AD603 Critical Theory

Something about Mirror

I like looking at myself in the mirror very much. Maybe it is kind of narcissism, well I just like it. And I am sure that most of the girls like mirror and even boys, who seldom admit it. Believe or not, according to a survey, males care about their appearance much more than females and look in the mirror more often then females. And that throw out a question, “Is mirror only for checking physical outlooks for human?”

The answer from my view is not, absolutely not. Individuals love to look in the mirror and find themselves not only because they want to see themselves physically but also to recognize themselves and see the confidence and smile on their face. In that case, mirror is not only the glasses with reflection. In fact, it is the mirror of personality and self-acceptance.

Let’s come back to Lacan.

The ego is kind of combination of self-image and self-identification. For infants, they have no idea of self and also ego. So when they look in the mirror for the first time, they get confused and even angry. They yell, shout and cry which helps nothing with the situation. And then they finally find out, if they smile and be friendly to the mirror, they will get feedback in the same way. I guess that is one of the reasons why adults like mirror since they may obtain what they want in return from their own behaviors.

In reality, mirror is not only mirror and also not only mirrors can be mirrors. All kinds of objects, abstractive or not, can be mirrors. Girls look at themselves in the mirror while dressing up, boys look at themselves in the mirror while shaving, babies look themselves while learning and at the same time, people look at others’ faces while talking in order to get feedback, producers look at selling numbers to learn the market and editors look at the audience for deeper inspirit. When it comes to talk about ego, I would like to say something about films. On one hand, films, on some degree, are the reflection of deep thinking and kind of ego of the editor. On the other hand, all the audience have different thoughts and different personalities and understandings based on different background. That is why different individual has totally different comments or comprehensions towards the same film. In that case, film is just the mirror, telling who you are and what you are thinking about while watching the movie and what you have experienced or what kind of ego or personality you have which is different from others. That is similar with other personal preference, such as music, fiction, TV programs and brands. Certain group has certain hobbies or likes which can tell others what kind of people they are or which class they are belonging to. All the stuffs above are mirrors in our social life.

Mirrors are everywhere. Anything in our life and anybody around us can be a mirror. Human beings are social animals and we need respondent and feedback from others so that we would know in which way we could express ourselves better and also we get information about how others think about ourselves. And communication is brought out at this point. Language is the most important element in communication, both writing and speaking. We often take it granted that what we speak everyday is just what it should be. But when it comes to a second language, the situation is different. For the first language, it has already be a part of our unconscious personality since we were born with this certain language and we are exposed to this environment since we were born. But the second language is another thing. We have to pay special attention and effort to learn how to speak and how to master the language in a logical way, like grammar. But we don’t learn grammar before we can speak our own language. In this case, language is a sign telling us what group we are belonging to and which society is new to us.

Sometimes, mirror has magical power like the one in fairy tales. It not only can reflect our looks but also our thoughts.

This reading, more so than any other reading so far, made me giggle. Oh lacan, you are hilarious. First of all, I think its sweet that somewhere around the age of six months I managed to surpass the intellectual capabilities of an untrained chimpanzee. And I really do wonder if, in my dreams, I am a fortress, stadium, arena, or any other large structure that can contain hundreds of people and is placed conveniently in a marshy swamp.

Ok, enough with that. Although I do find lacan funny, and just like Derrida he has his moments of both confusion and hilarity, I managed to find some things about this reading that I imagine I will turn into art fodder… The idea of a Gestalt is incredible to me.

The word identifies a “thing” or “being” that is made up of a variety of characteristics, but within that body (not exclusively human or animal) there is meaning far beyond the conglomeration of parts. OMG. That is fascinating! Of course, that (for me) is the whole basis of art and the whole point of making it! The idea that the conglomeration of parts and marks and lines equates to something more than the direct summation of those things it just makes me tingle all over.  (Although lacan was clearly talking about a little boy or girl who sees him/herself in the mirror for the first time and has some sort of recognition of him/herself as a Gestalt).

Also, I think the whole idea of the mirror stage is pretty cool too. But I do wonder if there are a variety of mirror stages throughout our lives. Perhaps there are none that are as earth shattering as the initial discovery of ourselves as solid functioning existing beings, but what if we had these little epiphanies all the time? I mean there has got to be a point at which we come to the understanding that we are a certain sex (generally), or that we are redheads, or blondes? We are constantly making new discoveries about ourselves, many of which are made by looking in a mirror. Ultimately these discoveries add traits or aspects add to our Gestalt (is that a noun or an adjective?).

