Original Article

KOME − An International Journal of Pure

Communication Inquiry
Volume 9 Issue 1, p. 85-100.
A Case for Psychoanalytic Visual © The Author(s) 2021
Reprints and Permission:
Dispositif? Birdman after the [email protected]
“Cinematographic Capture” Published by the Hungarian
Communication Studies Association
DOI: 10.17646/KOME.75672.62

Constance Goh

Faculty of Humanities, Curtin University, SINGAPORE

Abstract: This paper investigates how the notion of “superhero” in popular imagination,
evident in the multiple live-action adaptations of Detective Comic’s and Marvel Cinematic
Universe’s comic book heroes for their commercial value, has been debunked by Alejandro
Inarritu’s 2014 Birdman. While the aforementioned dream factories affirm the fantasmatic
“flight” inherent to these cinematic creations, especially symbolised by the aviating capacities
of most of their superheroes, it is Inarritu’s Birdman, although not commercially comparable,
that is theoretically significant here: the “flight” motif paradoxically gestures to the “capture”
that is the very cinematic essence. Working with some key psychoanalytic theorists of the
apparatus and later the suture, I shall argue that the messianic in this film, embodied by the
male lead, whose waning career is resurrected from oblivion given Keaton’s subsequent work
acknowledgement despite his Oscar nonsuccess, is revealed by this author to be ultimately the
cinematographic apparatus that gives us Baudry’s transcendental subject, a concept arguably
bound to his cinematic effect, a term with epistemological import. This paper will also redirect
attention to the interpretative liberation associated with “flight", insisting that Baudry’s
discussion of the cinematic dispositif is among the first to address the real, albeit with an
emphasis on intelligibility, so that release from what I call the “cinematic capture”, a term that
Todd McGowan defines as “uncritical subjectivity”, can be enacted. This thesis asserts that
Birdman, proposed here as a case for psychoanalytic film theory, unintentionally exposes the
traumatic real within the imaginary because of cinematic capture, thus leading to this discussion
of the gaze, identification, narration, control and desire. In addition, it will appraise what
Baudry calls the “knowledge effect” by responding to the following inquiries that encapsulate
the critical stake here. How can one call this effect “knowledge” when the “subjective” of the
transcendental subject becomes more pronounced with the other title of Baudry’s apparatus
theory, which is suture theory? What can one say about the “reality effect” of the apparatus
theory in an age of digitisation the emphasis of which is virtuality and, last but not least, can
one argue that Inarritu’s Birdman is an illustrative intervention of the digitised post-cinematic?

Keywords: Psychoanalytic Film Theory, the Psychoanalytic Triad of the Imaginary, Symbolic
and the Real, the Cinematographic Apparatus, Superhero, Birdman, Alejandro Inarritu

Address for Correspondence: Constance Goh, email: [email protected]

Article received on the 4th January, 2020. Article accepted on the 19th April, 2021.
Conflict of Interest: The authors declare no conflict of interest.
Goh, C. 86

Introduction

This paper theoretically investigates how an analysis of popular culture spectatorship yields
thoughts on Jacques Derrida’s phrase “the messianic without messianism” in Specters of Marx
(1993), the self-sacrificial hero that is other than the messiah as religiously prophesized.
Derrida’s messianic is an ethical response to contemporary political and economic crises; its
religious undertones is reworked here to address the notion of “superhero” in popular
imagination, evident in the multiple live-action adaptations of the comic book heroes of
Detective Comics and Marvel Cinematic Universes for their commercial value. With
qualification, This address also notes that not all comic book franchises are valued for their
Hollywood commercialism; some comic book adaptations are self-aware, positioning
themselves external to the hegemony of the tinseltown blockbuster. DC’s or Marvel’s recent
box-office earnings attest to the financial successes of its serialized film franchises. While these
dream factories are premised on the “flight” motif inherent to cinematic creations, especially
symbolized by the aviating capacities of some superheroes, it is Alejandro Inarritu’s 2014
Birdman, although not commercially comparable, which is theoretically significant here: the
“flight” motif paradoxically gestures to the capture that is the very essence of the cinematic.
Besides the commercial successes of the comic book heroes, Inarritu’s filmic spoof ruptures
the heroic aspect of comic superheroes and brings to the fore not only the earth-bound actor
who plays the character but also how the concept of the heroic can only be understood in and
through the anti-heroic.
James Driscoll’s (2016) critical review of Todd McGowan’s psychoanalytic film theory is
crucial to an understanding of the manner in which audience participation is invited via an
affective filmic involvement. He cites McGowan’s “attribution to Jean-Louis Baudry that ‘[i]n
the cinema, one can gain a sense of identity through the act of seeing heroic figures on the
screen, I see Sandra Bullock or Denzel Washington acting in a specific way, and I model myself
on them.’” (2016: 106). Whereas McGowan indicates the imaginary identification activated by
the image: how we “model” ourselves on our favorite characters in action, Driscoll’s ironic
remark emphasizes the complexity of Baudry’s exposition of how the filmic mechanism pulls
the spectator’s attention into the filmic object in and through the medium as the social link, a
socialization brought forth by the screened object, using the ideological interpellation inherent
to the belief systems of communities. However, this sociality is not an intersubjective person-
to-person connection; it signals the manipulation of the imaginary dimension of the spectator’s
psyche by filmic creators for psychic immersion. One can only state that, after reading
Driscoll’s review, the successes of the superhero genre testify to the psychologically
immaturity of those who find it appealing.
Driscoll attempts to retrieve psychoanalysis for clinical practice, which, according to him,
is meant to be a psychic aid for the analysand. The analyst is to cure the analysand via a
transference of his or her desire for the lost object onto a new object as substitution. This
provides the necessary ontological support, without which the analysand’s psyche may
disintegrate, thereby his recommendation of not trivializing this psychic remedy by using it to
analyze film. With hindsight, this “modelling” of iconic heroes because they are physically
beautiful, muscular, amazing in action et cetera only reinforces the mundaneness of our
everyday lives, resulting in an inverse negative identification that Driscoll explains as
alienation in his psychoanalytic reading of Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 The Clockwork Orange. It
is the same with the consumption of “superhero” comics or films, live action or otherwise.
Rather than psychic healing, this emotional negativity, which makes us more conscious of our
physical inadequacies, can be used by the commercial machinery for economic reasons: to
psychically render the urbanites conducive to suggestive promptings that will increase
commodification. On the other hand, Tim Groves’s “Entranced: Affective Mimesis and
Goh, C. 87

