un train a La Ciotat in 1897. The associations are
manifold: the experience of looking out of the train window at an unbid-
den image, tracking cameras move on rails, films are projected from cel-
luloid tracks passing over light, both are claustrophobic microcosms of
limited worlds. The film director Wim Wenders has commented percep-
tively on the connections:
Trains, in a way, are related to filmmaking insofar as it’s completely mechan-

ical—a mechanical thing of wheels and speed and movement, and you have
this wonderful view, like the movie screen. Trains are even more related to
movies than cars are. When you sit in a train it’s so much like the situation
of sitting in a movie—sitting with other people. Trains are complete dream
machines. They’re very relaxing and they’re very comfortable, and you
really lose yourself—all the same qualities good movies have. And of course
there’s the constant movement and sort of little rattle, like the noise from
the projection booth. (1992, 74)
Wenders’ reference to the ‘dream machine’ connects the oneiric

dimension of film viewing and train travel as a vehicle for dreaming.
Charles Barr has suggested that ‘From the moment the flowerpot strikes
her and we are given her blurred point of view as she lapses into uncon-
sciousness, the film could be the dream of Iris, working through her
eve-of-marriage preoccupations: her doubts about Charles [her fiancé],
her attraction to Gilbert, and her lack of a mother’ (1999, 197). For
Graham Fuller, The Lady Vanishes displays and is predicated on another
aspect of train travel: ‘speed—of narrative, wit, motion and emotion’
(2008, 38).5 Through miniature railway sets, back projection, process
shots, transparencies, archival footage, shrieks of the engine and wisps
of steam drifting through an open window, Hitchcock recreates the
paradoxical experience of railway travel as both prison and freedom,
incarceration and flight, and places the train at the centre of his film’s
dynamism.
The Real (see Chap. 3) that forms the core of The Lady Vanishes, at
once derailing the train and fuelling the narrative, is of a kind perhaps
more exemplary of the early Hitchcock than the late. For the Real does
not so much appear in the film as disappear, or appear through its disap-
pearance (see e.g. The Wrong Man (1956)). It (dis)embodies the void of
that absent or excluded interior, in Lacan’s words ‘that essential object
that isn’t an object any longer’ (S2, 164)—that structures the Symbolic
Order. As Žižek insists, the Real is nothing in itself, but merely an ontolo-
gization of the inconsistencies of the Symbolic Order itself, making nega-
tivity or death an advent of the Real. This ontologization of a gap—the
gap, in film language, of the cut is precisely what the film performs in the
vanishing act that evacuates Miss Froy from the film’s diegesis. The cam-
era shifts from the occupied seats of the other inhabitants of Iris’s carriage
to an empty place where Miss Froy was sitting: this unoccupied seat does
not (cannot) signify absence, but it directly renders that absence. This in
film terms is the absence of something where the gaze has been taught,
through the rules of shot/reverse shot, to expect something. Is not the
Symbolic predicated precisely on ‘disappearing’ or ‘barring’ the bodies
that it names? So here the ‘symbolic cut’ assumes a positive existence as
the film cut. Yet if the Symbolic bars access to something that was never
available in the first place, then Miss Froy does not ‘vanish’ but was in fact
(as is framed by the predominant and insistent voices of the other charac-
ters) ‘never there’—positing the encounter with the Real as that which is
always too late, or too early, a trace already. On the level of individual
character, if Miss Froy embodies the barred body of the (m)Other for Iris,
her person could be said to suffer the imminent threat of Iris’s ‘symbolic
castration’ in marriage. The film registers the absence of her body on
another level as a foreign body in the social texture undermining, as Žižek
suggests, all the rules of the reality principles by which we conduct our
day-to-day lives. This trauma of disappearance, totally inexplicable to Iris,
and deemed impossible by the others on the train, is played out for the
spectator through the flouting of the generic codes of the comic, light-
hearted story into which we have been sutured, as Miss Froy’s absence
throws us, the spectators, into an incomprehensible alterity. The gap that
this disappearance opens up between the signifying system and the Real,
between what the other says and the non-symbolized surplus of being
located there, is, of course, a necessary gap, the very condition of the
speaking subject: Miss Froy’s disappearance is, after all, what gets the nar-
rative moving and the characters talking something other than Euro-
babble. Yet at the same time as it generates speech, the Real is ‘the
impossible to say’, or for our purposes the ‘impossible to film’, as all
124 L. SIMMONS
attempts to signify the abyss of Miss Froy’s absence merely replace it with
the notion of spuriousness, a spurious presence—as the film’s repeated,
defeated utterances of the word ‘gone’ attest. This tautology of the Real
as ‘the impossible to say’ exemplifies the mutual imbrication of the Real
and Symbolic, the fact that what we call the Real is in fact nothing more
than what is excluded from the Symbolic. ‘People don’t just vanish …
People don’t just disappear into thin air’, as the unbelieving Englishmen
Charters and Caldicott assert, but what is excluded from the Symbolic
returns in the Real, and it is in these terms that Hitchcock frames his cri-
tique of the British government’s complaisant pacifism. The Real it seems
can only be articulated in itself within the Symbolic as a question, and in
The Lady Vanishes, Hitchcock keeps ‘the Real’ largely at the level of a ques-
tion, of that obscene negativity which is opened up by the ‘hysterical ques-
tion’ of Iris herself. The hysterical question—why am I what you say I
am?—opens up the surplus of the Real in its gesture of refusal of the
Symbolic mandate that determines their place in the Symbolic Order—in
this case the mandates that determine Iris as ‘mad’ or merely tired. The
Real as the stain of absence that manifests itself in the apparition of Miss
Froy’s name on the windowpane, a name that is not so much inscribed as
erased or subtracted from the smog in which it is ‘written’ (Fig. 4.2).
Yet the Real is more directly rendered in the film in the form of the train
whose roar temporarily blocks the linguistic exchange between Iris and
Miss Froy, emphasizing the material contingencies that threaten the
Symbolic exchange of meaning. The huge and inhuman train is rendered
not as a signifier, but as a Thing (das Ding, see Chap. 3) that threatens to
overtake the film itself. Yet even here the Real appears ‘disappeared’ again
in the ‘impossible to hear’ of Miss Froy’s name—a non-exchange that
seems to perform the erasure of her name from the Symbolic that will
make her ‘a body without a name’ in the trunk that must be rapidly dis-
posed of to restore Symbolic Order. The repeated roar of the train read
alongside the film’s compulsive musical score demonstrates the way the
musical sinthome Miss Froy collects threatens repeatedly to slide into the
abyssal realm of jouissance—the roar of the engine, the screech of the
whistle like a very human scream, the pounding of the wheels that threaten
to submerge the minimal ordering of the tune into the flat, atonal noise of
the train.
Fig. 4.2 Miss Froy’s name on the train window
The Harriman’s Herbal Teapacket Label as Lamella

In order to take Iris’s mind off the disappearance of Miss Froy, Gilbert
invites her to take tea with him in the dining carriage. They sit at the table
Iris previously shared with Miss Froy, and the sequence begins with a static
medium two shot of the seated couple, while behind them visible on the
train window, which has just been lowered to sight-level by Gilbert, the
word FROY (written by the kidnapped woman during the earlier encoun-
ter with Iris at the same table) emerges on the windowpane. For the spec-
tator, this provides the jolt of recognition, a feeling of superiority and a
heightened state of anticipation (FROY ‘rhymes with joy’—we have
already been told—and thus, too, with Freud) about whether the charac-
ters in the diegesis will spot the small but crucial difference that is the
sudden appearance of the name. Iris does at the last minute (‘Look!’), just
as Gilbert is telling her he admires the fact that she ‘is always seeing things’.
Iris’s eyes become transfixed, and it is almost as if we see what she sees,
126 L. SIMMONS
even though at this point we don’t, since this is not a shot/reverse shot.
Then we see it and, together with the traced name, disappear into another
dark tunnel, but Gilbert, whose gaze fascinated on Iris (the reverse of his
shot), misses everything (‘What’s gone?’, he asks). The flickering appear-
ance and then disappearance of letters traced on the neutral support of the
glass recall the transitory nature of the cinematic image we are watching
projected on a film screen.6 If we know how to read a film, we know that
Miss Froy was there in the film’s present but now is not. Similarly, a few
sequences later, the Harriman’s herbal teapacket label that sticks momen-
tarily onto the train window when the rubbish is thrown out by the chef
confirms the veracity of Iris’s viewpoint (Fig. 4.3). Miss Froy has previ-
ously declared that it is the only tea she drinks: ‘A million Mexicans drink
it!’. This ‘appearance’ unsettles us as spectators even though it confirms
for Gilbert, who moves forward to examine it, the truth of Iris’s encounter
with Miss Froy (‘There’s something definitely queer in the air’, remarks
Gilbert).
Fig. 4.3 Harriman’s Herbal teapacket stuck to the train window

Like the letters FROY, we cannot get rid of the impression that the
object Iris, and then Gilbert, is looking at is somehow returning their
gaze. We are dealing, says Žižek,
with a kind of empty, a priori gaze that cannot be pinpointed as a determi-

nate reality … the object returns the gaze from [a] blind spot … the object
returning the gaze … is a kind of formal “condition of possibility” of our
seeing anything at all. What happens in psychosis is that this empty point in
the other, in what we see … is actualized, becomes part of effective reality:
in psychosis … we effectively know that we are being observed all the time.
(‘I Hear You With My Eyes’, 90–91)
The teapacket is both a spatial intrusion that sticks to the carriage

window through some mysterious force and then (like the perplexing
fading letters of ‘FROY’) it flies off into a space beyond the frame. The
teapacket is both unstable and a spatial point of stability, providing a
concrete hold upon the narrative world and something to cling onto. It
is both ‘in’ and ‘out of ’ the frame, both one of, and an antidote to, the
film’s ceaselessly changing images and the ever-present uncertainties of
the film’s plot.
As such, it is a version of the mythic creature called by Lacan the lamella.
On the one hand, the lamella is a thin plate-like strata, like those of a shell
or the layers found in geological formations, and on the other, it can refer
to flat amoeba-like organisms that reproduce asexually—bacteria, viruses,
prions and today clones as well—and which can, in principle, live forever,
because their reproduction comes down to a replication. In these cases,
death is purely accidental and not inevitable as such. This is not the case
with sexually differentiated organisms, because these life forms have to
die. The cell division that characterizes these sexual life forms—the meio-
sis—causes not only the loss of half of the genetic material; it excludes
these life forms from the eternal life as well. Žižek notes that, through his
almost poetic description of this mythic creature,
Lacan imagines the lamella as a version of what Freud called ‘partial object’:
a weird organ that is magically autonomized, surviving without the body
whose organ it should have been … an entity of pure surface, without the
density of a substance, an infinitely plastic object that can incessantly change
its form and even transpose itself from one medium to another … As Lacan
puts it, the lamella does not exist, it insists: it is unreal, an entity of pure
128 L. SIMMONS
semblance, a multiplicity of appearances that seem to enfold a central void—

its status is purely phantasmatic. (HRL, 62)
In its materializations, the lamella has ‘the function of situating the

subject … marking his place in the field of the group’s relations’ (S11,
206), but it also marks an Otherness beyond intersubjectivity. Lacan’s
description, Žižek declares, reminds us of the creatures in horror movies:
vampires, zombies, the undead, the monsters of science fiction. Indeed,
again it is the alien from Ridley Scott’s film of the same name that may
conjure up the lamella in its purest form. Uncannily, Lacan writes in
Seminar 11, a decade before the film appeared, ‘But suppose it comes and
envelopes your face while you are quietly asleep …’ (ibid., 197): ‘it is as if
Lacan somehow saw the film before it was even made’, suggests Žižek
(HRL, 62). We think immediately of the scene in the womb-like cave of
the unknown planet when the alien leaps from its throbbing egg-like
globe and sticks to John Hurt’s face. This amoeba-like flattened creature
that envelops the face stands for irrepressible life beyond all the finite
forms that are merely its representatives. In later scenes of the film, the
alien is able to assume a multitude of different shapes; it is immortal and
indestructible. When a scientist on board the mother-ship cuts into its
body still attached to Hurt’s face, the liquid that drips onto the metal floor
ferociously corrodes it (SOI, 79). The lamella is an entity of pure surface
without density, an infinitely plastic object that can change its form. It is
indivisible, indestructible and immortal—like the living dead which after
every attempt at annihilation simply reconstitute themselves and continue
on. In The Lady Vanishes, the lamella as teapacket sticks insistently to the
carriage window but, as Žižek cautions,
the lamella … remains within the domain of the Imaginary, although as a

kind of image that endeavours to stretch the imagination to the very bound-
ary of the unrepresentable. The lamella inhabits the intersection of the
Imaginary and the Real: it stands for the Real in its most terrifying Imaginary
dimension, as the primordial abyss that swallows everything, dissolving all
identities. (HRL, 64)
The phantasmatic appearance of the lamella signals the discordance

between reality (the ‘apparent’ loss of Miss Froy) and the absolute prox-
imity of the Real (her ‘mummified’ bandaged body, all surface, in the
nearby carriage).
The Vanishing Lady Act—‘A Symptomal Torsion’

Lucy Fischer’s article, ‘The Lady Vanishes: Women, Magic, and the
Movies’, begins with an account of George Méliès 1896 film The Vanishing
Lady. The plot of the film is simple: a woman, fully dressed, is seated in a
chair against the background of an ornately plastered wall. A magician
(played by Méliès) drapes her body with a fabric cover. When the cloth is
removed, the ‘lady’ has disappeared and in her place is a skeleton. In this
important essay, Fischer highlights cinema’s early obsession with making
women appear and disappear, sawing them in half and chopping their
heads off, all mutilations which, she insists, constitute ‘symbolic acts of
considerable violence’? There were hundreds of early magic films of ‘van-
ishing’ or ‘manifesting’ women made between 1896 and 1912, many of
them produced by Méliès.7 For Fischer, it is precisely the ‘dominance and
mutability of the paradigm’ that enables it to become ‘a cinematic arche-
type, or even cliché’ (1979, 30). She demonstrates how cinematic disap-
pearance is indebted to the original Victorian stage trick of The Vanishing
Woman Act8 and notes that, prior to making films, Méliès himself was a
stage magician. Because he recognized that the medium of film was ideal
for magic, Méliès develops some of what we now call ‘film language’—the
cut, the superimposition, the fade—as an assemblage of magic tricks and
illusions. As the poster which Gilbert unravels as he and Iris search the
luggage carriage reveals, Signor Doppo specializes in ‘The Vanishing Lady
Act’: ‘The Great Doppo. Magician, illusionist, mind reader. … See his
fascinating act, The Vanishing Lady’. Fischer argues that the issue of van-
ishing ‘makes one begin to suspect that sexual role-playing is itself at issue
in the rhetoric of magic, and that perhaps in performing his tricks on the
female subject, the male magician is not simply accomplishing acts of pres-
tidigitation, but is also articulating a discourse on attitudes towards
women’ (1979, 31).
This, of course, is what Žižek suggests in his discussion of The Lady
Vanishes when he argues that
The lady who vanishes is thus ultimately the woman with whom the sexual
relationship would be possible, the elusive shadow of a Woman who would
not be just another woman; which is why the disappearance of this woman
is a means by which filmic romance takes cognizance of the fact that ‘The
Woman does not exist’ and that there is, therefore no sexual relation-
ship. (LA, 82)
130 L. SIMMONS
But, at first glance, it would appear that Žižek has got it wrong for it is
the older woman, a spinster Miss Froy, who mysteriously disappears in the
presence of the visually vigilant younger woman Iris. Miss Froy is neither
a femme fatale, a fantasy figure filling out the void, nor is she the object of
the hero Gilbert’s desire. Yet, in a parallax view, Žižek is right ‘the lady
who vanishes’ to become ‘the woman [who] does not exist’ in The Lady
Vanishes is in fact Iris not Miss Froy. From the feisty, independent, self-
determined figure of the first half of the film who, nevertheless, seemed
fated to ‘disappear’ into Lady Fotheringale at the end, Iris ends ‘obliter-
ated’ by the saved ‘mother’ in the resurrected Miss Froy.9 It is a shift finally
sealed and confirmed by the beatific stare of Miss Froy back at the couple
after she has delivered her melody to be decoded on the grand piano at
Whitehall. What the film eventually elaborates in this trajectory is what
Žižek, following Alain Badiou, calls a ‘symptomal torsion’, a delusion and
malfunctioning that disturbs the balance and ‘that make(s) accessible the
subject’s Truth’ and ‘opens the space for a traumatic encounter with the
Real’ (TS, 131, 141).10 As Žižek explains elsewhere: ‘In psychoanalytic
terms, lapses, dreams, compulsive formations and acts, and so forth, are
“symptomal torsions” that render the Truth of the given individual inac-
cessible to Knowledge, which sees them as mere malfunctionings; in
Marxist terms, an economic crisis is such a “symptomal torsion”’
(‘Psychoanalysis in Post-Marxism’, 239).
An Aesthetic of Emptiness—The Hitchcockian Cut

At the heart of Hitchcock’s film lies what we might call an aesthetic of
emptiness: a disappearing Miss Froy; Iris who becomes the ‘woman who
does not exist’; a lack of cognizance among the English characters of the
future implications of their ideological position of non-intervention. This
view of art as the organization of emptiness (le vide) was developed by
Lacan in his Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, his major work on
visual culture and the arts:
This Thing, all forms of which created by man belong to the sphere of sub-
limation, this Thing will always be represented by emptiness, precisely
because it cannot be represented by anything else—or, more exactly, because
it can only be represented by something else … in every form of sublima-
tion, emptiness is determinative … All art is characterized by a certain mode
of organization around this emptiness. (S7, 129–130)
In The Lady Vanishes, Miss Froy is someone who for all intents and
purposes represents ‘emptiness’—someone who is assuredly present but
does not exist, she is the subject who carries the film (around whom it is
organized) because of her emptiness—and there are countless examples of
this figure of the central void in Hitchcock’s films: Mrs Danvers in Rebecca,
Madame Sebastian in Notorious, Mrs Bates in Psycho, Madeleine in Vertigo,
George Kaplan in North by Northwest. It is Méliès ‘assemblage of tricks’
that Hitchcock exploits in The Lady Vanishes to elaborate a tapestry of
fantasy woven out of this central void. First of all, his presentation of the
disappearance of Miss Froy. After conversing with Miss Froy in the car-
riage seat in front of her, Iris who has been hit on the head (and is not
quite unconscious) before boarding the train falls asleep only to awake to
Miss Froy’s absence. She like the film audience (who also remains ‘uncon-
scious’) sees nothing of the mechanics of Miss Froy’s disappearance. The
narrative and this perceptual ‘cut’ are marked by a montage of shots that
indicate distance and the passing of time: the roaring train engine, tele-
graph wires, disappearing railway lines. As a section of curated images that
are cut together to constitute a new, previously non-existent, continuity,
the montage is itself a self-reflexive sign of the intervention of the cut.
Secondly, in a subsequent sequence, that of the luggage carriage, the pro-
tagonists begin to uncover evidence, not only of Miss Froy’s existence—
her name drawn on the carriage window, the Harriman’s Herbal Tea
label—but also of the events of her actual disappearance: Signor Doppo’s
magical equipment, the poster for his performance, Miss Froy’s broken
spectacles. After Iris and Gilbert’s comic romp with magical trick cabinets
and changing costumes, suddenly Signor Doppo’s hand and presence
‘cuts in’ as he forces the spectacles out of Iris’s hand, and the scene now
cuts back and forth between the ensuing battle between Doppo and the
couple watched by the observers in the rest of the carriage, a calf in a
wicker basket, two rabbits in a magician’s hat. These cuts again serve to
fragment the continuity of the narrative, that is to make us aware of ‘the
cut’, just as those of the train montage had done previously. And now this
move is literalized as we ‘cut’ to a close-up of Signor Doppo’s raised hand
holding a knife. And at the same moment, the camera ‘cuts’ as Iris, who
reaches for the knife standing on a suitcase, is literally cut (magically sawn)
in half, and now we see only her legs. Once again she is erased and becomes
‘the (half) vanished lady’. It is the brute presence of the knife that cuts
which brings the whole of the narrative into stark relief so that finally all of
the pieces fit (Dr Hartz the brain specialist with the aid of Signor Doppo
132 L. SIMMONS
the magician has contrived to make Miss Froy disappear and to abduct
her). It is at this point that the spectator sees the work for what it is,
namely a projected fantasy, a film that is a substance-less presence. With
the literal presence of the knife that cuts in the hand of the magician as
Karen Beckman suggests: ‘This self-reflexivity extends beyond the plot to
the cinematography, through which Hitchcock repeatedly draws the spec-
tators’ attention to the complicity between cinematic magic and romance,
disrupts the illusion of continuity, and refuses to allow the spectators a
passive role’ (1996, 99). Paradoxically, Hitchcock through the cut,
through the foregrounding of the cut in this way and the consequent dis-
ruption of cinematic identification actually sutures his spectator into the
story and projects the spectator further into his fantasy (by providing a
radical absence). Once again he transforms the discontinuous into the
continuous. This has been marked by a fundamental shift from the level of
the Imaginary (identification with the image on the screen) to that of the
Real (identification with the cut itself). The standard cinematic practice is
to conceal the cut, to construct and conserve the fantasy by disavowing
the real cuts and to disavow them through a fetishization of the ‘complete’
image. Instead, Hitchcock acknowledges the cut to traverse its own fan-
tasy. As he declared in an interview with Peter Bogdanovich: ‘It’s limitless,
I would say, the power of cutting and the assembly of images’ (1963, 4).
Foreclosure—The Woman Does(n’t) Exist

BARONESS: There has been no English lady here.
‘Woman doesn’t exist’ seems to be one of the most notorious ‘antifemi-

nist’ theses of the late Lacan. There is, however, a fundamental ambiguity
surrounding this repudiation of woman. An ambiguity that reflects the
notion of the ‘symptom’, as well as that of ‘repudiation’ itself, within
Lacanian theory. On the first, Žižek explains:
Woman doesn’t exist in herself, as a positive entity with full ontological con-
sistency, but only as a symptom of man … If … we conceive the symptom as
it was articulated in Lacan’s last writings and seminars—as, for example,
when he speaks about ‘Joyce the symptom’—namely as a particular signify-
ing formation which confers on the subject its very ontological consistency,
enabling it to structure its basic, constitutive relationship to enjoyment
(jouissance), then the entire relationship is reversed: if the symptom is dis-

solved, the subject itself loses the ground under his feet, disintegrates. In
this sense, ‘woman is a symptom of man’ means that man himself exists only
through woman qua his symptom: all his ontological consistency hangs on, is
suspended from his symptom, is ‘externalized’ in his symptom. In other
words, man literally ex-ists: his entire being lies ‘out there,’ in woman.
Woman, on the other hand, does not exist, she insists … Woman is therefore
no longer conceived as fundamentally ‘passive’ in contrast to male activity:
the act as such, in its most fundamental dimension is ‘feminine’.
(EYS, 155–156)
The second replays a repudiation of a repudiation. Freud’s Verwerfung

is translated as ‘repudiation’ in the Standard Edition of Freud’s work but
by Lacan with a word derived from the French legal system. ‘Forclusion’
(English, ‘foreclosure’) is a term introduced by Lacan in the 1950s. It
designates a specific phenomenon: the exclusion of a key signifier (the
Name-of-the-Father) from the Symbolic Order, which in turn triggers the
psychotic process. The foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father, ‘the failure
of the paternal metaphor’ (E, 479), leaves a gap in the Symbolic Order
that can never be filled, and this produces a psychotic structure in the
subject even in the absence of classical signs of psychosis. In Lacan’s refor-
mulation of Freud, what was foreclosed from the Symbolic returned in the
Real—in the form of hallucinatory phenomena, for example.
DR HARTZ: So interesting. You know, if one had time, one could trace
the cause of the hallucination.
GILBERT: Hallucination?
DR HARTZ: Oh, precisely. There is no Miss Froy. There never was a
Miss Froy. Merely a vivid subjective image.
Foreclosure designates a process of Symbolic abolition or wiping out.

In the later Lacan, this is universalized: a certain foreclosure is proper to
the order of the signifier as such. Whenever we have a Symbolic structure,
it is structured around a certain void; it implies the foreclosure of a certain
signifier. For example, in the lack of the Name-of-the-Father, what is at
issue is not a person but a signifier, and it is one replete with cultural and
religious significance, a key signifier in the regulation of the subject’s
Symbolic universe giving it structure. Lacan remarks: ‘It is in the name of
the father that we must recognize the basis of the symbolic function which,
134 L. SIMMONS
since the dawn of historical time, has identified his person with the figure
of the law’ (E, 230).
Psychosis—delusions and hallucinations—is brought about by the fore-
closure of the Name-of-the-Father. A psychotic is a subject who is not
duped by the Symbolic Order. In psychosis, the three rings of the
Borromean knot become disentangled. The psychotic dissociation may be
avoided by a symptomatic formation (sinthome) which acts as a fourth ring
to hold the other three together. Freud’s example was an Austrian judge,
Daniel Paul Schreber (1842–1911), who suffered from paranoid delu-
sions: these according to Lacan were produced by his failure to have a
child and thus become a father, and his election as a judge: both of these
experiences confronted him with the question of paternity and thus the
Name-of-the-Father in the Symbolic (S3, 30–31). In psychosis, the call for
Symbolic recognition arises under two conditions: when the subject is in a
particular intense relation with a strong narcissistic component (Iris’s
strong, ‘mirrored’ relationship with Miss Froy as ‘mOther’); and when the
question of the father arises from a third position (talk of Gilbert’s absent
father—‘it’s remarkable how many great men begin with their fathers’, he
says—plays the role of a suppléance, a substitute, a stand-in for what is
lacking for Iris in the Symbolic). This is why Gilbert, at least until the
film’s climax, plays the role of a naughty child, for psychosis involves the
exclusion of the Symbolic father from the family structure and its reduc-
tion to fractured mother–child relations. In The Lady Vanishes, Iris’s psy-
chosis is made manifest through two montage sequences: the first
containing Iris’s view of her friends refracted in an octagonal image that
represents her disorientation after being hit on head as the train pulls out
of the station; the second the superimposition of Miss Froy’s face over the
faces of the other passengers in the train who conspire to deny her exis-
tence (Fig. 4.4). This is the psychotic’s distrust of the big Other (embod-
ied in the intersubjective community) which she believes is trying to
deceive her. In both cases, Iris ‘blacks out’, as she does, curiously, after the
non-administration of poison by Dr Hartz. So, the ‘disappearance’ of Miss
Froy is matched by the disappearance of Iris as subject, her ‘fading out’.
She is able to overcome, or postpone, her encounter with the paternal
figure only at the price of her aphanisis (blackout or self-obliteration).
This accounts for the uncertainty that sticks to Iris’s ontological status. Is
she truly herself?
Fig. 4.4 Miss Froy’s face seen multiplied by the semi-conscious Iris
The Jouis-sens of Noise

Accompanying the credits that open The Lady Vanishes we hear the
musical tune associated with Miss Froy, which is later identified as the
secret melody carrying important information for European security. This
‘music whose status is never quite clear (when it is part of the diegetic real-
ity and when it is just part of the musical score), embodies, by means of its
painfully noisy repetition, the superego imperative of idiotic enjoyment’
(LA, 128). It is, at least initially, contrasted to Gilbert’s expressive, natural,
ancient folk-music, but even this is music representative of the patriarchal
order (the dance Gilbert records is what ‘they danced when your father
married your mother’, he explains to the hotel manager). Miss Froy’s
response to the clarinet ‘noise’ coming from Gilbert’s room is ‘What a
horrible noise … I feel quite sorry for that poor singer outside having to
compete with this’. Gilbert subsequently offers a defence, again to the
hotel manager, but still in patriarchal terms: ‘You dare to call it a noise.
136 L. SIMMONS
The ancient music with which your present ancestors celebrated every
wedding for countless generations’. Gilbert, too, is not above singing the
Colonel Bogey March (popularly associated with ribald lyrics) loudly in
Iris’s bathroom. Miss Froy’s ‘proper’ tune, however, contains the threat of
death, as the strangulation of the lone guitarist who first performs it
confirms.
MISS FROY: Do you hear that music? Everyone sings here. The people
are just like happy children, with laughter on their lips
and music in their hearts.
CHARTERS: It’s not reflected in their politics, you know.
MISS FROY: I never think you should judge any country by its politics.
Thus, there exists an association of music and the voice (we remember
the ‘musicality’ of the Babelesque otherness of the opening scene at the
hotel), music and politics, and a distinction (but nevertheless a link)
between music and noise. What is the status of music if it is allied to the
voice? The musical code to be passed on by Miss Froy, in that it translates
or transposes the phrases of the treaty into tune, is akin to Michel Chion’s
(1999) notion of la voix acousmatique, ‘the voice without bearer, which
cannot be attributed to any subject and hovers in some indefinite inter-
space … insofar as it is not anchored to a specific source, localised in a
specific place, the voix acousmatique functions as a threat that lurks every-
where’ (LA, 126). Here we might also turn to Žižek’s exploration
(together with Mladen Dolar) of opera in Opera’s Second Death (2002).
Opera’s first death according to Žižek was its (still) birth, which involved
an arresting of the libidinal life-force of music by suturing a voice to it. Its
second death involves the erasure of the voice proper, or its replacement
as just another instrument, by the second Viennese School of composers
like Schoenberg. As Rex Butler and Scott Stephens elaborate:
With opera’s second death, therefore, we no longer have the sense of the
voice, as we do after its first death, but the jouis-sense of noise (at least the
noise of the instruments themselves, no longer understood as mere accom-
paniment to the voice or as part of some overall harmony). We might even
say that, if opera begins with a negation—its first death as a kind of symbolic
cut into the imaginary of melody—it ends with a negation of negation—the
entry of the Real into the symbolic. (ITR, 1)
The unique character of the operatic voice and its relation to (musical)
noise is that it enacts formally, materially the speculative Hegelian notion
of the negation of negation (see TN, 120–124; LTN, 292–304). It does
not return to the simple starting point, rather within the affirmation of the
double negative lie the layers of negation.
What is music’s status if it is allied to political secrets? This is a point
Miss Froy conveniently glosses over or deflects. Again the musical tune,
inasmuch as it is ‘the experience that we never had what we were supposed
to have lost’ (ITR, 274), is a circularity that is its own cause, an instance
of the negation of negation: it cures, but only in the form of the disease
itself. Hitchcock attaches music to Miss Froy, the bearer of the tune and
the unexpected secret agent, but she is also amaterial, ‘vanished’, mummi-
fied even, for a good part of the film. So, what are we to make of the laugh-
ing Miss Froy at the piano in the Foreign Office at the end of the film? We
are offered a form of what Žižek calls ‘ideological jouissance’ (SOI, 79–84).
The melody captures the conjunction of the meaning offered by ideology
with its ultimate core of meaninglessness, for it is the very attempt to cover
it over that reveals there is nothing underneath. Because, as Žižek insists,
‘Le sinthome is not the symptom, the coded message to be deciphered by
interpretation, but the meaningless letter that immediately procures jouis-
sense, “enjoyment-in-meaning,” “enjoymeant”’ (LA, 128–129).
Bandrika, Land of Bands

Žižek in one definition of the symptom describes it as ‘the point of
emergence of the truth about social relations’ (SOI, 26). The first chapter
of his first book in English, The Sublime Object of Ideology, makes the pro-
vocative—if typically counterintuitive for Žižek—claim that Marx not
Freud invented the symptom, and he acknowledges that it was Lacan who
first made this claim.11 In his chapter ‘How Did Marx Invent the Symptom?’
he proposes that Marx’s criticism of ideology is ‘already “symptomatic”: it
consists in detecting a point of breakdown heterogeneous to a given ideo-
logical field and at the same time necessary for that field to achieve its clo-
sure, its accomplished form’ (SOI, 21). At some point, the logic of every
socio-economic system breaks down and this is the point that marks its
symptom. The symptom provides a position from which to challenge the
social order since it endangers the functioning of the system, even though
it is a necessary creation of that system. Capitalism invents and needs the
138 L. SIMMONS
proletariat, yet the existence of the proletariat is what threatens the future
of capitalism. ‘In this sense’, argues Todd McGowan, ‘the symptom
becomes perhaps the primary category in Žižek’s conception of politics’
(2014, 242). The fundamental symptom that is both the key for a political
system and holds it together is, for Žižek, the kernel of enjoyment that is
the sinthome. What is the relation between the symptom and ideology?
Social space is one of conflict because symptoms are the result of conflict.
Even as it disrupts the structure, the symptom provides enjoyment that
the structure cannot do without. In all its complexity, this is the logic of
the symptom that shapes Žižek’s work:
This, then is a symptom: a particular, ‘pathological’, signifying formation, a

binding of enjoyment, an inert stain resisting communication and interpre-
tation, a stain which cannot be included in the circuit of discourse, of social
bond network, but is at the same time a positive condition of it. (SOI, 75)
Repetition is key in recognition of the sinthome, for if other signifiers

shift and slide metonymically along a signifying chain, the sign of the sin-
thome is its persistence, its inertia, the force of whose repetition evades
interpretation. It is the persistent cough from which Freud’s Dora could
not rid herself. From the first scene in the Bandrikan hotel—when a
cuckoo clock blasts out not fake birdsong but trumpet solos—music, bells,
voices, tunes of every kind pervade and intrude on The Lady Vanishes’ nar-
rative, their intrusive rhythms literally holding up the Symbolic Order
even as they embody the imperative of enjoyment that sustains the diegetic
reality. It is, for example, the cuckoo clock that early on trumpets the time,
that links music to the imperative temporal ordering of the time of the
nation. Therefore, it is apt that one of the two Englishmen should take the
version of the ‘Hungarian rhapsody’ sung by a group of Bandrikan locals
for their ‘national anthem’, for as Žižek insists, what holds together a
nation’s Real, Symbolic and Imaginary attributes, what constitutes its mis-
recognized centre, is not the symbolically and ideologically decipherable
national anthem but its particular form of ‘idiotic enjoyment’. Those
things deemed purely ‘aesthetic’ or without particular national meaning
actually work to condense the fantasy frame of the Nazi/Fascist ideology
that will appear much later in the film in its political force. In a later scene,
the negotiations between Gilbert and Iris are almost drowned out by the
narratively gratuitous sound of dancing and singing in the background.
These songs embody the core of enjoyment that sustains the nation as
signifiers immediately penetrated by jouissance, which in their persistent
presence escape historical or discursive explicability. As Miss Froy points
out, ‘Everyone sings here, the people are just like happy children, with
laughter on their lips and music in their hearts’. Yet there is, as she herself
knows, no innocence to this singing: as the example of the tune to be
remembered indicates, simple melodies can sustain or break the ideologi-
cal order that history will come to know as fascism. It is no accident that
among the intricacies of espionage and intrigue that make up the film’s
plot is the murder by strangulation of the singer of the theme song, locat-
ing at the centre of international conflict the jealous attempt to silence the
other’s enjoyment. It is enjoyment, then, that is at stake in the interna-
tional dispute, the object of that dispute a cheerful whistle-able tune. Yet
if the ideological sinthome works to sustain a latently violent Symbolic
Order, it ultimately exceeds the social order it sustains: thus, we could
say—proving Žižek’s point that the symptom both sustains and threatens
the system (SOI, 21–23)—that it is precisely by means of the sinthome
(music) that the Bandrikans endure the totalitarian system to which they
are subjected, embodying as it does a meaningless remainder of the real
jouissance that puts them beyond reach of the totalitarian signifier. As
Žižek writes of Terry Gillian’s Brazil with its irritating, stupid song from
the 1950s, the spectacle of The Lady Vanishes ‘does not therefore stage any
sort of “repressed truth of totalitarianism”, it does not confront totalitar-
ian logic with its “truth”. It simply dissolves totalitarianism as an effective
social bond by isolating the hideous kernel of its idiotic enjoyment’
(LA, 129).
Gilbert’s position exemplifies the sinthome’s status as the ‘fourth ring’
that can artificially sustain the consistency of the subject, making him what
Lacan dubbed a ‘synth-homme’. The sinthome secures the potentially
fragile knotting together of the Imaginary, Symbolic and Real, effected by
the exclusion of the Name-of-the-Father. With regard to Gilbert’s inheri-
tance, as he attests to Iris, music was ‘all his father left him’. Throughout
Gilbert is identified with compulsive musicality: singing loudly in the
shower, orchestrating Bandrikan folk festivals in his hotel room, writing a
very large tome on the subject. These musical events seem to hold together
his very being. In the final act of the film, Gilbert whistles the tune
imparted to him by Miss Froy compulsively, as the only way to support
potential loss of reality induced by the recognition of the impossible vio-
lence of the foreign soldiers. Yet despite Miss Froy’s insistence on the vital
140 L. SIMMONS
import of the tune, the status of music as a sinthome for Gilbert, as a signi-
fier that immediately procures enjoyment, interferes and puts it beyond
interpretation, even when the future of a nation is at stake. In the final
scene at the Home Office, it looks like his sinthome is about to be deci-
phered but then it has conveniently slipped his mind (in fact it has been
displaced by another tune [symptom], Mendelssohn’s ‘Wedding March’).
Though the sinthome can theoretically be accorded a certain meaning that
can locate it in a discursive context, it resists getting caught in the grip of
a signifying meaning.
The Objet petit a, Other of the Other

When Gilbert embarks on his first conversation with Iris, he announces
why he finds her so ‘remarkably attractive’: she possesses ‘two great quali-
ties (he) used to admire in his father’—she is ‘very rude and always seeing
things’. What we encounter here immediately is an example of desire’s
dependence on the objet petit a, the cause of desire that resides in the
object of desire (see Chap. 2). The agalma, as the feature or element that
mediates desire, is what makes the object desirable without however coin-
ciding entirely with that object, giving our enjoyment of the object an
inevitable surplus in which we relate not to the other, but only to the objet
petit a. What is opened up by Gilbert’s words is the void instituted by the
absence of his father, the void that Žižek identifies as ‘the ultimate object-
cause of desire’; it is in her being ‘put in the place of’ this void that Iris
becomes an object of desire. The objet petit a, then, as the always already
lost-cause of desire, is knowable only in its effects, in the contingent
objects that fill the place of that void opened up by symbolic castration.
Yet if it is only knowable in its effects, then how do we recognize it? The
answer is that it is precisely in desire’s endless sliding through a chain of
signifiers, as Gilbert’s desire can be seen to do in The Lady Vanishes, that
the metonymical signifiers of desire betray their essential contingency and
open up the inevitable gap between the object and the object-cause of
desire. Thus, when the film opens, music, which itself bears a metonymical
association with his father, is Gilbert’s defining passion, defended jealously
when attacked; and, as noted above, we learn that his father ‘left me noth-
ing else—only music’. Yet by the end of the film, music has been sup-
planted as the cherished object of desire by the heroine Iris, and in the
final scene the ‘tune’ has slipped his mind, replaced by the ‘Wedding
March’ as his desire easily slips from the grip of one signifier to that of
another. Lacan thus identifies the heterosexual love relationship as merely

one contingent and substitutable formula of desire among others, one
more link in a chain of signifiers on the run from their ‘lost cause’. This
non-coincidence between cause and object is played out further in the
scenes between the two protagonists that display the devious route that
desire takes to the other. For initially, Gilbert’s behaviour towards Iris
takes no account of her desire whatsoever—clambering over her bed,
invading her space, ignoring her rebuffs. Since it is her ‘rudeness’ (like his
father’s) that operates as the cause of his desire, he enjoys both provoking
and encouraging it as that in her that makes her desirable, as that apparent
‘obstacle’ to desire that his desire would paradoxically be nothing without.
‘You heartless, callous, selfish, swollen-headed beast, you’, declares Iris in
the final scene before Gilbert kisses her passionately. ‘I love what is in you
more than you, and therefore, I destroy you’, as the Lacanian formula has
it (S11, 263). Gilbert doesn’t, of course, destroy his beloved, but he does
achieve a surplus-enjoyment through her, an enjoyment whose very exces-
siveness suggests that it is not her, but ‘something in her more than her’,
that catches his fantasy.
Aufhebung-ed (Sublation Not Sublimation)

This is a film of couples and doubles: Iris and Miss Froy; Gilbert and Iris;
Gilbert and his absent father; the (possibly gay) cricket buffs Charters and
Caldicott; Signor and Signora Doppo (doppio is double in Italian and
Signor Doppo also has a cardboard cut-out double); the Todhunters; Dr
Hartz and the Baroness, even the two rabbits in the magician’s hat. Not
surprisingly, then, a series of oppositions are set up in the film that the nar-
rative labours to ‘sublate’. We learn immediately that Iris is ‘independent’
and ‘wilful’: it is she who calls the hotel manager to stop the person play-
ing music upstairs, she who appears to be the group leader among her
friends. Yet we also learn that she is about to be married—and the two
pieces of information, her ‘masculine attributes’ and her fatal feminine
destiny, seem to pose an irreconcilable conflict. The terms on which this
impending marriage are framed are those of sacrifice, of ‘renouncing her
maidenly past’; she looks forward cynically to her marriage as the occasion
of a ‘slightly sunburnt sacrifice on an altar’ that will end her life as an active
sexual agent, in which she will ‘take the veil’ adding, ‘and the orange blos-
som’ of the bride as a mere qualifier of her miserable vision. Marriage is
figured, then, as occasioning a loss of those very features with which her
142 L. SIMMONS
character has been identified, as qualities irreconcilable with the status of

a married woman. Her friends mock her for her notion of marriage:
BLANCHE: Have you ever read about that little thing called love?
JULIE: It used to be very popular.
Iris, unable to understand marriage in terms of love, limits her concept

of marriage to external necessity, an answer to the order ‘Marry!’ deliv-
ered, among others, by her father, who she says wants a ‘coat of arms’.
Marry! in fact seems to be a refrain of the film: its recurrent, compulsive
reference to heterosexual love as the inevitable sum and aim of human life
make the film itself a sort of compulsive matchmaker intent on ‘getting
people together’ (consider, e.g., Miss Froy’s romantic image of ‘the big
mother and father mountains with their white snow hats’ and ‘Mrs’
Todhunter’s desire to normalize her relationship). The invasion of her first
encounter with Gilbert dramatizes, and seems to confirm, the loss of self
with which Iris associates the relationship with the male sex. However, the
heterosexual labour of the film works to reconfigure this ‘surrender’ as an
accession to an equal and productive partnership.12 As the film progresses,
this conflict will, in Hegelian terms, be sublated (Aufhebung-ed), that is
simultaneously ‘raised up’, ‘annulled’, and ‘preserved’—transforming the
moral necessity of the heterosexual relationship into a work of free choice,
‘removing it from its immediacy and external influences’. As Gilbert and
Iris go about attempting to save Miss Froy, those apparent opposites—the
concept of independence and the concept of union—are sublated in their
partnership, their ‘we’ is the fulfilment of rather than the loss of the self-
hood to which Iris is attached. This is one of numerous examples of the
Hitchcockian love relationship as a working partnership, rather than a nar-
rative digression. For Iris, the only way in which she can sublate the
aggression with which Gilbert’s desire is enacted is through reciprocating
it: simultaneous ‘abolition’ and ‘preservation’ of his invasive desire via the
reciprocation of desire that raises desire up to the level of love. Their final
kiss in the taxi on the way to the Foreign Office embodies, at the level of
the film-text itself, a singular ‘moment of the whole’ in which the split
inhabitants of the structuring shot-reverse shot formation that ‘diploma-
tizes’ between opposites, coincide, together in the same frame. ‘Love’ as
partnership, then, is the truth or sublation of the impossible sexual
relationship.
Like the film, as I have noted, Žižek reads the dialectical process of
Hegel in a more radical way. The dialectic does not produce a resolution
or a synthesized viewpoint, rather it points out that ‘contradiction is an
internal condition of every identity’ (SOI, 6). An idea about something is
always disrupted by a discrepancy, but that discrepancy is necessary for the
idea to exist in the first place. This is contradictory but the truth of the
assertion lies in the contradiction. It is, suggests Tony Myers, ‘an oxymo-
ronic style of thought’. For Žižek, Myers argues, ‘the truth is always found
in the contradiction rather than the smooth effacement of differences’
(2003, 17). Truth is not found in the compromise or the middle way but
in the contradiction. One works through the negative not by opposing it
to the positive but by conceiving of the positive itself as a materialization
of negativity, a negation of negation.
Eastern European Totalitarianism? No Thanks!

In The Parallax View, Žižek notes the curious, almost systematic, use of
the fake background in many of Hitchcock’s films:
Ingrid Bergman skiing down a mountain slope in front of a ridiculously

discrepant snowy background in Spellbound; Ingrid Bergman again, driving
a car in a studio with the uncoordinated background of a night landscape
passing by in Notorious; and two exemplary cases from his late films (the
dining-car-table conversation between Cary Grant and Eva-Marie Saint with
a Hudson Bay background in which we pass the same barn three times in
North by Northwest; Tippi Hedren riding a horse in Marnie). Although it is
easy to project a conscious strategy into what may simply have been
Hitchcock’s sloppiness, it is difficult to deny the strange psychological reso-
nance of these shots, as if the very discord between figure and background
conveys a key message about the depicted person’s subjectivity … this irre-
ducible gap between the subject and its ‘background,’ the fact that the sub-
ject never fully fits its environment, is never fully embedded in it, defines
subjectivity. (PV, 45)
The opening credits of The Lady Vanishes roll over a mountainous land-
scape, part rock part fir trees covered in a dusting of snow. When the
credits have finished, the camera slowly pans right, and we look down over
a hillside of avalanche snow, a white-out of signification, that has buried a
train at the entrance to a rail tunnel. Our point of view then advances over
a train station with carriages sidelined on parallel tracks, a hodge-podge of
144 L. SIMMONS
station buildings and tiny, immobile figures on the snow-bound platform.

We subsequently slide past several chalet-like dwellings of an alpine village,
while observing a motor-vehicle that negotiates the space between them.
The camera then pans along the lower façade of one of these chalets,
clearly from its signage a hotel or guest-house, and the shot dissolves
through the hotel window to the activity inside. What is most obvious is
that this opening sequence, up until the moment of the dissolve to the
‘realistic’ scene inside the hotel, is an illusion. It is made, first of all, from
a landscape painting and, then, it consists of a constructed, toy-like model
shot complete with miniature car. Indeed, we could say that this film is
constructed in large part from an illusion of miniature models, transparen-
cies, back projection and studio sets, of characters never fully embedded in
their backgrounds—the audacious but ham-fisted trickery of which we are
only too aware. Francois Truffaut, who claimed that he sometimes saw the
film twice in one week in Paris, told Hitchcock:
Since I know it by heart, I tell myself each time that I’m going to ignore the
plot, to examine the train and see if it’s really moving, or to look at the
transparencies, or to study the camera movements inside the compartments.
But each time I become so absorbed by the characters and the story that I’ve
yet to figure out the mechanics of [the] film. (1985, 117–118)
Similarly, the projected setting of the Balkan nation of Bandrika is also

a discrepant (and illusory) composite: a mixture of Yugoslavia,
Czechoslovakia and the French-Swiss Alps; as is the Bandrikan language:
a phonetic salad ludicrously cobbled together by screenwriters Sidney
Gilliat and Frank Launder from fragments of the languages of central
Europe. The chosen setting of the film is also cinematically charged and,
as Tom Cohen points out, referenced to popular Hollywood vampire and
monster movies ‘including a merry innkeeper named “Boris”, a Bela
Lugosi double in Dr Hartz and the presentation of a mummy-wrapped
Miss Froy … Everything from Signor Doppo’s magic props to the screen-
like train windows works cinematic tropes into something that is under-
way’ (2005, vol. 2, 26).
Nevertheless, as most commentators note, the film was to portray both
overt and subliminal content of political events taking place in Europe at
the time, and this is even more conscious as it was made in a period when
the British Board of Film Censors blocked any film which overtly criti-
cized foreign governments. The villains of the plot are most obviously
Nazi surrogates, in particular the brain specialist Dr Hartz whose name

conflates the German for hard (hart) and heart (Hertz). Hitchcock’s film
is a clear attack, too, on Britain’s isolationist foreign policy under Prime
Minister Neville Chamberlain who a few months after it was released was
to come to an accommodation with Hitler at Munich. With the exception
of Miss Froy, Iris and Gilbert, the British passengers on board the train still
cling to an obstinate isolationism, reluctant to take the enemy seriously
even when they are fired upon, they would rather focus inwardly on events
(cricket matches!) or domestic arrangements back in England (see Smith
2012). The conservative lawyer dies shot in the back fluttering a white
handkerchief (‘They can’t possibly do anything to us. We’re British sub-
jects’; ‘They can’t do anything. It would mean an international situation’,
insists Todhunter before he abandons the safety of the train).
Historical events immediately preceding the writing and making of the
film are surely significant: Germany had passed the Nuremberg Laws in
1935 stripping its Jewish citizens of most of their rights, in 1936 it had
remilitarized the Rhineland contravening the treaty ending World War
I. Also at the time secret treaties, such as the one Miss Froy is reporting to
Whitehall, were a source of anxiety as they were seen as one of the causes
of the First World War, when individual countries may have attacked each
other, but were also supported through secret alliances by others, with the
final result that all of Europe ended up at war. The political situation of
Bandrika, as much as we are given to understand it, reflects the contempo-
rary uncertainties and anxieties of the leaders of dozens of countries of
Eastern Europe, some of which had emerged out of the ruins of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire, struggling to materialize into a period of pop-
ular rule against the background of the political manipulations of larger
powers such as Russia, Germany and Italy.
The term Balkan which includes the countries of the former Yugoslavia
along with Greece, Albania, Romania, Bulgaria and the European part of
Turkey—but also the imaginary (novel and film) lands of Carphatia,
Ruritania, Kravonia, Silaria, Moesia, Selvonia, Pottibakia, Evarchia, Slaka
and Bandrika—has long been the subject of the Western European colo-
nial imagination, and visited by fantasists who Vesna Goldsworthy in her
book Inventing Ruritania (1998) rightly labels ‘textual colonisers’.
According to Žižek, this
fantasy which organized the perception of ex-Yugoslavia is that of the

‘Balkan’ as the Other of the West: the place of savage ethnic conflicts long
146 L. SIMMONS
since overcome by civilized Europe; a place where nothing is forgotten and

nothing learned, where old traumas are replayed again and again; where the
symbolic link simultaneously devalued (dozens of ceasefires are broken) and
overvalued (primitive warrior notions of honour and pride). (ME, 212)
Like Hitchcock’s representation of Bandrika, constructed at moments

from a painting or back projection, Žižek often speaks of the Balkans as a
spectral fantasy screen (Deckerinnerung, screen memory) where the recent
upheavals have allowed the West to project in fantasy the (re)discovery of
its own democracy. He explains:
What fascinated the Western gaze was the reinvention of Democracy. It is as

if democracy, which in the West shows more and more signs of decay and
crisis and is lost in bureaucratic routine and publicity-style election cam-
paigns, is being rediscovered in Eastern Europe in all its freshness and nov-
elty. The function of this fascination is thus purely ideological: in Eastern
Europe, the West seeks for its own lost experience of ‘democratic inven-
tion’ … The real object of fascination for the West is thus the gaze, namely
the supposedly naive gaze by means of which Eastern Europe stares back at
the West, fascinated by its democracy. (TN, 200)
It is clear, Žižek insists, that in the case of the Balkans, we are dealing
not with ‘real geography but with an imaginary cartography which proj-
ects onto the real landscape its own shadowy, often disavowed, ideologi-
cal antagonisms, just as Freud claimed that the localization of the
hysteric’s conversion symptoms project onto the physical body the map
of another, imaginary anatomy’ (FA, 4). The Balkans—as the terrain of
ethnic horrors and intolerance, of primitive irrational warring passions,
ridiculous political comic operetta plots—in fact mirrors ‘Europe itself in
its Otherness, the screen onto which Europe projected its own repressed
reverse’ (ME, 212). The nation of Bandrika and its primitive passions and
ethnic horrors is not the opposite of civilized and reserved England, but
rather its symptom, the place from which the hidden truth of Englishness
emerges. It surfaces, of course, with Iris and her friends Julie and Blanche
who use their wit and sex to dominate any context, and who resist any
notion of the passive, decorous woman (here the ‘lady’ has vanished in
another sense). Flirty and self-confident Iris stands in her lingerie on a
table and asks the embarrassed waiter who is delivering an oversized bot-
tle of champagne there for help to get down. In terms of conventional
politics The Lady Vanishes might seem to support the elaboration of two
alternatives, which would become the two sides of the second world war,
followed by the eventual victory and predominance of the ‘correct ideol-
ogy’; or possibly even some pseudo-Hegelian compromise that takes the
best of both sides. The villains are obvious Nazi surrogates, and indeed
one publicity still shows Gilbert reading a newspaper with a partially
obscured headline in German not Bandrikan: ‘Hitler erzählt…’ (Hitler
says…).13 But Hitchcock, who had signed a deal with producer David
Selznick in July 1938 when The Lady Vanishes was still in post-produc-
tion, and was to leave for Hollywood in 1939, had also blended the
genres of romantic comedy and thriller based on the agency of a vanish-
ing process. That is, he had both foregrounded political violence and
erased it with illusion. Is this not what Žižek means by a ‘third type of
socio-political arrangement’, that is, the thinking of the alternatives
together, in some way maintained and inseparable. The solution is not to
be found by choosing between alternatives but in thinking what both
choices exclude and stand in for.14 In social analysis the symptom, the
sinthome of the melody from the Balkans, the vital clause of a secret pact
between two European countries, would be that which is thought to
introduce disharmony in a society that would otherwise be harmoniously
unified under a certain utopian ideal: ‘A thing like this might cause a war’,
declares Charters. In an ideological fantasy that serves to conceal from
political systems their own necessary finitude, the sinthome appears as an
alien disturbing intrusion, not as it is in a conscious reality, and it is, as
Hitchcock along with Žižek intimates, ‘the point of eruption of the oth-
erwise hidden truth of the existing social order’ (LA, 140). Perhaps the
last word on the matter should be left to a Bandrikan:
DR HARTZ: May our enemies, if they exist, be unconscious of our

purpose.
Notes
1. Žižek insists that if we search for a common core among these figures we
say too much, if we reduce them to an empty signifier we don’t say enough:
‘The right balance is attained when we conceive them as sinthoms in the
Lacanian sense: as a signifier’s constellation (formula) which fixes a certain
core of enjoyment, like mannerisms in painting…’ (EYAW, 16).
2. The main difference between the Freudian conception of the symptom
and the early Lacanian one is that Lacan views the symptom from the
148 L. SIMMONS
erspective of language: it is a signifier not an index (which is how it is

p
viewed from a purely medical perspective). In his first seminar, Lacan pos-
its that the symptom initially appears to us ‘as a trace, which will only ever
be a trace, one which will continue not to be understood until the analysis
has got quite a long way, and until we have understood its meaning’ (S1,
159). There is subsequently a long conceptual shift away from the linguis-
tic model towards a view of the symptom as a pure jouissance which can-
not be interpreted, a shift that culminates in the elaboration of the term
sinthome. ‘The symptom is not only a cyphered message, it is at the same
time a way for the subject to organize his enjoyment—that is why, even
after the completed interpretation, the subject is not prepared to renounce
his symptom: that is why he “loves his symptom more than himself”’
(SOI, 74). Indeed, the sinthome in the ‘Late Lacan’ blocks rather than
elicits interpretation since it recognizes in the symptom that which binds
the subject to his or her jouissance. In this sense, the symptom is what
keeps the subject going and cannot be removed or resolved without sub-
jective collapse.
3. Žižek continues by quoting Jung: ‘A neurosis is truly removed only when
it has removed the false attitude of the ego. We do not cure it—it cures us.
A man is ill, but the illness is nature’s attempt to heal him, and what the
neurotic flings away as absolutely worthless contains the true gold we
should never have found elsewhere’ (Jung 1979, 170).
4. See Michael Walker (2005, 374–377) and Graham Fuller (2008) for more
on Hitchcock’s trains.
5. King and Miller point out how the original source novel of Hitchcock’s
screenplay, Ethel Lina White’s The Wheel Spins (1955 [1936]), comments
in a self-reflective fashion on the experience of train travel (2001, 112).
6. As Robert Samuels notes: ‘“Iris” can be read as a double reference to
“ego” and “eye”. She is the one who has seen the lady and is looking for
proof of her absence’ (1998, 19).
7. These films are examples of what Simon During analyses as ‘secular
magic … a powerful agent in the formation of modern culture precisely
because it is trivial’ (2002, 2). During notes, ‘As far as Méliès was con-
cerned, what would become Hollywood’s ‘classic’ cinema style consisted
of magic tricks that did not declare themselves as such’ (170).
8. During (2002, 142) traces this stage act back to 1886 and French magician
Buatier de Kolta (1847–1903).
9. As Graham Fuller remarks of Iris not Miss Froy: ‘This lady has vanished for
good’ (2008, 36).
10. The significant phrase which Žižek isolates from Badiou is ‘that symptomal
torsion of being which is a truth within the perpetually total web of knowl-
edges’ (Badiou 2006, 19) (translation modified).
11. In a text of 1966, ‘On the Subject Who Is Finally in Question’, Lacan
alludes to Marx’s relation to the symptom: ‘It is difficult not to see that,
even before the advent of psychoanalysis, a dimension that might be called
that of the symptom was introduced…’ (E, 194). In his Seminar 22 of
1974–1975, RSI, the allusion becomes explicit: ‘That the term should
have come from elsewhere, namely from the symptom as Marx defined it
in the social, takes nothing away from the well-foundedness of its employ-
ment, as I might say, in the private’ (Seminar January 21, 1975) (S22, 60).
For a further detailed elaboration of the relationship between Lacan and
Marx, see Pierre Bruno (2020).
12. For a different reading of these dynamics. See Petro (2009).
13. Quoted in Beckman (1996, 89).
14. This is Žižek’s response to NATO bombings in Serbia in support of human
rights and Milošević’s programme of ‘ethnic cleansing’: ‘What if this very
opposition between enlightened international intervention against ethnic
fundamentalism and the last heroic pockets of resistance against the New
World Order is a false one? What if phenomena like Milošević’s regime are
not the opposite of the New World Order, but rather its symptom, the place
from which the hidden truth of the New World Order emerges?’ (TUE, 263).
References
Works by Žižek
HRL. How to Read Lacan. London: Granta Books, 2006.
ITR. Interrogating the Real, edited by Rex Butler and Scott Stephens. London
and New York: Continuum, 2005.
LA. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 1991.
LTN. Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London:
Verso, 2012.
ME. The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Women and Causality. London:
Verso, 1994.
OSD. Opera’s Second Death, with Mladen Dolar. London: Routledge, 2002.
PV. The Parallax View. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. 2006.
150 L. SIMMONS

TS. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. London:
Verso, 1999.
TUE. The Universal Exception, edited by Rex Butler and Scott Stephens. London:
Continuum, 2006.
Objects, Renata Salecl and Slavoj Žižek editors. Durham and London: Duke
‘Psychoanalysis in Post-Marxism: The Case of Alain Badiou,’ South Atlantic
Quarterly 97:2 (1998): 235–261.
‘“The Most Sublime of Hysterics”: Hegel with Lacan,’ Interrogating the Real,
edited by Rex Butler and Scott Stephens. London and New York: Continuum,
2005: 38–58.
Works by Lacan
S1. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique 1953–1954,
edited by Jacques-Alain Miller translated with notes by John Forrester.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954–1955, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller trans-
S3. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book III 1955–1956: The Psychoses, edited by
Jacques-Alain Miller, translated with notes by Russell Grigg. London:
Routledge, 1993.
S7. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book VII: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the
Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954–1955, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller trans-
lated with notes by Dennis Porter. London: Routledge, 1992.
Psychoanalysis 1963–1964, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by Alan
Sheridan. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1998.
S22. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book XXII: R.S.I. 1974–1975, unpublished
translation by Cormac Gallagher.
S23. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book XXIII: The Sinthome, edited by Jacques-
Alain Miller, translated by A. R. Price. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018.
Works by Freud
SE XII. ‘Psychoanalytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of
Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides) (Schreber)’ (1911), vol. 12, The Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Translated from
the German under the General Editorship of James Strachey. In collaboration
with Anna Freud. Assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson, 24 volumes.
London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1955: 3–80.
Other Works
Badiou, Alain. 2006. Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham. London and
New York: Continuum.
Barr, Charles. 1999. English Hitchcock. Moffat: Cameron & Hollis.
Beckman, Karen. 1996. Violent Vanishings: Hitchcock, Harlan and the
Disappearing Women. Camera Obscura 13:3: 77–103. Reproduced in her
Cinematernity: Film, Motherhood, Genre. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Bogdanovich, Peter. 1963. The Cinema of Alfred Hitchcock. New York: Museum
of Modern Art Film Library.
Bruno, Pierre. 2020. Lacan and Marx: The Invention of the Symptom, trans. John
Holland. Abingdon and New York: Routledge.
Chion, Michel. 1999. The Voice in Cinema, ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman.
Cohen, Tom. 2005. Hitchcock’s Cryptonomies. Volume 2. War Machines.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Dean, Tim. 2002. Art as Symptom: Žižek and the Ethics of Psychoanalytic
Criticism. Diacritics 32:2: 20–41.
During, Simon. 2002. Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular
Magic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Fischer, Lucy. 1979. The Lady Vanishes: Women, Magic and the Movies. Film
Quarterly 33:1: 30–40.
Fuller, Graham. 2008. Mystery Train. Sight and Sound 18:1: 36–40.
Goldsworthy, Vesna.1998. Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the
Imagination. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Grigg, Russell. 1998. From the Mechanism of Psychosis to the Universal Condition
of the Symptom: On Foreclosure. In Key Concepts of Lacanian Psychoanalysis,
ed. Dany Nobus, 48–74. London: Rebus Press.
Jung, Carl Gustav. 1979. Civilisation in Transition. The Collected Works of
C.G. Jung, vol. 10. London: Routledge.
King, Noel and Toby Miller. 2001. The Lady Vanishes but She Won’t Go Away. In
Hitchcock at the Source: The Auteur as Adapter, ed. R. Barton Palmer and David
Boyd, 103–115. Albany: State University of New York Press.
152 L. SIMMONS
McGowan, Todd. 2014. Symptom. In The Žižek Dictionary, ed. Rex Butler,
242–5. Durham: Acumen.
Myers, Tony. 2003. Slavoj Žižek, London and New York: Routledge.
Petro, Patrice. 2009. Rematerializing the Vanishing ‘Lady’: Feminism, Hitchcock,
and Interpretation. In A Hitchcock Reader, ed. Marshall Deutelbaum and
Leland Poague, 126–135. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2nd edition.
Samuels, Robert. 1998. Hitchcock’s Bi-Textuality: Lacan, Feminisms and Queer
Theory. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Smith, Gregory O. 2012. Jolly Old Sports: English Character, Comedy, and
Cricket in The Lady Vanishes. Film History: An Interdisciplinary Journal
42:2: 55–76.
Soler, Colette. 1991. Literature as Symptom. In Lacan and the Subject of Language,
ed. Ellie Ragland-Sullivan and Mark Bracher, 213–219. New York and London:
Routledge.
Walker, Michael. 2005. Hitchcock’s Motifs. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Wenders, Wim. 1992. Wim Wenders’ Guilty Pleasures. Film Comment 28:1: 74–77.
White, Ethel Lina. 1955 [1936]. The Wheel Spins. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
CHAPTER 5
Metastases: Spellbound (1945)
Abstract In a film that takes psychoanalysis as its subject matter, John

Ballyntine arrives at Green Manors mental asylum unaware of his own
past. Suffering from amnesia, he believes himself to be a Dr Edwardes
arriving to replace its director. After his false identity is exposed, he searches
for the truth about his past with the help of Constance, a psychiatrist with
whom he is falling in love. After solving the riddle of an obsessive dream,
he returns to the site of his apparent murder of the real Dr Edwardes.
Metastasis is a rhetorical figure that involves the rapid transition from one
point to another. Sexuality, Žižek argues following Lacan, who preferred
the term ‘sexuation’, is a metastasis: it is something that is transferred, not
a fixed essence or identity. In Hitchcock’s film, there exists a split and shift
from Ballyntine to Constance. A shift from desire represented in the text
to the desire of the text.
One never knows until afterward.

