TWO FACES OF THANATOS

Marion Minerbo

Since Freud formulated the death instinct concept, it has received

widely diverse interpretations. Even Freud offered two versions:
first, as a return to the inorganic, to inertia, to total narcissism;
second, as the primal source of destruction and hate. Some
psychoanalysts, such as Winnicott and Freeness, do not believe in
it. Others have seen it in action in their clinical practice. Melanie
Klein understands it to be the destruction of the Other and of
one’s self. Still others, such as Green, Laplanche and Figueiredo,
have interpreted this notion rather than taken it literally. We use all
these points of view in working with two films: Ai No Corrida and
Broken Flowers.
! The narrative time in Ai No Corrida unfolds as imperative
arousal, intense sexual activity, with a radical and dramatic
denouement. Broken Flowers presents apathy and marasmus. In this
film nothing seems to happen. It portrays down-time suggesting a
lack of mental life, and its final scene is tenuous and open-ended.
Both films’ plots are monotonous and repetitive. In Broken Flowers,
a static road movie, Don searches tediously for the supposed
mother of his offspring. The revolutionary Ai No Corrida, in its
obsession with sex and absolute pleasure, offers its audience the
monotony of a porno-movie. Life controlled by the repetition
compulsion is also monotonous when there are no new objects to
change its course. In Ai No Corrida, an object appears which allows
itself to be expropriated by and in pure repetition: Sada is in
search of absolute pleasure and Kichi offers himself as the means
to obtain it. Broken Flowers presents the repetition compulsion
interrupted by a new object’s coming on stage. As we shall see in
Broken Flowers, Don’s life undergoes a change when he gets a letter
in a pink envelope. The letter offers Don the chance to take a trip
thanks to his neighbour Winston’s arrangements. For our clinical
material, we offer synopses of these films.
AI NO CORRIDA
In the first scene, Sada, a new maid in Kichi’s house, cannot fall
asleep. The look on her face is ambiguous: sexual arousal?
torment? A friend tells her that, “This happens to everyone who
joins the household.” In the next scene, the two peek through a
crack and see the owners’ sexual goings-on. The woman, Kichi’s
wife, climaxes. “It happens like this every day before he leaves the
house.”
! Immediately thereafter, some boys throwing snowballs at his
withered genitals wake up an old drunk in the gutter. When he
sees Sada, the old man regains his strength and remembers having
been a customer of hers. “You’re a fantastic woman!” The viewer
gets the idea that a long time ago he experienced something
unforgettable with this prostitute. The old man begs for some
more “of that”. He would like to be potent one last time. This
scene will only make sense later on, when the viewer understands
that Sada is especially sensitive to sex.
! In the kitchen, a fight takes place among the maids. When
someone calls her a prostitute, Sada grabs a knife. Kichi, the boss,
restrains her. When he looks at her face, he perceives something
special, since he says, “You should be holding on to something
other than this knife.” Immediately under the spell of her
sensuality, he says, “You’re young and full of vigour. I’m old. I’d
like to be young like you.”
! This is the meeting between Kichi, who every morning drives
his wife into ecstasy, and Sada, whose sensuality makes its mark on
an old man with fond memories. Sex between the two of them is
electrifying. In a certain moment after her first sexual encounter
with her boss, Sada asks his wife, also her boss, to be let go. She
has a premonition that she should not remain there. Seemingly,
she tries to protect herself and her future lover from what will
become, as the film progresses, a full-blown sexual obsession, an
addiction to Kichi’s penis, a fatal attraction.
! It is fatal because the girl’s violence is present from the
beginning, in the kitchen scene. Later, when she witnesses sexual
intercourse between Kichi and his wife, she hallucinates and
produces an image in which she cuts the wife’s throat with a knife.
She will eventually use the knife to threaten Kichi:

SADA:! I’m going to cut it off so that it’ll never enter anyone else.

KICHI:! If you do, you’ll also lose.

SADA:! If you’re going to die, I’ll not do it.

The knife appears again at the film’s end when Sada kills Kichi
and actually does cut off his penis so as not to lose it. In this scene,
the redness of the blood is especially striking. Indeed, the colour
red predominates throughout the film. It represents sexuality and
violence or, better yet, the violence of sexuality.
! The filming is almost all close-up, there are scarcely any
outside scenes, and no horizons, creating a disturbing sense of
suffocation. The audience is extremely disturbed when Sada
doesn’t let Kichi leave the bedroom to go and urinate. She prefers
that he urinate inside her. Little by little she becomes obsessed with
his penis. The male protagonist, referring to his erections, says:

KICHI:! I sometimes wonder whether it’s mine or yours.

