"What are women in film texts" has always been a topic discussed in feminist film theory, and its goal is to objectify women's performance in film narratives. In her famous "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Movies", Laura Mulvey mainly used the background of psychoanalysis to deconstructively criticize the classic Hollywood movies, exposing the "gender" which is logically based on male desire. "Discrimination" and "voyeurism" style viewing mechanism. "Sex, Lies, Videotape" uses a non-Hollywood sense of alienation to describe women and men, marriage and sex. Under the premise of this kind of rebellious thinking, I have already bid farewell to the feminist or psychoanalytic criticism of the film, but switched to the use of psychoanalysis to analyze the feminist consciousness contained in the film itself.
The film uses sex, lies, and videotape to design the story between a pair of sisters and a pair of old classmates with three signifier codes with rich meanings. The concise relationship between the characters and the narrative structure contains profound women. consciousness. The story begins in the dialogue between sister Ann and the psychologist. The younger sister is the secret mistress of brother-in-law John. John’s old classmate Graham has a sexual psychological disorder, and Ann, who has similar sexual psychological problems, has a good impression of her. As a turning point in the story, Graham appeared in the lives of the three people and uncovered this lie about the extramarital affair in the form of a videotape. Although the film's story unfolds with two males, two females and four protagonists, the seemingly balanced gender division implies a change of theme centered on the female perspective. Director and screenwriter Steven Soderbergh is not a woman, but with the rebellious spirit of her young people, she describes a personal experience from a non-mainstream perspective, incorporating a lot of female consciousness worthy of reading, and acting as an independent film. Formed a calm deconstruction of the mainstream male power vision.
Reconstruction of self-"mirror phase" and "secondary assimilation"
The two heroines in the film are two completely different types, both in terms of appearance and inner character. Sister Ann is an elegant American middle-class housewife, younger sister Cynthia is a slutty or even vulgar barmaid, but these two are sisters. The application of Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory to movies mainly refers to the two psychological stages—the “mirror stage” and the “Oedipus stage”. Express. The film sets Ann and Cynthia, the relatives of sisters, into two huge contrasts, which has its reference to the "Lacanian" mental model in the formation of female subjects.
Both of them have a certain degree of disdain for each other, but this superficial disdain hides dependence and jealousy for each other. Whether it is due to kinship or psychological needs, as if the other party is another invisible self, the two are pulling each other. When the third party Graham asked Ann about his sister Cynthia, Ann replied that they were doing well, but she thought Cynthia was an outgoing and vulgar person, and she thought that her sister would not agree with her. When Cynthia met Graham, she said that her sister described her as expected. Implied here is a kind of discordant tacit understanding. While Ann disliked her sister's being too outgoing, she was also full of doubts about herself. The film sets Ann’s questioning into a sexual psychological barrier. She has never enjoyed orgasm from her husband, and she has become increasingly unable to get close to her husband. Ironically, Cynthia became her brother-in-law's sexual partner. Cynthia said to her brother-in-law John: "I was so excited when I thought of your family sleeping with you, and the thought of being able to have sex with you on my sister's bed. I hope I can tell everyone that being in bed sucks. Beautiful and popular Miss Ann." This Cynthia's confession is a contradictory expression of her denial and affirmation of her identity. This shows that Cynthia has always been full of jealousy and dissatisfaction with Ann. Her narcissism hides inferiority complex. She is eager to get the outside world to identify with herself, even through immoral forms. "Determining oneself, but falling into the other, the mechanism of mirror identification implies this original rift: the anxiety of living in the other and experiencing one's own division in the other." Cynthia lived in this anxiety. , She looks chic and free, but this kind of freedom is fragile, because she has fallen into the consciousness of the other of her own sister and is in a state of pseudo-healthy lack.
Lacan's "mirror stage" theory believes that during the first six to eighteen months of life, the baby has no sense of independence, but will complete the first identification of his own mirror image, accompanied by identification with the mother. We can notice that there are only three scenes in the film where Ann and Cynthia’s face-to-face rivalry are played. Two of the motives were about the mother’s birthday present. The first was when Ann asked Cynthia’s home what gift to give, and the second was when Cynthia bought a gift in the bar where Cynthia worked and told Cynthia. It is obvious that Ann is an active role here, while Cynthia is passive and indifferent, as if she has no love for her mother. It can be inferred from this that Cynthia may not have successfully completed the self-identification of the "mirror phase", and naturally she will not enter the second phase of self-construction. "The mirror phase corresponds to the imaginary order. After that is the Oedipus phase, during which the child enters the symbolic order, which is the order of language and the order of the father." On the contrary, Anze smoothly transitioned to the "secondary assimilation" ", the legal stage of the patrilineal order. Lacan believes that only in this way can children become a subject different from their parents, enter the orderly world of language and culture, and freely switch between expressing imagination and reality.