—Jacques Lacan, Les non-dupes errent
The problem of analysis is that of passing through representation
something which radically escapes it (its exclusion, indeed, is the
condition of representation).
—Stephen Heath, ‘Cinema and Psychoanalysis’
BALLYNTINE: Will you love me this much when I’m normal?
CONSTANCE: Oh, I’ll be insane about you!
—Spellbound

Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62436-1_5
154 L. SIMMONS
‘Psychoanalysis. It Bores the Pants Off Me!’

Immediately after the credits of Spellbound, just before the narrative of the
film begins, the following words scroll down the screen:
Our story deals with psychoanalysis, the method by which modern science treats
the emotional problems of the sane.
The analyst seeks only to induce the patient to talk about his hidden problems,
to open the locked doors of his mind.
Once the complexes that have been disturbing the patient are uncovered and
interpreted, the illness and confusion disappear … and the devils of unrea-
son are driven from the human soul.
These words were added at the insistence of the film’s producer David
O. Selznick, penned by scriptwriter Ben Hecht and approved by the psy-
choanalytical consultant to the film May E. Romm, a prominent Los
Angeles psychotherapist who counted among her patients Selznick and his
wife.1 The very overtness of this reference to and adoption of psychoanaly-
sis in Spellbound has proved problematic. Hitchcock in his interview with
Truffaut disingenuously dismissed the film as ‘just another manhunt story
wrapped up in pseudo-psychoanalysis’ (Truffaut 1985, 165).2 Minutes
into the film, Mary Carmichael, a patient at Green Manors, declares to her
analyst: ‘Psychoanalysis. It bores the pants off me!’ Yet, as if to belie or
undercut these offhand dismissals, Constance Petersen will remark tartly
to John Ballyntine well into the film, and at the commencement of his
analysis, that ‘Apparently the mind is never too ill to make jokes about
psychoanalysis’. Despite, but perhaps also because of the jokes, as critics
such as Jonathan Freedman have convincingly argued, psychoanalysis as a
mass cultural phenomenon was an essential part of the remaking of post-
war American culture. ‘Spellbound’, Freedman claims, ‘purified psycho-
analysis’ and the figure of the psychoanalyst ‘of its aura of fraudulence and
criminality; for it was in Spellbound that psychoanalysis first became, for
Hollywood cinema, a means of solving a crime, not a means of commit-
ting one’(1999, 82–83). Going further, Mary Anne Doane has also linked
the model of psychoanalysis to the structure of classical Hollywood narra-
tive. She argues: ‘It provides an enigma (what is wrong with the character?
What event caused him or her to be like this?), a justification for the clas-
sical device of repetition (the compulsion to reenact the trauma, the recur-
rence of symbols) and a final solution (the cure, the recovery through the
5 METASTASES: SPELLBOUND (1945) 155
memory of the earlier scene)’ (1987, 47). Kaja Silverman places Spellbound
among those Hollywood films made between 1944 and 1947 that ‘attest
with unusual candor to the castrations through which the male subject is
constituted … and all speak in some way to the failure of the paternal func-
tion’ (1992, 52).3
As Marian Keane notes in her commentary to the Criterion Collection
DVD release of Spellbound, the characters in the film are constantly ‘paus-
ing’ to interpret the scene at hand, each other, or the meaning of
Ballyntine’s behaviour. Given their metacritical awareness, it is not surpris-
ing that Hitchcock’s films have often been interpreted as allegories of their
own reception. Several attempts have been made to transpose the psycho-
dynamics of relationships in Spellbound to those between its producer
Selznick and its director Hitchcock, that is to see the film as an allegory of
its own inception. See, for example, Murray Pomerance’s comment that
Edwardes’ skiing ‘accident’ conveys ‘the paralytic horror of seeing with
clarity in the precise moment of one’s impotence, an experience that may
have threatened him [Hitchcock], working for Selznick’ and thus pro-
vided Hitchcock with the impetus to free himself from his contract with
Selznick and enter independent production replacing ‘the dominant
superego of the Hollywood establishment with his own creative force’
(2004, 91).4
Despite psychiatrist May Romm’s vetting of the screenplay, and even
the then bestselling Karl Menninger’s subsequent sanction,5 there have
been countless critiques of Spellbound’s psychoanalytical flat-footedness.
How, it is asked, can Spellbound present itself as a serious account of psy-
choanalysis and then have one of its leading characters Constance violate
one of the principle tenets of psychoanalytic practice, ignoring the warn-
ings of her analyst mentor Brulov about the dangers of countertransfer-
ence, and fall in love with her patient? How can she allow herself to
become a participant in an Oedipal drama: ‘A love-smitten analyst playing
a dream-detective’ as Dr Murchison sneers at her at the film’s end? How
can the film show psychiatric doctors performing surgical interventions?
For Andrew Britton, the problem with the treatment of psychoanalysis in
Spellbound is not that it is taken too seriously but that it is fundamentally
confused, so much so he says that the film’s ‘interest lies in the nature of
its “badness”: in the tension between the affirmation and justification of
fundamental ideological assumptions and repressed meaning which is
everywhere at odds with them’ (1986, 80).
156 L. SIMMONS
But what if one were to reverse this equation and argue that the interest
the film sustains is not one-sided, that of psychoanalysis in cinema, but it
is that of psychoanalysis to cinema? This would be to ask how the recourse
to film illustrates the analytic session, how the analysand’s speech, associa-
tions and dreams, the residue of signifying traces, might draw upon how
spectators watch and experience film. Then the real interest of Spellbound
from a psychoanalytic point of view is not what goes on in the minds of its
characters during the action, nor even what might have gone on in the
minds of its director or producer, but rather what goes on in the minds of
its spectators when viewing the film. It is cinema as a matter of experience
and the film spectator’s shifting relationship to that experience that is at
the core of Žižek’s insistence on the importance of Lacan to film. First of
all, there is Lacan’s fable of a camera filming in the absence of human pres-
ence to illustrate the idea of a consciousness without ego (‘there’s not the
shadow of an ego in the camera’) (S2 47). Or Lacan’s discussion of how
psychoanalysis avoids the blot, the void, in the field of vision in Seminar 11:
From the outset, we see, in the dialectic of the eye and the gaze, that there
is no coincidence, but, on the contrary, a lure. When, in love, I solicit a look,
what is profoundly unsatisfying and always missing is that—You never look at
me from the place from which I see you.
Conversely, what I look at is never what I wish to see. (S11 103)
The paradox is that Freudian psychoanalysis interrupts the vision of

images, and it challenges the sufficiency of the representations they make
where, in contrast cinema aims to sustain vision, to bind in (suture) the
spectator with the images. In doing this, cinema removes something from
sight to maintain a surface continuity of images. In this way, the reality
that the cinema puts before us is troubled by what it excludes as its very
condition. This, as Žižek argues, is a sort of Lacanian blind spot of vision
from where the images look back. Stephen Heath comments: ‘“cinema
and psychoanalysis” necessarily opens up a field which will not be contain-
able within some enclosure of psychoanalysis itself’. It ‘involves the speci-
ficity of psychoanalysis in a way that equally reconceives it, sets it at the
distance from itself that its deployment in relation to cinema produces’.
The analyst’s compulsion is the corollary to cinema’s own compulsion to
visibility, a cinema haunted by the possibility of something more than its
vision, its controlled continuity of a screened reality ‘analyst and film come
across and miss one another on the common ground of their failure not to
be seen by this “more”’ (1999, 34).
With regards to Spellbound, the question of interpretation in general
has been understood as the revealing of a set of themes, a repeatable psy-
choanalytic story, in which often oedipal elements can be made to fit a
cinema culturally permeated by psychoanalytic awareness. For Spellbound,
the barely concealed fantasy material is at best familiar and at worst down-
right banal. In theoretical terms, the problem is, as Stephen Heath notes,
that this ‘functions too easily with and as a kind of enclosing imaginary:
the cinema’s films meet the interpretation they facilitate and from which
they in some large sense derive’ (1999, 35). Themes and explanations pass
back and forth in a way that avoids the reality of the encounter between
cinema and psychoanalysis. This raises the question of resistance to inter-
pretation and the unacknowledged question of transference. A point I
wish to return to in a moment. There is no problem between film and
interpreter that somehow is not already contained within this interpreta-
tive circle.
Why is it that Žižek turns to Lacan via film? Lacan’s seminars, in par-
ticular Seminars 20 to 25, show a teacher who is focused on performing
for his students the thought he is conveying. Theory is not separate from
practice, nor is theory presented as a savoir which can be learned as a
model to be later filled out in practice. Lacan’s audience becomes simulta-
neously student, analyst and analysand, and his teaching practices a savoir-
faire. Similarly, we might argue Žižek provides a use of cinema, not as an
object for psychoanalysis, to be understood through psychoanalytic con-
cepts (although that does occur in his work), but as itself providing the
means to understand those concepts. Cinema as a matter of experience is
not simply as a vehicle for/of exposition (confirmation of a set of given
themes and a recognizable narrative) since films are the material with
which to unravel psychoanalysis. Seen like this, Stephen Heath argues,
‘film no longer subtracts from psychoanalysis … on the contrary, it exceeds
it with the very excess with which psychoanalysis has to concern itself, that
it faces, comes down to, impasses on. Cinema translates psychoanalysis but
also confronts it’ (ibid., 56). Heath continues, ‘The problem of psycho-
analytic representation is exacerbated in Lacanian theory which comes
back always to what is not-in-representation: the subject is the impossibil-
ity of its own signifying representation; there is no signifying representa-
tion of jouissance, just the gap in the signifying system that symptoms and
fantasies serve to hide’ (ibid., 42). This is why Žižek grasps in films
158 L. SIMMONS
something excessively psychoanalytic: not just some conceptual demon-

stration of psychoanalysis but an experience that pushes psychoanalysis to
the edge of representation.
J.B. (scowling): I don’t believe in dreams. That Freud stuff is a lot

of hooey.
BRULOV: You are a fine one to talk! You got amnesia. And you got
a guilt complex. And you don’t know if you are coming
or going from some place. But Freud is hooey. This
you know!
Retroactivity of Meaning—A Message

from the Future
John Ballyntine arrives at Green Manors insane asylum unaware of his own
past. Suffering from amnesia, he believes himself to be a Dr Edwardes
arriving to replace Dr Murchison as director of the asylum. After his false
identity is exposed, he searches for the truth about his past with the help
of a psychiatrist, Constance Petersen, with whom he is falling in love. After
solving the riddle of his fear of dark parallel lines upon harsh white back-
grounds as well as an obsessive dream, he returns to the site of his appar-
ent murder of the real Dr Edwardes. Resolution: after Ballyntine is charged
and jailed, Constance confronts Murchison with evidence that he is the
real murderer. Murchison shoots himself and Ballyntine is released from
prison and from guilt and reunited with Constance. It is a story in which
changes in the external scene retrospectively make sense of the apparently
inappropriate feelings of a character. This account of the film’s plot is emi-
nently psychoanalytical and incorporates the Freudian structure of
Nachträglichkeit (translated for the Standard Edition as ‘deferred action’;
by Lacan and his followers in French as ‘après-coup’; and more latterly in
English as ‘afterwardsness’6): present events affect past events a posteriori,
since the past exists in the psyche only as a set of memories which are con-
stantly being reworked and reinterpreted in the light of present experi-
ence. This structure was first discussed by Freud in his account of the case
known as the Wolfman (1914) to account for the after-effect of the primal
scene dream: a dream remembered by the patient at age eighteen, dreamt
at age four and with materials incorporated from when he was one and a
half (see Freud, SE VIIa). The French translation of ‘après coup’ with its
connotation of a hit or blow after the first blow itself—a boomerang of
representation upon itself—gives a telling hindsight to how deferred
action brings meaning and salience back to symptoms. From a psychoana-
lytic perspective, hindsight may unveil the richness of the apprehension of
time in a given representation. So that the patient understands here and
now that which could not be understood back-then-and-elsewhere. A
subject learns to re-cognize now that which was formerly mis-cognized
then. A recursive symptom, which was ignored or denied, repressed or
disavowed (Ballyntine’s parallel lines), thus acquires a new significance and
a new obviousness in this recognition.
As Žižek writes of David Lynch’s Lost Highway:
Do we not have here [I am suggesting with Spellbound too] a situation like

the one in psychoanalysis, in which, at the beginning the patient is troubled
by some obscure, indecipherable but persistent message—the symptom—
which, as it were, bombards him from the outside; then, at the conclusion
of the treatment, the patient is able to assume this message as his own, to
pronounce it in the first person singular … In his very first Seminar, Lacan
invokes this temporal-loop structure of the symptom when he emphasises
that the Freudian symptom is like a signal bearing a message that comes not,
as one would expect, from the ‘deeply buried past’ of ancient traumas, but
from the (Subject’s) future—from the future in which, through the work of
psychoanalyic treatment, the meaning of this symptom will be realised.
(TS 299–230)
In the psychoanalytic schema, there is always ‘another scene’ (eine

andere Szene), back in the deixis of the there-and-then which may shed
light on the deixis of the here-and-now for any particular subject.7 The
link, whether causal or symptomatic, is rarely obvious, and the link is made
explicit in the specific temporality which Lacan in an essay entitled ‘Logical
Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty’ calls ‘the time for compre-
hending’ (E 168). Žižek’s theoretical corollary is to suggest that the mes-
sage comes not from the past but from the subject’s future. The symptom
and the message no longer coincide, yet the notion of the symptom as
message is recuperated at the end of the plot through retroactivity. At the
conclusion of analysis, when the message comes from the future, ‘the
meaning of this symptom will be realized’ where the word ‘realized’ both
recuperates the ‘meaning’ and defines it as having been there ‘from the
beginning’. The trauma that the symptom bears as its message quite
160 L. SIMMONS
literally does not take place as symbolizable trauma until it is realized.

‘Realized’ here bears the double and significantly non-synonymous weight
of both ‘enacted’ and ‘understood’ in the work of analysis.
The scene on the mountain, in which Ballyntine and Constance re-
enact the traumatic death of Edwardes, and which is foreclosed from
Ballyntine’s consciousness, exemplifies the temporal loop of nachträglich-
keit. This scene initially ‘took place’ in a purely hypothetical, pre-filmic
‘past’, but on the level of this filmic representation, it occurs only in a
present. As Žižek argues:
The point is not to arrive at the factual truth of some long-forgotten event—
what is effectively at stake here is, quite literally, the recollection of the past,
i.e., the way this remembrance of the past bears on the subject’s present posi-
tion of enunciation, how it transforms the very place from which the subject
speaks (is spoken). Herein lies the ‘effect of truth’ intended by the psycho-
analytic cure: when I draw a childhood trauma out of the shadowy world of
‘repression’ and integrate it with my knowledge, this radically transforms
the symbolic horizon that determines my present ‘self-understanding’—
after accomplishing it, I am not the same subject as before. (EYS 33)
This account stresses the crucial role of the performative dimension in

structuring intersubjective space, of assuming performatively a symbolic
mandate. Such a performativity may help explain why Hitchcock’s filming
of Ballyntine and Constance’s ski sequence appears so falsely staged. Not
because Hitchcock as a director was ham-fisted but because he was acutely
aware of the fact that the scene of every symptom must be ‘enacted’ in
order to be understood through analysis.
Transference and Countertransference
J.B.: Do you have to sit there smiling at me like some smug

know-it-all school teacher?
CONSTANCE: I can’t help smiling. That’s what happens in analysis. As
the doctor begins to uncover the truth in the patient,
said patient develops a fine, hearty hatred—of said doc-
tor. (She smiles at him.) You’re going to hate me—a
great deal—before we’re through.
Paradoxically, as we have just seen, the very condition of the message

‘returning from the future’ is that it be misrecognized as returning ‘from
“the deeply buried past” of ancient traumas’ (TS 300). Thus, in order for
the past to be realized in the future of the analytic treatment, the knowl-
edge that will only emerge in the future must be presupposed by the analy-
sand as already present in the analyst from the beginning. And so, the
analysand must overtake him or herself into that future in which the past
about to be realized in analysis is already known to the analyst, who occu-
pies the position of ‘the subject supposed to know’. As Žižek says:
For Lacan, this strange transposition of what I already know in my uncon-

scious onto the figure of the analyst is at the core of the phenomenon of
transference in the treatment: I can only arrive at the unconscious meaning
of my symptoms if I presuppose that the analyst already knows their mean-
ing. (HRL 28)
Constance’s demand that Ballyntine trust her is a demand that he imag-

ines she ‘already knows’, and thus that he transferentially overlook the
temporal loop by which the message of the symptom is produced only at
the end of its analytic realization. The necessary misrecognition of the
transferential situation is acted out in the film’s cohesion of the blindness
of true love.
This in part is the answer to those critics who argue that Constance’s
psychoanalytic pedagogy merely constitutes a set of vulgar Freudian illu-
sions, but it is just these commonplace illusions, we might argue, that are
necessary to all psychoanalytic practice. It is just this ‘overtaking’ which
Dr Brulov calls Constance’s ‘backwardness’ (BRULOV: ‘She knows! This
is the way science goes backward!’), a ‘backwardsness’ that he aligns with
a feminine i(l)logic that starts from base desire (BRULOV: ‘We both
know that the mind of a woman in love is operating on the lowest level of
the intellect!’) and moves ‘backward’ to justify that desire. ‘Who told you
what he is?’, he snaps at her, ‘Freud? Or a crystal ball?’ The question spe-
cifically concerns the relation between past and future, one of which is
determined as fixed and reliable, the other as unpredictable. The film of
course will prove Brulov, the ‘master analyst’, wrong, as Constance’s back-
wardsness is precisely the condition by which she ‘cures’ her patient, and
Ballyntine’s ‘infatuation’ with her is essential since the engagement of the
analyst’s desire in the treatment is in this case of absolute import.
162 L. SIMMONS
The Loop of Writing and Reading

Spellbound is a film full of books—early on the patient Mary Carmichael
throws one at Constance’s head; soon the author’s autograph of the lim-
ited edition Labyrinth of the Guilt Complex will disclose the blank subjec-
tivity of the mysterious ‘J.B.’; Fleurot lectures Constance on her lack of
‘emotional experience’, ‘It’s rather like embracing a textbook’, he says—
and the film exhibits a fascination with reading, but reading as analysis, the
search for an extra-textual authority who stands behind the text. ‘Don’t
read the paper—let’s pick up where we left off’, Constance insists to
Ballyntine on the train initiating another punishing session of analysis.
Another oppositional structure is that between reading and writing. The
film’s own concern with writing, its scriptedness, is literalized with the
crucial plot functions of written notes and book dedications; indeed, the
first time we see Constance, she is seated at her desk, holding a pen in her
hand. Later Ballyntine’s letter to her on the floor in the doorway of her
apartment, in full view but seen by no one, uncannily prestages the Lacanian
commentary on Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’ (E 6–48).
But in Spellbound the concern with writing is literalized also with a
metacinematic interest in its own script and throughout its unfolding the
characters seem to be writing the film from within, that is they are engaged
in a process of interpreting and producing the very narrative they star in,
thus placing them both inside and outside the diegesis. The loop enacted
here is not simply a temporal loop like that of nachträglichkeit but a sig-
nificatory one. The fixed subject being narrated is also the speaker doing
the narration. This loop by which language posits what it then perceives is
played out vividly in the sequence in which John Ballyntine downs the
glass of milk which Brulov passes him: the camera takes the position of
Ballyntine as if he were actually drinking the glass of milk, making him
both the object and subject (seeing and indeed deciding to perform the
action of) of the shot. The events between Constance and Ballantyne can-
not be described as the mere realization of the reality of the unconscious,
for this realization is itself caught up in a loop of signification: writing lit-
erally produces the chain of events it then goes on to interpret. It is, for
example, through the act of writing, one of Constance’s textual hunches,
that they travel finally to ‘Gabriel Valley’. The name of the location is not
chosen by chance and, indeed, the annunciation of the archangel Gabriel
where the future event is anticipated as already having happened works on
the same proleptic structure I have just outlined.
Flitting Figures or Parallel Lines

How might we describe the relationship between the two sides of these
oppositions? Reading and writing; analyst and analysand. For Žižek, they
illustrate the plural form of subjectivity Lacan called ‘the inmixing of sub-
jects’ [l’immixion des sujets], the way each subject is penetrated by some-
thing else, and thus speaks from a position off-centre to itself, a reminder
of the fragmentary status of the ego where ‘social reality is unveiled as the
coexistence of the plurality of individual … destinies that … intermingle in
totally contingent ways, so that the same event acquires absolutely incom-
mensurable meanings’ (ME 208–209; see also EYS 19). Another way to
account for the oppositional structure is recourse to the concept of metas-
tasis. Metastasis is a rhetorical figure, often referred to as ‘the flitting fig-
ure’, that involves the rapid transition from one point to another. In
medical terminology, metastasis also refers to the transference of a bodily
function, of a pain or a disease, especially cancer cells, from one part or
organ of the body to another. Both definitions are suggestive for Žižek’s
way of thinking and writing, the way he disregards the standard formats of
academic argumentation (Harpham 2003, 453–485) and relentlessly
shifts from quirky example to quirky example, extracting conceptual impli-
cations from the dreck of everyday culture. The relationship between
metastasis and enjoyment is that of the philanderer. Indeed, we might
argue that the elusive status of enjoyment, and its metastases in the realms
of politics and culture, is the overarching subject matter of Žižek’s entire
oeuvre. Another potent image of the ‘metastatic’ for Žižek is the
Moebius band.
Studied extensively by Lacan, the Moebius band is a figure that seems
to subvert our normal (Euclidean) way of representing space, for it appears
to have two sides but in fact has only one. At any one point, two sides can
be distinguished, but when the whole strip is traversed, it becomes clear
that they are continuous. The figure illustrates the way that psychoanalysis
problematizes various binary oppositions such as inside/outside, love/
hate, truth/appearance. While these opposites are traditionally presented
as radically distinct, Lacan prefers to understand them in terms of the
topology of the Moebius band, that is continuous with each other, and the
image of the Moebius strip helps him understand how the subject can
traverse the fantasy without making a mythical leap from inside to outside.
As one traces one’s finger round the surface of a Moebius band, it is
impossible to say at which precise point one has crossed over from inside
164 L. SIMMONS
to outside. Žižek writes that ‘Lacan’s obsession with topological models of

the “folded” space in the last years of his teaching (the Moebius band, the
inverted 8, etc) attests to his effort to articulate clearly this folding back
wherein the subject encounters its own reverse’ (EYS 137). With
Spellbound, we could say that the real significatory loop by which the mes-
sage of Ballyntine’s symptom is constructed by the film ultimately con-
founds the film’s attempts to purvey that message. For example, the
problem with Ballyntine is precisely that the past, not properly narrativ-
ized, keeps repeating, the foreclosed scene returning in the form of a sig-
nifier that fills out the void of an excluded representation. The analysis,
then, as a bringing about of the past, stages that representation to put
things in their (temporal) place. Yet paradoxically the very mechanism by
which psychoanalysis attempts to ‘put the past in its place’, by forcing it to
take place, ends up by confounding what it enacts. The film cannot simply
‘represent’ at an objective distance Ballyntine’s symptom, but must liter-
ally take it on as its own: each time Ballyntine ‘sees’ the parallel lines, the
film, too, performs a cinematic swoon as the music and the camera tech-
niques lurch to embody his experience. The message of the symptom that
is produced at the end of analysis purports to straighten out the sub-
ject’s past.
‘We’ll talk about it—and straighten everything out…’, are Constance’s
words to Ballyntine on the first night of his collapse, but as we know that
is only the beginning. Straight but parallel lines have already begun to
make their telling mark in the film from the deep scratches of Mary
Carmichael’s fingernails drawn across the back of the hand of the Green
Manor’s attendant Harry, the pattern etched by Constance with the
prongs of a fork in a tablecloth (Fig. 5.1), the patterned lines on
Constance’s bathrobe, the uneven skin graft on Ballyntine’s hand, the
hairs on the soaped shaving brush, the grill at the train ticket-seller’s win-
dow, to the marks of ski lanes in the snow which finally help ‘solve’ the
film’s enigma. In terms of a wider oeuvre, these parallel lines become part
of a larger set of what Tom Cohen calls ‘the bar series’—a visual pattern of
alternating vertical lines and spaces—that was first perceived as an impor-
tant motif in Hitchcock’s work by William Rothman. For Rothman, these
repeated and repeating ‘bars’ are consciously literalized by Hitchcock in
the extra-diegetic slash marks //// in the credits to Psycho (2012, 258).
But whereas Rothman reads this Hitchcock signature event as denoting
Hitchcock’s complicity with the murderous gaze, Cohen sees it differently
as an emblem of anteriority, a form of Derridean spacing: an ‘irreducible
Fig. 5.1 Constance scratches a fork on the tablecloth
“signature” of prefigural alteration and spacing’ (2005a, vol. I, 50). An

excess of meaning in the bar’s ‘spacing’ points to the amateriality of the
cinematic image, a shimmer in the darkness, a phantasmagoria of immate-
rialized bodies, that is produced by the material, the apparatus of produc-
tion and projection and the directorial organization of skills. The mark is
at once outside the cinematic, beyond the screen and yet quintessentially
cinematic—we might think of the slicing of Psycho’s shower curtain
(screen)—a suspension between the system that explains all and the end-
less (im)possibilities of interpretation. The series of parallel lines that
appear through so many of Hitchcock’s films are, of course, a trace of
writing, another allusion to the process of scripting the film to which the
image must constantly turn a blind eye. Thus, in so far as Ballyntine’s
symptom is also the symptom of the film itself, the symptom of what must
be excluded in order for (filmic) meaning to occur, we can see how the
film might be attempting to function, in a sense, as an allegory of that
signifying loop that is constitutively repressed of all representation.
166 L. SIMMONS
The shift culminates in the black screen (both at the moment of the
film’s ‘truth’ and the film’s end); blankness, the staying out of imaginary
identification is constitutive of Ballyntine as a subject: he is able to con-
front his repressed childhood, to accomplish the act destined to elucidate
his relationship with the obscene paternal father, only at the price of
aphanisis (eclipse, blackout). This accounts for the fundamental motif of
amnesia, the loss of memory that threatens the subject’s self-identity. The
subject can confront his extimate kernel only at the price of his temporary
aphanisis, which is why Ballyntine unexpectedly departs from the film with
his arrest for Edwardes’ murder and is absent until its closing shot. As
David Boyd comments: ‘When Ballantine [sic] disappears, he leaves his
fantasy behind him, in effect, but so actualised by the events of the film
that it is no longer recognisable as fantasy. And it is precisely because it is
now presented as reality, paradoxically, that it can exercise its force upon
us as fantasy’ (2000, 8).
‘Vorrei e Non Vorrei’—Edwardes or Edwards?

Ballyntine or Ballantine? Petersen or Peterson?
Francis Beeding, the author of the novel The House of Dr Edwardes (1927),
which formed the basis for Spellbound, is the pseudonym for the British
writers Hilary St. George Saunders (1898–1951) and John Palmer
(1885–1944). In fact, this writing duo was further divided and composed
together under two pseudonyms: ‘Francis Beeding’ penned crime novels
and ‘David Pilgrim’ historical novels. The unusual ‘e’ of the surname
Edwardes, which was for a time the proposed title of Hitchcock’s film,
signals the instability of the absent character in the plot who becomes a
cipher to be filled at Green Manors having previously been eliminated on
the Gabriel Valley ski-field. Dr Edwardes, or the mysterious man who
would pass for him, has an unexpected extra ‘e’ in his name, and even
before we find out he has not one name but two, there is something exces-
sive about him at the level of the symbolic.8 There have been problems,
too, with the elusive name of Gregory Peck’s character ‘J.B.’ Is it Ballantine
or Ballyntine? For Thomas Hyde, Robert Samuels, David Boyd, Robin
Wood, Murray Pomerance, Tom Cohen and E. Ann Kaplan, he is
Ballantine; Ken Mogg in an early footnote to his extended essay on the
film writes: ‘I’ve standardised the spelling of Peck’s character’s name as
“Ballyntine”, which is how it’s spelt in the published screen play of the
film’ (1995, 21).9 Even more confusingly, essays in the Criterion collec-
tion, and critics such as John Orr, Leslie Brill and Andrew Britton, refer to
a John Ballyntine.10 Finally, and perhaps it should not surprise us, it is
noteworthy, too, how many critics misspell Constance’s surname as
Peterson not Petersen, as if to reinforce and echo the hint of the film’s
oedipal content. Thus the alternative versions of its characters’ names
become another spell that binds Spellbound to spelling and the word.
Spellbound is persistently marked by the theme of division: the old ver-
sus the new psychiatry; the difference between age and youth;11 is
Constance an objective doctor or a muddled woman in love?; are we
responsible for our actions or just victims of circumstance?; how is material
reality linked to psychical reality?; are we watching a murder mystery or a
love story? But it is not that the film aims to provide a resolution of these
oppositions, or some sort of Aufhebung in the conventional view of
Hegel’s dialectical thinking, that resolves and raises them up to a higher
plane. Instead, again Žižek’s reworking of the Hegelian dialectic provides
us with an insight into the resolution of this division. Žižek is fascinated by
an underlying principle of non-contradiction in the dialectic. He writes:
We should thus abandon the standard notion that the dialectical process
advances by moving from particular (limited and “unilateral”) elements
toward some final totality: in fact, the truth at which one arrives is not com-
plete [n’est pas “toute”] … The dialectical turn takes place when this very
contradiction becomes the answer … whatever presents itself initially as an
obstacle becomes, the dialectical turn, the very proof that we have made
contact with the truth. (‘The Most Sublime of Hysterics’, 38, 39)
The dialectic does not produce a resolution or a synthesized viewpoint,

rather it points out that ‘contradiction [is] an internal condition of every
identity’ (SOI, 6). As Tony Myers glosses: ‘An idea about something is
always disrupted by a discrepancy, but that discrepancy is necessary for the
idea to exist in the first place’ (2003, 17). This is contradictory but the
truth of the assertion lies in the contradiction, and for Žižek, the truth is
always found in the contradiction rather than in compromise or the
smoothing out of differences.
It is tempting here to recall the structure of Zerlina’s reply to Don
Giovanni’s advances in Mozart’s opera. ‘Vorrei e non vorrei’, literally ‘I
would and I would not (like to)’, illustrates the principle of non-
contradiction in fantasy. It is uttered in a non-space where the actual is
168 L. SIMMONS
virtual, ready to be actualized, yet not at all realized; a virtual fantasy is

staged and constructed by consent yet already recused by disavowal
(Verwerfung). The very figure of contradiction in logic (p and not p)
allows for slippage between two equally possible modalizations of the
same action. According to one reading, ‘Vorrei vs non vorrei’ provides a
choice, whereas ‘Vorrei e (and) non vorrei’ maintains the ambiguity by
means of the principle of non-contradiction. In Spellbound, the ‘loop of
signification’ returns as a filmic slip in the very scene that enacts the power
of analysis to retroactively finalize the meaning of a symptom: the skiing
scene. As he reaches the precipitous edge of the mountain, Ballyntine’s
primal scene—a scene in which, in earliest childhood, he ‘saw’ his brother
slide down the balustrade to his death impaled on the spiked iron fence
railings—plays out before his (and our) very eyes (Fig. 5.2). Immediately
after the scene, two interpretations follow: we hear Ballyntine say inter-
nally, ‘I remember now. I killed my brother’ rapidly followed by his cry ‘I
didn’t kill my brother! It was an accident!’. This slip of the tongue from ‘I
Fig. 5.2 The young Ballyntine views his brother on the balustrade
did’ to ‘I didn’t’ is the ‘accident’ by which Ballyntine implicates himself in

being guilty of what he then proceeds to call an accident. Indeed, we see
the older boy (Ballyntine) sliding down the balustrade towards the other
boy and the look of alarm on the adolescent Ballyntine’s face as he seems
set to push his brother off the edge onto the iron spikes.
What we experience is also a filmic slip between script (word) and image
where the meaning of the ‘accident’ is filmed ‘as if it did happen’, as if
scripted, yet in the words of the actual script, Ballyntine declares himself
innocent (as if it may not have happened). The slippage between the two
interpretations, internal (what we see) and external (what is scripted for
us) to the story, points up the undecidability of ‘meaning’ itself. But the
celebration of the couple thawing out before a log fire at the inn in the
next scene indicates that they have undergone a transferential illusion that
enables them to efface the traces of the loop. In trying to give a determi-
nate meaning to his symptom, Constance overlooks Ballyntine’s slip of the
tongue that is the symptom of the message. Indeed, what is the entire
scene itself except a Freudian ‘slip’ of the body into death from the edge
of the balustrade, or the mountainous precipice? Up until this point,
Ballyntine cannot read between the lines but sees only the lines them-
selves. As he remarks to Constance just after his first moment of collapse:
‘I have no memory. It’s like looking into a mirror—and seeing nothing
but the mirror. Yet the image is there. I know it’s there’. It’s like looking
in the mirror and seeing nothing but the mirror, seeing the thing at the
expense of what it signifies, symbolizes. So, in terms of the Lacanian ‘mir-
ror stage’, his subject is stalled in the Imaginary, foreclosing entrance into
the Symbolic that would regulate his position in relation to others. With
resolution comes release but also capture.
Structures of Sexuation—‘Any Husband

of Constance Is a Husband of Mine, So to Speak’
Twice in the film Brulov repeats his strange (certainly odd for a male ana-
lyst) declaration: ‘Any husband of Constance is a husband of mine, so to
speak’. Thus, it is clearly not just a throw-away line, and it contains an
undertone that unsettles gender roles and performances within the film.
The lesson seems to be that sexuality is a metastasis: it shifts, it is some-
thing that is transferred, not a fixed essence or identity. Lacan’s term ‘sex-
uation’ also suggests that sexuality is a process not a given; it is not
170 L. SIMMONS
biological sex, not gender, not sexual identity. In Žižek’s discussion of

sexuality and gender, based on Lacan’s ‘formulae of sexuation’ (see
FTKNW 122–123, FA 146–147, FRT 91–92, TN 56–61, ME 153–161
and SFA 109–110), he refers directly to Lacan’s session from his Seminar
20, Encore, entitled ‘The Love Letter’ where masculinity and femininity
are presented as two internally contradictory attempts on the part of
human beings to symbolize their relation to castration. There is no such
thing as a sexual relationship Lacan controversially declares (S20 34)
because these two attempts are neither the same as each other, nor com-
plementary, but heterogeneous and incompatible.
Lacan’s concrete example of this is the Lady in courtly love who sub-
jects her knight to an endless series of tasks before she will allow him to
sleep with her (a modern version of this, Žižek argues, is the femme fatale
in film noir tradition [ME 102]). Now, in one way this Lady fits entirely
within the symbolic economy of man, but in another, she is beyond it,
chaste, virginal and pure (or cold, manipulating and in control in the case
of the femme fatale). What must be realized is that this deferral of the
knight’s desire does not at all undermine but actually makes possible the
masculine sexual economy: so long as the knight believes that his failure to
sleep with his Lady is contingent, something that can be overcome by
accomplishing one more good deed, he does not confront the essential
impossibility of the sexual relationship as such. The Lady, through her
exception, converts the impossibility of a sexual relationship into a mere
prohibition. As Lacan puts it: ‘It is a highly refined way of making up for
the absence of the sexual relationship, by feigning that we are the ones
who erect an obstacle thereto’ (S20 69). The whole point is to avoid pass-
ing to the act so as to sustain the belief that complete jouissance exists and
discovering, once again, the disappointment of phallic jouissance. And it is
exactly through the positing of an exception to take the place of the limit
that the male order can respond to the impossibility of symbolizing the
‘all’ (the male and the female together in a unified whole).
There is no sexual relationship: it does not mean that in reality there is
no such thing as sex or coitus. Rather it refers to the fact that sexual dif-
ference is impossible to Symbolize (that sexual difference belongs to the
Lacanian Real). The masculine subject cannot form a relationship directly
with the feminine. Sean Homer specifies as follows:
It is precisely because masculinity and femininity represent two non-

complementary structures, defined by different relationships to the Other,
that there can be no such thing as a sexual relationship. What we do in any

relationship is either try to turn the other into what we think we desire or
turn ourselves into that which we think the other desires, but this can never
exactly map onto the other’s desire. (2005, 106)
Instead each connects only with objects that are merely indirectly
related to the other subject in the form of fantasies or symptoms. There is
no sexual relationship is why we have love. According to Žižek, love is a
lure, an illusion whose function is to mask over the impossible out-of-joint
relation between the sexes. Love conceals the failed Symbolization of sex-
ual difference.
How might we make this abstraction have consequence for our film? In
Spellbound, we might argue that the feminine position is indistinguishable
from the position of the castrated male. Indeed, it would seem that the key
to the film’s sexual relations is that we have a case of role reversal: Ballyntine
takes on the role of the femme fatale and Constance acts as the traditional
film noir detective.12 This reversal would help us explain the oft-quoted
comment of Hitchcock: ‘The chief point I keep in mind when selecting
my heroine is that she must be fashioned to please women rather than
men, for women form three-quarters of the average cinema audience’
(‘How I Choose My Heroines’ [1931] in Gottlieb 1995, 73). Ballyntine
is, as Frank Krutnick describes the film noir femme fatale, ‘a dangerous
free agent uncontrolled and a possible enemy despite coming to the detec-
tive for help’ (1991, 95). The advertising byline for the early film poster
has Constance asking, ‘Will he kiss me or kill me?’. As with most film noir
films, the relationship between the femme fatale and the detective almost
brings about the ruin of the detective both professionally and personally.
Constance, who runs such a threat, rationalizes to Brulov that she is only
doing her duty to help the police, but she later admits to Brulov that her
attraction is compulsive: ‘Don’t ask me to stop—I can’t!’.
It is clear that Hitchcock here is interrogating, rather than accepting,
the assumption of gender roles as naturalized. Žižek writes how we must
not forget that ‘woman is one of the names-of-the-father’ exemplified by
the figure of the Lady in courtly love who is ‘a capricious Master who
wants it all, i.e., who, herself not bound by any Law, charges her knight-
servant with arbitrary and outrageous ordeals’ (‘Woman is one of the
names-of-the-father’, np). Constance Petersen’s jouissance appears to be
phallic in nature: she is autonomous, bookish and intelligent, conserva-
tively dressed, wields cigarette holders and cuts open her mail with a
172 L. SIMMONS
paperknife much to her patient Mr Garmes’ distress. She is at ease in all-

male company and partakes in their parlour room banter, focussed on her
career and intent upon her desire to become like her (father) mentors
Brulov and Murchison. As such her character is indistinguishable from
that of a masculine sexuated being in regard to jouissance. The only sug-
gestion that Constance is sexuated as feminine lies in the very fact that this
is so. It is true every quality of Constance is ‘put on’; all that is essential
about her turns out to be a male cliché. There is no ironic distance, it is as
though her qualities were simply taken up, as if no woman existed outside
of or beyond (behind) this woman-in-herself. But there is something
nonetheless about the tone with which Ingrid Bergman plays her character
that distinguishes it as feminine. So, despite the fact that she is troped as
masculine, there is then a certain ‘woman’ produced, something that can
not entirely be reduced to (masculine) appearances. Constance as woman
exists precisely in the fact that there is no woman outside herself, outside
this for-the-other. We sense this in the contrast between the moments of
warmth and intelligence of Bergman’s performance and Miss Carmichael’s
characterization of her as ‘Miss Frozen-Puss!’, together with Fleurot’s
accusation that she is a ‘human glacier’ when she does not respond to his
advances. For Robin Wood, ‘the restoration of Bergman’s naturalness
coincides with the release of her sexuality’ (2002, 322) and as the Courtly
Love tradition instructs sublimation has everything to do with
sexualization.
Again we need to be careful, Ballyntine’s role as ‘femme fatale’ is not a
mere satirical inversion of a supposed masculinity, just as Constance’s is
not a case of femininity consciously wielding masculinity’s signs but stand-
ing somewhere ‘behind’ them. The non-existence of ‘J.B.’ is rendered
manifest by his removal from inscription in the socio-symbolic network.
Indeed, in her obsession, Constance acts as if he does not exist, as if he
were only her idée fixe. The man (woman) who vanishes is ultimately the
one with whom the sexual relation would be possible. The disappearance
of John Ballyntine is the means by which this film takes cognizance of the
fact that ‘The woman does not exist’ and that ‘there is no sexual relation-
ship’. This disappearance is staged doubly: Ballyntine is arrested and jailed
for Edwardes’ murder but then, newly married to Constance, is seen off
by Brulov at the railroad station. The result, of course, is ‘a happy end-
ing’—at the railway platform gate, the characters kiss once again before
the bemused ticket collector who cannot understand or trust his eyes
(Why does this couple kiss before boarding the train together? Usually the
couples on the platform kiss when one leaves on the train and the other
remains behind. So, are this couple together but separate? Separate in the
Lacanian sense that we always miss what we aim at in the other and can
never be One?). As Žižek writes:
even when it is ‘all’ (complete with no exception), the field of knowledge

remains in a way not-all, incomplete. Love is not an exception to the All of
knowledge but rather a nothing that renders incomplete even the complete
series or field of knowledge. In other words, the point of the claim that, even
if I were to possess all knowledge, without love I would be nothing is not
simply that with love I am ‘something’. For in love, I also am nothing, but
as it were a Nothing humbly aware of itself, a Nothing made paradoxically
rich through the very awareness of its lack. (‘The Real of Sexual
Difference’ 334–335)
There exists an interesting undertone to this happy ending, and the les-
son of the film is more ambiguous than it might first appear to be.
Ballyntine is a dangerous free agent whom the audience cannot trust, and
his discord is his inability to distinguish his fantasy figure and empirical
self. Indeed for a good part of the film he, along with everyone else,
believes he is a murderer. Constance is the maternal, loyal, devoted
woman, ‘constant’ as her name suggests, but she is also, as we have seen,
the potent, dangerous woman with a phallus. So the reversal of the happy
ending implies a kind of renunciation or blindness on the part of both
Constance and Ballyntine—a silent acceptance of the fact that Ballyntine
indeed may be a killer, and, for Ballyntine, in Žižek’s words, ‘an acceptance
of the fact that the woman with whom we live is never Woman, that there
is a permanent threat of disharmony’ (LA 82).13
As we have seen, looping is the condition of the very structure of
Spellbound’s ‘straight’ narrative and retroactivity is used to ‘straighten out’
the ambiguity of these loops precisely by coming at them rhetorically
‘from behind’. The retroactive structure of analysis has been used, pun-
ning on anal intercourse that ‘takes it from behind’, by queer theorist Lee
Edelman, to implicate psychoanalysis in a loop that is ‘queer’. What this
might mean for Spellbound is the instatement of ‘straight’ heterosexual
subjectivity as the determining last term of theoretical and filmic meaning,
yet simultaneously the recognition of the loop as the condition of that
‘straightness’. The constitution of any straight narrative through a tempo-
ral loop means paradoxically that it can never be fully constituted at all, as
174 L. SIMMONS
the loop persists in the form of a symptom to de-constitute what it ‘consti-

tutes’.14 Spellbound itself seems to mock the possible retroactive unbinding
of its own spellbinding, to mock that is its own conventional sexual poli-
tics. After Ballyntine’s epiphany of remembrance, the question of meaning
is immediately displaced; and with its ironic and hasty closure, Ballyntine
and Constance return to the amnesiac innocence of the Hollywood comic
couple. Their disappearance ‘through the gates’ at the railway station is a
recapitulation of an earlier, less blissful, scene, but now Dr Brulov, as if
attempting one last time to sabotage their match, wishes them goodbye
with the ambiguous ‘Any husband of Constance is a husband of mine’. Yet
if this loop seems to be straightened out at the end of the film on the level
of meaning, the structure of the unconscious is such that it cannot be rel-
egated to a past: it will persist as a symptom in the very ‘straightness’ that
it conditions, and the multiple points of possible ending mean that,
depending on where we choose to stop the film, Ballyntine can be figured
as a killer, a lover or a husband ‘all along’.
‘Le Père ou Pire’—‘The Father or Worse’

Let me pass to the other side, the male side, the split as it were external-
ized. Although the literal character of Ballyntine’s father is absent from the
film, it teems with father figures. Raymond Durgnat in The Strange Case
of Alfred Hitchcock (1974) is the first to analyse the presence of two fathers
in Spellbound. He writes: ‘Obviously in analytical terms, Murchison is the
evil father-figure, angry at being supplanted, and Constance’s analyst, her
father-figure, is the kindly father-figure, willing to yield the mother-figure
to the son’ (1974, 193–194). As noted in the introduction to this book,
one of Žižek’s persistent claims is that in Lacan there are always two
fathers. All normative subjects are split, are caught in what Žižek repeat-
edly stresses as a late Lacanian notion of the forced choice between two
evils, le père ou pire (Seminar 19), ‘the father or worse’: on the one hand,
the oedipal or ordinary father of normative patriarchal subjection and, on
the other, the anal or obscene or superego father who is not subject to the
law and is identified with the terrifying narcissistic jouissance of objet a.
The father who articulates the law and guarantees its symbolic transmis-
sion and the father whose pure will enforces the law, tyrannically without
justification or explanation.15 In Spellbound, if ordinary law has its repre-
sentatives in Brulov who deliberately casts himself in the parental role (‘I
am going to be your father figure’, he declares to Ballyntine), the
primordial superego law has its in Dr Murchison. Indeed, Brulov,

Murchison’s analogue, is first mentioned at the moment of Ballyntine’s
first breakdown at the dinner table when Constance remarks that
Ballyntine’s irrational behaviour reminds her of Brulov. On the face of
things, the opposition between the two fathers Brulov and Murchison
couldn’t be clearer: Europeanness/Englishness, irascibility/suavity, excit-
ability/extreme self-control, dishevelment/sartorial finesse, endearing/
sinister, carries a cane/carries a gun.
But with opposition comes similarity. Note how Brulov’s actions con-
tain attributes of the primal father: during his conversation with the police-
men, he agitatedly manipulates a knife; we learn that he had a violent
disagreement with Dr Edwardes at a conference that resulted in him
storming out of the lecture hall; his reaction to Constance’s resistance to
his advice becomes one of sarcasm when he accuses Constance of being ‘a
schoolgirl in love with an actor’. Notice, too, that the oedipal struggle
with Murchison, who has been displaced by his board and repeatedly
draws attention to the element of generational conflict, is for professional
control of Green Manors. The process is ambiguous, the subject identifies
with authority, the law and, at the same time, the illicit desires that trans-
gress and undermine that very law. In these representatives, we also see
how the ordinary (Oedipal) rests fundamentally upon the primordial (nar-
cissistic). We see it precisely in the attitude of masculine smugness that
pervades the film. Dr Fleurot’s superciliousness, Dr Murchison’s smug-
ness and the same conceited smugness that exists in John Ballyntine’s
resistance to psychoanalysis. The pervasive smugness suggests an enjoy-
ment in the scene of the crime that can only connote the complicity of the
one law with the other, the complicity between the ordinary law and the
law of the obscene, superego, primordial father. ‘Therein’, says Žižek,
‘resides the lesson of the Freudian myth of the parricide, of the primordial
father who, after his violent death, returns stronger than ever in the guise
of his Name, as symbolic authority’ (‘Re-visioning ‘Lacanian’ Social
Criticism: The Law and its Obscene Double’ 15). The anal primordial
father represents the tendency in Lacan’s seminar for every concept to
have, as a Moebius strip does, an obverse, a paradoxical reverse or inner
lining that contradicts or obviates it (ME 206). The oedipal and primor-
dial fathers exist not on the axis of opposition or contrariety but on the
axis of contradiction.
In ‘Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis’,
Lacan distinguishes between the real father, the imaginary father and the
176 L. SIMMONS
symbolic father (E 66–67). The first of these figures is the flesh-and-blood

father; the second, the ideal father, the one the son dreams of becoming;
and the third is the father as a representative of the Law. Together, they
constitute the ‘paternal function’. Lacan also notes that the real father is
always more or less inadequate to the task of representing the other two.
In order to serve as the ego-ideal, the father must therefore be embedded
in a larger symbolic matrix, one which sustains and legitimates his author-
ity. In Spellbound, the division is actually tripartite and Edwardes is the
third father figure who Ballyntine mistakenly believes he has killed. These
three prospective fathers are all without a wife; Brulov appears to have lost
his and Murchison’s and Edwardes’ are never mentioned. There is no or
little suggestion of an Oedipal struggle between Ballantyne and Brulov,
and indeed rather the Oedipal struggle is with Murchison through the
agency of Edwardes (both as real subject and then again as a role assumed
by Ballyntine). The child’s feelings of wanting to replace the father in the
relationship by eliminating him in some way (the dead father) are accom-
panied by initial guilt followed by fear (of the bad father) followed by
identification (with the good father). This would seem to be Ballyntine’s
trajectory: guilt for the death of a father-figure (Edwardes), desire for a
woman initially presented in the role of maternal carer (Constance), and
eventual identification with a new father figure (Brulov).
Žižek reminds us that for Lacan, writing as early as 1938, ‘the very birth
of psychoanalysis is linked to the crisis and disintegration of … the “pater-
nal image”’ (IDLC 465).16 Spellbound, as Kaja Silverman has suggested, is
one of a number of Hollywood films made in the mid-1940s that speak to
the failure of the paternal function.17 In order to shore up the ruins of
masculinity, many of these films are obliged to confer narrative agency, the
usual attribute of male character, on a female character, thereby further
undermining sexual difference. Given their preoccupation with male lack,
these films are also characterized by a loss of faith in the familiar and self-
evident. The hero no longer feels at home and has been dislodged from
the narratives and subject-positions which make up the dominant fiction,
and he returns to them only under duress. The crisis of male subjectivity is
attributed to the Second World War in which we learn John Ballyntine has
participated: the hero returns with a psychic as well as physical wound
which marks him as deficient. As Žižek notes, ‘the very act of assuming
guilt as an escape from the real traumatism—we don’t only escape from
guilt but also escape into guilt, take refuge in it’ (EYS 38).
Les Non-dupes Errent

Žižek is fascinated by the classic topos in Lacan that only human beings
can deceive by feigning to deceive or deceive by telling the truth. This may
be, as Fredric Jameson has suggested, the supremely unclassifiable figure
that somehow, in ways that remain to be defined, presides over all of
Žižek’s work. One of Jacques Lacan’s late seminars has the title Les Non-
Dupes Errent (Seminar 21). The joke lies in the homophony of this enig-
matic proposition (literally, ‘the undeceived are mistaken’) with the oldest
formula in the Lacanian book, ‘le nom(s) du Père’, the name(s)-of-the-
Father or, in other words, the Oedipus complex. However, Lacan’s later
variant has nothing to do with the Father, but rather with the structure of
deception. As everyone knows, the truth is itself the best disguise. To
illustrate this point, Fredric Jameson, in a review of Žižek’s The Parallax
View, recounts the story of the CIA agent at a party, who when asked what
he does in life answers, ‘Why, I’m a CIA agent’, only to be greeted with
laughter (2006, 8). This peculiarity of truth, to express itself most fully in
deception or falsehood, plays a crucial role in psychoanalysis, as one
might expect.
By way of explanation, Žižek refers to Lacan’s retelling of the joke
about two travellers—one of the meanings of errent is, of course, ‘wander-
ing’ (‘the non-dupes wander’)—who encounter each other on the street:
‘One character shouts breathlessly, “Yes, why do you lie to me saying you
are going to Cracow so I should believe you are going to Lemberg, when
in reality you are going to Cracow?”’ It would be far better for us, Lacan
suggests, to act the fool or dupe who accepts or inherits the Name-of-the-
Father in such a way.18 Why does Ballyntine pretend he is Edwardes so that
we may cannily believe that he is not when in fact he accurately portrays
the reality of the performativity of our social lives? The aim of the Green
Manors’ psychoanalysts in the film is that they should be not be duped
(non-duped) by their patients. Within the plot of the film, Murchison is
the exemplary non-duped. Indeed, Dr Fleurot remarks about ‘Edwardes’
(that is, Ballyntine) to the Sheriff: ‘The fellow took us all in—all except Dr.
Murchison’. Murchison’s is a desire to hold onto an unchanging certainty
(his directorship of Green Manors) somewhere outside his own ‘fake’
experience. It is a desire for being ‘non-duped’, which turns into a not-
too-innocent desire to seize total control.
During the first encounter in the film between Murchison and Ballyntine
(although we come to surmise that he has seen him twice before: once at
178 L. SIMMONS
the Twenty-One Club in New York, where Ballyntine had been dining
with Edwardes, and again in Gabriel Valley, where Ballyntine had been
skiing with Edwardes), Murchison strides into the staffroom door and
announces he is pleased to see ‘Edwardes’ but is also surprised at his
youthfulness. We have here a double-dupe. Murchison, after having mur-
dered the real Edwardes, certainly could not have known that Ballyntine
would assume the dead Edwardes’ identity and, of course, Ballyntine in his
assumption of that role is bluffing without knowing it. Murchison’s per-
formance of the demonstration of an urbane and pleasurable interest in
Edwardes (while masterfully concealing deep apprehension and fear at the
possibility of his own unmasking) is consummate. Žižek notes how in
Hitchcock films the characters ‘effectively become something by pretend-
ing that [they] already are that’ (LA 73). He continues:
By ‘pretending to be something,’ by ‘acting as if we were something,’ we

assume a certain place in the inter-subjective symbolic network, and it is this
external place that defines our true position. If we remain convinced, deep
within ourselves, that ‘we are not really that,’ if we preserve an intimate
distance toward ‘the social role we play,’ we doubly deceive ourselves. The
final deception is that social appearance is deceitful, for in the social-symbolic
reality things are precisely what they pretend to be. (LA 74)
Those who pretend not to be mistaken are the most mistaken and those
who think they are undeceived are the fools. Who, then, are the ‘non
dupes’ in Spellbound? The non-duped spectators are those who recognize
from their position as perverse spectators their own powerlessness before
the image. Rather than preventing the possibility of deriving conventional
pleasure from the text (as would the duped spectator), the non-duped
spectator utilizes their identification with the form of the text as a way of
occupying a position of authority over the text, allowing them to derive
pleasure from that positioning. The non-duped spectator does not occupy
the position of the Other, even though their position is tainted with
perversity.
Today the savvy, non-duped viewer of Hitchcock is everywhere as is
evidenced by websites; informed, if geeky, fans like the Australian Ken
Mogg editor of the on-line The Macguffin; and numerous publications
like the Hitchcock Annual. The non-duped spectator is totally and inti-
mately conversant with the Hitchcock oeuvre. I fear that I may be ‘non-
duped’. Crucially, the very ways that Hitchcock’s films thwart conventional
viewing practices (through their plot structures, powerless protagonists,

absence of resolution and interruption of convention) all become sites of
pleasure for these spectators. But the position of the perverse non-duped
spectator is one from which no real critical activity will emerge despite all
the blogging, for within the non-duped position, pleasure comes from
inactivity. Hitchcock’s texts rupture the easy stability of the non-duped
spectator and, as Žižek notes, in fact ‘les non-dupes errent those who do not
let themselves be caught in symbolic deception/fiction and continue to
believe their eyes, are the ones who err most’ (PV 347).
La Mère ou La Mort—‘You’re Not His Mama,