SADA:! It’s entirely mine.

KICHI:! [In a flash of awareness] Look, I’ll end up a skeleton if we’re

! ! ! always together. Kichi-san will be a thing of the past.

SADA:! [Enraged] Do you mean you won’t love me forever?

KICHI:! Even as a skeleton I’ll never leave you.

SADA:! I’ll never abandon you, even if you turn into a skeleton.

And she never does abandon him. In one scene, the couple walks
down a street, she with his penis in her hand as if she were pulling
him on a leash. Their bedroom becomes nauseating, permeated
with stench-since they refuse to leave even for the weekly cleaning.
They stop eating. Kichi perceives where this obsession will
inexorably lead them; nonetheless, he says, “My pleasure is to give
you pleasure and to obey your every wish.”
! In one scene, Sada sings a nursery rhyme about a girl who
incessantly asks her father to take her with him when he goes to
gather rice. He refuses, saying that she will get in his way. In
another scene, Sada’s mother plays with two nude children who
race around her in a frenzy of excitement and fear. The woman
grabs the boy’s penis, and he shouts, “Let me go, let me go!” At
the end of the film we have another dream sequence in which she
is lying down nude and around her whirls a man with a girl behind
him. The girl asks, “Can I go?” and the man answers, “Not yet.”
! Pain also has its moment. Sada asks Kichi to beat her, and
then they change roles. They discover that choking impedes
venous return and produces a harder erection, independent of
Kichi’s will. At one point, she grabs a knife and says, “I love you so
much I could kill you.” He answers, “Don’t use the knife, I’d
rather you strangle me.” It seems he already knows what awaits
him. Sada is after the absolute climax, even though it may cost her
lover’s psychological or physical wellbeing. And he does not mind:
“My body is yours. I’m part of you, we are one.” He agrees to be
choked to the point of blacking out. Sada, in despair when she
understands he has died, cuts off his penis so as to have it forever.
! At the film’s beginning, with the first sex scenes, the audience
experiences some sexual arousal owing to the couple’s eroticism
and sensuality. Little by little this early excitement becomes
disturbing, then horrific because the audience realises that this is a
case of sexual addiction. The sex scenes, now frankly
pornographic, are boring. The obsession grows and grows, and we
foresee its tragic denouement, especially as Kichi gives in to
everything Sada desires.
BROKEN FLOWERS
Don, a former Don Juan, is an ageing bachelor whose life has
become empty and aimless. He made money selling computers,
then retired. His face is expressionless and betrays apathy. His
living room is equally lifeless. He is seated on a couch starring
blankly into space or at the television set, which is showing Don
Juan’s burial. A young woman, Sherry, comes and gets her things.
She is leaving Don owing to a lack of commitment: “You don’t
want to have a family.” He doesn’t move a muscle, be it to defend
himself, be it to stop her from leaving. In the background one can
see a vase containing wilted flowers. Flowers, like the colour pink,
are the plot’s leitmotiv-wilted flowers at home, letters on pink
paper, and conventional pink flower bouquets for his former
girlfriends. At the end of the film, fresh flowers symbolise his
psychological reawakening. Broken Flowers may also connote the
women who loved him and who suffered when he abandoned
them.
! In contrast to Don’s, his neighbour Winston’s house brims with
life. Don likes this warm environment: the coffee served there,
Winston’s wife and children. Winston is a would-be detective. Don
gets an anonymous letter on pink paper, which, at first, he doesn’t
bother to open. Finally, bored as ever, he reads it and learns that
he is the father of a 19 year-old son, the fruit of a bygone love
affair. The boy has left home in search of his father, and his
mother wants Don to know about it in the event his son finds him.
! After considerable urging, Winston convinces Don that he
should go search out the truth. Winston seems to think that Don’s
son could get him out of his doldrums. He prepares Don’s
itinerary, arranges hotel reservations and car rentals. As an
amateur detective, Winston suggests that Don look for typewriters
and other objects coloured pink. Throughout the trip, Don’s face is
deadpan, making the atmosphere more and more distressing. The
audience wants him to find something to get him out of his
morass. He visits five women, but any one of them could have
been the letter writer since all their houses contain pink objects. At
least now he’s searching for something, even if it is a bureaucratic
sort of search in which he is only following Winston’s directions.
! Each house’s ambiance is unique. At Laura’s, indiscriminant
eroticism is the order of the day. Dora’s is a set stage. Carmen has
become a pet therapist who converses with her animal patients.
Penny lives in a virtual garbage dump with a violent boyfriend.
When Don asks her if she has a son, the boyfriend attacks him,
wounding his eyebrow. Don passes out and comes to-into life. He
goes to a florist to buy flowers to leave on the grave of the fifth
woman on the list, Michelle. The florist, whose name is Sun,
dresses his wound. At the cemetery Don lays down the flowers and
cries.
! Between one visit and another, we see monotonous road-movie
