Image & Narrative, Vol 13, No 1 (2012) 80 Medial Techniques of the Uncanny and Anxiety
Michaela Wünsch
Abstract: The following article deals with techniques of the uncanny that are used in horror films, particularly in the stalker film, Halloween. The concrete device of
framing will first be situated in the context of medial technology and mediality, not
least the mediality of the television set and its resultant uncanny aspects. Distinctions
will then be made between the uncanny and anxiety with regard to the effects of
framing, especially in relation to the objects within the frame and the specific status of
the frame. The final part of the article will contextualise this discussion in relation to
the concept of “Whiteness”, understood as an object of anxiety, and its application to
the figure of the serial killer.
Résumé: L’article suivant traite des techniques de l’inquiétante étrangeté qui sont engagées dans des films d’épouvante, en particulier dans le film de harcèlement
Halloween. Le procédé concret du cadrage sera d’abord situé dans le contexte de la technologie médiale et de la médialité, surtout la médialité du plateau de télévision et
les aspects étranges qui en résultent. Dans un second temps, il sera question de
distinguer l’inquiétante étrangeté et l’anxiété en rapport avec les effets du cadrage, en
particulier en relation avec les objets encadrés et le statut spécifique du cadre. La
dernière partie de l’article contextualise cette discussion à la lumière du concept de
« Blancheur », entendu comme un objet d’anxiété, et de son application à la figure du
tueur en série.
Keywords: "Horror film", "Halloween", "The Wolf Man", "framing", "expectation", "anxiety"
Image & Narrative, Vol 13, No 1 (2012) 81 I. The Borders of the Uncanny
Halloween (USA 1978, R: John Carpenter), one of the most famous stalker films, established the point-of-view shot in horror films as a means of indicating the extra-diegetic presence of a killer that is invisible to both the victims in the film itself and the cinema audience. The point-of-view shot suggests that the view of the camera is identical to the view of an unseen person, usually the killer. The frame of the image thus imitates the field of vision of the human eye. However, the frame created by the camera is often narrower than the field of vision belonging to the human eye, and the movements of the camera are also too abrupt to produce the illusion of a human perspective. Thus, it becomes obvious that it is a camera that is “looking”, usually at the potential or prospective victims. This view through a camera reminds the audience of a hunter’s look. It is likely that this camera technique leads to the audience’s identification with the perspective of the killer.
In addition to the point-of-view shot, the half-subjective shot is also used in Halloween to an even greater degree. This type of shot also imitates the perspective of the killer but does not reproduce his vision precisely. Although the killer is seen in the image, only a part of his body is shown in the film frame or he is only visible from behind. It is worth noting that during these shots, the film frame is often doubled by other frames, such as doors, windows or window panes. Such doubling is evident, for example, in a scene in which the serial killer, Michael Myers, stalks a child from a car. The camera is placed behind Michael in the car so that his back is seen from behind a mesh net consisting of little squares. The camera then pans to the side windows in the back of the car so that the image is divided into multiple frames: the little squares in the mesh net and the different frames of the windows of the car.
In his discussion of internal framing devices in Halloween, Steve Neale notes that these shots focus on the fields of vision as marked by the frame (335). He also states that the point-of-view shots dominate the first part of the film, whereas the “system of frame” is more prevalent in the second. For Neale, the point-of-view shot mediates control and power for the audience, which identifies with the look of the killer, while the half-subjective shots and division of images into small frames in the mise-en-scène frustrate the spectators, because it causes them seemingly to lose control over the image(s) in the frame(s) (337).
Image & Narrative, Vol 13, No 1 (2012) 82 According to Christian Metz, the use of multiple framing devices in a film brings about a transition to the reflexive (58f.). The frame within a film frame is, for Metz, a result of the means of self-expression of the cinema per se, and it is always “meta-cinematographic” (60). Metz referred to this film technique as “deictic dispositive” (Diegetisierung des Dispositivs), or more specifically, the dispositive of the screen and its framing (60). The film screen is both the rectangle and the site of that which is displayed; “it enables the vision but also forecloses it; it shows and conceals” at the same time (Metz 61). Halloween is therefore a film about showing and concealing by rendering cinematic techniques themselves both visible and invisible.
