LAST SEEN ALIVE

199 Pages·2015·1.01 MB·English

LAST SEEN ALIVE:
Navigating the Abyss

A theoretical and creative application of Jacques Lacan’s model of the psyche
as an analytical tool for translating newspaper accounts of an unsolved
abduction case from 1983 into a creative audio project titled Last Seen Alive.

A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at
The Flinders University of South Australia

by
Fiona Sprott, B.A., MCA

Department of Drama
Faculty of Education, Humanities, and Law
Submitted June 2014
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Table of Contents
__________________________________________
Table of Contents ……………………………………………………………………ii
Summary ……………………………………………………………………………iii
Declaration …………………………………………………………………………v
Acknowledgements ……………………………………………………………….vi
Chapter 1: Introduction …………………………………………………..7
PART I: “Home” Becomes a Crime Scene ………………………………38
Chapter 2: The House is not a Home Anymore ………………………….39
Chapter 3: The Detective Enters the Abyss ……………………………...57
Chapter 4: The Conjuring of the Absent Body as Present ………………71
PART II: “Home” is a Haunted House ………………………………….87
Chapter 5: The Congregation of Ghosts ………………………………...88
Chapter 6: Loving the Monster …………………………………………104
Chapter 7: Girlhood as a Geography of Fear and Desire ………………122
PART III: “Home” is Impossible ………………………………………137
Chapter 8: An Abyss as the Real ………………………………………138
Chapter 9: Me and Louise and the Real ………………………………...155
Chapter10: Performing the Real ………………………………………..170

Conclusion ……………………………………………………………..191
References ……………………………………………………………...193

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Summary
________________________________________
This thesis combines a creative work titled Last Seen Alive which takes the
form of an archive box filled with ‘evidence’ related to a fictional cold case,
and theoretical exegesis. I explore my relationship to the 1983 true story of ten-
year-old Louise Bell who disappeared from her bedroom in the middle of the
night from a suburb south of Adelaide in South Australia, and has never been
found. I was of a similar age and lived close by at the time she disappeared
and her story affected me deeply by instilling in me a fear of being taken from
my own bedroom in the middle of the night. This thesis details my research
process using psychoanalysis as a theoretical and creative methodology for
translating my personal relationship to the story of Louise Bell’s mysterious
disappearance into a creative work. I present a performance text which uses
evidence collected from a crime scene as the form the ‘script’ takes.
I use Jacques Lacan’s Borromean knot model of the psyche as a tool to
interpret a collection of newspaper articles on the 1983 unsolved case of Louise
Bell. I then apply Lacan’s model of the psyche to my own recollections of
being a girl of similar age, and living in close proximity to Louise at the time
she was taken.
There are three layers to my psychoanalytic analysis. The first is
interpreting the newspaper articles detailing the story of Louise Bell’s
mysterious disappearance as a story in which the symbolic order, imaginary
and real can be interpreted. The second layer examines my own memories of
the story of Louise Bell’s mysterious disappearance throughout my girlhood,
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and into womanhood. In this second layer of analysis I seek an intersection
where Louise’s story and my own overlap in order to locate the real as a
dramatic nucleus for my creative work. The third layer translates the first two
layers (her story and my own) into Last Seen Alive as an interactive experience
for solitary audience members sifting through a fictional cold case file.
The thesis divides into four parts. The first is an analysis of the print
media stories of Louise Bell’s mysterious disappearance delivered in three
parts covering the symbolic order as the world of the story, the second explores
the ghosts and monsters of the imaginary, and the third discusses the real as the
dramatic nucleus from which all else emanates. Part four documents the
creative material I have produced, in the form of an archive box filled with
bagged evidence, DVD footage, and a CD of the audio tracks for audience to
listen to as they sift through the contents of the fictional cold case file. Whilst
preparing the final draft of my thesis, police announced they have arrested a
suspect, but the trial and final determination of the suspect’s guilt have not
taken place at the time of submitting. Louise Bell’s body has not been found as
of May 2014.

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Declaration

________________________________________
I certify that this thesis does not incorporate without acknowledgement any
material previously submitted for a degree or diploma in any university; and
that to the best of my knowledge and belief it does not contain any material
previously published or written by another person except where due reference
is made in the text.

Signed:
v
Acknowledgements

________________________________________
I was greatly assisted by the guidance and support of my academic supervisors,
Dr Jonathan Bollen and Dr Maggie Ivanova (Drama), Dr Alison Wotherspoon
and Associate Professor Karen Orr Vered (Screen and Media), Associate
Professor Mark Halsey and Dr Derek Dalton (Law). Between them I have
enjoyed and benefitted from a diverse and dynamic series of conversations,
debates and provocations. At an early stage in my research I was also assisted
by Chief Inspector Albert Quinn of the South Australian Police.
Parts of the creative material were workshopped and developed during
my attendance at the South Australian Film Corporation Film Lab initiative in
2011. My thanks go to fellow team members Jason Sweeney and Julie Byrne
for their willingness to workshop and develop creative ideas and material.
Family and friends were also a great moral support throughout the
duration of the research and authoring of this thesis.
Tom Drahos came on board as an editor and document ‘doctor’ assisting
me with preparing the thesis for submission .