scenes: the car going down the highway, Don’s irritatingly
unexpressive face, the irritatingly similar music. Don has two
dreams in which ‘pieces’ of all these women appear: one woman’s
leg, another’s hair and so on. They are all blonde. There is no plot
linking the images in his dreams. At night in the motels, Don,
complaining of the futility of his search, keeps in contact with
Winston.
! Don goes back home, apparently without having found what
he was looking for. His face has not changed. One does not know
whether he is disappointed with his search or if anything has
changed within him. Then, at the bus station, he finds a boy with a
backpack, bearing a pink ribbon. The boy seems lost and to be
searching for someone. Don stares at him, and for the first time we
get the notion that we would really like it if that boy were his son.
This boy could have fled from Penny and his violent stepfather.
Don approaches him and offers to buy him a snack. They start
talking about fathers and sons. The boy takes off, scared. Don
chases him in vain. Shortly after this, another ‘likely son’ appears
and once more Don looks, searches, hopes, and desires. However,
this boy does not reciprocate either. And, with a third boy, one
understands that Don will never rest, since now he ardently wants
to have a son. Something, after all, has changed in him.
" The film has, so to speak, two endings. Sherry sends him a
letter, on pink paper, proposing that they try one more time to
have a relationship. And Don is on the road, at a crossroads, with
several different routes to choose from.
" From beginning to end, the viewer experiences a never-ending
tedium. We see to our regret and horror that nothing can touch
this man-not now, not when he was young. He was never
emotionally involved with any of those women. We are repelled by
an existence in which nothing meaningful has happened. In the
scenes in which Don visits the women on the list, the desire that
something different might happen is left to the audience. At the
end, we are left with the hope that he can find his son.
" Total narcissism is one of the clinical manifestations of the
death instinct. Both Sada and Don tend toward total narcissism:
the former owing to the heat of fusion with her object, the latter
owing to the coldness of object divestment. The films present two
faces of Thanatos and will allow us to consider both its destinies:
the repetition compulsion paroxysm or its interruption.
PSYCHOPATHOLOGY IN PSYCHOANALYSIS:
A CRITICAL VIEW
Who is the ‘sicker’? Don, walled off in his schizoid solitude, or
Sada, who, travelling along the border between perversion and
psychosis, kills her lover?
! In psychoanalyses, the answer is not an easy one. On the one
hand, the cases’ seriousness as well as these patients’ possible
outcomes, depends upon the objects they have found in their lives.
Sada does not kill Kichi because she is crazier, but because, along
with him, she becomes crazier-after all, before she met him she
had been relatively sane and content! On the other hand, how can
one recognise ‘another object’ if the pathologic object related to
the death instinct is being constantly recreated through projective
identification? In such cases, the subject always ends up finding the
same traumatising object. In other words, Sada would not have
become interested in an object who refused to play her game to
the hilt. On the other hand, if Kichi had behaved like a
psychoanalyst and if, instead of offering himself to give her the
absolute orgasm, he had tried to contain her arousal somewhat, if
he had withdrawn once in a while—to urinate, to eat—and then
come back, if he had tried to defer a bit her sexual gratification,
allowing her to experience her own sexual arousal and learn that
one does not die of it. Perhaps she could have tolerated
‘homeopathic doses’ of this ‘new object’ and not abandon him or
go mad.
! Concerning Don, he meets up with Winston, who set out to
‘treat him’. No matter how much he may have wanted to remain
isolated in his tedium, to refuse to open himself to the world
outside, given how often he visited, Don was aware there was
something of value in his neighbour’s house. He seemed to seek
something there. The outline of this object already existed, and
Winston comes on the scene to instantiate it, offering the necessary
transferential sustenance. Even at night he was available for Don’s
phone calls. Had these two men not known each other, one can
easily imagine Don’s spending the rest of his life sitting like a
zombie on his living room couch watching television. His
pathology is every bit as serious as Sada’s.
! The analysis of these two films supports the idea that in
psychoanalysis psychopathology is relative. That is, psychoanalysis
does not address an empirical reality, an encapsulated nosological
entity like a gastric ulcer. Psychopathology is not a disease of the
psychic organ of the soul. If psychic life exists in intersubjectivity,
then psychopathology comes about in the realm of object
relations. Objects, because of their own unconscious needs,
actively seek and ‘arouse’ subjects’ internal objects in different
ways. Thus, a pathological internal object can ‘come to life’ only
within certain relationships. For instance, children can be terrible
with their mothers, then pleasant and co-operative with other
people. Psychoanalysis can alter the repetition compulsion since