You’re an Analyst’
Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol as part of their analysis of the ‘Catholic’
Hitchcock conclude: ‘The scenario … was designed to show the protec-
tive and maternal role of woman considered as guardian angel’ (1979,
80). Constance, they argue, is cast in the caring, maternal role and is
referred to throughout as a mother figure. It would seem that this tradi-
tional reading is supported by numerous references to parenting that
occur elsewhere: Murchison announces that he plans to stay around Green
Manors ‘like an old mother hen’; Dr Fleurot, jealous of the attention
Ballyntine is receiving from Constance, declares: ‘I detected the outcrop-
pings of a mother instinct towards Dr Edwardes’; as Brulov and Constance
become engrossed in Ballyntine’s dream Brulov cautions her: ‘You’re not
his mama. You’re an analyst. Leave him alone. He will come out of this
himself’. While Constance and Ballyntine on the lam wait for Dr Brulov
to return home, they share the waiting room, as they soon unnervingly
discover, with two middle-aged police officers. In the midst of small talk,
Sgt Gillespie asks Lt Cooley about his mother. Cooley replies that she has
been complaining of rheumatism, and she wants him to obtain a transfer
to Florida. As a dutiful son Cooley reports that he took this up with his
superior but was dismissed unsympathetically with ‘some crack about me
being a mama’s boy’. As is often common with Hitchcock, central con-
cerns of the main plot are echoed comically by minor characters.
It would seem that a humdrum Oedipal drama is being played out
between the level of the main and the subplot. But what is interesting
about Spellbound is that while never pushing the Oedipal drama into the
background, at significant moments, the film nevertheless obscures it from
180 L. SIMMONS
view. Constance, for example, protests her labelling as a mother-figure,

and as we see, she is herself protean and can adopt a rapid succession of
roles. At the Empire Hotel, she is a repentant schoolteacher eager to make
amends to her husband; at Penn Station, a wife who justifies her husband’s
fainting fit; at Brulov’s house she is a newly-wed, even if Brulov is not
taken in by this role. If we remove the obstructions, it becomes clear that
in reality Spellbound is just another one of those tedious North American
melodramas about a man who cannot relate to women because he has
never properly worked through all his issues with his mother (as Woody
Allen puts it, ‘if it’s not one thing it’s your mother’ (quoted in LA 105).
On the symbolic level of Spellbound we are dealing with an empty name,
the name of a missing person, a signifier without its proper bearer, attached
to the hero. Just as he is literally fatherless, the hero is also motherless, he
has no maternal superego. As they approach the precipice, Ballyntine
recalls his childhood trauma, when he slid down the sloping balustrade of
some steps and impaled his brother on some iron railings. On the ski
slope, he grabs Constance so that they both fall down and the danger of
their going over the precipice is averted. In this incident, is not Constance
the mother figure who was not present at the childhood event and was
thus unable to prevent the fatal accident? But at this moment is not the
traditional universe of the Oedipal father and mother also replaced by the
neototemic regime of the bonded brothers reinstated through Ballyntine’s
denial of his agency in his brother’s death?19 Constance is, and is truly not,
Ballyntine’s mother. Constance, the analyst ‘supposed to know’, is unaware
that Ballyntine’s role in his brother’s death is still not resolved. And we
could describe this process as a shift from desire represented in the text to
the desire of the text. Ballyntine’s fantasy that he did not kill his brother
now works on us the audience, and it becomes reality so it can work on us
as fantasy.
Zwangsvorstellungen, a Paranoiac Vision—Lacan

avec Dalí
In his autobiography, Salvador Dalí describes his meeting in 1931 with

a ‘brilliant young psychiatrist’:
One day in Paris I received a telephone call from a brilliant young psychia-
trist. He had just read an article of mine in the review Le Minotaure on The
Inner Mechanism of Paranoiac Activity. He congratulated me and expressed
his astonishment at the accuracy of my scientific knowledge of this subject,

which was so generally misunderstood. He wished to see me to talk over this
whole question. We agreed to meet late that very afternoon in my studio on
Rue Gauguet. (1993, 17)
The young psychiatrist was, of course, Jacques Lacan.20 Lacan had been
looking to find a way of understanding paranoiac hallucination not as an
under-ordered collage of mental images but as an inherently systematic
scene. In an article, published a year later in the surrealist magazine La
Minotaure, that bears the marks of his meeting with Dalí, Lacan grants
paranoiac hallucinatory systems their own ‘original syntax’ and presents
them as ‘symbolic expressions’ (DPP 385; 387).
In turn, Dalí, who had joined the Surrealist movement in 1929, was to
embrace Lacan’s paranoiac-critic method which understood ‘reality’ to be
a construction of the human psyche.21 ‘Psychiatry before Lacan’, Dalí later
wrote in his ‘unspeakable confessions’,
committed a vulgar error … by claiming that the systematization of para-

noiac delerium developed ‘after the fact’ and that this phenomenon was to
be considered as a case of ‘reasoning madness’. Lacan showed the contrary
to be true: the delerium itself is a systematization. It is born systematic, an
active element determined to orient reality around its line of force.
(1976, 140–141)
Unlike the prevailing surrealist tradition of automatism in which the

individual merely tried to avoid taking any conscious control of his or her
actions, the ‘paranoiac-critic method’ through a deliberate simulation of
paranoia would demonstrate that reality was not a fixed entity but a con-
struct born out of the comprehension of the world. Dalí advocates an
active production of imagery based on the idea that any given image is
open to multiple interpretations. Whereas surrealist automatism relies on
a passive opening of the mind to the irrational images of the unconscious,
the paranoiac-critic method advocates an active production of imagery
meant, as Dalí puts it, ‘to systematize confusion and to contribute to the
total discrediting of the world of reality’.
Lacan pushing Dalí’s insights further claimed that paranoiac interpreta-
tion came from an existent delerium whose ‘conceptual structures’ (DPP
211) had to do with the individual’s personal history rather than some
natural physiological malfunction of the body which was the current
182 L. SIMMONS
theoretical interpretation of the condition. Against the standard psychiat-

ric definitions of paranoia as an error in judging reality, Dalí, too, theo-
rized paranoid delerium as creative and subversive and already an
interpretation of reality. In his doctoral thesis, Lacan had argued that para-
noid interpretations come from the same source as dreams: ‘there is a
perception of the external world, but it presents a double alteration close
to the structure of dreams: to us it seems refracted through [dans] a psy-
chic state intermediary between dreams and a waking [vigile] state’ (Lacan
DPP 210). Paranoiac vision restores to dreams their status as visual docu-
mentation of sublimated desire. Dalí therefore shifts attention from the
passive recording of dream imagery (automatism) to the active (paranoid)
perception of the exterior world. In Dalí’s own words:
My whole ambition in the pictorial domain is to materialize the images of

my concrete irrationality with the most imperialist fury of precision ….
Paranoiac-critical activity organizes and objectifies in an exclusivist manner
the limitless and unknown possibilities of the systematic association of sub-
jective and objective ‘significance’ in the irrational. (1998, 265)
Unlike surrealist automatism, in which the individual merely tried to

avoid taking any conscious control of his or her actions, the paranoiac-
critic method advocated the active production of imagery that through
power and violence used coincidence and pretext to produce a second
image. It was, said Dalí, ‘a spontaneous method of irrational knowledge
based on the interpretative-critical association of delerious phenomenon’.
This was achieved by depicting the images of concrete irrationality with a
realism of fastidious precision in order, Dalí maintained, ‘to paint realisti-
cally according to irrational thought, according to the unknown imagina-
tion’ (1998, 267; 265). The attractions in general of such a method for
cinema as an illusionist medium based upon realism, and specifically for
Hitchcock, a filmmaker who constantly experimented with those forms of
realism, are obvious. In his doctoral thesis, which as we have seen influ-
enced Dalí, Lacan had made the connection between paranoid interpreta-
tions and dreams. Paranoid interpretation was, he suggested, an ‘oniroid
state’ that refracted repressed desires as do dreams but one based in tan-
gible reality (Lacan DPP 210).
Hitchcock initiated discussions with Dalí in early August of 1944 two
weeks before Dalí signed a contract with Vanguard Films. Dalí’s contract
for work on Spellbound required him to ‘create, draw and paint all sketches
and/or designs required’ in connection with the Dream Sequence of the

film, and for this, he was paid $4000. From all accounts, Selznick seemed
primarily interested in the ‘bankable’ publicity value of Dalí’s name.22
However, Hitchcock, in a later television interview, makes it clear that he
was interested in Dalí’s technique and avoiding the blurred haziness of
dream clichés found in most Hollywood films by employing the sharpness
and the quality of harsh light in Dalí’s painting:
I requested Dalí. Selznick, the producer, had the impression that I wanted
Dalí for the publicity value. That wasn’t it at all. What I was after was … the
vividness of dreams … [A]ll Dalí’s work is very solid and very sharp, with
very long perspectives and black shadows. Actually I wanted the dream
sequence[s] to be shot on the back lot, not in the studio at all. I wanted
them shot in the bright sunshine. So the cameraman would be forced to do
what we call stop it out and get a very hard image. This was again the avoid-
ance of cliché. All dreams in the movies are blurred. (quoted in Bergala:
2001, 156)
As elaborated in the final script, the dream sequence was set in four dif-
ferent locations:
1. A gambling house in which Ballyntine plays cards with a bearded

man (Dr Edwardes) and meets the faceless proprietor (Dr
Murchison) who angrily accuses the bearded man of cheating with
blank cards;
2. A high sloping roof, off which the bearded man with skis on his feet
falls as the faceless man appears from behind a chimney holding a
distorted small wheel;
3. A ballroom in which Ballyntine dances with Constance and kisses
her when she turns into a statue (this sequence was deleted by
Selznick during the final editing, see Leff 165);
4. A huge slope down which Ballyntine tries to escape from the shadow
of a pair of beating wings.
Dalí completed four grey-tone paintings and two on canvas including

one in colour, as well as a drawing on paper that served as backdrops for
three of the dream scenes: a grey-tone image repainted as a curtain of eyes
used in location 1 (Fig. 5.3) and a colour oil study of a floating eye set
above a receding perspective grid (not used); a grey-tone oil landscape on
184 L. SIMMONS
Fig. 5.3 Dalí’s drawing of eyes repainted for the film set of Spellbound
panel with a high rooftop and chimney used in location 2; an oil design on
canvas of floating objects including a suspended piano and dancing figures
for the discarded ballroom sequence (not used); a drawing on paper (not
used) and a grey-tone oil on masonite of two abutting pyramids overshad-
owed by enormous outsized pliers used in location 4; and a grey-tone
barren landscape with solitary tree and swirling cloud for a new bridging
scene into the ballroom sequence that was eventually not used. In the final
film, the sequence began with the image of an oversized pair of scissors
cutting through an eye painted on a curtain (reproduced from the Dalí
painting by professional billboard painters) to reveal another eye under-
neath. Dalí’s allusion was to the infamous opening shot of his and Buñuel’s
Un Chien Andalou (1928), but the image was yet another Dalí ‘double’.
In Spellbound, the actual analysis of Ballyntine’s dream occurs in two
stages: first in Brulov’s home where Brulov, in an orthodox Freudian fash-
ion and in response to Ballyntine’s scepticism, compares dreams to jigsaw
puzzles with the pieces all mixed up. Secondly, at Green Manors when
Constance discusses it with Murchison. Andrew Britton has argued that

the understanding of the dream is pre-Freudian and must be recognized
as corresponding point to point with historical events ‘as if they were
empirical clues’ rather than with condensed or displaced instincts, the
dream is interpreted as a code or rebus for ‘real events’ (1986, 80). That
is, the great pair of wings becomes a reference to San Gabriel Valley; the
sloping roof becomes a ski-run; the misshapen wheel dropped from the
roof of the building is interpreted by Constance as the revolver that kills
Edwardes dropped in the snow; the curtain of eyes represents the eyes of
the spectators, the eyes of patients and doctors that stare at Green Manors.
So in classical Freudian terms, the explicit narrative is like a dream-text
that refers in an encoded manner to its true referent, the ‘dream-thought’
(the events of Edwardes’ death), reflecting it in a distorted way; however,
it is through this very distortion and displacement that the ‘unconscious
wish’ inscribes itself. The dreamt action takes place within the frame of an
eye, but we are meant to understand that the image we see is turned back
on itself. Hitchcock reinscribes the cinematic through Dalí’s graphic work.
The outsized scissors cut the eyeball on a curtain that, as it falls away,
reveals yet another eye; a marking that both generates, and bars, meta-
phoric totalizations of the cinematic gaze.
There is a fundamental question to be raised apropos the dream as
interpretive tool. The dream is a metastasis, and as such, it undermines the
very hermeneutic model of the interpretation of dreams. The key insight
for Žižek is that ‘the unconscious desire in a dream is not simply its core
which never appears directly, which is distorted by the translation into the
manifest dream-text, but the very principle of this distortion’ (IDLC 72).
Žižek takes his cue from Freud’s Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis:
The only essential thing about dreams is the dream-work that has influenced
the thought-material. We have no right to ignore it in our theory, even
though we may disregard it in certain practical situations. Analytic observa-
tion shows further that the dream-work never restricts itself to translating
these thoughts into the archaic or regressive mode of expression that is
familiar to you. (SEXV 115)
Žižek comments:
The paradox is that this dream-work is not merely a process of masking the
dream’s ‘true message’: the dream’s true core, its unconscious wish, inscribes
186 L. SIMMONS
itself only through and in this very process of masking, so that the moment
we retranslate the dream content back into the dream-thought expressed in
it, we lose the ‘true motif force’ of the dream—in short, it is the process of
masking itself which inscribes into the dream its true secret. (IDLC 73)
Thus, it is Dalí’s exploration of (Lacanian) ‘paranoiac vision’ in the set

designs that restores to the Hitchcockian dream its true status as visual
documentation of sublimated desire.
Dalí’s childhood exhibits some curious parallels with that of the pro-
tagonist of Hitchcock’s film John Ballyntine. He was named Salvador after
his brother, who had died before Dalí was born. Consequently, he was
obsessed by his alter ego and continually struggled to prove that he him-
self existed (that he was not his dead brother, whom he would visit in the
cemetery, placing flowers at the gravestone that bore his own name). Dalí
declared that his discovery of Freud’s On the Interpretation of Dreams
made a great impression upon him: ‘It was one of the capital discoveries of
my life, and I was seized with a real vice of self-interpretation, not only of
my dreams but of everything that happened to me, however accidental it
might at first seem at first glance’ (1942, 167 fn1). In his account of his
meeting with Lacan, Dalí notes that he was somewhat puzzled by the way
Lacan smiling softly closely scrutinized his face from time to time. Only
after Lacan left did Dalí realize that a piece of paper which he had stuck to
his nose while painting earlier, which he had placed there in order to pro-
tect his eyes from the glare, had remained visible throughout the conver-
sation.23 The story offers an ironic deflation of what we may consider lucid
in Dalí, and Dalí himself provides evidence and implies he is not to be
taken seriously; but then in a tongue-in-check posture that implies that he
is fully aware of what he is doing and that the rigour behind the stance
implies some hidden seriousness. The bizarre Dalí and the lucid Dalí chase
each other in a circle and, like the Moebius strip, it is impossible to tell
where one ends and the other begins. This, as I hope to have shown, is
also Hitchcock’s position with regard to his psychoanalytical subject matter.
The Light Under the Door and the Last

Freudian Slip
Photophobia is the term used by Brulov to describe John Ballyntine’s
lapses into threatening trances and protopyschotic cinamnesia.24 A phobia
to light which occurs in the reflective white tiled bathroom and when he
sees the blanket of snow that has just fallen outside the window:
CONSTANCE: Snow!
DR. BRULOV: The light frightened him—photophobia.
CONSTANCE: That’s the white he’s afraid of. Snow and these tracks.
DR. BRULOV: What tracks?
CONSTANCE: The sled tracks in the snow … skiing … ski tracks in
the snow.
We first become aware of the white light when Constance gets up in the
middle of the night and passes the closed door to Ballyntine’s office/
apartment, and she is attracted by the mysterious light escaping under the
door. Doors appear again when Constance and Ballantyne kiss for the first
time which engenders the shot of a door opening to reveal another door
and so on.25 During Ballyntine’s breakdown in the operating theatre, he
cries out ‘The doors! Unlock the doors!’ In Brulov’s white bathroom
when he is unable to cope, he clings to the doorframe surrounded by
white light. After Ballyntine’s conviction, the shots of the locking of jail
cell doors reverse those of opening doors when he and Constance first kiss.
In the film’s penultimate scene, while standing in front of a slightly open
door, Murchison reveals to Constance that he knew Dr Edwardes. His
words signal to her that there is something sinister below the surface of Dr
Murchison’s character, something hidden beyond the door. When
Constance returns for her confrontation with Murchison before she
knocks, the same eerie light escapes from underneath the door.26
It is Murchison’s drive to know, to signify, that convicts him.27
Throughout the film, he is unable to resist touting his knowledge of the
events that he himself has scripted as evidence of a superior manifestation
of psychoanalytic insight; significantly, it is in the claim that he ‘knew
Edwardes’ that Murchison sets off Constance’s ‘agile young mind’ (and
notice how at the end of the film the theme of the antithesis between age
and youth surfaces again), speaking his own death warrant. Constance
finds herself staring into the barrel of a gun, and with steel nerves, she tells
188 L. SIMMONS
Murchison why he will not kill her: ‘You are thinking you were not men-
tally responsible for that other crime in the snow. They will find extenuat-
ing circumstances in the state of your health. They will not execute you for
the death of Dr Edwardes. You can still live, read, write, research, even if
you are put away…’ For Constance’s reading of Murchison’s ‘slip of the
tongue’, in a film full of slips and physical slipping down slopes, is nothing
more than an extension of Constance’s training at the hands of Murchison.
Murchison fully and correctly interprets the sequence of Ballyntine’s
dream at his (Murchison’s) own expense. Murchison convicts himself as
the surrogate author of the plot, a plot cunningly scripted by the analyst
who has pretended to be a mere character in it. The result of this ‘double
inscription’ is that, as Žižek notes,
The gaze denotes at the same time power (it enables us to exert control over
the situation, to occupy the position of the master) and impotence (as bear-
ers of a gaze, we are reduced to the role of passive witnesses to the adver-
sary’s action). The gaze, in short, is a perfect embodiment of the ‘impotent
Master’ one of the central figures of the Hitchcockian universe. (LA 72)
We might say that the analysis becomes the symptom of its own mes-
sage at this point. We might also say that Murchison has no other motive
than to enable Spellbound. He is not a soul in torment (this role is reserved
for Ballyntine), nor an agent of evil, but a pure agent of the film’s author,
Alfred Hitchcock.
Constance leaves the room and the gun in Murchison’s hand slowly
swivels round until it is pointing directly into the camera (now sited in
Murchison’s head). Murchison pulls the trigger, and the screen is filled
with a red flash much as the screen is blotted out at the end of the momen-
tary flashback of Ballyntine’s brother’s death. The message of the (gun)
shot that is the inverted message of the (camera) shot registers the loop by
which the film produces what it then claims to perceive. The void or black
hole of the barrel of the revolver is the objective correlative of the camera
in the field of vision. The message of the film is, then, no message at all,
for the process by which the characters write the film from within becomes
the process by which they write themselves out of the story. Here
Hitchcock, the only one we did not suspect of the murder, points the fin-
ger, or rather the gun, in his own direction, at his own direction. As
William Rothman has observed: ‘That Hitchcock’s art has a murderous
aspect is a—or the—quintessentially Hitchcockian idea’ (2012, 216).
Hitchcock, like Murchison himself, does not step aside when the conse-
quences of his own shot return as a bullet aimed straight at himself—if
only because, as always, the camera is too enthralled to look away. Here is
William Rothman again:
Only the camera can nominate a villan, and it can do so only by nominating
itself. When human beings perform villanous acts, as they often do, the
camera is implicated—the film’s author is implicated, we are implicated—in
their villany. No filmmaker had a deeper understanding of these principles
than Hitchcock. His cinema is a sustained, profound meditation on their
implications. (2012, 220)
Epigraph—Cassius avec Constance

In the opening sequence, as the credits of the film roll by, we observe a
tree in an autumn wind, its leaves are progressively blown away to finally
leave it denuded and bare. This, according to Christopher Morris, ‘sug-
gests an enervating desuetude or decay of signs even before the film’s sec-
ond beginning can unfold’ (2002, 147), and we will remember later on
that dry leaves have to be removed from Constance’s hair as she picnics
with Ballyntine. The wind of this opening sequence is simulated most
elaborately by the film score, with its use of the mysterious instrument the
theremin, and the eerie tune returns again in the moments of Ballyntine’s
anxiety attacks.28 If the tree is the mind and the dead leaves are obstructive
repressed feelings perhaps the wind may be the strange vigour of psycho-
analytic insight? Or, does the image simply prefigure the theme of youth
versus age and signal that Murchison is a dead leaf that will fall with the
passing of a season or epoch?
The second opening consists of an equally mysterious epigraph from
Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: ‘The fault is not in our stars but in ourselves’.
The quotation is incomplete but, as Hitchcock would have most certainly
known, his quotation relates to questions of power and abuse and is part
of Cassius’ plea to Brutus for revolution:
Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world

Like a Colossus, and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs and peep about
To find ourselves dishonourable graves.
Men at some time are masters of their fates:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
190 L. SIMMONS
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

Brutus and Caesar: what should be in that ‘Caesar’?
Why should that name be sounded more than yours?
Write them together, yours is as fair a name;
Sound them, it doth become the mouth as well;
Weigh them, it is as heavy; conjure with ‘em,
Brutus will start a spirit as soon as Caesar.
Now, in the names of all the gods at once,
Upon what meat doth this our Caesar feed,
That he is grown so great? Age, thou art shamed!
Rome, thou hast lost the breed of noble bloods!
When went there by an age, since the great flood,
But it was famed with more than with one man?
When could they say till now, that talk’d of Rome,
That her wide walls encompass’d but one man?
Now is it Rome indeed and room enough,
When there is in it but one only man.
O, you and I have heard our fathers say,
There was a Brutus once that would have brook’d
The eternal devil to keep his state in Rome
As easily as a king. (Julius Caesar, I.ii)
Andrew Britton is quick to point out that the quotation from

Shakespeare has ‘nothing to do with psychological disorder’ (1986, 72)
but is about power and professional status: the fault Cassius alludes to is
the fact that he and Brutus are unfairly subordinate to Caesar and that
powerlessness is belittling. The speech, like the film, does depend upon
the repeated notion of a name: ‘Why should that name be sounded more
than yours?’, Cassius asks, ‘Write them together, yours is as fair a name’.
The immediate conscious goal of the conspirators opposed to Caesar is of
course to reinstate the Republic, but the final result of their conspiracy
was, however, the installation of the Empire, that is the exact opposite of
what they intended. Ballyntine’s trying to take the (symbolic) place of his
predecessor is only a consequence of Murchison’s (real) attempt to regain
the place of his successor. The epigraph and the speech from Julius Caesar
thus speak to the film’s other plot line in which the stakes are not the
Oedipal ones of son killing father but of the father killing the son. Indeed,
Cassius asks: ‘Upon what meat doth this our Caesar feed, That he is grown
so great?’
The epigraph has been read simply and directly to mean that we human
beings ourselves control our destinies and are not mere subjects of the
brute forces of the world. ‘Men at some time are masters of their fates’.
But as we have seen, the moment of ‘revelation’ of Ballyntine’s childhood
act will cause us to ask, did he act blindly as a pawn of fate, or was his
action guided and deliberate? The difference between guilt and innocence
is for the film itself a slippery (ski) slope, and we cannot answer this ques-
tion definitively. If the past can be repeated, or rather realized, it is, as
Lacan suggests, only as a repetition of the same ‘missed encounter’, where
what is missed is the real of desire, the desire to kill a brother that remains
inadmissible: ‘If the transference is only repetition, it is repetition of the
same missed encounter. If the transference is supposed through this rep-
etition to restore the continuity of a history, it will do so only by reviving
a relation that is, of its nature, syncopated’ (S11 143).
At the end of the film, Ballyntine has traversed his fantasy. Lacan used
the term ‘traversed’, the fantasy is not eradicated but is now different from
how we began. Yet as Žižek himself points out in The Sublime Object of
Ideology, there is always a ‘remainder of the real’ in any operation of quilt-
ing, the transference never entirely ‘effaces its own traces’. As I have
argued here, this remainder persists as the ‘repressed truth’ of the very
misrecognition that is the condition of ‘truth’. Perhaps the last word here
should be left to Dr Brulov: ‘The case was a little deeper than you figured.
This often happens’.
Notes
1. On Mary E Romm and her relationship with Selznick, see Steven Farber
and Marc Green (1993, 37–55) and David Thomson (1992, 423–429).
2. However, in another interview, Hitchcock declared: ‘Spellbound was based
on complete psychiatric truth’ and notes that ‘The Couch’ was a possible
title for the film (Gottlieb 1995, 121). Hitchcock’s overt knowledge of
psychoanalysis—whether mere ‘pop Freud’ or something deeper—has
been much debated. Nicholas Haeffner comments: ‘Although Hitchcock
was not consistent or expert in his use of psychoanalytic motifs, he was
hardly innocent of Freud’s work and even without the intervention of his
script writers, psychoanalytic ideas other films of his in less direct form’
(2005, 83). William F. Van Wert actually suggests that the film is ‘a dead-
end on Freudian theory’ and undercuts its psychoanalytic content:
‘Spellbound is a subtle put-down of psychoanalysis in that it insists on prov-
ing scientifically what can be guessed with common sense all along’ (1979,
192 L. SIMMONS
42). While Royal S. Brown proposes a Jungian rather than Freudian inter-
pretation of the film which she argues is ‘consciously Freudian and uncon-
sciously Jungian’ (1980, 41). For Tom Cohen, ‘Hitchcock’s direct
“invocations” of psychoanalysis, each defac[e] it as a prop’ so that his
‘engagement with the discourse of psychoanalysis is deliberately eviscerat-
ing and consuming, circulating it as semiotic coinage, disinscribing its his-
torical frame…’ (2005b vol. 2, 84).
3. Other examples include: Hail the Conquering Hero (1944), State Fair
(1945), Lost Weekend (1945), The Guilt of Janet Ames (1947), It’s a
Wonderful Life (1946), Gilda (1946), The Best Years of Our Lives (1946).
4. On the complicated relationship and cat and mouse dealings between
Selznick and Hitchcock over Spellbound, see Leonard J. Leff (1999,
115–173).
5. Karl Menniger’s first book The Human Mind (1930) had been a bestseller
and popularized the notion of human behaviour. The Menninger
Foundation founded in Topeka Kansas by Karl and his father and brother
gained a reputation for intensive, individualized treatment, particularly for
patients with complex or long-standing symptoms.
6. See Jean Laplanche (1992).
7. Freud borrowed the expression ‘another scene’ from G.T. Fechner and
used it in his The Interpretation of Dreams stating that ‘the scene of action
of dreams is different from that of waking ideational life’, (SE V 535–6).
8. Ballyntine seems aware of the significance of the letters of a name. At one
point in the room in the Empire Hotel, he remarks to Constance:
J.B. (softly): I think you’re quite mad—you’re much crazier than I, to

do all this for a creature without a name. To run off with
a—a pair of initials.
9. And I have followed his practice here.

10. Were we to play a game of psychoanalytical word association, we could
note that the name ‘Ballantine’ is made up of ‘ball’ and ‘tine’ (meaning the
prongs of a pitchfork; but also affliction, loss or damage). John Ballyntine
may have had the ‘balls’ to kill his brother by impaling him on the ‘prongs’
of an iron fence but does he have the ‘balls’ to acknowledge it?
11. On the theme of age vs youth see Murchison to Constance: ‘You haven’t
learned the basic secret of science. The old must make way for the new’
and, much later, Brulov to Ballyntine: ‘This is the secret of old age.
Everything becomes just the opposite … Do you know who make the most
trouble in the world—old people’. Upon his arrival at Green Manors,
Edwardes’ youth is remarked upon by Graff: ‘He looks a littler younger
than I expected’, and Murchison: ‘You’re younger than I thought you

would be’.
12. E. Ann Kaplan writes: ‘The two reverse roles: Petersen’s femininity is mas-
culinized by her needing to be active and in control while his masculinity
is muted by his physical and psychological weakness’ (2005, 83). The film
also makes a direct connection between detective and psychoanalyst. The
house detective who rescues Constance from the drunken businessman
from Pittsburgh in the Empire Hotel lobby declares to Constance’s amaze-
ment that he is ‘a kind of psychologist. You know, you gotta be in my line’.
13. As if to confirm her blindness, in a moment of narrative prefiguration,
Constance has told Garmes, a patient at Green Manors, who believes he
has killed his father, ‘People often feel guilty over something they never
did. It usually goes back to their childhood. A child often wishes some-
thing terrible would happen to someone. And if something does happen to
that person the child believes he has caused it. And he grows up with a
guilt complex—over a sin that was only a child’s bad dream’.
14. Instructive here is Žižek’s reading of Neil Jordan’s film The Crying Game
through the matrix of Courtly Love underlining that the relationship
between the ex-IRA soldier and the black girlfriend of the British soldier
killed by the IRA is governed by ‘a radical sense of discord by what the
lover sees in the loved one and what the loved one knows himself to be’.
Žižek stresses how queerness is the secret of the norm itself. What the film
shows is that the core of male sexual fantasy is that woman is really no dif-
ferent from himself and that sexual difference is a masquerade (ME
102–109).
15. In Freud’s myth of the primal father in Totem and Taboo, there was once a
primal father who ruled over a horde of brothers. He kept all the women
for himself, and drove away his sons when they became adults. The primal
father had no limits on his sexual enjoyment and no restriction to his
power. The sons hated the father because he prevented them from doing
what they wanted to do, but since that was, in effect, to become him, they
also loved him.
16. For Lacan, the question ‘what is a father?’ is the central theme of Freud’s
work (S4 204–205).
17. See also Paul Verhaeghe (2000).
18. Lacan (S11 139 and S3 37) is, of course, referring to a joke from Freud’s
Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (1905) (SE VIII 115). Žižek
refers to this joke on several occasions: LSP 319; ZJ 130; TUE 316, LA 73.
19. The minor character Garmes is another ‘brother’ for Ballyntine. Indeed,
Garmes is a sort of surrogate for Ballyntine. Garmes is suffering from a
guilt complex: he believes that he has killed his father and his brother has
had him committed to punish him.
194 L. SIMMONS
20. Elizabeth Roudinesco, Lacan’s biographer, dates the meeting 1931 but
differs on the text that provoked the meeting: ‘One day, he [Lacan] tele-
phoned Salvador Dalí to discuss with him a text the latter had just pub-
lished under the eloquent title L’âne pourri [‘The rotten donkey’]. The
painter agreed to meet him and received the psychiatrist in his home’
(1990, 110). Among the accounts of the Dalí-Lacan encounter, one of the
most comprehensive is Hanjo Berressem (1996). See also Haim Finkelstein
(1975), Soraya Tlatli (2000), Patrice Schmitt (1980) and the issue of
Revue des Sciences Humaines CCLII (2001), Lire Dalí, ed. Frédérique
Joseph-Lowery.
21. There is evidence that Dalí also read Lacan’s thesis once it was published.
He cites Lacan’s thesis in his essay ‘Nouvelles considérations générales sur
le mécanisme du phénomène paranoïaque du point de vue surréaliste,’
Minotaure, no. 1 (May 1933).
22. It is also clear that this worked. Sara Cochran comments: ‘The Dalí name
was indeed a bankable asset. The mid-August announcement of his hiring
garnered an article in Life and four in the local press over the course of less
than a month’ (in Gale ed.: 2007, 175).
23. See Dalí’s account (1942, 18). Roudinesco’s version mistakenly suggests
that Dalí’s act was deliberate: ‘As a provocation, he [Dalí] wore an adhesive
plaster on his nose and suspected a surprised reaction from his visitor.
Lacan did not flinch…’ (1990, 110).
24. According to Tom Cohen, the term ‘photophobia’ is a mocking reference
to the fear ‘not only of the citational structure of the image but of the
betraying structure of “light” itself’ (2005b vol. 2, 85).
25. In an interview with Peter Bogdanovich, Hitchcock admitted: ‘I asked Ben
Hecht to find out for me the psychiatric symbol for the beginning of love
between two people, and he came back with the doors’ (1997, 512).
26. As Dan Aulier notes Hitchcock’s trailer for Spellbound contains the follow-
ing statement: ‘Maybe you know about one of those doors, or maybe
two … but there are others … there’s a whole succession of doors in the
human mind … and very few people expose themselves beyond the first or
second … Spellbound deals with methods by which the individual is forced
to open those closed doors …. All of them’ (1999, 558).
27. Murchison’s is the sort of act that Peter Brooks calls ‘self-nomination’ and
finds characteristic of the theatrical melodramas of the nineteenth century:
‘The villain at some point always bursts forth in a statement of his evil
nature and intentions’ (1976, 37). Notice, too, how when Murchison first
arrives at Constance’s room in Green Manors, he marches in
‘self-announced’.
28. Jack Sullivan writes that ‘[Miklós] Rózsa’s score was a significant factor in
the film’s success, both before and after its release, so much so that it is a
milestone in the history of cinema music’ (2006, 107).
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217–223. London: Institute of Contemporary Arts.
Leff, Leonard J. 1999. Hitchcock and Selznick: The Rich and Strange Collaboration
of Alfred Hitchcock and David O. Selznick in Hollywood. Berkeley, Los Angeles
and London: University of California Press.
Mogg, Ken. 1995. Their Way: Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945). The MacGuffin
(Australia) no. 15: 3–26.
Alfred Hitchcock. Wesport, CT and London: Praeger.
Myers, Tony. 2003. Slavoj Žižek, London and New York: Routledge.
University Press.
Rothman, William. 2012. Hitchcock—The Murderous Gaze. Albany: State
University of New York Press, second edition.
Roudinesco, Elizabeth. 1990. Jacques Lacan & Co.: A History of Psychoanalysis in
France, 1925–1985, trans. with a foreword Jeffrey Mehlman. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Schmitt, Patrice. 1980. De la psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec Salvador
Dalí. In Salvador Dalí Retrospective 1920–1980. Paris: Centre Georges
Pompidou.
Silverman, Kaja. 1992. Male Subjectivity at the Margins. London and New York:
Routledge.
Sullivan, Jack. 2006. Hitchcock’s Music. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Thomson, David. 1992. Showman: The Life of David O. Selznick. New York: Knopf.
Tlatli, Soraya. 2000. Le Psychiatre et ses poètes: Essai sur le jeune Lacan. Paris: Tchou.
Van Wert, William S. 1979. Compositional Psychoanalysis: Circles and Straight
Lines in “Spellbound”. Film Criticism 3:3: 41–47.
Verhaeghe, Paul. 2000. The Collapse of the Function of the Father and Its Effect
on Gender Roles. In Sexuation, ed. Renata Salecl. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
CHAPTER 6
Enjoyment: Marnie (1964)
Abstract Marnie does not want to be touched; the desire to touch the
human being who does not want to be touched animates a system of look-
ing. Hitchcock’s camera wants to possess Marnie who can not only be
viewed but also physically touched. Marnie’s stealing is a symptom of
something she does not know or understand, her jouissance is almost
excessive. What is the nature of her enjoyment and why do we retain our
sympathy with the character of Mark Rutland when he apparently rapes
her? Žižek explores how the Lacanian concept of jouissance provides for a
re-reading of the femme fatale (Marnie). In the traditional reading the
femme fatale is the embodiment of the fear of emancipated femininity. But
for Žižek all the features denounced as the result of male paranoia account
for the figure’s charm, as if the theorizing provides an alibi for our enjoy-
ment of the femme fatale.
Jouissance is what serves no purpose [La jouissance, c’est ce ci qui ne sert

à rien].
—Jacques Lacan, Seminar 20.
… you cannot have both meaning and enjoyment.
—Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom!
MARNIE: We don’t need men, Mama. We can do very well for
ourselves … you and me.
—Marnie.

Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62436-1_6
202 L. SIMMONS
A Detail That Sticks Out—The Lady

with the Yellow Alligator Purse
My subheading focuses on what is most probably the most famous—as

well as being the opening—sequence, of Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie
(1964): the extreme close-up of a yellow purse tucked under a woman’s
arm, a fetishized object that points us to Marnie’s problem (her penchant
for theft), as well as the artifice of her shifting of costume and hair colour
(about to be changed from black to blonde) (Fig. 6.1). Indeed, it signals
for us the important role of colour in the film as a whole, and the fact that,
at least initially, we are denied access to her face which is, when we do get
to see it, perhaps only a mere mask of shifting identities. But I was also
deliberately misreading this scene. I called it a yellow alligator purse when
quite clearly it is not, alligator that is. The answer why will have to wait
until the end of this chapter. But here from the outset I am interested in
Fig. 6.1 Marnie’s yellow purse

6 ENJOYMENT: MARNIE (1964) 203
the detail, as Lesley Brill suggests, the yellow colour that first appears with
the handbag is a sign of caution and alert throughout the film (1991, 242).
We might also usefully recall here Žižek’s commentary on the function
of the tracking shot in Hitchcock’s films. He argues that the tracking
shot—like the one of Marnie’s opening sequence—typically serves to rep-
resent a scene from a position of neutral objective distance, to emphasize
a world of normality and convention. According to Žižek, this neutral
objective tracking shot proceeds inexorably from the establishing plan ren-
dering the overview of the scene to the registering of a ‘“stain” which
sticks out’ (EYAW, 248)—the closeness of the yellow handbag. As a result,
he continues elsewhere:
A perfectly ‘natural’ and ‘familiar’ situation is denatured, becomes ‘uncanny’,

loaded with horror and threatening possibilities, as soon as we add to it a
small supplementary feature, a detail that ‘does not belong’, that sticks out,
is ‘out of place’, does not make any sense within the frame of the idyllic
scene. This ‘pure’ signifier without signified stirs the germination of a sup-
plementary, metaphorical meaning for all other elements: the same situa-
tions, the same events that, till then, have been perceived as perfectly
ordinary acquire an air of strangeness. (LA, 88)
However, the most influential account of the significance and impor-

tance of this shot is contained in the famous analysis by Raymond Bellour
of the opening of Marnie which traces a chain of (male) gazes around the
imaging/imagining of the heroine that demonstrates a patriarchal regula-
tion of the scopic drive. A yellow handbag, a deserted platform, a woman
with her back to us, and Bellour describes how:
At the very beginning of this shot, the camera clings possessively to this
body that it offers to us as an enigma … From this point on, the camera fol-
lows this body only while pulling away from it, revealing its own presence
through this separation and substituting for the partial body one that is total
and thus all the more imaginary. (2000, 217)1
Central to Bellour’s analysis is also the presence of Hitchcock who uses

his male characters as ‘fictional delegates’ in order to fulfil Hitchcock’s
own desire:
On the left of the frame a door opens from what must be a hotel room.
Hitchcock emerges, his back turned three-quarters toward the viewer,
204 L. SIMMONS
erfectly positioned to allow him to observe Marnie waking down the hall
p
and away from him. He then turns towards the spectator staring at the cam-
era that he himself is and whose inscription he duplicates. The spectator in
turn (re)duplicates this inscription through his identification with both
Hitchcock and the camera. (2000, 223)
Indeed, for Bellour, as he has argued in another essay, it is Hitchcock’s

own appearance in the film that is an index of this particular relationship.
Bellour claims that Hitchcock appears in his films ‘at that point in the
chain of events where the film-wish is condensed’ (1977, 73). His appear-
ance is an ironic underlining, a sort of cinematic tic that suggests the set of
(patriarchal) assumptions, which the film is ever at pains to disguise. This
figure is termed the ‘enunciator’ by Bellour and, importantly, the figure of
Hitchcock is not the author/auteur, for as part of the text, he is part of the
‘enounced’ as opposed to the ‘enunciation’. The corollary, and it is one
supported by Laura Mulvey who uses Marnie as an example in her equally
famous essay on the ‘male gaze’, is that the film is ordered by a logic of
masculine desire and that enjoyment (jouissance) within its system is to be
found only at the expense of the woman and through identification with
the man. The image of the woman in Hollywood is merely the repetition
of the constitutive moment of male identity, and woman is otherwise the
simple expenditure of the text, its cost margin (Mulvey 1975, 23).
However, I want to suggest an alternative.
As we have seen, Žižek can be credited with a revival of interest in spe-
cifically Lacanian psychoanalytical film criticism, but also a decisive shift
from Laura Mulvey’s analysis of the gaze of mastery, and Oudart’s notion
of suture and cinematic identification that in particular underpins Bellour’s
analysis.2 It is a shift to focus on questions of fantasy and spectator enjoy-
ment. Thus, concepts of the gaze and identification in Žižek’s film com-
mentary are linked, as I hope to show here, to issues of desire and
jouissance. A case in point is Žižek’s repeated analysis of the sexual assault
scene from Lynch’s Wild at Heart (1990) discussed in Chap. 1. A key-
stone to Žižek’s edifice is the Lacanian notion of jouissance, which, charac-
teristically, he simply translates as ‘enjoyment’. For Žižek, jouissance is
both a feature of individual subjectivity, an explanation of our individual
obsessions and investments, and a phenomenon that best describes the
political dynamics of collective violence, for example, it is the envy of the
jouissance of the Other (as neighbour) that accounts for racism and
extreme forms of nationalism. It is the relational and paradoxical
understanding of enjoyment that renders it important for an understand-

ing of film spectatorship.3 So, taking a cue from Žižek, and opposing the
analyses of Raymond Bellour, which propose that the figure of Marnie in
this film is constructed by a relay of looks of the male gaze, I want to sug-
gest that she is constructed through a process of touch. Marnie (Tippi
Hedren) does not want to be touched, and curiously, it is this desire to
touch the human being who does not want to be touched that animates a
system of looking in the film narrative. At one point in the film, Mark
Rutland (Sean Connery) describes an object that seems to be a flower until
one reaches out and touches it and perceives that it is in fact a conglomera-
tion of insects.
MARK: In Africa, in Kenya, there’s quite a beautiful flower. It’s coral-

coloured with little green-tipped blossoms, rather like a hya-
cinth. Now, if you reach out to touch it, you discover that the
flower was not a flower at all, but a design made up of hundreds
of tiny insects called fattid bugs. They escape the eyes of hungry
birds by living and dying in the shape of a flower.4
During the first kiss between Mark and Marnie in the midst of a thun-
derstorm, Hitchcock’s camera comes in to a close two-shot and then a
very tight zoom that ends up obliterating all but facial fragments. It is as
if the actors’ flesh seems to stretch and cover the film frame in an act of
caressing.
Throughout the film there is a need for Hitchcock’s camera to possess
Marnie, to offer her up as ‘something’ who can not only be viewed but
also physically touched. Marnie’s stealing is a symptom of something she
does not know or understand. Marnie’s jouissance is almost excessive.
What, we need to ask, is the nature of her enjoyment and why do we retain
our sympathy with the character of Mark Rutland when he (almost?) rapes
her? His relationship duplicates Marnie’s relationship with her mother
(Mark = Marnie Marnie = Mother). He is not simply her antagonist but a
double in terms of the film’s motif of touch and desire. Mark wants to
touch Marnie who wants to touch her mother, a prostitute, who makes
her living from the touch of men, and reciprocally Marnie only desires for
her mother to touch her.
Let us return for a moment to that early appearance of Hitchcock in his
film. Instead of gazing longingly after Marnie, thus authorizing the spec-
tator as a double of Mark and of Hitchcock, and, we might note,
206 L. SIMMONS
translating Mark’s fantasy of mastery into theory, Hitchcock gives a quick

glance down the corridor and then back at the camera. The effect is to
deflect any identificatory or desiring relay and to hypostatize the structure
of the male gaze itself. In this way, the stain of the yellow handbag opens
up the abyss of the search for a meaning—as Žižek remarks of the ‘phallic
spot’ in the picture ‘nothing is what it seems to be, everything is to be
interpreted, everything is supposed to possess some supplementary mean-
ing’ (LA, 91).
Jouissance as Clinamen—From Nothing to Something

It may appear curious that to discuss enjoyment I have chosen a film with
so little enjoyment, indeed no apparent sexual enjoyment. A contrast, we
might add, to the standard Hollywood fare that gives a certain consistency
to the infallibility of enjoyment and props up a saccharine belief in jouis-
sance. Although jouissance can be translated as ‘enjoyment’, translators of
Lacan often prefer to leave it in French in order to render palpable its
excessive, properly traumatic character: to indicate the fact that we are not
dealing with simple (Hollywood) pleasures, but with a violent intrusion
that brings more pain than pleasure, an intrusion that is ‘beyond the plea-
sure principle’. For Freud, the pleasure principle thus functions as a limit
imposed on enjoyment: it commands the subject to enjoy as little as pos-
sible.5 Jouissance transgresses this law and, for Žižek, jouissance is ontologi-
cal in essence and is a mark of the primordial decentring of the subject.
I want to briefly outline some forms and modalities of jouissance that
will be dealt with in this chapter. As Žižek has observed, ‘The central para-
dox of jouissance is that you cannot directly target it; it is always a by-
product’ (OSD, 115). ‘Jouissance is what serves no purpose [La jouissance,
c’est ce ci qui ne sert à rien]’, declares Lacan in Seminar 20, Encore (S20, 3).
Sean Homer, in his introductory book on Lacan, echoes Žižek when he
characterizes jouissance as ‘retrospectively turning nothing into something’:
The difficulty with talking about jouissance is that we cannot actually say
what it is. We experience it rather through its absence or insufficiency. As
subjects we are driven by insatiable desires. As we seek to realize our desires
we will inevitably be disappointed—the satisfaction we achieve is never quite
enough; we always have the sense that there is something more, something
we have missed out on, something more we could have had. This something
more that would satisfy and fulfill us beyond the meager pleasure we experi-
ence is jouissance. (Homer 2005, 90)6
According to Žižek, jouissance intrudes, it cuts in to upset things:
Jouissance is thus the ontological aberration, the disturbed balance (clina-

men, to use the old philosophical term) which accounts for the passage from
Nothing to Something; it designates the minimal contraction … which pro-
vides the density of the subject’s reality … this absolutely meaningless intru-
sion, this clinamen, upsets everything. (PF, 49)
Let me start with the ‘Hollywood movie jouissance’ I just alluded to,
since it is the form of enjoyment that most of us experience most of the
time. Just when we think we possess our object of desire—be that another
person or a difficult idea like jouissance that we are struggling to get hold
of—we discover that we are still dissatisfied. And here lies another pun:
jouissance is always jouis-sans, ‘without joy’. This is what Lacan’s translator
Bruce Fink refers to as ‘paltry jouissance’ (2002, 36). This sense of some-
thing wanting, something which fundamentally misses our partner or idea,
is the form of jouissance that Lacan identified as ‘phallic jouissance’ and, he
says, it defines the masculine structure. As Fink continues:
I would like to suggest that we understand ‘phallic’ as ‘fallible’, to hear the

fallibility in the phallus. Phallic jouissance is the jouissance that fails us, dis-
appoints us. It is susceptible to failure, and it fundamentally misses our part-
ner. Why? Because it reduces our partner, as Other, to what Lacan refers as
the object a, that partial object that serves as the cause of our desire….
(ibid., 37)
The structure that is of the signifier within the Symbolic. A structure

that belongs to fantasy and finds a link with a piece of the body, an objet a,
creating the illusion of union.
Then, for Lacan, there exists a feminine structure. The ‘jouissance of
the other’, therefore, refers to the subject’s experience of being for the
Other and object of enjoyment in contrast to being an object of the
Other’s desire. More than phallic jouissance and beyond the Symbolic—
outside of language and not sexuated, it is the jouissance that is not sup-
ported by a fantasy structure. As Žižek explains,
the ‘non-all’ (pas-tout) of woman means that not all of a woman is caught
up in phallic jouissance: she is always split between a part of her which accepts
the role of a seductive masquerade aimed at fascinating the man, attracting
the male gaze, and another part of her which resists being drawn into the
208 L. SIMMONS
dialectic of (male) desire, a mysterious jouissance beyond the phallus about

which nothing can be said. (‘Death and the Maiden’, 214)
This jouissance of the other cannot be spoken about. If I were to talk

about it, as I am trying to do now, then I would simply reel it back into
the Symbolic order of the phallic, to be subjected again to the signifier.
The crucial difference between men and women Lacan maintains is that
women can experience both forms of jouissance, but for men, it is one or
the other. Women, then, have access to something more than men, a
surplus-jouissance (plus-de-jouir). Žižek explains this as follows: ‘jouissance
is the basis upon which symbolization works, the basis emptied, disem-
bodied, structured by the symbolization, but this process produces at the
same time a residue, a leftover, which is the surplus-enjoyment’ (SOI,
169). Jouissance is always in the nature of a spending. There is one last
jouissance that will be important for me. I have already alluded to it and
employed it, and hopefully you my reader are utilizing it now. It is the
jouissance of Lacan’s pun: jouis-sens or ‘enjoy-meant’. The enjoyment in
meaning.
When the Other Comes Too Close—Angst vor

Etwas (Fear of Something)
Marnie, I have begun to suggest, is constructed not only by a relay of
looks (Bellour, Mulvey) but through a haptic process of touch. What is the
effect of touch? Its affect. Anxiety is the affect that signals when the Other
is too close and the order of the Symbolic is at risk of disappearing. In her
illuminating short book on anxiety, Renata Salecl outlines Lacan’s modifi-
cation of Freud’s two theories of anxiety (2004). In the first version from
1884 to 1925, Freud described anxiety in relation to repressed libido,
claiming that the repeated prevention of the discharge of sexual energy in
coitus interruptus leads to anxiety neurosis. In 1926, thirty years later,
Freud published his study Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety in which he
radically reconceived this earlier theory. While the first theory considered
anxiety to be the result of repression, the second theory came to under-
stand anxiety as the cause of repression. Now Freud argued that the sub-
ject develops inhibitions as processes of defence against feelings of anxiety
where the symptoms might try to replace the affects of anxiety.
Furthermore, and significantly, anxiety came to be thought of as a signal,
a reaction of the ego to a (perceived) danger and, as such, was without an

object. In this latter theory, anxiety is considered to be less a disturbance
of the psyche than an attempt to protect itself from disturbances. As
Samuel Weber shrewdly notes, ‘Freud’s discussion of anxiety thus turns
upon a question that it will never entirely resolve: Is anxiety a constitutive
process by which the psyche maintains its coherence and identity, or does
it ultimately entail their dissolution?’ (1991, 154). Salecl describes Freud’s
second theory of anxiety in a depiction that almost perfectly characterizes
the figure of Marnie:
Anxiety becomes taken as an affect, a bodily excitation, which the subject

has difficulties dealing with. Often, the subject develops various inhibitions
or symptoms as processes of defence against the feeling of anxiety …
Enjoyment for the subject will often seem as something as something lost,
something inaccessible, or something stolen by others. If the process of
symbolic castration (i.e. entering into language) extracts jouissance from the
body, leaving it only in the margins of partial drives, then anxiety later
becomes an excitation, which aims at this lost jouissance. (2004, 20, 30)
Marnie’s phobia of red on white—the vase of red gladiolas against the

white window curtain in her mother’s house; the drop of red ink she spills
on her white shirt sleeve while working late for Mark; the red polka dots
on the jockey’s white shirt—is a way of keeping her anxiety in check.
The classic Freudian model here is the figure of Little Hans whose pho-
bia of horses becomes for him a means of keeping his anxiety under con-
trol (Freud, SE X [1909]). What the phobia is masking according to Freud
was Little Hans’ ambivalent relationship with and the threat of castration
that originates with his father. Since he cannot overcome this threat in
reality, Little Hans tries to beat it in the Imaginary and represses what
incites anxiety through the creation of a phobic symptom. Similarly,
Marnie through the creation of a phobia to thunder and lightning, as well
as the colour red, finds a way to avoid the real phobic object and thus
manage her feelings of anxiety. As Samuel Weber articulates it, Freud’s
later theory of anxiety involved not simply a reaction to the loss of an
object, since this relies on a relationship to an external reality, but rather
to the perceived loss of the object (1991, 155). Anxiety is ‘not incited by
the lack of the object but rather by the lack of the lack, i.e. the emergence
of an object in the place of lack’ (Salecl 2004, 50). This notion of percep-
tual loss is what distinguishes anxiety from fear. For Freud, fear involved a
210 L. SIMMONS
relationship to objects in a determinate external reality, while anxiety

involved the perceived loss of familiar objects. Fear is then more easily
understood and potentially ‘cured’ or resolved. On the other hand, anxi-
ety is a far more obscure and difficult problem, since the perception of the
(loss of) the object is far less easy to locate. As Weber points out, Freudian
anxiety signals the danger of an approaching trauma—not the loss of per-
ception itself, but what this loss might lead to (1991, 155).
Secondly, the Lacanian position on anxiety is that it represents a bridge
between desire and jouissance, ‘an affect that warns us of the painful
encounter with jouissance’. ‘Desire is always linked to dissatisfaction (to
the lack of the object), while jouissance brings the subject close to the
object, often in most painful ways’ (Salecl 2004, 52, 51). Lacan in his
seminar on anxiety adopts an optical schema of two mirrors borrowed
from physics (S10, 39) (Fig. 6.2). Because of the optical properties of
concave mirrors, a bouquet of flowers that is hidden from the visual field
of the viewer emerges above the vase. And if the eye of the viewer is prop-
erly placed, an image of flowers in the vase is produced as a whole or a
unity. The use of the concave mirror can make appear something that is
not there, and the final image of the ‘complete’ vase of flowers is not an
image as such, it is a virtual image. ‘Anxiety emerges when a mechanism
makes something appear in … a natural place … the place that is occupied,
on the left-hand side, by the a of the object of desire’ (S10, 41).
Lacan points out that a man takes a woman as a vase in which there is
supposed to be a hidden object, while he also behaves as if there is hidden
in the vase the phallus of another man. This can be illustrated in Marnie
by Mark who finally intuits that the man hidden in the vase ‘Marnie’ is the
Fig. 6.2 Lacan:

Schema of the Two
Mirrors (S10, 39)
figure of the sailor who functions as a kind of father figure—as substitute

for the absent father—or phallic figure. Mark in ‘raping’ Marnie re-
performs his, the sailor’s, presumed action. Mark’s desire is constructed
via the desire of the Other, and the hidden father, the object-cause of his
desire, secures the love relation with the person he desires (Marnie). The
affect of anxiety alerts the subject (Marnie) to her imaginary frailty, as
Žižek explains, ‘anxiety is the only affect which does not deceive; by means
of which we encounter the real: the real of a lost object which cannot be
absorbed into a circular movement of symbolization’ (FTKN, 125–126).
In the seminar on anxiety, Lacan also argues that this affect is caused by
the proximity of the object. It is his recognition of the centrality of the
object—as irruption of the Real—that leads Lacan to formalize the object
of anxiety as objet a, the logical supplement figuring a Real caught in the
Symbolic order.
With Marnie there is another anxiety, and it is one we might associate
with Lacanian ‘enjoy-meant’ (jouis-sens). The film keeps us as spectators in
a state of anxiety since we don’t have an object or answer for the film’s
central question; as it is with fear or phobia only at the end, once we have
an object of reference can anxiety be released. This anxiety has much to do
with the reputation of Hitchcock as ‘master of suspense’ and to what
Weber describes as ‘remain[ing] bound to the I: bound up, that is, with
the effort of the subject to bind itself to and with representations’ (1991,
157). This refusal to presentify anxiety and, as I shall argue, the film’s
somewhat unsatisfactory ending, brings us to the realization that anxiety
is something that escapes both the Symbolic and the Imaginary. Thus, in
its attempt to define anxiety as object, the film has traced a path towards
an object that does not (cannot) exist, and this in itself becomes the very
experience of anxiety. To put this another way, the discourse on anxiety
becomes a discourse of anxiety since in its attempt to define anxiety as
object the film has traced a path towards an object that does not exist, this
in itself is the very experience of anxiety.
Phallic Jouissance—Virtually a Rape

For Renata Salecl, anxiety comes from proximity when desire is replaced
with jouissance, ‘when we come close to an object that is no longer the
elusive object of desire but rather the object that incites a particular enjoy-
ment often coupled with pain’ (Salecl 2004, 52). The most extreme and
violent instance of proximity and touch within Hitchcock’s film must be
212 L. SIMMONS
its rape scene. It appears that Hitchcock felt the scene was vital to his con-
ception of the film. The original screenwriter, Evan Hunter, refused to
write the sequence, arguing that it was unmotivated and fearing that the
character of Mark would lose audience sympathy. He was immediately
replaced by Jay Presson Allen who wrote the scene as it is filmed.7 Robin
Wood, perhaps subconsciously influenced by the echoes of ‘rutting’ in
‘Rutland’, comments: ‘What we see is virtually a rape. To the man it is an
expression of tenderness, solicitude, responsibility; to the woman, an
experience so desolating that after it she attempts suicide’ but he also
describes the scene as ‘one of the purest treatments of sexual intercourse
the cinema has given us’ (2002, 189).8 Donald Spoto, Hitchcock’s biog-
rapher, describes the scene as ‘virtually pornographic’ (1984, 476). Mark
is shown to have been potentially violent previous to this episode. He has
earlier declared to Marnie: ‘I’m fighting a powerful impulse to beat the
hell out of you’. However the scene is also ambiguous: after Mark pulls off
Marnie’s nightgown, then declares he is sorry, he quickly moves to cover
her up again. This is followed by an overhead two shot where he kisses her
and a low angle matching shot of the kiss. Though Marnie is still motion-
less and terrified in these shots, the extremes of angle remove us from a
position of identification with her. Likewise, the discovery of Marnie’s
attempted suicide is ‘enunciated’ from Mark’s point of view (he discovers
her missing from the bed, then runs through the ship to find her in the
pool—and this is clearly a scene of his anxiety). The suicide is ‘seen’ from
Mark’s point of view, but his concern is subsequently undercut by Marnie
who responds to his question why she didn’t throw herself overboard with
‘I wanted to kill myself, not feed the damn fish’.
Marnie’s stealing is seen again and again by critics as a substitute for
‘normal’ sexuality. John Fletcher, for example, considers the money she
takes to be a ‘phallic signifier’ and claims that her compensatory thefts are
‘the other side of her sexual rejection of men’ (1988, 60). Marnie as asser-
tive, purposeful thief is the inverse mirror to frigid, terrified of sex, with-
drawn and innocent, or cowardly Marnie. It is Mark who is beginning to
understand the slide back and forth from one persona to the other. Critics
have also noted that Marnie’s jouissance seems activated by the sexual
overtones of her relation to her horse Forio. ‘Ah, there’s my darling!’ she
declares as the horse is brought out from Garrod’s stable. ‘That big, old
spoiled baby of yours knew something was up’, says the trainer, ‘tried to
bite me twice already this morning’. Marnie embracing the horse’s muzzle
murmurs: ‘Oh, Forio, if you want to bite somebody, bite me!’ The subse-
quent episode of her cantering as the music rises conveniently provides
one of those saccharine (Hollywood) images of jouissance.
But let me re-explore Marnie’s frigidity in the light of Lacan’s discus-
sion of the topic in his 1958 paper, ‘Guiding Remarks for a Convention
on Feminine Sexuality’, a paper that was to provide an important source
of ideas for Seminar 20, Encore (1972–1973), where he deals directly with
the topic of jouissance (E, 610–620). In contrast to Freud’s developmental
model and his recourse to physiology, Lacan understands frigidity—or the
absence of sexual jouissance in a feminine subject—to be a structural
dilemma rather than an anatomical dysfunction. Frigidity is not necessarily
a symptom because the subject may tolerate it and, indeed, not complain
about it. The nature of frigidity is that it is a defence by the subject against
jouissance that presents itself at the border between anxiety and adoration.
Marnie overestimates love (from her mother) but neither desires nor expe-
riences jouissance from Mark. Instead of speaking of sexual need and its
frustration in frigidity, Lacan speaks of it as an intersubjective process in
which the imperative ‘not to enjoy’ passes from one to an Other. ‘Nothing
forces anyone to enjoy (jouir) except the superego. The superego is the
imperative of jouissance—Enjoy!’ (S20, 10). Through such transference,
the pleasure denying power of the Other can, through a series of veilings
and unveilings, become a return route to interpersonal sexual enjoyment.
This revised understanding of frigidity is part of the Lacanian refusal to
grant signifying power to the female body as such. Lacan’s most radical
attempt to construct a feminine sexuality is found in a central chapter of
Encore entitled ‘God and the jouissance of the Woman’. It is in Seminar 20
that Lacan establishes the distinction between masculine and feminine jou-
issance as qualitatively different. Phallic jouissance is termed the ‘jouissance
of the idiot’ (81) and is also referred to as sexual jouissance, as that which
‘is marked and dominated by the impossibility of establishing as such …
the ‘sexual relationship’ (rapport sexuel)’ (S20, 6–7). But there exists a
specifically feminine jouissance that is ‘beyond the phallus’ (74). Women
have access to both a phallic or sexual jouissance and to a supplementary
form of jouissance (‘jouissance of the other’) by virtue of not being wholly
subsumed by the phallic function as men are.
214 L. SIMMONS
‘We Don’t Need Men, Mama’—Tippi Hedren

as Santa Teresa
The most famous example of feminine jouissance from Lacan’s Seminar 20

is Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Baroque marble and gilded bronze statue The
Ecstasy of Saint Teresa in the burial chapel of Cardinal Federico Cornaro in
the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome (1647–1652). This
sculptural staging of ecstasy was reproduced on the cover of the French
edition of Encore by Lacan, and he introduces it in his text as follows
(Fig. 6.3):
Saint Teresa—you need but to go to Rome and see the statue by Bernini to
immediately understand that she’s coming. There’s no doubt about it. What
is she getting off on? It is clear that the essential testimony of the mystics
consists in saying they experience it, but know nothing about it. (S20, 76)
Saint Teresa of Avila surrenders herself to a smiling cupid-like angel

wielding the pointed arrow of divine love, her bent-back body of billow-
ing robes is borne upon a cloud. Bernini’s statue and Lacan’s account of it
reflect directly Saint Teresa’s description of the moment in her mystical
autobiography:
In his hands I saw a great golden spear, and at the iron tip there appeared to
be a point of fire. This he plunged into my heart several times so that it
penetrated my entrails. When he pulled it out, I felt that he took them with
it, and left me utterly consumed by the great love of God. The pain was so
severe that it made me utter several moans. The sweetness caused by this
intense pain is so extreme that one cannot possibly wish it to cease, nor is
one’s soul then content with anything but God. This is not a physical, but a
spiritual pain—though the body has some share in it—even a considerable
share. (Teresa 1957, 210)
The symbolic scenario is suspended between the sacred narrative of the

saint’s endlessly deferred coming and the profane semblance of the lost
phallic object that would miraculously accomplish its deed. Saint Teresa is
a visual embodiment of the very definition of the pain in pleasure of
Lacanian jouissance. The supplementary jouissance beyond the phallus
adrift in the flow of endless signification. The imaginary schema of the
sculptural tableau—the angel’s arrow of phallic jouissance, the truth of the
saint’s enraptured jouissance of silence and the male witnesses, witnesses to
Fig. 6.3 Lacan: cover page of French edition of Encore with Bernini’s Ecstasy of
Saint Teresa
216 L. SIMMONS
the staging of an act which, because of the perspective lines of the chapel,
they cannot actually see—are all recast in the dynamics of Hitchcock’s
film. Bernini’s symbolic scenario is suspended between the sacred narra-
tive of the saint’s endlessly deferred ‘coming’ and the profane semblance
of the lost phallic object that would miraculously accomplish its deed.
Lacan focuses on the blissful figure of Teresa and describes her enraptured
movements as ‘mystical jaculations’ (S20, 76). In so doing, he has removed
the detachable prefix of phallic ejaculations and the distinction between
inside and outside that determines the male orgasm. Jouissance, he thus
continues, is not to be found in the ‘come’ and ‘cum’ (affaires de foutre)
(77) but where the combined production of meaning and pleasure occurs.
As Malcolm Bowie comments:
Enjoying oneself and not knowing anything about it is ‘feminine’ in a way,

but this does not mean that men are debarred by their gender from reaching
such states. The answerable proof that feminine sexuality migrates between
the sexes is to be found in the fact that ‘The Ecrits of Jacques Lacan’ is itself
a mystical jaculation, a ‘Jacques-ulation’. (1991, 153)
In Seminar 20, Lacan locates this ineffable ‘feminine jouissance’ in the

mystical sphere outside the symbolic:
There is a jouissance that is hers (à elle), that belongs to that ‘she’ (elle) that
doesn’t exist and doesn’t signify anything. There is a jouissance that is hers
about which she herself perhaps knows nothing if not that she experiences
it—as much as she knows. She knows it, of course, when it comes (arrive).
It doesn’t happen (arrive) to all of them. (S20, 74)
According to Žižek, ‘The saint … occupies the place of objet petit a, of

pure object, of somebody undergoing radical subjective destitution’ (SOI,
116). We have to differentiate between two modalities here. When Lacan
tries to decipher this feminine jouissance, he usually invokes the example
of the mystics like Saint Teresa who find enjoyment in a total devotion to
God, who immerse themselves in an ascetic stance and detach themselves
from the world. This feminine jouissance, which language cannot deci-
pher, is thus usually perceived as the highest ‘happiness’ that the subject
can experience. However, because this jouissance is foreclosed from lan-
guage, it is also something that the unconscious does not know and thus
cannot assimilate. Here it is important to register Lacan’s subtle
distinction of feminine jouissance: there is something that doesn’t exist

which can still have impact; ‘its inexistence can leave traces in (symbolic)
reality’ (D, 348).
Marnie, as we have seen, is also a femme fatale figure, someone who
masquerades in order to attract and impress men, yet at the same time she
is, as Strutt says, a prude and frigid, someone who pulls her skirt down
over her knees. How might we account for this structural disparity? As
Renata Salecl observes
a femme fatale also has a certain ignorance about men, and it is this very
ignorance that actually makes her so attractive … The paradox of the femme
fatale, therefore, is that she wants to be admired for her beauty, but she is
perceived as beautiful precisely because she is also ignorant about others’
reaction to her. A femme fatale enjoys her own self-sufficiency, which is why
we cannot simply say that she needs men as relays to her jouissance.
(2000, 71–72)
In contrast to Freud, Lacan understands frigidity to be a structural

dilemma rather than an anatomical dysfunction or a sign of undeveloped
sexuality. Frigidity is consequent on an imaginary identification with the
phallus, an identification that inhibits the circulation of jouissance. The
ambiguity of Marnie’s frigidity is thus a refusal of feminine jouissance due
to the risk it implies of submersion, and her ‘masquerade’ must be under-
stood as her defence against jouissance.
La Femme à Postiche: The Fake, Phony Woman