Cinematic Identification” (2006) provides a cognitive account of how structures of affect are
activated so that some kind of mirroring occurs, leading to recognition, perception and
construction. This paper, in an endeavour to be impartial, states clearly that the successes of
the DC or Marvel franchises indicate both the psychic strength and weakness of our imaginary
capacity. But it is the weakness of the imaginary in the Lacanian triadic formula that opens us
to ideological manipulation and, in this age of cyberspace, online deception.
Slavoj Zizek, too, states in “Jacques Lacan’s Four Discourses” (2006) the interdependence
of cultural studies and clinical practice: the latter fails when it ignores the socio-historical
dimension of the psychoanalytic treatment. In line with Zizek’s exposition and agreeing with
Driscoll’s premise, this cultural analysis starts by suggesting that psychoanalytic film theory
can increase our awareness of the social ills of hegemonic commercialism. The cultural
benefits are demonstrated in how this analytical approach yields apperceptions of the
ideological underpinnings of not only institutional or bureaucratic functioning but also the
disadvantages of global commercial bureacratization. McGowan’s psychoanalytic take on
films shows us how one can achieve liberation by overcoming the real on the side of the
imaginary, the impasse that escapes symbolization, which intrudes into the individual’s psychic
functioning. The final scenes of Birdman show a male protagonist whose reconciliation with
his family helps him to move past his psychic blockage, an obstacle that Jacques Lacan
attributes to the effect of the Imaginary as explained in the chapter “The Mirror Stage as
Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Pyschanalytic Experience” (2006) and into
the Symbolic, the social reality as we know it with its laws and conventions. Furthermore,
McGowan’s The Real Gaze (2007) attends to what I call the “cinematic capture” when he
speaks of the psychic immersion that some films promote. This, of course, implies that the
psychoanalytic import for those who study or analyze films has to do with what is uncovered
with the removal of the imaginary overlay, the blankness of the screen itself that gives the
viewer imaginary space. I shall examine the validity of Driscoll’s negative comment of
psychoanalytic film theory: how psychoanalysis when taken out of its clinical context and used
as an approach for film analysis becomes shaky. This reworking of the discursive approach,
which traces the theoretical shifts from Baudry’s apparatus theory (1974) to the 1970s screen
theory to the suture theory of late twentieth century and coupled with McGowan’s innovative
reading of the cinematic gaze, owes much to Thomas Elsaesser’s advice (2011) to examine
more closely the theory of the apparatus. A word of caution to those who think that
psychoanalysis is trendy; psychoanalysis as a theory is premised on failure, albeit not only the
failure that McGowan describes in The Real Gaze, which actually supports my thesis that any
attempt to theorize film viewing must begin with the premise of heterogeneity, a theoretical
premise illustrated by the ambiguous filmic conclusion of Inarritu’s Birdman. The failure is
due to the fact that what ails the individual psychically has to do with an unarticulated desire;
the analysand must work through her own psychic trauma herself for the narrative band-aid the
psychic wound necessitates.
Birdman, labelled a modern classic because it cinematically exposes the fundamental
failure of the Other, causes psychic discomfit rather than the maternal comfort of which Baudry
speaks in “The Apparatus”, wherein the film nurtures psychically the regressive longings of the
individual. Its critical strength is found in how it unveils the fantasmatic leanings of our psyche
and ironically demolishes them without being overtly tragic. More importantly, its ambiguous
ending sparks off more cineaste speculations, which I insist counter Vadim Rizor’s five points
of contention in his critical review of Birdman’s (2014) sustained long shot, crucial as a
cinematographic device. Rizor’s critique is brought to the fore as an inverse aid to my thesis
that Emmanuel Lubezki’s fluid cinematography reinforces the “thematic purpose” of Birdman:
its attempt to present the Real within the Imaginary as chaotic material reality. Second, Rizor
focuses on what the film characters have in common, which he attributes to Birdman’s go-to-
Goh, C. 88