analysts do not, in principle, actively solicit any particular internal
object in their patients. On the contrary, analysts let themselves be
‘created’, i.e. ‘transformed’ by their patients’ projections, however
they do not respond the same way their patients’ internal objects
do. This is where psychic change begins.
DESTINIES OF THE DEATH DRIVE:
THE MEETING WITH THE OBJECT
According to Figueiredo the term ‘death drive’ describes a specific
drive’s function regimen that is closely related to the quality of the
primal object. If the object reacts to the drive demand in an
adequate fashion, it can be discarded as the primal object and
internalized. In these cases, psychic processes can create
representations that will function according to Eros. That is,
repetition will lead individuals to find the object of desire, which
will appear in different forms throughout their lives. But, if the
primal object did not make the necessary psychic binding, or if,
owing to some traumas, the binding was destroyed too early, a
pattern of drive function marked by a thanatic repetition
compulsion will emerge. Life’s goal is not the search for pleasure,
but a desperate need to make connections that quell the traumatic
pain and reconstitute vital narcissism. A third pattern of drive
function, also guided by Thanatos, emerges when subjects despair
of finding any object capable of containing the violence, or
intensity, of impulses. In the latter case, rather than going on
searching, they give up. They stop seeking. Whatever connections
they do make get undermined. They return to their narcissism
having pre-empted any opening to any object. This is Figueiredo’s
interpretation of what Freud called a reversion to the inorganic,
i.e. a rejection of their very subjectivity.
! It is obvious which patterns of drive function these two
characters adopt. Sada seems to be looking for the object that can
help her contain her intense sexual and aggressive impulses. So
much so that she gave up prostitution and went to work as a
housemaid. Ironically, however, she finds in Kichi the same hyper-
stimulating object that occurs in her childhood dreams—the
mother with two naked children. As far as Don is concerned, he
seems to have given up trying to find his object. In this case, the
object actively seeks him out.
! Winston, his full-of-life neighbour, is psychologically disposed
to be ‘making new connections’ constantly. He is connected to the
world through the internet, he has a passion for mysteries, and a
detective’s avocation. Don, on the other hand, does not even have
a computer. He does not open the pink envelope, but with the
letter in hand he does go next door to say hello to his neighbour.
Winston interprets this as a cry for help and, within the
transference, urges Don to travel and find out if he does have a
son. Don refuses to be moved by such a possibility and in so doing
exemplifies Freud’s definition of death drive: the desire to have no
desire whatsoever. That is, to keep arousal at the lowest level
attainable, if possible at zero. Still, Winston does not give up when
Don asks him to leave him alone, when he says he would rather
not know, that he’s not interested. Instead, supported by his own
narcissistic reserves, Winston actively invests his own libido in Don,
‘reclaiming’ his drive and calling him back to life. Thus, Winston’s
insistence and investment in Don have a disruptive, and therefore
therapeutic, effect on Don’s melancholic divestment of his dead
mother.
! According to Green, the dead mother denotes the psychic
functioning of a mother who, owing to her own melancholy,
cannot make the necessary investments in her baby. She lets the
baby’s drive sleep on, so to speak. Primal identifications will be
made precisely on the lack of any regard capable of constituting
primal narcissism. One must remember that primal identification
is made to the negative, i.e. to a lack of investment. Given this
identification with the negative, Don will invest no object
whatsoever, with the result that no object becomes meaningful.
That is, there is no emotional density in his inner life. This is
evident in the film, since his girlfriends have left no mark on him.
His list of possible mothers for his child is made owing to
Winston’s request and in a totally rote fashion. The predominant
affect in this psychological landscape is tedium. Based on the
notion of the dead mother, Don’s tedium derives from melancholy,
not his melancholy, rather his mother’s.
" At first glance Don seems melancholic, but the audience soon
realises that he feels no sadness, no pain from the loss of a
significant object, no self-recriminations, no despair, indeed none
of the symptoms that usually characterise this psychopathological
state of affairs. In truth, he feels nothing. There is another
pathological condition, the schizoid state, in which the subject feels
nothing. Figueiredo suggests that the most characteristic affects
associated with schizoid withdrawal are tedium and a feeling of
futility, both consequent to a wholesale divestment of the world.
! The treatment of this type of borderline in its beginning
consists of actively encountering patients where they are. This is
what Winston does. He suggests an itinerary for Don, he buys the
tickets, reserves the lodging and rents the cars for this trip into the
past, where Don will meet up with his ex-girlfriends. This is also a
trip into Don’s inner self so as to give new meaning to his past.