My question then, is: within this empirically altered Gestalt do we have a greater understanding of ourselves? Or by the constant barrage of new self-information does our idea of our selves become more convoluted? I guess what I am trying to say is: Do we know ourselves better when there is less information but initial discovery, or when there is more information but the information is constantly changing as we discover new things (and some that become refuted)? …nature or nurture?

Furthermore… are we not ourselves most before society has had a chance to tell us what to do? Aren’t we the most human when are completely dictated by our bodily and immediate needs? Or as humans, are we doomed to forever be controlled by our culture?

Oh God, get Sara Rockwell and her squirt gun in here…I think I need to be doused.

So…here’s a clip from The Life of David Gale, it doesn’t deal with the mirror stage, but I think that it points out something about lacan that is interesting and deconstructs our minds…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyqVvMAp9Bo

I feel like the readings clarified my understanding of the mirror stage. In a means to better understand myself, as well as what I am trying to say with my work, I started reading books on Lacan not very long ago. The books that I have read so far jumble up all his work, without an in-depth explanation to any one thing Lacan was doing.

The mirror stage seems to be the beginning of a visual identification. I feel that having a four year old around me greatly benefits my understanding of the mirror stage. I take notice of how my daughter reacts to situations, such as having Hannah Montana as an idol. I know that she doesn’t notice the difference between herself and Hannah Montana /MIley Stewart (Miley Ray Cyrus); I say this because she tells me that she is going to be Hannah Montana when she grows up. I would also like to note that she thinks she can become a dog when she grows up; this is due to her mother telling her she can be anything when she is older. I have tried to explain that humans cannot become animals numerous times and in numerous ways, yet she still thinks that it is entirely possible to become a dog once you reach a certain age. It’s very likely that I too thought I could be a dog at her age, so I know that it’s not a big deal, based on the idea that I am somewhat normal. I just don’t want her to turn out to be one of those people who really think that they are an animal, like this lady.

This is an image of Jocelyn Wildenstsin after having plastic surgery making her look more like a cat, just what she asked for, to become feline like. I have a hard time understanding some people and I feel like they need help, or maybe she didn’t have mirrors around and her parents owned numerous cats? If you think she looks odd take a look at this dude, I think he could use a little more help than her.

I know that I look like the bad guy, pointing out the differences in people, but I am interested in what happened here, why the need to transform yourself into something else.

In Why Lacan, on the eleventh page, second to last paragraph Sean Homer brought up the unconscious, this is something that I am very interested in and I’m trying to incorporate into my work. I don’t necessarily feel the need to speak to the audience’s unconscious, but I would like to display my unconscious indirectly. The way that the unconscious has no boundaries, nothing saying you can’t do that, no restrictions, this idea is extremely appealing. I am trying to understand the links between the real and the unconscious, and how to display this idea.

The best example I can give is the work of Del Harrow, he talks about Deleuzes “Virtual Reality” and Zizeks “reality of the virtual”. His work has layers and contains links to each other through a deeper understanding or meaning.

Different form Freud’s id, ego and super-ego, Lacan put the concept of “subject” into his structured psychology. As all the initiative reasons of the language, Lacan believes subject also provide the motive viewpoints from unconscious and psychological realm. In the field of phenomenology, subject is understood as Intentionality. Lacan pointed out three steps on the development of psychology, imaginary order, symbolic order and the real. According to his theory, a fetus lives in matrix peacefully which is an ideal place. After it is born, a suffering came out due to the loose of safety and the material support. Such pain stimulates the imaginary of self and later is developed to be a illusion of individual. Because the imaginary order has no material base, it is impossible to balance the motivation of id and desire of ego and an infant’s image is just the ideal-I.

The phenomena of the world are created by language and speech which Lacan believes, and it has more functions than communication for they create a network of meaning. The real is quite disputed for it is the material based ambit where self can not speak out and illustrate. It sounds ridiculous that there’s something exists but we can not illustrate, then why Lacan call it the real?

The mirror stage is another profound concept that provided by Lacan which enabled an individual to become aware of him/herself as an autonomous thinking, feeling being in the first place and to maintain this level of self-consciousness. In this stage, one must first distinguish themselves from others and from their social environment. The first idea comes to my mind is why an infant cry? Based on this theory, an infant feels an extremely hurt when it finds it is separated from its mother to be another individual unit. However, they start to consider itself as a gestalt and feel happy. The pain produced in the mirror stage is the base of all the suffering of one’s whole life and anyone can not get rid of it. However, it is also the impetus for the development of gestalt. Lacan believes this moment of alienation and fascination with one’s own image creates ego.