phrase “you are an asshole” which exposes their vile imperfections. This, moreover, is in
accordance to Lacan’s Hegelian take in Seminar 1 (1953-54) on the master/slave dialectic with
the master as an idiotic asshole enjoying the slave’s labor. Third, Rizor enquires into
Thomson’s staging of Raymond Carver’s play, thematically crucial because of what Lacan says
about the stupid dimension of “love”. Fourth, besides prompting a caustic snigger from the
knowing spectator, the intertextual importance of the citation from Roland Barthes’s
Mythologies comes to the fore when a celebrity reviewer at the interview scene asks if the
aforementioned semiotician is an Avenger and, lastly, the reason for Birdman as a credible
alternative to Hollywood’s “superhero” narratives despite Rizor’s rather disgruntled review.
Because of the contemporary emphasis on the digital production of the post-cinematic, in
line with the virtual and, thereby, psychoanalytically the imaginary, this paper addresses
topographically the Lacanian real within the imaginary, rendered visually in Jacques-Alain
Miller’s diagram, which Inarritu’s Birdman arguably demonstrates. I shall define briefly the
three terms of the psychoanalytic triad, detailed mostly in Lacan’s Ecrits and The Four
Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, before we proceed further. The Imaginary
designates the ego formation of the mirror stage wherein maternal care is most crucial with the
Symbolic as the Name-of-the-Father coming in at some point to collapse the Oedipal complex
so that desire for the mother becomes repressed as the child enters society. Lacan works with
Saussurean semiotics to introduce his version of the psychoanalytic treatment of the symptoms
arising from the unconscious, coupling it with the metonymic and metaphoric movements of
the Freudian psychoanalytic field. The Real, by far the most intriguing term, designates material
reality for the earlier Lacan as well as the later Lacanian excess that escapes symbolization.
Working with Christian Metz’s imaginary signifier (1991) and Jean-Louis Baudry’s 1974-
1975 “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus” and his more important
1986 “The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impressions of Reality in
Cinema”, I shall examine, in particular, the cinematographic achievements of Inarritu’s film
and assert that the messianic in this film, although fronted by the male lead, is revealed
ultimately to be the cinematic apparatus that gives us what Baudry calls “the transcendental
subject”, a concept suggesting movement and meaning and arguably bound to his “cinematic
effect” or “impression of reality”, making Lacan’s early discourse on the real as material reality
exceptionally significant. This theoretical assertion has to do with how the cinematographic
apparatus aids in the imaginary cut that slices through the real, giving the viewer not only the
visual narrative but also the analyst a symbolic reading at a different level. This paper also
redirects attention to the interpretative liberation figured by the “flight” motif, proposing that
Baudry’s cinematic dispositif is among the first to address theoretically the real, albeit with an
emphasis on intelligibility, which McGowan appears to have elided in The Real Gaze, so that
my espousal of the release from what I call the “cinematic capture”, a term that McGowan
defines as “uncritical subjectivity”, can be found. This classical film narrative apparatus, which
Constance Penley (1989) rather ironically classifies as similar to “the bachelor-machine” of
Marcel Duchamp in The Future of an Illusion, gives us the former’s omnipotent subject that
liberates us in and through our reading processes. This thesis asserts that Birdman, as a case for
psychoanalytic film theory, unintentionally exposes the traumatic real within the imaginary of
the cinematic capture, thus leading to this discourse of the gaze, identification, narration,
control and desire. In addition, it appraises what Baudry calls the “knowledge effect” in
“Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus” by responding to the following
inquiries. On what premise can one call this effect “knowledge” and how does the “subjective”
of the transcendental subject attain this when the other title of Baudry’s apparatus theory is
suture theory? A preliminary response will indicate the semantic bind between the semiotic and
the cinematographic, especially with the argument I pose in a different essay entitled
“Aesthetic(s) Moves” (2014) that cinematography can be read as “writing-in-movement”. This
Goh, C. 89

will, in turn, alters how one approaches the material dimension of the sign, the signifier. It then
takes us to the “reality effect” of the apparatus theory, which arguably interrupts the virtual
emphasis of digitisation. Lastly, can one argue that Inarritu’s Birdman is an illustrative
intervention of the digitised post-cinematic?

The Psychoanalytic Theorists’ Toolbox of Semiosis

The relevance of Christian Metz’s linguistic conception of cinema (1991) to an analysis of

Birdman becomes evident with the visual dimension of the title sequence. It functions like the
“tissue sample”, Lacan’s “piece of flesh”, that Jacques-Alain Miller touches upon in the drive
as speech published in Umbr(a) (1997). Describing this piece of flesh as the drive
metaphorically invokes the messianic as the embodiment of the spirit, the mirror images of the
ego ideal transformed into the ideal ego, Birdman as Thomson at the filmic beginning and
Thomson as Birdman by the filmic end. Raymond Carver’s “Late Fragment” is used in the title
sequence, which only appears momentarily: “And did you get what you wanted from this life,
even so? I did. And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the
earth”. The creativity of the opening sequence centers on the slow appearance of letters
followed by the disappearance of the previous ones, paradoxically recalling invisibility even as
the cinematic essence is that of the visible. The word made flesh, more precisely, the rotting
flesh of an aging actor sums up what drives the entire human race, the objet petit a, which has
no actual existence but takes on the various guises of the demand for love, the articulation of
need and the combination of the two that leads to desire. To Miller, “[d]esire is as such full of
identifications” (1997, 19). The manifest text of Birdman dramatizes Driscoll’s concept of
“negative” identification in “Reification and Alienated Form in A Clockwork Orange” (2016).
Revolving around Thomson’s faded career which he hopes to give a dramatic boost by staging
Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”, Thomson hears Birdman’s voice
taunting him about his aged appearance, his failing career, his broken family. These delusional
episodes are instances of Birdman’s aggressiveness, psychoanalytically termed “aggressivity”,
and symptomatic of narcissism. Here, what we have is the messianic image turned into the
obscene father of the superego, threatening Thomson’s reality with disintegration and
fragmentation. By writing a film on the production process of Carver’s play, Inarritu and his
writers (un)wittingly provide intellectual access to the various psychic symptoms found within
the hypocritical and self-obsessed world of Broadway or the commercial machinery of
Hollywood comic book superheroes, with their perennial and excessive preoccupations with
youth, beauty and money.
Birdman’s filmic body discloses the obverse of the invocatory as drive, the appellation to
which Althusser (1970) refers as well as the latter’s exposure of the ideological state
apparatuses; instead we are shown loud excesses, the cause of which is the lack of affirmation:
Thomson, after reading a nondescript review of his preview performance, has a fist fight with
“ponsy” Shiner that turns into a hysterical catfight; Samantha Thomson puts her father down
with “you don’t matter, get used to it”; people burst into Thomson’s studio; neurotic Lesley
shouts and throws a hair dryer at Shiner and Thomson or his alter ego acts out, one using
telekinesis whereas the other actual physical strength to throw furniture and accessories against
the wall. On one hand, it is histrionics without the Oedipal drama, one recalling Macbeth’s
words, “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”. On the other, one is reminded of the Icarus
complex that results in a hubristic fall. The Icarus complex is pertinent not only to our proclivity
to take flight from our real world problems, but interpretatively more relevant to human desire
and ambition. These qualities inadvertently invite the intrusion of the real that ruptures the
imaginary in Miller’s diagram, which topographically maps the psychic area where trauma
Goh, C. 90

occurs. However, cinematographically, Birdman’s flight metaphor alludes to its predominant

