Recently viewed: Article: Psychoanalysis, film theory, and the case of Being Joh n Malkovich.

Save Export Email Print Cite Psychoanalysis, film theory, and the case of Being John Malkovich. Film Criticism December 22, 2001 | Dragunoiu, Dana | Copyright Permalink Being John Malkovich opens on a stage where a puppet's gaze into a mirror leads it to perform what its maker, Craig Schwartz, calls "Craig's Dance of Despair an d Disillusionment." Raging against its mirror image, the puppet discovers its de pendence on the man who pulls its strings, a puppeteer whom it strikingly resemb les in name and physical appearance. The puppet's performance is greeted by enth usiastic applause, but we soon discover that the theatre sits in the puppeteer's home studio and that the applause is simulated by a soundtrack. The puppet's distress at the sight of its mirror image suggests a state of selfalienation, a psychic division that is reinforced by the puppet's physical resem blance to its maker. This psychic split recalls Jacques Lacan's formulation of t he human subject as divided between a narcissistic total being (me) and a speaki ng subject (I), which fuels its attempt to validate its (fictional) unity of bei ng by convincing the outside world to pronounce it authentic. Although the appla use that follows the puppet's dance seems to confer the external validation need ed by both puppet and maker, the fact that the applause is a recording identifie s the futility of the puppeteer's attempt to cope with his own self-alienation b y inventing the adulation of an audience. The absence of real spectators alerts us to the psychic conflict that sets the plot in motion--the puppeteer's desire to be someone else, someone who enjoys the personal and professional recognition Craig does not have. As Xan Brooks has aptly observed, Spike Jonze's 1999 surrealistic comedy is a fl amboyant extrapolation of this opening scene. The relentless search for outside validation at the heart of Lacan's conception of subjectivity fuels the film's p rovocative exploration of freedom and manipulation, gender and subjectivity, con sumerism and the cult of celebrity. The film's investment in these discourses ma kes it deserving of a more rigorous examination than its current status as a cle ver and entertaining pastiche might suggest. If the opening scene's invocation o f psychoanalytic subject formation seems initially restrictive in relation to ot her relevant accounts of subjectivity (postmodern social construction, Warholian cult of celebrity), I would argue that this clash of conceptions and discourses is central to the film's texture. Chris Chang's observation that Being John Mal kovich is "paradoxically cerebral and patently ridiculous"(6) signals the possib ility that the film's combination of madcap comedy and serious cultural critique is in fact a strategy for producing meaning. Film theorists have rightly argued for a cultural affinity between film and psyc hoanalysis, and reading film through the lens of Freudian and Lacanian theory ha s become a critical orthodoxy in film studies. Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and director Spike Jonze seem intent on parodying this hegemony, and Being John Malk ovich's most explicit deployment of psychoanalysis is so reductive as to suggest a deliberate caricature of a sanctified tradition. This, however, does not tell the whole story, for Being John Malkovich's romp through the "greatest hits" of psychoanalysis and what Christine Gledhill has called "cine-psychoanalysis" is not merely parodic. The film's sophisticated deployment of these two fields of s

tudy can be framed by invoking the familiar folk tale of Br'er Rabbit, who escap es from the clutches of the fox by begging the fox not to throw him into the bri ar patch. The fox throws him into the patch and discovers, to his dismay, that h e has sent the Br'er Rabbit home. Like Br'er Rabbit, Being John Malkovich only seems to reject the psychoanalytic terms on which it depends. Its strategic blending of the serious with the comic is most explicitly announced in two scenes that parody the most familiar concept s of Freudian psychology. The first of these scenes depicts a chimp who, having been diagnosed by his psychotherapist as suffering from feelings of inadequacy a nd repressed childhood trauma, is confronted and cured by an event that reminds him of the original traumatic experience. In the second of these scenes, the fil m's two female protagonists chase each other through John Malkovich's unconsciou s, which is structured like an oversimplified Freudian case study of a child's d evelopment: young Malkovich watches his parents copulate, sniffs a woman's under garment, and suffers public humiliation after wetting his pants on a school bus. Although these caricatures of Freud seem defiantly to dare us to be so foolish as to investigate the film in psychoanalytic terms, they play a crucial role in establishing psychoanalysis as the film's natural environment. Anticipating the terms of its own reception, Being John Malkovich dares critics to approach it th rough the very terms it parodies, all the while hiding the fact that psychoanaly sis is its rightful home. Likewise, the film's parodic elements only seem to und ermine the validity of psychoanalysis and the film theory it has inspired, and t he film finishes by underscoring its self-awareness as an artistic product entan gled in cinematic conventions and psychoanalytic imperatives from which it canno t escape. The need for external validation portrayed in the opening scene offers one reaso n for the film's inability to transcend the psychoanalytic conception of reality that it parodies with such delight. The film's comic appropriations of some of the most popular theoretical models of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic film th eory--Jacques Lacan's formulation of subjectivity in his lecture "The mirror sta ge as formative of the function of the I" and his "Seminar on `The Purloined Let ter,'" and Laura Mulvey's formulation of the spectator-screen relationship in he r essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"--reveal that the act of appropria tion, or "purloining" to use Lacan's central metaphor, is a risky undertaking be cause the psychic structures illustrated in these texts will inevitably have the final word against those who dare challenge them. Like the purloined letter tha t, as Lacan maintains, "always arrives at its destination"("Seminar" 53), our sp lit subjectivities will always dictate the way we relate to ourselves and the ou tside world. Because there is no professional validation for a puppeteer in "tod ay's wintry economic climate," Craig (John Cusack) lives in a dingy Manhattan ba sement apartment with his frumpy pet-obsessed wife Lotte (Cameron Diaz). Deeply committed to his puppeteering, Craig peddles his talents on street corners, only to be assaulted by an irate father upset by Craig's risque depiction of Eloisa' s To read the full text of this article and others like it,