"If the mirror phase marks the original place where the subject constitutes his own prototype, the tragedy that man cannot spend his life with himself is created by this." Cynthia mental health. This tragic reversal setting requires both of them to complete a process of "reconstructing themselves" in terms of identity. The two sisters need to find their true self through each other like looking in a mirror, and because the psychological problems in this process are related to sexual desire, the two male protagonists must participate. At the end, the two bid farewell to John, and Ann specially went to the bar to give his sister a birthday gift and reminded her to call herself, and their relationship reached a temporary reconciliation and consensus. This kind of reconciliation is both self-help and a reconstruction of self.
Deconstructing men-from the object's "aphasia" to the subject's "resistance"
Beauvoir said in "Second Sex" that "a man who identifies a woman as the other will find that a woman plays the role of complicity." Women because of it The identity of the "other" inevitably requires deconstruction of men in the process of self-reconstruction. It should be said that it is with the deconstruction of men that women have completed their self-reconstruction.
Although the two male characters in the film used to be old classmates, they can now be said to have very different personalities. John is a typical middle class, with a house, a car, and a family, but Graham has no girlfriend and rents a house. The only thing he has is a drifting car. "According to Lacan, even when a man has grown up and obtained a certain social subject identity confirmation, the image of a woman is still an image that triggers anxiety, because "she" is a bloody wound, a lively threat of castration. Therefore, the further confirmation of the male subject's identity and the acquisition of symbolic power always include the process of symbolic anxiety and traumatic memory caused by the successful expulsion of women. "The male subject in the film has indeed always survived the oppression of the female image. , Seemingly calm but always anxious, but they say goodbye to this anxiety is not based on the successful expulsion of women as a prerequisite, on the contrary, they become the object of expulsion.
At first John wandered between the two women comfortably, but he gradually felt the oppression. He received a call from Cynthia in the office, and when he hesitated to move forward, there was a picture of Ann on the table. When Ann doubted him for the first time, his mood was almost to the brink. When Ann compromised, he sat on the side of the bed and took a deep breath. And another male, Graham, lived under the oppression of women from beginning to end. There is an "absent" presence in the film-the female Elizabeth, which is obviously the root cause of Graham's sexual psychological disorder. Graham's main identity was inverted from women, and he became a castration symbol lacking masculine objects. Women are mainly anti-going here. In the cafe scene, Ann asked if Graham would feel inferior due to impotence. Graham replied awkwardly, "Usually not", and then he added "Yes, I am inferior." Obviously, Ann walked out of the inherent "aphasia" through Graham's appearance, began to ask questions, and began to take proactive actions. After Ann confirmed the affair between her husband and sister, she resolutely came to Graham's home to conduct self-analysis, and became the main body holding the video recorder, questioning Graham's mental state. This move changed the norm of women being "stared". Obviously it gave Graham a blow. For nine years, he has been supporting his life by shooting women's sexual talks, and Ann's "resistance" made him have to face his own dilemma.
Graham is an escaped passive character, while Ann has gone through a process of change from "aphasia" to "resistance". Obviously, men in this film have become a supporting role or a disadvantaged group. When Graham was questioned by Ann, he tried to refute that he thought he was healthier than Ann and Cynthia, but An still resolutely said "You have a problem", Graham could only silently acquiesce. And finally under the initiative of Ann, Graham began to make a "sex breakthrough." Not only through Graham, but from John's body, we can also see the "anti-guest" of the two women. Although Cynthia is not an "aphasia" in the traditional sense, she can express her attitude freely, but she has always been at the mercy of the man when she gets along with John, and her indifferentness is actually an escape from her. After she finished talking about her sexual experience, she seemed to have completed a self-examination. "All individuals try to determine that they are the subject. This is an ethical ambition. In fact, in addition to this, there are intentions to escape freedom and become things in humans: this is a sinister path, because people are passive, Alienation and loss will become victims of foreign will, separated from its transcendence, and deprived of all value." Cynthia herself is a freer individual than Bian. But her freedom is actually premised on the price of women becoming "things", and she voluntarily was toyed with by men. In fact, this is also a kind of alienation and loss. But when she realized this kind of unnecessary sacrifice, she began to look for her subject identity. She began to reject John and pointed out John's hypocrisy to her face. When John questioned whether Graham instructed her to do this, she resolutely said no, she figured it out. At this time, John changed his normal instead, showing a weak side. He couldn't help himself during this period of derailment. He said that things have become more and more complicated, but Cynthia retorted that it has become very simple. It can be seen that at this time, men have become weak among women, and the existence of women poses a fatal threat to men. In the end, John was dumped by two women and had problems at work. Graham was not as miserable as John, but his psychological recovery was due to Ann's help.
Women’s self-reconstruction is accompanied by innate kinship factors and acquired social environmental factors. Through non-Hollywood narrative methods, the film implicitly expresses the plight of women in this reconstruction and sets off by deconstructing men. The salvation of women in difficult situations. Feminist film critics use "passionate alienation" to advertise their position. This film also adopts a "passionate alienation" position to construct the story. The relationship between sex, lies, and videotape can be interpreted as: women Using one's own sexual experience and sexual awakening to dissolve men's stubborn extramarital affairs and voyeurism, this sentence can also summarize the interpretation of the feminist theme of the film in this article.
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