cinematic style, a question of form and very much in line with what Baudry acerbically states
in “The Apparatus”: “That the real in Plato’s text is at an equal distance from or in a
homologous relationship to the ‘intelligibly real’ – the world of Ideas – and ‘reality-subject’ –
‘the impression of reality’ produced by the apparatus in the cave would moreover be sufficient
to make us aware of the real meaning of the world of Ideas and of the field of desire on which
it has been built…” (1986, 696-697). Baudry’s commentary is psychically telling on at least
two levels: first, the propensity for illusions that homo sapiens have and, second, without the
structuration given by the cinematic dispositif, one will not have a narrative nor a film of which
to speak. In fact, Baudry’s “knowledge effect” complements Lacan’s conception of the two
epistemological dimensions of psychoanalysis: the knowledge of the imaginary, a reflexive
misrecognition that paradoxically promotes the psychic unity of an individual, and, in the case
of psychoanalyzing film, film unity, whereby the knowledge of the symbolic becomes
prioritized, a reflecting type of analysis motivating psychic transference, one leading to the ego
formation whereas the other the subject. Thus, it is the substantive of the earlier Lacanian real
that incites the endeavour to know which, in turn, presupposes the intellectual organisation
required in such an attempt.
Metz’s take on the imaginary signifier is clearly premised on montage and how this editing
technique represents cinematic potency. He describes “[m]ontage as supreme ordering”
because it is how montage is used that gives to filmic sense. Baudry’s citation of Pudovkin’s
conception of montage “as the art of assembling pieces of film, shot separately, in such a way
as to give the spectator the impression of continuous movement” illustrates the director’s
“ingenious manipulation” of images. While Metz debates whether film is a language or a
language system, one based on the dissection of the film to visual or aural units as signifiers
and the shot arrangements as significates, a sort of cinematic language that resemble the
“linguistics of speech”, an issue evinces when one examines his broad use of filmic speech.
One cannot simply make equivalent the “sequential arrangement” of filmic components to
linguistics despite the fact that Metz calls it “cinematographic syntax”. Even as he questions
whether film is langue or parole, a linguistic system or a specific language use, the section, “A
non-system language: film narrativity”, intervenes in his discussion of the semiotic import of
cinematography with the various genres of film as “the spectacle’s formula” (1977, 139),
indicating that “cinema is only in theory an art of images” (1977, 140). Perhaps the point missed
by Metz here is this: this “art of images” is the silent crux from which the story-telling begins;
it expresses without talking. It also lends the potential to mask an opaque gap within the
cinematic image, an invisible lacuna upon which McGowan’s The Real Gaze is founded.
Structurally, the film is surrealistic without using montage as the key technique of filming.
The only montage use is when there are documentary frame insertions: the introductory and
multiple scenes of a diving meteorite; the repeated images of sea birds soaring and settling on
the islets of a tributary, montage shots of natural phenomena. To quote the film critic found in
Birdman, Tabitha Dickson, it is the “superrealism” of the long take or continuous shot that,
albeit with quite a few visual jolts of the handheld camera, glides along the inner corridors of
the theatre leading to its exterior, St. James Square, which then lifts to the sky and dives when
Inarritu decides that both Thomson and the audience have to return to reality per se that gives
to Baudry’s “impressions of reality”. This means that what the audience experiences is not the
usual filmic continuity; in fact, this heightened use of the long take, reminiscent of Bazin’s
recommendation that film ought to lay bare the verisimilitude of reality, challenges Hollywood
intensified continuity editing. Besides the ironic character portrayals or the unsettling stylistics,
the few disjunctive frame insertions further disrupt filmic immersion and, just when one thinks
that Edward Norton caricaturizes Mike Shiner as the self-enamored, pretentious thespian, he
has some authentic moments with Sam Thomson or Tabitha Dickson. Instead of intensifying
Goh, C. 91

psychic absorption, this film uses cinematography to waylay filmic suture so that the film
exposes the ideological abuses of commercial blockbusters, which use filmic suture for
financial reasons. Taking center-stage, Inarritu’s innovative cinematography brings mental
release from the filmic capture of Hollywood continuity editing since it auto-reflexively
critiques itself. Invoked is the desire for intellectual liberation, one akin to the desire of the
analyst, the subject supposed to know, for she is the one endowed with the analytic capacity.
Inviting the analysand to speak is the analyst’s way of encouraging what Lacan calls “the pass”,
the Freudian transference from one signifier to the next. The analyst may not really know what
ails the analysand psychically but the ethics of psychoanalysis insists that she pushes the
analysand’s remembrance of a truth her very own. This articulation is not the truth as fact;
neither is it the truth as experienced. It is the truth of the analysand’s unconscious: a narrative
that the analysand enunciates so that the gaping trauma becomes covered by a “tissue sample”,
the logic of the signifier as the messianic.
This, in turn, calls to question the concept of reality in the phrase “virtual reality”. The
reality mentioned is obviously taken and reassembled from “objective” reality; a simulation
that requires a higher degree of the suspension of disbelief than live-action films. The phrase
“cinematographic specificity”, used in both Metz’s (1991) and Baudry’s (1974-75) discourses
and read in relation to the Lacanian “unique truth” indicates something particularly imprinted
in each of us. Thus one cannot simply equate cinematography with speech owing to the fact
that the organising dimension of speech is aural whereas that of cinematography is imagistic,
which, in fact, takes the specificity of the individual filmic sense of the viewing subject, the
subjective point of view, to that of the “transcendental subject” of the omniscient view point,
comparable to the shift from the mirror function of ego formation to the multifocal reading
manifested by the gliding eye of the camera that eventually results in cinematic effacement,
correlating to Baudry’s focus on “objective reality” which will be elaborated in the next section.
Metz’s characterizing of film as “expressive” is prodigious given that my focus is on the
“expressiveness” of the other “systems of signification” which he lists in his footnote, systems
that constitute that filmic organisation at the level of codification: “cultural, social, stylistic,
perceptual, etc.” (1977, 162), the other of Baudry’s mention of “the other scene” in “The
Apparatus”. Notwithstanding Metz’s emphasis on speech, the immediacy of the image is
definitely more impressionistic, and thereby more psychically powerful, than the aural sign
even if Baudry notes that it is easier to evade the image than the sound. It calls to attention how
film is an arrangement of images, corresponding to Baudry’s description of our ego as „a sum
of images”, testifying to how film owes its existence to cinematography. According to Oxford
Etymology Dictionary, “cinematography”, which began its use in 1910, is Greek in origin, with
the word-forming element “graph” derived from “graphos”, signifying “writing”. Thus
cinematograph is that which writes, marks or describes, i.e. an instrument for recording. Noting
that the webpage on Lacanian psychoanalysis has no entry on psychoanalysis and critical
thought, I shall approach what knowledge is in relation to psychoanalysis: how the film analyst
analyses the structural dimension of the film so as to go beyond the merely imaginary, the
sense-making processes invoked by narrative and analysis, the recognizing of the
organisational aspect of the film’s composition as a manner of being attentive to the symbolic
in its relation to the real, the muteness of which attests strangely to its organic nature.
This, paradoxically, points to how the commercialism of DC or Marvel Cinematic
Universe can be undermined by redirecting focus to psychological implications of Baudry’s
“impression of reality”. The word “imprint” that “impression of reality” brings to mind is key
to psychological conditioning, reinforcing the visual dimension of the printed word. Birdman
interrupts the continuity editing with another film technique that points to the true significance
of “seamless reality”, a post-production digital technique that DC or Marvel franchises promote,
making the animated versions representative of what we call virtual reality in the digital age.
Goh, C. 92

