The Pervert's Guide to Cinema

The problem for us is not

are our desires satisfied or not.

The problem is how do we know what we desire?

There is nothing spontaneous,

nothing natural about human desires.

Our desires are artificial.

We have to be taught to desire.

Cinema is the ultimate pervert art.

It doesn't give you what you desire.

It tells you how to desire.

Oh, I do like you,

but it just isn't good enough.

Oh, I forgot.

Your mother asked me up for supper.

Okay, bring some ice cream with you, will you?

Sure, what kind you want, chocolate or vanilla?

Chocolate. -Okay.

What we get in this wonderful clip

from Possessed

is commentary on the magic art of cinema

within a movie.

We have an ordinary working-class girl

living in a drab, small provincial town.

All of a sudden, she finds herself in a situation

where reality itself reproduces the magic cinematic experience.

She approaches the rail.

The train is passing,

and it is as if

what in reality is just a person standing near

a slowly passing train,

turns into a viewer observing

the magic of the screen.

Have a drink?

Oh, don't go away.

Looking in?

Wrong way, get in and look out.

We get a very real ordinary scene

onto which the heroine's inner space, as it were,

her fantasy space is projected,

so that although all reality is simply there--

the train, the girl--

part of reality in her perception,

and in our viewer's perception

is, as it were, elevated to the magic level,

becomes the screen of her dreams.

This is cinematic art at its purest.

This is your last chance.

After this, there is no turning back.

You take the blue pill, the story ends,

you wake up in your bed and believe

whatever you want to believe.

You take the red pill,

you stay in wonderland,

and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.

But the choice between the blue and the red pill

is not really a choice between illusion and reality.

Of course, Matrix is a machine for fictions,

but these are fictions which already structure our reality.

If you take away from our reality

the symbolic fictions that regulate it,

you lose reality itself.

I want a third pill!

So what is the third pill?

Definitely not some kind of transcendental pill

which enables a fake fast-food religious experience,

but a pill that would enable me to perceive

not the reality behind the illusion,

but the reality in illusion itself.

If something gets too traumatic, too violent,

even too... too filled in with enjoyment,

it shatters the coordinates of our reality.

We have to fictionalize it.

The first key to horror films

is to say, "Let's imagine

the same story, but without the horror element."

This gives us, I think, the background.

We're in the middle of Bodega Bay,

where the action of Hitchcock's Birds takes place.

Birds is film about a young, rich, social,

socialite girl from San Francisco

who falls in love with a guy.

Goes after him to Bodega Bay,

where she discovers that he lives with his mother.

Of course, it's none of my business,

but when you bring a girl like that--

Darling? -Yes?

I think I can handle Melanie Daniels by myself.

Well, as long as you know what you want, Mitch.

I know exactly what I want.

And then, there is the standard edible imbroglio

of incestuous tension between mother and son.

The son's split between his possessive mother

and the intrusive girl.

What's the matter with them?

What's the matter with all the birds?

Where'd you want this coffee?

Uh, in on the table, honey.

Hurry up with yours, Mitch.

I'm sure Miss Daniels wants to be on her way.

I think you ought to stay the night, Melanie.

We have an extra room upstairs and everything.

The big question about The Birds, of course, is

the stupid obvious one:

Why do the birds attack?

Mitch?

It is not enough to say that

the birds are part of the natural setup of reality.

It is rather as if a foreign dimension intrudes,

that literally tears apart reality.

We humans are not naturally born into reality.

In order for us to act as normal people

who interact with other people

who live in the space of social reality,

many things should happen,

like we should be properly installed

within the symbolic order, and so on.

When this, our proper dwelling within a symbolic space,

is disturbed, reality disintegrates.

So to propose the psychoanalytic formula,

the violent attacks of the birds are obviously

explosive outbursts of maternal superego,

of the maternal figure preventing, trying to prevent

sexual relationship.

So, the birds are raw incestuous energy.

What am I doing, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, now I got it.

My God, I'm thinking like Melanie.

You know what I'm thinking now?

I want to fuck Mitch, that's what she was thinking.

Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry.

I got this spontaneous confusion of directions.

Mrs. Bates?

We are in the cellar of the mother's house

from Psycho.

What's so interesting is that

the very disposition of mother's house.

Events took place in it at three levels:

first floor, ground floor, basement.

It is as if they reproduced

the three levels of human subjectivity.

Ground floor is ego.

Norman behaves there as a normal son,

whatever remains of his normal ego taking over.

Up there, it's the superego...

...maternal superego because

the dead mother is basically a figure of superego.

Now, Mother, I'm gonna

bring something up.

I am sorry, boy, but you do manage to look ludicrous

when you give me orders.

Please, Mother.

No, I will not hide in the fruit cellar!

Ha, you think I'm fruity, huh?

And down in the cellar,

it's the id,

the reservoir of these illicit drives.

So we can then interpret

the event in the middle of the film

when Norman carries

the mother--or, as we learn at the end, Mother's mummy,

corpse, skeleton--from the first floor to the cellar.

Not ever again, now get out!

I told you to get out, boy.

I'll carry you, Mother.

It's as if he is transposing her

in his own mind

as a psychic agency

from superego to id.

Put me down, put me down!

Of course, the lesson of it is

the old lesson elaborated already by Freud,

that superego and id are deeply connected.

The mother complains first as a figure of authority.

"How can you be doing this to me?

Aren't you ashamed?

This is a fruit cellar!"

And then, mother immediately turns in to obscenity.

"Do you think I'm fruity?"

Superego is not an ethical agency.

Superego is an obscene agency

bombarding us with impossible orders,

laughing at us when, of course, we cannot ever

fulfill its demand.

The more we obey it, the more it makes us guilty.

There is always some aspect

of an obscene madman

in the agency of the superego.

We often find references to psychoanalysis

embodied in the very relations between persons.

For example, the three Marx Brothers,

Groucho, Chico, Harpo.

It's clear Groucho, the most popular one

with his nervous hyperactivity, is superego.

Well, that covers a lot of ground.

Say, you cover a lot of ground yourself.

You better beat it, I hear they're gonna tear you down,

and put up an office building where you're standing.

You can leave in a taxi,

if you can't get a taxi, you can leave in a huff.

If that's too soon, you can leave in a minute and a huff.

You know you haven't stopped talking since I came here?