Lest one forget, Don goes off in search of a ‘mother’, in this case
the woman who supposedly is his son’s mother. However, we can
also take this as Don’s search for his own mother, but now a live
mother, represented by Winston, a mother who can be
internalized as a worthy internal object. Such an internalization
will constitute a framework necessary for the objectifying function,
a concept developed by Green; Broken Flowers is nothing less than
the narrative of new meaning for Don’s past owing to new
encounters.
! Sada, who up to the point that we meet her, one way or
another seems to have managed to adapt to the world through her
profession as a prostitute. She leaves that life and that helpful
framework—being a geisha is respected in the Japanese social code
—and becomes a maid in Kichi and his wife’s house. In this new
context, where her impulses are no longer under control owing to
the sudden loss of the adequate external framework, she
encounters the object with whom she embarks upon a folie deux, in
this case, sexual addiction.
! Kichi embodies an object doubly determined. On the one
hand, he is the very primal object, hyper-stimulating and
incapable of totally exercising the maternal function: he awakens
the impulse but does not contain it. When he becomes aware of
Sada’s sensuality, Kichi exacerbates it by saying that she should be
holding on to his penis rather than the knife. That is, he perceives
her need, and, instead of offering containment, i.e. words that
contain and symbolise drive’s arousal, he offers his penis, a
concrete object with which he maintains a pre-genital, mostly oral,
object gratification. In this sense, Kichi acts as a mother of a
future psychotic. He is narcissistically aroused because Sada in her
transference takes him for the idealised breast. Dazzled with his
own potency, he resolves to satisfy Sada absolutely. Kichi is caught
up in his own ‘counter-transference’. His own narcissistic needs
trap him in the role that will cost him his life. Throughout the film,
the audience witnesses Kichi’s not wanting, not knowing, or not
being able to frustrate her. He goes so far as to try, once or twice,
to offer words instead of his penis, but, in the face of Sada’s rage,
he gives up. When he concedes, “Even if I turn into a skeleton, I’ll
never leave you,” he does not help her open some space for
thought and symbolisation, instead he keeps her in the needy
register forever.
! In addition to representing the self-idealised and over-
stimulating breast, Kichi is also Sada’s boss. This asymmetry
makes him, in transference terms, into the paternal figure who
invites her to act out with him an archaic incestuous relationship
characterised by orality. She asks to be dismissed, which reveals
some capacity for thought and self-containment. But, since her
bosses do not let her go, she loses control and is overwhelmed by
her violent impulses. In other words, instead of finding herself an
analyst, she found an object that lets itself be captured and
colludes with her and her fantasy—the abolition of all boundaries
between them.
! Laplanche helps us understand Sada’s sexuality. He maintains
that when Freud advanced the concept of death drive, he rescued
the pre-genital, unbound sex drive: violent, disruptive and
fragmented in character. With narcissism, however, the sex drive
unifies around its first object, the ego. At this point in Freud’s
writing, the sex drive became ‘pacified’, i.e. connected to an
object. Laplanche sees no need to postulate the existence of two
drives since the death drive would be the sex drive in its unbound
state. In this sense, the death drive emerges with the characteristics
described above and seeks absolute and immediate gratification. It
uses the shortest route, discharge, in a pattern typical of the
primary process, with no deferral possible. Sexual death instinct
fragments and de-personalises its object, turning it into a partial
object, using it as an instrument and satisfying itself in this
manner. This is borderline territory, with its perverse, addictive, or
even psychopathic manifestations.
! We are talking about meeting the object and its consequences.
It is worthwhile to emphasize that the meetings narrated in these
two films have the power they do owing to transference. At the
beginning of Broken Flowers, Don’s only significant investment is in
Winston and his family. This shows that there is a trace in his
psyche of a living object alongside the ‘dead mother’ with whom
Don is identified. This is why, in spite of his resistance, Don is not
indifferent to his neighbour’s words. Sada finds in real life the
twice-determined object we identified above, and this is what
brings about her entrapment in and by the transference.
DESIRE/NECESSITY
Broken Flowers’ initial scenes are shot from a camera that is as
immobile as Don is, and they last long enough to make the
audience feel uneasy. Don gazes emptily at nothing. He makes no
move whatsoever to stop his girlfriend from leaving. This ex-Don
Juan, whom we imagine to have had many women in his past, now
appears to want nothing, except to be left alone in his house,
which seems more like a funeral parlour than anybody’s home. If
there once was any desire in Don’s life, there are certainly no
traces of it, and this is compatible with schizoid withdrawal.
Tedium, as we have seen, is its characteristic affect. Figueiredo
says:

The feeling of tedium and futility is the dominant tone in schizoid states in
their most sombre moments. Here nothing, absolutely nothing, neither in
the present, nor in the past, nor in the future can be infused with any affect,
be appeals positive or negative.

In this sense, Broken Flowers is a film that perfectly portrays

contemporary subjectivity in which the psyche emerges in the
midst of traumatic conditions and subjects’ defences mobilise to
submerge them in isolation and a desireless state.
! On the other hand, Sada is a former prostitute obsessed with
sex. Still, while her sexual desire is insatiable, from the
psychoanalytic point of view, this is not desire, it is an urge. Desire
supposes an entire object, but in this film Sada cannot be
separated from Kichi’s penis, the partial object this urge demands.
“I want you now! Inside of me! I can’t wait! I can’t wait!” After a
while, in spite of its constant explicit sex scenes, the film occasions
no arousal, which proves that what it shows is not a matter of
desire. Indeed, the audience feels a subtle disturbance, which soon
turns into horror when it enters into the lovers’ psychic universe.
We discover that sex, for Sada, is a matter of life and death. In
terms of psychopathology, this is borderline territory, beyond the
pleasure principle.
! In these two characters’ manner of sleeping, we have two
radical forms of narcissism: hot and cold. Sada has no experience
of decent sleep, probably because she has surrendered to unbound
sexual impulses. Contrariwise, Don, without even taking off his
shoes, and any disturbing thought, desire, or fantasy, falls asleep
while watching TV. Sada tries ‘to bind’ her impulses by fusing with
her object. Don will do anything to keep any object from
becoming meaningful to him. In both cases, the characters seek
the same thing: no dependence, no desire, no pain. Green calls this
death narcissism-the search for ‘zero’, which he distinguishes from
life narcissism which aims for ego’s constitution and stability at any
price-a search for a ‘oneness’.
SEDUCTION
Ai No Corrida’s two protagonists engage in a mutual narcissistic
seduction. Sada tells Kichi that he is the only one who can satisfy
her. And Kichi tells Sada that he will satisfy her absolutely. Sada
finds nourishment in Kichi’s semen, while he survives on an egg
that ‘emerges’ from Sada’s vagina-this is a baby who totally
satisfies her mother, who in turn totally satisfies her baby. But this
is also a case where the father seduces his daughter, arouses her
and fails to contain her impulse to attack, which he had awakened.
We have a double seduction here, by the maternal and paternal
object. It is to be expected that Sada and Kichi fuse and fail to
tolerate any minimal separation, any deferral, any presence of a
third party. They even eschew their biological needs such as sleep
and sustenance. Sada never falls asleep at night. She caresses
Kichi’s penis until he wakes up.
! On the other hand, Winston’s seduction, if we can call it that,
is a necessary one. lvarez speaks of ‘reclaiming’ the drives.
Working with autistic and psychotic children, she developed a
positive vantage point that she has called the ‘reclamation
function’. Her patients seemed not to want anything from her, not
even the psychotic fusion that one would expect in these
circumstances. They had given up. Their situation called for her to
extend the models of analysis she was familiar with. The attitude
in which one waits for projections to contain and transform would
never work given these children’s degree of withdrawal. The
reclamation function entails an active stance on the part of the
analyst so as to awaken drives. And this can be seen as a necessary
seduction.
! Similarly, Aulagnier refers to the mother’s necessary seduction
as ‘primal violence’, which is necessary to constitute a subject’s
psyche. The maternal ego attributes the baby’s bodily
manifestations to a supposed desire from an as yet nonexistent ego.
The mother supposes this to be desire for her presence, her breast,
or her voice. Indeed, mothers anticipate babies’ desires by offering
their breasts before a baby can demand them, and, once they are
satisfied, the baby becomes a breast demander, i.e. ‘one who
desires a breast’. This primal identity constitutes primal narcissism
as well as desire.
! Thus, what Winston does is to anticipate and to reclaim Don’s
drive when he ‘offers’ him the trip. He anticipates all this when he
has Don open and read the letter, when he prepares the itinerary,
when he tells him to look for a typewriter and pink objects.
Returning to Green’s ‘dead mother’, she is the one who has