Near the beginning of the film, after she has left her hotel and arrived at a
train station, Marnie carries two large suitcases towards a locker area. She
places one of them inside a locker and then, carefully looking around to
see that she is not observed, kicks the key down a nearby floor grate. The
key does not drop easily from sight but must be forced between the gap
by Marnie’s shoe. According to Lesley Brill, the implication here is that
what we are now seeing is the ‘real’ Marnie, since she has put all the attri-
butes of her false identity into a station rental locker and thrust them away
by kicking the key down a grate (1991, 245). This interpretation would
seem to be supported when the scene then moves to the Red Fox Tavern,
where a relaxed Marnie is greeted affectionately by the hotel staff, and this
is followed by a close-up of her riding her horse Forio almost blissfully. But
218 L. SIMMONS
the horse-riding occurs against the obvious and artificial back projection
of the passing woods. As Brill and others have noted, the portrayal of this
real Marnie is presented in a heightened artificial fashion by Hitchcock.
It is as if Marnie disposes of a false identity to seemingly take on her true
identity in a happy and unperturbed fashion only to have this then framed
in an overtly simulated (false) manner. The paradox, as Brill argues, is that
the ‘real person’ is presented in an artificial manner. Marnie is, she declares,
‘a film in which exaggerated formal characteristics have been associated
with what is most true and significant’ (1991, 250).
Many early reviewers of the film though were to complain about what
they thought were the ‘hokey bits’ of implausible reality: the woozy cam-
era movements as Marnie tries to steal the Rutland money from the safe
but cannot bring herself to do so; the matte shots for the foxhunt ride and
her car journey with Mark; the conspicuously painted ship at the end of
the Baltimore tenement block; the apparent (deliberate?) stiffness of Tippi
Hedren’s acting.9 There was an early and spirited defence of Hitchcock’s
cinematic fakery and artifice on part of Robin Wood (2002, 174ff) who
suggested they required responses that are open and free from ‘precon-
ceptions’ about realism. ‘[T]he final justification for these devices’, he
concluded, is not in the individual arguments made, ‘but in the way in
which they are absorbed into their context, the context of the entire film’
(176). Lesley Brill, too, is drawn to what she calls occurrences of ‘internal
artifice’ which hint at fundamental dynamics: ‘Set against the art of the
movie itself are frequent instances of ‘internal artifice’: pretense and deceit
of all kinds … Most occurrences of internal artifice raise the crucial issues
of the film, but they characteristically obscure or misrepresent rather than
clarify them’ (1991, 250).10 These examples of fakery—first thematicized
at the very beginning of the film when Marnie rinses the dye from her
‘false’ hair—point not only to the construction of representation, but also
to the imaginary objectification of the Real that disrupts the relations
between subjects. Following Žižek, the hulk of a giant ship at the end of
the street where Marnie’s mother lives ‘has a massive, oppressive material
presence; it is not an indifferent void like the MacGuffin, but at the same
time it does not circulate between the subjects, it is not an object of
exchange, it is just a mute embodiment of an impossible jouissance’
(EYAW, 7) (Fig. 6.4).
According to Žižek, ‘Psychoanalysis is aware of a whole series of “false
acts”: psychotic-paranoiac violent passage à l’acte, hysterical acting out,
obsessional self-hindering, perverse self-instrumentalization—all these
acts are not simply wrong according to some external standards, they are
Fig. 6.4 Sanders Street, Baltimore with painted ship in background
immanently wrong, since they can be properly grasped only as reactions to

some disavowed trauma that they displace, repress, and so on’ (CHU,
126). He later cites the essay by analytic philosopher J.L. Austin on
‘Pretending’ (1979), where Austin
evokes a neat example of how pretending to be vulgar can itself become

vulgar: when I am with people who have rigid standards of behaviour, I
pretend to be vulgar and, as part of a social joke, start to use obscene lan-
guage or refer to obscene content. My pretending to be vulgar will in fact
be vulgar—this collapse of the distinction between pretending and being is
the unmistakable signal that my speech has touched some Real. (CHU, 222)
The difference, or lack of it, between the ‘real Marnie’ and her ‘fake
presentation’ may be likened to the distinction that Jacques-Alain Miller
draws between the woman who assumes her non-existence, her constitu-
tive lack (‘castration’), that is, the void of her subjectivity in her very heart,
220 L. SIMMONS
and what he calls la femme à postiche, the fake, phony woman (2000, 21).
This femme à postiche is not what commonsense conservative wisdom
would tell us (a woman who distrusts her natural charm and abandons her
vocation of rearing children, serving her husband, taking care of the
household, etc. and indulges in the extravaganzas of fashionable dressing
and make up, of a career, of decadent promiscuity) but almost its exact
opposite: the woman who takes refuge from the void in the very heart of
her subjectivity, from the ‘not-having-it’ which marks her being in the
phony certitude of ‘having it’ (of serving as the stable support of family
life, of rearing children)—this woman gives the impression (and has the
false satisfaction) of a firmly anchored being, of a self-enclosed, satisfied
circuit of everyday life. This is the façade that Mark Rutland, who else-
where charges her with being ‘a cold, practiced little method actress of a
liar’. forces Marnie to play the first morning after the return from their
honeymoon as he leaves for work:
MARK: This is a drill, dear. Wife follows husband to the front door.
Gives and/or gets kiss. Stands pensively as he drives away. A
wistful little wave is optional.
The interesting feature to be noted here is that, contrary to common-

sensical expectation, it is the woman who ‘has it’, the self-satisfied femme
à postiche disavowing her lack, who not only does not pose any threat to
patriarchal male identity, but even serves as its protective shield and sup-
port, while in contrast, it is her, it is the woman who flaunts her lack (cas-
tration) who poses as a hysterical composite of semblances covering a void,
who poses a more serious threat to male identity. The paradox is that the
more a woman is denigrated, reduced to an inconsistent and insubstantial
composite of semblances around a void, the more she threatens the firm
male substantial self-identity and, on the other hand, the more the woman
is a firm self-enclosed substance, the more she supports male identity. As
Žižek noted earlier, nothing is what it seems to be, everything is to be
interpreted, everything is supposed to possess some supplementary mean-
ing. The ground of an established, familiar situation opens up; we find
ourselves in a realm of total ambiguity, but this very lack propels us to
produce ever new hidden meanings: it is a driving force of endless compul-
sions. The character biography in Jay Presson Allen’s final script describes
Marnie as follows:
She has loved only in fantasy. One result is that she has evolved into an excel-
lent actress, able to improvise quite brilliantly in almost any situation. She
has assumed, perfected and discarded so many roles, that to act (to lie) is as
natural to her as putting one foot before the other. (cited in Moral 2002, 75)
Thunder and Lightning—Hysteron Proteron

Marnie has been called back to Rutland & Co. by Mark Rutland for a
Saturday afternoon typing session. They meet in his high-ceilinged office
with its large opulent desk, leather-upholstered chairs and display cabinets
full of pre-Columbian artefacts. Outside the Rutland & Co. Building, a
thunderstorm brews over the almost empty carpark. As she begins to type
Mark’s manuscript about ‘aboreal predators in the Amazonian rain forest’,
Marnie freezes caught unawares by a lightning flash. Mark, thinking that
it is merely the darkening shift in light of the brooding storm that has
disturbed her, suggests that she turn on the overhead light. She gets up
and moves towards the switch by the door but again is frozen in fear
against the wall by another lightning flash and thunder clap. Now the
flashes of light which seem to paralyse her appear blood-red in colour.
Mark moves to her side, reassures her that she has nothing to worry about
since the building is electrically ‘grounded’. ‘You’re quite safe’, he reiter-
ates. But, as if to belie his words, there is a loud smash as a large tree
branch crashes through the window shattering a display cabinet of his late
wife’s pre-Columbian art. Mark, who is now protectively holding her
tightly, kisses Marnie’s temple, and we zoom in to a tight close-up as his
lips slide down the side of her face towards her mouth. We are transfixed
by the play of mouth upon mouth as the violent storm crashes about
them. It is a scene of disempowerment and of (perverse) enjoyment.
This scene prefigures another at the end of the film. Mark and Marnie
arrive by car at Bernice Edgar’s Baltimore apartment. Van Buren Street
with its matte painting of a ship berthed at the end uncannily reminds us of
the Rutland & Co. carpark and its side street. They exit the car to thunder
and lightning, and Mark shields a wet Marnie with his jacket on the door-
step. Marnie’s mother comes to the door and a wet and bedraggled Marnie
and Mark enter, and he quickly closes the curtains to a flash of lightning.
MARK RUTLAND: I guess you know how Marnie feels

about storms.
BERNICE EDGAR (to Marnie): Stop acting like such a ninny.
222 L. SIMMONS
MARK (to Bernice): You’ve got to tell her and she needs to remember
everything. You’ve got to tell her the truth. She
has no memory of what happened that night. You
must help her.
To the sound of thunder in the background and flashes of lightning in

the windows, with Marnie cowering on the internal staircase, Mark pro-
ceeds to unravel the past:
MARK: Was there also a storm that night, Mrs Edgar? Is that why
Marnie is terrified of storms? Was there thunder and lightning
that night? Did the storms terrify your little girl?
In the flashback sequence that follows, the little girl screams at the
lightning and thunder. A sailor emerges from the bedroom door to com-
fort her.
SAILOR: Now you ain’t afraid of a little lightning, are ya?
The term hysteron proteron comes from classical rhetoric. It refers to a

figure of speech, a rhetorical trope, in which two terms are reversed
according to the sequence, the order, temporal, spatial, causal in which
you ordinarily find them. It is a term of language that deliberately places
the cart before the horse. And a typical example in dictionaries of rhetoric
is exactly that: ‘the cart before the horse’. Another example often cited in
dictionaries is the phrase ‘thunder and lightning’.11 Everyone knows
though that lightning comes first in the actual sequence of things, but no
one ever says lightning and thunder. Hysteron proteron is a rich trope, and
it is more than a metalepsis. Metalepsis simply means reversal of the word
order, but hysteron proteron is more than a reversal because it not only
leaps across a gap, but it puts the last hysteron first and the first proteron
last. The lightning and its unheard thunder in this film becomes a meta-
phor for time. A metamorphosis of time as well as space, a sort of explod-
ing space where the gaze can never rest in one place except as to leave it
for another. On each occasion, the storm, and the instantaneous dazzling
of the lightning flash, is a pure emergence of the event, its instant is incom-
mensurable, an accident without beginning or end, only its effects might
be grasped. Indeed, the instantaneousness is expressed perfectly in the
figure of Marnie, immobilized, fixed to the spot.
According to Laplanche and Pontalis, Nachträglichkeit (‘deferred

action’ ‘retroaction’) means that
experiences, impressions and memory traces may be revised at a later date to

fit in with fresh experiences or with the attainment of a new stage of devel-
opment. They may in that event be endowed not only with a new meaning
but also with psychical effectiveness. (Laplanche and Pontalis 1988, 111)
Lacan was fascinated with problems of temporality and how, according

to Freud, time became skewed and syncopated by a traumatic event. An
all-important temporal and causal notion, Nachträglichkeit is both a the-
ory of intersubjectivity and time and a theory of psychical time. Psychical
time is different from ‘natural’ time because the present can change the
past and the retroactive mode produces a kind of backward-looking hope,
a wish to create for oneself a past that can be lived with. Žižek finds a paral-
lel for Freudian Nachträglichkeit (‘deferred action’ retroaction’) in the
work of F.W.J von Schelling. First of all, Schelling himself is ‘an exemplary
case of the noncontemporaneity of a thought to its time, that is, of the para-
doxical temporality in which staying behind coincides with being ahead’
(AF, 4). But more importantly, the creation of time for Schelling involves
a paradox, since creating time means creating the past; but the past never
was and never could have been present before its creation. Thus, the
moment founding linear time cannot be considered as having occurred in
time. What the invention of the past does is to overlay with the temporal
order what was (and is) eternal. Schelling’s achievement
is a theory of time whose unique feature is that it is not formal but qualita-
tive: in contrast to the standard notion of time that conceives the three
temporal dimensions as purely formal determinations (the same ‘content’
‘travels’, as it were, from the past through the present to the future),
Schelling provides a minimal qualitative determination of each temporal
dimension…. (IR, 32)
Both the Freudian Nachträglichkeit and the Schellingian ‘unformal

time’ complicate the notion of one event in the emotional history of the
subject causing a traumatic after-shock.
There are suggestive points of intersection between the psychic process
of Nachträglichkeit and the double temporality of a film that contains a
flashback. The memory traces are a residue of the trauma, the legacy of
events that surpassed the subject’s understanding at the moment of the
224 L. SIMMONS
original event, the flashback is the imprint of a present moment that per-
sists into the future but one that offers a revision of the past events within
the context of an altered consciousness, but the new narrative does not
completely absolve the impact of an unalienable past. Laplanche suggests
that the hidden memory traces may also be a message from the Other:
Even if we concentrate all our attention on the retroactive temporal direc-

tion, in the sense that someone reinterprets their past, this past cannot be a
purely factual one, an unprocessed or raw given. It is impossible therefore to
put forward a purely hermeneutic position on this—that is to say, that every-
one interprets their past according to their present—because the past already
has something deposited within it that demands to be deciphered, which is
the message of the other person. (Laplanche 1992, 265)
To adapt Laplanche to the purposes of Hitchcock’s film, the ‘revision’

of the ‘original’ footage ‘in the past’ reveals ‘something deposited in it
that demands to be deciphered’: the traces of trauma of murder but also
‘the message of the other person,’ in this case Marnie’s mother, who never
wanted her, left her ‘in the cold’ when she entertained clients, and lost her
own childhood because of Marnie’s arrival in her teenage years. But the
(re)ordering and (re)articulation of the event stop short of being an
entirely coherent and self-explanatory narrative.
The action involved in Marnie is not strictly ‘deferred’ as such: there is
no action at all until Marnie’s resurgent feeling triggers it in the sailor
flashback sequence. If we look closely at the sailor flashback sequence,
Marnie sees her recollection as a child, and curiously she sees it from her
mother’s point of view: the sailor is trying to kiss her, he is then beating
her mother, she must save her mother… (‘He hit my mama! … I hit him
with a stick! I hurt him!’, she utters childishly almost ventriloquizing her
childhood voice). But in the flashback sequence that we see on film, we
might equally argue that the sailor is actually trying to comfort Marnie
who is upset by the thunder and lightning and has been forced to leave her
warm bed and sleep on a chair in the cold. Does Marnie in this scenario
see/think of the sailor as a father? The novelist Evan Hunter who submit-
ted the first 189-page screenplay to Hitchcock which included the flash-
back sequence wrote a letter to Tippi Hedren where he explains Marnie’s
psychosis in strictly Oedipal terms: ‘Marnie succumbs to the sailor think-
ing him her father; her mother taking the sailor’s friendliness as a sexual
advance, attacks and kills the father figure, and the child’s analysis of the
situation is “my father made love to me and my mother killed him for it”’
(cited in Moral 2002, 33). It is the second screenwriter, Jay Presson Allen,
who has Marnie as a little girl kill the sailor and not her mother. How,
then, might this modify the Oedipus complex in this revised murder scene?
Bernice who enters the room does not recognize that the sailor might be
attempting to be kind and (perhaps as a result of her, stated, loathing of
men?) begins attacking him.12 She tries to beat the sailor with a fire poker
for touching her daughter, and the sailor, confused, tries to fend her off.
As the mother and the sailor fall down entangled and Bernice’s leg is
crushed, Marnie picks up the poker and beats the sailor to death, his white
shirt becoming drenched with red blood.
Plus-de-jouir—‘Money Answereth All Things’

MARNIE: Mark, I, um, I don’t have any money.
On her first visit to her mother, Marnie brings her a fur and wraps it
around her mother’s neck. However, a few minutes later, the fur is set
aside and Marnie watches with longing as her mother combs the young
girl from next-door Jessie’s hair, something Marnie’s mother will never do
for her. Jessie leaves the house, and Marnie immediately places the fur
around her mother’s neck again. Shortly after the two go into the kitchen
and they quarrel. Stung by her mother’s insinuation that there is some-
thing suspicious about Marnie’s relationship with her boss, Marnie raises
her voice and asks her mother if she thinks she is having an affair with him.
Becoming increasingly shrill, she demands, ‘Is that how you think I’ve
gotten the money to set you up?’.
It would seem that this is a film about the purchase of affection, the
acquisition of love. Unable to secure the love of her mother in earliest
childhood, Marnie has proceeded in adulthood to substitute for it the cash
she steals from other people’s safes.13 Robin Wood concurs that money is
‘Marnie’s way both of taking and of trying to buy love’ (2002, 178). Such
an interpretation would seem to find confirmation in the emblematic
phrase that Marnie quotes, but perhaps sarcastically, from Ecclesiastes:
‘Money answereth all things’. Possession may be central to Marnie but
hardly as a substitute for sex. Rather, sex is often shown as a substitute for
possession. The taking is more important to Marnie than what is taken,
and the concrete objects and gifts made in the exchange of love neverthe-
less fail, or are not adequate: the mink scarf, the expensive wedding ring
226 L. SIMMONS
bought by Mark so Marnie could have ‘something that had never belonged
to anyone else’, the Columbian artefacts all that Mark has that ‘belonged’
to his late wife, Forio the horse—all objects that are passed back and forth
in the hope of some emotional union. But they are all bribes that fall short.
This is yet another example in the film of jouissance as something that
escapes us. It is the surplus-enjoyment (plus-de-jouir) produced by the
renunciation of giving up enjoyment. Lacan introduces this concept in
Seminar 17, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis (1972–1973). He acknowl-
edges he has modelled his concept on the Marxian notion of ‘surplus
value’, which implies a similar renunciation of use value (S17, 20). Plus-de
can mean both ‘more’, ‘an excess’ and ‘no more’, ‘a lack’ in French.
Enjoyment as entertainment that derives not from the direct satisfaction
of drives, but from the satisfaction of not directly satisfying them. Marnie’s
problems may be Oedipal, but they are also Capital.14 ‘We were poor,
grindingly poor’, she confesses to Mark in the car. And despite Mark’s
unquestioned view of himself as owner and as a man of property, we learn,
too, that he married an heiress, and a collector of precious objects, in
order to keep the Rutland family business afloat. He is thus as much a
prostitute as Bernice Edgar. This is a film, says Michele Piso, ‘in which all
relationships are characterized by cash’ and ‘Marnie’s characters and
images not merely depict the psychological problems of the individual
characters but evoke as well the conditions of the larger organisation of
society—an ebbing away of ceremonial culture, the dissolution of vital col-
lective bonds, the isolation of individual action’ (2009, 290, 283).
‘Tonight the Door Stays Open’—Jouissance

and the Femme Fatale
MARNIE (to her mother): It’s always when you come to the door—
that’s when the cold starts.
As Deborah Thomas has argued, thresholds and doors in Marnie are

given ‘considerable rhetorical weight’ (2006–2007, 107). Several scenes
begin or end with the camera remaining focused on a closed door: when
Mark and Marnie leave the Rutland Building after the Saturday storm, the
camera remains focused on the door that closes after them; the camera
tracks towards the closed door of the Rutland home before the wedding
guests emerge; when Mark and Marnie return from their honeymoon, the
camera stops momentarily on the closed library doors before they open to
let the couple pass through; the green safe door and its combination lock
are a constant source of interest. Marnie repeatedly closes or locks the
bedroom door in Mark’s face, and he insists that ‘tonight the door stays
open’ after Marnie attempts to flee following Strutt’s surprise appearance
at the Rutland party. Marnie, dredging the past, declares to her mother:
‘It’s always when you come to the door—that’s when the cold starts’.
How might we account for this extensive thematics of blockage? Lacan’s
concrete example of this is the Lady in courtly love who subjects her
knight to an endless series of tasks before she will allow him to sleep with
her (A modern version of this, Žižek suggests, is the femme fatale in film
noir tradition [ME 102]). Now, in one way this Lady fits entirely within
the symbolic economy of man, of phallic jouissance, but in another, she is
beyond it, chaste, virginal and pure—covering her legs, sneers Strutt of
Marnie, ‘as if they were a national treasure’—(or cold, manipulating and
in control in the case of the femme fatale). What must be realized is that
this deferral of the knight’s desire does not at all undermine but actually
makes possible the masculine sexual economy: so long as the knight
believes that his failure to sleep with his Lady is contingent, something
that can be overcome by accomplishing one more good deed, he does not
confront the essential impossibility of the sexual relationship as such. The
Lady, through her exception, converts the impossibility of a sexual rela-
tionship into a mere prohibition. The whole point is to avoid passing to
the sexual act, so as to sustain the belief that complete jouissance exists and
avoid discovering, once again, the disappointment of phallic jouissance.
In the traditional reading, the femme fatale is the embodiment of the
fear of emancipated femininity perceived as a threat to male identity, some-
one who masquerades in order to attract and impress men. But this would
seem to miss the point. As Renata Salecl has observed:
a femme fatale also has a certain ignorance about men, and it is this very
ignorance that actually makes her so attractive … The paradox of the femme
fatale, therefore, is that she wants to be admired for her beauty, but she is
perceived as beautiful precisely because she is also ignorant about others’
reaction to her. A femme fatale enjoys her own self-sufficiency, which is why
we cannot simply say that she needs men as relays to her jouissance.
(2000, 71–72).
228 L. SIMMONS
Talking Smart About the Bible—The

Acousmatic Voice
BERNICE EDGAR: We don’t talk smart about the Bible in this
house, Missie.
After her ‘accident’, we learn that Marnie’s mother has turned to reli-
gion. On the one hand, we might see this ‘turn’ to Christianity not only
as redemptive of Bernice’s story of how she ‘got’ Marnie as a fifteen-year-
old who has sex in exchange for a schoolfellow’s basketball jersey, but also
as a corrective to the capitalism that taints all relationships in this film with
cash. On the other, this ‘God talk’ has framed the seemingly immoral and
neurotically compulsive life of Marnie. In the game of free association that
she is forced to ‘play’ with Mark, the word ‘water’ prompts a series of
associations to do with cleansing and which culminate in the repetition of
the admonition of a Baptist preacher:
MARNIE: “And his tears shall wash away thy sins and make thee over
again”—Mother used to take me to church twice on
Sundays.
How do we resolve the ambiguity of Marnie’s adult behaviour with

that church attendance ‘twice on Sundays’? Is it enough that at the end of
the film, Mark and Marnie will be washed (baptized?) by a (redemptive?)
rain storm in their final visit to her mother’s house?
Also, given Bernice’s previous profession of prostitute, the rejection of
her own daughter’s touch might seem to be the very antithesis of the
Christian morality she is now professing. But in Žižek’s understanding, it
represents a ‘parallax gap’, a separation between two points between which
no mediation seems possible. ‘We are never safely within the Religious’, he
argues, ‘doubt forever remains, the same act can be seen as religious or
aesthetic, in a parallax split that can never be abolished’ (PV, 105). This is
why Bernice’s choice at the beginning of Marnie is also properly ‘reli-
gious’, she chooses prostitution to support her child. They were after all,
as Marnie has already told Mark, ‘grindingly poor’. Žižek calls this the
paradoxical status of ‘belief before belief’ that is staged in advance of our
understanding of the fact (SOI, 40). Tony Myers explains: ‘we believe
before we know we do’. Our belief is manifest in the rituals of the Church.
‘When we finally convert to the Church, when we actually believe we
believe, all we are doing is recognising the fact that our belief has already
been decided and pre-exists our knowledge of it’ (Myers 2003, 68–69). In
later life, the more Bernice renounces her past in pursuit of the ‘Bible’, the
more her enjoyment-in-renunciation is revealed. What Bernice attempts
to conceal is precisely the (perverse) surplus enjoyment she takes in now
rejecting the source of Marnie’s support for her and deflecting her atten-
tion away from Marnie to Jessie, the little girl she has virtually adopted.15
In this way, her entire economy of righteous retribution is driven by enjoy-
ment, that is, an extra enjoyment is generated through the renunciation of
enjoyment itself. According to Žižek, Christianity is not to be read from
the point of view of belief but as a way of understanding the question of
freedom and its relation to the Symbolic order. In fact, for Žižek, to say
that you are a Christian is to say (or should say) that you are an atheist.
Likewise, the assertion of atheism should be seen as fundamentally corre-
lated to the experience of God-forsakenness of the crucified Christ. The
difference, Žižek continues, is merely modal: for the Christian, the God-
forsakenness of Christ is experienced as the source of faith, and for the
atheist, it is its termination:
Christianity …. enacts the reflexive reversal of atheist doubt into God him-
self. In his ‘Father, why have you forsaken me?’, Christ himself commits
what is for a Christian the ultimate sin: he wavers in his Faith. While, in all
other religions, there are people who do not believe in God, only in
Christianity does God not believe in himself. (MC, 48–49)16
There is another kind of ‘talk’ and voice that we hear in Marnie.

According to Kaja Silverman, Marnie is a film obsessed with the woman’s
voice of self-articulation. In the film’s final flashback sequence, Marnie’s
adult voice is transformed to her child voice and ‘her voice seems to cir-
cumvent her consciousness altogether … she speaks not so much the lan-
guage of the unconscious as the language of unconsciousness’ (Silverman
1988, 65). Mark raps three times on the wall near Marnie’s head to simu-
late the knocking he has observed in her recurring nightmare. The camera
frames his hand in a macro shot so the sense of location becomes blurred.
Then it transposes in a shift to an extreme close-up of Marnie’s face that
takes her out of location and time, and Marnie ventriloquizes herself.
Marnie’s voice is the ‘acousmatic voice’ posited by cinema theorist
Michel Chion, a spectral voice that floats freely in a mysterious intermedi-
ate domain, a voice that cannot be attached to any subject in the film’s
230 L. SIMMONS
diegesis, at least not to the adult Marnie we know. And it is important to

remember that while we may see the child and the episode with the sailor,
Mark, embedded in the present narrative, does not. Žižek elaborates,
What took place from the very beginning of the sound film was an uncanny
automatisation of the voice, baptized ‘acousmatisation’ by Chion: the emer-
gence of a voice that is neither attached to an object (a person) within
diegetic reality nor simply the voice of an external commentator, but a spec-
tral voice, which floats freely in a mysterious intermediate domain and
thereby acquires the horrifying dimension of omnipresence and omnipo-
tence. (‘I Hear You with My Eyes’, 92)
Elsewhere Žižek cites the mother’s voice at the end of Hitchcock’s

Psycho that finds a body, but not that of the mother, rather it sticks artifi-
cially onto the body of Norman, and Žižek says, ‘literally cuts a hole in
visual reality’ (LTN, 669).17 Chion refers to Lacan’s theoretical elabora-
tion of the voice as an object, not the object of desire, but the object-cause
of desire, one that Lacan insists, ‘only functions in correlation with anxi-
ety’ (S10, 86). The voice as objet petit a is an object that can be heard in
the aural field only by distortion. In Marnie, the voice as objet petit a mani-
fests the subject’s desire because it is what can be heard beyond the regime
of sense. Chion states that the complete acousmêtre is ‘the one who is
not-yet-seen, but who remains liable to appear in the visual field at any
moment’ (1999, 22). And for Lacan, the ‘j’ouïs’ of jouissance is the French
for ‘I hear’, and the speaking subject acknowledges a call coming from
beyond conscious meaning of language, j’ouïs-sens I hear meaning: ‘To the
imperative Jouis. I can only reply one thing, and that is J’ouïs, I hear’ (S10,
80). Marnie’s voice makes itself heard by an effect of j’ouïs-sens releasing
her from her fixed position. In this scene, we come to understand how the
voice gives body to what Mark Rutland can never see and then we are
given to see it. As Žižek contends,
the moment we enter the symbolic order, an unbridgeable gap separates

forever a human body from ‘its’ voice. The voice acquires a spectral auton-
omy, it never quite belongs to the body we see, so that even when we see a
living person talking, there is always some degree of ventriloquism at work …
the voice does not simply persist at a different level with regard to what we
see, it rather points towards a gap in the field of the visible, toward the
dimension of what eludes our gaze. In other words their relationship is
mediated by an impossibility: ultimately, we hear things because we cannot see

everything. (‘I Hear You with My Eyes’, 92–93)
There is one more sense of jouissance played out in the scene of Marnie’s
auto-ventriloquism, as Jacques-Alain Miller describes it, ‘the voice comes
in the place of what is properly unspeakable about the subject, what Lacan
called the subject’s ‘surplus enjoyment’ [plus-de-jouir]’ (2007, 144–145).
The children singing as Mark and Marnie exit from the apartment signal
that the excess of the voice we have just heard inside is radically undecid-
able. As if cut loose from its anchoring in meaning, the nursery rhyme
must now be understood as plus-de-jouir, surplus enjoyment, pure repeti-
tive, self-enjoying voice.
‘Would Rather’ or ‘Had Rather’?—Mental

Health Week
MARNIE (to Mark): I’m sick? Well, take a look at yourself, old dear.
You’re so hot to play Mental Health Week, what
about you? Talk about dream worlds. You’ve got
a pathological fix on a woman who’s not only an
admitted criminal but who screams if you come
near her!
Mark and Marnie leave Bernice Edgar’s house, the storm appears to
have lifted for the moment, but the large ship at the end of the Baltimore
street is still there, Marnie’s tears have dried, and the group of children at
the front door, whom Marnie stops to observe, chant:
Mother, mother, I am ill,

Send for the doctor over the hill.
Call for the doctor, call for the nurse,
Call for the lady with the alligator purse.
Mumps said the doctor,
The measles said the nurse,
Nothing said the lady with
The alligator purse.
The two boys have their backs to her and the three girls face her. A little
girl wearing yellow who resembles her catches Marnie’s eye. Murray
232 L. SIMMONS
Pomerance comments: ‘Marnie is met, suddenly, with a vision of her own

early self … staring distrustfully from the threshold that is in fact the
boundary of Marnie’s own past’ (2004, 157). The acousmatic voice has
found another subject to attach itself to. But does the reference to illness
in the children’s rhyme undercut closure here, and suggest that analysis
might be interminable, as well as add an ominous tone to the couple’s
departure? Perhaps love doesn’t quite redeem? The complicated tone at
the end of Marnie causes Robin Wood to declare: ‘Nor are we given
grounds for believing Marnie “cured” at the end of the film: a start has
been made, but the hopefulness of the last shots is offset by the reminder,
through the mother, of the difficulty of outgrowing habitual attitudes’
(2002, 177). The same jump-rope rhyme occurs also at the beginning of
the film, but now it seems to recap more concrete elements of the story we
have just seen: the famous first scene where we see Marnie from behind
carrying a yellow purse; Mark Rutland’s role as pseudo-psychiatrist and
doctor; the ‘measles’ of the red ink spot on Marnie’s sleeve and the red
polka dots of the jockey’s uniform; Marnie’s ‘Nothing’ to Mark when he
asks her at the racetrack what she believes in.
All of a sudden, it seems that Marnie’s final lines are radically ambigu-
ous, and they put the romantic alignment with Mark into a different con-
text. She confesses, ‘Oh Mark, I don’t want to go to jail, I’d rather stay
with you’. Murray Pomerance observes ‘now Mark Rutland says some-
thing to make any attentive member of Hitchcock’s audience sit up’
(2004, 162). Mark replies: ‘(with a short, happy laugh): Had you love?’.
Pomerance suggests that the odd (and very English) grammatical marker
in Mark’s speech points not, as the romantic film viewer might wish to
hear it, to ‘I would rather’ stay with you in the future, but (in almost an
acousmatic fashion) to ‘I had rather’ in the past.18 Marnie confesses to
Mark that, despite what may have occurred between them, it had been her
desire to remain with him, she confesses that is to the pure feminine jouis-
sance of her attraction. This, I believe, is the ‘something more’ that was
hidden inside the yellow (alligator) purse.
Indeed, here again at the end of the film, our jouis-sens (‘enjoy-meant’)
of Hitchcock’s complex and extraordinary character of Marnie reminds us
how jouissance eludes us, always an enemy of any system that may be
erected in its honour; how it is beyond our reach and its full confrontation
is lethal; at the same time, however, how one can never get rid of it, how
it comes between partners in a dispensation that can never produce sym-
metry or reciprocity, how its remainder sticks to whatever we do. As Julia
Kristeva insists of the domain of jouissance: ‘One does not know it, one
does not desire it, one joys in it [on enjouit]. Violently and painfully. A
passion’ (1982, 9).
Notes
1. Regarding the voyeurism, Bellour further notes: ‘In thus observing Marnie,
who is both object of desire and enigma (becoming the one because she is
the other), Hitchcock becomes a kind of double of Mark and of Strutt,
who have just contributed to the creation of his image but who, at the
same time, are caught in it’ (224). And in describing the hair rinsing scene
in the bathroom, ‘we see her seeing herself, without her seeing us seeing
her. In this way, the divergence dramatically increases the voyeurism as
such, what might be called the passion for the image aroused by its missing
part’ (232).
2. For early theoretical elaborations of the notion of suture, see Jacques-Alain
Miller, ‘Suture (elements of the logic of the signifier),’ Jean-Pierre Oudart,
‘Cinema and Suture,’ and Stephen Heath, ‘Notes on Suture’ (1977–1978).
3. Geoff Boucher asserts the ubiquity of the concept of ‘enjoyment’ in Žižek’s
work as follows: ‘Every ideological universal, or statement of the norm,
entails reference, at the level of the enunciation, to a set of inherent trans-
gressions of the norm, which are the focus for prohibited enjoyment. This
thesis is represented in Žižek’s work directly and through a set of equiva-
lent claims: every universal implies a non-universalizable kernel of singular
enjoyment; democratic politics is supported by nationalist enjoyment; uni-
versal human rights are supported an obscene enjoyment of torture and
assassination; the public legal framework is supported by an unwritten
code of illicit enjoyment; the Symbolic Law is sustained by the Real of a
superego imperative to ‘enjoy’ transgression’ (in Butler (ed.) 2014, 132).
4. Murray Pomerance (2014, 18) traces the source of the description to
Robert Ardrey (1969, 67) and suggests that in the context of the film,
Mark ‘diagnoses Marnie’s emotional withdrawal as a self-protective tactic,
as though surrounded by predators, she has built a defensive barrier’.
5. Jouissance refers to the kind of satisfaction people derive from their symp-
toms which Freud characterized as follows: ‘The kind of satisfaction which
the symptom brings has much that is strange about it. … It is unrecogni-
sable to the subject, who, on the contrary feels the alleged satisfaction as
suffering and complains of it’ (Freud SE XV–VII, 365–366). He later
described this as ‘pleasure in pain’ (Schmerzlust) (Freud SE IX, 162). Lacan
went so far as to say ‘jouissance bothers the hell out of us’ (Seminar 21)
(quoted in Fink 2007, 69).
234 L. SIMMONS
6. In Seminar 7, Lacan declares: ‘jouissance presents itself as buried at the

center of a field and has the characteristics of inaccessibility, obscurity, and
opacity’ (S7, 209).
7. Allen, in an interview on the recent DVD release of the film, declares that
she decided that what happened on the honeymoon was not rape but
rather ‘a trying marital situation’! She claims elsewhere that ‘she never saw
the sequence in those terms and that Hitchcock never used the word rape
itself’ (quoted in Pomerance 2014, 33). William Rothman also maintains
that we ‘have grounds for believing, as [Mark] does, that he is making love
to her, not raping her’ (2012, 415).
8. Yanal also makes the connection Rutland=rutting (2005, 130). Lesley Brill
writes: ‘Critics often assume that Mark rapes Marnie and that his violation
of her leads to her suicide attempt. This assumption strikes me as unwar-
ranted and unnecessary. The sexual threat in Mark’s stripping Marnie’s
nightgown from her would be quite sufficient to terrify her to the point of
suicide … the sequence is photographed and edited to make what happens
or does not happen beyond ascertaining. We do not know what Mark does
or does not do to Marnie, and the film pointedly makes it impossible for us
to know’ (1991, 251 fn3).
9. Although Robert Yanal believes, rightly I think, that Hedren is ‘convincing
as a very troubled young woman, living under a series of false identities,
without human attachments (she seems comfortable only with her horse),
and begging love from her unresponsive mother’ (2005, 129–130).
10. As Lesley Brill observes, ‘Marnie begins … realistically, but it quickly
becomes intensely stylized and expressionistic. Marnie’s self-recovery … is
associated throughout the film with conspicuous formal devices: suffusions
of red, flashbacks, zooms, eerie music, obvious artificiality of sets, and con-
spicuous rear projection. This attention-getting artifice paradoxically sig-
nals again an intensification of truth and significance’ (1991, 244). See also
Elisabeth Bronfen (2015) and Susan Smith who claim that the back projec-
tion dislodges ‘the security of the viewer’s position suspending it between
character-based involvement and a detachment based on Hitchcock’s
directorial presence’ (2000, 49).
11. See, for example, Lanham (1991).
12. Immediately they are inside the door, when Mark puts his arm around
Marnie to soothe the effects of lightning, Marnie’s mother tells him ‘Get
your hands off my kid’. In her mind, he has taken up the place of the sailor.
13. As Lesley Brill points out, Marnie does not understand why she steals: ‘No
core supports the manikin-like surface of her manufactured identity.
Herself unknown to herself, she cannot respond to other people except to
deceive and rob them for motives she does not understand’ (1991,
264–265). John Fletcher writes, ‘At first Marnie’s thefts seem perfectly
explicable as mercenary, even professional exploits. Only in the light of her

repeated attempts and final inability to take money from the Rutland safe
are they reveled as the compulsive replaying of an original act of transgres-
sion, the murder of the sailor who possessed and hurt her mother’
(1988, 61).
14. For a convincing reading of the importance of class antagonism and social
exploitation in the film, see Michele Piso (in Deutelbaum and Pogue edi-
tors 2009, 28–294).
15. Camille Paglia describes Jessie as a resurrection of Cathy from Hitchcock’s
previous film The Birds and ‘a loathsomely wheedling, preening neigh-
bourhood princess who is pampered and spoiled by Marnie’s mother’
(1988, 45).
16. See my Chap. 8. Also Boscaljon (2010).
17. Zizek writes: ‘the screen image becomes a delusive surface, a lure secretly
dominated by the bodiless voice of an invisible or absent Master, a voice
that cannot be attached to any object in the diegetic reality—as if the true
subject of enunciation of Norman’s/mother’s voice is death itself, the skull
that we perceive for a brief moment in the fade-out of Norman’s face’
(LTN, 669).
18. Pomerance in a later text riffs even further: ‘“Had you” not “Would you”.
A delicious subjunctive, which invokes a potent “if”. If all the past could
now disappear … if we could manage to be happy ever after … if he could
see what she saw and know the nightmare she knew … if one could only be
the person one truly wanted to be’ (2014, 83).
References
Works by Žižek
AF. The Abyss of Freedom/Ages of the World. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan
Press, 1997.
CHU. Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left
D. Disparities. Bloomsbury Academic: London and New York, 2016.
FRT. The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kieslowski between Theory and Post-Theory.
Verso, 1991.
236 L. SIMMONS
Verso, 1996.
LTN. Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London:
Verso, 2012.
MC. The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? with John Milbank.
Verso, 1994.
OSD. Opera’s Second Death, with Mladen Dolar. London: Routledge, 2002.
PF. The Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso, 1997.
Verso, 1999.
WDR. Welcome to the Desert of the Real. London: Verso, 2002.
Objects, Renata Salecl and Slavoj Zizek editors. Durham and London: Duke
‘Death and the Maiden’ in The Žižek Reader, Elizabeth Wright and Edmond
Wright editors. Malden Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1999: 206–221.
‘Anxiety: Kierkegaard with Lacan’, Lacanian Ink 26 (Fall 2005): 103–117.
Works by Lacan
S10. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book X: Anxiety 1962–1963, edited by Jacques-
Alain Miller, translated with notes by Dennis Porter. New York: Polity, 2014.
S17. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book 17: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis
1969–1970, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated with notes by Russell
Grigg. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2007.
S20. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book XX: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of
Works by Freud
SE X. Sigmund Freud, ‘Little Hans’ (1909), vol. 10, The Standard Edition of the
Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1955: 227–238.
SE XV. Sigmund Freud, ‘Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis’ (1916–1917),
vol. 15, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud. Translated from the German under the General Editorship of James
Strachey. In collaboration with Anna Freud. Assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan
Tyson, 24 volumes. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of
Psychoanalysis, 1955: 157–171.
Other Works
Ardrey, Robert. 1969. African Genesis: A Personal Investigation into the Animal
Origins and Nature of Man. New York: Dell.
Austin, J.L. 1979. Pretending. In Philosophical Papers, ed. J.O. Urmson and
G.J. Warnock, 253–271. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 3rd edition.
Bellour, Raymond. 1977. Hitchcock the Enunciator. Camera Obscura 2: 66–91.
Bellour, Raymond. 2000. The Analysis of Film, trans. Constance Penley.
Boscaljon, Daniel. 2010. Žižek’s Atheist Theology. International Journal of Žižek
Studies 4:4: np.
Bowie, Malcolm. 1991. Lacan. London: Fontana.
Brill, Lesley. 1991. The Hitchcock Romance: Love and Irony in Hitchcock’s Films.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Bronfen, Elisabeth. 2015. Screening and Disclosing Fantasy: Rear Projection in
Hitchcock. Screen 56:1: 1–24.
Chion, Michel. 1999. The Voice in Cinema, ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman.
Fink, Bruce. 2002. Knowledge and Jouissance. In Reading Seminar XX: Lacan’s
Major Work on Love, Knowledge, and Feminine Sexuality, ed. Suzanne Barnard
and Bruce Fink, 21–45. New York: State University of New York Press.
Fink, Bruce. 2007. Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique: A Lacanian
Approach for Practitioners. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
Fletcher, John. 1988. Versions of Masquerade. Screen 29:3: 43–71.
Heath, Stephen. 1977–1978. Notes on Suture. Screen 18:4: 48–76.
Homer, Sean. 2005. Jacques Lacan. London and New York: Routledge.
Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror, trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York:
Columbia University Press.
238 L. SIMMONS
Lanham, Richard A. 1991. A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms. Berkeley and Los

Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2nd edition.
Laplanche, Jean and J.B. Pontalis 1988. The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans.
Donald Nicholson-Smith. London: Karnac Books.
Laplanche, Jean. 1992. Notes on Afterwardsness. In Jean Laplanche: Seduction,
Translation and the Drives, a dossier ed. John Fletcher and Martin Stanton,
217–223. London: Institute of Contemporary Arts.
Miller, Jacques-Alain. 1977–1978. Suture (Elements of the Logic of the Signifier).
Screen 18:4: 24–34.
Miller, Jacques-Alain. 2000. The Relations between the Sexes. In Sexuation, sic. 3,
ed. Renata Salecl, 13–27. Durham: Duke University Press.
Miller, Jacques-Alain. 2007. Jacques Lacan and the Voice. In The Later Lacan: An
Introduction, ed. Véronique Voruz and Bogdan Wolf, 137–146. Albany: State
University of New York Press.
Moral, Tony Lee. 2002. Hitchcock and the Making of Marnie. Lanham, MD:
Scarecrow Press.
Press, 1989.
Myers, Tony. 2003. Slavoj Žižek. New York and London: Routledge.
Paglia, Camille. 1988. The Birds. London: British Film Institute.
Piso, Michelle. 2009. Mark’s Marnie. In A Hitchcock Reader, ed. Marshall
Deutelbaum and Leland Poague, 280–294. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell.
University Press.
Pomerance, Murray. 2014. Marnie. London: British Film Institute and Palgrave
Macmillan.
Rothman, William. 2012. Hitchcock—The Murderous Gaze. Albany: State
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Salecl, Renata. 2000. Love and Sexual Difference: Doubled Partners in Men and
Women. In Sexuation, ed. Renata Salecl, 297–316. Durham: Duke
University Press.
Salecl, Renata. 2002. Love Anxieties. In Reading Seminar XX: Lacan’s Major
Work on Love, Knowledge, and Feminine Sexuality, ed. Suzanne Barnard and
Bruce Fink, 93–98. New York: SUNY Press.
Salecl, Renata. 2004. On Anxiety. London: Routledge.
Silverman, Kaja. 1988. The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and
Cinema. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Macmillan.
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Thomas, Deborah. 2006–2007. Self-Possession and Dispossession in Hitchcock’s
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Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
Yanal, Robert J. 2005. Hitchcock as Philosopher. Jefferson, NC and London:
McFarland & Company.
CHAPTER 7
Fantasy: Che vuoi? Rope (1948)
Abstract A homosexual couple strangles their best friend in order to win

recognition from their teacher who preaches the right of Supermen to
dispose of the useless and weak. There are two things for which Hitchcock’s
film is notorious: the continuous take and its portrayal of homosexuality.
The question of homosexuality is collapsed onto that of technique, for the
real subject of the film appears to be ‘murder as a work of art’. But the
original murder lacks what every work of art (especially Hitchcock’s films)
have, an audience. Hence, the assembled party guests and the murderers’
desire for acknowledgement, along with Hitchcock’s for the bravura of his
technique. This confirms Žižek’s exposition of Lacanian fantasy. Murder is
not an affair between the murderers and their victim, it always implies a
third party and the murderer expects something in return for his act: the
enigma of the impenetrable desire of the Other, epitomized in Lacan’s
phrase Che vuoi? (What do you want?).
RUPERT CADELL: You’ve given my words a meaning that I never

dreamed of.
—Rope
…everything we are allowed to approach by way of reality remains
rooted in fantasy.
—Jacques Lacan, Seminar XX Encore
If theory does not fit the facts, then so much the worse for the facts.
—Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing

Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62436-1_7
242 L. SIMMONS
‘Le style est l’homme même’: Le Trait Unaire

In the ‘Ouverture’ to his Ecrits, Lacan invokes French naturalist Comte de
Buffon’s ‘The style is the man himself’. While pointing out that the man
himself, Buffon, is no longer a ‘reference point’, Lacan proposes that to
use the phrase of anyone addressed is simply to invoke the belief that ‘in
language our message comes to us from the Other … in an inverted form’
(E 3–4). It is the objet a—the object that can never be attained that is really
the cause of desire rather than that towards which desire aims—he contin-
ues, that ‘responds to the question about style that I am raising … both as
the cause of desire in which the subject disappears and as sustaining the
subject between truth and knowledge’ (E 5). Moving on from Buffon’s
assertion that it is from the singularity of ‘his’ style that we uncover knowl-
edge of the true ‘man’, Lacan proposes that any attention to style will
uncover an eternally lost object and, ultimately, a subject divided between
a knowledge that lacks truth and a truth that can never be known. The
paradox of style now resides in the fact that it subverts the notion of a uni-
fied subject of knowledge, and the standard opposition of subjective and
objective. Of course, style is by definition not objective (in the sense of
something that exists independently of the subject’s perceptions and
choices); however, it is also not subjective (something that belongs only to
the subject’s consciously experienced intuitions, the product of his or her
imagination). It belongs to the category of the objectively subjective and
thus subverts the notion of the subject who directly expresses him- or
herself via inner states.
What are the implications of this for a discussion of Hitchcock’s style?
François Truffaut, adopting pure auteur theory in the introduction to his
famous conversation with Hitchcock, reverts to the notion of the film-
maker directly expressing himself: ‘Because he exercises such complete
control over all the elements of his films and imprints his personal con-
cepts at each step of the way, Hitchcock has a distinctive style of his own’
(1985, 18). Rope may appear at first sight to be emblematic of such ‘con-
trol’. It is Hitchcock’s meticulous handling of cinematic decoupage and
editing that make Rope appear to be eighty minutes of real time in the
single location of Brandon and Philip’s apartment. Hitchcock famously
masked the cuts of the film—suturing together the eleven film takes, each
of which lasts between three and nine minutes—often by focusing on a
dark object (the back of Brandon’s suit or the lid of a chest), which allowed
for a momentary blackout, so that the camera could be reloaded or
7 FANTASY: CHE VUOI? ROPE (1948) 243
refocused. While regularly described as composed of ten-minute shots,

only three of the eleven shots of Rope are over nine minutes long (2, 6 and
9); the credit shot is roughly three minutes; one (number 10 culminating
with Rupert throwing open the chest lid) is under five minutes; the last is
under six, the remainder are all between seven and eight.1 Hitchcock
stated in fact that he wanted to do the entire film in one take, impossible
at the time given the length of film that could be loaded into a camera.
The effect of this means that all the editing with the exception of five cuts
actually takes place in the pre-planned movements of the actors and cam-
era movements. The camera on the set of Rope is mobile and meticulously
choreographed according to Hitchcock’s famously precise storyboards. In
the interview with Truffaut, Hitchcock conceded that Rope was in a sense,
precut: ‘The mobility of the camera and the movement of the players
closely followed my usual cutting practice. In other words, I maintained
the rule of varying the size of the image in relation to its emotional impor-
tance within a given episode’ (1985, 180). ‘Precutting’, or the careful
plotting of the camera’s position in the space, would seem to secure the
viewer’s belief not just in any reality, but in a reality of Hitchcock’s own
making. The film’s ‘painstaking quest for realism’, as Truffaut deems it, is
secured not only because the viewer ‘believes’ in the camera’s testimony to
a real experience, but also because he/she ‘believes’ in Hitchcock’s genius
and his style. François Renault (1980), in a refinement of Truffaut’s auteur
position, argues ‘that the relationship between form and content offers us
a reading of the entire Hitchcock opus where the content is always ren-
dered by a certain formal feature’ (in Vertigo: the spiral circles; Psycho: the
intersected lines; Rope: the continuous line) (cited in LA 174 fn23). The
‘rope’ of Rope—which first appears in the lettering of the film’s title, is
then used to strangle David, protrudes incriminatingly from the chest that
hides David’s body, ties together the first-edition books for his father—
while it may originate as a sign becomes a signifier (for Brandon and
Philip, but also for Hitchcock) when incorporated into the film’s signify-
ing system.2 In this way, it resembles Lacan’s trait unaire (rendered in
English as ‘single trait’, ‘unbroken line’, ‘unary trait’), the symbolic term
introjected by the subject to produce an ego ideal: ‘a point of symbolic
identification to which the real of the subject clings’ (LA 75). This was a
term Lacan derived from Freud’s observation that the subject identifies
with a love object or rival by identifying with a single trait (einziger Zug)
of the other person (SE XVIII 107). Dora’s cough, for example, was an
imitation of her father’s. Lacan gave the term a mathematical inflection
244 L. SIMMONS
from set theory by comparing it to a binary number. As a means of repre-

senting the qualitative symbolic differences of a subject to another signi-
fier, Lacan recognized the single trait as a signifier, what he called ‘an
insignia of the other’ (S5 304). ‘As long as the subject is attached to this
feature we are faced with a charismatic, fascinating, sublime figure; as soon
as this attachment is broken, the figure is deflated’ (LA 75). Rope is the
story of this deflation.
But there are cracks in this veneer of ‘control’. Hitchcock was to dis-
miss Rope retrospectively, deeming the film a ‘stunt’ and ‘a crazy idea’
(Truffaut 1985, 179), and most of his viewers were unaware of his experi-
ment with style. Ultimately, the ‘masterpiece’ of Brandon and Philip’s ‘art
of murder’ and the risks they take are undermined by Hitchcock’s stylistic
‘risks’. Rope’s camera never probes the perspective of the film’s protago-
nists (one never gets into Brandon or Philip’s eyes); rather, Rope’s single,
mobile camera assumes one unidentified point of view. It becomes an
anonymous witness to Philip and Brandon’s crime and the perverted din-
ner party that follows. In this sense, the film functions as a subjective long-
take, but seemingly without a subject. As D.A. Miller argues in one of the
most celebrated responses to Rope, it is the question of homosexuality
which is collapsed onto that of technique. There exists an overdetermined
relation between the technical experiment of the long takes, including the
cuts between them that are masked on a male character’s back (and are
thus, for Miller, a figure for the anus), and the tacit homosexuality of the
characters of Philip, Brandon and possibly Rupert. In noting that critics
have focussed primarily on the film’s technique—dismissing the alleged
homosexuality of its protagonists as an afterthought—Miller writes,
‘Technique acquires all the transgressive fascination of homosexuality,
while homosexuality is consigned to the status of a dry technical detail’
(1990, 117).
What, then, of Žižek’s style? As Justin Clemens has noted, ‘If commen-
tators agree on anything, however, it is that manifest repetition is the hall
mark of Žižek’s style’ (2005, 6).3 Not only does Žižek repeat his examples
(the Rabinovitch joke, Antigone or Parsifal), repeat himself (sometimes
verbatim in the same text), but the same ideas and concepts recur through-
out his writing (the Lacanian Real, the structure of the fetish, the presence
of the obscene father, multiculturalism versus universalism…). The com-
pulsive repetition of the same words, phrases or ideas is on a par with their
verbal delivery where a dishevelled Žižek’s stylistic tics of wildly gesticulat-
ing and tugging at his beard and nose reveal a case of performance anxiety
becoming the performance of anxiety. As Rex Butler records, when ‘see-

ing Žižek lecture’, we
feel he is making the same point over and over, but we cannot quite grasp it,
and in order to do so he must take in the entirety of Western philosophy and
culture … as his public performances and writings attest, his work is end-
lessly shifting, open-ended, refuses to close itself down or draw conclu-
sions—in a word psychotic. (2005, 2)
However, with the charge that his work exhibits mere ‘compulsive rep-
etition of the same’, Žižek’s detractors fail to see that his form of repetition
is ‘non-identical’, that is, he returns to the same ideas and concepts to
both keep them alive and approach them from new directions. He himself
understands repetition as a way of ‘making anew’:
What repetition repeats is not the way the past ‘effectively was,’ but the
virtually inherent to the past and betrayed by its past actualisation. In this
precise sense, the emergence of the NEW changes the past itself, that is, it
retroactively changes … the balance between actuality and virtuality in the
past. … So, it is not only that repetition is (one of the modes of) the emer-
gence of the New—the New can ONLY emerge through repetition.
(OwB 12–13)
It is the very force of Žižek’s repetitions that form the strength and the
thesis (if there could be said to be one) of his project. For, as Žižek himself
argues, repetition is the only way that we understand the force and mean-
ing of historical events whose character is always, in the first instance,
misrecognized:
historical necessity itself is constituted through misrecognition, through the

initial failure of ‘opinion’ to recognize its true character—that is, the way
truth itself arises from misrecognition. The crucial point here is the changed
symbolic status of an event: when it erupts for the first time it is experienced
as a contingent trauma, as an intrusion of a certain non-symbolized Real;
only through repetition is this event recognized in its symbolic neces-
sity. (SOI 61)
The way in which this Žižekian déjà vu effect of repetition works could
be compared, on a more simplistic level, to the importance of the numer-
ous jokes and anecdotes which fill Žižek’s texts. In general, jokes and
246 L. SIMMONS
anecdotes hold interpretative power precisely because they are not told for
the first time. It is through the repetition of the seemingly familiar tale, the
interpretative re-situation of the event, that we actually come to see the
importance of what we experience as the already seen. Žižek’s repetitions
have a similar status to Freud’s joke about the man going to Cracow
(which Lacan quotes and Žižek repeats): where the man lies by telling the
truth, and vice versa. Žižek is nothing if not critical when he repeats, yet is
too often merely faithful in his criticisms.
A phenomenon can thus tell the truth precisely by presenting itself as a lie,
like the Jew in the Freudian joke often quoted by Lacan who reproaches his
friend: ‘Why are you telling me that you are going to Cracow and not to
Lemberg, when you’re really going to Cracow?’ (Telling the truth repre-
sented a breach of the implicit code of deception that ruled their relation-
ship: when one of them was going to Cracow, he was supposed to tell the lie
that his destination was Lemberg, and vice versa). (SOI 197 and ZJ 130)
In his preface to Žižek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology, Ernesto Laclau

calls attention to ‘a series of theoretical interventions which shed mutual
light on each other, not in terms of the progression of an argument, but in
terms of what we would call the reiteration of the latter in different discur-
sive contexts’ and how because it is ‘not the result of a necessary progres-
sion, the text reaches a point of irruption rather than conclusion, thus
inviting the reader to continue for him- or herself the discursive prolifera-
tion in which the author has been engaged’ (SOI xii). Žižek’s ‘repetition’,
like Hitchcock’s ‘single take’ and the ‘rope’ of his diegesis, thus also exem-
plifies Lacan’s trait unaire.
Interpassivity: A Fetishism of Technique

According to Žižek, ideology works not because we believe in it, but
because we believe someone else does, because belief is external, it is
‘interpassive’ to borrow a term created by Robert Pfaller (HRL 23ff).
Pfaller develops his concept from Octave Mannoni’s structure of fetish-
ism: ‘I know very well … but all the same’ (2017, 44). For Žižek, belief is
‘interpassive’; it is a matter of disavowal and fetishism. The structure of
fetishism underlies Mannoni’s structure ‘I know very well [that woman
does not have a phallus] … but all the same [I am convinced that this shoe
is it]’. To explain how this concept works in practice, Žižek uses the
example of Father Christmas and the way in which parents claim they pro-
mote the story only ‘for the sake of the children’. He argues that the
majority of children know that Father Christmas does not exist and in
reality the only people who truly believe in him are the parents themselves.
They pretend to believe, that is in the guise of knowing adults performing
for innocent children, they actively foster belief even though they know it
to be false (HRL 29–30). Not only does Žižek see displaced belief as a
kind of real belief, but he goes on to assert that all belief functions to a
certain extent in this manner: ‘In an uncanny way, belief always seems to
function in the guise of such a ‘belief at a distance’: in order for the belief
to function, there has to be some ultimate guarantor of it, yet this guaran-
tor is always deferred, displaced, never present in persona’ (‘The
Interpassive Subject’ n.d., np). Mannoni’s point is that a disavowing sub-
ject does not directly believe but needs someone else to believe and the
fantasy that fetishism describes is at the heart of what we call the subject
as such.
This concept of belief and the structure of fetishism is central to
Hitchcock’s Rope (1948). A homosexual couple strangles their best friend
in order to win recognition from their teacher who preaches the right of
Supermen to dispose of the useless and weak. When the teacher, Rupert
Cadell, is confronted with the verbatim realization of his doctrine, when
his words come back to him in an inverted form, he is unprepared to rec-
ognize in them his own truth. There are two things for which Hitchcock’s
film is notorious: the continuous take and its portrayal of homosexuality.
As we have seen, D.A. Miller argues that there exists an overdetermined
relation between the technical experiment of the long takes and the alleged
homosexuality of its protagonists. Homosexuality in Rope would appear to
become a dry detail, responded to with indifference, for the real subject of
the film would seem to be ‘murder as a work of art’. But the original mur-
der lacks what every work of art (especially Hitchcock’s films) has, an audi-
ence. Hence the party guests are assembled to provide the audience that
Brandon desires. Brandon’s motivation is desire for acknowledgement as,
we might argue, is Hitchcock’s for the bravura of his technique. Both
desires ultimately fall flat or are not noticed. The moment at the end of the
film when Rupert takes over from Brandon’s stage managing is the
moment when he reconstructs David’s murder and becomes a sort of
metteur en scéne, a Hitchcock stand-in. This confirms Žižek’s exposition of
Lacanian fantasy as the third term. Murder, for Brandon and Philip, is not
the desired object but the object-cause of desire. Murder is not an affair
248 L. SIMMONS
between the murderers and their victim, it always implies a third party.
The murderer expects something from a third party in return for his act:
the answer to Che vuoi?, the Lacanian question of the subject.4 In Rope,
this is recognition. Fantasy is thus not opposed to reality, it structures real-
ity and determines the contours of desire. Fantasy gives us something to
desire. But equally here the question of male homosexuality just won’t go
away. If Brandon and Philip are gay, what about the other characters?
David the victim who is over-protected by his mother. And what about
bachelor-teacher-mentor Rupert? And Kenneth who is often mistaken for
David? We learn that Janet Walker, as a ‘girlfriend’, has been passed from
Brandon to Kenneth to David and thus functions to strengthen the homo-
social bond between boyfriends. Finally, what is the status of the (homo-
sexual) Rupert’s exposure of (homosexual) murder at the end of the film?
Twisted Words: The Counter-Voice of Humour

JANET: Is that funny? I never know when I’m being funny.
Susan Smith describes Brandon’s sense of humour as ‘macabre’ (2000,

57). Brandon’s witticisms encourage us to admire the very traits of intel-
lectual superiority and control over others that he has and have enabled
him to commit the ‘perfect’ murder. The contrast is made ever more evi-
dent by Philip’s panic attacks, as well as Janet’s ineffectiveness and inade-
quate ability to tell a joke. What makes this even more insidious, suggests
Smith, is that it plays to the spectator’s ‘epistemic superiority’ (57) and
ability to understand the double-entendres in the film script as the privi-
leged holder of the knowledge of David’s murder. Thomas Bauso pro-
poses ‘that Brandon is Hitchcock’s surrogate … demonstrated by their
common delight in perverse wit’ (1991, 231) and that the tone of practi-
cal joking creates a complicity between the film protagonists and
Hitchcock’s public persona. As Smith notes, Rope displays a self-
consciousness about the nature of its humour within the narrative, a trait
that surfaces explicitly within the dialogue:
JANET (to Brandon): At times your humour is a little too mali-

cious, chum.
MR KENTLEY: It’s probably a symptom of approaching senility
but I must confess that I really don’t appreciate
this morbid humour.
JANET: I might have known you couldn’t just give a party for Mr.
Kentley. No, you’d have to add something that’d appeal to
your warped sense of humour.
Other examples include Rupert telling Mrs Wilson, the housekeeper,

that he no longer likes the paté she purchased especially for him. When she
questions him crestfallen, Rupert replies, ‘Just teasing’. Mrs Wilson
responds, ‘You’re awful’. Importantly, the humour is not only based on
words but may also be visual as is the case with Mrs Atwater’s short sight-
edness and mistaken identification of Kenneth as David. There is a double-
level to this self-reflexivity with regard to the diegetic forms of humour
which can also expose the limits of the viewpoints of the characters since,
as mentioned, the film audience is in possession of privileged knowledge
which the characters are not. The above voices are counter, censoring
voices of the filmmaker, but also proof of his complicity with his male
protagonists.
The notion of humour functioning as a device for ensnaring the viewer
is consistent with its use by Žižek. Robert Pfaller has written how Žižek’s
humour, his jokes and stories serve an important theoretical purpose but
also how for many critics they may ‘obscure his philosophy’ (2007, 34).
Paraphrasing Freud, Pfaller suggests that, in introducing humour, Žižek is
doing theoretical ‘joke-work’. Rather than understanding a Žižek joke as
the concrete example of the (philosophical) idea to be introduced, an illus-
tration of what, at first, could not be seen in the concept, Pfaller insists
that the function of the Žižekian joke is not to illustrate or exemplify a
theoretical point but ‘to displace it; to drag it away from its initial position;
to “estrange” it…; to shed a different light on it; to comb it against the
grain, as it were—in other words: to interpret it against its common under-
standing and against its self-understanding’ (2007, 38). The typical Žižek
joke does not present an instance to which an abstract idea could be easily
applied. It is not a passive material that visualizes something which has
already been included in the abstract idea.5 Its function is rather to make
something appear which was completely foreign to the first idea and which
this idea could only be connected to with considerable theoretical effort.
The humorous example is therefore highly active. It is not just the object
or the raw material of a theoretical explanation, but it functions as its theo-
retical tool: it makes visible a theoretical structure in the original idea
which, before, was not easy to discern or which was even hidden by
another structure which appeared evident.
250 L. SIMMONS
Let us take an example that illustrates the question of desire. In The

Plague of Fantasies, in a section titled ‘From the Sublime to the Ridiculous’,
Žižek recounts the following joke of
a poor peasant who, after enduring a shipwreck finds himself on a desert

island with Cindy Crawford. After having sex with her, she asks him if he is
fully satisfied; his answer is yes, but none the less he still has a small request
to make his satisfaction complete—could she dress herself up as his best
friend, put on trousers and paint a moustache on her face? In response to her
surprised reaction and suspicion that the poor peasant is a hidden pervert,
he comforts her that this is not the point at all, as she will immediately see.
So, after she fulfils his request, he approaches her, elbows her in the ribs and
tells her with the obscene smile of male complicity: ‘You know what just
happened to me? I had sex with Cindy Crawford!’ (PF 179; also repeated
in ZJ 112)
What does Žižek’s joke tell us?
1. Fantasy is not simply reducible to an imagined scene in which our

desires are satisfied. Desires can’t be satisfied (sleeping with Cindy
Crawford won’t do it!). As soon as the desire is fulfilled, it disap-
pears or slips away from us.
2. Fantasy teaches us what to desire. Fantasy constitutes our desire.
The fantasy on one level is mine, at the same time though it is the
desire of the Other, of what I am to other people. Fantasy tells me
what I am for my others. In this case, the peasant has no fantasy
unless he can find a witness to declare it to.
3. Fantasy is intersubjective, or produced by the interaction between
subjects, however specific it is to an individual. It goes to show that
for the sexual relationship to exist there has to be a third gaze. Sex
is never just about two people.
4. Fantasy is a kind of frame through which we see reality. But the
point of view offered is always subjective, or what Žižek following
Lacan calls anamorphic, askew in some way, distorted in such a way
that it is only recognizable from a specific angle it cannot be seen
objectively.6
As Žižek insists, fantasy stages a desire but whose desire? Not the sub-
ject’s desire.
What we encounter in the very core of fantasy formation is the relationship

to the desire of the Other: to the opacity of the Other’s desire … Fantasy is
a way for the subject to answer the question of what object they are for the
Other, in the eyes of the Other, for the Other’s desire. (IR 61)
Žižek’s peasant needed a witness to his fantasy. There is no universal

formula for a happy relationship with one’s partner. We all have to invent
our own private formula for each relationship. What my (or the peasant’s)
fantasy of a sexual relationship with Cindy Crawford does is conceal the
impossibility (the necessary failure) of the sexual relationship, it supplies
the missing enjoyment. Fantasy is a way for me to organize my enjoyment
(jouissance), to manage or handle the loss of enjoyment that cannot be
symbolized (both for the peasant in the joke, and for me retelling the joke
to you, and for you in fantasizing about the joke).
Similarly, Žižek maintains, in Rope ‘murder functions as a stake in an
intersubjective logic of exchange’ and in ‘Hitchcock’s films, murder is
never simply an affair between a murderer and his victim; murder always
implies a third party, a reference to a third person—the murderer kills for
this third person, his act is inscribed in the framework of a symbolic
exchange with him … i.e., the murderer expects from the third party
something in return for his act—recognition (in Rope)’ (LA 74).7
Act or ‘Acting-Out’ or Passage à l’acte: Aphanisis

of the Subject
Rope opens with a high angle shot of a one-way New York city street (54th
Street and First Avenue), we see a restaurant doorway canopy, a woman
sweeps the steps of her brownstone, a mother pushes a pram along the
sidewalk, cars and a taxi pass, the film credits play, people then return
walking in opposite directions, this includes Hitchcock walking alongside
a woman with a newspaper in his hand,8 a policeman stops the traffic and
crosses the road with a child on each hand. We are treated to the day-to-
day world of the Symbolic. Hitchcock’s camera then pans back over a
concrete balcony from which it has been observing events and tilts across
a black gravel surface, perhaps ominous of the shift from Symbolic to Real
that is about to happen, up to a continuous series of long windows all
heavily curtained; there is a scream, and we move through the curtained
window to the inside. Two young men, Brandon and Philip, are in the
process of strangling a third man. With conspicuously gloved hands, Philip
252 L. SIMMONS
Fig. 7.1 Brandon and Philip strangle David Kentley
pulls a short rope tight around his neck (Fig. 7.1). Brandon, who has
encouraged and orchestrated the strangulation, feels in the third man’s
chest for a heartbeat or its lack. Philip seems shattered by the event;
Brandon in contrast appears ecstatic and exhilarated. Together, they place
the body in a long chest where it will remain throughout the duration of
the film. There is a dialogue ‘laden with post-coital punning’ (Brandon
admits, ‘I felt tremendously exhilarated’) as they share a glass of cham-
pagne in the afterglow of the murder.9
How are we to understand this moment of murder. Is it an act? The
fundamental quality of which is that its ‘actor(s)’ can be held responsible
for it (as they are by Rupert Cadell at the denouement). Or is it ‘acting
out’? The term Freud used (Agieren) to account for the subject who is
condemned to repeat past events repressed in memory which are then
expressed in repeated actions (SE XII 150). (Brandon will later make fun
of an incident of ‘chicken strangling’ from Philip’s past.) From a Lacanian
perspective, ‘acting-out’ is a ciphered message which the subject addresses
to an Other. Who is the addressee of Brandon and Philip’s act? Is it Rupert?