By demonstrating the hidden “real” of filmic creations: the psychic symptoms manifested in
the chaotic and histrionic human interactions along the corridors of the backstage of the theatre,
Birdman theatrically satirizes the superhero fantasy; it also alerts us to the dangers of delusion
when the camera pans to Thomson found at the edge of a building about to dive. In other words,
when the real is concealed to a great extent by the imaginary, it becomes unsettling and possibly
traumatizing once exposed. The cinematic filter, on the other hand, is uncovered by the theatre
within the film, an intensified performativity that oddly enhances the constative dimension of
Birdman, the film as a cinematic frame as well as the objet petit a. This narrative or genre
interruption becomes heightened by Thomson’s television giving us news of Ironman’s
blockbuster status, subsequently eliciting a satirical response from his alter ego.
Significant to psychoanalytic film theory is Metz’s exposition on the “reconstructed model”
of reality, an assemblage of images, which is quite different from the documentary film that
merely films the event as reproduction. With Barthes, he argues that fiction film can only be
called reconstruction and not reproduction because it does not merely copy “the concrete aspect
of the original object; it is neither poiesis nor pseudo-physis, but simulation, a product of techne.
That is to say: the result of a manipulation. As the structural skeleton of the object made into a
second object, it remains a kind of prosthesis” (1977, 135-6). This distinction between film as
reproduction or film as reconstruction ties in with what Baudry describes as “perception” or
“representation” in “The Apparatus”: “perception”, a word used in art history to define visual
interpretation, attests to the subjective viewing of art objects, the reconstruction aspect of films,
whereas “representation” is more in line with Metz’s discussion of reproduction. It is when an
individual mistakes the reconstructed model as the reproduced one, perception confused with
representation, that delusion reigns.
Returning to the above discussion of “genre”, the intertextual reference to Barthes’s quote
from Mythologies: “[t]he cultural work done in the past by gods and epic sagas is now done by
laundry-detergent commercials and comic strip characters” informs us that “genre” is the key
to comprehending the self-consciousness of Birdman; instead of placing the Hollywood
superhero genre on a pedestal, the film ridicules it by revealing the human and all too human
Thomson behind the superhuman mask. Not only is the film a film about theatre which, of
course, comes from a play, in this case, written by Carver; it is also about how the three- or
five-act structure has made a transition from plays to theatre performances to films. Birdman,
although considered an alternative to mainstream films, is still constructed in accordance to the
Aristotelian structure. However, this supposed reproduction can be considered “reconstruction”,
despite its docu-drama stylistics, an artistic instance of Baudry’s “work as a process of
transformation”, the much-needed Lacanian symbolic realization for psychic healing. This
reminds me of Bert Olivier’s word, “orthopaedic”, psychoanalytically mentioned in his
“Lacan’s Subject” (2004), which is, of course, techne as prosthesis and, in Birdman, prosthesis
as object cause, coming to life because of its high stakes: the protagonist’s love for himself
psychically transferred to his love for the art object, the theatrical production that he has
invested so heavily. The character arc can be rendered as the half-circular projection of self-
obsession to a psychic entrancement by the substitutive object, Lacan’s vector drawn from
jouissance to castration, symbolized by Thomson’s loss of his nose. This cultural analysis of
Birdman bears witness to the fact that psychoanalytic film theory may not be that “shaky” after
all.
Metz’s footnote xx elaborates the semiotic emphasis for psychoanalytic film theory as the
“double articulation” of film. The subject of enunciation here is the film discussed and the
subject enunciating is the film’s expressiveness, which is a split cine-subject symbolized by not
just Thomson and his alter ego, Birdman, but also Thomson and Shiner, the egotistical
narcissist. The women are also fractured signifiers of good and bad mothers or lovers. Moreover,
Metz’s five levels of codification signal why a semiotic reading is necessary: first, how
Goh, C. 93