insufficient libido to seduce her baby, which creates a no-desire
inscription.
AFFECT
A knife is what Sada, throughout the film, uses to work out
situations that produce anxiety and other painful affects. In the
kitchen, she attacks the woman who called her a whore. In a
hallucination, she kills Kichi’s wife when the latter came between
the two of them. She threatens to kill Kichi or to cut off his penis
when she imagines that he could penetrate another woman. The
tension created by affect that she cannot process can only be
released in the impulsive discharge of a violent act. After she
severs it, Sada wanders through the streets of Tokyo carrying in
her hands Kichi’s penis, which earlier had worked to quell her
arousal.
! This couple’s sexual addiction brings Green to mind once
more. Contrary to life drive, which constantly creates new objects,
death drive occasions de-objectification. When the primal object is
sufficiently good, it is internalized as a internal framework. Objects
such as these are the source of pleasure; they make the world
attractive. Green calls this the objectifying function. When the
primal object is lacking, it is not internalized and it ends up being
sought concretely and compulsively in the external world.
! Relationships with this object are ‘noisy’, since subjects relate
to it out of need rather than for pleasure. The object’s absence
produces pain and hatred. The repetition compulsion comes from
the ever-present need for the primal object. It is continuously and
increasingly besieged, like a drug to which one is addicted. It is like
a black hole that sucks in all the subject’s libido while making all
other objects in the world meaningless. In this way, the de-
objectifying function attacks the psyche’s capacity to produce new
objects of desire and to become attached to them. Instead, the
subject remains stuck on the same unique object of need. For these
patients, analysts do not represent the primal object, they are the
primal object. That is, analysts must always perform as a psychic
prosthesis and cannot be gone for very long, lest they leave their
patients woefully helpless. This is Sada’s and Kichi’s situation. De-
objectification also sheds light on the tedium that dominates Don’s
psychic life. He neither creates nor invests in any significant object,
save Winston and his family, and this exception is fundamental in
differentiating him from Sada. We can imagine that, if Don were
to lose these people, he would be even more depressed. Don does
not seem to have bonded with anyone during his youth. Perhaps
he was attracted by blonde hair, i.e. a fetish, a partial object. If one
thought of him as schizoid, he could be seen as severed from the
part of him that was able to make contact with objects and to
experience love’s dependence.
PAIN
Pain is present in both films, but with different functions. In Ai No
Corrida, Kichi and Sada discover that pain works as one more
element in their quest for the absolute thrill. Sada discovers the
erotic side of pain in a scene in which she asks the teacher to beat
her. Here, her pain is part of the erotic game. It is a case of female
masochism, which, according to Freud, pertains to normal
sexuality. Freud advanced the idea of erogenic or primal
masochism. Before that time, Freud had only dealt with the primal
inscription of traces of satisfaction, which gives birth to the search
for pleasure. Then, with solid evidence for the repetition
compulsion, Freud concluded that primal inscription of pain’s
traces leads one to seek repetition. This unsettling discovery led
Freud to write Beyond the pleasure principle. At this point, then,
the clinical paradigm for the death drive became moral
masochism. Primal masochism helps constitute a psyche, and it
functions as a fixation point and as a matrix for regression to
pathologies related to the death drive, e.g. moral masochism.
These pathologies depend on the fusion and the de-fusion of life
and death instincts, which in Freud are indistinguishable from
sexual and aggressive drives. In sadism, sexuality and aggression
fuse on a visceral level. In moral masochism, de-fusion ‘wins’, and
the individual’s destruction holds forth with no pleasure
whatsoever.
! Throughout Ai No Corrida, pain undergoes a qualitative
change-it begins in accord with the pleasure principle, then goes
beyond it. Sada discovers that, when she chokes her lover, his penis
becomes even harder, and independent from Kichi’s strength or
desire. His penis becomes truly autonomous, an object more
partial than ever. One cannot say, however, that this person’s
destruction was actively sought, as is the case in moral masochism.