Freud believes ego is self and Lacan thinks ego is the effect of images or an imaginary function while its function is refusing to accept the truth of fragmentation and alienation. For Lacan, the unconscious is “structured like a language”. As an antitheist, I prefer to accept the fact all of these are the law of nature. To me, what Lacan did was to create another self-subject, to help people to understand his/herself. Subject starts to exist when gestalt comes out and what is mirrored and we can see is the truth we think but we can not tell. It shows the difference and diversity between individual and the “real world” created by us. If the “real world” in the mirror can not meet what we expect, then we will feel suffering from this alienation because we are separated from what we hope.

Hate others or suffer from yourself? The mirror can tell. This picture comes from the cartoon movie Snow White and Seven Dwarfs.

I found Lacan less difficult to read than Freud. Lacan’s writing style was more logical in explanation and sprinkled with a hint of sarcasm.  I really enjoyed reading the Homer chapters.  His explanations were straightforward, and I could appreciate Lacan more after reading Homer. He talked about Lacan’s history and his interest in art.  One point about Lacan that helped me to understand these psychoanalysis writings was how he did not consider psychoanalysis as a medicine, and instead, related it to the arts and philosophy.  When thinking about that, I found it easier to understand where people like Lacan and Freud were coming from.  

When explaining Lacan, Homer brought up Freud, since Lacan was influenced by him and shifted between agreeing and disagreeing with Freudism.  One difference between the two men was their interpretations of the ego.  For Freud, the ego is about morals and self-control, but for Lacan the ego is about maintaining the illusory image established during the mirror phase (Homer stated that the ego is a mis recognization of the self).  I can see a balance between Freud’s and Lacan’s theories, except that I’m hesitant on the mis recognization.  Homer (my favorite!) said it nicely, “In order for the subject to identify with an image in the mirror and then to misrecognize themselves, they must first have a sense of themselves as a self.”  This is a good critique of Lacan.  According to him, humans, at birth, have a clean slate, and they must go through the mirror phase in order to establish a sense of the self in reality.  The mirror phase reminded me of a documentary about feral children.  These children are abandoned at young ages, are, apparently, raised by wild animals, and eventually begin to behave the same as their animal providers behave.  Without proper recognition during the mirror phase, the child does not and cannot recognize the self.  That is a simple explanation of mis recognization, but if we were to apply that to a “normal” mirror phase, then is there a mis recognization in all of us? Can there not be a true recognition?    

During my photo seminar, idea of self performance was brought up during one of the grad’s critiques.  Andrea Dailey, a third year photography grad student, is working on her thesis project which involves some aspects of gender performance and self performance.  She is photographing before-and-after shots of women as their “private self” and as their “public self”. The concept is to reveal the influences of Western culture in beauty by noting the changes of the public and private self.  The actual act of transforming oneself from private to public is what I relate to with Lacan.  When we put make-up on, style our hair, and dress we are constantly doing so in front of a mirror as a self performance.  The discussion asked: How could the photographer capture this self performance?  It was suggested that she place a mirror next to the camera so that the model could look at herself instead of looking directly into the camera lens.  That way she would know what she looked like, which may change her facial expression.  I know that Lacan is not speaking of a physical mirror, but I thought it was interesting to think about performance with the ego.  Even though Lacan speaks of the mirror phase during early child development, I’m sure it is still evident in adult stages.  He stated that the mirror phase involves recognition by the self and others. Application of makeup, styling hair, and dressing are all acts of self performance and are ways to be recognized by others.  So my question is: Is the self performance a way for the ego to maintain the illusory image?

Private Self and Public Self; Andrea Dailey 2008

Before Lacan, I’d based my ideas about “self-awareness” on the notion of Cogito-“I think, therefore I am.” That is, in order to “be,” one must be aware of his/her own awareness. I had always speculated that I had experienced my first taste of self-awareness when I was about 4 or 5. It was at this age that I recall asking myself, “Do other people see the same blue that I see?” This was literally the question I asked and I remember thinking about it often after that but never finding an answer. Every subsequent inquiry was made in terms of what “I” knew. Every answer to every inquiry was in relationship to what “I” was aware of.  I understood this: because I was thinking of an idea, I must exist. And that “idea” that I was thinking of (be it “blue” or “water” or “cold”) existed in relationship to me. If the answer to “Do other people see the same blue that I see” is “No,” then what ever “others” see is always in relationship to what “I” see. That’s a lot of quotation marks.