perception depends on the structural play of space and time; second, “recognition and
identification of the visual and audio objects” within the filmic diegesis; third, the “symbolisms
and connotations” that accompany the cultural reading; fourth, the narrative structures and five,
“the set of properly cinematographic systems that, in a specific type of discourse, organize the
diverse elements furnished to the spectator by the four preceding instances” (emphasis mine,
1977, 162). Examining closely its structuration, the symbolisms and connotations of the film
are refracted initially so as to interweave later to configure a psychic labyrinth, evident in the
multiple character parallels as well as the intertextual allusions. If this film is superrealistic,
Baudry’s “more real than the real”, it is “filmic reality” unfolded by the camera transitioning
to the “social” reality of Times Square with Thomson’s fans using social media to send
recordings to each other of the actor’s semi-naked, frenzied rush to his next theatrical
appearance. One can place Metz in Baudry’s camp because he describes the narrative flow as
“…the course of real events refracted through an ideological point of view” (1977, 136), thus
signaling the elemental extraction of the apparatus from objective reality in order to create the
filmic reality. In a film that uses in a sustained manner the long shot, what Metz states in the
following citation is crucial: “…they fall back on what is called, for better or worse, the
‘tracking shot’ (and which implies nothing other than a noncodified mobility of the camera, a
movement that is truly free) where traditional film syntaxes distinguish between rear and
forward ‘dolly,’ ‘pan,’ ‘tilt,’ etc” (ibid). Quoting Metz aids my response to Rizor’s point one
of contention. The long take cinematographically corresponds to the “escape” theme of this
film, which, ironically, means nothing unless understood in relation to the cinematic capture of
Hollywood blockbusters, McGowan’s cinema of integration. When the noncodified mobility
of the camera gives to a truly free motion, the filming technique of Birdman visually illustrates
cinematographic emancipation by way of filmic sensibility to cinematic sense, albeit one
founded upon “the unexpected virtue of ignorance” promoted by the dream screen and
analogous to the imaginary release for which Thomson longs and he supposedly achieves as
Birdman. It is the playful cinematographic structure of this film, not the narrative configuration,
that adds to the connotative richness of the film.
Of import to my thoughts on the realism of one-take filming is the reiteration of words
such as “real”, “reality”, and “truth” or phrases with these words in Birdman, for instance when
Birdman tells Thomson after the latter has met with his wife, arguably the only rational and
psychically stable character in the film, that he ought to have taken the offer of a “reality show”
on his family, perhaps a snide, underhanded jab at reality television programmes not only says
a lot about the overlaps between appearance and reality; the superrealistic nature of this film
psychoanalytically theorizes what Baudry call “more real than the real”, signaling again the
omnipotence of the camera’s eye. Social reality, which goes under the intersection of the
imaginary and the symbolic in Lacanian psychoanalytic schema, can be considered now as
constructed artificially through the use of the various communicative channels, an ontological
state encapsulated by Marshall McLuhan’s “the medium is the message”. While not disavowing
social media because of its convenience and usefulness, reality per se is definitely more
complicated than what is communicated through these devices. Birdman, in its dalliance with
what Lacan calls “a real of non-sense”, cited in Miller’s the drive as speech, unintentionally
reveals the constructed nature of the Symbolic, evident in how Thomson, as a failed symbolic
figure, cannot control his actors, crew or family members.

Baudry’s Apparatus Unveiling of the Gaze

Baudry’s “The Apparatus” examines the role of cinema in producing subject effects by
comparing it to the psychic apparatus described in Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams.
Goh, C. 94

Metapsychologizing film, he privileges the cinematic image, given that visual representation
takes precedence in and through the optical apparatus, the camera obscura, which was invented
at about the same time as the birth of Western science, with focus going from objective reality
to that of subjective reality. Citing Baudry’s “The Apparatus” renders obvious the concept of
desire in psychoanalysis. This desire for womblike comforts is a concept linked to the gaze as
conventionally defined: “[w]e can thus propose that the allegory of the cave is the text of a
signifier of desire that haunts the invention of cinema and the history of its invention” (1986,
697). This section examines the role that desire plays in the technological progress of media
productions, resulting in epochal as well as paradigm shifts; as Baudry explains: “…their
existence (the instruments of visual communication) has at its origin a psychical source
equivalent to the one which stimulated the invention of cinema” (ibid). Though Freud replaces
the optical metaphor with the “mystic writing pad”, apposite in its metaphorical nature to my
proposition that “belief” (which Miller describes as the menage a tois of truth, meaning and
fiction) to which Baudry alludes must take into account not only of the Lacanian triadic
structure but also the Freudian conscious, preconscious and unconscious systems. Filmic
essence resides precisely where the imaginary coincides with the symbolic, comparable to what
we call reality per se, the topos where the systematization of belief takes place with no actual
guarantee of truth, thus explaining how primary ego construction occurs and why it shifts with
later identifications.
Significant to this discussion on film is Baudry’s description of how the primary and the
secondary identifications work in their constructions of the ideal ego and the ego ideal. The
ideal ego, a construction occurring at the primary level, is premised on a misrecognized mirror
reflection of wholeness: the mirror image is the figurative stand in for the child, further
reassured by the maternal caregiver. During the secondary stage, wherein the formative scene
for the subject of the symbolic is both substitutive and synecdochic, the image of perfection
stands in place as the signifier for personal identification. Psychoanalytic film theory informs
us that the play of reflection concerns not the mirroring of reality but that of images even as
film provides “impressions of reality”. Filmic identification focuses on the relations between
the subject and the camera. According to Baudry, “[u]ltimately, the forms of narrative, the
contents of the image, are of little importance so long as an identification remains possible”
(1974, 45). The following citation is important to the understanding of Baudry’s take on the
boundedness of film identification; filmic mirroring, to him is closed with “no exchange, no
circulation, no communication with any outside” (1974, 44), indicating the finiteness of ego
construction even as the subjective point of vision is a point of fixity, given the determining
significance achieved in the individual’s identity construction. But the later Lacan places
emphasis more on the ego ideal, the construction governed by the symbolic order. Crucial to
this secondary process of identification is the individual placing himself at this point of
perfection looking upon himself as “subject”. Birdman’s voice functions as this symbolic
process. Producing Carver’s play not only permits another opportunity to reinvigorate his
acting career; it also reminds him of why he embarked on an acting career, a regressive move
symbolized by the napkin with Carver’s acknowledgement, what Zizek calls the objet cause. It
is this double identification, first, through the imaginary order for “the imaginary integration of
the self” (1974, 45), before it passes to the symbolic order that prompts the ego to pursue “the
ideal vision” forever missed even if it never were.
Still Cartesian in its inclination, Baudry privileges the “eye” as the “active center” and the
“origin of meaning” (1974, 40), illustrating how the eye of the camera records the narrative as
it unfolds whereas the eye of the human subject, which is beside it, watches the narrative as it
is communicated. Just before he closes his essay, he refers to the “I” that has an imaginary
function, quoting Lacan that “that it is to this unreachable image in the mirror that the specular
image gives its garments” (1974, 45). Calling this “new mode of representation”, which is the
Goh, C. 95

normalized traditional perspective used by the Renaissance painters, perspectiva artificalis,