It is the absolute orgasm that leads to destruction. According to
Freud, the pleasure principle abets the death instinct.
! In Broken Flowers, pain has another function; it brings the
subject back to life. When Don visits Penny, her truculent
boyfriend punches him in the head and creates an open wound
over his eyebrow. Don passes out and awakens into life with a
bloody face. By this point in the film, Don has revisited a good
part of his past. The typewriter he spies at Penny’s house
represents both the possible construction of a narrative about
Don’s history, giving it new meaning, and it represents the
possibility of new psychic inscriptions, i.e. of objects, functions,
and meanings. Don’s wound, the boyfriend’s punch that represents
his discovering Otherness, is literally inscribed on his body.
Emergence from one’s narcissistic retreat into the world does not
come about painlessly.
! And it is precisely the pain of living that brings with it the
possibility of finding an object outside the repetition compulsion: a
caretaker object, whose function is to mitigate and contain pain, to
transform it. After being hit, Don enters a florist’s shop to buy
flowers for the last woman on his list, Michelle, who has died. The
florist, who also represents an analyst, dresses his wound. If Don’s
trip led him to find his [child’s] mother, the florist represents an
object who is able to perform the maternal function. She washes
him, dresses his wound, and tells him how to find the cemetery,
which symbolises Don’s necessary mourning. He is not to mourn
for some lost object, he mourns, instead, for the lack of any object,
for his life’s affective poverty. At Michelle’s grave, he cries and lays
down the fresh flowers. His journey is over.
! Don returns home apparently without having found what he
was looking for. He could not totally discard the possibility of
having a child, nor could he confidently confirm that he has an
adolescent son. But the journey’s underlying therapeutic effect is
not long in becoming evident. When he goes to his local bus
station he sees a boy who could be searching for his father. What is
important for us, the movie-goers, is not that this boy, or any other
boy, might actually be his son. What is important is that Don
wants him to be his son. We can see that now he looks at all boys
hoping that he can find his. His libido has been awakened. Don’s
drive is now searching for an object to which it can attach itself.
Better yet, Don now has a strongly invested object-the fantasy of
being a father. His objectifying function is operative once more.
Don has desire, meaningful objects, psychic life in the form of
fantasy. One can almost speak of a hallucinatory desire. The way
the camera portrays Don and each boy he encounters makes us
believe, for a second or two, that this or that one is the long-lost
son. Sherry sends Don another letter on pink paper suggesting
they try again. Who knows? Perhaps it may be possible for him to
have a family. Don is at a crossroads with several paths ahead of
him. The film is coherently open-ended.
" We shall briefly mention one more type of pain in Ai No
Corrida. Kichi cannot bear the pain of setting limits and frustrating
his darling. He is the mother who cannot stand to let her baby cry.
This pain can be insufferable when the parties share the fantasy
that the other one will not survive this frustration. Kichi has given
up on confronting her and on the effort necessary to leave the
omnipotent psychic breast on which he was placed and to which
he is stuck. His acceptance of death, which can be seen as a
suicide, constitutes his liberation from that situation.
! To conclude, thanks to the concept of death instinct, we can
advance a new category of film genre. Oshima created the porno-
horror genre in his perfect portrayal of the rawness, the violence,
and the demoniacal character inherent in ‘unbound drive’, in
‘sexual death drive’, as Laplanche would put it. And Jarmusch
seems to have invented the tedium epic, or, if one prefers, the
affectless road movie. But the de-objectifying function is slowly left
behind, mourning takes place, and Don begins to invest in new
objects created little by little in his recently resuscitated psyche.
Trauma may not be easily depicted, but it has colour. In Ai No
Corrida, the trauma is red. This is the film’s predominant colour,
the red of uncontained over-stimulation and violence. In Broken
Flowers, Don seeks things that bear the colour of his trauma-pink,
which connotes his early let-down by his mother and femininity
itself. Horror is par excellence counter-transferential affect in the
face of the death instinct.