What Lacan is suggesting (well, more than suggesting) is that self-awareness goes further than just cogito. Lacan proposes that a child has his first self-encounters at about 6 mos. old when he recognizes himself in a mirror. In other words, the child understands that he is a visible thing: visible to himself and visible to others. He also recognizes that he is inside of his visible self. In other words, he is aware of himself as separate from everything else but not separate from himself. I think the “re” in recognize exists because the cognition is happening after the first time. The child must have already seen his arms and feet and probably already touched his face and stomach. But, for the first time, in the mirror he is aware not only of his entire physicality but of his very “being” in the ontological sense of the word.

One of the most solid points found in the text (there weren’t many) was the idea that “the mirror-image would seem to be the threshold of the visible world.” This is true both metaphorically and literally. The way one sees oneself informs the way one views the world and oneself in that world (AKA: Idenity). These ideas are particularly interesting to me given my interest in the concept of personal identity. I find that one’s identity is intensely determined by the community that one belongs to. In communities there are roles and expectations. There are hierarchies and politics. There are producers and consumers. Every person is subject to these. All of those relationships that determine one’s position/identity start with this initial self-encounter. BUT the process continues with additional encounters during one’s lifetime. 

The threshold is the entire framework for identity– the way you see yourself and the way others see you. Encountering oneself is kind of a rattling, jolting event.

About four years ago, I started having these experiences in the mirror that took what Lacan said and pushed it even further. If I stare into the mirror long enough, the physical awareness of myself begins to challenge itself. I can’t recognize myself anymore as that form that I see in the mirror. My physical, visible self separates from my internal self. It’s very strange and it’s a little like when you stare at the word BICYCLE long enough. After a little while, it loses it’s meaning. My point is that observation of the self, in an exploratory sense, leads to the shaping of one’s world. First you understand that you exist. Then, you understand that you exist apart from everything else. Then, you ask questions about everything and the answers are all in terms OF yourself. Isn’t this what identity is?

Now, I would like to refer to a clip from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Yes, we all know the story but I’d never payed enough attention to just HOW MUCH the Queen’s identity is determined by the mirror. First, she is anxious to make sure that she is the fairest. The mirror assures her, of course, that she is not. She feels compelled to change that and in the process she literally changes her identity to regain her ideal identity. Well, I thought it was cool!

The It-Self is dispersed systematically by individual structure, beginning at birth through mid-life.  It is this instance point that the It-Self filters out of the NON-EGO.  The unknown quantity is portioned by the Ur, the re-repressed memory.  Before the It-Self is realized (in the Lacanian mirror) it floats freely in the conscious of a child less than 4 months old, no more.  Objects of reality (again, this is pre-mirror) such as a doorknob, will not solidify as “thought” until the It-Self disperses via the Ur.  “I know that is a doorknob, but I do not know”.  It is not until the child reads “doorknob”, text as visual and phonetic symbol, that the definition and notion of a “doorknob” enters the Post Conscious (see Fig. 1-1).  The unconscious It-Self.

Fig. 1-1

I’m sorry.  I was thought it would be easy to improvise some psychoanalytical philosophy nonsense.  I give full credit to Freud and Lacan, it’s difficult material to come up with.

As always, while I am reading the text for this class i attempt to constantly consider how it relates to art (FINE more than DESIGN).  Maybe this is stating the obvious, but how the mirror stage becomes a structure for subjectivity seems to be a direct statement addressing why people see art the say they do.  I had a 3D Design course in undergrad and I remember on the first day the instructor telling us that everything designed three-dimensionally relates to the human body.  That leads me to conclude that everything two-dimensional (everything a person can see… how is that objectification skewed for the blind?) relates to our mind’s perception, and a system of symbols/language that we have developed.

So when we’re infants the mirror stage is what forms our ego?  This seems a bit trivial, and maybe taking the text too literally, but I can hardly remember looking at my own reflection as a child.  I don’t think i really knew what my face looked like or cared all that much.  However, I do distinctly remember walking into the bathroom one day and finally realizing i was tall enough to see my own eyes in the bottom edge of the mirror.  But by that age, has the mirror stage already ended?  Is this phrase used to just describe self-awareness, and an actual mirror is not required?  Like when an infant realizes how their hands and arms are part of themselves?  And the objects they touch with their hands are separate?

Maybe I am oversimplifying… sorry.

Time for bed.