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Chapter One:
Introduction
__________________________________________
In 1983 ten-year-old Louise Bell disappeared from her bedroom in the middle
of the night whilst her younger sister slept soundly in the same room. Her
parents, sleeping in a bedroom down the hall heard nothing either. To this day
the mystery of her disappearance remains unsolved as her body has never been
found. The Bell family lived in the suburb of Hackham West, south of
Adelaide in South Australia. I was living in close proximity to the Bell home at
the time of Louise’s disappearance and for this reason the story had a great
impact on me. Like many girls of a similar age living in the area, I was afraid
that I too would be taken from my bedroom in the middle of the night and
never seen again. Louise became part of my girlhood, a ghost that haunts my
memories and imagination. I asked myself, how can I examine my relationship
to Louise Bell as a public figure whose story became part of the tapestry of my
own memories? How can I tell the story of how the unknown fate of Louise
Bell shaped my girlhood and the woman I became?
This thesis examines my personal relationship to a story about a girl I
never met, but with whom I identified because I felt we were quite alike. I
present a creative work titled Last Seen Alive as a mystery about an unsolved
crime. Last Seen Alive is an experience akin to reading through an
investigative file which is filled with bagged evidence, witness statements,
photographs and video footage of locations and memories. Told through the
objects and memories left in the wake of a fictional girl called Ellen who has
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disappeared, the story is told by a girl called Me who keeps a secret about
something she witnessed on the night that Ellen disappeared.
The accompanying exegetical work exemplifies the specific
psychoanalytic research and writing process I undertook to arrive at decisions I
made in creating Last Seen Alive. I recommend that one explores the contents
of the archive box before reading the exegetical material of this thesis. Doing
so will offer the experience of performing the role of a detective sifting through
evidence. Ideally this work is to be staged in such a way that a solitary
spectator sits with the material in the privacy of a family home trapped in time,
as it were, in the era of the early 1980s. A domestic space which is now an
abandoned site of trauma where the remains of a former family life sit
gathering dust, disrupted by the telltale signs of old crime scene tape, black
fingerprint dust, etcetera; the fictional home of the fictional girl called Ellen
referred to in the creative work. For pragmatic reasons such as cost of staging
such a live installation performance experience, a solitary spectator might be
sent the archive box, and examine the materials in the comfort of their own
home. Key to Last Seen Alive is the idea of the house that fails to be a safe
home for the family who live there.
This was not a practice-led project. I apply the same psychoanalytical
methodological approach to both the research and the creative work of this
thesis. I use my research findings as the driving force for the creative decisions
I have made. I therefore consider my thesis to be a research-led creative
project. The exegetical chapters present my analysis of source material, what I
determined from my analysis and how I then applied my findings to make the
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creative decisions that inform Last Seen Alive being presented as a case file
that audience members sift through.

Research Questions
I began with an initial question: How do I examine my own memories of
childhood against the narrative of a true crime story which became part of the
tapestry of my own girlhood experience of fear and desire? In other words,
how do I tell the story of my relationship to a public figure lifted from media
reports about an unsolved crime? Woven into this question of “how” to achieve
a creative examination of this cold case against my own personal history is the
question of why should I tell my story through reflecting upon a victim’s story?
I felt certain that if I approached it the right way, I might reveal new insights
into the cultural impact of true crime stories upon a girl as she learns what it
means to become a woman in the society she lives in.
I decided that I would attempt an experimental adaptation of Jaques
Lacan’s theory of the psyche as a methodological process as an answer to both
‘how’ and ‘why.’ I saw in Lacan’s theory of the psyche as three separate but
linked fields of the symbolic order, the imaginary and the real a potential
model for analysis and creative methodology as well as dramatic structure.
This project attempts to answer the question: Can Jacques Lacan’s model
of the psyche (the symbolic order, imaginary and real), be adapted as a critical
inquiry tool, a creative methodology for generating creative material and an
organising principle for the resulting creative material? It is important to note
that this three-part methodology is my suggested answer to the original
question of “how” to approach both my own story and that of Louise Bell’s
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mysterious disappearance. In order to answer my question of “why” I should
be telling a story which intersects with that of Louise Bell I needed to submit to
the actual proposed model of methodology which is primarily a psychoanalytic
approach. The creative work I have produced here, the creative decisions I
arrive at are entirely driven by this methodological approach.

Literature Review/Contextual Review:
Below I discuss the key texts that have influenced my decision making in
developing both critical and creative concepts for this project. There is no
specific book that details or responds directly to the crime I am examining.
Neither have I identified any other project of live performance which attempts
an adaptation or translation of factual source material into dramatic fiction
using Lacan’s model of the psyche. To the best of my knowledge this project
and the experiment I undertake is addressing a gap in documented scholarly
investigation in the field of drama and live performance.

Bachelard and Bond
The conceptual and intellectual foundations of this thesis in its entirety are
primarily built upon ideas expressed in two key texts. Henry Bond’s Lacan at
the Scene (2009) and Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (1969). Bond
puts forward a very playful notion of imagining Jacques Lacan as a police
detective applying his theories towards solving crime. Using archival
photographic material of actual crime scenes taken in the 1950s, Bond
identifies ways to read each as either perverse, psychotic or neurotic. Bond’s
bold act of translation of psychoanalysis to reading crime scenes inspired me to
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