These techniques might be defined as what Gilles Deleuze referred to as “obsessive framing” (77). He writes: “All framing determines an out-of-field. [...] The out-of-field refers to what is neither seen nor understood, but is nevertheless perfectly present” (Deleuze 17). The technique of obsessive framing makes the camera await the entry of a character into the frame. The absence of the killer paradoxically serves to highlight his ubiquitous presence, as the frame activates the space behind it, thus creating the expectation that someone is emerging from the out-of-field into the frame.
In his essay, “Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety”, Sigmund Freud discusses the connection between expectation and anxiety. He writes: “Anxiety has an unmistakable relation to expectation: it is anxiety about something. It has a quality of indefiniteness and lack of object” (1959, 164f.). Initially, the assertion that anxiety is related to the lack of an object might appear contradictory. However, Freud argues that expectation anxiety arises not because of a certain object, but because of a repetition of a situation of helplessness (ibid., 166). Moreover, he differentiates between real anxiety and neurotic anxiety, the latter being distinguished by the lack of an object and indefiniteness. According to Freud, this uncertainty derives from the fact that the cause of anxiety is unknown. He assumes that a repressed situation of helplessness and the expectation of a repetition are the first steps towards “self-preservation”, since the patient can foresee and expect a traumatic situation of this kind which entails helplessness, instead of simply waiting for it to happen” (ibid., 166).
For Freud, expectation anxiety is a way of “changing from passivity to activity” in order to master the traumatic experience (ibid.). The return of an affective
Image & Narrative, Vol 13, No 1 (2012) 83 impulse “that is transformed by repression into anxiety”, however, is defined more specifically as “das Unheimliche” or the uncanny: “This class of frightening things would then constitute the uncanny; and it must be a matter of indifference whether it carried some other affect. In the second place, if this is indeed the secret nature of the uncanny, we can understand why linguistic usage has extended das Heimliche [‘homely’] into its opposite, das Unheimliche” (2003, 241).
Expectation anxiety is therefore more accurately defined as the uncanny, since the indefiniteness of the unknown is founded in circumstances where the cause has been forgotten or repressed. What is expected, then, is the return of something that is already known, but repressed. It is in this way that a frame in a horror film causes a feeling of the uncanny, because it raises the expectation of something else and because a frame always refers to that which is beyond itself. In horror films, every frame therefore refers to an as yet unknown element which is still to come. At the beginning of Halloween, the killer is a yet unknown person who is either off-screen or “behind” the camera. He does not have the status of an object within an image, but is instead an object coming from outside.
In his volume, The Legend of Freud, Samuel Weber relates the frame and expectation to the uncanny. He writes about E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Sandman: “The Sandman is insofar as he is coming. Nathanael’s problem is related precisely to the ubiquitous possibility of this coming, an eventuality that cannot be foreclosed by any of the borders with which we seek to wall in our spaces and control access to them” (Weber 2000, 9). In Hoffmann’s tale, the young Nathanael is told that the Sandman is an evil man, who comes to children who refuse to go to bed and throws a handful of sand in their eyes, causing these to jump out of their sockets in a bloody fashion. Weber stresses that the threat of the Sandman consists of his coming; for although Nathanael is afraid that the Sandman will come and hurt his eyes, the Sandman does not in fact ever really come.
Like the Sandman, the Bogeyman, the epithet for the unknown killer in Halloween, is a figure that is supposed to catch his victims at home. His threat, however, lies in the uncertainty of not knowing whether and when he will enter the house or/and image. It is this uncertainty that makes the figure ubiquitous; the home as a closed space is rendered permeable and uncertain.
The coming, according to Weber, “is an eventuality that cannot be foreclosed by any of the borders with which we seek to wall in our spaces and control access to
Image & Narrative, Vol 13, No 1 (2012) 84 them. [...] The power of the Sandman, then, inheres in his ability to invade and occupy what in the modern period is considered the most sacred of spaces: the private space of the family, the home” (2000, 9).The Sandman and the Bogeyman cannot be kept on the outside by walls, since they are able to cross borders. Borders lose their ability to frame a closed space, instead becoming permeable, and they also begin to be invaded by that what has been excluded. For Weber, the figure of the Sandman is uncanny, because the foreclosed element (re-)invades the sacred realm of the modern period, the home; the Sandman also questions the borders that are supposed to divide the inside and the outside, the private and the public, the familiar and the unfamiliar. In the same way, the film frame refers to what is off-screen, while the frame of the interior room also refers to what is outside of it.
