The concept of a more mobile gaze was explored by Elizabeth Cowie in her article 'Fantasia' (1984), in which she drew on Laplanche and Pontalis's influential essay of 1964, 'Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality'. Laplanche and Pontalis established three original fantasies - original in that each fantasy explains an aspect of the 'origin' of the subject. The 'primal scene pictures the origin of the individual; fantasies of seduction, the origin and upsurge of sexuality; fantasies of castration, the origin of the difference between the sexes' (1964/ 1986:19). These fantasies - entertained by the child - explain or provide answers to three crucial questions: Who am I?' 'Why do I desire?' Why am I different?' The concept of primal fantasies is also much more fluid than the notion of fantasy permitted by apparatus theory, which inevitably and mechanistically returns to the Oedipal fantasy. The primal fantasies run through the individual's waking and sleeping life, through conscious and unconscious desires. Laplanche and Pontalis also argued that fantasy is a staging of desire, a form of mise-en-scène. Further, the position of the subject is not static in that positions of sexual identification are not fixed. The subject engaged in the activity of fantasizing can adopt multiple positions, identifying across gender, time, and space.
Cowie argued that the importance of fantasy as a setting, a scene, is crucial because it enables film to be viewed as fantasy, as representing the mise-en-scene of desire. Similarly, the film spectator is free to assume mobile, shifting modes of identification- as Cowie demonstrated in her analysis of Now Voyager (USA, 1942) and The Reckless Moment (USA, 1949). Fantasy theory has also been used productively in relation to science fiction and horror-genres in which evidence of the fantastic is particularly strong.
Pamela Church Gibson, Oxford University Press, 1998
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