What We Don't See in What We See: A Response to Cinema and Fascination

The world is an enigma, Nietzsche said, but an enigma composed of its various solutions (qtd. in Calasso 3). In much the same way, we can say that fascination in cinema is an enigma made up of its various interpretations. The essays in this special issue of Postmodern Culture, each brilliant in its own very different way, draw on a wide range of disciplines—from psychoanalysis and philosophy to sound art and quantum physics—as if to say that what is fascinating about cinema exists everywhere and not just in cinema alone. However, each essay manages to construct its argument around a reading of one or two films. The arguments are staged in dialogue with Freud or Lacan, Blanchot, Barad, or Bersani, but these canonical figures are not given the last word on the enigma of fascination. (More often than not, they appear like apotropaic gargoyles attaching themselves to an argument.) Rather, the significant emphasis is always on how fascination informs and deforms all the elements in cinema, including words and images—informs by de-forming them, like the sly way Deleuze's "dark precursor" works, or the way Lucretius's clinamen conditions atoms to swerve from the straight and narrow. What emerges from this special issue, then, is not a unified theory of fascination, but something perhaps more valuable: descriptions from the field of how fascination is present in a film and how a viewer or reader experiences it. Taken together, the essays suggest that behind the question "What is fascination?" lies the question "What is cinema?"

Let me begin with Kwasu D. Tembo's essay, which raises some key questions about fascination and cinema, including, if only by implication, the question of film form. Tembo notes that fascination is often used today as a term of approbation, especially when we do not know what to say, but he also reminds us that there is a sinister side to it, highlighted by the psychoanalytic study of sexuality. When sex is linked to power, as it always is, we find "aberrations" like sadism and masochism. In the first half of the essay, Tembo brings out the heavy artillery (Freud, Lacan, Gallop, and others) to argue that Steven Shainberg's Secretary (2002) is about psycho-sexual fascination as a form of bondage. The film deals with the affair between Lee Halloway and her boss Edward Grey; Lee has masochistic tendencies, and Grey sadistic. Not unlike the master/bondsman dialectic, psycho-sexual bondage is "bidirectional." Furthermore, it turns around a Lacanian "thing," an objet petit a, a thing that is a no-thing—like the dead earthworm Lee mails to Grey—which Tembo calls in his title "the power of absolute nothing." The work of Jane Gallop, herself a reader of Freud and Lacan, opens the further possibility of a feminist reading.

However, it should be obvious that what accounts for the film's fascination is not any scholarly apparatus but its overall tone, the fact that it is not a case study but a romantic comedy given several generic twists. In the film, bondage as "bidirectional exchange" is less a psychological insight than a comic formula whose automatism makes it appropriate for farce: so less a psychoanalytic tour de force than a Schnitzleresque tour de farce. The marriage of true minds takes the farcical form of a sadist and a masochist falling in love. Of course, it will have to be a kinky kind of love, romantic comedy taken to unexpected places. Nevertheless, like more conventional affairs, kinkiness has its own trials and tribulations, as well as its own precise if perverse algorithm of desire, seen most clearly in the minute detail of the fetish. One example is Grey's red pencil. He uses it like an instrument of torture, a red-hot branding iron, to circle Lee's typing errors. Tembo points to an even better example, the dead earthworm that Lee mails to Grey when all else fails to rekindle his passion. She tries enticing him to no avail by placing a sexy photo of herself on his desk or dressing...