Baudry reveals the instrumental use of the visual apparatus, by virtue of its corresponding
progress with scientific development. It makes the reality captured by the film appear
transparent or neutral, albeit true for some documentary films is not true for fiction films. It is
objective reality as raw materials that is “always worked upon, elaborated, selected” (1974, 42)
by the filmic apparatus, its hegemonic significance concealed by the normative appearance of
plot development. Once ordered to make narrative sense, ideological capture occurs with the
audience’s psychic submergence, which also explains the reason for Baudry’s likening of the
projector, the darkened room and the screen to Plato’s cave (1974, 45); the enchainment of the
prisoner “demonstrate[s], reveal[s] and make[s] understood what sort of illusion underlies our
direct contact with the real, would imagine or resort to an apparatus that doesn’t merely evoke,
but quite precisely describes in its mode of operation the cinematographic apparatus and the
spectator’s place in relation to it” (1986, 693). Captivated by the shadows cast on the wall by
the firelight, an individual prisoner will not be inclined to think for himself and, as a result, has
no self-awareness. This scene of primal regression signals the subject’s passive positioning that
McGowan also describes in his discussion on how the viewing subject relinquishes conscious
control when engrossed by filmic images. While discussing the “inherent mobility of the
cinematic mechanism”, Baudry unwittingly and subtly undermines his side-by-side positioning
of the human eye and the eye of the camera: “[t]o seize movement is to becomes movement, to
follow a trajectory is to become a trajectory, to choose a direction is to have the possibility of
choosing one, to determine a meaning is to give oneself a meaning” (1974, 43), an ontological
passage that appropriately poetizes and privileges the camerawork of Birdman, transiting from
subjectivity to objectivity, an objectivity Sean Cubitt’s “Suture” (2014) calls the “omni-voyant
gaze” of the filmic apparatus.
What is this “hidden or disguised truth in idealism” that Baudry states in “The Apparatus”?
The disguised truth in idealism is the founding technics that the imaginary overlays, the
apparatus testifying to how reality as represented by the symbolic is ordered in and through
social conventions and codes, which otherwise can turn out to be meaningless. This sublimating
passage from one scene to the other is a displacement that permits access from one place to
another (1986, 693): the other scene of the individual’s psyche, the gaze of the Other. It is
movement from the spectator’s unconscious system to the conscious one in the process of
attaining meaning. This corresponds to the analyst position, the one who supposedly knows, in
relation to the analysand’s speech so that an acknowledgement of her or his own truth can be
effected. Read in relation to the film, this movement is not an emergence normatively
understood; it is more the descending movement of the camera as it optically lands on the reality
of the ground: the traffic chaos of New York city, the masses of urbanites, the neon lights along
the streets. It is as if the material base of the apparatus, after having to take the violence enacted
upon it by our noetic designs, decides to avenge itself by showing us the unpalatable side of
humanity as it swoops down on the throngs of people jostling, transport vehicles steaming or
the massive concrete jungle of the metropolis bustling. As Baudry states: filmic motion can
counter the “single perspective for the image projected” by photography. This happens when
the multiplicity of viewpoints enabled by cinematography oppose the subjective viewpoint of
the viewer, creating what Lacan alludes to as a stain in the mirror and the later psychoanalytic
thinkers call the “gaze”. However, the illusion of continuity, dependent on Baudry’s
“persistence of vision”, is a condition that rests upon differential erasure, providing a ground
for identification. Any filmic disruption, in the form of a visible cut or an actor refusing to be
in character, discloses the invisible hand that gives it signifying synthesis, the cinematographic
apparatus. Birdman exposes all the above with the extensive use of the tracking shot, which
ingenuously lays bare the inherent discontinuity and signifying disjuncture. Thus Lubezki’s
apparently free-wheeling cinematography counters the assumption that the audience is
Goh, C. 96

absorbed by the narrative flow given by continuity editing, one premised on continuity,
direction and movement. Meaning is only ever achieved by the perceptual “relations between
points and a curve in geometry”, a visual communication that filmic psychoanalysis intuits.
Lacanian psychoanalysis, besides being used as a form of clinical practice, is undoubtedly
imbued with an epistemological side. This is made evident in the chapter, “The rat in the maze”,
found within Lacan’s Seminar XX, which not only suggests our capacity to be psychologically
reconditioned; there is the implication that, in certain circumstances, the individual has to resist
psychic manipulation.