I was pleasantly surprised to enjoy reading Lacan this time around, in comparison to my previous attempts. Perhaps this was mainly due to the readings focusing on getting to know Lacan’s background and biography a bit and then, for the most part, focusing on just one of his main concepts, that of the “Mirror Stage”. My previous reading of his work perhaps took on too much of his ideas at once leaving me with little fully understood. Here having the opportunity to focus on one gave me a chance to really sink into the ideas behind it.

In my previous post-Freudian research I had often been mostly concerned with the way in which a person, more specifically a child, becomes aware of and begin to define and categorize others in there immediate surroundings, if not also the surroundings of the world beyond themselves. Beyond the establishing and understanding of the other, I had then been fascinated with the ways in which a child develops a concept of how to interact with others or the idea of relationships (which I then like to believe they practice these interactions through play and toys).

With my introduction to Lacan’s “Mirror Stage” I was faced with the question of how one first creates a concept of the self (and develops the ego) before or along with the concept of the other. The idea that we are a fragmented bundle of bits and pieces of ourselves until we are able to establish an illusion of wholeness or completeness through the whole reflected image of ones self is one that, as a very visually dependent individual, I feel I can get on board with quite easily.

I have a seemingly long visual memory going back to as far as a memory or two in which I can not yet talk. Mostly what I tend to remember is a visual sense of myself looking out of the window that are my eyes and feeling a bombardment of fragmented senses that don’t seem to make all that much sense being that I don’t recall having a sense of my entire body or how it related to outside stimuli and perhaps Lacan would argue of my entire self. Perhaps once I was faced with my mirror image I was given a larger scope of my physical being and therefore the oneness (even if it was an illusion) that would give me a sense of the conscious “I” that I seemed to have lacked in that faint memory.

Thinking about the impact of the mirror image, be it a literal mirror or reflective surface, or the mirror of others perception of ourselves (which one may argue we can never understand fully), it is also easy to think about different ways in which these images affect us not just from the ages of 6 to 18 months, but through out the rest of our lives. I am sure I am not alone in having literally compared myself in the mirror at about age 8 to the barrage of female images I was introduced to on a daily basis by some form of media, or within direct interaction, and wondering about the separation between what I saw before me and what I either wanted to see or imagined myself as being. The “self-image” is an idea that is just so loaded with implications and importance; I find it hard to even organize all that comes to mind in regards to it.

So, that all being said, I now look forward to more reading of Lacan instead of near terror at the effects (like spinning head syndrome) I had previously had from his work.

Here are some links to a few of the many videos one can find on the internet of children interacting with their mirror image for the first time. I watched quite a few and must say that I was surprised by how many where absolutely thrilled and pleased to see themselves. Most of them kiss themselves quite a few times and laugh uncontrollably:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7Box3Yp1Yk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_APBem23Fnc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Elilm2iGzCs

In contrast (and perhaps for a bit of adorable entertainment) here is a kitten faced with himself in the mirror. He is far more aggressive and mistrusting of the creature he sees before him, oh and he is fabulously able to fit in a shoe quiet nicely, so that is just great. Enjoy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FnUTQMJVXI

I

there was a small scarring of the earth, next to an older scarring, not known since its inception, and always remembered, and found only the night before, measured it was, paced out, and marked, the new gouge placed in relation, deep dug, and small-throated, in the morning we gathered, clutched and some tottered, the one of the warm red bowls, thirty years past, still doppled with butter and swum with sugar, and the brightness of the sun all magnified, hot-spliced to this one spot, this one gouge that reaches far deeper than this scumble of root, worm-eskered and rife, and here we tip her, ashen, particulate, unknowable but through the primordial bloody manner of we as her issue, perhaps she is winged, perhaps she is here, in this fist-sized cloud of dust, dispersing and absorbed, lifting.

II

Song of Childhood
By Peter Handke

When the child was a child
It walked with its arms swinging,
wanted the brook to be a river,
the river to be a torrent,
and this puddle to be the sea.

When the child was a child,
it didn’t know that it was a child,
everything was soulful,
and all souls were one.

When the child was a child,
it had no opinion about anything,
had no habits,
it often sat cross-legged,
took off running,
had a cowlick in its hair,
and made no faces when photographed.

When the child was a child,
It was the time for these questions:
Why am I me, and why not you?
Why am I here, and why not there?
When did time begin, and where does space end?
Is life under the sun not just a dream?
Is what I see and hear and smell
not just an illusion of a world before the world?
Given the facts of evil and people.
does evil really exist?
How can it be that I, who I am,
didn’t exist before I came to be,
and that, someday, I, who I am,
will no longer be who I am?