The framed window is presented as a permeable object even in the beginning of Halloween, in the scene where the killer Michael circles around a house and watches through a window opening onto the living room. This window, normally used by the inhabitants inside a home to look outside from a safe vantage point, now becomes a point of invasion and inversion of the gaze.
This scene would not be uncanny if the spectator were to identify with the viewpoint of the camera/killer. However, it becomes uncanny if the audience identifies with the couple that is being observed by this as yet unknown person. The idea that someone is watching you when you believe that you are alone and unobserved at home is uncanny for most people, because they expect that the home is a place that is private and a place where the public is excluded.
That the unnoticed observer is uncanny becomes more apparent in a scene in Halloween in which the observed does not see Michael, but the audience does. The audience does not watch this scene by means of a point-of-view shot, but rather from a half-subjective perspective, which reveals Michael’s image through a framed window that in turn contains smaller frames.
In this scene, the audience already knows the identity of the observer and his precise intention: namely, to kill the observed. The killer remains unnoticed by the potential victims because they are watching horror films such as The Thing and Night of the Living Dead, which are being shown on television the night before Halloween.
Image & Narrative, Vol 13, No 1 (2012) 85 In this scene, it is not the window that is being used as a means of viewing the world outside, but rather the television set. The window instead becomes the point of an inverted gaze, since it loses its “original” function; the television already has the function of bringing the world outside into the home. The television and the killer both invade the home, which in turn becomes an uncanny place because of the permeability of its borders.
The announcer who informs us of the next film to be shown in the horror movie marathon also compares the television to windows and doors. He warns the viewers: “Lock your door, close your windows and turn off the lights”. Closing the doors and windows, however, does not prevent the spooky content of the horror film from entering the living room. The introduction of the television set into the (private) home also brings with it horror stories, because the television transmits both psychical and physical waves. The announcer’s warning to close the windows and the doors directly addresses the spectators who are watching at home and who are unable to leave the horror film behind completely when they finish watching it (as they would have been able to do in the cinema), since a remainder of the film stays in the living room even after the television is turned off. This idea is used in the narration of many horror and stalker films and, in these films, the horror in the home begins after the television is turned off.
The invasion of the serial killer into the private space of the home can be read analogously as the invasion of television into this same domestic realm. For Weber, “the television set turns out to be something like a Trojan Horse introduced into the heart of the domestic fortress that we call ‘home’” (1996, 122). The television is uncanny because it is uncontrollable with regard what is being transmitted, and because its limits of transmission are inherently unstable.
A similar claim can be made with regard to the serial killer, the difference being that the serial killer encounters more obstacles before he is able to invade the room, since he is not readily welcomed like the television programme. While the audience is rarely privy to seeing exactly how he manages to cross these barriers, it is clear that, once he has gained access to the home, nothing is how it was before. The curtains, which are supposed to provide protection, are now potential hiding places. Danger seems to come from everywhere: under the bed, inside the closet, behind every door. Carol Clover writes: “The house [...] may at first sight seem a safe
Image & Narrative, Vol 13, No 1 (2012) 86 heaven, but the same walls that promise to keep the killer out quickly become, once the killer penetrates them, the walls that hold the victim in” (31).
Just as in Weber’s description of the Sandman, the presence of the killer in stalker films transforms the domestic space and gives the objects within this space a different meaning. This displacement of meaning is the effect of a changed perspective on the seeming normality of white, middle-class families. The hostile outside is no longer something that exists beyond what is normal and everyday, but rather something which is already within the bounds of the normal, in the home. Although the killer is inside, he nevertheless remains elusive and he is therefore dangerous.
