Like a Film: Ideological Fantasy on Screen, Camera, and Canvas

What does it mean when we claim that our experience is “like a movie”? The trope is common enough. Yet we tend to mean many different things by this everyday mode of description. Sometimes, we measure the believability of an experience by movie standards: “It was so unreal, it was like a movie.” Or, alternately: “It was so realistic, like a movie.” Describing one’s experience as “like a film” might also have to do with how the cinematic has affected our mode of visual perception (in Benjamin’s sense). We talk of seeing things in slow-motion, freeze-frames—time slowing or stopping to let us take in every slight motion—or viewing ourselves from outside, as if on a screen.

In his new book, Timothy Murray groups a collection of essays on texts and theories of visual culture under the rubric “like a film” to capture “the various ways the cinematic experience has pervaded contemporary cultural production only to return to itself ‘im-segno’” (4). Individual essays examine psychoanalysis and feminism (Torok, Silverman, Rainer), Barthes’ Camera Lucida, Olivier’s Othello, Jarman’s Caravaggio, Lyotard’s art criticism, and the Harrisons’ Lagoon Cycle. Murray begins with the everyday way in which we employ the trope “like a film,” focusing, in particular, on one witness’s description of the 1992 car crash in Washington Square Park: “It was like a surreal experience. We couldn’t believe what was happening. It was like a movie” (3–4). The trope “like a film,” in this instance, would seem to have to do with how the cinema has affected our experience of trauma, helping us to narrativize it in order to make sense of it or distance ourselves from it.

Moving somewhat beyond the narrativization implicit in the witness’s account, yet maintaining the sense of trauma, Murray takes the phrase “like a film” to describe ideological fantasy, “the analogical modulation of belief and fantasy” (5). He suggests that “the cinematic ‘happenings’ of culture—of identity, identification, and politics—are often believable precisely because they are structured so much like film” (5). This circular formulation is contradictory, however, because on the one hand it suggests that film precedes ideology and on the other, that these “happenings” are always already cinematic. Further, it’s unclear what it means to be structured like a film. Narrative or montage? The apparatus or the lure of the surface?

In part, it is difficult to sort through what Murray means by “like a film” because the essays that make up the collection consist primarily of close theoretical readings of texts rather than analyses of the experience or perception of readers and spectators. In countering critics who question the ability of psychoanalytic and post-structural Continental theories sufficiently to address issues of identity, identification, and politics, Murray argues that these theories can be usefully employed to explore the psychic borders of intellectual and cultural differences, or adopting Lyotard’s term, differends. For Lyotard, “a case of differend between two parties takes place when the ‘regulation’ of the conflict that opposes them is done in the idiom of one of the parties while the wrong suffered by the other is not signified in that idiom.” ¹ And Murray argues that just such an “instability of cultural exchange might be understood psychoanalytically to constitute the structure of visuality per se” (17).

Murray does take up texts that are produced by or attempt to delineate various gendered, sexual, and racial differends. At times, however, the most striking differend is that between the critic and the others whose idiom he explores. As Murray says of Lyotard’s art criticism, “the visage of the philosopher hovers over the terrain” (177). For example, when Murray claims in a chapter on Olivier’s Othello that “Olivier does more to maintain the cultural ideology of negritude . . . than to expose it to any sustained performance of retrospective critique” (111), and seems surprised by his own discovery (“this statement may appear...