Introduction

The first issue of American Imago devoted to “Psychoanalysis and Cinema” focused largely on issues to do with the feminine in cinema. The volume revisited, critiqued, and re-flected upon seventies and eighties feminist film theories: an essay critiquing theories was followed by one that built on existing paradigms so as to include the psyche among political discourses forming the social field; another opened up the question of race and psychoanalysis, a fourth advanced a theory of fetishistic structure in Hollywood film, and yet another explored phallic women in Hollywood films. A final essay argued for a postmodern psychoanalysis that calls into question the entire process of referring back to “origins.”

This second volume brings together articles written by male film critics on two main themes, which are explored using psychoanalytic paradigms, namely those of masculinity in the cinema and of cinema aesthetics, the spectator and politics. As in the prior volume, authors use psychoanalysis to varying degrees and in quite different ways.

On the masculinity theme,Jurgen Reeder writes from Stockholm about what he calls the American “psychopath films” which are often brushed off as “mere entertainment.” Reeder argues that the scenarios of repeated psychopath films evidence “an epoch’s need to explore an experience that as yet has not been adequately formulated and thematized” (1). Reeder explores the specific repeated theme of the primitive Oedipal struggle between a young man and an older one who could be his father as it is worked out in the 1986 film, The Hitcher. The repeated theme, Reeder argues, bears witness to the crisis of masculinity in American culture—but also to the fact that neither the film nor the culture know what is wrong, nor what can be done. The fantasy of the uncastrated man is part of the irrationality of masculinity, but this is something that America refuses to know, and refuses even to know that it does not know. Reeder uses the concept of “living alongside” to suggest a state of refraining from projecting anxieties onto the world—a state of reconciliation with knowing that one does not know, or in Freud’s terms, a kind of sublimation.

Robert Lang’s essay on Innerspace also describes a crisis in masculinity, this time, however, in regard to how affective elements in homosocial desire can be expressed. In pursuing this cultural anxiety, Lang explores a particular instance of the buddy film which in 1987 (the year the film was made) “seemed to be on the verge of admitting that the homosocial desire which has always fueled the genre” includes homosexuality (5). For Lang, the core issue of Innerspace is masculinity—that is, the “correct” culturally sanctified masculinity. He shows how the film asserts, even as it undercuts, the idea that “a proper masculinity is founded on the repression of homosexuality and of women.”

Both Tuck and Jack start out with problems (alcoholism and hypochondria) that can be attributed to repressed homosexual desire but which the film insists on “curing” through the usual culminating heterosexual union of Tuck and Lydia. Lang argues, however, that the incorporation fantasy on which the film rests (Tuck is injected into Jack in a diverted experiment) reveals how patriarchal culture is constructed. While the homosexual desire “that underpins the film’s meanings exceeds the strategies that would contain it” (20), the film must end by endorsing dominant values. Lang shows, however, the resonances that the apparently innocent dialogue takes on when heard through a homosexual framework.

Lang analyzes the role of Tuck’s wife, Lydia, as the device for keeping sexual difference intact and dominant as “the heart of the film’s symbolic system.” Lang concludes, following Irigaray that “for the patriarchal notion of masculinity to obtain, homosexual relations between men must be forbidden . . . Male subjects . . . to be agents of symbolic exchange, must give up the possibility of serving as commodities themselves” (38).

On the second theme, Jonathan Scott Lee questions relations among cinema aesthetics, psychoanalytic transformation and politics in Spike Lee’s Malcolm X. In his persuasive argument, Lee shows how Malcolm X, far from being a standard Hollywood bio-epic as...