This state of an inner outside can be described by the term “extimity”. The expression derives from the term “intimity”, and it signifies an inner outside, like a subject’s unconscious (see Miller 1994). That which seems to be outside the interior turns the interior into that which is outside, alien and uncanny, within the space of that which is “heimlich”. Once again, the killer and the television set share similar characteristics, since they both destroy the division between inside and outside when the outer world invades the inner home and overcomes the limits of the body (see Weber 1996, 115f.).
At the same time, the television initiates a process of signification or, at the very least, a displacement of meaning, by altering the spatial order of the home. The television, moreover, transforms people’s vision of the world and even vision itself. “What we see on the TV screen is not so much ‘images’ but another kind of vision, a vision of the other (to be understood as both an objective and subjective genitive)” (Weber 1996, 121). According to Weber, the television screen is the site of an uncanny confusion, resulting from an inability to ascertain exactly who is seeing what: “What we see (…) is someone or something seeing” (Weber 1996, 122). Like the point-of-view shots in stalker films, we know that we can see someone or that there is something to be seen, but we do not know exactly who is watching. The word “watch” means not only “to look at”, but also “looking out for”, “that is, being sensorially alert for something that may happen” (Weber 1996, 118). This “looking out for” refers both to the killer’s act of looking into the living room (at the beginning of Halloween) and to the look of the potential victim. The necessary alertness of the victim implies an uncanny experience of the Freudian “expectation anxiety”. Every phenomenon analysed thus far that has to do with expectation, that is, with the entry
Image & Narrative, Vol 13, No 1 (2012) 87 from an out-of-field into the image, the incursion of external forces into the home, and the uncertainty as to who or what is coming, seems to belong to the category of the uncanny. However, the uncanny cannot be separated from anxiety, as Weber states: “That the uncanny is inseparable from anxiety is evident; but it is more difficult to determine precisely how it relates to it” (2009, 78). Given this statement, I will therefore now analyse the differences between anxiety and the uncanny in their relation to the frame itself.
II. Framing Anxiety
In his seminar on anxiety, Jacques Lacan argues:
“We could not spend too much time on the nuances of this framing of anxiety. Are you going to say that I am appealing to it in the sense of bringing it back to expectation, to preparation, to a state of alert, to a response which is already one of defense against what is going to happen. That yes! It is the Erwartung [expectation], it is the constitution of the hostile as such, it is the first recourse beyond Hilflosigkeit [helplessness].
But anxiety is different. If, in effect, expectation can serve among other means to frame it, […] there is no need for this expectation: the frame is always there! Anxiety is different. Anxiety is when there appears in this frame something which is already there much closer to home” (Seminar 6, 6).
According to Lacan, expectation displaces anxiety to something outside, to something hostile that is constituted by anticipation. As was outlined above, the unknown and hostile guest belongs to the realm of the uncanny and not so much to the register of anxiety. For Lacan, this is because the hostile guest who crosses the border is “already someone who has been well worked over in terms of expectation” (Seminar 6, 6). Lacan follows Freud in his assumption that expectation is a way of handling anxiety. Expectation conceals the fact that the cause of anxiety “is much closer to the home”. “This guest [l‘hote] is not the heimlich, it is not the person who lives in the house, it is someone hostile who has been softened, pacified, accepted” (ibid.). At the same time, while the act of labelling a threat as hostile eases anxiety
Image & Narrative, Vol 13, No 1 (2012) 88 and belongs to the realm of the uncanny, anxiety is nevertheless released by “the emergence of the heimlich in the frame” (ibid.).
The term “heimlich” points to the fact that anxiety is not triggered by something unknown, but instead by a known yet concealed cause. Lacan also underscores the fact that anxiety is always framed. When anxiety occurs in conjunction with a frame, we must consider whether it is not in fact the frame itself in which anxiety is situated. It follows that the framed images of cinema and television would thus be the privileged “frame” where anxiety becomes readable.
Lacan stresses that his seminar on anxiety is about the relationship between the stage and the world, together with the stage in its own dimension. In this regard, he cites the example of Freud’s case of the “Wolf Man”. In this case, the patient dreamt that he was lying still in bed when the window facing him suddenly opened by itself. He was terrified to see that some white wolves were sitting on a tree in front of the window looking at him. From that time onwards, he claimed that he was always afraid of seeing something terrible in his dreams (Freud 1990, 259).
