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49 Post-Nationalism and the Cinematic Apparatus in Minghella’s Adaptation of Ondaatje’s The English Patient Hsuan Hsu Theories of the cinematic gaze, strongly influenced by the work of Lacan and Althusser, often denigrate visual pleasure as a politically compromised response. Christian Metz, for example, links film spectatorship to the pathological practices like fetishism, disavowal , and voyeurism; Laura Mulvey, agreeing that films are fundamentally voyeuristic , calls for the “destruction of pleasure as a radical weapon.” Jean-Louis Baudry suggests that ideological manipulations are inherent in the cinematographic apparatus itself: it feeds empty simulacra to mute, immobilized spectators, just as the apparatus composed of flames and silhouettes in Plato’s allegorical cave supplies illusory images that dissuade prisoners from pursuing Truth. In this paper, I discuss the notion that that such confining models of spectatorship fail to do justice to a particular “mainstream” film such as Anthony Minghella’s adaptation of Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient (1996). Minghella’s film is, simultaneously, pleasurable and politically productive: indeed , it embodies a radical politics of pleasure, an adulteration of vision that undermines nationalist ideology by creating a post-national audience tied together by suppressed flows of “adulterous” desire. In her study of Latin American national romances, Doris Sommer draws a suggestive connection between marital and national desire. While moving their readers to desire the union of a central pair of lovers, national romances produced simultaneously in them a yearning for the sort of nation in which such a union could be realized: “The unrequited passion of the love story produces a surplus of energy . . . a surplus that can hope to overcome the political interference between the lovers. At the same time, the enormity of the social abuse, the unethical power of the obstacle, invests the love story with an almost sublime sense of transcendent purpose. As the story progresses, the pitch of sentiment rises along with the cry of commitment, so that the din makes it ever more difficult to distinguish between our erotic and political fantasies for an ideal ending” (Sommer 48). Sommer implies that, in the case of these “foundational fictions,” the ideological strategy of blurring the distinction between erotic and political desires was a means justified by their end: the creation of communities of readers, and hence the establishment of self-determining nations, in Latin America. The English Patient, however , takes place in Europe during World War II, when nations themselves initiate and justify enormous abuses of power: its plot hinges on the political interferences that nationalism throws in the way of the illicit lovers, Count László de Almásy and Katharine Clifton. When Almásy walks from the Cave of Swimmers to El Taj to fetch help for the injured Katharine, British soldiers detain him as a German spy, and Katharine dies alone. Afterwards, as he is flying her body back to civilization, German machine gunners shoot down his British plane. The lovers, it seems, could only have been united on 50 Hsuan Hsu the “earth without maps” that Katharine imagines in her dying moments. In the Latin American colonies described by Sommer, marriage provided a means of bourgeois consolidation that “filled the ‘relative vacuum of social structures’ to construct a social organization preliminary to public institutions including the state itself”; it also channeled eroticism into reproductive relationships which would populate newly consolidated nations (Sommer 19). The English Patient, however, derives its libidinal force from adultery rather than marriage. If marriage represented alliances between cultures, classes, and races in national romances, Ondaatje and Minghella’s filmic post-national romance employ extra-marital bonds as metaphors for international alliances. Geoffrey Clifton’s statement that he and Katharine “were practically brother and sister before we were man and wife” (Minghella, The English Patient; all quotations are from the film) links intra-national marriage to incest implicitly and suggests an introverted form of society that precludes external ties. Almásy, Katharine, Hana, and Kip embody and enact desires that transgress both national and familial boundaries. The English Patient dramatizes the way in which foundational fictions, while producing national desire by means of libidinal and geographical mapping, give rise to various marginalizations and exclusions or foundational “frictions” simultaneously. Marriage, with its insistence on productive and sanctioned eroticism, suppresses adultery , along with homosexuality and other unmapped forms of sexual satisfaction. In addition to frustrated adulterous and homosexual relationships, The English Patient also includes several instances of non-genital eroticism, such as a close-up of the Patient’s mouth receiving a...

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