Beyond Dolby (Stereo): Cinema in the Digital Sound Age

10. The Real and the Symbolic

297 The Real and the Symbolic 10 The close relationship between cinema and our psychic life emerges not only from the way in which a subject is modeled, but also from the trends and themes that films repeatedly introduce. Francesco Casetti The introduction to the previous chapter argued for reexamining nolonger -fashionable branches of film theory in the light of digital surround sound (DSS), given that many theoretical models for cinema say little or nothing about the soundtrack, much less about multichannel . Because apparatus theory relies directly on the screen as sole locus of filmic meaning, it was a logical candidate for DSS-driven reexploration; in the last chapter, just such an analysis demonstrated that even this often-dismissed vein of film theory offers useful insights about contemporary cinema when considered in the context of today’s multi-channel soundtracks. That investigation’s necessary focus on the specific details of apparatus theory forced it to neglect psychoanalysis, the broader theoretical framework of which apparatus theory is a part. Baudry’s invocation of the unconscious and his description of the primitive, narcissistic state (where perception and representation are united) rely explicitly on Freud’s work;1 moreover, the fundamental argument in Baudry’s formulation of apparatus theory is itself a psychological one: that cinema 298 · Theory functions in the same way as dreams, and thus watching a movie affects us the same way dreaming does. This final chapter complements the preceding one by examining psychoanalysis itself through the lens of digital surround sound. While several areas of psychoanalytic film theory deserve DSSoriented reconsideration, any attempt to tackle all of them would fill several books. Psychoanalysis is invoked by a broad range of scholarship , including everything from models for how cinema functions (i.e., Baudry’s work on apparatus theory or Christian Metz’s The Imaginary Signifier) to feminist work on the voice (Kaja Silverman’s The Acoustic Mirror) to analyses of individual films and filmmakers—Hitchcock’s works alone have spawned several books grounded in psychoanalytic theory.2 This chapter’s explorations will focus on a single concern of psychoanalytic theory particularly relevant to surround sound: the relationship between the Real and the Symbolic in Lacan’s reformulations of Freudian theory. Varying Approaches to Psychoanalytic Film Theory As the above examples demonstrate, vastly dissimilar types of cinema scholarship fall under the general label of “psychoanalytic theory.” To help distinguish these varying uses, Francesco Casetti outlines three distinct branches of psychoanalytic film studies; these provide a useful way to categorize individual psychoanalysis-based works. The first of Casetti’s branches is perhaps the most radical application of psychoanalysis . In works based on this approach, cinema is seen as directly modeled on our psychic apparatus. Rather than being a means to reach certain secret nodes or the equivalent of certain unconscious manifestations, cinema emerges as a phenomenon that extends and encompasses the structures and dynamics that are the object of psychoanalysis. . . . Thus, the procedures behind films reproduce the mechanisms that construct dreams, mental lapses, and hallucinations.3 In other words, this category of psychoanalytic scholarship assumes elements of the psychic apparatus have analogs in the cinema. Baudry’s work on apparatus theory, which ties cinema to dreaming and to the “primitive stage,” can be placed squarely in this category. The Real and the Symbolic · 299 Casetti’s phrase “certain unconscious manifestations” also hints at a second category of psychoanalytic film theory, the application of psychoanalysis to filmmakers. Here films are treated as “symptoms” that, when analyzed, reveal hidden truths about their makers. Casetti summarizes this method as “a spontaneous extension of the analyst’s couch: the director becomes the patient, the film the discussion, and the critic (and the astute spectator) the analyst.”4 The third and final of Casetti’s categories involves close filmic analysis, like the second. But instead of analyzing what movies can reveal about their makers, work in this category explores movies in and of themselves: “In this case it is not filmmakers who are analyzed through their work, but cinema itself [which] lies on the analyst’s sofa.”5 Though this branch of psychoanalytic work, like Casetti’s first one, aims to explicate the nature of cinema, it does not claim cinema correlates directly to the “psychic apparatus.” Rather, it seeks ways in which the two may be related and uses those to exploit psychoanalysis’s understanding of the unconscious in explaining how parts of cinema...