The numbness of the Wolf Man, the autonomous opening of the window and the act of looking through it remind us of the situation of the spectator in the cinema. Lacan writes that there is always a sensation of anxiety at the moment when the curtain is opened. However, this anxiety does not refer to the content of the image but to the frame: “What do we see in this dream? The sudden opening – and the two terms are indicated – of a window. The phantasy is seen beyond a pane and through a window which opens, the phantasy is framed” (Lacan Seminar 6, 5).
According to Lacan, the dream of the Wolf Man reveals the scene of a fantasy frame(?) rather than content. The episode in the Wolf Man’s dream consists of a child lying in bed while a window is opened like the curtains on a stage. At the moment when this window is opened there is a moment of uncertainty. Whereas Freud associates this uncertainty with a past traumatic event, Lacan attributes it to the desire of the other. The Wolf Man sees the wolves looking at him through the window and Lacan describes this act of looking as the experience of being seen by the Other and becoming the object of the desire of the other: “What do you want (from me)?”. The question becomes especially important in this particular scene, because the muteness of the wolves prevents it from being answered. Through their silence and otherness, the wolves therefore question the Ego of the Wolf Man. Here, the basic relationship between anxiety and the desire of the other is exposed, since the expression, “What do
Image & Narrative, Vol 13, No 1 (2012) 89 you want?”, raises the question of what the Other sees in me. Anxiety arises when there is no “communication”; it involves a confrontation with the desire of the Other which occurs when I have no awareness of what I am for the Other. We encounter an indefiniteness or uncertainty similar to the uncanny feeling discussed previously, but here, this uncertainty is related to an object.
For Slavoj Žižek, “fantasy is an answer to this ‘Che vuoi?’; it is an attempt to fill out the gap of the question with an answer” (Žižek 1989, 114). If the scene in the dream of the Wolf Man is a scene of fantasy, it therefore contains not only the question, but also the answer to the question, “Che vuoi?”
There is a scene in Halloween that shows Lynda (P.J. Soles) lying in her bed after having sex, while her lover Bob (John Michael Graham) fetches some beer from the kitchen downstairs. Unnoticed by Lynda, Michael stabs Bob to death in the kitchen. While Lynda waits for Bob’s return in bed, the audience sees from Lynda’s perspective how the door is being opened slowly, apparently by an invisible hand. A person wrapped in a white sheet and wearing Bob’s glasses then appears above the sheets. Here we have a scene in which the killer is not entering or crossing a frame, but appears suddenly within the frame of the door.
Although Lynda mistakes the person for Bob, the audience knows that it is Michael underneath the sheet. He looks silently towards Lynda and she asks him what he wants. She lifts up her shirt and shows him her breasts, saying: “Is there anything you like?”. Since he does not respond, Lynda continues: “What’s the matter? Can I get your ghost, Bob?”, and laughs. However, because he still does not respond, Lynda becomes angry and then anxious. She asks if he cannot answer. During this one-sided dialogue, Lynda’s head can be seen while she speaks. This is then followed by a counter-shot of the white figure, breathing loudly under the sheets.
This scene from the film is reminiscent of the Wolf Man’s dream, since Michael gazes mutely at Lynda, just as the wolves were staring through the window at the person lying in bed. Anxiety in Lynda is aroused, because someone is looking at her despite there being no communication. Lynda is exposed to the look of the Other, but she does not know whose look it is; she speaks, but gets no answer. It is therefore unclear as to what the Other wants from her.
At the beginning of his seminar on anxiety, Lacan describes a hypothetical scenario based on a similar situation: he imagines himself confronted by a gigantic
Image & Narrative, Vol 13, No 1 (2012) 90 praying mantis whilst wearing an animal mask. He does not know, however, what type of mask he is wearing because he can neither mirror himself in the eyes of the praying mantis nor ask the insect. In this situation, the question, “Che vuoi?”, “What do you want?”, is, for Lacan, ultimately futile, because it will not be answered at all. He is, after all, fully exposed to the animal, and the danger of this scenario lies not only in the threat of being eaten by the praying mantis, but also in the insect’s inherent muteness and otherness.
