Lost Angels: Psychoanalysis and Cinema

185 Pages·1995·1.23 MB·English

by  Vicky Lebeau

Lost Angels
In Lost Angels, Vicky Lebeau re-reads Freudian theories of femininity
to develop a remarkable contribution to spectatorship theory. Lebeau
discusses Freud’s distinctive preoccupations with female fantasy and
femininity—from his studies on hysteria and the ‘family romance’ at
the origins of psychoanalysis to the analysis of mass psychology in the
1920s and 1930s. Lost Angels exposes how Freud’s accounting of
femininity is intimately tied to his changing representation of the
paternal, and explores his ensuing differentiation between masculine
and feminine fantasy through critical and feminist theories of
spectatorship and cinema.
Discussing three popular ‘youth’ films of the 1980s—John Hughes’s
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Francis Ford Coppola’s Rumble Fish and Tim
Hunter’s River’s Edge—Lebeau works through issues of sexual
difference and social identification and creates a dialogue between
feminism, psychoanalysis and the critical theory of the Frankfurt
school. Intervening in current debates on femininity, fantasy and
identification, Lebeau suggests that, for Freud, femininity is always both
a sexed and a social category which cannot be understood outside of its
relation to the father.
Lost Angels is a ground-breaking addition to current feminist film
theory and essential reading for all students of film, gender and cultural
studies.
Vicky Lebeau is Lecturer in English in the School of Cultural and
Community Studies at the University of Sussex.
Frontispiece: production still from Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
(1919). Courtesy BFI.
Lost Angels
Psychoanalysis and cinema
Vicky Lebeau
London and New York
First published 1995
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s
collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
© 1995 Vicky Lebeau
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission
in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the
British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Lebeau, Vicky.
Lost Angels: psychoanalysis and cinema/Vicky Lebeau.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Psychoanalysis and motion pictures.
2. Motion pictures-psychological aspects.
I. Title.
PN1995.9.P783L43 1994
791.43′01′9-dc20 94–11706
ISBN 0-203-99253-9 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-415-10720-2 (Print Edition)
0-415-10721-0 (pbk)
For my family—especially DOREEN and
GARY LEBEAU
and
To the memory of my father,
TERRY LEBEAU
1939–1994
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
1 Introduction: ‘one can learn nothing from them’ 1
2 Daddy’s cinema: femininity and mass spectatorship 19
3 Femininity, fantasy and the collective (or Ferris 57
Bueller’s Day Off—take two)
4 Rumble Fish: Francis Coppola, Susan Hinton and 87
Narcissus
5 Lost Angels: River’s Edge and social spectatorship 121
6 Afterword: ‘beyond all shadow of doubt’ 153
Notes 157
Bibliography 163
Index 169
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the following journals for permission to reprint (in
revised form): ‘“You’re my friend”: River’s Edge and social
spectatorship’, Camera Obscura and Indiana University Press;
‘Daddy’s Cinema’, Screen and Oxford University Press.
Acknowledgements also for permission to reprint from the following:
Less Than Zero © 1985 by Bret Easton Ellis, reprinted by permission of
Simon & Schuster, Inc. and Pan Macmillan; Rumble Fish by
S.E.Hinton, by permission of Victor Gollancz; The Culture of
Narcissism, American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations, by
Christopher Lasch, by permission of W.W.Norton & Company, Inc.
copyright © 1979 by Christopher Lasch; Future Shock, by Alvin
Toffler, by permission of The Bodley Head.
My thanks to Jacqueline Rose and Rachel Bowlby for their
commentary and support throughout the writing of this book, to John
Shire for his friendship and for staying with the many different versions
of these chapters and to Christine Blake for her generous reading at the
critical moments. Thanks also to the women of the ‘Sexual Difference:
Women and Writing’ seminar (Sussex, 1991) for their interest in
S.E.Hinton and the ‘masquerade’; and to Gary Lebeau for a fraternal
gloss on Rumble Fish. For invaluable help, in different forms, my
thanks to: the Graduate Colloquium, University of Sussex, Constance
Penley, Nancy Wood, Doreen Lebeau, Terry Lebeau, Anne Crane, Peter
Urpeth, Gwen Holmden, Vic Holmden, Paul Myerscough, Jo Croft,
Richard Fuller and, for her (much appreciated) attempts to solve the
enigma of ‘the computer’, Jane Phillips.
My special thanks, finally, to D.S.Marriott.
viii
Chapter 1
Introduction
‘One can learn nothing from them’
In ‘Hysterical Phantasies and their Relation to Bisexuality’, first
published in 1908, Freud gave the following brief account of the
‘favourable circumstances’ in which a female patient was able to
‘capture’ an unconscious fantasy in the process of making its way into
her conscious fantasy life or daydream:
After I had drawn the attention of one of my patients to her
phantasies, she told me that on one occasion she had suddenly
found herself in tears in the street and that, rapidly considering
what it was she was actually crying about, she had got hold of a
phantasy to the following effect. In her imagination she had
formed a tender attachment to a pianist who was well known in
the town (though she was not personally acquainted with him);
she had had a child by him (she was in fact childless); and he had
then deserted her and her child and left them in poverty. It was at
this point in her romance that she had burst into tears.
(Pelican Freud Library, hereafter PFL 10:88)
Curiously, however difficult it is for the daydreamer to become aware
of and to reflect on the fantasmatic scenes which absorb her, it is only
too obvious to others what she is doing—at least according to the
description of the daydreamer’s abstracted appearance in public that
Freud gives just before this passage: ‘It is easy to recognize a person
who is absorbed in day-dreaming in the street, however, by his sudden,
as it were absent-minded, smile, his way of talking to himself, or by the
hastening of his steps which marks the climax of the imagined situation’
(ibid.). We can compare this with the famous passage from the case
history of Anna O. in Studies on Hysteria (1895) in which Joseph
Breuer describes his patient’s invisible participation in a ‘private
theatre’: