The notion of the cinema as an institution or apparatus is central to 1970s theory. However, it is crucial to understand that Baudry, Metz, and Mulvey did not simply mean that the cinema was like a machine. As Metz explained, 'The cinematic institution is not just the cinema industry... it is also the mental machinery - another industry - which spectators "accustomed to the cinema" have internalized historically and which has adapted them to the consumption of films' (1975/1982: 2). Thus the term 'cinematic apparatus' refers to both an industrial machine as well as a mental or psychic apparatus.
Jean-Louis Baudry was the first to draw on psychoanalytic theory to analyse the cinema as an institution. According to D. N. Rodowick, one 'cannot overestimate the impact of Baudry's work in this period' (1988: 89). Baudry's pioneering ideas were later developed by Metz, who, although critical of aspects of Baudry's theories, was in agreement with his main arguments. Baudry explored his ideas about the cinematic apparatus in two key essays. In the first, 'Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus' (1970), he argued that the cinema is ideological in that it creates an ideal, transcendental viewing subject. By this he meant that the cinema places the spectator, the 'eye-subject' (1986a: 290), at the centre of vision. Identification with the camera-projector, the seamless flow of images, narratives which restore equilibrium-all of these things give the spectator a sense of unity and control. The apparatus ensures 'the setting up of the mirror stage refers to the pre symbolic, the period when the infant is without language.
Nevertheless, Metz advocated the crucial importance of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory for the cinema and stressed the need to theorize the screen-spectator relationship- not just in the context of the Imaginary, but also in relation to the Symbolic. To address this issue, Metz introduced the notion of voyeurism. He argued that the viewing process is voyeuristic in that there is always a distance maintained, in the cinema, between the viewing subject and its object. The cinematic scene cannot return the spectator's gaze. Metz also introduced a further notion which became the subtitle of his book: the imaginary signifier. The cinema, he argued, makes present what is absent. The screen might offer images that suggest completeness, but this is purely imaginary. Because the spectator is aware that the offer of unity is only imaginary, he is forced to deal with a sense of lack that is an inescapable part of the viewing process.
Metz drew an analogy between this process and the experience of the (male) child in the mirror phase. (Metz assumes the spectator is male.) When the boy looks in the mirror and identifies for the first time with himself as a unified being he is also made aware of his difference from the mother. She lacks the penis he once thought she possessed. Entry into the Symbolic also involves repression of desire for the mother and the constitution of the unconscious in response to that repression. (Here, Lacan reworks Freud's theories of the phallus and castration.) Along with repression of desire for the mother comes the birth of desire: for the speaking subject now begins a lifelong search for the lost object - the other, the little 'o' of the Imaginary, the mother he relinquished in order to acquire a social identity.
As the child enters the Symbolic it acquires language. However, it must also succumb to the 'law of the father' (the laws of society) which governs the Symbolic order. Entry into the Symbolic is entry into law, language, and loss - concepts which are inextricably bound together. Thus, entry into the Symbolic entails an awareness of sexual difference and of the 'self' as fragmented. The very concept of 'I' entails lack and loss.
When the boy mistakenly imagines his mother (sisters, woman) is castrated, his immediate response is to disavow what he has seen; he thinks she has been castrated, but he simultaneously knows that this is not true. Two courses of action are open to the boy. He can accept her difference and repress his desire for unification with the mother on the understanding that one day he will inherit a woman of his own. He can refuse to accept her difference and continue to believe that the mother is phallic. Rather than think of her lack, the fetishist will conjure up a reassuring image of another part of her body such as her breasts or her legs. He will also phallicize her body, imagining it in conjunction with phallic images such as long spiky high heels. Hence, film theorists have drawn on the theory of the phallic woman to explain the femme fatale of film noir (Double Indemnity, USA, 1944; Body Heat, USA, 1981; The Last Seduction, USA, 1994), who is depicted as dangerously phallic. E. Anne Kaplan's edited collection Women in Film Noir (1978) proved extremely influential in this context.
The Oedipal trajectory, Metz argued, is re-enacted in the cinema in relation not only to the Oedipal nature of narrative, but, most importantly, within the spectator screen relationship. Narrative is characteristically Oedipal in that it almost always contains a male protagonist who, after resolving a crisis and overcoming a 'lack', then comes to identify with the law of the father, while successfully containing or controlling the female figure, demystifying her threat, or achieving union with her. The concept of 'lack' is crucial to narrative in another context. According to the Russian Formalist Tzvetan Todorov, the aim of all narratives is to solve a riddle, to find an answer to an enigma, to fill a lack. All stories begin with a situation in which the status quo is upset and the hero or heroine must - in general terms - solve a problem in order for equilibrium to be restored. This approach sees the structures of narrative as being in the service of the subject's desire to overcome lack.
Pamela Church Gibson, Oxford University Press, 1998
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