For Lacan, this scenario exemplifies the basic relation between anxiety and the desire of the Other. The question, “What do you want?”, is directly related to the question of what the Other sees in me. The mask concerns the “moi”, that is, the place in the Ego with which the subject identifies, and which represents itself with regard to the Other. If there is no inkling of what the subject represents for this Other, then anxiety arises. It results in a confrontation with the desire of the Other without knowing what the object of this desire is.
In Halloween, even if it is Michael who wears a mask, Lynda’s anxiety arises for the same reason as in Lacan’s scenario. First, she assumes that the masked figure is her boyfriend. However, since he reveals himself as alien to her because of his masquerade, Lynda cannot be certain of his identity. Her reaction – her gesture of offering her breasts as objects – can be interpreted as her attempt to try to change the situation by transforming it into a scene of desire. In Lacanian and Kleinian psychoanalysis, breasts are defined as partial objects of desire since they, as part of the mother, have been lost with the separation from the mother. Although this loss produces a lack on the side of the subject, the lack is nevertheless perceived as pertaining to the object. At the same time, Michael does not react when Linda offers him something that he (and she) lacks. This is, I would argue, because the lack is lacking in this scene.
First, the lack is lacking because in this scene the killer, a figure who is hidden or partly hidden for most of the film, appears in person in the frame. Second, the killer represents the lack of the lack by virtue of his white mask, that is, the white sheet that covers him, which functions as an indicator of his “Whiteness”. He is not only a white male, but his white mask makes him whiter than white and this is what causes anxiety.
Image & Narrative, Vol 13, No 1 (2012) 91 The “Whiteness” of Michael should not signify his racial identity since it works not so much as identity, but rather as a lack of identity that is filled with the objet a and therefore causes anxiety. I agree with Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks’ definition of Whiteness as “not mean[ing] a physical or ideological property as it is invoked in ‘Whiteness Studies’ or a concept, a set of meanings that functions as a transcendental signified.” (Seshadri-Crooks, 3). According to her Lacanian analysis in Desiring Whiteness, Whiteness instead posits itself at the place of the lack and thereby produces anxiety. Seshadri-Crooks writes: “This is because Whiteness, by attempting to signify that which is excluded in the subject constitution, the more-than-symbolic-aspect of the subject […] produces anxiety. There is a lack of a lack as it appears in that place that should remain empty. It is a false door opening not onto a nowhere, but to an all-too-concrete wall” (38).
In Halloween, there is no wall behind the door, but there is a veiled figure wearing glasses. How, in this situation, is the lack of the lack produced? How is this moment of anxiety connected with the cinematic mise-en-scène? According to Lacan, anxiety arises not when the objet a lacks, but when it is exposed. He defines the objet a as a part of the subject that is lost when the subject enters the symbolic. “It is made like that when any cut whatsoever has occurred […]. There remains, after this cut whatever it may be, something comparable to the Moebius strip, something which does not have a specular image” (Lacan Seminar 7, 13). The objet a could be a partial object of desire like the breast, faeces, the voice and/or the gaze. It has no (visual) representation, but it perceived as being located in the other who, of course, also lacks this object that never existed, but whose recuperation is repeatedly sought after by the subject. “Whiteness” embodies the objet a in a twofold way. “Whiteness” enables the hidden object to be regained, along with the completeness of the subject. (see Seshadri-Crooks 61). At the same time, however, “Whiteness” also initiates anxiety when the objet a is not hidden, but really appears. The objet a both embodies and distorts the lack, and as a result, it only fulfils its function if it is hidden or lacking.
For instance, the objet a as gaze is a place inside a picture that is missing; it is a gap in which the viewer places himself. Gerhard Schmitz describes this gap as follows: “In order to posit the subject of seeing there has to be a gap at the place of the gaze, a blank space, a hole that works like a blind spot – a non-seeing, that has to be seen. In this non-seeing the subject of seeing is placed” (238). As a result, the gap inside a picture is what enables it to be seen. According to Schmitz, the presence of a
Image & Narrative, Vol 13, No 1 (2012) 92 mask makes it impossible for there to be any empty space: “It lacks within that what the mask gives to see, the result is that the seeing sees itself. In this confrontation, our status as a subject fades, we become an object of our look and this produces anxiety” (Schmitz 238).