Or is the murder that opens the film perhaps a passage à l’acte (passage to
the act), a term which comes from French clinical psychiatry used to des-
ignate impulsive acts, often of a violent or criminal nature, sometimes
marking the onset of an acute psychotic episode, which are out of keeping
with the subject’s normal motivational patterns. These acts mark the point
when a subject proceeds from an idea or intention and because they are
attributed to the action of the psychosis, French law absolves the perpetra-
tor of civil responsibility for them. ‘Acting out’ is a symbolic message
addressed to the big Other, whereas a ‘passage to the act’ is a flight from
the Other, and an exit from the Symbolic network, into the dimension of
the Real. Neither acting-out nor passage à l’acte are true acts since the
subject does not assume responsibility for his or her desire in these actions.
The act of murder in Rope is all three types of act. It is an act in the
sense that it is made without strategic consideration of outcomes; it opens
up a moment when absolute freedom coincides with unconditional neces-
sity short-circuiting ethics. It differs from an action in that it radically
transforms its agents. After the act, the subject is ‘not the same as before’.
In the act, ‘the subject is annihilated and subsequently reborn’; ‘the act
involves a kind of temporary eclipse, aphanisis, of the subject’ (EYS 44).
It opens up the void for which the Symbolic stands in and disturbs the
Symbolic field into which it intervenes, but not out of nowhere rather
precisely from a disavowed structuring principle that is its hidden logic. As
Žižek insists, it
does not simply occur within the given horizon of what appears to be ‘pos-
sible’—it redefines the very contours of what is possible (an act accomplishes
what, within the given symbolic universe, appears to be ‘impossible’, yet it
changes its conditions so that it creates retroactively the conditions of its
own possibility). (CHU 121)
It is also ‘acting out’ in the sense that it is a deliberate anti-social action,

but one that is a form of communication as well as action, and which for
Brandon in his final defence involves the full range of a verbal justification.
And it is a passage a l’acte in the sense that as a violent action it ‘is mean-
ingless … an impulsive movement into action which can’t be translated
into speech or thought and carries with it an intolerable weight of frustra-
tion’ (V 76). For Rupert, who takes refuge in the values of society he has
earlier scorned, we might say that murder starts out as ‘acting out’ but by
254 L. SIMMONS
the end, and to his consternation, has become pure ‘act’, which, neverthe-
less, he needs to interpret, and it is the very fact that there was no agenda
behind the murder of David which becomes the evidence to be inter-
preted. For Brandon, David’s murder was never anything but pure ‘act’
outside the interpretive framework of the Symbolic order. For Philip, as
his increasing psychosis intimates, he can only come to justify it as the
blind outburst of a passage a l’acte, not a genuine act but a sign of
impotence.
As Sheila Kunkle claims, the act ‘is a foundational concept in Žižek’s
philosophy and serves as the key to understanding the political and ethical
dimensions of his thought’ (2014, 1). Žižek’s ‘act’ draws equally from
Hegel and Lacan. As he explains, the Hegelian notion of the act:
always, by definition, involves a moment of externalization, self-

objectivization, of the jump into the unknown. To ‘pass to the act’ means to
assume the risk that what I am about to do will be inscribed into a frame-
work whose contours elude my grasp, that it may set in motion an unfore-
seeable train of events, that it will acquire a meaning different from or even
totally opposed to what I intended to accomplish. (TN 31)
The radical agency of the act is therefore decidedly on the side of the
Real and since it is made without considering outcomes and it short-
circuits cause and effect. The act is also governed by the death-drive which
intervenes to cause the subject to repeatedly experience the symbolic
breakdown of its subjective economy. The act thus involves the aphanisis
(disappearance or fading) of the subject, the process whereby the subject
is (partially) eclipsed behind a signifier used in its symbolic narrative.
‘There is no subject’, Lacan maintains, ‘without, somewhere, aphanisis of
the subject, and it is in this alienation, in this fundamental division, that
the dialectic of the subject is established’ (S11 221). It is not just that the
subject is divided for Lacan, but it is this division that is the subject. Žižek
clarifies this point as follows:
The act differs from an active intervention (action) in that it radically

transforms its bearer (agent): the is not simply something I ‘accom-
plish’—after an act, I’m literally ‘not the same as before.’ In this sense,
we could say that the subject ‘undergoes’ the act (‘passes through’ it)
rather than ‘accomplishes’ it: in it, the subject is annihilated and subse-
quently reborn (or not), i.e., the act involves a kind of temporary eclipse,
aphanisis, of the subject. Which is why every act worthy of this name is
‘mad’ in the sense of radical unaccountability: by means of it, I put at

stake everything, including myself, my symbolic identity; the act is there-
fore always a ‘crime,’ a ‘transgression,’ namely the limit of the symbolic
community to which I belong. (EYS 44)
What of the resonances between the act in the film and the act of film-
ing? The act of murder, like the single take, may appear to reduce space to
time, that of spatial synchronous existence to temporal succession. But, as
we have noted, the first cut in Hitchcock’s film occurs at the moment of
the act of murder and so ‘what defines an act is a temporality irreducible
to space: the act introduces a cut separating “afterward” from “before”, a
discontinuity which cannot be accounted for within a spatial disposition of
elements’ (EYS 64). Thus, in attempting to reduce the temporality of the
act (of murder) to the synchronous unity of the single take, the film evokes
the sensation of the paradoxical ontology of something ‘out of place’,
abnormal, pathological. Motion of the camera as such comes to signal
imbalance, which is why at the anticlimactic ending of the film where the
three characters, the two murderers and their teacher, are waiting motion-
less and silent, the camera stops. Rupert has opened the window which,
for the first time, allows sounds from the outside world to enter, the wail-
ing of a siren that announces the arrival of the police and the return to
moral stability of law and order in the Symbolic (even during the opening
credits we did not hear the sounds of the outside everyday world depicted).
The opening of the cassone at the end, like the opening of the window to
follow, provides relief from the claustrophobia of the single takes. The
camera positioned behind the chest now stays motionless like the charac-
ters, the sole moment of total immobility in a film that has been character-
ized by perpetual motion (which, of course, is the title of the piece of
music by Poulenc played by Philip on the piano).10 Needless to say, there
is a fourth character waiting who has been motionless and silent through-
out the entire production, the murdered David Kentley, or at least the
actor playing him who from all accounts remained in the cassone during
the filming of the film’s second long take.
The Canting Candle: Takes or Mis-Takes?

As Juhani Pallasmaa suggests, ‘The decorating of the dinner table and,
later, the chest-cum-coffin with a three-candle candelabra secretly rein-
forces a variety of triads in the plot: two murderers and the innocent
256 L. SIMMONS
victim…; the three boyfriends of Janet; the three women in the film—
Janet, Mrs Wilson and Mrs Atwater; the three members of the Kentley
family; the three former disciples of Rupert Cadell; Cadell’s three pistol
shots’ (2001, 58–9).11 Nevertheless, there is something wrong with this
candelabra, something which we immediately notice as Hitchcock’s
camera pans across the table: one of its candles leans lopsidedly (Fig. 7.2).
This and other ‘technical errors’ in Rope have been well documented,
even fetishized, by the film’s ‘closest’ viewer, D.A. Miller. In his 2016
book Hidden Hitchcock, Miller unearths all of Rope’s glitches, which
span from continuity errors (a chair that just happened to turn to face
the camera, while it was focused on another side of the room) to perfor-
mance errors (like the aforementioned candle that cants to one side,
tottering on its candlestick, until Brandon turns in time to screw it firmly
into its socket). For Miller, who wishes to make a distinction between
‘continuity violations’, such as the shadow of the film camera within the
Fig. 7.2 The canting candle

frame, and what he calls ‘hidden picturing’, signifiers deliberately con-

cealed in plain view, these errors are not so much mistakes as ‘mis-takes’,
foregrounding a ‘fault that lies, primal and irreparable, at the core of
[Hitchcock’s] art’ (2016, 77). The risk of the mis-take (deliberately)
permeates Rope—it tinges each performance with an ‘unacted nervous-
ness that spikes through the script’s overliterate finish’ (2016, 74). It is
in this sense that, for Miller, the film collapses its multivalent risks (the
risk of murder, the risk of theatre, and above all, the risk of homosexual-
ity in 1948) into the risk of the film’s form itself. According to Miller,
then, Rope’s virtuosic, if imperfect, illusion of a single-take upstages its
diegetic risks, thus serving as a form of cinematic risk management (only
what gets ‘managed’ is a cultural dynamic (homosexuality) too risqué for
Hitchcock’s late-1940’s audience).
Seemingly Rope is an abstract, artistic project of covering over story
and narration, and party chatter, with the perpetual motion of the cam-
era in relation to objects circumscribed within a cramped space and
bathed in a progressively dimming light. The long take becomes gratu-
itous in the same way that the murder is, and can be justified as it is by
the argument (by Brandon) for perfection. Both the narrative and the
making of the film embody, as Miller notes, the paradox of a perfect
murder and a work of art.
As an instance of perfection, the crime must be in Brandon’s expression, ‘an

immaculate murder,’ without stain or other evidence to incriminate its
author. To be an example of art, though, it must be marked with an inten-
tion, even a solicitation, to be recognized as one. (2016, 56)
The story and the making also embody a hidden erotics where the ten-
sion resulting from the practice of the long take, while not erotic in itself,
is not unlike a form of sexual tension, especially in the course of shooting
in the sense that the long take consists in making the jouissance last.
Hitchcock’s attraction with technique at the expense of content is fetish-
istic and just as the sexual fetishist’s desire remains uncomprehended, or
even noticed, by those around him, so Hitchcock’s fetish of technique was
not understood by his actors, nor by the critics, and it went unnoticed by
most of his audience.12 It is finally with Miller that we ‘come under the
spell of a hidden Hitchcock’ (2016, 3).
258 L. SIMMONS
Le Sujet Supposé Savoir: Rupert as Detective

or Analyst?
PHILIP: He knows, he knows, he knows…
The term sujet supposé savoir was introduced by Lacan in his 1961–1962
Seminar Identification (S9 11) and has been translated as ‘subject sup-
posed to know’ in most of the subsequent commentary in English.
However, the translation of ‘supposed subject of knowledge’ has been
proposed in order to capture the implication that it is the subject not just
knowledge that is ‘supposed’ (Schneiderman 1980, vii). Lacan returned to
the term in 1964 in his Seminar 11, The Four Fundamental Concepts of
Psycho-analysis, where he links it to the relationship of transference: ‘As
soon as the subject who is supposed to know exists somewhere … there is
transference’ (S11 232). Lacan insisted that while transference may mani-
fest itself in the guise of strong affects such as love or hate, it does not just
consist of these emotions. If transference manifests itself as love, Lacan
suggests, it is first and foremost love of knowledge (savior). The term sujet
supposé savoir does not designate the analyst as such but the function
which she/he comes to assume in the treatment. It is only when the analy-
sand perceives and understands this function that transference ‘is estab-
lished’ (S11 233). The belief or ‘supposition’ of the analysand in
psychoanalysis is that the Other (his or her analyst) knows the meaning of
the analysand’s symptoms. This is obviously a false belief, certainly at the
start of the analytic process. But it is only through holding this false belief
about the analyst that the work of analysis can proceed, and the transfer-
ential belief can become true (when the analyst does become able to inter-
pret the symptoms). The patient in analysis has the absolute certainty that
analyst knows his or her secret. It is this transposition of what the analy-
sand already knows in his or her unconscious onto the figure of the analyst
that is the phenomenon of transference in treatment.
Žižek draws an analogy between the omniscient role of the detective
and the sujet supposé savoir. In the detective novel, the detective is assumed
by the reader to be the site of a certain privileged knowledge, the sujet
supposé savoir who will solve all mysteries. The detective occupies the place
of the Other as the guarantor of the Symbolic order, and he assures that
the readers play by the rules of his particular symbolic game (the conven-
tions of the crime story genre).
The certainty on the part of the reader that, at the end, the detective will
solve the case does not include the supposition that he will arrive at the truth
notwithstanding all deceitful experiences. The point is rather that he will
literally catch the murderer in his deception, i.e. he will trap him by taking
into account his cunning. The very deceit the murderer invents to save him-
self is the cause of his downfall. Such a paradoxical conjunction in which it
is the very attempt at deception that betrays us is of course only possible in
the domain of ‘meaning,’ of a signifying structure; it is on this account that
the detective’s ‘omniscience’ is strictly homologous to that of the psycho-
analyst, who is taken by the patient as the ‘subject supposed to know’ (le
sujet supposé savoir)—supposed to know what? The true meaning of our act,
the meaning visible in the very falseness of the appearance. The detective’s
domain, as well as that of the psychoanalyst, is thus thoroughly the domain
of meaning, not of ‘facts’: as we have already noted, the scene of the crime
analyzed by the detective is by definition ‘structured like a language’. (LA 57)
Žižek reminds us that Lacan’s Ecrits begins with the detailed analysis of
an archetypal detective story, Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’
where Lacan draws the parallel between ‘the subjective position of Auguste
Dupin—Poe’s amateur detective—and that of the analyst’ (LA 50). Žižek,
though, turns for his example to the popular TV series Columbo where.
the crime—the act of murder—is shown in detail in advance … Even more

crucial than this feature is the fact that not only do we, the spectators, know
in advance who did it (since we directly see it), but inexplicably, the detec-
tive Columbo himself immediately knows it: the moment he visits the scene
of the crime and encounters the culprit, he is absolutely certain, he simply
knows that the culprit did it. His subsequent efforts do not concern the
riddle ‘Who did it?’, but how he should prove the culprit’s guilt to the cul-
prit. (HRL 27–8)
With Rope, of course, we, the audience, know the crime in advance and
we can readily substitute Rupert Cadell—who has ‘stated’ the crime and
come to suspect the ‘culprits’ early on—for Inspector Columbo in the
description above. There is also the knowledge revealed early on that
Rupert is Brandon’s ‘subject supposed to know’, both his mentor and a
form of ‘prep school analyst’. The scene of the crime which confronts the
detective—in Rope a lavish banquet party—is a false image arranged by the
murderers to cover traces of their act. Rupert starts with details that may
appear in themselves insignificant—the top of a chest that is used as a
260 L. SIMMONS
dining table, a piece of thick rope used to tie a small parcel of books, a hat
with the initials DK in the hatband—they are details that render the imagi-
nary unity of the scene of the crime strange and unreal. The analyst, too,
starts with a false or mysterious appearance, obscure details of the human
psyche (dreams, slips of the tongue, symptoms), things that render the
imaginary unity of the subject suspect and from which the analyst pro-
duces meanings that seem to be ‘hidden’.
The Purloined Corpse: Cassone or Closet?

Christopher Morris in The Hanging Figure (2002) proposes that Edgar
Allan Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’ informs Hitchcock’s Rope (175).13
Both depend on incriminating evidence planted in a prominent position
and not discoverable through traditional rationality. Rupert discovers the
body in the chest because he is guided by verbal clues dropped by Brandon
and because of David Kentley’s initials inside the hat that is mistakenly
passed to him by Mrs Wilson. In Poe’s story, looking around him and
counterintuitively, Inspector Dupin discovers the letter of the story’s title
on full display in a cheap letter rack on the mantelpiece. In Lacan’s 1956
seminar on Poe’s story (E 6–48), the content of the letter is irrelevant and
instead the letter becomes a pivot around which a pattern of human rela-
tionships rotates. It constitutes the signifying chains that come to domi-
nate the signified symbolic universes that structure and tie the story’s
characters together. In Rope, it is David, or more accurately his corpse,
that functions like Poe’s ‘purloined letter’, binds the group of individuals
together and is the focus of their intersubjective relations. Rope, too,
shares the same dimension of fate at work in the very formal structure of
Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’ where, as Žižek elucidates,
the self-experience of the main characters in Poe’s story is determined by the

simple ‘mechanical’ shift of their positions within the intersubjective triad of
the three glances (the first which sees nothing; the second which sees that
the first sees nothing and deludes itself as to the secrecy of what it hides; the
third which sees that the first two glances leave what should be hidden
exposed to whomever would see it). (EYS 16)14
With respect to Rope, the first glance is that of the Kentleys, Mrs
Atwater and Janet; the second glance is that of Brandon and Philip; the
third glance is the investigative glance of Rupert Cadell. The role played
by the body in Rope, like that of the letter in Poe’s story, is that of an
object which has circulated among the subjects, and by its very circulation,
makes out of them a closed intersubjective community. Such, says Žižek,
‘is the function of the Hitchcockian object … the tiny “piece of the real”
which keeps the story in motion by finding itself “out of place”’. The story
ends, he insists, when this object ‘arrives at its destination’, that is returns
to its rightful owner. In Rope when Rupert finally opens the cassone, he
gets back not only the results of his abstract philosophizing, his serious
theory of permissible murder, but David’s literal body. (David, as we sus-
pect, has already been ‘passed’ (as pupil or lover?) from Rupert to Brandon
to Janet and now he finally comes back to Rupert again.) The story opens
with David’s murder, whereby his body (and his absence) becomes the
object of double-entendres, searches and eventually suspicion. It ends
when David’s body is given back to Rupert who must pay for this re-
establishment of balance by recognizing his own moral culpability, if not
his criminal responsibility. In this way, as Žižek intimates, ‘the object
embodies, gives material existence to the lack in the Other, to the consti-
tutive inconsistency of the symbolic order’ (EYS 18).
There is another tale, known as ‘The Legend of the Mistletoe Bough’,
alluded to at the heart of the film. Rupert introduces the story after
Brandon uses the word cassone and recounts how chests kept turning up
in the bedtime stories he, Rupert, told in the preparatory school Brandon,
Phillip, David and Kenneth attended.15 The hint of illicit bedtime meet-
ings between teacher and pupils, and the use of storytelling to seduce,
reveal perhaps more than Rupert wishes. By using the Italian word cassone,
Brandon links his antique chest to a tradition of wedding chests.
Renaissance Italian cassoni were large decorated chests made from the
fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries often commissioned by the groom,
carried in nuptial processions and laden with the dowry of the new bride.
Significantly, Rupert’s memory falters when recalling this tale, and Henry
Kentley takes over the storytelling:
RUPERT: I don’t remember exactly how it started. It was about a

lovely young girl…
HENRY: She was a bride-to-be, and on her wedding day she playfully
hid herself in a chest. Unfortunately it had a spring lock.
Fifty years later they found her skeleton.
JANET: I don’t think I’ll ever get that playful.
262 L. SIMMONS
In its retelling, and in the new setting, the story about chests morphs
from what may be an ambiguous, private moment of homosexual intimacy
and use of narrative for the purposes of seduction, also possibly an account
of the failure of heterosexual love (as Rupert initiates it but cannot com-
plete it and as Janet’s self-confessed affair with Brandon suggests), to a
marriage that is doomed by too much play (as Mr Kentley and Janet revise
it). The source for the story seems to have been a traditional ballad with
words by Thomas Bayly and music by Sir Henry Bishop composed around
1830 which tells the tale of tale about a newlywed bride who accidentally
locks herself in an old oak trunk while playing hide and seek with members
of her wedding party, who then spend a long night searching for her in
vain. The ballad drew upon an earlier poem by Samuel Rogers entitled
‘Ginevra’ and published in 1822. There existed two film versions of the
story that Hitchcock or his screenwriters may have known: a 1904 pro-
duction directed by Percy Stow and a 1926 production directed by Charles
Calvert.
David inside the cassone becomes the dead princess and Janet (but also
Rupert), the ‘spouse’ who searches for him, the further implication being,
as Christopher Morris suggests, David ‘partly brought on his own death
through a spirit of “play,” thereby augmenting the homoerotic subtext in
his fatal assignation with Phillip and Brandon’ (2002, 177). The story, of
course, also foreshadows Rupert’s eventual revelation of the corpse in the
cassone at the film’s end. The figure for narratives closeted within larger
narrative, here the story of a skeleton inside a box of ‘The Mistletoe
Bough’ inside another story of a skeleton (corpse) inside a box of Rope, is
that of mise-en-abyme. Compositions en abyme are those that bear within
themselves a miniature reflection of themselves.16 The effect is to turn
inside-out all our certainties about inside and out. The story within the
story is a story held in reserve, as if to demonstrate a surplus of invention,
and its telling focuses our attention on the mechanisms of representation,
as does Hitchcock’s obsession with the long take. Rope represents the very
process whereby form is represented and it is self-interpreting because it
represents the process of representation by means of representation.
Semantically, the word abyme (‘abyss’) evokes ideas of depth, of infinity, of
vertigo, of falling and of madness (all recurrent motifs for Hitchcock). The
madness that is Brandon and Philip’s folie-a-deux where the mind is the
abyss. In a near-description of Brandon and Philip’s hypertrophied self-
consciousness, the clinical psychologist Louis A. Sass describes his dis-
turbed patients as caught ‘in a paradoxical combination of self-constitution
and self-cancellation, a process in which categories are “torn apart” by

their own self-referentiality’. ‘This’, Sass writes, ‘is the condition of imagi-
nation imagining itself imagine, a state captured by the prominent literary
notion of “mise en abyme”’ (1992, 238, 225). Could it be then that the
dizzying abyss we feel as spectators in the presence of Brandon and Philip
(and even Rupert) is connected with the mise-en-abyme into which they
themselves are falling?
Both these embedded stories highlight the thematics of inside and out-
side, depth and surface, the hidden and the revealed. It is a thematics that
itself surfaces and is literalized towards the end of the film in the exchange
between Rupert and the murderers:
BRANDON: Remember we said ‘the lives of inferior beings are unim-

portant’? Remember we said, we’ve always said, you and I,
that moral concepts of good and evil and right and wrong
don’t hold for the intellectually superior, Remember Rupert?
RUPERT: Yes, I remember.
BRANDON: Well, that’s all we’ve done. That’s all Philip and I have
done. He and I have lived what you and I had talked.
…
RUPERT: There must have been something deep inside you from the
very start that let you do this thing. But there’s always been
something deep inside me that would never let me do it and
that would never let me be party to it now.
The play of language is on the surface and yet the reference is to some-
thing deep inside, similarly the film captures only the surface and never
shows us the interior of the cassone nor the interior motives of the charac-
ters. The rhetorical chiasmus in the above exchange is an attempt to use
language to escape language, or escape the stability of meaning. Just as
Rupert wishes to escape, or cannot front up to, the consequences of his
words. Žižek is precise on this point:
the ‘rope’ from the film’s title is the rope linking words and deeds, and the
film turns out to be an admonition against ‘playing with words’—never play
with dangerous ideas since you can never be sure that there won’t be a
psychotic taking them ‘literally’; nobody in the film, neither the professor
nor the murderous couple, is capable of breaking this bond and attaining
the point of freedom. (EYS 37)
264 L. SIMMONS
The play on ‘something’ also recalls the earlier incident when Rupert
mocks Mrs Atwater’s inability to remember the title of a film (actually
Hitchcock’s Notorious). She says: ‘You know what I mean; I don’t have to
choose a specific word to express a meaning we both share’. Note the way
Rupert responds is to deny that he knows what the ‘something’ of the title
means. He then refers to a film whose title is ‘the something, something.
Or was it just plain something. Really, something rather like that’.
‘Something’ here functions as an empty signifier. It is precisely nothing or
at least carries the trace of its opposite meaning. Yet, of course, this is the
same word Rupert returns to when he utters the phrase ‘something deep
inside’. ‘Something’ now becomes a transcendental signifier that can rise
above Brandon’s supposed (mis)understanding of Rupert’s use words. It
is now the something that keeps Rupert from killing, and the hidden
moral faculty deep inside us all; it is, undeniably, the Kantian categorical
imperative. Rope, through the empty signifier of Rupert’s ‘something’,
thus illustrates what Žižek describes as the Hegelian critique of Kant:
According to the standard pseudo-Hegelian critique, the Kantian universal-

ist ethic of the ‘categorical imperative’ (the unconditional injunction to do
one’s duty) lies in its formal indeterminacy: the moral Law does not tell me
what my duty is, it merely tells me that I should accomplish my duty, and so
leaves room for an empty voluntarism (whatever I decide will be my duty is
my duty). (IV 238)
There is another clue to this play of words around inside and outside,
something and nothing. The neon letter S appears again and again through
the apartment’s side window and later we notice the letter R. The neon
word, hidden in its completeness from us, is STORAGE (and thus it
points us to the literal practical everyday use of the cassone), but it might
equally be SIGNIFIER (pointing us to its current aberrant use as cof-
fin).17 Thus, the cassone becomes, as a sign of a sign, one of the endlessly
relayed signifiers of the film. Rope’s cassone is many things: a container for
books; a coffin for David’s body and thus an image of the ultimate spatial
confinement of death; an altar as Philip momentarily kneels in front of it
to check whether the lock is secured; a table on which the guests symboli-
cally consume the body that is unknowingly contained within it; and also
what D.A. Miller describes as the ‘structure of occultation’ that is the
closet (1990, 125).
While the apartment of Rope contains a literal closet in the entrance-

way—from which Mrs Wilson procures the incriminating hat for Rupert—
the film, as most critics seem to agree, keeps its closet closed, indeed it
would seem to maintain an almost forensic denial of homosexuality, as
does most subsequent critical discussion of it. But, we might say, there is
a sense in which Rope also opens the closet, in that, while formally oblique,
the subject of homosexuality is marked by a certain cinematic excess, for
example, as D.A. Miller records, the way in which Hitchcock’s camera
frames male bodies (not only Brandon and Philip but also Brandon and
Rupert) as ‘standing-too-close’ in a position that invokes a romantic clinch
(1990, 124) (Fig. 7.3),18 or even in terms of the ‘homosexual baroque’ of
the apartment film set. The closet is understood here not merely as inte-
rior decoration or architecture but, as Lee Wallace argues, ‘an epistemic
figure which organizes relations of knowledge and ignorance which inad-
equately cordon off homosexuality from the heterosexuality for which it is
everywhere mistaken’ (2000, 371). The effect of the ‘representational
Fig. 7.3 Brandon and Philip stand too close

266 L. SIMMONS
logic’ of the production code interdiction, and Hitchcock’s ‘tact’ in

upholding it is, as Wallace notes, that homosexuality was ‘compulsorily
forbidden, yet always illicitly known’ (376).
Why then, we might legitimately ask, when Rupert finally lifts the lid of
the cassone that hides the body of the strangled victim, does the camera
continue to conceal the anticipated sight offscreen, and not give us the
requisite reverse shot of the body (one that the conventions of a murder
narrative would seem to require)? One answer must be that homosexuality
is put in the place of cinematic technique. For D.A. Miller, this has every-
thing to do with the ‘obscenity’ of the aroused and asphyxiated male body:
‘“Murdered” from behind, the body would no doubt show or signify the
penetrated, penetrable anus … Inasmuch as David is a victim of asphyxia-
tion, moreover, another “secret” to be disclosed with the opening of the
cassone is that the stiff within has a hard on’ (1990, 130). Another might
be that cinematic suspense (as employed consummately by Hitchcock) has
always exploited the capacity of viewers to see what is not there: ‘inasmuch
as I want to see, precisely, that I don’t have to look: that is the paradox of
the closet’, Miller opines (125). Perhaps the innovation of Rope, despite
the insufficiencies of its homosexual diegesis, is to suggest that something
like this is at play in our understanding of sexuality, or at least its demarca-
tion as heterosexual and homosexual. In this case, the rope of Rope marks
the twisted line between gay and straight.
Masters or Servants?: The Minotaur of Conscience

For a film set in New York, Rope retains strong remnants of the British
class system. Homer Pettey contends that ‘Class was always a particularly
dark obsession with Alfred Hitchcock’, and in his American films, class was
‘always a suspended dilemma of American culture’ where Hitchcock illus-
trated ‘the paradoxical American system of class ambivalence’ (2014, 76,
90). Murray Pomerance also confirms that ‘social class and a vertical hier-
archy of power underlie the visible relations’ of Hitchcock’s films (2004,
139). It is important to establish at the outset that one of the unique fea-
tures of Hitchcock’s films, which partly helps to explain their status as
both ‘popular culture’ and ‘high art’, lies in Hitchcock’s own objective
class position, which was poised between his family’s working-class roots
and his own cultural aspirations. The former gave him a firm grounding in
popular culture, while the latter led him to absorb influences which are
more usually associated with elite culture. Rope is no exception. Brandon
and Philip’s Midtown Manhattan penthouse is clearly situated in an afflu-

ent neighbourhood. Steven Jacobs describes it as ‘the quintessential resi-
dence of the rich and powerful and it drew its mystique from the verticality
that was New York’s special trademark’ (2007, 268). The interior environ-
ment is permeated with the trappings of affluence: classical music (with
Philip’s piano), paintings and allusions to books and with books as objects
themselves: Janet writes for a magazine called Allure; Mr Kentley is a bib-
liophile who collects first editions; the penthouse walls have prominent
bookshelves; Rupert is a private school teacher, proponent of an elitist
philosophical doctrine who now publishes (obscure) philosophical texts.
Class is mobilized in Rope, in an illusion of vertical depth, as repressed
content in which Hitchcock’s own marginalized class origins return to the
surface. It is in this way that the master/servant dialectic becomes central
to intersubjective relations in Rope: Rupert takes pleasure on looking
down on others and in his interactions with the other guests his tone of
mockery and cynicism is aloof and undemocratic; Brandon adopts a defer-
ential speaking position with regard to Philip; the talkative housekeeper
Mrs Wilson plays the role of the faithful servant enamoured of the rich and
powerful.
In the 1950s, Lacan often referred to the dialectic of the master and the
slave which Hegel introduced in his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). Lacan
is indebted to Alexandre Kojève’s (1980) reading of Hegel which he
encountered in Kojève’s lectures in the 1930s. According to Kojève, the
relation between the master and the slave is dialectical because it leads
ultimately to the negation of their respective positions. Philosopher Jean
Hyppolite, who also attended Kojève’s lectures and contributed to Lacan’s
seminars, pithily summarizes the lesson of the master/slave dialectic in
saying that it ‘consists essentially in showing that the truth of the master
reveals that he is the slave, and that the slave is revealed to be the master
of the master’ (1974, 172). The master/slave dialectic is also based on the
fact that human desire is the desire for recognition and that in order to
achieve recognition, the human subject must impose the idea s/he has of
him/herself upon the other. The fight for recognition, for Kojève, involves
not simply another’s recognition of one’s own desire and subjectivity, but
that it also requires putting oneself at risk. Lacan echoes this position: ‘the
master enters into this struggle for reasons of pure prestige, and has risked
his life. This risk establishes his superiority, and it is in the name of that,
not of his strength, that he is recognised as master by the slave’ (S1 223).
In the words of Alexandre Leupin, ‘the master is always a usurper precisely
268 L. SIMMONS
because he feigns that he is able to derive his position from himself, eras-
ing the fact that he occupies it only because the designation allows him to
do so. The source of his power is a signifying, linguistic structure, which
he conveniently forgets’ (2004, 72).
In Rope, who are the masters and who are the slaves? We might think
that David’s family, the characters whom it seems the audience would
most easily relate to, are ‘slaves’, but they are inherently boring and incon-
sequential. As Brandon remarks churlishly before his guests arrive: ‘they’re
a dull crew. The Kentleys couldn’t be duller if they tried!’ And David is,
similarly, a victim of Brandon’s contempt: ‘Well, the Davids of this world
merely occupy space, which is why he was the perfect victim for the perfect
murder’. The myopic Mrs Atwater, David’s aunt, does have one interest-
ing character trait that sets her apart from all of the other characters in the
film, her gullibility. Hitchcock creates her as a person with a fascination
and trust in astrology, and she reads horoscopes to characters twice in the
film. Janet would seem to represent shallow vanity. Her very first line is,
‘Be careful of my hair. It took hours’. Throughout the rest of the film,
almost every single instance that Janet is engaged in dialogue, it is a con-
versation about herself. Mrs Wilson, as Brandon’s housekeeper, is the
film’s only literal servant, but she does not hesitate to challenge his inten-
tions and authority: his use of the cassone as a tabletop is, she declares, ‘a
crazy idea if you ask me’.
From the beginning, we note the anomaly between Philip’s strength in
drawing the rope around David’s neck and his apparent enslavement to
Brandon and his wishes. But it is not long before Philip wilfully acts against
Brandon’s commands, and even turns on him: ‘You frighten me, you
always have from that very first day in prep school, part of your charm I
suppose’. Rupert, too, even before his arrival at the party is introduced as
the supreme ‘master’:
BRANDON: Curious fellow, but I like him.

KENNETH: You always did. Golly, those bull sessions you and Rupert
used to have in school. Brandon would sit up till all hours
at the master’s feet.
JANET: Brandon at someone’s feet! Who is this Rupert?
In the end, neither Rupert, nor Brandon, nor even Philip are absolute
masters, and they illustrate Kojève’s point that the outcome of the mas-
ter/slave dialectic is paradoxical, and that the master (Rupert) ends up in
an existential impasse, whereas the slave (Brandon) retains the satisfaction

of potentially overcoming his slavery. So, at the end the master/slave rela-
tionship between Rupert and Brandon is turned on its head. Brandon
loathes Rupert for not honouring his words and thus not understanding
why he killed for the sake of killing, while Rupert is repulsed at what the
pupil he idolized has become. The complex turn of relationship dynamics
is caught in a bitter line of dialogue by Philip where he lashes out at both
of them: ‘Cat and mouse! Cat and mouse! Which is the cat and which is
the mouse?’. The power of Philip’s words can only authenticate
Žižek’s claims:
Lacan’s fundamental thesis is that the Master is by definition an impostor:

the Master is somebody who, upon finding himself at the place of the con-
stitutive lack in the structure, acts as if he holds the reins of that surplus, of
the mysterious X which eludes the grasp of the structure … The unmasking
of the Master’s imposture does not abolish the place he occupies, it just
renders it visible in its original emptiness, i.e., as the preceding element
which fills it out. (EYS 103)
Believing they hold the ‘mysterious X’, and through Brandon’s reckless
pursuit of his selfish will, Rupert and Brandon become lost in the labyrinth
of their ideals and ultimately Rupert, in the charged atmosphere at the
film’s ending, is unmasked as an ‘impostor’:
RUPERT: Brandon, Brandon, until this very moment, this world and
the people in it have always been dark and incomprehensi-
ble to me, and I’ve tried to clear my way with logic and
superior intellect. And you’ve thrown my own words right
back in my face, Brandon. You were right to—if nothing
else, a man should stand by his words.
But his subsequent ‘words’ wilfully disclose his inability to accept his
‘original emptiness’—‘But you’ve given my words a meaning that I never
dreamed of. And you’ve tried to twist them into a cold logical excuse for
your ugly murder. Well, they were never that, Brandon, and you can’t
make them that’. As D.A. Miller argues, ‘his very effort to decide the mat-
ter wilfully discloses, if not the impossibility of doing so’ at least ‘the
sleight of hand’ involved in his decision to place the murderers on one side
of a divide that has him on the other with their victim, a position and a
270 L. SIMMONS
tactic that is plainly, as Miller says, ‘factitious’ (1990, 121). Interestingly,

this was a labyrinthine danger foreseen in fact by Nietzsche who, in a
somewhat superficial fashion for a philosopher, Rupert takes as his
own master:
independence is for the very few; it is a privilege of the strong. And whoever
attempts it even with the best right but without inner constraint proves that
he is probably not only strong, but also daring to the point of recklessness.
He enters into a labyrinth, he multiplies a thousandfold the dangers which
life brings with it in any case, not the least of which is that no one can see
how and where he loses his way, becomes lonely, and is torn piecemeal by
some minotaur of conscience. (2000, 231–32)
Returning to the issue of class, and Hitchcock’s management of his

‘dark obsession’, we can now make sense of Žižek’s claim regarding class
antagonism that ‘There is no class relationship’ (SOI 126 and LC 295).
Class antagonism does not refer to the antagonism between master and
slave, or capitalist and the proletariat, but that any attempt, like that of
Rupert and Brandon, to institute an ideal class relationship that might ‘fix’
class relations as such is doomed to fail. In this sense, Žižek maintains,
articulations of class positions are invented Symbolic identities that paper
over the absence of meaningful class relations. Every class antagonism, like
the one proposed by Rupert and enacted by Brandon and Philip, is ‘already
a “reactive” or “defense” formation, an attempt to “cope with” (to come
to terms with, to pacify…) the trauma of class antagonism’ (‘Four
Discourses, Four Subjects’ 1998, 81).
Prime Movers and Second Handers

In Conversations with Žižek, when he is asked the populist question ‘If you
had to take a book to a desert island what would it be?’ surprisingly, but
characteristically contrarily, Žižek responds: ‘the proto-fascist classic Ayn
Rand’s The Fountainhead’ (CZ 51). Provocative references to Rand
abound throughout Žižek’s work. For Žižek, there is an ideological proce-
dure in Rand’s work that is far more radical than she herself would have
admitted. Rand, he argues, belongs to a line of authors who are ‘overcon-
formist’ and who, by nature of their very excessive identification with the
ruling ideology (capitalism), achieve a successful subversion of that ideol-
ogy. Rand’s excessive adoration of capitalist market liberalism ‘without its
communitarian, collectivist, welfare etc, sugar-coating’, he argues, actually

serves only to make the inherent ridiculousness of capitalism ever more
obvious. Her fascination with male figures, men of the mind, who display
an absolute unswayable determination of their will, along with her advoca-
tion of ‘a full individualist egotism deprived of all traditional forms of
morality concerning family values and sacrifice for the common good’
(LET 37–8), makes Rand obviously strike a chord with the Nietzschean
ideology of Rupert and Brandon. For, as Žižek insists,
The elementary ideological axis of her work consists in the opposition

between the prime movers, ‘men of mind,’ and second handers, ‘mass
men’ … the ‘mass man’ is searching for recognition outside himself, his self-
confidence and assurance depend on how he is perceived by others, while
the prime mover is fully reconciled with himself, relying on his creativity,
selfish in the sense that his satisfaction does not depend on getting recogni-
tion from others or on sacrificing himself, his innermost drives, for the ben-
efit of others. (‘The Lesbian Session’ 2000, np; see also IV 98)
Further proof that Rand in fact undermined contemporary capitalism

in the name of a fundamental, pure capitalism, is to be located, according
to Žižek, in her opposition between what she identifies as the ‘prime mov-
ers’ and the ‘second handers’ in her work. The prime mover is indepen-
dent and autonomous, he makes no sacrifices and his satisfaction does not
depend on the well-being of others. The prime mover rejects the Hegelian
construction of personhood coming into itself only externally, through
the recognition of others. Because the prime mover is not ‘contaminated’
by others and otherness, he is presented in Rand as innocent and without
hatred or fear. Roark the prime mover in The Fountainhead does not
actively hate his arch-opponent Toohey, and he simply does not think or
care about him. In Rope, Rupert, like Brandon, full of self-confidence and
assurance, supposedly reconciled with himself, is a prime mover who
exhibits diffidence to the ethical feelings of his listeners. Second handers
are followers—they rely on each other (as do the members of the Kentley
family) and are properly dependent for their happiness on others (as is
Janet). For prime movers, the second handers are the contaminators,
diluting and dirtying the pure ideal of philosophers like Rupert Cadell,
and Rope is full of them.
But in Rope, as in Ayn Rand’s two novels, The Fountainhead (1943)
and Atlas Shrugged (1957), the true conflict in the universe is not between
272 L. SIMMONS
the prime movers and the crowd of second handers, the undifferentiated
conformist crowd, who parasitize on the prime movers’ productive genius,
but it runs within the prime movers themselves: it resides in the (sexual-
ized) tension between the prime mover, the being of pure drive (Brandon),
and his hysterical partner (Philip), the potential prime mover who remains
caught in the deadly self-destructive dialectic (and by extension also the
sexualized tension between Rupert and Brandon). There are obvious con-
nections here to the Hegelian/Lacanian discourse of the master/slave as
Rand argues: ‘What is accomplished if a man attains power and promi-
nence at the cost of playing down to the masses? It is not he that triumphs,
it is not his ideas and standards. It is only his physical frame. Essentially, he
is only a slave to those masses’ (Rand 1983, 71). Curiously, as Žižek pro-
poses, and in a way that resonates with Rope’s un- and understated homo-
sexuality, the Randian hero is not phallocratic but in effect emerges as a
feminine subject, but a feminine subject liberated from the hysteria of
entanglement in the desire of the Other.
What Rand was not aware of was that the upright, uncompromising mascu-
line figures with a will of steel that she was so fascinated with, are, effectively,
figures of the feminine subject liberated from the deadlocks of hysteria …
One can see now, in what precise sense, the struggle between the hysterical
feminine heroine and the persistent male hero, which forms the centre of
Rand’s both great novels can be conceived as a barely concealed presenta-
tion of a lesbian (psychoanalytic) session: of the painful process in the course
of which the feminine analysand traverses her fantasy and thus overcomes
her hysterical position. (‘The Lesbian Session’ np)
Could we not say the same of the thwarted (disavowed) homosexual

libidinal economy of Hitchcock’s Rope? In the film’s final scene, Rupert
moves towards the window, pushes open the latch with the gun barrel and
fires three shots. As voices rise from the street, he turns away, looks at
Brandon and then Philip. He lifts his bad leg off the window-seat steady-
ing himself against the piano and limps across the room to the chest. He
pulls a chair closer and sits resignedly with his gun hand resting on the
chest’s closed lid. Guilt, shame and utter defeat now mark his position.
Incipient fascism, the ‘perversity of his disdain for propriety, his careless
playfulness with what others hold sacred’ (Lawrence 1999, 72). All of
these things are traits he shares with Brandon and Philip. That Rupert has
‘blood on his hands’ becomes a metaphor literalized in his final struggle
with Philip, from prime mover he has become second hander, from master
he has become slave.
Ethics of the Real: ‘Kant avec Cadell’

For Raymond Durgnat, ‘The basic weakness of Rope, from the higher
standards, is that what is basically a serious issue about serious ideas and
their serious consequences is approached from a fundamentalist anti-
intellectuality’ (1974, 205–6). So, instead of Hitchcock as ‘a moral mas-
ter’, we have a weak version of the line ‘Only unbalanced people put
intellect above moral convention’ or ‘People who take unconventional
ideas seriously get life wrong’ (205). Given the ambiguities and side-
stepping of Rupert’s ‘speech of justification’, can we say that Rope has an
‘ethics’ and, given the film’s twists and turns (those of the single-take
camera), where might we situate it? Could it be when Hitchcock’s camera
finally becomes stationary and fixated in the sort of coda added to the
resolution of the narrative? The final moment when Rupert having fired
the gun out of the window moves back from the window to a chair where
he keeps Brandon and Philip under his gaze: ‘For a full half a minute the
camera prolongs its gaze on the inverted triangle that the three men form,
Rupert at the apex interposed between Brandon and Philip at the corners
of the base’ (Miller 1990, 122). The formality of this uncomfortable (for
the viewer, too) moment, coupled with its texture of incompleteness and
lack of ‘content’, functions as a sort of ellipsis.19 We are made to feel the
omission of something implied but not shown in the heedful disquiet of
Hitchcock’s narrative pause, a pause made even more poignant in that his
camera, relentlessly in motion up until this point, now encourages us to
provide a felt lack in our knowledge. I want to propose that what we feel,
and are encouraged to formulate, as Hitchcock’s camera gives us pause in
the attempt to find new bearings amid uncertainty in these final moments,
is an ‘ethics of the Real’.
Žižek’s colleague, Alenka Zupančič, who has elaborated this eth-
ics, writes.
An ethics of the Real is not an ethics orientated towards the Real, but an
attempt to rethink ethics by recognising and acknowledging the dimension
of the Real (in the Lacanian sense of the term) as it is already operative in
ethics. The term ethics is often taken to refer to a set of norms which restrict
or ‘bridle’ desire—which aim to keep our conduct … free of excess. Yet this
274 L. SIMMONS
understanding of ethics fails to acknowledge that ethics is by nature exces-

sive, that excess is a component of ethics which cannot simply be eliminated
without ethics itself losing all meaning. (2000, 4–5)20
Following Zupančič, Žižek relates the realm of the ethical to the

Lacanian Real. If the field of ethics belonged to the Symbolic, then the
ethical act would emerge out of the operation of a Kantian reason, but in
The Ticklish Subject, he develops a model of the subject that is Hegelian
that stresses the subject’s radical negativity. Hegel now ‘becomes a phi-
losopher of the flawed symbolic, a symbolic fissured by the real, rather
than a philosopher of imaginary totality’ (Kay 2003, 45). Žižek’s com-
mentary on Lacan’s discourse on ethics centres on three significant
moments: the paper ‘Kant with Sade’ (E 645–7), the Christian command-
ment to ‘love thy neighbour’ (E 645–70), and the maxim that one should
not give way on one’s desire. Let me briefly explore the first and the third.
The categorical imperative proposed by Kant is for Lacan a prototype of
the moral law (S7 315–16). The unique strength of Kant’s ethics resides
in a formal indeterminacy: the moral law does not tell me what my duty is,
it merely tells me that I should accomplish my duty, that is, it is not pos-
sible to derive the concrete norms I have to follow in my specific situation
from the moral law itself. And, as Lacan notes with some mischief, the
same abstract principle is formulated by Kant’s contemporary, the Marquis
de Sade. As Žižek explains, ‘The imperative which sustains the Sadeian
subject’s endless search for enjoyment fulfils all the criteria of the categori-
cal imperative. Far from “besmirching” Kant, Lacan “purifies” Sade’ (IR
173).21 Zupančič concurs: ‘The thesis of “Kant with Sade” is not simply
that Kantian ethics has a merely “perverse” value; it is also the claim that
Sade’s discourse has an ethical value—that it can be properly understood
as an ethical project’ (2000, 2).
Towards the end of Seminar 7, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Lacan
invokes the notion of ceding on or giving way in relation to desire (S7
319–21). Lacan’s point here is often summarized by Žižek as the impera-
tive ‘ne pas céder sur son désire’ (TS 153, PF 239, EYS 76; and Zupančič
2000, 238).22 This has commonly been taken as the encapsulation of
Lacan’s stance on ethics, as his ethical imperative; do not give way on or
do not give up on your desire. As desire must be taken to point to the
Real, that is, as desire is such that it cannot, by definition, find its satisfac-
tion within the Symbolic, then the conception of ethics being advanced
here must be one which prioritizes the Real, which situates the Real as the
proper realm of the ethical. To emphasize the Real in ethics, to describe

ethics as of the Real, implies moving beyond signification, implies an eth-
ics which resists comprehension, an ethics about which we could, quite
literally, not know anything nor have anything to say.
Lacan in his outline for The Ethics of Psychoanalysis foregrounds the
distinction between the notion of ‘ethics’ on the one side and ‘morality’
on the other (S7 2). But the key point he is making in the volume as a
whole is that there is a world of difference between the two and morality,
with its aspiration to universality, belongs in the Symbolic order, whereas
ethics results from the way we apply the law, is situated in the Real, where
notions of good and evil become indistinguishable, and the way into the
ethical for Lacan is via this opening onto the Real. The seeming inhuman-
ity of Rupert’s, and consequently Brandon’s position, to which the ‘ethi-
cal’ Mr Kentley objects from the point of view of conventional morals
(‘I’d rather not hear any more of your, forgive me, contempt, for human-
ity, and for the standards of a world that I believe is civilised’), thus
becomes an injunction to perceive that the object of ethics is not pre-given
(for, as Brandon phrases it, ‘Perhaps what is called “civilisation” is
hypocrisy?’). As Zupančič concludes:
The heart of all ethics is something which is not in itself ‘ethical’ (nor is it
non-ethical)—that is to say, it has nothing to do with the register of eth-
ics … for Lacan it is ‘the Real’ … According to Lacan, the Real is impossible,
and the fact that ‘it happens (to us)’ does not refute its basic ‘impossibility’:
the Real happens to us (we encounter it) as impossible, as ‘the impossible
thing’ that turns our symbolic universe upside down and leads to the recon-
figuration of this universe. (2000, 235)
Endings, as Rope’s ending implies, are more often than not where we
make our beginnings.
From the Big Window to ‘The Night of the World’

Brandon and Phillip’s Midtown Manhattan penthouse, situated at 54th
Street and First Avenue, is typical of many luxury residential towers with
penthouses constructed in Manhattan during the 1930s. The apartment is
dominated by an extensive panoramic window that curves upwards
(Fig. 7.4). As Steven Jacobs observes, in this period ‘New building meth-
ods and the feasibility of glass panes allowed spectacular, uninterrupted
276 L. SIMMONS
Fig. 7.4 The panoramic window
views of the city’ (2007, 270). The view from Brandon and Phillip’s apart-
ment also includes landmarks such as the Empire State Building, St
Patrick’s Cathedral, Radio City, the Chrysler Building and the Woolworth
Building. As Jacobs notes, the modernity of the wall-sized curved window
deliberately contrasts with the antique furniture, dark wood panelling and
heavy mouldings around the doors of the apartment’s interior (2007,
270–72). To produce the view from the window, Hitchcock constructed
a miniature New York skyline of buildings laid out on a twenty-five-metre
semicircle, a cyclorama covering twelve hundred square metres in total.
The closer buildings were three-dimensional whereas those more distant
were photographs mounted on cut-outs of two sides. ‘To provide a con-
vincing transition from day to night, each building was individually wired
and connected to a “light organ” that allowed for gradual activation of the
skyline’s thousands of lights and hundreds of neon signs’ (Jacobs 2007,
276). Spun-glass clouds, their shapes authenticated by meteorologists,
were slowly shifted during filming from left to right across special rails,
and the colour of the setting sun was authenticated by a suite of profes-
sional photographs taken of the actual Manhattan sunset.
As a modernist work, Rope stages an architectural antagonism. It is
caught between the enhanced claustrophobia of the inside of the apart-
ment and the ‘freedom’ of the outside, where the reality we see through
the window is always minimally spectral (apart from the initial credit
sequence it is a created set), not as fully real as the closed apartment space
where we are seems to be. When ‘looking through a window of a house’,
Žižek notes, ‘one perceives the reality outside in a weirdly de-realized
state, as if one were watching a performance on screen; on opening the
window, the direct impact of the external reality always causes a minimal
shock; we are, as it were, overwhelmed by its proximity’ (LET 258). The
artificial cyclorama of New York skyline is the outside ring of a mise-en-
abyme structure described earlier. Inside the window is an apartment,
inside of which in turn is a closed cassone placed at its centre, inside of
which is a corpse. The animated Manhattan skyline in miniature recalls
Žižek’s description of the demilitarized zone between the two Koreas
where the South Koreans have built a visitors site with a large screen-like
window facing the North and the North has constructed a fake model
village:
The spectacle people observe when they take their seats to look through the
window is reality itself (or rather a kind of ‘desert of the real’): the barren
demilitarized zone with its walls and so forth, and, beyond, a glimpse of
North Korea. As if to comply with the fiction, North Korea then built a fake
model village with beautiful houses in full view of the window; in the eve-
ning, the lights in all the houses are turned on at the same time … North
Korea may appear sublime—when viewed from the safe spot in South Korea;
conversely democracy may appear sublime, when viewed from an authoritar-
ian or ‘totalitarian’ regime. (LET 258–9)
As Rope unfolds, the Manhattan scene behind the panoramic studio

window gradually turns from the light of late afternoon to the darkness of
night, and eight thousand incandescent bulbs and two hundred miniature
neon signs come alive in what Hitchcock described as ‘a nocturnal
Manhattan symphony in light’ (Gottlieb 1995, 278). Architect Juhani
Pallasmaa explains the effect on the film’s diegesis as follows:
The slowed dimming of light serves the purpose of gradually isolating the
flat from its external metropolitan context. This increasing sense of isolation
reinforces the emotional tension, focus, and sense of pressure and claustro-
phobia. At the very end of the film, the opening of the window and the
sounds from the street feel like fresh air and oxygen. (2001, 45)
278 L. SIMMONS
The theme of light and dark is played out within the narrative from the
outset: after the murder, Brandon dramatically opens the curtains that
cover the panoramic window (‘Pity we couldn’t have done it with the
curtains open in the bright sunlight’, he declares), but Philip wants to
keep them closed; Philip also asks Rupert to turn off the table lamp as he
plays the piano; the final clue from the hatband that clinches Rupert’s
suspicion a murder has been committed is revealed in the bright artificial
light in the hallway; Rupert’s final speech is punctuated by the pulsating
green and red glow of the neon sign.
One of the key Hegelian concepts Žižek draws upon repeatedly is the
notion of the subject as a self-regulating negativity developed in the first
part of The Ticklish Subject where he refers to Hegel’s enigmatic ‘night of
the world’ passage from his 1805–1806 Jenaer Systementwürfe:
The human being is this night, this empty nothing, that contains everything
in its simplicity—an unending wealth of many presentations, images, of
which none happens to occur to him—or which are not present. This night,
the interior of nature, that exists here—pure self—in phantasmagorical rep-
resentations, is night all around it, here shoots a bloody head—there another
white ghastly apparition, suddenly here before it, and just so disappears.
One catches sight of this night when one looks human beings in the eye—
into a night that becomes awful, it suspends the night of the world here in
an opposition. In this night being has returned.23
This strange poetic passage resounds with proto-psychoanalytic refer-

ences and would appear to anticipate both the Freudian unconscious and
the Lacanian Real. Hegel’s night of the pure self, in which dismembered
and disconnected phantasmagorical representations appear and vanish, is
the most elementary manifestation of the power of negativity; the radical
negativity of arbitrary freedom coupled with the power of the Real to dis-
rupt unity. The metaphor for subjectivity is the ‘night of the world’ here
in contrast to the Enlightenment ‘light of reason’.
What better description could one offer of the power of the imagination in
its negative, disruptive, decomposing aspect, as the power that disperses
continuous reality into a confused multitude of ‘partial objects’, spectral
apparitions of what in reality is effective only as part of a larger organism? …
This ‘night of the world’ is thus transcendental imagination at its most ele-
mentary and violent—the unrestrained reign of the violence of imagination,
of its ‘empty freedom’ which dissolves every objective link, every connection
grounded in the thing itself. (TS 30)
For Žižek, the passage is also emblematic of the relationship between

Hegel and Lacan: ‘For both of them, the “free” subject, integrated into
the symbolic network of mutual recognition, is the result of a process in
which traumatic cuts, “repressions”, and the power struggle intervene,
not something primordially given’ (TS 274). Both ‘envisage the subject as
an effect of lack and/or as the resistant kernel of the real, around which
symbolisation turns. What unites them is the “coincidence of the real”,
expressed as a “coincidence of lack” and a “coincidence of trauma”’ (Kay
2003, 24). But, as Robert Sinnerbrink specifies,
Žižek differs from Hegel, however, in arguing that this withdrawal from the
world is the founding gesture of humanisation, the emergence of subjectiv-
ity itself. There is no subjectivity without this experience of radical negativity
or passage through madness; this cutting of links with the Umwelt followed
by the construction of a symbolic universe of meaning. (2014, 108)
What are we left with at the end of Rope? Two young men who, through
a senseless murder which they justify with moral non-sense, have cut their
ties with their external reality; their teacher who receives his instruction in
return in an inverted but true form, and can only shrink back from the
consequences. It is as if we find ourselves in a psychotic universe without
symbolic openness. The film does not shy away from the negativity of its
final moment, indeed, as we have suggested, it seeks to prolong it motion-
lessly so the viewer might reflect and recover an ethical position. For Žižek,
there is no subjectivity without this experience of radical negativity, no
becoming human without isolation and destruction, no subject without
the freedom to negate (what Schelling identifies as ‘the abyss of freedom’
(AF 15–15)), no subject without the passage through madness that can
then be followed by the construction of a symbolic universe of meaning.
What Hegel calls ‘the night of the world’ (the phantasmagorical, pre-
symbolic domain of partial drives) is an undeniable component of the sub-
ject’s most radical self-experience … In a way, the entire psychoanalytic
experience focuses on the traces of the traumatic passage from this ‘night of
the world’ into our ‘daily’ universe of logos. (TS 35)
280 L. SIMMONS
Notes
1. D.A. Miller notes: ‘Again and again, for instance, we are told that each
shot in Rope runs to ten minutes, whereas the shots range variously from
roughly three to nine minutes; or that Hitchcock blackened out the action
every time he changed cameras, though only five of Rope’s ten cuts are
managed this way. It is as though Rope criticism aimed less at a description
than at a correction of Hitchcock’s experiment, for whose irregularities
and inconsistencies there is substituted a programmatic perfection that
better supports the dream of a continuous film (not yet to mention what-
ever wishes might find fulfillment in that dream) than Hitchcock’s actual
shooting practice’ (1990, 114).
2. Christopher Morris proposes that the ‘rope’ is a figure for the narrative
storyline and notes the physical resemblance between rope and film: ‘both
are continuous, pliable, coilable, and recursive’ (2002, 169).
3. See, for example, Eagleton (2001, 40); Easthope (2002, 124); Butler
(2005, 2); Kotsko (2015, 243).
4. For Lacan, ‘man’s desire is the Other’s desire … This is why the Other’s
question [la question de l’Autre]—that comes back to the subject from the
place from which he expects an oracular reply—which takes some such
form as “Che vuoi?,” “What do you want?,” is the question that best leads
the subject to the path of his own desire’ (E 690). See also Žižek’s How to
Read Lacan: ‘There is, however, another meaning of “man’s desire is the
Other’s desire”: the subject desires only in so far as it experiences the Other
itself as desiring, as the site of an unfathomable desire, as if an opaque
desire is emanating from him or her … For this reason, Lacan’s “Che
vuoi?” does not simply ask: “What do you want?” but rather: “What’s bug-
ging you? What is it in you that makes you so unbearable not only for us,
but also for yourself, that you yourself obviously do not control?”’
(HRL 42–3).
5. Of course, Žižek’s jokes are not ‘his’ for, as he notes, ‘Jokes are originally
“told”, they are always already “heard” (“Have you heard the one
about…?”). Therein resides their mystery: they are idiosyncratic; they
stand for the unique creativity of language but are nonetheless collective,
anonymous, authorless, arriving all of a sudden out of nowhere’
(LTN 94–5).
6. Lacan’s famous example is the distorted skull at the bottom of Hans
Holbein’s The Ambassadors. The splodge at the lower front of the painting
‘looks like fried eggs’, Lacan says reminding us of his description of the
infant in the Imaginary as the homme-lette. Holbein has made visible for us
the subject negated through the process of anamorphosis (a distorted
image which will look normal if viewed from a certain angle). In the fore-
ground of this detailed realist painting, there is a strangely phallic object

and, if one stands at a certain angle (the angle of the moment of leaving it
behind), one can see a skull appear. Thus, the anamorphosis is a continual
reminder of death, and it is also a self-portrait: the surname Holbein,
means ‘hole-in-the-bone’. It sticks out and represents subjectivity itself
(see S11 85–90).
7. On another level, Susan Smith suggests that Rope was Hitchcock’s ‘fantasy’
about his turbulent relationship with the Hollywood producer David
Selznick from which Hitchcock was emerging. David Kentley, the mur-
dered man, shares the same first name as Selznick—something that was
changed from the original stageplay. With Rope then, is Hitchcock killing
off his troublesome producer, re-asserting his rights as auteur with the
long take (a technique and expense Selznick would never have counte-
nanced), and giving a final ‘farewell party’ to Selznick? (2000, 58).
8. There is a second Hitchcock cameo in Rope near the end of the film. It is a
red neon advertisement in the distant background of the cityscape for a
fictional weight-loss drug called Reduco where Hitchcock’s profile is
‘reduced’. The cameo advertisement for Reduco debuted in Lifeboat, see
Chap. 1.
9. Hemmeter (1991, 263) underlines the link of the opening scene to another
Hitchcock film Shadow of a Doubt.
10. As Coursodon points out, there is one other prolonged stretch of non-
camera movement in the film. It is one of the cassone in the foreground
while Mrs Wilson is seen shuttling between kitchen and living room as she
clears the top of the chest. The stillness of the camera here is undone by the
back and forth motion of the housekeeper (2004 [1984] np).
11. A triangular candelabrum is used in the celebration of Roman Catholic
Matins and Lauds during Holy Week when the candles are extinguished
one by one, finally leaving only the top one alight which is extinguished
last: an allusion to the apostles’ desertion of Christ at the crucifixion.
12. James Stewart expressed his doubts about the film’s success: ‘It wasn’t
altogether a success. The audiences wanted to be just audiences. They
didn’t want to become the eyes of a mobile camera’ (quoted in Humphries,
1986, 99).
13. Dennis Perry makes a strong connection with another story by Poe, ‘The
Tell-Tale Heart’ (2003, 117–134). Hitchcock in an essay written in 1960
entitled ‘Why I am Afraid of the Dark’ describes how he encountered Poe’s
works at the age of sixteen and began a life-long interest in him (see
Gottlieb 1995, 142–145).
14. Poe’s story provoked a debate among critical theorists in the 1960s and
1970s. Lacan argued in Ecrits that the content of the Queen’s letter is
irrelevant to the story and that the proper ‘place’ of the signifier (the letter
282 L. SIMMONS
itself) is determined by the symbolic structure in which it exists and is dis-

placed, first by the minister and then by Dupin. Jacques Derrida (1975)
responded to Lacan’s reading in ‘Le Facteur de la vérité’ (‘The Purveyor of
Truth’), pointing out what Lacan ‘missed’ and suggesting that it is not that
the letter lacks meaning, as Lacan claimed, but that Lacan made the lack
the meaning. The truth, for Derrida, is that the letter is a castration of the
king by the queen, which Lacan cannot see/abide/is blind to. Lacan’s
structuralist reading and Derrida’s deconstructive reading provoked a
response by Barbara Johnson (1977), who mediated the debate by sug-
gesting that the letter belongs all along to the queen as a substitute for a
phallus.
15. When Rupert first sees the chest, he asks, ‘Exactly what is this?’, to which
Brandon replies, ‘A cassone I got in Italy’.
16. The notion of mise-en-abyme was first introduced by André Gide in 1893,
as a term of literary criticism, and its visual application has been elucidated
by Lucien Dällenbach (1989).
17. Notice, too, how the flickering of the neon sign outside the apartment
window is linked to Brandon’s stuttering and the repetition of Hitchcock’s
camera that goes over the same ground.
18. ‘In their tight framing by the camera, for instance, Brandon and Philip
always seem to be standing too close to one another; and what is already a
transgression of the normally enforced boundaries between men’s bodies
promotes the fantasy that these boundaries will be even further breached’
(Miller 1990, 124).
19. This shared short interval invites us into a curious intimacy with Hitchcock’s
characters, of whose privacy we partake without knowing them well, and
without being able to identify ourselves with them: an intimacy combined
with an inquiring detachment. There is a pull to involvement, an aroused
impulse to empathy and a concomitant push, holding back that impulse.
And so, as viewers we find ourselves in an unsettled position both involved
and estranged.
20. Žižek’s account of Kantian ethics and its resonance for Lacan has been
heavily influenced by Zupancic (see his acknowledgement in FA 175
n105), and she, in turn, has been influenced by him.
21. For Žižek’s discussions of the ‘Kant with Sade’ theme, see FTKN 229–41;
E 219–23; PF 213–41; LTN 817–18.
22. The English translation ‘not giving ground relative to one’s desire’ (S7
319) does not actually capture the imperative of the French original: ‘Je
pense avoir assez fait le tour de cette opposition entre le centre désirant et
le service des biens pour proposer quelque chose au vif du sujet’ and Lacan
adds ‘à titre expérimental formulons-le en manière de paradoxe. Voyons ce
que ça donne, au moins, pour des oreilles d’analystes: Ne pas céder sur son
désir’. (Le Séminaire, Livre VII, L’éthique de la psychanalyse, leçon du 6

juillet 1960. Paris, Le Seuil, 1986).
23. Across the full range of his work, this passage is referred to or quoted at
least ten times by Žižek: see EYS 50; ME 145; IR 78; AF 8; TS 29–30; PV
44; AR 151; MSH 229; LTN 353; SFA 350. In many of these references,
Žižek also notes the ‘strange echo between this passage and Hegel’s
description of the negative power of Understanding [from the Preface to
the Phenomenology] which is able to abstract an entity (a process, a prop-
erty) from its substantial context and treat it as if it had an existence of its
own’ (LTN 354). Žižek uses the passage as translated by Donald Verene
(1985, 7–8), but I have adopted Sarah Kay’s version which contains slight
variations (2003, 23).
References
Works by Žižek
AF The Abyss of Freedom/Ages of the World. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan
Press, 1997.
CHU Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left
CZ Conversations with Slavoj Žižek (with Glyn Daly). Oxford: Polity Press, 2004.
EYS Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. New York and
London: Routledge, 2nd edition. 2002.
FTKN For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor. London:
Verso, 1991.
HRL How to Read Lacan. London: Granta Books, 2006
IDLC In Defense of Lost Causes. London: Verso, 2008.
IR The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters. London:
Verso, 1996.
IV Incontinence of the Void: Economico-Philosophical Spandrels. London and
LA Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture.
LET Living in the End Times. London and New York: Verso, 2010.
LTN Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London:
Verso, 2012.
ME The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Women and Causality. London:
Verso, 1994.
MSH The Most Sublime Hysteric: Hegel with Lacan. Oxford: Polity Press, 2014.
OwB Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences. London:
Routledge, 2004.
284 L. SIMMONS
PF The Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso, 1997.