When the child was a child,
It choked on spinach, on peas, on rice pudding,
and on steamed cauliflower,
and eats all of those now, and not just because it has to.

When the child was a child,
it awoke once in a strange bed,
and now does so again and again.
Many people, then, seemed beautiful,
and now only a few do, by sheer luck.

It had visualized a clear image of Paradise,
and now can at most guess,
could not conceive of nothingness,
and shudders today at the thought.

When the child was a child,
It played with enthusiasm,
and, now, has just as much excitement as then,
but only when it concerns its work.

When the child was a child,
It was enough for it to eat an apple, … bread,
And so it is even now.

When the child was a child,
Berries filled its hand as only berries do,
and do even now,
Fresh walnuts made its tongue raw,
and do even now,
it had, on every mountaintop,
the longing for a higher mountain yet,
and in every city,
the longing for an even greater city,
and that is still so,
It reached for cherries in topmost branches of trees
with an elation it still has today,
has a shyness in front of strangers,
and has that even now.
It awaited the first snow,
And waits that way even now.

When the child was a child,
It threw a stick like a lance against a tree,
And it quivers there still today.

III

That, having drawn their art from the realm of freud, and his dreamy ideas, and creating works which could be examined and dissected for its meaning in a psycho-analytic way, and how these were accepted, even at their most fraudulent, that the surrealists would see a psychoanalitic theorist turn the tables, reverse the flow, take those images and try to use language in a way that seems to amount to a sensual perception, and see him struck from the roles of respectability and expelled and discredited, and slowly re-assimilated, and finally to have his influence felt in some of the very arenas in which the surrealists first experimented…

IIII

Strictly speaking, an enantiomorph is a pair of asymmetrical figures, usually two three-dimensional forms, that are mirror images of one another.

IV

ed ruscha sex at noon taxes

V

why not?

In this week’s readings on Lacan, a couple different aspects of his mirror-image theory struck me.

Two begin with, as I’ve previously said, I’m always thinking about how these readings and practices can be applied to my work; how can they make me a better artist? In looking at the mirror image, I couldn’t help but think about the MFA process as a whole.  Getting an MFA is ideally a time of open exploration, finding one’s identity and ego through work, and one does this by personalizing said work. So in a sense we as infant artists are looking into a mirror for the first time. Tntrospective-practice was done on a small level as undergrads, but the MFA assumes you have the techniques down and can entirely focus on self-exploration, looking into the mirror uninterrupted. This might be kind of a stretch, but when I read Lacan’s quote saying that the process is “precipated from insufficiency to anticipation” I couldn’t help but thinking of how all first-year MFAs think they’re too insufficient to pass the review, and all third-years do is anticipate being done.

On a more serious note, the second concept that really jumped out at me was, of course, Lacan and Metz’s views on the mirror image’s application to film. Lacan seemed to argue that. Much like Debord’s definition of spectacle, the audience watching a film went through a communal mirror image process. Metz argued that Lacan’s theory on film was wrong because we as audience members don’t see ourselves on the screen. In this instance, I’m going to have to disagree with Metz, and somewhat agree with Lacan, specifically Baudry, and I think my opinions on both of their theories have to do with the society in which we live in now.

Metz argues that since we’re not physically seeing ourselves, the mirror image theory doesn’t apply. But our society now is completely driven by celebrity culture. We’re obsessed with fame a beauty, more so than ever. So while we’re not seeing our specific faces on the movie screen, we are seeing celebrity faces, which is a way of telling us what we should be, what look we should strive for. Our society tells us that what’s being screened is perfection, so it’s very much a method for establishing ego.

On the other side, I only somewhat agree with Lacan and Baudry. Lacan talks about screening a film as a communal experience, and Baudry takes it one step further, utilizing the master/slave metaphor to talk about how those in the theater are prisoners in a dark room. I think we share a film communally, but in the modern digital age, the process of screening a film is no longer a  entirely a shared one. The idea of the home-theater makes watching a film alone in your basement a reality. And in the actual theater, the introduction of the cell phone and mobile internet has become a powerful force in removing one’s self from the hypnotic trance of the film. This leads me to my outside reference for the week:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVcHhJD9bh0

The video was actually released by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences to promote turning phones off in theaters.

So this week, I kind of took a random approach to the readings. I was able to identify the mirror image theory with getting my MFA and of course had to talk about how it connected to film, but all in all, it was very interesting.