For Schmitz, the mask is a kind of stage where both seeing and the gaze are enacted. On this stage, the look sees itself and, because the gap is missing, the lack lacks. In the scene in Halloween described above, this is not obvious because of the glasses that Michael wears which have the effect of emphasising the dimension of the look. Since Lynda cannot see Michael’s eyes, the glasses mirror her own look, she thereby becomes the object of her look. On the other side, Michael is the vehicle of the look, but this is not a desiring look like the one Schmitz describes: “The desiring look exposes (...) the conditions of being as an empty space (...): there is an inherent lack” (239). Nevertheless, Michael’s look is not lacking, since this situation is analogous to the fantasy of “Whiteness” that positions itself in the place that should remain empty.
As mentioned earlier, the fantasy is an attempt to answer the question “Che vuoi?”, and we have noted that Žižek views fantasy as “an answer to this “Che vuoi?” and suggests that “it is an attempt to fill out the gap of the question with an answer”. According to Lacan, there are two ways to answer the question regarding the desire of the Other: one is the “acting out”, and the other is the “passage a l’acte” (a passage to the act) in the scene of the phantasma. In the “acting out”, the subject is looking for the answer in the Other, and this might even be projected onto the Other (Seminar 9, 8). The fantasy functions as a screen “that masks the gap”, thus filling the gap by producing images of the Other (Žižek 1989, 126). In the “passage à l’acte”, the subject identifies with the objet a and transfers the symbolic into the real: “It is at the moment of greatest embarrassment that, with the behavioral addition of emotion as disorder of movement, the subject, as one might say, precipitates herself from where she is, from the locus of the stage where it is only as a fundamentally historicized subject that she can maintain herself in her status of subject, that essentially she topples off the stage, this is the very structure as such of the passage à l’acte” (Lacan Seminar 9, 2).
When applied to the fantasy of “Whiteness”, Lacan’s words might imply that the historic foundation of the subject is foreclosed. However, contrary to the promise of “Whiteness” that this foreclosure produces, that is, a feeling of completeness and
Image & Narrative, Vol 13, No 1 (2012) 93 wholeness, the a-historical identification with the objet a instead produces anxiety, because the encounter with the objet a results in the annihilation of the subject.
In Halloween, the a-historicity of “Whiteness” is deconstructed by the look of the killer. The gaze as the objet a that is exposed in the frame reveals the artificial, medial character of “Whiteness”. The non-lacking gaze of the killer threatens “White” identity because the gap that “Whiteness” promises to overcome is filled. In this moment, the subject becomes the object of the gaze and it has to realise that “it is no longer at home, at its house, or rather, it is at home, but no longer controls what goes on there” (Weber 2009, 83). This deconstruction of “Whiteness” therefore also concerns the spectators, who are incapable of sharing the look of control and power and who find themselves instead in the anxious position of seeing themselves seeing.
IV. Conclusion
The uncanny in film arises when there is something that is coming, especially in moments of uncertainty when borders or frames are being crossed or have otherwise become permeable. Yet in these examples neither the frame itself nor the viewer and his relation to the image are thematised. The focus on the frame itself does not mean that it is always necessarily scary, even if one can describe it as an objet a. Also, the confrontation with the gaze of the other does not always cause anxiety, because the troubling question concerning the gaze, “What do you want?,” can be resolved as a projection of one’s own fantasies onto the screen and the Other. Nevertheless, anxiety arises when the gaze of the Other is framed. In the stalker film, this is especially the case when the masked killer enters into the frame at the very moment in which he is no longer expected by appearing suddenly inside the frame of the door. In these moments, there is no lack or uncertainty, but rather a confrontation with the subject seeing itself seeing, a disturbing and anxious moment indeed.
Edited by Angela A. Chung, University of California, Riverside and Katrin Pesch, University of California, San Diego
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Image & Narrative, Vol 13, No 1 (2012) 95 Michaela Wunsch is Visiting professor at the Institute for Film-, Theatre and Media studies at the University of Vienna. Her research interests are psychoanalysis, race and gender in visual cultur and media philosophy.