PV The Parallax View. London and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.
SFA Sex and the Failed Absolute. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2019.
SOI The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1989.
TN Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press. 1993.
TS The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. London:
Verso, 1999.
V Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. London: Picador, 2008.
ZJ Zizek’s Jokes, edited by Audun Mortensen, afterword by Momus. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2018.
‘Four Discourses, Four Subjects,’ Cogito and the Unconscious, edited by Slavoj
Žižek. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998.
‘The Interpassive Subject,’ n.d. https://www.lacan.com/zizek-pompidou.htm
‘The Lesbian Session,’ lacanian ink 12 (2000). https://www.lacan.com/symp-
tom13/the-lesbian.html
Works by Lacan
E Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English, translated by Bruce Fink. New York
and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006.
S1 The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique 1953–1954,
edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated with notes by John Forrester.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
S5 The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book V: Formations of the Unconscious, edited by
Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by Russell Grigg. Oxford: Polity Press, 2017.
S7 The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book XX: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of
S9 The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book IX: Identification 1961–1962, Unpublished
translation by Cormac Gallagher, n.d..
S11 The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of
S20 The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book XX: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of
Works by Freud
SE XII ‘Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through’ (1914), vol. 12, The
1955–: 145–157.
SE XVIII ‘Group Psychology and the analysis of the Ego’ (1921), vol. 18, The
1955–: 65–144.
Other Works
Bauso, Thomas M. 1991. Rope: Hitchcock’s Unkindest Cut. In Hitchcock’s
Rereleased Films: From Rope to Vertigo, ed. Raubichieck and Walter Srebnik,
226–39. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
Butler, Rex. 2005. Slavoj Žižek: Live Theory. New York and London: Continuum.
Clemens, Justin. 2005. The Politics of Style in the Works of Slavoj Žižek. In
Traversing the Fantasy: Critical Responses to Slavoj Žižek, ed. by Geoff Boucher,
Jason Glynos and Matthew Sharpe, 3–22. Aldershot and Burlington, VT:
Ashgate.
Coursodon, Jean-Pierre. 2004. Desire Roped In: Notes on the Fetishism of the
Long Take in Rope. Rouge. http://www.rouge.com.au/4/rope.html. Accessed
November 14, 2020.
Dällenbach, Lucien. 1989. The Mirror in the Text, trans. Jeremy Whitely and
Emma Hughes. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1975. The Purveyor of Truth, trans. Willis Domingo. In
Graphesis: Perspectives in Literature and Philosophy, Yale French Studies No.
52: 31–113.
Durgnat, Raymond. 1974. The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock, or The Plain
Man’s Hitchcock. London: Faber and Faber.
Eagleton, Terry. 2001. Enjoy!. Paragraph: A Journal of Modern Critical Theory
24:2: 40–52. (Special issue on Slavoj Žižek).
Easthope, Anthony. 2002. Privileging Difference. Houndmills: Palgrave.
Fink, Bruce. 2007. Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique: A Lacanian
Approach for Practitioners. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
Berkeley Los Angeles and London: University of California Press.
Hemmeter, Thomas. 1991. Twisted Writing: Rope as an Experimental Film. In
Hitchcock’s Rereleased Films: From Rope to Vertigo, ed. Walter Raubichieck and
Walter Srebnik, 253–65. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
286 L. SIMMONS
Hyppolite, Jean. 1974. Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit,

trans. Samuel Cherniack and John Heckman. Evanston, Ill: Northwestern
University Press.
Humphries, Patrick. 1986. The Films of Alfred Hitchcock. New York: Crescent Books.
Jacobs, Steven. 2007. The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock.
Rotterdam: 010 Publishers.
Johnson, Barbara. 1977. The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida. Literature
and Psychoanalysis/The Question of Reading: Otherwise, Yale French Studies,
55–56: 457–505.
Kay, Sarah. 2003. Žižek: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Polity.
Kojève, Alexandre. 1980. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the
Phenomenology of Spirit, assembled Raymond Queneau, ed. Allan Bloom, trans.
James H. Nichols Jr. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Kotsko, Adam. 2015. The Problem of Christianity and Žižek’s ‘Middle Period’. In
Repeating Žižek, with an afterword by Slavoj Žižek, ed. Agon Hamza, 243–55.
Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Kunkle, Sheila. 2014. Act. In The Žižek Dictionary, ed. Rex Butler, 1–5.
Durham: Acumen.
Lawrence, Amy. 1999. American Shame: Rope, James Stewart, and the Postwar
Crisis in American Masculinity. In Hitchcock’s America, ed. Jonathan Freedman
and Richard Millington, 56–76. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Leupin, Alexandre. 2004. Lacan Today: Psychoanalysis, Science, Religion. New York:
Other Press.
Miller, D.A. 1990. Anal Rope, Representations 22: 114–33.
Miller, D.A. 2016. Hidden Hitchcock. Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press.
Alfred Hitchcock. London and Westport, CT: Praeger.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2000. Basic Writings of Nietzsche, introduction Peter Gay,
trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Modern Library.
Pallasmaa, Juhani. 2001. The Architecture of Image: Existential Space in Cinema.
Helsinki: Rakennustieto Oy.
Perry, Dennis. 2003. Hitchcock and Poe: The Legacy of Delight and Terror. Lanham
and Oxford: The Scarecrow Press.
Pettey, Homer B. 2014. Hitchcock, Class, and Noir. In The Cambridge Companion
to Alfred Hitchcock, ed. Jonathan Freedman, 76–91. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Pfaller, Robert. 2007. Interpassivity and misdemeanors: The analysis of ideology
and the Žižekian toolbox. International Journal of Žižek Studies, 1:1: 33–50.
Pfaller, Robert. 2017. Interpassivity: The Aesthetics of Delegated Enjoyment.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
University Press.
Rand, Ayn. 1997. Journals of Ayn Rand, ed. David Harriman, 71. Boston:
E.P. Dutton; previously published in The Objectivist Forum, vol. 4, no. 4,
August 1983.
Renault, François. 1980. Système formel d’Hitchcock. In Alfred Hitchcock. Paris:
Cahiers du cinéma, hors-série 8.
Sass, Louis A. 1992. Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art,
Literature and Thought. New York: Basic Books.
Schneiderman, Stuart. 1980. Returning to Freud. Clinical Psychoanalysis in the
School of Lacan. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Sinnerbrink, Robert. 2014. Hegel. In The Žižek Dictionary, ed. Rex Butler,
107–111. Durham: Acumen.
Smith, Susan. 2000. Hitchcock: Suspense, Humour and Tone. London: BFI
Publishing.
Verene, Donald Phillip. 1985. Hegel’s Recollection. Albany: SUNY Press.
Wallace, Lee. 2000. Continuous Sex: The Editing of Homosexuality in Bound and
Rope. Screen 41:4: 369–387.
Zupančič, Alenka. 2000. Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan. London and
New York: Verso.
CHAPTER 8
The Fragile Absolute: I Confess (1953)
Abstract The thesis of Hitchcock’s Cahiers du cinéma critics was that the
transference of guilt is the central motif of Hitchcock’s films. I Confess deals
directly with the relationship between faith and personal integrity, divine
and human forgiveness, and the boundaries of civil and ecclesiastical powers.
Father Logan who hears a murderer’s confession, and is bound by the seal
of confession, then becomes the suspect of murder himself. The suffering of
Father Logan is that he accepts the transference of guilt; he recognizes the
murderer’s desires as his own. Žižek, paradoxically for a Marxist, has turned
to Christianity and attempted to resuscitate its subversive core. He contends
we must bring the gap or tension back into the centre of religion: to show
how all religions may serve postmodern pleasure seeking. In this way, the
theological dilemmas raised and embodied in I Confess can be understood as
part of what Žižek calls the hidden, perverse core of Christianity.
If religion triumphs, it will mean that psychoanalysis has failed.

—Jacques Lacan, The Triumph of Religion
The ultimate secret of Christian love is, perhaps, the loving
attachment to the Other’s imperfection.
—Slavoj Žižek, On Belief
INSPECTOR LARRUE (to Father Logan): I just don’t want all of
this mystification to make things too awkward for you.
—I Confess

Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62436-1_8
290 L. SIMMONS
‘Are You Given to Understatement Father?’:

Hitchcock’s Catholicism
The most explicitly religious of Hitchcock’s films, I Confess (1952) drama-
tizes the dilemma of a priest falsely accused of a murder for which he
might exculpate himself only by breaking the sacred bond of the confes-
sional. The film thus deals directly with the relationship between faith and
personal integrity, divine and human forgiveness, understanding and
grace, and the boundaries of civil and ecclesiastical powers. Hitchcock
himself was brought up by Jesuits, had a strict Catholic background and,
according to his biographer, continued to attend mass until 1942, the date
of his mother’s death (Spoto 1984, 129).1 He required his wife’s conver-
sion before they married, and they raised and educated their only daughter
in the Church. In 1952, the year of I Confess, his daughter, Patricia, mar-
ried Joseph E. O’Connell, the grandnephew of the late Cardinal arch-
bishop of Boston. Hitchcock was buried with Catholic rites, and his 1980
funeral in Beverly Hills was presided over by his long-standing Jesuit
friend Father Thomas Sullivan who had served as theological adviser on I
Confess.2 In his interview with François Truffaut, Hitchcock declared:
I come from a Catholic family and I had a strict, religious upbringing. My

wife converted to Catholicism before our marriage. I don’t think I can be
labeled a Catholic artist, but it may be that one’s early upbringing influences
a man’s life and guides his instinct … I am definitely not anti-religious; per-
haps I’m sometimes neglectful. (1985, 316–17)
Let us begin to read I Confess through the lens of Žižek’s comments on

Mel Gibson’s The Passion of Christ (PV 357–9). On the one hand, Žižek
notes the criticism has been that this is a film made by a fanatic Catholic
traditionalist with anti-Semitic outbursts. The film is a sort of manifesto
for Christian fundamentalism. Therefore, it would be the duty of every
Western secularist to reject it. For how can we attack Muslim fundamen-
talism and not attack the Christian fundamentalism of this film? On the
other, Pope John Paul II in his response to the film stated: ‘It is as it was’.
The film has been portrayed as an historically accurate account of the last
twelve hours of Christ’s life, the language is Aramaic, the settings are
8 THE FRAGILE ABSOLUTE: I CONFESS (1953) 291
meticulously researched, the aggressive religious passion is simply what

occurred and in the Bible there exist claims that the Jewish mob demanded
the death of Christ. According to Žižek, the problem with this film and
others arises because passion itself is politically incorrect. In contrast, the
politically correct attitude is one where everything is permitted except
certain prohibitions which are displaced. This is what Žižek calls decaffein-
ated passion, when he points to the fact that there are a whole series of
products on the market today that are deprived of their malignant quali-
ties: coffee without caffeine, cream without fat, beer without alcohol, sex
without sex (phone or virtual sex), for Colin Powell war without casualties
(on the American side at least) and religion without religion. The ultimate
example of this for Žižek is chocolate laxative. If you have constipation,
you are urged to eat more of the thing which causes constipation. What
politically correct tolerance is giving us, he extrapolates, is ‘belief without
belief’, a belief that doesn’t hurt anyone and does not commit us to any-
thing, a belief devoid of passion. This is the structure of chocolate laxative,
a product that contains its own containment. The politically correct atti-
tude causes us to rewrite or tone down religious injunctions. ‘Thou shalt
not commit adultery’ (except if it is emotionally sincere and part of your
self-realization). ‘Thou shalt not divorce’ (except where your marriage has
irrevocably broken down).
Does this mean that we should return to religious fundamentalism such
as that found in Gibson’s film? Does Hitchcock’s film underscore a similar
fundamental attitude, a return to doctrine and the sanctity of the confes-
sional? Perhaps there exists a third position between religious fundamen-
talism and liberal tolerance? It is not the case, Žižek argues, that the
religious attitude is framed in terms of good and bad: good Islam based on
love and tolerance versus bad Islamic terrorism; the good ethic of Judaism
of justice and responsibility towards the Other versus bad Zionism of the
Israeli state. It is not a case of trying to redeem a pure ethical core of reli-
gion. Rather, Žižek contends, what we need to do is ruthlessly criticize this
core and bring the gap or tension back into the centre of religion: to show
how all religions (including the cheap spiritual hedonism of the Dalai
Lama) may serve postmodern pleasure seeking. In this way, the ideological
and theological dilemmas raised and embodied in I Confess can be under-
stood as part of what Žižek calls the hidden, perverse core of Christianity.
‘If it is forbidden to eat from the Tree of knowledge in Paradise’, he asks,
‘then why did God put it there in the first place? Is it not that this was a
292 L. SIMMONS
part of His perverse strategy first to seduce Adam and Eve into the Fall, in
order then to save them’ (PD 15).
The Cahiers’ Take, or, Murder Always Implies

a Third Party
The thesis of the Cahiers du cinéma critics was that the transference of
guilt is the central motif of all Hitchcock’s films. According to Eric Rohmer
and Claude Chabrol,
Though Hitchcock’s protagonists participate simultaneously in guilt and in

innocence, it is impossible to discern the exact point at which these two
extreme poles are balanced. Each of these two forces, the positive and the
negative, seems to grow not inversely but proportionately; the guilt of the
innocent will increase in proportion to his absolute innocence and vice
versa. Or at least, if this strange state of equilibrium is never actually reached,
we are made to glimpse it as a possibility, an asymptote against which all our
good or evil resolutions will come up, and which defines the constitutive or
let us rather say the original—flaw in our natures. If free will manages to find
its point of impact on the curve and more or less deflect its course, this can
only be due to a miracle. (Rohmer and Chabrol 1979, 113)
I Confess is a sort of prototype for this structure in later Hitchcock

films. Murder in Hitchcock’s films (as we have seen in Chap. 7) is never an
affair between the murderer and victim; murder always implies a third
party, and in some way, the murderer kills for this third person, the act of
murder is part of a Symbolic exchange with the third person.3 The third
person finds him or herself charged with guilt even though s/he refuses to
be implicated in the affair. In I Confess, the question is not whether the
priest will keep the secrets of the confessional rather ‘he experiences a sort
of vertigo in recognising his feelings of guilt’: the ‘just man assumes
another man’s guilt to the very extent that he himself is innocent’ (116).
In support of their argument, Rohmer and Chabrol cite the comments of
another filmmaker Jacques Rivette: ‘The guilty person understands by
remission of sin that he is totally discharged of it, and that his confessor is
obliged, if necessary, to take the sin on himself and expiate it in his place’
(115). The point is that the transference of guilt doesn’t depend on some
internal repressed desire but rather on an external network of intersubjec-
tive relations. It is the place in the system of relations that determines the
subject’s apperception of guilt. This is the ambiguity of Hitchcock’s world

where the ordinary course of events can disintegrate, not through an
irruption from below but because of a change in the intersubjective rela-
tions.4 It is Father Logan’s
past with which the world, the police, and the law reproach him. His sin, if
sin there is, is not that he has been a man before becoming a man of God
but, on the contrary, to have given away to the intimidation, the blackmail,
of wanting to redeem by heroic and paradoxical conduct what need no lon-
ger be redeemed: to give way to the temptation of martyrdom. (115)
Logan’s sin is a sin that lies within religion, not prior to or outside it. A
case of what are the rules now seemingly becomes a crime, although the
situation has remained basically the same. The suffering of Father Logan
is that he accepts the transference of guilt; he recognizes the murderer’s
desires as his own. As Rohmer and Chabrol declare: ‘Each being has need
of the mirror of somebody else’s conscience, but in this universe where
salvation shines only when illuminated by the light of grace, he sees in that
mirror only his own deformed and exposed image’ (114).
Žižek’s ‘Turn’ to Christianity

Žižek’s turn to what he understands to be the paradox of Christianity is for
him a way of furthering psychoanalytic inquiry and offering a practical
model for politics. A number of his recent texts explore these issues: there
is a book on Catholic filmmaker Krystof Kieślowski The Fright of Real
Tears; a short text On Belief (a call for a politics of the ethical act—the
example being St Paul—which argues that we are all secretly believers);
The Fragile Absolute (an attempt to resuscitate the subversive core of
Christianity); The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity
(where he attempts to find what he calls a materialist kernel of Christianity
in contrast to New Age philosophies and Judaism); and The Monstrosity of
Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? (that debates the future of religion, secularity
and political hope in the light of the humanization of God). In all these
works, the passage from Judaism to Christianity is seen by Žižek as a pas-
sage from a religion of the law to a religion of love. Judaism is not so much
a matter of belief as of actions: ‘Jews do not have to declare their belief,
they immediately show it in their practice’ (OB 129). Also Judaism and its
294 L. SIMMONS
iconoclasm, for Žižek, does not represent a break with the anthropomor-
phization of pagan religions, and it is rather its fulfilment:
Anthropomorphism and iconoclasm are thus NOT simple opposites: it is

NOT that pagan religions depict gods as simple ‘larger than life human
persons, while Judaism prohibits such a depiction. It is only with Judaism
that God is FULLY ‘anthropomorphized’, that the encounter with Him is
the encounter with another PERSON in the fullest sense of the term …
Christianity only goes to the end in this direction by asserting not only the
likeness of God and man, but their direct identity in the figure of Christ.
(OB 130–31)
Žižek’s reference point in these books is the figure of St Paul who is the
central protagonist of the Christian break. But what strikes Žižek is Paul’s
indifference towards the living person of Jesus:
Paul more or less totally ignores Jesus’ particular acts, teachings, parables…;
never in his writings does he engage in hermeneutics, in probing into the
‘deeper meaning’ of this or that parable or act of Jesus. What matters to him
is not Jesus as a historical figure, only the fact that he died on the Cross and
rose from the dead.… (PD 9)
Žižek draws a parallel with the political situation of Lenin between the
revolutions of February and October 1917 when he describes Paul’s
Leninist project of organizing ‘the new party called the Christian com-
munity’ (ibid.).
Badiou and the ‘Vanishing Mediator’

Žižek’s main source for his discussion of St Paul is the contemporary post-
Althusserian French political philosopher Alain Badiou. In Saint Paul: The
Foundation of Universalism (2003 [1997]), Badiou revives the figure of
Paul as militant, as the apostle who did not know Jesus in his lifetime, as
someone who came to Christianity through dramatic and decisive conver-
sion, who showed little interest in the figure of an intimate and personal
God and who spent much of his life as an itinerant preacher working
mainly among non-Jewish communities. For Badiou:
Paul’s unprecedented gesture consists in subtracting truth from the com-

munitarian grasp, be it that of a people, a city, an empire, a territory, or a
social class. What is true (or just; they are the same in this case) cannot be
reduced to any objective aggregate, either by its cause or by its destina-
tion. (2003, 5)
Žižek’s description of St Paul as ‘vanishing mediator’ borrows a term

from Fredric Jameson (from his essay ‘The Vanishing Mediator; or, Max
Weber as Storyteller’ [1988 3–34]) (see the discussion in Chap. 1). The
vanishing mediator mediates the transition between two seemingly oppo-
site traditions and then ‘vanishes’. Žižek can thus explain the perversity of
the role of Judas in Christ’s death according to the logic of the vanishing
mediator (PD 17–18). Judas is thus the ‘vanishing mediator’ between the
original circle of the Apostles and Paul, the founder of the universal
Church, who literally replaces Judas, taking his absent place among the
apostles in a kind of metaphoric substitution:
And it is crucial to bear in mind the necessity of this substitution: only

through Judas’ ‘betrayal’ and Christ’s death could the universal Church
establish itself, i.e., the path to universality goes through the murder of par-
ticularity. Or to put it in a slightly different way: in order for Paul to ground
Christianity from the outside, as the one who was not the member of
Christ’s inner circle, this circle had to be broken from within by means of an
act of terrifying betrayal. (PD 72)
In Žižek’s reading, Paul is not the father of Christianity as a metaphysi-

cal project but a revolutionary anti-philosopher of the event operating
under a radical universalism.5 This fact centres on the relationship of
Pauline Christianity and Jewish Law. It is not simply that Pauline
Christianity opposes Jewish Law but that it is indifferent to it. It is not that
Paul simply rejects the tenets of the Law he just doesn’t pay much atten-
tion to it, and it is this not paying attention that is the potent revolution-
ary stance. As Peter Hallward has commented of Badiou’s position: ‘To
become adequate to the truth, oriented by truth, involves indifference to
knowledge of the world as it is’ (2003, 110). So, for Badiou, and Žižek, St
Paul is not the venerable saint, nor the moral disciplinarian, that he has
traditionally been understood to be. He is a profoundly revolutionary
thinker, a new figure of the subject who refuses to submit to the order of
the world and has a radical belief in the resurrection of Christ. Paul’s law
of faith is not simply a suspension that uses law while remaining unbound
296 L. SIMMONS
to it. It doesn’t suspend law per se; it suspends law’s superego supplement:
the prescriptions that tell us how and when to follow the law (PD 113).
Žižek’s understanding of Pauline materialism is first developed in The
Fragile Absolute, or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (2000)
and then continued in The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of
Christianity (2003). We might say that what St Paul institutes for Žižek is
the word of Christ in its properly symbolic sense. For what he brings
about is a situation in which the arguments used against Christ (the failure
of His mission; His miserable death on the cross) are now reasons for Him
(the sign of His love and sacrifice for us). As opposed to the prophets of
the time who sought to adduce evidence of miracles, St Paul shows our
very ability to take account of these defeats is already a kind of miracle. It
is in this sense that Hitchcock’s Father Logan takes on a role as vanishing
mediator. In suspending the agency of Symbolic Law, he marks the transi-
tion to the period of secular modernization and change in Québec when
Law, rather than ecclesiastical edict, will prevail: this is the period referred
to in the history books of Québec as the Quiet Revolution (Révolution
tranquille). The Quiet Revolution was spearheaded by the Liberal govern-
ment of Jean Lesage (elected in 1960) and involved intense socio-political
change characterized by secularization, establishment of a welfare state
(état-providence) and the eventual election of a pro-sovereignty provincial
government. A primary change meant that control of the institutions of
education and health care, which had been in the hands of the Roman
Catholic Church, was assumed by the provincial government.6 Hitchcock’s
film contains traces of this transition: Pierre Grandfort’s speech in parlia-
ment about the need to increase the salaries of female schoolteachers con-
tains intimations of this coming social transformation. For Father Logan,
there cannot be, and there is, no reconciliation at end of the film (either
with his former lover Ruth, or with his ‘flock’ the people of Québec).
Ruth dismissively demands that Pierre ‘take her home’ and Inspector
Larrue’s knowledge comes too late to do Father Logan any good. There
can be no final reconciliation because, as Žižek insists,
‘Reconciliation’ does not convey any kind of miraculous healing of the

wound of scission; it consists solely in a reversal of perspective by means of
which we perceive how the scission is already in itself reconciliation. To
accomplish ‘reconciliation’ we do not have to ‘overcome’ the scission, we
just have to remark it. (FTKN 78)
Christianity Is the Religion of Confession

Christianity, Žižek notes, ‘is the religion of confession … Christians are
ready to confess the primordial crime (in the displaced form of murdering
not the Father but Christ, the son of God), and thereby betray its trau-
matic impact/weight, pretending that it is possible to come to terms with
it’ (FA 97–8). However, the speech act that begins with the words ‘I con-
fess’ seems marked by contradictory intentions. We are deeply uneasy with
the concept of confession: how can we tell whether a confession is true?
What kinds of truth do we associate with confessions? How can we rely on
them? Why do we regard them with suspicion? For centuries, law has con-
sidered confession to be ‘the queen of proofs’. Western culture has made
confessional speech a prime measure of authenticity, seeing it as an expres-
sion of selfhood that bears witness to personal truth. Yet the urge to con-
fess may be motivated by inextricable layers of shame, self-loathing and
the desire to propitiate figures of authority. The speech act of confessing
always carries a certain, if variable, illocutionary force: it is doing some-
thing as well as stating something. Confession as a speech act accom-
plishes something other than the simple revelation of truth. In Austin’s
famous distinction, there is a constative aspect (the sin or guilt to which
one confesses) and a performative aspect (the troubling action performed
by confessing). As Peter Brooks explains:
When one says ‘Bless me Father, for I have sinned,’ the constative meaning
is: I have committed sins, while the performative meaning is: absolve me of
my sin. The confessional performance of guilt always has this double aspect,
and since it does, it opens the possibility that the performative aspect will
produce the constative, create the sin or guilt that the act of confessing
requires. (2000, 21)7
When Otto Keller declares he is asking for absolution, his motive for
confession is the concealment guaranteed by the seal of confession, but,
more importantly, it is part of his strategy of the pre-meditated ‘framing’
of Father Logan for the murder of Villette. A process begun by Keller
when he commits his crime disguised in a priest’s cassock. It is in this sense
that Keller’s confession is a ‘false confession’: in the sense that it is under-
taken and designed to ensure that Logan becomes a criminal suspect and
cannot testify to his own innocence. His confession thus operates as a pure
performance, he does not confess to produce guilt through some inner
298 L. SIMMONS
compulsion, he does not even confess to attain traditional absolution and

reintegration into the community of the faithful, rather he confesses to
assure concealment and avoid punishment. It has been argued that psy-
choanalysis offers a secular version of religious confession (see, for exam-
ple, Brooks 2000, 52ff).8 Indeed, Foucault contends in his The History of
Sexuality that psychoanalysis is the last conclusive term in the confession-
ary mode of discourse that began with early Christianity (1979, 67). Freud
writes in ‘The Question of Lay Analysis: Conversations with an Impartial
Person (1926)’:
Confession no doubt plays a part in analysis—as an introduction to it, we

might say. But it is very far from constituting the essence of analysis or from
explaining its effects. In confession the sinner tells what he knows; in analy-
sis the neurotic has to tell more. Nor have we heard that confession has ever
developed enough power to get rid of actual pathological symptoms.
(SE XX 188)
Since it leads to the articulation of secrets, the affective bond between

analysand and analyst in the psychoanalytic transference may seem compa-
rable to that between confessant and confessor. Nevertheless, as Freud is
at pains to demonstrate, the status of a ‘true confession’ in psychoanalysis
is complex since what is confessed to by the analysand must always be the
subject of suspicion on the part of the analyst, since it cannot be taken as
the cause of neurosis which, as Freud argues, always requires the analysand
to ‘tell more’. This means of course that the ‘truth’ of the confession in
psychoanalysis depends not on its constative value but almost entirely on
its process or performance. In this, it is similar to Keller’s confession.
Indeed, as Freud came to realize in (‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’
[1937]), there may be no final ‘truth’ or end to analysis.
Let us turn to Hitchcock’s filming of the scenes of confession in I
Confess: the closed space of the curtained and grilled confessional box itself
suggests a space set apart from everyday life, touched with the mysterious
and magical, a closed circuit of communication. We are in the confessional
booth on Logan’s side, but we hear Keller’s story, we are part of and par-
take of his culpability, we see and sense his presence. The priest on the
other side is listening to Keller’s story with us but he is distant from us,
unfocussed (Fig. 8.1). He will bury his eyes in his hands, and Keller’s eye
is further gridded from us by the lattice screen of the confessional. This
Fig. 8.1 Father Logan in the confessional
distance, the questionability of the priest, a combination of resistance and

inscrutability, is a central structural element in the film.
However, Keller’s full confession to the priest is cut and the location
abruptly shifts to the rectory, and Keller ‘confesses’ the rest of his story to
his wife Alma in intimate domestic circumstances. We assume he repeats
what he told the priest but how are we to know? Much later there is a self-
reflexive moment when Father Logan at his moment of crisis finds a ‘con-
fessional’ sign for himself. Walking the streets of Québec in despair, he
stops before a cinema bulletin board and reads his own dilemma in the
publicity shots of the film that is screening. The film is a 1951 black and
white film noir, The Enforcer (in part directed by an uncredited Raoul
Walsh), starring Humphrey Bogart. The publicity still that Logan fixes
upon has a gangster in handcuffs arriving at court under heavy protection
to testify against the gang boss who has employed him in the crime ring
known as Murder Inc. This may be Logan’s lowest point, his moment of
‘utmost abjection’ and abandonment, but seeing this ‘representation’ of
300 L. SIMMONS
himself he can now decide to present himself at Inspector Larrue’s office.

As Žižek reflects: ‘When I, a human being, experience myself as cut off
from God, at that very moment of the utmost abjection, I am absolutely
close to God, since I find myself in the position of the abandoned Christ’
(OB 146).
Catholic doctrine speaks of ‘The Seal of the Confession’, the absolute
imperative that the confession remains with the confessor alone. The
Catechism of the Catholic Church insists:
Given the delicacy and greatness of this ministry and the respect due to
persons, the Church declares that every priest who hears confessions is
bound under very severe penalties to keep absolute secrecy regarding the
sins that his penitents have confessed to him. He can make no use of knowl-
edge that confession gives him about penitents’ lives. This secret, which
admits of no exceptions, is called the ‘sacramental seal,’ because what the
penitent has made known to the priest remains ‘sealed’ by the sacrament.
(Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 1467)9
The term seal suggests an image of a letter or document sealed with

wax, a communication that exists but is not to be open to public perusal.
There is of course another ‘confession’, and another ‘confessional’, in I
Confess. The criminal suspect in the spartan interrogation room face to
face with police detectives where the confession of guilt arises not from the
spontaneous contrition of the aggrieved conscience, but from a relentless
interrogation. Ruth Grandfort confesses to Larrue that earlier in her life
she was (and still is) in love with Michael Logan. Her intimate confession
which she gives to provide an alibi for Logan she will in fact discover
implicates him since there exists a discrepancy between the time she can
vouch for him and the time of the murder. Nevertheless, there are impor-
tant similarities between the two confessions (the religious confession and
the confession of law): Logan cannot speak effectively about Keller; Ruth
cannot speak effectively about Logan: Logan the lover seems as culpable
as Keller; Logan the priest is as innocent as Ruth. But the second confes-
sion is different from the first in a number of ways:
• it is about love not murder;

• while Keller’s confession is a result of his inner psychic need (or a
stage in his premeditated framing of Logan), Ruth’s is a result of the
inspector’s demand (nevertheless, it also frees Ruth in that it frees
her of a secret—in that sense she tells the inspector more than
she has to);
• for us the audience at least it contains flashbacks (filmed in a way to
seduce us not mystify us as the film noir style of the opening does);
• Keller has a professional confessor, Ruth has an ambivalent one in
Larrue because of his own Catholic background. At the end of the
film, of course, the police turn out to be wrong.
The confession is about a murder, but it is also about a love story, and
this makes sense of the lyrics of the song at the film’s opening:
While the town is sleeping tight/comes the music of the night/one can hear
its lonely beat/on each dark deserted street/the dreams and hopes of yes-
terday/sigh and slowly drift away/all the sounds of earth unite/secretly in
the night.
Fig. 8.2 Flashback of Ruth descending the stairs

302 L. SIMMONS
The film will open on Québec’s ‘dark deserted’ streets. Somewhat

incongruously, this same melody is played as Ruth, in a flowing white
dress and shot through a diffused lens, descends the stairs in broad day-
light in the flashback during the second confession (Fig. 8.2). It is at the
moment of confession in Larrue’s interrogation room that finally her
‘dreams and hopes of yesterday’ begin to ‘slowly drift away’.10
I Confess contains a third confession that of Alma who asks for forgive-
ness, and a fourth and final confession: As he holds the dying Keller in his
arms, Keller almost inaudibly asks Father Logan for confession once again:
‘Father, forgive me?’ As the film ends Logan makes the sign of the cross
and speaks the sacramental words ‘Ego te absolvo’. The film ends where it
had appeared to begin in the speech act of confession and traditional abso-
lution between Keller and Logan. It could just be that I Confess suggests
there can be no reconciliation of the religious tradition of confession—
with its emphasis on the care of the soul—to the secular requirement of
the law for confession in a process of legal judgement. In this vein, the
final resolution of unattributed guilt in the film, it might be argued, simply
happens because Inspector Larrue overhears Keller’s accusation to Logan
that he has violated the seal of the confessional: ‘You’re a coward like all
other people, aren’t you? A hypocrite like all the rest! Logan! I thought
you’d die rather than betray your faith?’ But what may in fact be the real
truth of the film is that both practices are marked by a process of excess
and remainder. In any act of confession, whether it be Keller’s to Father
Logan or Ruth Grandfort’s to Inspector Larrue, the bond between con-
fessor and confessant goes beyond the speech act of confession itself to
touch an excess of deeply repressed material.
A Knowledge Beyond Perception: Faith

How do we know or accept that we know the priest is innocent despite the
fact that we learn that he has a motive, and has been camouflaging an illicit
love affair? Knowledge derives from looking but for Hitchcock that scopo-
philic knowledge is always tenuous. As we have seen, in the confessional
Father Logan covers his eyes. Just before he hands himself in to Larrue, he
leans against a wall and does the same thing. There is, however, a knowl-
edge beyond perception—faith. Žižek cites Kierkegaard on faith as a pure
internality that the believer is unable to symbolize with others rejects
intersubjective symbolic mediation:
Kierkegaard’s point is that true religion is simultaneously more ‘inner’ (it

involves an act of absolute faith that cannot even be externalized into the
universal medium of language) and more external (when I truly believe I
accept that the source of my faith is not in myself; that in some inexplicable
way, it comes from outside, from God himself…). (TS 211)
How does a film, based in perception, illustrate this ‘knowledge beyond

perception’ that ‘comes from outside’? Otto Keller confesses to Michael
Logan, and the drama of confession is a religious ritual of cleansing. But
the title I Confess itself raises the question who is the confessor and who
receives the confession? The irony of I Confess is that each character is
perpetually confessing throughout the movie, and many of them achieve
relief through confession. The practice of confession, seems intrinsically
verbal but, as we have seen, includes a thematics of the gaze, and this film
is a succession of gazes and visual solicitations: Michael Logan and other
priests spend time looking out of the window to the street below; there is
the myopic priest Father Benoit with his bicycle; and everywhere the patri-
archal eyes of the Church not to mention the surveilling eyes of the police.
Murray Pomerance writes of Otto Keller’s ‘bulbous eyes’ (2004, 186)
and his constant surveillance of his wife Alma with their nervous back and
forward gazes. In the breakfast room, Alma’s gaze seems riveted to the
back of Father Logan’s head, yet she is desirous to read his facial expres-
sion to see what he really feels about her husband’s confession. When
Father Logan covers his eyes in the confessional—the signal to us is to
watch. In response, Keller’s eye peers through the confessional screen. At
the scene the morning after the murder at Villette’s apartment, Inspector
Larrue has an odd line of sight past Keller’s head through the window at
the (for him) silent exchange between Ruth Grandfort and Father Logan.
Then there are the exchanges of gaze between Ruth and Logan in the
flashbacks during Ruth’s confession, and the insistent gazes of Villette at
Ruth as he hounds her in public and her unnerved return look back at
him. There is at the end Keller’s powerful controlling gaze directed at
Alma as he moves to shoot her. The film is a string of visual invitations and
insistences: it repeatedly raises the question to what extent is the world
coextensive with and dependent upon the visible impression it makes?
What about the world of seeming? The man on the nocturnal street out-
side Villette’s apartment seems to be a priest to the young girls who wit-
ness him; Ruth Grandfort seems to be happily married to her husband,
but perhaps they are just playing the role of a happy marriage; Willie
304 L. SIMMONS
Robertson seems best friends with them, but is really a bored, ambitious
and ruthless man acting the role of a dispassionate prosecutor; despite the
jury verdict, we have a judge who believes that finding Logan innocent of
Villette’s murder is a miscarriage of justice.
Father Logan as Bartelby: Jumping Too Suddenly
PROSECUTOR: Have you any idea who might have put this cas-
sock in your trunk?
FATHER LOGAN: I can’t say.
Father Logan’s response of ‘I can’t say’ when questioned by the trial

Prosecutor Robertson about the bloodied cassock found in his room is a
version of Herman Melville’s character Bartleby’s ‘I would prefer not to’.
Melville recounts the story of Bartelby, the Scrivener, a quiet man who
came to a standstill one summer morning in a law office on Wall Street,
and just stayed there, gazing out the window at the brick wall outside. The
lawyer (the narrator of Melville’s novella) tries to engage Bartelby in the
daily tasks of his office but bit-by-bit Bartleby indicates that he would
prefer not to perform any of the ordinary duties of a copyist in a law office.
Politely he sets aside his employer’s suggestion that he seeks some other
kind of employment more congenial to him. He would prefer not to he
says. Soon all the lawyer’s associates begin to urge their colleague to do
something about Bartelby who has become a permanent fixture in the
office, either standing or sitting behind his green screen but seemingly
indifferent to the tasks of the office to be undertaken. The colourless scriv-
ener persists in staying in the office not only every day of the week, but
nights, too, and on Sundays. The lawyer is advised to ‘settle’ Bartleby at
once, but of course Bartelby is by now only too ‘settled’ in another sense.
The lawyer can no more employ Bartelby than he can dismiss him, but
immobilized as he is before the demand that Bartelby quietly brings to
bear upon him—‘I would prefer not to’—he cannot seem to restrain him-
self. He keeps officiously offering Bartelby all kinds of help. Even though
he protests to his associates, who urge him to do something, that there is
nothing to be done, he goes on agitatedly trying one thing and another
with no success, and he is finally forced to vacate his own chambers.
Melville’s story stages the fantasy of passivity that renders an agent a
kind of inert substance. ‘Utter passivity’, argues Žižek, ‘is the foreclosed
fantasy that sustains our conscious experience as active, self-positing sub-

jects—it is the ultimate perverse fantasy’ (WDR 96). Father Logan’s dead-
lock is similarly a forced choice that leaves open no capacity for decision.
As a way of confronting and ‘traversing’ the fundamental fantasy of passiv-
ity, Žižek introduces the figure of Bartelby from Herman Melville’s short
story ‘Bartelby, the Scrivener’.11 Insofar as Bartleby declines the choices
and activities generally associated with normal Symbolic exchange, he
becomes a kind of strange, unbearable object, one hard to recognize as
human. Bartelby’s gesture of refusal works as a stain or lump that cannot
be readily assimilated.
The next morning came.

‘Bartelby,’ said I, gently calling to him behind his screen.
No reply.
‘Bartelby,’ said I, in a still gentler tone, ‘come here; I am not going to ask
you to do anything you would prefer not to do—I simply wish to speak
to you.’
Upon this he noiselessly slid into view.
‘Will you tell me, Bartelby, where you were born?’
‘I would prefer not to.’
‘Will you tell me anything about yourself?’
‘I would prefer not to.’ (Melville 1986, 25)
Compare this with the exchange between Inspector Larrue and Father
Logan where Logan’s similar gesture of refusal forces a deadlock:
LARRUE: You see with a murder one has to jump from one detail to
another. Forgive me. Perhaps I have jumped too suddenly
for you?
LOGAN: It seems maybe I don’t follow as fast as you jump. I have a
methodical mind. I do have to take things one by one.
LARRUE: So do I. So do I. The difficulty perhaps is that, well, we
weren’t thinking from the same point of view. Could it be
that Father?
LOGAN: It could be… I don’t really know what your point of view is.
LARRUE: Oh, then I’ve put it badly, very badly. Let me try again.
Now, this lady you met outside Villette’s house…
LOGAN: I wish I could discuss it but I can’t.
LARRUE: Who is she?
306 L. SIMMONS
LOGAN: She isn’t involved.

LARRUE: That is for me to decide Father.
LOGAN: I know, I know, but you’ll have to take my word for it that
she’s not involved.
LARRUE: I respect your word but I need your help.
LOGAN: I’m not able to help.
LARRUE: I see, I see. I just don’t want all of this mystification to make
things too awkward for you.
Both these examples reverse the standard notion of the subject as active
and the object as passive. The subject as one who submits, who is sub-
jected, means that the object objects, disturbing the established order of
things: ‘The difference between the subject and the object can also be
expressed as the difference between the two corresponding verbs, to sub-
ject (submit) oneself and to object (protest, oppose, create an obstacle)’
(PV 17). Bartelby’s inert refusal thus figures the possibility of the active
object one that ‘moves, annoys, disturbs, traumatizes us (subjects): at its
most radical the object is that which objects, that which disturbs the smooth
running of things’ (ibid.). Bartelby’s gesture of refusal, his ‘I would prefer
not to’, figures the complete destitution or displacement of the subject.
Bartelby is nearly inhuman, basically an ‘inert, insistent, impassive being’
rendered into a maddening object. It is an impassivity and lack of expres-
sion that Father Logan shares. Insofar as Bartelby does not simply negate,
insofar as he affirms a non-predicate, his politics is more than resistance, as
is Logan’s in I Confess. It steps away from a dynamic of compliance, guilt
and transgression.
In his refusal of the Master’s order, Bartelby does not negate the predicate;
rather, he affirms a non-predicate: he does not say that he doesn’t want to do
it; he says that he prefers (wants) not to do it. This how we pass from the poli-
tics of ‘resistance’ or ‘protestation,’ which parasitizes on what it negates, to
a politics which opens up a new space outside the hegemonic position and
its negation. (PV 381–2)
In Father Logan’s exchange with Larrue, it is significant that they con-

cede a difference of point of view. Nevertheless, Logan’s truthful ‘I can’t
say’ is consistently (mis)understood by those who interview him as ‘I
refuse to say’. His interrogators fail to acknowledge, that is, what Žižek
calls a parallax view:
the apparent displacement of an object (the shift of its position against a

background), caused by a change in observational position that provides a
new line of sight… the observed difference is not simply ‘subjective,’ due to
the fact that the same object which exists ‘out there’ is seen from two differ-
ent stances, or points of view. (PV 17)
Logan’s (and Bartelby’s) politics responds to the parallax gap in law.

Instead of mere passivity in the guise of activity, Logan embodies the activ-
ity of a radical disruptive object who disturbs the order of things. He
marks, as well, an attitude towards law, precisely Pauline work of love,
which suspends law’s superego supplement and fully immerses it in law
without exception. It does this by a simple refusal of an order that neither
denies that order nor rejects its authority, but marks a conditional prefer-
ence not to do what the order commands.
Die Versagung: Perdition

Žižek writes: ‘The difference between Bartlelby’s gesture of withdrawal
and the formation of a new order is … that of parallax: the very frantic and
engaged activity of constructing a new order is sustained by an underlying
‘I would prefer not to’ which forever reverberates in it’ (PV 382).
Bartelby’s act, like that of Father Logan, is an act of Versagung (frustra-
tion): a Freudian concept elaborated by Lacan in Seminar 8 and an earlier
version of what Lacan later came to call the sinthome (see Chap. 4).
Frustration was traditionally understood as the act whereby the mother
denies the child the object that would satisfy one of his or her biological
needs. In his article ‘Types of Onset of Neurosis’ (1912), Freud used the
word Versagung for the first time to describe both internal and external
factors that cause neurosis. He wrote:
Psycho-analysis has warned us that we must give up the unfruitful contrast

between external and internal factors, between experience and constitution,
and has taught us that we shall invariably find the cause of the onset of
neurotic illness in a particular psychical situation which can be brought
about in a variety of ways. (SE XII 238)
In essential particulars, Freud continued to hold this view, going on to

write, for example, about a narcissistic form of frustration. In Freud, the
308 L. SIMMONS
concept of frustration seems to cover the idea of privation, while some-

times also seeming to go beyond it.
The connections made by Freud among frustration, prohibition and
privation form the basis for Lacan’s discussion of the connections between
castration, privation and frustration in his seminar on the object relation-
ship (Seminar 4 1994). Frustration there appears as an imaginary forma-
tion caused by the symbolic mother but related to the real breast; it
prevents the subject from entering the symbolic dialectic of giving and
exchange. Lacan was thus to argue that the Freudian concept of Versagung
does not correspond to the concept of frustration described as concerning
biological needs, but it is connected with the demand for love. The real
function of the object (such as mother’s breast or feeding bottle) is over-
shadowed by its symbolic function, the fact that it functions as a symbol of
the mother’s love. Lacan writes:
Frustration essentially belongs to the realm of protest. It relates to some-

thing that is desired and not possessed but that is desired without reference
to any possibility of gratification or acquisition. Frustration itself constitutes
the realm of unbridled and lawless demands. This core of the concept of
frustration as such is one of the categories of lack and an imaginary damna-
tion. It exists at the imaginary level. (Seminar 4)12
Frustration for Lacan is nonetheless more than a mode of object rela-

tionship; it extends from an object relationship to the very organization of
speech and the ego. There is an inherent frustration in the discourse of the
subject, and the feeling of frustration is a basic characteristic of the ego.
It is clear that a number of characters in I Confess from Ruth Grandfort
to the Prosecutor experience frustration with Father Logan’s refusal to
break the secrets of the confessional. Michael Logan performs five acts in
I Confess:
1. Michael and Ruth’s pathetic but ethical early promise of love and
fidelity that would preserve the Symbolic Order;
2. Michael’s enlistment in the army, his non-response to Ruth’s letters
and Ruth’s marriage to Grandfort when she does not hear
from Logan;
3. Michael Logan’s (illicit) encounter with the (married) Ruth;
4. Michael Logan’s decision to sacrifice Ruth for the Church and
Ruth’s sacrifice (of her public reputation) for Logan;
5. Michael Logan’s refusal to reveal the secrets of Keller’s confession

and Ruth’s return to the Symbolic Order with her husband Pierre
(‘Take me home Pierre’, she declares in the penultimate scene).
The crucial enigma (frustration) here is not (5) Logan’s refusal to reveal
the secrets of the confessional but his act of meaningless sacrifice as the
ultimate guarantee of sense in joining the Church (4). It is a gesture not
done out of respite or on the rebound (it is not simply a reaction to Ruth’s
marriage to Pierre Grandfort), instead it is a gesture that cannot be
inscribed into any calculating strategy—it seems not to have a reason. It
would appear to be a pure act of vocation that returns meaning to earthly
life. As cheaply melodramatic as Logan’s act (5) may seem, and Hitchcock
as we shall see underscores the melodrama, ‘such an act of renunciation is
eminently modern; it implies a split—the split between duty (responsibility
to one’s profession) and the supreme good (the beloved woman)—which
defines the modern subject’ (EYS 165). The Versagung that occurs (for
Ruth at least) in the move between (1) and (4) is inherent—essential
even—to the twist of (5), it designates a shift from alienation or immersion
in the Cause (Church) to the possible loss of this Cause itself. Logan sac-
rifices everything, his happiness and honour for the Cause, and he becomes
alienated in the Church, only to realize that because of this total immer-
sion, he may lose it all. Logan’s refusal then is not some degree zero of
negativity but a kind of bodily gesture of self-mutilation, a passage from
the big Other of the Symbolic Order to a pathological gesture that sustains
his subjectivity in its perversity. When Logan sacrifices everything for the
Church, when he removes himself from the Symbolic Order of the Law, he
ends up possibly losing the Church itself—his alienation is thus re-doubled
or reflected into itself. As Žižek explains it: ‘the radical (self-relating) loss/
renunciation of the very fantasmatic core of being: first, I sacrifice all I have
for the Cause-Thing which is more to me than my life; what I get then in
exchange for this sacrifice is the loss of the Cause-Thing itself’ (PV 80).
This ‘exchange’ needs to be read in the context of the role of frustra-
tion in psychoanalytic treatment where, following ‘the rule of abstinence’,
the analyst must continually frustrate the analysand by refusing to gratify
his/her demands for love. In this way, suggests Freud, ‘the patient’s need
and longing should be allowed to persist in her, in order to serve as forces
impelling her to do work and make changes’ (SE 12b 165). In Lacan’s
elaboration of this, the act of frustration is not to be seen as an end in
itself. Rather the frustration should be seen as a means of enabling the
310 L. SIMMONS
previous demands of the signifiers to emerge. In Ecrits, he writes, ‘the

analyst is he who sustains demand, not, as people say, to frustrate the sub-
ject, but in order to allow the signifiers with which the latter’s frustration
is bound up to reappear’ (E 516).
Let us read the full sequence of events in I Confess again. The early
repose is disturbed by an act of self-withdrawal which provides a proper
density to the subject’s being, but the result of this is a deadlock that tears
the subject apart, a refusal to speak that causes him to sabotage his own
impetus. Father Logan’s ‘No’ is not simply a refusal to reveal the identity
of Keller as murderer but, as Žižek might describe it, ‘this “No” is not a
“No” to a particular content, a refusal to reveal a secret … but a “No as
such,” the form-of-No which is in itself the whole content, behind which there
is nothing’ (PV 83). According to Lacan in Seminar 8, Versagung (frustra-
tion) is about the demand for love and the refusal of its saying; for him,
the Versagung.
becomes what the very structure of the word implies: ver-sagen is refusal
regarding what is said [le dit]; and were I to equivocate in order to find the
best translation, perdition. Everything that is a condition becomes perdi-
tion. And this is why not saying becomes saying no here. (S8 301)
Thus, Versagung is not a simple ‘frustration’ but an abjuration that

announces a tragic dimension.
Hiding Grime
The French accents in I Confess both signal place and culture, and the act
of listening (carefully) that is the essence of the confession. There is Keller
whose repeated name sounds like ‘Killer’. But above all, there are two
scenes with Father Millais who, in the first instance, complains about the
‘pains’ (paints) used by Keller and Logan to decorate the rectory lounge.
In the second, as Detective Murphy waits in the refectory to escort Father
Logan to the police station, Father Millais again makes a comment about
the fresh paint covering the lounge walls.
FATHER MILLAIS: I believe this room has given this gentleman from
the police department the idea that we hide grime
with paint. But it is not so, Mr. Murphy. We have
made certain the walls underneath are spotless.
In his heavy French accent, ‘grime’ becomes ‘crime’, and the film, of
course, is full of faces that do not manage to cover over ‘crime’: the pallid,
inexpressive look of Alma; the exaggerated perspiration of Keller’s brow
and face. As Murray Pomerance remarks:
The optical problem of the film is not merely to see that things are not the
way they appear to be, because here, really, they can only appear to be. The
problem is to accept that things must appear, and to see enough. All things
really are exactly as they look, yet we tend not to look at them. (2004, 196)
It is worth remembering that Hitchcock himself was forced to hide

‘grime’. As the early screenplay by George Tabori, and the production
code office letters to Hitchcock demonstrate, he was forced to renounce
the early idea of an illegitimate child of Ruth Grandfort and Father Logan.
As well, the original screenplay ending had the priest hanged for Keller’s
crime and then proven innocent post eventum. Hitchcock bowed to eccle-
siastical authorities and had the present ending substituted during shoot-
ing.13 The pressure of the Hays Code censorship rules rectify the original
narrative so that at the end of the film, we return somehow to a normal
everyday reality. However, the innocent reading must perforce coexist
with more unsettling undertones. What has been introduced to mollify
the censors reintroduces yet another element of pathology. The ironic
symbols of Keller repeatedly walking past the white cross, and Willie
Robertson, the Crown Prosecutor, balancing a pair of forks over a glass of
wine with a coin as if they were the scales of justice, simply underscore the
‘grime’ beneath the surface (Fig. 8.3).14
Cupidinous Weltschmerz, or, ‘Love Is Whatever

You Can Still Betray’
PROSECUTOR: Mme Grandfort would you please answer my

questions yes or no?
RUTH GRANDFORT: Some questions cannot be answered that way.
During Ruth Grandfort’s confession to Detective Larrue, we flashback

to one of her first meetings with Michael Logan. This sequence, particu-
larly for Hitchcock, is a saccharine flashback of idealized love where the
gauzy perfection of Anne Baxter descending the stairs to meet her lover
312 L. SIMMONS
Fig. 8.3 Prosecutor Willie Robertson balances forks on a glass of wine
and their ‘halo-ed’ embrace indicates her subjective fantasy about the past
and clues us in through its ‘unreality’ to the unreliability about the rest of
her testimony. Ruth is shallow and selfish, and the romantic clichés, the
music and the overwrought cinematography indicate that this flashback is
more a projection of Ruth’s (present) desires than the reality of her past.
Indeed, Robin Wood suggests that ‘this romantically gushing girl descend-
ing the steps to her waiting lover, to the accompaniment of a sentimental
love song, is her cherished image of herself’ (2002, 84). Ruth has con-
fessed her continuing love for Michael Logan on the Lévis ferry:
RUTH (intensely): I love you, Michael. I have always been in love

with you.
LOGAN: No! (he turns his head away from her)
RUTH: I know it’s wrong, but I can’t help myself. Do you
want me to lie to you?
LOGAN: What you are saying is not the truth. It is no lon-
ger the truth.
Now Ruth’s eagerness to confess to Larrue, her eagerness to sacrifice

her present life, her reputation for a former love and her potential destruc-
tion of her husband are all indications of her selfishness and shallowness.
Within Ruth’s ‘confessional’ narrative is another idyllic flashback sequence
overlaid by lush orchestra strings, shot on location, the late summer sun
giving way to a violent storm with real rain, the couple desperately rushing
to find shelter, ending up in a tickety-boo gazebo in a Garden of Eden in
the middle of nowhere. All of this is filmed with a certain documentary
transparency (a real location, real rain) but overlaid with heavy tones of
melodrama, the editing creating a sense of impending desperation. This
sequence places great weight on the exchanges of gaze, but Logan at this
stage doesn’t know that Ruth is married. It is, as Murray Pomerance
insists,
a Garden of Eden in the middle of nowhere in which true love is briefly

consummated. But Villette, the dawn intruder, may then either be one of
two things, the hovering serpent who destroys true love, or alternately
God’s witness (or avenging angel) who has discovered Original Sin in the
Garden. (2004, 184)
Does Ruth’s dazed awakening suggest cupidity and ‘consummation’ or

simply an uncomfortable night’s rest? And Logan’s ‘forced’ altercation
with Villette soon after seemingly continues the unreal tone of melodrama.
Žižek turns to John Le Carré’s The Perfect Spy to explain the paradox of
love as betrayal. The novel tells the tale of Magnus Pym, a long-time spy
for the United Kingdom. When Pym mysteriously disappears, a number of
his fellow secret agents suspect that he may have betrayed them, and not
without reason—throughout most of his career, Magnus was also cooper-
ating with the Czechoslovak secret service. The story itself is non-linear
and told primarily in a memoir format, incorporating multiple narrators,
whose various portraits gradually reveal Pym as an individual who has
worked for so long at manipulating his appearance to those closest to him
that in the end he is unable to hold his conflicting persona together. He
has been a perfect spy, but at the cost of his psyche. In Le Carré’s account
of the psychology of betrayal in his novel, Magnus Pym’s father (inspired
by Le Carre’s own father’s chameleonic career as a petty con man) states
‘Love is whatever you can still betray … betrayal is a repetitious trade’.
The beloved person who put all his trust and reliance in us incites the urge
to betray, hurt or shatter this trust. Betrayal is thus the ultimate form of
314 L. SIMMONS
fidelity. It is not the case that Ruth Grandfort betrays Michael Logan by
marrying Pierre Grandfort because of what he (Logan) stands for, or
might become as a priest, (this would be an ‘ethical betrayal’), but because
she loves him for something beyond this:
The message of true love is thus: even if you are everything to me, I can
survive without you, I am ready to forsake you for my mission or profession.
The proper way for the woman [Ruth] to test the man’s [Michael’s] love is
thus to betray him [by marrying Grandfort] at the crucial moment of his
career … only if he can survive the ordeal, accomplish his task successfully,
although deeply traumatized by her desertion, will he deserve her and she
will return to him. The underlying paradox is that love, precisely as the
Absolute, should not be posited as a direct goal—it should retain the status
of a byproduct, of something we get as an undeserved grace. (PD 19; 73)
The paradox is that love is not an absolute but merely an undeserved

by-product which we receive by means of grace. This remains one of the
basic lessons of I Confess.
There is another betrayal of/for love in I Confess: Alma’s betrayal of her
husband Keller. Her wavering begins in the courtroom immediately after
the announcement of the not-guilty verdict when Keller, believing he has
gotten away with murder, looks triumphantly towards her. Murray
Pomerance writes of Keller’s ‘bulbous, ravenous eyes, eyes that see every-
thing not only analytically but with a certain exigent and cupidinous
Weltschmerz … greedy eyes that strain to limit and possess through defini-
tion’ (186). From the exchanged glances though it is clear that Alma does
not share her husband’s Weltschmerz. Alma’s betrayal of Keller reaches its
climax when she rushes down the courthouse steps pushing through the
crowd to join the embattled and surrounded Logan. Standing next to
him, she points back at Keller on the steps: ‘My husb….’ Before she can
finish Keller’s gun aimed at her (and our) directed gaze explodes in a
white flash. And as if to underline the ‘cupidity’, the sequence is intercut
three times with the mid-shot of an unknown woman standing on the
steps alongside Keller conspicuously chomping on an (Edenic) apple.
What, too, is the basic lesson of the subsequent scene of Keller’s last
gasp in the hotel ballroom and the radiance (jouissance) of Ruth’s face in
close-up upon the final revelation to Inspector Larrue of Keller’s culpabil-
ity? According to the standard interpretations, Ruth understands that
Logan’s constant love for God is what had enabled him to protect Keller’s
confession and now she can let go of her desires for him releasing Logan
to his ‘true calling’. She turns (back) to her husband, literally waiting in
the wings outside the ballroom door, and says: ‘Pierre, take me home’.
Elisabeth Weis accounts for the moment as follows:
Ruth turns with her husband to leave before Logan’s problems are resolved.
The gesture indicates that she is at last psychologically disengaged from her
romantic illusions that her postmarital love for Logan was requited; Ruth
and her husband are now ready to begin a more open and healthy marriage.
(1982, 58)
But isn’t this too neat and conventional? What if the real truth were
that Ruth’s desire for Father Logan can only survive insofar as he remains
an undecipherable abyss? What if it is against this background that one
should conceptualize Ruth’s ‘disappearance’ at the end of the film? Any
mystery at Logan’s core has now evaporated in what seems a version of
Lacan’s ‘I love you, but there is something in you more than yourself that
I love, objet petit a, so I destroy you’ (quoted in PD 59). What Ruth is in
love with is not simply Logan but the real kernel—that which is in him
more than himself—and once she has extracted that kernel, the price is the
eclipse of her desire, and her literal ‘eclipse’ from the scene (she goes
‘home’). Is not this structure also somehow connected with the basic par-
adox of symbolic castration as constitutive of desire where symbolic castra-
tion is described as the loss of something one never possessed, that is, the
object-cause of desire (objet petit a) is an object that emerges through the
very gesture of its own loss/withdrawal. This also casts new light on what
may be understood as Michael Logan’s ‘masochistic sacrifice’ (Ruth for
the Church). As Žižek insists:
one sacrifices not in order to get something from the Other, but in order to
dupe the Other, in order to convince [her] that one is still missing some-
thing, that is, jouissance… sacrifice is the most refined way of … acting as if
I really do possess the hidden treasure that makes me a worthy object of
love. (PD 51)
Michael Logan subordinates his relationship to Ruth to the domain of

ethical goals, to a superior cause outside the domain of sexuality (first the
call to fight in the war and then the calling of the Church) but the message
between the lines is that precisely sacrificing his love for Ruth is the
316 L. SIMMONS
supreme proof of his love for her, of how she is everything to him, so that
the sublime moment in the melodrama … is the sublime moment of rec-
ognition when the woman [Ruth] finally realizes that the man [Michael]
has betrayed her, that he has left, but precisely sacrificing her is the ulti-
mate proof of his love for her.
It’s About (Homosexual) Love Not Murder

I Confess is a film about marriage: a film about the impossibility of mar-
riage. Michael’s possible marriage to Ruth; Michael’s religious marriage to
Jesus; Ruth’s ‘unsatisfactory’ civil marriage to Pierre; Keller’s doomed
marriage to Alma. How can a man commit himself to the principles of the
Church when he wishes to be with the woman he loves; how can a woman
take vows of matrimony while retaining a passion for another man? As
Pierre Grandfort despairs at one point: ‘What does one do when one’s
wife is in love with a priest?’ These questions, at least, seem obvious on the
surface, underneath, however, is a subtext where nothing is obvious.
Deborah Thomas points out how Hitchcock ‘resembles Keller in two
key respects. Like Keller, he also walks away from the murder during his
cameo in the direction montage that opens the picture and in real life his
wife shares the same name as Keller’s wife—Alma’ (Thomas 1996, 182).15
Hitchcock’s biographer (McGilligan 2003, 457–8) notes that in early
drafts of the script by screenwriter George Tabori the priest has fathered
an illegitimate child after an affair with a married woman and is then pow-
erless to prevent a guilty verdict that results in his execution for a murder
he did not commit. In the final film, Logan is not yet a priest when he has
an affair, and at the end, he is acquitted of the murder he did not commit,
and no child exists. John Orr’s argument is that this early ‘illicit’ content
was forced from the original script by censorship and the Hays Code, but
he believes that Hitchcock embedded the repressed text of the early
screenplay in a (homosexual) subtext of his final film. According to Orr,
the subtext or hidden agenda that runs counterpoint to the overt plot of I
Confess is a homosexual one and ‘a continuation of the queer aesthetic
inherent in Rebecca, The Paradine Case, Rope and Strangers on a Train
but because of its religious subject-matter, more covert than ever’ (2005,
179). He points out that Montgomery Clift and O.E. Hasse were gay
actors, raises questions about the intensity of Logan’s relationship to Ruth
and records Logan’s moments of indifference towards her.16 He also notes
that Logan is a figure who seems most comfortable in the company of men
and appears almost always in uniform whether military or ecclesiastical;

that his volunteering for the war might be read as a form of escape from
the cloying saccharine Ruth; at the end of the film, the distressed Logan
holds the dying Keller in his arms, pietà-like; and the conflict by the
gazebo between the effete Villette (note his feminized name) and the
manly Logan contains, Orr believes, a flicker of ‘homosexual’ recognition.
The character of Villette first comes to Ruth’s notice as an uninvited guest
at her wedding, he is someone who neither she nor her husband knows.
Villette in the Hitchcockian landscape is ‘The Man Who No-one Knows’,
an enigma … As the inspector ponders:
LARRUE: No one seems to have known this Villette. And yet he was a
lawyer, he had clients. Not one of his clients had any infor-
mation to give about the man…
As we have already seen, Ruth is a potentially unreliable, or at least self-

indulgent, narrator, and Pierre Grandfort would not appear to be the sort
of person to get jealous over his wife’s brief encounter with a previous
lover. Orr concludes:
Villette then acts as the signifier of an alternate circuit of desire whose full
nature the film never reveals (and never can reveal) to us. There is no point
at which we can say reductively that such and such a liaison occurred and
that is the ‘real’ reason for the murder. Instead there is a sense in which
Villette dies because he was a man who knew too much: more, indeed, than
we shall ever know. (2005, 182)
The dilemma of a sexual loyalty—Keller’s to Alma and of Logan’s to

Ruth—is something shared by both men. As Žižek intimates, this type of
loyalty may generate the nature of the relationship between two men:
Homosexuality can arise out of the very anxieties generated by too-strong

heterosexual fantasies … One should not miss the crucial point here: homo-
sexuality emerges not as the revolt of the suppressed ‘polymorphous perver-
sity’, or whatever, against the heterosexual phallic economy, but as a reaction
to the very excessive strength of heterosexual fantasies. (IR 29)
The strength of their ‘heterosexual fantasies’, along with their double

hatred of Villette, cements Keller and Logan’s (potentially homosexual)
relationship. What appears to be keeping them ‘straight’ may in fact be
318 L. SIMMONS
leading their desires astray in the opposite direction. We need only think
of Keller’s imploring, bulbous eyes looking up at Logan, Keller circling
around him with an armful of flowers in the Church ‘propositioning’
Logan about the fate of his confession; Keller and Logan decorating the
room together and painting over their ‘grime/crime’; Logan’s cradling of
Keller’s body at the film’s end. As Orr admits ‘Keller may be like Logan
and may well like him—we never know what their relationship truly
is’ (183).
As we have seen in Chap. 6, for Lacan, ‘there is no sexual relationship’
because there are always at least three parties involved, never just the two
partners. This also complicates the issue of homosexuality which can never
just be the relationship between two persons of the same sex but must also
contain a fantasized third. According to Žižek,
the need for this fantasmatic Third arises from the excess which escapes the
(sexual) partner’s grasp: … on the male side, it is the drive which makes him
stick unconditionally to his (political, artistic, religious, professional) voca-
tion. The eternal male paranoia is that the woman is jealous of this part of
him which resists her seductive charm, and she wants to snatch it from him,
to induce him to sacrifice that kernel of his creativity for her (afterwards, of
course, she will drop him, because her interest for him was sustained pre-
cisely by that mysterious ingredient which resisted her grasp) … paradoxi-
cally, a chaste priest is one of the emblematic figures of the non-castrated
Other, of the Other not bound by the symbolic Law. (FRT 91)
If it is Father Logan’s unconditional religious ‘vocation’ that provokes

Ruth’s ‘seductive charms’, then it is this vocation that cements Keller’s
attraction to him where the fantasized third figure could well be
a paternal God.
Dans La R(r)ue
I Confess begins with its camera slowly advancing across the shimmering St
Lawrence River towards the silhouetted skyline of Québec City. As the
camera tilts upwards over the distinctive architecture of Chateau Frontenac,
dramatic brooding rain clouds play across the upper screen, then the image
cuts to a sharply tilted angle of a statue in front of the Québec House of
Parliament. The next shot contains Hitchcock’s signature cameo appear-
ance. From a low position the camera looks up a long, wide set of stairs.
High above, silhouetted against a dramatic dark sky, and bright clouds
Fig. 8.4 Direction sign in opening sequence
that after rain have broken apart to reveal some light, the figure of
Hitchcock determinedly gazing straight ahead strides across the screen
walking into a shaft of that light and disappearing off the screen to our left.
Following these images and the opening credits come a series of
insistent one-way street signs, each one inscribed in capital letters with
the word ‘DIRECTION’, each one pointing to the right (Fig. 8.4).
These alternate in a montage sequence with shots of sentient façades of
the medieval-like buildings of the city of Québec. The last of the
‘DIRECTION’ signs points the camera to an open window of the
library room of an apartment into which it gazes to discover a lifeless
body sprawled on the floor. The camera then pans to a shuffling bead
curtain in a doorway that is an indication of the ‘direction’ of the mur-
derer. Out on the street, we see a priest stepping away and removing his
cassock. The story begins … According to Tom Cohen, the ‘very topos
of the street [la rue] will anticipate the name [Larrue] of Karl Malden’s
detective introduced later’ and the
320 L. SIMMONS
direction of the arrows, left to right, is the direction of reading, yet this is
nonetheless contradicted by the cameo profile of Hitchcock, crossing as a
shadow only at the top of a cascade of stone steps, moving from left to
right—a movement, a direction that would deracinate any serial model of
reading. (Cohen: vol. 2, 2005b, 23)
True Hitchcock appears to walk away from the murder in his cameo
appearance but, nevertheless, the elementary semiotics of the DIRECTION
signs does suggest a narrative direction under control of the ‘director’
behind the camera. For the film’s spectators there will be something to be
found by following the sign. More importantly, the one-way signs suggest
the ‘directed’ society of Québec described by Murray Pomerance as ‘a
nation within a nation, where the clergy shaped, measured, and marshalled
not only the moral, but also the educational and commercial life of the
people’ (2004, 173). Nevertheless, a society about to be transformed but
here embodied by a priest split between a sacred and a secular persona; an
empowered secular class; an older clergy nostalgic for a lost moral author-
ity; a policeman once a true believer now a cynical cop; a killer Keller who
is German and a new migrant. There are signs on the streets of this
impending change. As well as the directions on the street, and the many
scenes of Keller, Logan and others walking the streets, the film is notable
for its imagery of descent and ascent and ‘verticality’. Will the changes
take the Québécois up or down? Stairways and ladders are everywhere:
starting with the elevated statue on a plinth; the top of the steep steps
Hitchcock crosses in his cameo; Ruth sweeping down the stairs; Villette
approaching Ruth in the upper gallery of the Assembly; Logan and Keller
descending and ascending the steep rectory steps; in a low angle shot-
reverse shot Father Logan sees Keller entering the church; Keller is at the
bottom of ladder from which Father Logan paints a wall; after his trial
Logan goes down the marble stairs out of the court and into the street but
he looks up. This is a skewed world emblematized by the sequence of
police officers interviewing priests around the city each intercut with a
very skewed angle of a church they belong to. Not only are the mecha-
nisms of the State and the Law unconcerned with the inner world of faith
and fidelity, they are now actively interrogating them. There exists a con-
flict between Church and State power in Québec, so that the inner world
sanctified by the Church is a domain for the State to discover.
On Belief: ‘Je sais bien, mais quand même…’

In his essay ‘Je sais bien, mais quand même…’ (‘I know well, but all the
same…’), Octave Mannoni addresses the structure of belief and draws a
distinction between ‘faith’ (foi) and ‘belief’ (croyance). Faith involves a
symbolic pact or binding engagement, and this dimension is not present
in simple belief. The structure of belief, according to Mannoni, is estab-
lished by Freud’s account of disavowal in his discussion of fetishism. The
primary lesson Freud teaches us here, in Mannoni’s view, is ‘how a belief
[croyance] can be abandoned and preserved at the same time’ (2003, 70),
and he intends to show how this apparent contradiction is an everyday
occurrence. It reveals itself every time the formula, ‘Je sais bien que, mais
quand même’, is found, and it is found wherever beliefs are confronted
with a reality that denies them. Disavowal is at the core of the belief struc-
ture that belongs to bad faith, insofar as this is characterized by the accep-
tance (mais quand même) of not believing what it believes (je sais bien),
and this is precisely what Mannoni locates in Freud’s account of fetishism.
Mannoni rejects the commonly assumed notion that disavowal
(Verleugnung) rests on Freud’s dualistic topology of the conscious system
and the unconscious. The ‘mais quand même’, as he claims, is not an
unconscious gesture. Were it to be so, then the fetish, the disavowal,
would effectively be a sign of psychotic hallucination, which it specifically
is not (ibid., 71). Rather, as Mannoni clarifies, ‘the sole reason for the ‘but
all the same’ (mais quand même) is the ‘I know well’ (je sais bien). For
example, the sole reason for the existence of the fetish is that the fetishist
knows (sait bien) that women have no phallus’ (ibid.). Belief persists
despite, or in fact because of, the fact that one has been disabused of one’s
belief. Thus, one does not really believe what one believes, yet consents to
believe it nonetheless. For Žižek, who cites Mannoni, this relates, for
Lacan, to the case of the big Other: ‘“there is no big Other” it is just a
virtual order, a shared fiction, we do not have to believe IN it in order to
believe IT, to feel bound by some symbolic commitment’ (OB 109–10).
With regard to I Confess there are two deceptions taking place. First,
Ruth (during the countryside tryst) does not tell Logan of her marriage to
Grandfort—she ‘keeps a secret’—and, second, her insistence (on the Lévis
ferry and again under interrogation) that she still loves Logan. Disavowal
in this way forms the basis of her love. Her avowal (‘I know very well that
he is a priest…’) demonstrates knowledge of what she is denying, just as
her disavowal (‘but all the same I love him’) denies what she has just
322 L. SIMMONS
avowed. The structure matches Logan’s (‘I know very well that Keller has
committed a murder…’) but by making the vow to ‘keep the secret’ he is
reduced to (‘but all the same I cannot reveal the murderer’). Disavowal
thus forms the basis of his faith. In both cases what we have is the con-
struction of a fetishistic form of subjectivity whose actions are structured
by beliefs it knows to be untrue and conspires to deceive itself because it
sees through its own deceptions. As Mannoni puts it, ‘belief, shedding its
imaginary form, is symbolized sufficiently to lead on to faith, that is, to a
commitment’ (2003, 75). It is not a question of how belief intercedes in
an already existing field of acts but of how the acts themselves are not pos-
sible outside a certain structure of belief. For Žižek, this is the ultimate
structure of contemporary Christian faith, this is ‘the ultimate heroic ges-
ture that awaits Christianity: in order to save its treasure, it has to sacrifice
itself—like Christ who had to die so that Christianity could emerge’
(PD 171).
There is, of course, more than a touch of perversity in all of this.
Perversity is not a Sadean ‘anything goes’ for Žižek but rather is contin-
gent on the forbidden fruit, and transgression is alluring as long as the
subject believes in the existence of a big Other (God). Despite the associa-
tion with ‘sexual deviancy’, Lacan uses perversion in a technical sense to
designate the certainty that the subject knows what the Other wants. The
pervert needs God to sustain his libidinal economy. The perverse subject
(Father Logan) tries to evade a confrontation with the non-existence of
God, and avoids questioning because he or she knows the meaning of the
desire of the Other. Žižek notes that the figure of Christ subverts this
structure, the theological framework of Christianity. The speech of Christ
during his dying moments—‘Father, why has Thou forsaken me?’ (Eloi
Eloi lama sabachthani?)—is the site of this subversion. This is Christ’s
darkest hour, it activates the possibility that God is non-existent or no
response is forthcoming. In identifying with Christ, the Christian believer
(unwittingly) identifies with this position of anguished doubt. The
Christian is a pervert like the fetishist: he or she knows something full well
(God does not exist/my mother does not have a penis) yet disavows it at
the same time through the fetish. Paradoxically and counterintuitively for
Žižek, Christianity can only fully become itself by destroying itself. We
might say the same of Father Michael Logan.
Surplus-Enjoyment: ‘An Accessory after The Fact’

In his interview with Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock stated, ‘Any priest who
receives the confession of any killer becomes an accessory after the fact’
(1985, 203). Is not the supplementary structure of ‘accessory after the
fact’—‘Whoever, knowing that an offense has been committed, receives,
relieves, comforts or assists the offender in order to hinder or prevent his
apprehension, trial or punishment, is an accessory after the fact’
(U.S.C. 18)—the same structure of Lacanian enjoyment as the remainder
or excess (plus-de-jouir), which prevents the subject from ever occupying
the place provided for it within the Law, but at the same time holds the
subject together and provides it with another place? This is what Žižek
calls ‘Lacan’s basic materialist position that the lack itself has to be sustained
by a minimum of material leftover, by a contingent, indivisible remainder
which has no positive ontological consistency’ (PD 152–3). Even Father
Logan’s jury sentence of ‘not guilty’ must be supplemented by the presid-
ing judge who comments: ‘Michael Logan, while I have no doubt that the
jury must have reached this conclusion in utmost fairness and solemn
regard for justice, I cannot help expressing my personal disagreement with
their verdict’. In French, the ‘plus-de’ of plus-de-jouir can mean both
‘more’ and ‘no more’, hence the ambiguity: both more pleasure and no
more pleasure. Because of this ambiguity, and since the quality of excess
does not ‘add to’ an already consolidated substance but is necessary to its
existence nonetheless, Žižek draws a homology with the Marxist construct
of ‘surplus-value’ (Mehrwert). The capitalist mode of production relies on
excess since the capitalist gets back from the process of production more
than was contributed. However, even as the worker loses the surplus of
his/her labour inasmuch as it is enjoyed by the capitalist, the worker
depends for survival on continued production and is thus trapped and
exists within the terms established by the circulation of this excess. ‘It is
this paradox which defines surplus enjoyment’, Žižek writes, ‘it is not a
surplus which simply attaches itself to some “normal” fundamental enjoy-
ment, because enjoyment as such emerges only in this surplus, because it is
constitutively an excess’ (SOI 52). Indeed, Žižek’s startling proposition is
that Lacan can supply what Marx overlooked by ‘focusing on the ambigu-
ous overlapping between surplus-value and surplus-enjoyment’ (OB 19).
What Lacan elaborates, suggests Žižek,
is how this renunciation of the body, of bodily pleasures, produces a pleasure

of its own—which is precisely what Lacan calls surplus-enjoyment. The fun-
324 L. SIMMONS
damental ‘perversion’ of the human libidinal economy is that when some

pleasurable activity is prohibited and ‘repressed’, we do not simply get a life
of strict obedience to the Law deprived of all pleasures the exercise of the
Law itself becomes libidinally cathected, so that the prohibitory activity
itself provides a pleasure of its own. (TS 106)
Surplus-enjoyment thus complicates the issue of responsibility (IR 93).

Father Logan can exonerate himself from responsibility with regard to the
symbolic network of Law invoking the inviolability of the confessional and
the sacredness of a priest’s vows. However, he is responsible for the little
bit of (perverse) enjoyment he derives from his ‘I can’t say’ and for the
reverse case of his libidinal satisfaction as ‘victim’ of the Law. The subject
gets surplus-enjoyment back both in the form of transgression and of sub-
mission and obedience, that is, it perversely returns in ‘the heroic suicidal
transgressive gesture which excludes the subject from the symbolic com-
munity’ (OB 29). At the end of the film the Québécois community rejects
him; is Father Logan’s flaw that he is behaving like a saint, with (self-
righteous) pride?
The Žižekian subject finds itself in a place not of its own choosing,
attached to fantasies of which it remains unaware but which nevertheless
structure its relation to enjoyment. Refusing the forced choice is, for
Žižek, a choice for subjective destitution, in the sense that the subject has
to give up the very symbolic coordinates that shape it. ‘Enjoyment’, Jodi
Dean writes, ‘is a kind of fixity, something that holds the subject together,
that provides it with a place. And, this place is not the same as a subject
position or place in the symbolic order of language’ (2006, 24).
Paradoxically, as Žižek comments, ‘utter passivity is the foreclosed fantasy
that sustains our conscious experience as active, self-positing subjects—it
is the ultimate perverse fantasy’ (WDR 202). Indeed, as Hitchcock
acknowledges to Truffaut in his interview, it was the fixity and passivity of
Logan as subject that remained unacceptable to his film audience:
FRANCOIS TRUFFAUT: People like the picture, they’re absorbed in

it, but they keep on hoping that Clift will
speak up, which, of course, is a misconcep-
tion. I feel sure that you didn’t expect that
sort of reaction.
ALFRED HITCHCOCK: I agree with you. (1985, 203)
How is it that an anti-Catholic atheist like Žižek has turned towards

Christian belief and has argued that the ‘Christian legacy is worth fighting
for’? Why does Žižek want to retain a version of the Christian view of the
Self and redeem the materialist kernel of Christianity? It is because ‘reli-
gious belief far from being the pacifying consolation, is the most traumatic
thing to accept’ (OB 86)? Ultimately, Žižek sees the Christian legacy as the
call to ‘thoroughly reinvent ourselves’ (OB 148), ‘through identifying
with the unique figure of God-the-Son abandoned by God’ (OB 146).
The act of Hitchcock’s Father Logan must be viewed in this light, not as
a conservative resignation to implacable institutional doctrine, a kind of
ecclesiastical closing in on itself, but as a return to the human vulnerability
of the subject. It is in this way that Logan’s stance opens up a gap for radi-
cal social change (the change that will eventually come to the province of
Québec). Logan’s redeeming gesture and his (albeit uneasy) exoneration
in the Symbolic Order is a version of Christ’s sacrifice which, in a kind of
supreme Hegelian Aufhebung, is ‘the ultimate heroic gesture that awaits
Christianity: in order to save its treasure, it has to sacrifice itself—like
Christ who had to die so that Christianity could emerge’ (PD 171). As
Murray Pomerance concludes: ‘This is a film where things can only be
watched and never be known’ (Pomerance 2004, 172).
Notes
1. Peter Ackroyd in a recent biography confirms Donald Spoto’s assertion,
arguing that Hitchcock was born into a deeply Catholic family. Three of
his grandparents were Irish Catholics, and Hitchcock’s father referred to
him as ‘my lamb without a spot’. In what Ackroyd describes as ‘a form of
familial confession’, the young Hitchcock recited his daily misadventures at
his mother’s bedside. His Catholic education, Ackroyd believes, ‘instilled
in him a tremulous sense of guilt’, and his films are shaped by ‘a Catholic
vision which is designed to have power which is emotional and conscious’
(2015, 2, 7, 63).
2. In 2012, an article appeared in the Wall St Journal (December 6, 2012)
written by a Jesuit priest Father Mark Henninger which refutes Spoto’s
claim that Hitchcock rejected religion as his death approached. Henninger
recounts how in Hitchcock’s later years, he visited the Hitchcock family
home with Father Sullivan where Mass was regularly said.
3. See, for example, the discussion of Hitchcock’s Rope in Chap. 7 where it
might be argued that Brandon and Phillip kill David Kentley ‘for’ their
former teacher Rupert Cadell.
326 L. SIMMONS
4. Žižek labels Hitchcock’s films after Marnie ‘post’-films of disintegration

(EYAW 5).
5. See also his Paul’s New Moment: Continental Philosophy and the Future of
Christian Theology, with Creston Davis and John Milbank (PNM 2010).
6. See John Dickinson and Brian Young (2003), Michael Gauvreau (2005)
and Gérard Pelletier (1984). As Pelletier notes: ‘The Quebec episcopate
and the clergy … were still in charge of a great many of the normal func-
tions of a modern State. They dominated education from primary school
to university. Through the religious orders they owned or managed almost
all the hospitals. Their good works took the place of social security and
public welfare…’ (49).
7. Brooks cites Paul de Man’s discussion of Rousseau’s Confessions in his
Allegories of Reading (293) where the confession produces ‘the excuse or
justification of guilt (by the fact of confessing it) and at the same time the
accumulation of more guilt (by the act of confessing it)’, and he concludes
that what is produced is: ‘a dynamic that is potentially infinite. The more
you confess, the more guilt is produced. The more guilt produced, the
more the confessional machine functions’ (2000, 22).
8. Interestingly, Lacan refutes this suggestion: ‘Absolutely not! They are not
at all alike. In analysis we begin by explaining to people that they are not
there in order to confess. It is the first step of the art. They are there to
talk—to talk about anything’ (TR 63).
9. See: http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p2s2c
2a4.htm. Accessed November 29, 2020.
10. Jack Sullivan notes that composer Dimitri Tiomkin’s ‘distant song that
expresses Ruth’s hopeless, doubly forbidden love’ was initially titled ‘Love,
What Have You Done to My Heart?’ and that its ‘singer is recorded at such
a distance that her lyrics seem yet another secret’ (2006, 163–4).
11. As well as Žižek’s treatment, the richness of this story for contemporary
theorists is attested to by the fact it has been the subject of commentaries
by Gilles Deleuze (1998) and Giorgio Agamben (1999) and Jacques
Rancière (2004).
12. Quoted in Luiz Eduardo Prado de Oliviera, ‘Frustration’ https://www.
e n c y c l o p e d i a . c o m / e a r t h -a n d -e n v i r o n m e n t / e c o l o g y -a n d -
environmentalism/environmental-studies/frustration. Accessed
November 31, 2020.
13. There is a suggestion that the Québec Catholic Church may have been
directly responsible for the changes: There was a hitch when Catholic
authorities saw George Tabori’s original script and stopped all use of their
churches in the city, because in the original draft, Clift’s character was
found guilty. Rather than fight the Catholic fathers, Hitchcock instructed
Tabori to alter his script (see Patrick Humphries 1986).
14. The wine, of course, is Christ’s blood, and the coin (money) achieves the
balance between the two sides.
15. For Hitchcock’s relationship with and dependence on his wife Alma
Reville, see Pat Hitchcock O’Connell and Laurent Bouzereau (2004).
Donald Spoto (1984, 337) notes that the name Alma was chosen in the
final stages of scripting of the film.
16. For a recent re-evaluation of Clift’s career, see the documentary directed
by his nephew, Robert Anderson Clift, Making Montgomery Clift (2018),
reviewed by Jim Farber, ‘Montgomery Clift: The Untold Story of
Hollywood’s Misunderstood Star’ (Guardian, 29 October 2018).
References
Works by Žižek
EYS Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. New York and
London: Routledge, 2nd edition. 2002.
EYAW Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid to
FA The Fragile Absolute, or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For?
FRT The Fright of Real Tears: Krzystof Kieslowski between Theory and Post-theory.
London: British Film Institute. 2001.
FTKN For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor. London:
Verso, 1991.
IR The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters. London:
Verso, 1996.
MC The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? with John Milbank. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2009.
MI Mapping Ideology. London: Verso, 1995.
OB On Belief. London: Routledge, 2001.
PD The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2003.
PNM Paul’s New Moment: Continental Philosophy and the Future of Christian
Theology, with Creston Davis and John Milbank. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos
Press, 2010.
PV The Parallax View. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. 2006.
SOI The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1989.
TN Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press. 1993.
TS The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. London:
Verso, 1999.
WDR Welcome to the Desert of the Real. London: Verso, 2002.
328 L. SIMMONS
Works by Lacan
S2 The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the
S3 The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book III: The Psychoses, 1955–56, edited by
Jacques-Alain Miller, translated with notes by Russell Grigg. London:
Routledge, 1993, p. 235.
S4 Le seminaire. Book IV: La relation d’objet (1956–1957). Paris: Seuil, 1994.
S8 The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book VIII: Transference, edited by Jacques-Alain
Miller, translated by Bruce Fink. Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity
Press, 2015.
TR The Triumph of Religion preceded by Discourse to Catholics, translated by Bruce
Fink. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013.
Works by Freud
SE XII ‘Types of Onset of Neurosis’ (1912), vol. 12, The Standard Edition of the
Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1955–: 227–238.
SE XII ‘Observations on Transference-Love (Further Recommendations in the
Technique of Psychoanalysis III)’ (1915 [1914]), vol. 12, The Standard Edition
of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Translated from the
German under the General Editorship of James Strachey. In collaboration with
Anna Freud. Assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson, 24 volumes. London:
The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1955–: 157–171.
SE XX ‘The Question of Lay Analysis: Conversations with an Impartial Person’
(1926), vol. 20, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud. Translated from the German under the General Editorship of
James Strachey. In collaboration with Anna Freud. Assisted by Alix Strachey
and Alan Tyson, 24 volumes. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of
Psychoanalysis, 1955–: 177–258.
SE XXIII ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’ (1937), vol. 23, The Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Translated from
the German under the General Editorship of James Strachey. In collaboration
with Anna Freud. Assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson, 24 volumes.
London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1964:
210–253.
Other Texts
Ackroyd, Peter. 2015. Alfred Hitchcock. London: Chatto and Windus.
Agamben, Giorgio. 1999. Bartleby, or on Contingency. In Potentialities: Collected
Essays in Philosophy, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, 243–71. Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press.
Badiou, Alain. 2003. Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
Brooks, Peter. 2000. Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature.
Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Cohen, Tom. 2005b. Hitchcock’s Cryptonomies. Volume 2. War Machines.
Dean, Jodi. 2006. Why Žižek for Political Theory?. International Journal of Zizek
Studies 1:1: 18–32.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1998. Bartleby; Or, The Formula. In Essays Critical and Clinical,
trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco. London and New York: Verso.
Dickinson, John and Brian Young. 2003. A Short History of Quebec. Montreal:
McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Foucault, Michel. 1979. The History of Sexuality. New York: Pantheon Books.
Gauvreau, Michael. 2005. The Catholic Origins of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution
1931–1970. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University.
Hallward, Peter. 2003. Badiou: A Subject to Truth. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Hitchcock O’Connell, Pat and Laurent Bouzereau. 2004. Alma Hitchcock: The
Woman Behind the Man. New York: Berkley Books.
Humphries, Patrick. 1986. The Films of Alfred Hitchcock. New York: Crescent Books.
Jameson, Fredric. 1988. The Vanishing Mediator; or, Max Weber as Storyteller. In
The Ideologies of Theory, Essays 1971–1986. Volume 2: The Syntax of History.
Routledge: London: 3–34.
McGilligan, Patrick. 2003. Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light.
New York: Regan Books.
Mannoni, Octave. 2003 [1969]. ‘Je sais bien, mais quand même’. In Clefs pour
l’Imaginaire ou l’Autre Scène. Paris: Seuil: 9–33. ‘I know very well, but all the
same’ … In Perversion and the Social Relation, ed. Molly Anne Rothenberg,
Dennis A. Foster and Slavoj Žižek, trans. G.M. Goshgarian. Durham &
London: Duke University Press: 68–92.
Melville, Herman. 1986. Bartelby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street. In Billy
Budd and Other Stories. Harmondsworth: Penguin: 1–46.
Orr, John. 2005. Hitchcock and Twentieth-Century Cinema. London:
Wallflower Press.
Pelletier, Gérard. 1984. Years of Impatience: 1950–1960, trans. Alan Brown.
New York: Facts on File.
330 L. SIMMONS
University Press.
Rancière, Jacques. 2004. Deleuze, Bartleby, and the Literary Formula. In The Flesh
of Words: The Politics of Writing, trans. Charlotte Mandell, 146–64. Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press.
Rohmer, Eric and Claude Chabrol. 1979. Hitchcock: The First Forty-Four Films,
trans. Stanley Hochman. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co.
New York: Ballintine Books.
Sullivan, Jack. 2006. Hitchcock’s Music. New Haven and London: Yale
University Press.
Thomas, Deborah. 1996. Confession as Betrayal: Hitchcock’s I Confess as
Enigmatic Text. Cineaction 40: 32–7.
Weis, Elisabeth. 1982. The Silent Scream: Alfred Hitchcock’s Sound Track. London:
Associated University Presses.
CHAPTER 9
Coda: Does Hitchcock Remake Žižek?
Abstract In 1998, Gus van Sant remade Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960)

(almost) ‘shot-for-shot’. The critical reaction was one of bewilderment
and dismay. Why engage in such an academic and meaningless exercise?
But interestingly, ‘remaking’ is a process central to all of Hitchcock’s films.
And ‘remaking’ is part of the structure of repetition that already exists in
every film. So what can van Sant’s film tell us about how Žižek’s use of
Hitchcock ‘remakes’ Žižek? Žižek can only remake Hitchcock, reveal his
truth, as a failure to retell. Indeed, Žižek interprets Hitchcock only through
the failure to interpret him, only through a certain wilful blindness.
Perhaps then it is Hitchcock who remakes Žižek? Rather than simply cata-
loguing Žižek’s return to Hitchcock, this book has attempted to enact a
return to Žižek through Hitchcock. Is it Hitchcock who helps us see that
Žižek’s entire project, still ongoing, is driven by the question of the
Lacanian Real?
One can never know too much about Hitchcock.

—Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry
One doesn’t often get a second chance.
—Scottie Ferguson, Vertigo
There can never be a faithful remake ... because there can never be a
simple original uncomplicated by the structure of the remake.
—David Wills, Play It Again, Sam

Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62436-1_9
332 L. SIMMONS
Double Takes: Hitchcock Remakes Himself

As Stuart McDougal has convincingly shown, the process of remaking is
central to all of Hitchcock’s work, and the remake appears in a variety of
forms throughout his career:
• Most obviously in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934 and 1955),
which Hitchcock first made in 1934 and filmed a second time twenty
years later. In doing so, he ‘retained the structure of the original but
changed the characterizations and many of the incidents’ (McDougal
1998, 61).
• Taking a theme and remaking it in a different context (e.g. ‘the
wrong man’ was first developed in The Lodger (1927) and then
reworked in The Wrong Man (1957) and again in North by
Northwest (1959)).
• Remaking a single shot or the transition between shots as well as
entire sequences (a scream from The Lodger (1927) is remade in
Blackmail (1929) and again in The 39 Steps (1935)).
• Hitchcock’s films are also ‘remakes’ in the sense that many of them
are adaptations of original novels or plays.
• And, finally, ‘remaking’ and the ‘makeover’ itself appears as a theme
in several films. In Vertigo, Scottie Ferguson spends considerable
time and energy remaking Judy in the image of a woman he once
loved, a woman who herself, as Madeleine, was ‘remade’ as the wife
of her former lover Gavin Elster. In addition, Madeleine is presented
as the ‘remake’ of an historical antecedent, Carlotta Valdes. As
McDougal concludes, ‘Vertigo is in part a meditation on the process
and consequences of remaking by a director for whom this had been
a lifelong concern’ (1998, 67).
On the one hand, these different forms of remaking reflect Hitchcock’s

desire to get things right—they are a part of his obsession with the details
of moviemaking as he developed as an artist.1 Nevertheless, as soon as we
investigate the category of the remake, its edges begin to blur—as David
Wills has argued, it is but a particular case of what exists within the struc-
ture of every film (1998, 148). True the remake is a genre, it has its own
codes, conventions and institutional constraints (the most common rea-
son given for remaking is economic—reselling ‘presold’ property), but
every remake simultaneously refers to and ‘remakes’ the genre itself. So
9 CODA: DOES HITCHCOCK REMAKE ŽIŽEK? 333
‘what distinguishes the remake is not the fact of its being a repetition or
containing repetitions, rather the fact of its being a precise institutional
form of the structure of repetition’, what Wills describes as ‘the citational-
ity or iterability, that exists in and for every film’ (148). The iterability that
functions in Hitchcock’s films in the five ways mentioned above. As Wills
remarks about Jim McBride’s remake of Godard’s Breathless, ‘There can
never be a faithful remake … because there can never be a simple original
uncomplicated by the structure of the remake’ (157).
Because of his desire for technical perfection we might say that
Hitchcock seeks to erase the traces of his own production, then it stands
to reason that what his ‘remake’ would seek to erase from an earlier exam-
ple (even an earlier film in the case of The Man Who Knew Too Much
(1955)) would be precisely the very traces of remaking. That is, by remak-
ing himself, Hitchcock erases himself. The paradox is that Hitchcock in
erasing himself like this, his spectator is duped into believing that he has
restored the seamlessness of a coherent and consumable image (a film, or
portion of a film, whose ‘faults’ have been corrected). The spectator is
unaware that in remaking himself, Hitchcock is supplementing himself,
adding to, rather than subtracting from the play of differences that is his
oeuvre. Thus, the remake necessarily both covers and fails to cover the
discontinuities or incoherences that structure the ‘original’. The film the
remake produces thus becomes enfolded back into the abyss that is the
original film; it inscribes in itself the structure of non-coherence and non-
integrality that inhabits the first film or sequence or shot, however much
it might presume to erase (or correct) those qualities in its remake. It
simply carries them over into the new product so all that is left to do is yet
one more remake, to remake it again. And, if this structure of the remake
pervades his entire work, perhaps this is the reason behind Hitchcock’s
famed ‘cameo appearances’? Hitchcock does not just sign his remake and
wink at the audience in the manner we have come to expect. Instead he
transfers the question of identity posed at the point of the image—and
repeated here by means of the competing images—to the level of his film
as a whole.2
334 L. SIMMONS
Creating Your Own Precursor: Van Sant

Remakes Hitchcock
It is a scene recognizable to all of us, familiar like a recrudescent dream: A
woman, pale and lissome, hair cropped short, stands beneath the stream of
a motel shower. There is nothing to indicate trouble, no portents of doom,
but we know what is going to happen, it is ineluctable, and this knowledge
lends the scene an air of menace. We await the inevitable. Through the
corrugated plastic curtain, we now see the bathroom door open, slowly,
silently. A figure emerges, galvanized from shadow, arm raised and face
obfuscated; the figure pulls back the curtain—it is a woman, with long
grey hair, an anachronistic dress from the 1950s, a kitchen knife clutched
in her fingers—and, after a brief dramatic pause, long enough for a scream
to escape from the showering woman’s mouth, the intruder begins to
slash, long downward strokes, into her back and torso, a vermillion stream
spiralling around the drain as the film score shrieks. The killer leaves and
the battered woman, reaches out, clutches the plastic curtains, collapses
and lies slumped over, her face against the floor, eyes open and vacant. It
is one of cinema’s indelible moments, but this time, in Psycho (Dir. Gus
Van Sant, 1998),3 it is not quite how you remember it. It is in colour and
the once dark black blood is now a bright, crisp red. This time there are
far more shots of the knife and the wounds on Marion’s back now seem to
gape. Also the shower curtain is this time patterned with a refractive design
and, in a new cut-in, the pupil of Marion’s eye dilates in death. The scene
appears to take longer and now, seemingly irrelevant, includes brief shots
of a maelstrom in the sky, of dark swirling clouds as if conspiring.4
The original shower scene, which has been vivisected and analysed as
much as any other in the history of American cinema, takes up just forty-
five seconds of Hitchcock’s film and comprises seventy-eight camera set-
ups and fifty-two cuts. It took a week to film (one third of the film’s total
shooting schedule), and twenty-six takes just to get the spinning shot of
Janet Leigh’s eye right. The scene became an obsession for Hitchcock,
who worked assiduously and feverishly to get everything perfect—and to
not run afoul of the Hays Code censors. The scene’s greatness is pretty
much uncontested. Why remake it? Why alter it if any alteration will feel
unnecessary? It cannot be improved upon. But might we say that Van Sant
shows us through contrast what makes Hitchcock’s scene, and his film, so
effectively compelling. The extra shots, the colour, the added violence
demonstrate how the restraint of the original imbues the act with a kind of
civility that belies the savagery, how its meticulous construction of audi-
ence identification is antipodal to the violent crime it depicts. It enhances
what Robin Wood called ‘The meaninglessness of it (from Marion’s point
of view)’ which ‘completely undermines our recently restored sense of
security’ where ‘it is her perception of Norman’s condition that gives
Marion her chance of salvation’. ‘It is’, Wood insists, ‘part of the essence
of the film to make us feel the continuity between the normal and the
abnormal’ (2002, 146, 145). The ‘irrationality’ and ‘meaninglessness’ of
Van Sant’s version can only underline Hitchcock’s careful balancing of our
sympathies and the brutal shattering of viewer identification with Marion
and shift to Norman, ‘sensitive, vulnerable, trapped by his devotion to his
mother’ (146), that he has carefully nurtured up until this point. ‘In a
sense’, says Wood, ‘the spectator becomes the chief protagonist, uniting in
himself all the characters. The remainder of the film is an inquiry into the
sources of the psychological hell state represented by Norman Bates: a
descent into the chaos world’ (147). In this way, Van Sant’s remake is also
irrational and meaningless, and each arbitrary deviation introduced and
noticed undermines the viewer’s sense of security because it alters audi-
ence participation in a film that has become so deeply embedded in film-
viewing consciousness.
Gus Van Sant’s Psycho is often described as a ‘shot-for-shot’ remake,
though this is not really accurate. As we have just seen, there are devia-
tions, changes and additions. Some of these additions feel desperate, an
attempt to make the film feel edgier, modern. But some are not so negli-
gible. Vant Sant in interviews has proposed that his film ‘holds up a mirror
to the original film: it’s sort of its schizophrenic twin’ (quoted in Schneider
2000, np). Hitchcock’s Psycho is, in a sense, a film about fetishizing the
past—about being beholden to it. Norman Bates is a man haunted by his
childhood, and by his desperate, disturbing actions which he tries to for-
get, tries to undo, by impersonating his mother, bringing her back from
the dead. He is rewriting (family) history. Van Sant’s remake is also about
being beholden to the past, and about trying to change by ‘bringing it
back from the dead’, like Norman, rehearsing it again, trying to re-film
history. The meaning of each shot, each emulation, is defined by its syn-
chrony with Hitchcock’s original shots and its diachrony with the history
and evolution of cinematic language. Van Sant haunts Hitchcock as much
as Hitchcock’s ‘original’ haunts Van Sant.5
Let us explore another example in which Van Sant’s remake illuminates
the historical specificity of Hitchcock. It is the scene just before the famous
336 L. SIMMONS
shower scene described above which Raymond Durgnat titles ‘Norman

Plays Peeping Tom’ (2002, 103–106). This time, let us begin with the
Hitchcock ‘original’. In the motel parlour, Norman, who has deliberately
placed Marion in ‘Cabin 1’, listens through the interconnecting wall to
Marion moving around in her unit. His expression darkens. He lifts a pic-
ture off the wall, revealing a peephole to which he applies his eye. The
light from Marion’s unit shines back on Norman’s bulging eye and will
dance over his shadowy body when he moves away from this peephole.
Norman watches as Marion removes her dark underwear and wraps herself
in a housecoat. Norman then withdraws and marches off towards the
house. In Psycho 60, Norman gazes at Marion through the peephole and
the viewer is made to share Norman’s perspectival gaze, and thus to iden-
tify, at least for the moment, with Norman. However, Van Sant’s restaging
of this scene in Psycho 98 encourages the viewer to rethink the original
phallocratic gaze. He achieves this in three ways:
• First of all, the viewer not only gazes with Norman at the sexualized
body of Marion, but we also gaze at Norman who is masturbating.
Norman is thus also rendered as a sexualized object of the view-
er’s gaze.6
• Secondly, in Psycho 60, before he looks through the peephole,
Norman displaces the reproduction of a painting that covers the
hole. In Psycho 60, this painting is a copy of a version of the 1731
painting Susanna and the Elders by Willem van Mieris, but in Psycho
98, it is a copy of Titian’s Venus with a Mirror (1555), which, inci-
dentally, is also on the wall in the parlour next to Susanna and the
Elders in Psycho 60. What is the difference? For Psycho 60, Donald
Spoto underlines the connection between voyeurism, desire and vio-
lence in both the painting and the film: ‘And so that we have no
doubt about his intention, Hitchcock makes everything clear:
Norman removes from the wall a replica of “Susanna and the
Elders” … Norman, in other words, removes the artifact of deadly
voyeurism and replaces it with the act itself. So much for “mere”
spying’ (1992, 322). Nevertheless, as Katrina Powers, referring to
Psycho 60, points out: ‘For centuries, paintings of Susanna and the
Elders have subtly played on the sympathies of viewers, inducing
them to identify both with Susanna and with the Elders. By placing
this painting so prominently in this scene, Psycho picks up this com-
plicated identification of the spectator as it manipulates its own audi-
ence into identifying with both Norman and Marion’ (2016, np).
For the painting in Psycho 98, Powers adds, ‘In Titian’s painting,
Cupid holds up a mirror as Venus poses, smiling with satisfaction at
her reflection. … Venus’s crossed arm is neither shielding her nudity
nor defending her, but is striking perhaps one of many poses as she
contemplates her own loveliness. … Thus the painting not only con-
nects Marion to an idealized version of feminine beauty, but also
alludes the relationship between Venus and Cupid, an ambiguously
sexual mother-son relationship parallel to the one Norman [describes]
to a disquieted Marion’. The story here twists the voyeurism into
something different, in which the mirror and the vanitas tradition
signals Venus’s—and thus Marion’s—self-absorption. In this tradi-
tion, Marion’s beauty will be the cause of her misfortune, and it is
not by chance, as Van Sant is aware, that Marion strikes the pose of
Titian’s Venus twice: once in the parlour in front of Norman and
then again in the shower this time as she attempts to shield herself
from her attacker.
• Thirdly, while it is not clear in Hitchcock that Norman derives sexual
pleasure from watching Marion’s body here and later in the shower
(the assumption of the role and dress of his mother renders this
questionable) in Van Sant’s version, Marion is directly eroticized
in this way.
The critical response to Van Sant’s film has been negative in review after
review, with critics listing the differences between the two films, yet long-
ing for the ‘original’ instead of Van Sant’s version.7 Yet, as Esther Anatolitis
points out, ‘What Van Sant achieves is to force the viewer into looking for
differences within a field of repetition where other remakes have us des-
perately looking for similarities and elbowing our friends in the darkened
cinema when we recognize the ever-so-oblique references, so very proud
of our sharpness’ (quoted in Schneider 2001–2002, 141). In ‘Is there a
proper way to remake a Hitchcock film?’, (2004) Žižek suggests that Van
Sant’s film promises more than it delivers: it is a ‘failed masterpiece’, nei-
ther different enough from Hitchcock’s to elaborate its themes, nor simi-
lar enough to achieve ‘the uncanny effect of the double’ (268). Though
the remake is no masterpiece, its difference-in-sameness can still be put to
critical work. As Žižek notes, the more similarities there are between two
objects, the more visible the differences become. By repeating Hitchcock’s
Psycho, van Sant generates another Hitchcock, the van Santian one, and we
338 L. SIMMONS
are thus dealing with not two but three texts: Hitchcock’s original Psycho,
van Sant’s and the van Santian Hitchcock. Rather than suggest, as its
detractors have, that Van Sant’s Psycho follows Hitchcock’s film too
closely—that it adds nothing to the ‘original’—the counterintuitive way of
approaching his remake, as the close readings of the shower and voyeur
scenes above reinforce, would be to argue that Van Sant’s Psycho through
its differences confirms Hitchcock’s ‘original’.
How might we better understand these complications of how the pres-
ent becomes a past? Žižek offers a suggestion in Less than Nothing with his
discussion of a short text by Jorge Luis Borges titled ‘Kafka and His
Precursors’ where, borrowing from an essay by T.S. Eliot ‘Tradition and
the Individual Talent’, Borges describes how certain authors are not sim-
ply influenced by those that come before them but that they ‘create their
own precursors’ (LTN 209). Borges writes that ‘The word “precursor” is
indispensable in the vocabulary of criticism, but one should try to purify it
from every connotation of polemic and rivalry. The fact is that each writer
creates his precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it
will modify the future’ (1964, 108). Now, says Žižek, the question—is this
message really in the source text or am I just reading it there?—is resolved
since ‘we can only perceive or state this retroactively, from the perspective
of the present’ (LTN 210). We are able to understand Hitchcock through
Van Sant’s appropriation of him; Van Sant’s present can become
Hitchcock’s past because in a way it is already. One way this happens,
Craig Uhlin proposes, is through an alignment with Norman’s character,
so ‘that Van Sant’s film literally enacts Norman’s (failed) preservation of
the lost love object. Just as Norman seeks to maintain the illusion that his
mother is living, so too does Van Sant seek to resuscitate a “dead” clas-
sic … It is only by literally embodying or re-enacting Norman’s psychosis
, by transferring from content to form, that Van Sant is able to be faithful
to the representation of it’ (2010, 132).
Another way of stating this is what Van Sant is doing now will have been
history. This tense structure is one we have encountered, the future per-
fect in English, a tense more accurately referred to as the future anterior
(futur antérieur) in the Romance languages, the tense that refers to some-
thing that lies ahead and yet which is already complete, not will happen
but what will have happened.8 There is a hint of the impossible in the
future perfect, of a future that has already taken place, a future projection
rooted in a memory of the past, a pro-tention founded in retention. The
future perfect tells us something about how we craft our narratives with
what we experience, the foreseeable with the unexpected. The future can-
not be known, but its contentlessness is given form by the strange expecta-
tion that you are going to have known it, by the strange temporality of
what will have happened. To think about a text or a film in terms of the
future perfect is not to use it in the way we may normally use a tense: that
is, as a description of the basic relation between the time of an utterance
and the time to which it refers. It is to acknowledge that the release of a
film is a transaction in which the past is re-experienced, but also its pros-
pect decoded in the process of delivery as a quasi-present. The future
perfect suggests a kind of doubling of temporal perspective, of what will
happen with what has already taken place.
How to Talk About Films You Haven’t Seen: Žižek

Remakes Hitchcock
There is a recent, not terribly amusing, review of Žižek and his work by
Thomas Moller Nielsen (2019) that counts examples, and constructs a
table, to illustrate Žižek’s proclivity for citing the same core group of
authors and discussing the exact same collection of topics. The article con-
tinues by arguing the most important reason for Žižek’s prodigious output
(forty-eight books in English, sixteen in Slovenian) is that he engages in
self-plagiarism and recycles material. All of which is proof of Žižek’s obses-
sive narcissism that thrives on outrage. Nielsen, outraged himself, then
rages at Žižek’s lax standards regarding academic practice: the scale of his
self-plagiarism; his inter-textual recycling and intra-textual recycling; his
open use of Wikipedia for information and extended plot descriptions of
operas and films; the fact he cites blurbs of books rather than the books
themselves; and has written about topics with which he has no genuine
familiarity or competence. All of which ‘contravenes traditional conven-
tional academic standards’. Nielsen seems oblivious to the fact that Žižek
has already responded to these charges on several occasions, most ably in
his polemical response to the edited volume The Truth of Žižek (2007):
This is why I effectively do what I am accused of: repeating the same exam-
ples—what changes is their interpretation … The difference between the
Idealist and the materialist use of examples is that, in the Platonic-Idealist
approach, examples are always imperfect, they never perfectly render what
they are supposed to identify, so that we should take care not to take them
too literally, while, for a materialist, there is always more in the example than
340 L. SIMMONS
in what it exemplifies: that is, an example always threatens to undermine

what it is supposed to exemplify, since it gives body to what the exemplified
notion itself represses, is unable to cope with. … That is why the Idealist
approach always demands a multitude of examples—since no single example
is fully fitting, one has to enumerate them to indicate the transcendent
wealth of the Idea they exemplify, the Idea being the fixed point of reference
of the floating examples. A materialist, on the contrary, tends to repeat one
and the same example, to return to it obsessively: it is the particular example
which remains the same in all symbolic universes, while the universal notion
it is supposed to exemplify continually changes its shape, so that we get a
multitude of universal notions circulating, like flies around a light, around a
single example. (‘Afterword: With Defenders Like These, Who Needs
Attackers?’ 2007, 234)
You could say then, contra Nielsen, that the real motivation for Žižek’s
self-plagiarism and repetitions of himself is, if anything, anti-narcissistic. In
a way, it is his own dissatisfaction with the convincingness of his arguments
and the foundations of his system that make him repeat again, that makes
him double and triple things.9 After each repeated citation or exposition,
everything is the same and yet everything is different.
Nielsen also discusses what he believes to be ‘the major feature of
Žižek’s work, namely, his (remarkable) discursiveness’. He notes that in his
Like a Thief in Broad Daylight (2018), Žižek reflects on ‘farting, porn,
Robert E. Lee, Lenin, La La Land, and the sexual lives of US presidents’
but almost never directly the book’s ostensible subject ‘the issue of tech-
nology and its impact on humans’. We could argue that Žižek’s straying
from subject to subject, and his return to the same examples, which annoys
Nielsen so much, is paradoxically the best way of ‘following’ and remain-
ing true to his subjects: Hegel, Lacan, Hitchcock. The rhetorical figure of
Žižek’s agrammaticality of following is anacoluthon. Anacoluthon, literally
a want of grammatical sequence, a passing from one construction to
another before the former is completed, an interruption within the
sequence. Anacoluthon is what fails to follow; it is what is non-sequential
or literally ‘without following’ (an, privative, akolouthos, ‘following’). But
there exists a strange, paradoxical and inseparable bond between anacolu-
thon and the acolyte. The acolyte (from akolouthos) is the ‘follower’, and
the apparent opposite of anacoluthon, but contained within it. Žižek is
always metastasizing to new subjects, not just to say the same thing again,
but to clarify his system, to come at it from another angle, to fill in one of
its lacks. So, Hitchcock’s follower, Žižek, best follows him by being
led astray.
This ‘being led astray’ is what Jean-Pierre Dupuy, one of Žižek’s con-
stant interlocutors like Alain Badiou, describes—in a phrase that returns
throughout his work—as the ‘logique du détour’ (2000): detour as turn,
deviation, circuitous path, even a turn of phrase, the association of theo-
retical and disciplinary perspectives that may seem ideologically and theo-
retically different: rationality and faith, the anthropological and the
technological, Ayn Rand and Althusser, Kant and Sade, Hitchcock and
Lacan.10 Dupuy’s theoretical use of this term would call for its own ana-
lytical exposition—a detour on the ‘détour’ one could say. In order to
indicate the cognitive movement that Dupuy has in mind with reference
to the articulation between past and future, prevision and prophesy,
between regression and anticipation, the logique du détour is a logic of the
turn, an indirect logic, even a ‘folding back’ of an element or part such as
the lapel of a jacket or the cover of a book (which is one of the meanings
in French of détour). The theoretical point being that a movement for-
ward or back in time, an articulation between past and future, prevision
and prophesy, regression and anticipation, can no longer to be simply
thought of as inserted in a temporal line understood as a succession of
instants (a historical linearity) nor that of a circular restoration (an eternal
return). So, the centre of an anacoluthon is both a rupture and an inter-
ruption, but it is also a fold, a folding back that enables the continuation
of thinking, of saying something new, of triggering a new ethical perspec-
tive. Žižek’s repetition is a form of folding over or overlap—and the cre-
ation of a final text that is agrammatically related to the initial text (that
follows and does not follow it).
Nielsen seemed especially annoyed that Žižek would dare write about
films without having seen them. For someone who has declared that he
wrote about Spartacus without viewing the end of the film, and wrote on
Avatar without seeing it at all,11 it seems appropriate that in Less than
Nothing, Žižek refers to Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk About Books You
Haven’t Read (2009a). In Žižek’s paraphrase, Bayard, ironically but seri-
ously, argues ‘that in order to really formulate the fundamental insight or
achievement of a book, it is generally better not to read it all—too much
data only blurs our clear vision’ and that ‘a truly detailed knowledge often
only gives rise to a boring specialist exegesis, rather than living insights’
(LTN 279, 280).12 Referring to Hegel’s Phenomenology, Žižek highlights
the productive tension between insight and blindness and the positive
342 L. SIMMONS
power of blindness and of ignoring parts of reality.13 ‘The art of abstrac-

tion, of tearing apart, can also be understood as an act of self-imposed
blindness, of refusing to “see it all”’ (278). This is not an accident, and
Žižek can only see what he sees through a certain ‘blindness’:
How does a notion emerge out of the confused network of impressions we

have of an object? Through the power of ‘abstraction’, of blinding oneself
to most of the features of the object, reducing it to its constitutive key
aspects. The greatest power of our mind is not to see more, but to see less in
a correct way, to reduce reality to its notional determinations—only such
‘blindness’ generates the insight into what things really are. (LTN 279)
So how does Žižek remake Hitchcock? It might be thought that

through his many different retellings of Hitchcock’s films, or moments
from those films, that they eventually reveal their ‘truth’. But this would
be to merely repeat the obvious, a presumed assumption. Žižek can only
remake Hitchcock, reveal his truth, as a failure to retell. Indeed, Žižek
interprets Hitchcock only through the failure to interpret him, only
through a certain wilful blindness, seeing less to see more, or, as he says,
‘to see less in a correct way’. This is why each time he returns to Hitchcock’s
films he further divides them, splits them from themselves, and from his
previous iteration of them. Rex Butler has carefully outlined this process:
In other words, each time Žižek returns to the same example there is not an
overturning based on new evidence, but a kind of splitting, a separation of
the ‘facts’ from themselves to make clear that which allowed the facts to be
put. This is our undoubted sense that each time Žižek returns to the ‘same’
argument, he pushes, or attempts to push, it a little further, giving it an extra
twist. (2014, 6)
This is the nature of the Žižekian remake.
Plagiarizing from the Future: Hitchcock

Remakes Žižek
It is difficult to know where to begin in theorizing remakes. It seems that
many of the studies of remakes do not go much beyond a superficial point-
by-point, pluses-and-minuses kind of analysis and, as we have seen, the
responses to Van Sant’s Psycho were mostly of this nature. Often this kind
of discussion employs a common strategy: the critic treats the original and
its meaning for its contemporary audience as a fixity, against which the
remake is measured and evaluated. And, in one sense, the original is a fixed
entity. But, in another sense, it is not. Viewed from the fuller perspective
of cultural analysis over time, the original must be seen as still in process in
regard to the impact it had or may have had for its contemporary audience
and, even more, that it has for its current audience. A remake is then a
kind of reading or rereading of the original. To follow this reading or
rereading, we have to interrogate not only our own conditions of recep-
tion but also to return to the original and reopen the question of its recep-
tion. For Žižek with Hitchcock, the ‘unique dimension’ ‘is not to be
sought primarily at the level of narrative content. Its original locus is else-
where. … while the narratives of his films provide a funny often perceptive
comment on our times, it is in his sinthoms that Hitchcock lives forever.
They are the true cause of why his films continue to function as objects of
our desire’ (‘Is there a proper way to remake a Hitchcock film?’ 258–262).
What is left for us now of the task to remake and rethink Hitchcock?
According to Žižek, there are two solutions:
One is indicated by Gus van Sant’s Psycho which, paradoxically, I am inclined

to consider a failed masterpiece, rather than a simple failure. The idea of an
exact frame-by-frame remake is an ingenious one, and, in my view, the prob-
lem is that the film does not go far enough in this direction. … The second
way would be to stage, in a well-calculated strategic move, one of the alter-
native scenarios that underlie the actualized Hitchcock. (‘Is there a proper
way to remake a Hitchcock film?’ 268)
Rather than the direct homages that fail to exact the perfect ‘frame by
frame’, then, the proper remake would be found in the ‘alternative sce-
narios’, the alternate realities in Hitchcock narratives. On the one hand,
the general lesson seems to be that we live in a world of alternate realities
in which, as in a cyberspace game, when one choice leads to a catastrophic
ending, we can return to the starting point and make another, better,
choice—what was the first time a suicidal mistake, can be the second time
done in the correct way, so that the opportunity is not missed. Along with
Hitchcock, this universe of cinematic alternate realities is best illustrated
by the films of one of Žižek’s favourite directors, Krzysztof Kieślowski. In
The Double Life of Véronique, Véronique learns from Weronika, avoids the
suicidal choice of singing and survives; in Red, Auguste avoids the mistake
344 L. SIMMONS
of the judge; White ends with the prospect of Karol and his French bride
getting a second chance and remarrying. However, while this universe
sustains the prospect of repeating past choices, and thus retrieving missed
opportunities, it can also be interpreted in the opposite, much darker, way
as Hitchcock’s fantasmatic scenarios of denouement in Vertigo, The Birds,
Psycho and other films intimate.
For Hitchcock, the creation of the double was a means of structuring
moral ambiguity, which we noted earlier is so basic to his work. More than
most filmmakers, he builds his mise-en-scène out of a counterpoint of
gazes, of characters looking at each other, and the viewer looking at the
characters within spaces that contextualize those gazes as intrusive, threat-
ening and violent. The possibility of visualizing one character as a reflec-
tion of the other, or one act or gesture as a mirroring of the desire of the
other, grows easily out of such structures. With looks and gestures,
Hitchcock rhymes his doubles: Judy-Madeleine in Vertigo is a double dou-
bled: she is the fault line of Scottie’s psychosis, his desire made impossible
flesh. And in turn she is two women to him: one the person someone else
created, who Scottie turned into the image of his beloved, the other the
‘real’ woman he thinks is someone else and proceeds to recreate again into
the image of his love. Often the doubling structure takes place in the
exchange between image and viewer, the latter given an image of sado-
masochistic desire through his or her assent to the characters’ actions on
screen and thereby becoming a kind of fantastic double of the character on
the screen.
The questions we have asked ourselves in this book. What does Žižek
mean by his many references to Hitchcock? What does he want? Why does
Žižek return to Hitchcock again and again? After Žižek we know many
new things about Hitchcock. Yet Hitchcock is not to be mastered by
Žižek. So is his a re-reading that can only be read as the failure to read,
simply in that case reflecting on itself? What if, asks Žižek, Hitchcock is the
‘Subject Supposed to Know’? (‘Is there a proper way to remake a Hitchcock
film?’ 257). To answer these questions, let us return, with Žižek, to another
text by Pierre Bayard, Le plagiat par anticipation (Plagiarising from the
Future) (2009b), which he refers to in Less than Nothing (LTN 557–62).
Bayard proposes the notion of ‘plagiarism by anticipation’ that writers can
plagiarize not only works from the past, but also from the future. The
accusation of plagiarism depends on a resemblance between an earlier and
later work which is ‘so strong that it cannot be dismissed as mere coinci-
dence or sharing of the same style’ (LTN 557), which, of course, is exactly
what Van Sant says he wished to achieve with Psycho 98.14 But what if, asks
Žižek following Bayard, we really have ‘the paradoxical case of the earlier
work plagiarizing the not-yet existing work from its future’? Again the
operative tense here is the futur anterieur which we have discussed. It will
always seem, in retrospect, that Psycho 98 is what Hitchcock wanted to say.
Interestingly, Žižek illustrates Bayard’s thesis with an example from
Hitchcock and suggests that Vertigo plagiarizes in anticipation Psycho:
Vertigo contains an enigmatic episode in which Madeleine is seen by Scottie

as she opens a window and then in explicably disappears from the house.
Does this scene not point forward to Psycho, to the appearance of the moth-
er’s silhouette in the window—in both cases, a body appears out of nowhere
and disappears back into the void? The fact that in Vertigo this episode
remains unexplained tempts one to read it in a kind of futur antérieur,
already pointing towards Psycho: is not the old lady who is the hotel clerk of
the house in Vertigo a kind of strange condensation of Norman Bates and his
mother, the clerk (Norman) who is at the same time the old lady (mother),
thus providing in advance a clue to their identity, which is the great mystery
of the film? (LTN 557–8)
It is an idea that is both ‘profoundly anti-teleological and materialist’,

yet the notion that we may write or paint or film knowing that the mean-
ing of what we do will be given to it in the future derives from what Žižek
calls the ‘openness’ of the Symbolic: ‘Once we enter the symbolic, things
never simply are, they all ‘will have been,’ they, as it were borrow (part of)
their being from the future’ (LTN 558). Žižek’s contention is that in the
Symbolic order we write (or film) knowing that the meaning of what we
write (or film) will be given to it in the future. Is it not possible to suggest,
then, that Hitchcock becomes a plagiarist-in-advance of Žižek, he becomes
Žižekian avant la lettre once Žižek arrives. Žižek does not simply add
another dimension to how we receive Hitchcock, his interventions inform
us that Hitchcock’s text is ‘open towards the future, as full of gaps and
inconsistencies waiting to be filled in’ (LTN 559). Like Van Sant, it will
always seem in retrospect that Žižek says what Hitchcock wanted to say. In
fact, as Žižek argues elsewhere, Hitchcock belongs to ‘the series of artists
whose work forecast today’s digital universe’ and it is only now we have
entered the digital world that we can truly understand Hitchcock, ‘that
the cyberspace hypertext is this new medium in which this life experience
will find its ‘natural’, more appropriate, objective correlative, so that,
346 L. SIMMONS
again, it is only with the advent of cyberspace hypertext that we can effec-
tively grasp’ what … Hitchcock [was] effectively aiming at’ (‘Is there a
proper way to remake a Hitchcock film?’ 267–68).
In trying to consider Žižek after Hitchcock, in terms of Žižek’s return
to Hegel and to Lacan, Hitchcock helps us see that Žižek’s entire project,
still ongoing, is driven by the question of the Real. Hitchcock’s discovery
was that of the field of effects in social relations, of relations in the Symbolic
order, is never uncomplicated, that sexuality is always a form of dissatisfac-
tion. His films reveal that the unconscious is not a place, or even a felt
presence, but simply, a representation that in turn refers to other represen-
tations, and the propulsive movement of film is that it always offers more
images in lieu of meanings. If, then, Hitchcock seems most interested in
what is divided and doubled, what appears and is withheld; he, too, con-
tinuously poses the question of the che vuoi?, of the mutual constitution of
the psyche and the social. Žižek’s discourse gives us Lacanian psychoanaly-
sis in its fuller dimension and broader scope, but Hitchcock already gives
us the perpetual interest in what might be called the objective register of
psychoanalysis that complements its subjective, or character, focus. He
made films that are speculative and searching, and that address the social
and the role of the constituted frameworks of social life.
After Žižek, we know so many new things about Hitchcock, but the
ultimate point of turning to Hitchcock is not so much about knowing
more as knowing differently. Simultaneously knowing too much and too
little. In this book, Žižek’s work has not been measured, summarized or
mastered; it is to be turned around in, revelled in, ‘detoured’ to use
Dupuy’s word again. As Lacan said of Freud: ‘One never goes beyond
Freud … One uses him. One moves around within him. One takes one’s
bearings from the direction he points in’ (S7 206). Perhaps it is the same
with Žižek and Hitchcock. Žižek can never go beyond Hitchcock, yet is
always called back to him, takes his bearings from him, keeps circling
around him. Žižek keeps returning to Hitchcock, rereading the images of
his films, listening to their soundscapes, reflecting on why the films say too
much and too little, attending to the ways Hitchcock’s films perform
rather than master the phenomena he was trying to explore.15 This is the
deepest economy of Žižek’s work—all that we mean by the richness and
texture of its analyses, the anti-orthodoxy of its critical judgements, the
counterintuition of its seeming paradoxes. After Žižek, we read Hitchcock’s
films not as philosophy, but as though Hitchcock himself was speaking
two discourses, that of the analyst who punctuates what the analysand
speaks, and that of the analysand whose desire derails that very saying.
After Žižek, we view Hitchcock’s films as if they were addressing us directly
as analysts, inviting us into hidden lacunae. Our reading of the films is
activated as if we were now attuned to their form, the contours and the
gaps of their discourse, their ‘sinthomes’. How at the very moments when
they seem summative they proliferate overdeterminations, questions,
enigmas; how they ask the Lacanian question che vuoi? ‘What do you
want?’ After Žižek, Hitchcock’s corpus is to be reviewed and rethought
again and again. And here it is the outcome, not the matter of accurate
chronology—Žižek after Hitchcock or Žižek after Lacan—but rather the
outcome of a certain self-contradictory logic, the very recovery of the
Real, how the noting of its artistic effectiveness, is enough to do away
with it.
This book has attempted to stage something of its own return, enacting
a return to Žižek through Hitchcock, rather than simply cataloguing
Žižek’s return to Hitchcock, in the hope that the arguments have achieved
greater effect than they might have otherwise. It is this prospect of argu-
ments and books acting out their own ideas, instead of authoritatively
delineating them, that Žižek pursues in advocating his rereading of Hegel
with Lacan (with Hitchcock). In fact, if we want to suggest what Žižek
introduces into philosophical discourse in its simplest form, it is some-
thing like the Lacanian Real. As Žižek writes of the Real, it is ‘simultane-
ously the Thing to which direct access is not possible and the obstacle
which prevents this direct access; the Thing which eludes our grasp and
the distorting screen which makes us miss the Thing’ (IDLC 288). What
Hitchcock teaches, how he ‘remakes’ Žižek, is the shocking revelation that
we are in the Symbolic, but things mean other than they appear, that
objects and people potentially deceive, that they are not immediately
themselves but only signify and can only be accessed through a process of
signification. After Hitchcock’s remake of Žižek, viewers today should
keep returning to Hitchcock, reviewing his cinematic language, touching
what in his films says too much, and too little, attending to the ways his
films perform, rather than master, the very phenomena he was trying to
discover. We should view Hitchcock as though his images are addressing
us, inviting us into lacunae. We should activate viewing as a process of
attunement to the form, contour, gap and surface of images. How the
shape and rhythm of what is being seen point us to what has not found its
way to being seen. And how, after Hitchcock, Žižek’s system that, as we
have seen, cross-references itself incessantly through repetition and
348 L. SIMMONS
obsession, still remains a work to be worked or detoured through, a cor-

pus to be rethought again and again.
Notes
1. See also Verevis (2006, 16–19) for the way in which Hitchcock ‘remakes
himself across a body of film and television work’.
2. Robert Kolker notes, ‘Hitchcock calculated himself as part of the overall
structure of his work. He foregrounded his presence by appearing in his
films; he developed an instantly recognizable persona on television; and he
entered the popular imagination with a distinctiveness unrivalled by any
other filmmaker in fifties and early sixties American culture. This success on
all levels created the event of the director as celebrity. His films were
known; and he (or rather the public persona he created) was known
through the work of film reviewers, who referred to almost any film that
used suspense, shock, or a “surprise ending,” as “Hitchcockian”’
(1998, 35).
3. From here on I will use the standard conventions of Psycho 60 and Psycho
98 to refer to Hitchcock’s and Van Sant’s films.
4. See Thomas Leitch (2000) for a list of 101 differences between Van Sant’s
Psycho and Hitchcock’s.
5. For this hauntology, see Donaldson-McHugh and Moore (2006).
6. For Roger Ebert, the inclusion of the masturbation scene is ‘the most dra-
matic difference’ between Psycho 98 and Psycho 60 and, he argues, this ‘is
appropriate because this new Psycho evokes the real thing in an attempt to
recreate remembered passion’ (1998, 12). Janet Staiger draws attention to
‘Van Sant’s tactics of irony’ and argues that by casting a decidedly straight
actor as Norman, Van Sant is rejecting the homophobia of Hitchcock’s
casting of Anthony Perkins (who was gay), and thus his deliberately
inverted casting roles produce ‘a strong critique of heteronormativity’
(2004, 15).
7. The most trenchant of these criticisms is by Adrian Martin (2001–2002)
but see also James Naremore (1999–2000), Jonathan Rosenbaum (1998),
James MacDowell (2005), William Rothman (1999) and Constantine
Santas (2000).
8. Also relevant here is Lacan’s discussion of the temporal order of the ‘futur
antérieur’ which he identifies as the necessary precondition for the realiza-
tion of subjective truth (E 37 and E 247). The structure of future anterior-
ity is the very model of temporal becoming as Lacan understood it, of
‘what I will have been, given what I am in the process of becoming’
(E 247).
9. For a positive take on Žižek’s repetitions, see Robert Pfaller (2007).
10. For major references to Dupuy in Žižek, see: LTN 972–79, 981–84; IDLC
315–16, 455–60; LET 25–6; D 35–6, 279–80; SFA 235–6; OwB 187.
11. ‘I wrote about Avatar before I’d seen the film, but having seen it I was
right to attack it’ (quoted in Jeffries 2011).
12. Rex Butler in his review of Less than Nothing raises the obvious question
and asks whether Žižek ‘has actually read Bayard’s book before putting it
to such good use’ (2014, 1).
13. Žižek refers to ‘the overlapping of “blindness and insight”’ in Paul de
Man’s (1983) exposure of Derrida’s blindness when deconstructing
Rousseau in his Blindness and Insight (LTN 279).
14. Van Sant has stated on several occasions that one reason for his remake of
Psycho was to renew its appeal for a younger generation (see Santas 2000
and Schneider 2000). The motivation for a shot-for-shot re-creation was
to retain the ‘mood’ of the original (see MacDowell 2005).
15. Curiously, Hitchcock himself wrote a short essay entitled ‘Why Thrillers
Thrive’ (in Gottlieb: 1995, 109–12). The reason being: ‘Watching a well-
made film, we don’t just sit by as spectators; we participate’ (109).
References
Works by Žižek
D Disparities. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016.
IDLC In Defence of Lost Causes. London: Verso, 2008.
LA Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture.
LET Living in the End Times. London: Verso, 2010.
LTBD Like a Thief in Broad Daylight. London: Penguin/Allen Lane, 2018.
LTN Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London:
Verso, 2012.
OWB Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences. London:
Routledge, 2004.
SFA Sex and the Failed Absolute. London and New York: Bloomsbury
Academic, 2020.
‘Afterword: With Defenders Like These, Who Needs Attackers?’ in The Truth of
Zizek, edited by Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp. London and New York:
Continuum, 2007: 197–255.
Routledge, 2004: 257–274.
350 L. SIMMONS
Works by Lacan
S7 The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960,
Other Texts
Bayard, Pierre. 2009a. How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read. London: Granta.
Bayard, Pierre. 2009b. Le plagiat par anticipation. Paris: Editions de Minuit.
Borges, Jorge Luis. 1964. Kafka and His Precursors. In Other Inquisitions:
1937–1952, trans. Ruth L.C. Simms, 106–108. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Butler, Rex. 2014. Less is Nothing is More than Something (Part 1). International
Journal of Žižek Studies 8:1: 1–10.
Donaldson-McHugh, Shannon and Dan Moore. 2006. Film Adaptation,
Co-Authorship, and Hauntology: Gus Van Sant’s Psycho (1998). The Journal of
Popular Culture 39:2: 225–233.
Dupuy, Jean-Pierre. 2000. Sur la logique du détour. Revue de philosophie
économique 1: 7–32.
Durgnat, Raymond. 2002. A Long Hard Look at ‘Psycho’. London: BFI Publishing.
Ebert, Roger. 1998. Psycho, Chicago Sun-Times, December 6, p. 12.
Jeffries, Stuart. 2011. A Life in Writing: Slavoj Žižek. The Guardian, July 15.
Kolker, Robert. 1998. Algebraic Figures: Recalculating the Hitchcock Formula.
In Play It Again, Sam: Retakes on Remakes, ed. Andrew Horton and Stuart
Y. McDougal, 34–51. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Leitch, Thomas. 2000. 101 Ways to Tell Hitchcock’s Psycho from Gus Van Sant’s.
Literature/Film Quarterly 28:4: 269–73.
MacDowell, James. 2005. Reappropriating Psycho. Offscreen 9:7: https://off-
screen.com/view/value_psycho. Accessed 31 November 2020.
McDougal, Stuart Y. 1998. The Director Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock
Remakes Himself. In Play It Again, Sam: Retakes on Remakes, ed. Andrew
Horton and Stuart Y. McDougal, 52–69. Berkeley: University of California Press.
de Man, Paul. 1983. Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary
Criticism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, second revised edition.
Martin, Adrian. 2001–2002. Gus van Sant vs. Alfred Hitchcock: A ‘Psycho’ Dossier:
Shot-By-Shot Follies. Hitchcock Annual 9: 133–39.
Naremore, James. 1999–2000. Remaking Psycho. Hitchcock Annual 8: 3–12.
Nielsen, Thomas Moller. 2019. What is Žižek for?. Current Affairs: A Magazine
of Politics & Culture, October 18. https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/10/
what-is-zizek-for. Accessed 14 November 2020.
Pfaller, Robert. 2007. Interpassivity and Misdemeanours. The Analysis of Ideology
and the Žižekian Toolbox. International Journal of Žižek Studies 1:1: 33–50.
Powers, Katrina. 2016. Marion, Venus, and Susanna in the Mirror: The Paintings
in the Parlor of The Bates Motel. Americana: Journal of American Popular
Culture (1900–present) 15:2: https://www.americanpopularculture.com/
journal/articles/fall_2016/contents.htm. Accessed 14 November 2020.
Rosenbaum, Jonathan. 1998. Hack Job. Chicago Reader, December 25. https://
www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/2018/09/hack-job/. Accessed 14
November 2020.
Rothman, William. 1999. Some Thoughts on Hitchcock’s Authorship. In Alfred
Hitchcock: Centenary Essays, ed. Richard Allen and Sam Ishii-Gonzales, 29–42.
London: BFI Publishing.
Santas, Constantine. 2000. The Remake of Psycho (Gus Van Sant, 1998): Creativity
or Cinematic Blasphemy?. Senses of cinema 2000: https://www.sensesofcin-
ema.com/2000/feature-articles/psycho-2/. Accessed 14 November 2020.
Schneider, Steven Jay. 2000. A Tale of Two Psychos (Prelude to a Future
Reassessment). Senses of cinema 2000: https://www.sensesofcinema.
com/2000/feature-articles/psychos/. Accessed 14 November 2020.
Schneider, Steven Jay. 2001–2002. Van Sant the Provoca(u)teur. Hitchcock
Annual 9: 140–148.
Spoto, Donald. 1992. The Art of Alfred Hitchcock: Fifty Years of His Motion
Pictures. New York: Anchor/Doubleday, second edition.
Staiger, Janet. 2004. Authorship Studies and Gus Van Sant. Film Criticism
29:1: 1–22.
Uhlin, Greg. 2010. Gus Van Sant’s Mirror-Image of Hitchcock: Reading ‘Psycho’
Backwards. Hitchcock Annual 16: 127–152.
Verevis, Constantine. 2006. For Ever Hitchcock: Psycho and its Remakes. In After
Hitchcock: Influence, Imitation, and Intertextuality, ed. David Boyd and
R. Barton Palmer, 15–29. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Wills, David. 1998. The French Remark: Breathless and Cinematic Citationality. In
Play It Again, Sam: Retakes on Remakes, ed. Andrew Horton and Stuart
Y. McDougal, 147–61. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Index1
A Allen, Jay Presson, 212, 220,

Abyss of Freedom/Ages of the World, 225, 234n7
The (Žižek), 13, 279 Allen, Richard, 32, 44, 62n9, 73,
Ackroyd, Peter, 325n1 89, 109n21
Acousmatic sound, 99 Althusser, Louis, 63n13, 341
Acousmère, 95–99 Anacoluthon, 340, 341
Acrophobia, 40, 46, 48, 64n18 Anamorphosis, 280n6, 281n6
Act, the, 3, 15, 31, 37, 42, 72, 81, 87, Answer of the Real, 80–83
103, 106, 107, 123, 129, 130, Anxiety, 40, 41, 44–48, 63n12, 74,
133, 134, 139, 148n8, 162, 166, 88, 94, 108n10, 145, 189,
170–172, 176, 177, 189, 191, 208–213, 230, 244, 245, 317
194n23, 194n27, 205, 216, 218, affect of, 48, 208, 209, 211
221, 227, 228, 235n13, 248, Aphanisis, 134, 166, 251–255
251–255, 259, 268, 269, 274, Aphonia, 97
292–295, 297, 302, 303, Après-coup, 17, 158
307–310, 317, 322, 325, 326n7, Architecture, 90, 91, 265, 318
334, 336, 342, 344 and parallax view, 90
Agalma, 33, 34, 37, 63n12, 140 Ardrey, Robert, 233n4
Agamben, Giorgio, 326n11 Art of the Ridiculous Sublime, The
Ahistoricism, 87, 88 (Žižek), 4
Alien (film), 119 Aufhebung (sublation), 141–143
1
Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62436-1
354 INDEX
Aulier, Dan, 53, 60, 62n10, 194n26 Blackguard, The (film), 8, 10, 20n8
Austin, J.L., 219, 297 Blackmail (film), 107n1, 332
Auteur theory, 20n11, 242 Blindness, 161, 173, 193n13, 341,
Avatar (film), 341, 349n11 342, 349n13
Bogdanovich, Peter, 104, 132
Bonitzer, Pascal, 44
B Boothby, Richard, 39
Back projection, 122, 144, 146, Bordwell, David, 5, 7, 36, 62n5
218, 234n10 Borges, Jorge Luis, 338
Badiou, Alain, 130, 148n10, Borromeo family, 120
294–296, 341 Bowie, Malcolm, 76, 216
and reading of Paul, 294 Boynton, Robert, 2
and ‘symptomal torsion,’ Brazil (film), 139
130, 148n10 Breathless (film), 333
Badmington, Neil, 74, 79 Brenner house, 92–94, 100, 108n11
Balkans, the, 146, 147 Brill, Lesley, 203, 217, 218, 234n8,
Barr, Charles, 45, 53, 54, 122 234n10, 234n13
Barrowman, Kyle, 20n5 Britton, Andrew, 155, 167, 185, 190
Barthes, Roland, punctum, 28 Bronfen, Elisabeth, 234n10
Bass, Saul, 39 Brooks, Peter, and confession, 298
Bauso, Thomas M., 248 Brown, Royal S., 192n2
Bayard, Pierre, 341, 344, 345, 349n12 Bruno, Pierre, 149n11
How to Talk About Books You Buchanan, Ian, 105, 110n26
Haven’t Read, 341 Buñuel, Luis, 184
Le plagiat par anticipation, 344 Un chien andalou, 184
Beckman, Karen, 132 Butler, Judith, 87, 88, 104
Beeding, Francis, 166 Butler, Rex, 10, 13, 21n12, 37, 104,
Belief, 170, 206, 227–229, 242, 243, 106, 107n6, 136, 245,
246, 247, 258, 291, 293, 295, 342, 349n12
321–322, 325
Bellour, Raymond, 100, 101, 103,
203–205, 208, 233n1 C
Bergala, Alain, 94, 95 Caesar, Julius, 190
Bernini, Gian Lorenzo, 214, 216 Calvert, Charles, 262
The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, 214 Capitalism, 10, 62n6, 137, 138, 228,
Berressem, Hanjo, 194n20 270, 271
Betrayal, 10, 295, 313, 314 Carroll, Nöel, 31, 64n24
Big Other, 63n12, 117, 134, 253, Castration, 45, 123, 140, 155, 170,
309, 321, 322 209, 219, 220, 282n14, 308, 315
Birds, The (film), 2, 3, 27, 72–107, Chabrol, Claude, 9, 179, 292, 293
108n10, 109n19, 110n25, Chamberlain, Neville, 145
235n15, 344 Chaplin, Charlie, 2
three readings of, 72 Chiasmus, 263
INDEX 355
Chiesa, Lorenzo, 33 Crime, 6, 154, 166, 175, 188, 244,

Chion, Michel, 96, 109n16, 136, 255, 257–260, 293, 297, 299,
229, 230 311, 318, 335
‘the acousmatic voice,’ 96, Critical misreading, 27
109n16, 229 Cultural Studies, 6, 7
and acousmère, 96 Cunningham, Douglas, 62n4
Christ, 229, 281n11, 290, 291, Cyberspace, 61, 343, 345, 346
294–297, 300, 322, 325,
327n14
Christianity D
and love, 274, 293 Dalai Lama, 291
perverse core of, 291 Dalí, Salvador, 180–186, 194n21,
Church, the, 40, 95, 214, 228, 290, 194n22, 194n23
295, 300, 303, 308, 309, 315, contribution to Spellbound, 182
316, 318, 320, 326n13 ‘paranoiac vision,’ 180–186
Class system, 266 Dällenbach, Lucien, 282n16
Clemens, Justin, 63n12, 244 Dean, Jodi, 324
Clift, Montgomery, 316, 324, Dean, Tim, 118
326n13, 327n16 Deconstruction, 37
Clinamen, 206–208 Delerium, 181, 182
Cochran, Sara, 194n22 Deleuze, Gilles, 326n11
Cognitivism, 5 Dennett, Daniel, 63n14
Cohen, Tom, 144, 164, 166, 192n2, Derrida, Jacques, 282n14, 349n13
194n24, 319, 320 Desire, 4–6, 13–15, 29, 31–35, 37,
‘bar series,’ 164 39, 41, 42, 45–47, 52, 53,
Columbo (TV series), 259 56–61, 63n12, 79, 80, 85, 96,
Communism, 10 98, 117, 118, 121, 130,
Comte de Buffon, 242 140–142, 161, 170–172,
Confession 175–177, 180, 182, 185, 186,
and Freud, 298 191, 203–208, 210, 211, 213,
and ‘seal of,’ 297, 300, 302 227, 230, 232, 233, 233n1, 242,
Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: 247, 248, 250, 251, 253, 257,
Contemporary Dialogues on the 267, 272–274, 280n4, 282n22,
Left (Žižek), 87, 88, 107, 292, 293, 297, 312, 315, 317,
219, 253 318, 322, 332, 333, 336, 343,
Contradiction, 5, 103, 143, 167, 168, 344, 347
175, 321 object-cause of, 46, 63n12, 80, 140,
Conversations with Žižek (Žižek), 270 211, 230, 247, 315
Counterintuition, 346 Destiny (film), 10
Counts, Kyle B, 91, 92 Detective novel, the, 258
Coursodon, Jean-Pierre, 281n10 Dialectical materialism, 49
Courtly Love tradition, 172 Lacan’s, 49
356 INDEX
Difference, 5, 14, 38, 40, 46, 48, 76, Elsaesser, Thomas, 10, 11,
78, 79, 83, 103, 104, 125, 143, 20n9, 20n11
147n2, 167, 170, 171, 191, 208, Empty signifier, 147n1, 264
219, 229, 244, 275, 306, 307, Enforcer, The (film), 299
333, 336–339, 348n6 Enjoyment, 5, 15, 16, 19, 21n17, 35,
See also Sexual difference 39, 56, 81, 82, 93, 116–119,
Disacousmatization, 96 121, 132, 135, 138–141, 147n1,
Disavowal (Verwerfung), 168 148n2, 163, 175, 193n15,
and faith, 322 202–233, 251, 274, 323, 324
Disparities (Žižek), 78, 83 See also Jouissance
Doane, Mary Anne, 154 Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in
Dolar, Mladen, 96–98, 109n17, 136 Hollywood and Out (EYS) (Žižek),
Double life of Véronique, The 12, 14, 39–42, 58, 61, 62, 97, 98,
(film), 343 133, 160, 163, 164, 176, 253,
Doubles, 13, 17, 32, 35, 54, 57–60, 255, 260, 261, 263, 269, 274, 309
81, 101, 103, 104, 106, 108n15, Ethical acts, 274, 293
109n22, 110n24, 116, 137, 141, Ethics, 253, 264, 273–275,
144, 148n6, 160, 182, 184, 188, 282n20, 291
205, 223, 233n1, 297, 317, Lacanian, 274
332–333, 337, 340, 344 and psychoanalysis, 275
Dreams, 8, 13, 15, 37, 45–47, 64n26, Evans, Dylan, 21n17
85, 122, 130, 156, 158, 176, Everything You Always Wanted to Know
179, 182–186, 188, 192n7, About Lacan (But Were Afraid to
193n13, 231, 260, 280n1, 301, Ask Hitchcock) (EYAW) (Žižek),
302, 334 44, 81, 85, 87, 96, 108n9, 116,
Drive, 7, 19, 33, 51, 85, 100, 104, 147n1, 203, 218, 326n4
154, 187, 203, 209, 220, 226, External reality, 78, 209, 210,
271, 272, 279, 318 277, 279
Dupuy, Jean-Pierre, 42, 341, 346
and ‘logique du détour,’ 341
‘time of a project,’ 42 F
Durgnat, Raymond, 27, 49, 62n2, Falling
62n3, 62n6, 174, 273, 336 fear of, 64n18
During, Simon, 148n7 in love, 39–44, 53, 64n18, 158
Fantasmatic, the, 15, 26–27, 46, 79,
309, 318, 344
E Fantasy, 3–5, 13, 15, 19, 32, 35–39, 46,
Ebert, Roger, 348n6 47, 55, 60, 85, 119, 130–132, 138,
Eco, Umberto, 104 141, 145–147, 157, 163, 166–168,
Edelman, Lee, 88, 110n26, 173 173, 180, 191, 193n14, 204, 206,
Eliot, T.S., 338 207, 221, 242–279, 281n7,
‘Tradition and the Individual 282n18, 304, 305, 312, 324
Talent,’ 338 traversing the, 4, 39, 46
INDEX 357
Fascist ideology, 138 on dreams, 85, 192n7

Father figures, 116, 174, 176, fort/da game, 33
211, 224 ‘The Interpretation of Dreams,’ 80,
Feminine sexuality, 213, 216 85, 186, 192n7
Femme fatale, the, 3, 4, 16, 130, ‘Introductory Lectures on Psycho-
170–172, 217, 226–227 analysis,’ 185
Fetishism, 36, 246–248, 321 ‘Jokes and their Relation to the
Fiennes, Sophie, 2 Unconscious,’ 193n18
Fight Club (film), 7 Kern unseres Wesen, 80
Film noir, 16, 170, 171, 227, ‘Little Hans,’ 40, 41, 209
299, 301 Moses and Monotheism, 13
Fink, Bruce, 74, 80, 207, 233n5 Nachträglichkeit, 158, 160,
‘paltry jouissance,’ 207 162, 223
the phallic as fallible, 207 parricide, 13, 175
Fischer, Lucy, 129 partial objects, 127
Fletcher, John, 212, 234n13 the pleasure principle, 206
Flisfeder, Matthew, 20n5 ‘Psychoanalytic Notes on an
Forclusion, 133 Autobiographical Account of a
For They Know Not What They Do Case of Paranoia (Dementia
(FTKN) (Žižek), 46, 48, Paranoides) (Schreber),’ 134
211, 296 ‘The Question of Lay Analysis:
Foucault, Michel, 298 Conversations with an Impartial
History of Sexuality, 298 Person,’ 298
Fragile Absolute, or, Why is the ‘Repression,’ 84
Christian Legacy Worth Fighting on symptom, 117, 233n5
For?, The (FA) (Žižek), 56, 146, ‘Types of Onset of Neurosis,’ 307
170, 296, 297 ‘The Uncanny,’ 51
Freedman, Jonathan, 154 Vorstellungsrepräsentanz,
Freud, Sigmund, 12–14, 33, 39, 40, 84, 85
45, 46, 51, 80, 84, 85, 117, the Wolfman, 158
118, 125, 127, 133, 134, 137, Fright of Real Tears, The (FRT)
138, 146, 158, 161, 185, 186, (Žižek), 5, 18, 19, 26, 27, 35, 50,
191n2, 192n7, 193n15, 55, 170, 318
193n16, 193n18, 206, 208, Frustration (Versagung),
209, 213, 217, 223, 233n5, 307–310
243, 246, 249, 252, 298, Fuller, Graham, 122, 148n9
307–309, 321, 346 Future anterior (tense), 338
Agieren, 252 Future of religion, 293
‘Analysis Terminable and Future, the
Interminable,’ 298 borrowing from, 345
‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle,’ 33, plagiarism by anticipation, 344
117, 206 relationship with past, 161
358 INDEX
G critique of Kant, 264

Garncarz, Joseph, 20n10 dialectical process, 5, 143, 167
Gaze, the, 6, 15, 16, 18, 19, 26–27, distinction between reality and
35, 47, 50, 51, 54, 63n12, actuality, 78
65n28, 75, 87, 95, 100, 101, ‘Jenaer Realphilosophie,’, 278
103, 123, 126, 127, 146, 156, master/slave dialectic, 11, 12,
164, 185, 188, 203–207, 222, 267, 272
230, 250, 273, 303, 313, 314, negation of negation, 13, 137
319, 336, 344 ‘the night of the world,’ 278, 279
of the Other, 63n12 Phenomenology of Spirit, 267
See also Mulvey, Laura, and gaze and Schelling, 12, 13
Gender, 169–171, 216 Žižek and, 5, 7, 11, 12, 16, 17, 49,
German idealism, 11 78, 104, 143, 167, 254, 264,
Glowinski, Huguette, 74 278, 279, 283n23, 340, 341,
God 346, 347
abandonment of, 299 Heidegger, Martin, 80
death of, 291, 295 Being and Time, 80
Lacan and, 216 Hemmeter, Thomas, 281n9
Godard, Jean-Luc, 333 Hitchcock, Alfred, 2, 14–15, 17–19,
God’s eye view, 86 27, 72, 116, 154, 202, 242,
Goldsworthy, Vesna, 145 290–292, 331–349
Gordon, Paul, 92, 104 America and, 9, 10, 20n11
Gottlieb, Sidney, 8, 9, 44, 107n5, 171, birds as theme, 107n1
191n2, 277 cameo appearances, 7, 61, 283n8,
Griffith, D.W., 9, 11, 44 318, 320, 333
Gunning, Tom, 9 Catholicism and, 290–292
childhood, 186, 335
‘couple on the hill’ motif, 94–95
H distrust of language, 105
Haeffner, Nicholas, 191n2 the double in films, 560
Hallward, Peter, 295 early work in Germany, 20n10
Harpham, Geoffrey, 163 film style of, 242–244
Heath, Stephen, 20n5, 156, function of tracking shot, 203
157, 233n2 German influence on, 9
Hecht, Ben, 154, 194n25 MacGuffin, 80, 107n5
Hedren, Tippi, 108n12, 143, 205, as matrix figure, 7
214–218, 224, 234n9 matte shots, 218
Hegel, G.W.F., 5, 7, 11–13, 78, 104, on objective and subjective
143, 167, 254, 267, 274, 278, suspense, 44
279, 283n23, 340, 341, 346, 347 obsession with detail, 332
act, 254 parallel lines as motif, 165
Aufhebung (sublation), 142, portrayal of guilt, 292
167, 325 practical joking, 248
INDEX 359
‘pure cinema,’ 9, 11, 20n11 Incontinence of the Void (Žižek),

and railways, 122 264, 271
self-parodying, 7 In Defence of Lost Causes (Žižek), 39,
and Selznick, 155, 192n4, 281n7 46, 47, 176, 185, 186, 349n10
sense of humour, 248 Indivisible Remainder, The (Žižek), 49
transference of guilt, 292 Interpassivity, 246–248
and thriller genre, 147 Interrogating the Real (Žižek), 74
use of false sets, 143 Intersubjectivity, 128, 223
use of the ‘cut,’ 130–132, 255 Iterability, 333
Hitchcock, Alma, 327n15
Hitchcock O’Connell, Pat, 327n15
Hitler, Adolf, 145, 147 J
Holbein, Hans, 100, 281n6 Jacobs, Steven, 91, 93, 267, 275, 276
The Ambassadors, 100, 280n6 Jameson, Fredric, 9, 10, 65n30,
Hollywood, 4, 7, 10, 11, 18, 37, 93, 177, 295
144, 147, 148n7, 154, 155, 174, Jeffries, Stuart, 349n11
176, 183, 204, 206, 207, Johnson, Barbara, 282n14
213, 281n7 Johnston, Adrian, 11
Homer, Sean, 170, 206 Jokes
Homosexuality, 244, 247, 248, 257, and Freud, 193n18, 246, 249
265, 266, 272, 317, 318 and Žižek, 2, 177, 193n18,
Horwitz, Margaret, 92, 104, 110n26 244–246, 249, 250, 280n5
How to Read Lacan (Žižek), 280n4 Joseph-Lowery, Frédérique, 194n20
Humour, 248–251 Jouissance, 3, 15–16, 21n17, 21n18,
Humphries, Patrick, 281n12 81, 82, 118, 119, 124, 133, 137,
Hyde, Thomas, 166 139, 148n2, 170–172, 174,
Hypertext, 61, 345, 346 204–214, 216, 218, 226–227,
Hyppolite, Jean, 12, 267 230–233, 233n5, 234n6, 251,
Hysteria, 272 257, 314, 315
Hysteron proteron, 221–225 See also Enjoyment
Jouis-sans (enjoy-meant), 207
Jouis-sens, 16, 21n18, 135–137, 208,
I 211, 232
I Confess (film), 4, 61, 289–327 Judaism, 291, 293, 294
Idealism, 11, 12, 48–51, 65n28 Jung, Carl Gustav, 118, 148n3
Hegelian, 11, 49 Justice, 291, 304, 311, 323
Identity of opposites, 96 Joyce, James, 120, 121, 132
Ideology, 35–39, 63n13, 137, 138,
246, 270, 271
Imaginary, the, 14, 21n18, 34, 81, 90, K
98, 120, 121, 128, 132, 138, Kafka, Franz, 338
139, 169, 209, 211, 280n6 Kammerspiel, 8, 10, 11
360 INDEX
Kant, Immanuel, 12, 78, 264, and enjoyment, 5, 15, 19, 21n17,
274, 341 35, 117, 118, 147n1, 204,
‘categorical imperative,’ 264, 274 206, 208, 323
Kant avec Sade, 274, 341 extimacy, 80
moral law, 264, 274 and fantasy, 3, 4, 37–39, 119,
noumena/phenomena, 78 191, 247
relation to Hegel, 12, 78 feminine jouissance, 213, 214,
Kaplan, E. Ann, 166, 193n12 216, 217
Keane, Marian, 155 Forclusion, 133
Kierkegaard, Søren, 302, 303 formulae of sexuation, 170
Kieślowski, Krzysztof, 5, 55, 293, 343 four discourses, 35
Kinder egg, 34 and Freud, 12, 33, 40, 45, 77, 85,
King, Noel, 122, 148n5 117, 118, 127, 133, 193n16,
King, Stephen, 6 193n18, 208, 213, 217, 223,
Kojève, Alexandre, 12, 267, 268 233n5, 243, 246, 308, 346
Kolker, Robert, 348n2 frigidity, 213, 217
Kristeva, Julia, 232–233 frustration, 307–310
Krutnick, Frank, 171 the Imaginary, 21n18, 34, 90, 120,
Kunkle, Sheila, 254 169, 280n6
infans, 98
‘inmixing of subjects,’ 163
L and James Joyce, 120, 121, 132
Lacan, Jacques, 3, 26, 74, 116, 156, and jouissance, 3, 15, 16, 21n17,
206, 242, 307, 340 21n18, 133, 148n2, 204,
anxiety, 40, 45, 46, 63n12, 208, 206–208, 210, 213, 214,
210, 211, 230 230, 234n6
Autre écrits, 38 jouis-sens, 16, 21n18, 208, 211
barred subject, 6, 59 ‘Kant avec Sade,’ 274, 341
the big Other, 63n12, 321, 322 lamella, 127, 128
blind spot, 6, 26, 27, 34, 156 le père ou pire, 174
the Borromean knot, 120, 134 ‘les non-dupes errent,’ 177
ceding to desire, 274 lost object, 63n12, 211, 242
che vuoi?, 248, 280n4, 346, 347 on love, 141, 170, 227, 243, 258,
comparison with Freud, 1, 12, 40, 308, 310
85, 117, 158, 208, 243, 346 and Marx, 12, 137, 149n11, 323
cri pour and cri pur, 98 materialism of, 11–13, 49
De la psychose paranoïaque dans ses mathemes, 6, 49, 63n12
rapports avec la personnalité, the non-All, 207
181, 182 objet petit a, 3, 27, 33–37, 42, 46,
as dialectical materialist, 49 49, 50, 56, 63n12, 80, 97,
Ecrits, 63n12, 216, 242, 259, 140, 216, 230, 315
281n14, 310 optical schema of two mirror, 210
INDEX 361
phallic jouissance, 207, 213, the Symbolic, 13, 14, 34–37, 39,
214, 227 74–78, 82, 85, 87, 88, 90, 98,
plus-de-jouir, 208, 226, 231, 120, 133, 134, 170, 176, 207,
323 208, 211, 227, 243, 254, 274,
the Real, 13–15, 34, 37, 46, 275, 308
74–78, 80–83, 85, 87, symptom, 116–119, 132, 147n2,
88, 90, 117, 120, 121, 123, 159, 169, 213
133, 211, 273–275, 278, theory of sexual difference,
346, 347 170, 176
Seminar 1, 26, 27, 35, 148n2, theory of the gaze, 100
267 theory of visual art, 130
Seminar 2, 26, 27, 35, 46, 63n12, ‘there is no sexual relationship,’ 3,
74, 123, 156 170, 172, 318
Seminar 3, 134, 193n18 topology, 120, 163
Seminar 4, 40, 308; The Object trait unaire, 243, 246
Relation, 40, 308 ‘traversing the fantasy,’ 4, 39, 46
Seminar 5, 244 triangulated schema, 82
Seminar 7, 14, 77, 85, 130, 234n6, Triumph of Religion (TR), 326n8
274; The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, the visible, 26, 27, 36
33, 77, 85, 130, 274 voice as object, 97, 230
Seminar 8, 307, 310 ‘woman doesn’t exist,’ 132
Seminar 9, 258 Lacan: The Silent Partners
Seminar 10, 210, 230 (Žižek), 193n18
Seminar 11, 26, 38, 49, 128, 156, Laclau, Ernesto, 87, 246
258; The Four Fundamental Lady Vanishes, The (film),
Concepts of Psycho- 107n1, 116–147
Analysis, 26, 258 Laibach, 2
Seminar 12, 97 La La Land (film), 340
Seminar 19, 174 Lamella, 125–128
Seminar 20, 157, 213, 214, 216; La Minotaure, 181
Encore, 170, 206, 213 Lang, Fritz, 8, 10, 11, 20n11
Seminar 21, 157, 177, 233n5 relationship with Hitchcock, 10,
Seminar 22, 149n11, 157 11, 20n11
Seminar 23, 120, 157 Laplanche, Jean, 84, 223, 224
Seminar 24, 157 L’Arivée d’un train a La Ciotat
Seminar 25, 157 (film), 122
and sexuation, 169 Last Laugh, The (film), 8
the sinthome, 3, 116–119, 121, 134, Lawrence, Amy, 272
139, 307, 347 Le Carre, John, 313
subject supposed to know, 161, 258, The Perfect Spy, 313
259, 344 Lebeau, Vicky, 20n5
surplus-jouissance, 208 Leff, Leonard J., 183
362 INDEX
Legend of the Mistletoe Bough, McDougal, Stuart Y., 332

The, 261 McGilligan, Patrick, 11, 64n22, 316
Leitch, Thomas, 64n18, 73 McGowan, Todd, 20n5, 138
Less Than Nothing (LTN) (Žižek), 47, Melville, Herman, ‘Bartelby, the
119, 137, 230, 235n17, 280n5, Scrivener,’ 304, 305
282n21, 283n23, 338, 341, 342, Menninger, Karl, 155, 192n5
344, 345, 349n12, 349n13 Metalepsis, 222
Leupin, Alexandre, 267 Metastases, 154–191
Like a Thief in Broad Daylight Metastases of Enjoyment, The (Žižek),
(Žižek), 340 146, 163, 170, 175, 193n14,
Lissajous spirals, 41 227, 283n23
Living in the End Times (LET) (Žižek), Miller, D.A., 244, 247, 256, 257,
45, 88, 90, 91, 93, 271, 277 264–266, 269, 270, 273,
Lodger, The (film), 332 280n1, 282n18
Looking Awry (LA) (Žižek), 19, 32, Miller, Jacques-Alain, 46
35, 37, 60, 61, 73, 74, 82, 83, anxiety, 46
93, 94, 106, 116, 129, 135–137, la femme à postiche, 217–221
139, 147, 173, 178, 180, 188, suture, 233n2
193n18, 203, 206, 243, 244, voice, 228
251, 259 Mise-en-abyme, 262, 277
Lost Highway (film), 4, 5, 159 Modleski, Tania, 20n5,
Lumière brother, 122 64n18, 110n25
Lynch, David, 4, 5, 15, 159, 204 Mogg, Ken, 166, 178
Money, 212, 218, 225–226,
235n13, 327n14
M Monstrosity of Christ, The (Žižek), 293
MacDowell, James, 348n7, 349n14 Moral, Tony Lee, 221, 225
Mannoni, Octave, 246, 247, 321, 322 Morris, Christopher D., 64n23, 73,
Man, Paul de, Blindness and 189, 260, 262, 280n2
Insight, 349n13 Most Sublime Hysteric, The
Man Who Knew Too Much, The (film), (Žižek), 167
63n17, 317, 332, 333 Mother, 2, 33, 40, 41, 44, 45, 72, 83,
Mapping Ideology (MI) (Žižek), 10, 37 87, 92, 94–96, 100, 104–106,
Martin, Adrian, 348n7 108n15, 110n26, 116, 130, 134,
Marx, Karl, 12, 137, 149n11, 323 135, 142, 179, 180, 205, 209, 213,
critique of ideology, 137 218, 221, 224–228, 230, 232,
surplus value, 323 234n9, 234n12, 235n13, 235n15,
Master Signifier, the, 37 235n17, 248, 251, 290, 307, 308,
Maternal super-ego, 74, 83, 93, 105, 322, 325n1, 335, 338, 345
106, 180 Mother’s voice, the, 98
Mathemes, 6, 49, 63n12 Mulvey, Laura, and gaze, 15, 26, 31,
Maurier, Daphne du, 109n18 36, 204, 208
INDEX 363
Murder, 4, 17, 43, 139, 158, 166, as remainder (reste), 34, 35

167, 172, 188, 224, 225, structure of, 35, 36, 41, 315
235n13, 244, 247, 248, and voice, 63n12, 230
251–255, 257, 259, 261, 266, Oedipal father, 13, 180
268, 269, 278, 279, 290, Oedipal jealousy, 73
292–293, 295, 297, 299–301, Oedipal tensions, 2
303, 304, 314, 316, 317, 320 On Belief (Žižek), 18, 293, 321–322
Music, 56, 135–141, 164, 195n28, Opera, 136, 167
213, 234n10, 255, 262, 267, Opera’s Second Death (Žižek), 136
301, 312 Opposites, unity of, 344
Myers, Tony, 12, 143, 167, 228, 229 Organs without Bodies (OWB) (Žižek),
Mythology, Madness, and Laughter 7, 29, 32, 41, 49, 51, 59, 62n3,
(MML) (Žižek), 49, 50 62n7, 62n10, 94, 110n23, 245
Orr, John, 10, 167, 316–318
Other, the
N gaze of, 18
Name-of-the-Father, the, 13, 74, 121, lack of, 209
133, 134, 139, 177 Oudart, Jean-Pierre, 15, 26,
Naremore, James, 348n7 204, 233n2
Negation, 13, 17, 136, 137, 267, 306 Overdetermination, 347
Negation of negation, 13, 136,
137, 143
Neurosis, 121, 148n3, 208, 298, 307 P
Niederkommenlassen, 39–44 Paglia, Camille, 81, 88, 90–92, 96,
Nielsen, Thomas Moller, 339–341 104, 105, 109n18, 235n15
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 270 Pallasmaa, Juhani, 255, 277
Non-all, the, 207 Paradine Case, The (film), 316
North by Northwest (film), 64n17, Parallax, 5–7, 90, 228, 307
122, 131, 143, 332 Parallax view (PV), 5–7, 65n30, 90,
North Korea, 277 130, 306
Notorious (film), 9, 131, 143, 264 Parallax View, The (film), 21n16
Nuremberg Laws, 145 Parallax View, The (Žižek), 6, 36,
143, 177
Partial objects, 127, 207, 278
O Passage a l’acte, 218, 251–255
Object of desire, illusory nature of, 29, Passivity, 304, 307, 324
32, 33, 56, 140, 207, 210, 211, Past, the relationship with future, 42,
230, 233n1 161, 338, 344
Objet petit a Paternal function, 13, 74, 155, 176
definition, 35, 36 failure of, 155
Lacan and, 3, 33–35, 42, 50, Paul, Saint, 293–296
63n12, 216, 230 and Badiou, 294, 295
as object-cause, 63n12, 140, 315 as vanishing mediator, 295, 296
364 INDEX
Pauline Christianity, 4, 295 Psychosis, 77, 108n9, 121, 127, 133,

Paul’s New Moment (Žižek), 326n5 134, 224, 253, 254, 338, 344
Pelletier, Gérard, 326n6 Puppet and the Dwarf, The (Žižek), 34,
Perry, Dennis, 281n13 42, 78, 292–296, 314, 315, 322,
Perverse father, the (père-vers), 13 323, 325
Perversion, 18, 44, 49, 322, 324
Perverts Guide to Cinema, The (film),
2, 21n16 Q
Pettey, Homer B., 266 Québec, 296, 299, 318–320, 325,
Pfaller, Robert, 63n13, 246, 249 326n6, 326n13
Phallic signifier, the, 212 Church and State power, 320
Photophobia, 187, 194n24 ‘Quiet Revolution’ of, 296
Piso, Michelle, 226, 235n14
Plagiarism, by anticipation, 344
Plague of Fantasies, The (Žižek), R
21n16, 250 Rand, Ayn, 270–272, 341
Plato, Symposium, 33 The Fountainhead, 270, 271
Platonism, 48, 49 primer movers and second
Poe, Edgar Allan, ‘The Purloined handers, 270–273
Letter,’ 281n13 Reality, 3, 7, 10–12, 14, 15, 19, 27, 32,
Pomerance, Murray, 31, 52, 155, 166, 35, 37–39, 47–50, 55–58, 60–62,
231–232, 233n4, 234n7, 65n28, 75–78, 80, 81, 84–87, 90,
235n18, 266, 303, 311, 313, 97, 100–104, 106, 119, 123, 127,
314, 320, 325 128, 135, 138, 139, 147, 156,
Post-theory, 5 157, 162, 163, 166, 167, 170,
Primal scene, the, 95, 158, 168 177, 178, 180–182, 207, 209,
Projection, 47, 48, 79, 92, 108n10, 210, 217, 218, 230, 235n17, 243,
122, 144, 146, 165, 218, 247, 248, 250, 276–279, 311,
234n10, 312, 338 312, 321, 342, 343
Protestantism, 10 Real, the
Psycho (film), 14, 17, 27, 96, 107n1, ambiguity of, 72
131, 164, 230, 243, 334–338, becoming engulfed by, 46
342–345, 348n6, 349n14 and the gaze, 47, 75, 95, 222
shower scene, 336 intersection with Imaginary, 13, 14,
Psychoanalysis 75, 90, 120, 121, 128, 138,
and American culture, 154 146, 175, 218
and enjoyment, 175, 226 Lacan and, 13, 14, 34, 74, 75, 77,
Lacan and, 3, 11, 12, 33, 38, 77, 78, 81, 83, 176, 275
78, 130, 156, 157, 274 and reality, 76, 78
and the self, 6, 48, 119, and the Symbolic, 13, 176
262–263 Rebecca (film), 11, 131, 316
and sexual difference, 176 Red (film), 343
sexuality and, 298 Reflexivity, 20n11
INDEX 365
Religion, 4, 10, 228, 229, 291, 293, Schelling, Friedrich von, 12, 13, 49,
294, 297–303, 325n2 223, 279
Religious fundamentalism, 291 critique of Hegel, 13
Remake, 48, 60, 63n17, 332–348 Weltalter manuscripts, 13
Renault, François, 243 Schmitt, Patrice, 194n20
Repetition Schneider, Steven Jay, 335,
principle of, 117 337, 349n14
‘repetition compulsion,’ 154 Schneiderman, Stuart, 258
Representation, 26, 35, 60, 65n30, Schreber, Daniel Paul, 134
73, 77, 79, 84–86, 98, 108n9, Self, the, 7, 106, 119, 220, 260, 325
146, 156–160, 164, 165, 211, Selznick, David O., 147, 154, 155,
218, 262, 278, 299, 338, 346 183, 281n7
Restivo, Angelo, 99, 108n14 Sex and the Failed Absolute (Žižek), 88,
Retroactivity, 158–160, 173 170, 283n23
Rivette, Jacques, 292 Sexual difference, 170, 171,
Rogers, Samuel, 262 176, 193n14
Rohdie, Sam, 57 Lacan’s theory of, 169
Rohmer, Eric, 9, 48, 64n27, 179, the Real of, 173
292, 293 See also Sexuality; Sexuation
Romantic comedy, 147 Sexuality, 52, 169, 170, 172, 212,
Romm, May E., 154, 155, 191n1 213, 216, 217, 266, 315, 346
Rope (film), 4, 10, 242–279, 280n1, and desire, 170
281n7, 281n8, 316, 325n3 and psychoanalysis, 173
Rosenbaum, Jonathan, 348n7 See also Sexual difference
Rothman, William, 38, 45–47, 64n26, Sexuation, 169–174
164, 188, 189, 234n7 Shakespeare, William (Julius Caesar),
Hitchcock and murder, 164, 188 189, 190
Roudinesco, Elizabeth, Short circuits, 4, 6, 32, 105, 253, 254
194n20, 194n23 Signification, 14, 33, 77, 80, 83–85,
110n26, 143, 162, 168, 214,
275, 347
S Silverman, Kaja, 155, 176, 229
Sache, die, 77 Sinnerbrink, Robert, 279
Sachvorstellungen, 77 Sinthome, 3, 116–147, 307, 347
Sade, Marquis de, 274 Sitney, P. Adams, 53
Salecl, Renata, 208–211, 217, 227 Slovenia, 2
Samuels, Robert, 148n6, 166 Smith, Susan, 110n25, 234n10,
San Francisco, 27, 29, 41, 53, 62n6, 248, 281n7
104, 109n21 Social reality, 12, 19, 37, 55, 107n3
Sant, Gus van, 334–339, 342, 343, 345, Solaris (film), 14
348n3, 348n4, 348n6, 349n14 Soler, Colette, 118
Santas, Constantine, 348n7, 349n14 Spellbound (film), 3, 116, 143,
Sass, Louis A., 262, 263 154–191, 194n26
366 INDEX
Spiral motif, 47 T
Spoto, Donald, 8, 73, 212, 290, Tarrying with the Negative (Žižek), 10,
325n1, 325n2, 327n15, 336 16, 50, 137, 146, 170, 254
Staiger, Janet, 348n6 Temporal retroactivity,
Sterritt, David, 53, 105 158–160
Stow, Percy, 262 Theremin, 189
Strangers on a Train (film), 116, 316 Thing, the (das Ding), 14, 15, 33, 34,
Strassenfilm, 9 77–79, 83, 124
Style, 8, 31, 92, 98, 143, 148n7, Thomas, Deborah, 226, 316
242–246, 301, 344 The 39 Steps (film), 122, 332
Subject Ticklish Subject, The (Žižek), 13,
Lacanian, 32, 35, 59 274, 278
split, 6 Titanic (film), 6
Sublation, 141–143 Tlatli, Soraya, 194n20
Sublime Object of Ideology, The (Žižek), Toles, George, 105
36, 137, 191, 246 Topology, 120, 163, 321
Sullivan, Jack, 195n28, 326n10 Torn Curtain (film), 95
Superego father, 174 Totalitarianism, 139, 143–147
Superego, the, 13, 16, 21n18, 74, 83, Touch, 107, 109n19, 205, 208, 211,
93, 105, 106, 135, 155, 175, 228, 302, 322
180, 213, 233n3, 296, 307 Traversing the fantasy, 4, 39, 46
Suppléance, 121, 134 Truffaut, François, 8–10, 64n19, 80,
Susanna and the Elders (van 98, 99, 108n15, 109n19, 144,
Mieris), 336 154, 242–244, 323, 324
Suspense, 9, 44–48, 64n24, 88,
266, 348n2
Suspicion (film), 65n31, 95 U
Suture, 15–16, 19, 26–27, 37, 54, Uhlin, Greg, 338
132, 156, 204, 233n2 Unconscious, the, 33, 51, 84, 85, 161,
Symbolic, the 162, 174, 181, 185, 216, 229,
and the Imaginary, 14, 21n18, 26, 321, 346
34, 75, 81, 90, 98, 120, 121, Universal Exception, The
136, 138, 139, 211, 322 (Žižek), 318–320
‘symbolic cut,’ 123, 136
Symbols, 63n12, 116, 118, 154,
194n25, 308 V
Symptoms, 39, 41, 97, 116–120, Vanishing mediator, 9–12, 294–296
129–130, 132, 133, 137–140, Venus with a Mirror (Titian), 336
146, 147, 147–148n2, 149n11, Versagung, 307–310
157, 159–161, 164, 165, 168, Vertigo, 39–41, 262, 292
169, 171, 174, 188, 192n5, 205, Vertigo (film), 3, 14, 17, 26–62, 116,
208, 209, 213, 233n5, 258, 131, 243, 262, 292, 332,
260, 298 344, 345
INDEX 367
Verwerfung, 133, 168 Z

Vest, James M., 60 Žižek! (film), 3
Violence, 7, 95, 129, 139, 147, 182, Žižek Reader, The (Žižek), 3
278, 334, 336 Žižek, Slavoj, 18, 106
Voice, the, 63n12, 77, 96–98, the act, 18, 106, 254
109n16, 136, 137, 228–232, appearance of, 49, 116
235n17, 249 and architecture, 90
Voyeurism, 53, 54, 233n1, Balkans as fantasy screen, 146
336, 337 belief without belief, 291
cinephilia of, 3
on collective violence, 16, 204
W contradiction importance of, 5
Walker, Michael, 65n33, 248 ‘counterintuitive observations,’ 3
Wallace, Lee, 265, 266 discursiveness of, 340
Weber, Max, 10, 295 Enjoy!, 213
Weber, Samuel, 209–211 film as fiction, 143
Weis, Elisabeth, 98, 108n15, 109n20, films with, 341
109n21, 315 future of religion, 293
Welcome to the Desert of the Real on heretical action, 18
(Žižek), 305, 324 jokes, 2, 177, 193n18, 245, 249,
Weltschmerz, 311–316 250, 280n5
Wenders, Wim, 122 on love, 291
White (film), 344 metastasis, 3, 340
White, Ethel Lina, 148n5 ‘No as such,’ 310
Wild at Heart (film), 15, 204 passivity, 304, 305, 324
Williams, Raymond, 6 perverse core of Christianity, 291,
Wills, David, 332, 333 293, 296
Wood, Robin, 30, 65n31, 72, principle of non-contradiction, 167
73, 91, 104, 108n14, 166, repetitions, 245, 246, 340, 341, 347
172, 212, 218, 225, 232, sublime object of ideology, 36, 246
312, 335 surplus enjoyment, 208, 229,
Wrong Man, The (film), 123, 332 323, 324
symptomatology, 118
and willful blindness, 342
Y Žižek’s Jokes (Žižek), 242, 248
Yanal, Robert J., 234n8, 234n9 Zupančič, Alenka, 84, 86, 273–275
Yugoslavia, 144, 145 ‘ethics of the real,’ 273

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Objet Petit A - Vertigo (1958)

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Žižek through

ISBN 978-3-030-62435-4 ISBN 978-3-030-62436-1 (eBook)

Cover image: Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo

the University of Auckland Library for their doggedness in tracking down

1 Introduction: From H to Z 1

2 The Objet petit a: Vertigo (1958) 25

3 The Real: The Birds (1963) 71

4 The Sinthome: The Lady Vanishes (1938)115

5 Metastases: Spellbound (1945)153

‘Vorrei e Non Vorrei’—Edwardes or Edwards? Ballyntine or

6 Enjoyment: Marnie (1964)201

7 Fantasy: Che vuoi? Rope (1948)241

Masters or Servants?: The Minotaur of Conscience 266

8 The Fragile Absolute: I Confess (1953)289

9 Coda: Does Hitchcock Remake Žižek?331

Fig. 2.1 Madeleine at Ernie’s Restaurant 29

Fig. 7.2 The canting candle 256

Watching a well-made film, we don’t sit by as spectators; we participate.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

The Elvis of Cultural Theory on Bodega Bay

again, forcing his reader to tease out a philosophical argument from

determines the contours of desire are uncovered in Rope (1948); Chap. 8

The Parallax View

The standard definition of parallax is: the apparent displacement of an object

it, subject and object are inherently ‘mediated’, so that an ‘epistemological’

Žižek is interested in the ‘parallax gap’ separating two points between

words, ‘culture is ordinary’.7 Indeed, the charge of Bordwell and others is

Why Are There Always Two (Three?) Fathers?

production model and its associated aesthetics.9 Francois Truffaut

often claustrophobic, environments using tight shot sizes, medium close-­

Max Weber as Storyteller’) (1988 [1973]). Jameson’s essay represents an

The vanishing mediator thus mediates the transition between two

Žižek’s Hegel is the exact opposite of what he is usually conceived to be—

Here it is the reference to Lacanian materialism that points us to Žižek’s

Lacan’s fundamental thesis is that the Master is by definition an impostor …

As with Hitchcock, so with Žižek we have the introduction of a ‘third

For Žižek, Schelling functions as a kind of vanishing mediator in the history

Through an analysis of the successive drafts of Schelling’s The Ages of

Rather, if Schelling relates to Hegel, it is not in opposing him but in bring-

We Can Never Know Enough About

of his own innermost traumatic fantasies. He discovers that she doesn’t

Less Suture More Jouissance

jouissance is both a feature of individual subjectivity, an explanation of our

The Hegelian Counterbook—Hitchcock

In recent afterword to a book on his ‘theological turn’, entitled ‘The

The employment of the structure of the counternarrative on the part of

lated by Sylvana Tomaselli with notes by John Forrester. Cambridge: Cambridge

Hyppolite, Jean. 1979. Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.

The Objet petit a: Vertigo (1958)

Abstract According to Žižek, Hitchcock’s film Vertigo illustrates the basic

Commenting on a text is like doing an analysis.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 25

Back to the Suture—Interface

Firstly, the spectator is confronted with a shot, finds pleasure in it in an

Getting it Wrong—Point of View at Ernie’s

imitate aspects of the Hitchcockian universe itself. The hero in a Hitchcock

Fig. 2.1 Madeleine at Ernie’s Restaurant

Vertigo is structured as an alternation between a forward-tracking shot and

Fig. 2.2 Scottie looking away at Ernie’s Restaurant

Fig. 2.3 Madeleine in profile at Ernie’s Restaurant

However, to insist, although this is a ‘fascinating’ shot that is subjectiv-

Petite Histoire of the Objet petit a

Kinder Surprise, one of the most popular confectionery products on sale in

1 Introduction: From H to Z 1

2 The Objet petit a: Vertigo (1958) 25

3 The Real: The Birds (1963) 71

4 The Sinthome: The Lady Vanishes (1938)115

5 Metastases: Spellbound (1945)153

6 Enjoyment: Marnie (1964)201

7 Fantasy: Che vuoi? Rope (1948)241

Masters or Servants?: The Minotaur of Conscience 266

8 The Fragile Absolute: I Confess (1953)289

9 Coda: Does Hitchcock Remake Žižek?331

Fig. 2.1 Madeleine at Ernie’s Restaurant 29

Fig. 7.2 The canting candle 256

often claustrophobic, environments using tight shot sizes, medium close-

SCOTTIE: Will you tell me something? Has this ever happened to

What Do the Birds Mean?

Three Varieties of the Real

Kern unseres Wesen—The Answer of the Real

The Birds as Psychotic Stain