Miller’s Deadlock of Sexuation

Miller’s “The Drive as Speech” refers to Lacan’s infamous line on the deadlock of sexuation.
It gives him the opportunity to speak of our relation to failure at “the specifically sexual level”
(1997, 15), a structural negativity in lieu of the temporal deferral that accompanies the
acquisition of language. This access to phallic jouissance is through partial drives, the scopic
drive in one’s look or the oral drive in one’s speech, as demonstrated by Lacan’s large vector
that moves from jouissance to castration, a vector linked by the demonstrably phallic function
of the drive, located beyond the pleasure principle. Man, with his privileged relation to the
phallus, apparently does not enter the sign of castration since his phallus is his fundamental
idiocy; woman, in her castrated state, seeks to attain the phallus in and through her child. This
is clearly evident in Birdman when Thomson’s partner announces that she with child, eliciting
his negative reaction whose concern, at that point, is his theatrical production, seeing the
infant’s imminent arrival as an obstacle to his desire. Man’s relation to the phallus is described
as fullness whereas the woman’s relation to it is one of loss. This structuration of the difference
between genders, a fundamental distinction that leads to a sexual impasse in their interactions
has other implications besides sexual desire; it expresses a fundamental alienation within any
societal interrelation, thus necessitating a conjoining prosthesis.
What is of utmost significance is this: the universal value of the castration complex is
regulated meaning. Miller insists that it is not the model of jouissance that is important nor the
fact that the phallus has become a signifier. It is the non-relationality of the phallic signifier;
when it becomes purely subjective and unrestrained, it does not have a dialogue with the Other.
Miller states that “…the primary status of jouissance is not sexual. Its status is phallic” (1997:
20). Thus what the phallus represents is crucial. When it does not relate to the Other, it leads to
some kind of fixation; phallic jouissance, in Marxian terminology, is “objectification” for one’s
gain in fullness. What this fullness is can be seen in the master’s discourse: the master’s stupid
enjoyment of the fruits of the slave’s knowhow. According to Miller’s playful description, this
solitariness of phallic jouissance that results in fixation shifts to the “solidarity of jouissance”
that reduces the other sex to a mere image or signifier. It is like being in love with one’s idea
of a woman rather than being in love with the actual woman. Miller mentions that feminism is
one of the resisting instances to such sexual reduction: “women are against this reduction to a
sexual object” (1997: 21). While this writer is not professedly feministic, she is against such
reductive male-female, male-male or female-female interactions. There is in actual fact no
solidarity only solitariness because “[i]t gives rise to the reduction of the Other as a sexual
object” (1997: 21). This phallic jouissance, the word is used here multiple times because there
is no word in English that provides a precise translation, poses difficulty to the Other because
it prevents authentic intersubjective relationship.
Miller addresses the title of his chapter by posing the question: who speaks when one
speaks of the unconscious? Using “blahblahblah” to indicate the non-sensical chatter of the
unconscious, which come from an other scene; in the case of Birdman, the meaningless
Goh, C. 97

pandemonium does come from the other scene, the backstage. The “who” that speaks is the “it”
of the Other, the “obscure zone” (1997: 23), a domain that one occasionally intuits but cannot
know exactly. The nothingness that Lacan calls “a real” in the imaginary is another word for
chaos, the obverse of “the real” in the symbolic that signifies the natural order. This real within
the imaginary produces effects that can be traumatic in the privileged schema of
communication. The lesson learnt regarding the drive as speech is the fact that there is no
“dialogue” between the heterosexual two and, in line with the aforementioned, neither is there
actual “dialogue” between desire and the object of that desire. Birdman demonstrates this
deadlock of sexuation not only by showing us the many failed heterosexual relations: while the
woman seeks the Other, as in seeking affirmation from the Other by being that which the Other
desires, the man seeks to be alone in his fullness (1997: 23); this description of failure also
applies to Thomson’s relation to his theatrical production, a relation inadvertently vulnerable
to frustration, betrayal and defeat.

McGowan’s Gaze of the Real

McGowan’s psychoanalytic film theory is brought to the fore here with what he calls
worldviews, “the four approaches to the gaze”: the cinemas of fantasy, desire, integration and
intersection. Cinema of fantasy examines how the gaze visually distorts the filmic field so that
the invisible becomes visible. The second type of cinema exposes the spectral absence within
the field of visibility as the traumatic real, the vacant, undead gaze of the camera that incites
desire. Part three is on integrative films, integration being the conventional productive process
since it mirrors the primary process of identification; they “incite desire only to resolve it into
a fantasy scenario that provides a screen through which the spectator can experience the gaze
without its attendant trauma” (2007, 19). Cinema of intersection reworks the merging of fantasy
and desire by “allowing an experience of the gaze without the fantasmatic screen” (2007, 20).
Of advantage to this paper is the manner in which McGowan theorizes the real gaze, an
approach that critically reconsiders the Althusserian ideological interpellation in light of
Lacan’s “knowledge of the Real”. This knowledge accedes to the fact that there will always be
a point of impairment in any power structure. The stake of McGowan’s discussion foregrounds
how Althusser fails to account for the success that the theorist has in recognizing and
conceptualizing the misrecognition underscoring ideological interpellation, especially when all
individuals are interpellated successfully. The answer lies in the alternate positioning of the
theorist, what McGowan calls “the mode of resistance to ideology rather than the product of
ideology” (2007, 173), a positioning at the point of “the real”.
Aligned with the thesis that Birdman psychoanalytically theorizes a real within the
imaginary is the acknowledgment of the necessity for the real within the symbolic wherein truth
and meaning reside, which McGowan undeniably states: “[w]ith the emergence of the new
Lacanian film theory, the theorist no longer battles against the cinema but becomes cinema’s
ally in the struggle to reveal the gaze” (ibid). Cinema of intersection, the filmic genre that
tackles the issue of the real, promotes the “alliance between the theorist and the cinema” by
“depicting the gaze directly” (2007, 175). Integrative cinema dupes us into believing that there
is no absence in the big Other, by virtue of the illusion of autonomy and mastery. The fourth
type of cinema shows the “insubstantial status” of the symbolic, traumatizing the subject whose
discovery leaves him bereft of fantasmatic support. By enabling this encounter with the Real,
the cinema of intersection celebrates jouissance as a manner of attending to the real within the
Other, which, despite its incompleteness, liberates an individual from any symbolic dependency.
McGowan’s exposition of the real as the impossible gestures to how “The Other does not exist”
in the following axioms: “one seeks the Other; one seeks all alone” (2007), which correspond
Goh, C. 98

to Miller’s conception of the fundamental alienation underpinning any social interaction.

Birdman inversely affirms McGowan’s cinemas of integration and intersection, which
separates the world of desire and the world of fantasy only to integrate or intersect these two
worlds, because of its open-endedness. The filmic conclusion as a point of ambiguity exposes
the craftiness of the imaginary by showing up the film’s status as a film, an artistic product that
frees the audience to their subjective musings or the film critic to her objective review.
We can read the ending of the film as either a dream sequence, a fantasmatic screen, that
occurs after Thomson’s staged suicide, concluding with his death, or interpret the hospital
sequence that follows his attempted suicide on stage as filmic reality. In the second scenario,
Thomson succeeds in achieving critical success as well as reconciliation with his estranged
family. This intersectional closure, instead of using a dream insertion, works with the lack of
what Baudry calls “cinematographic representation” to conclude the film. Cinematic resolution
is presented firmly as Miller’s “solidarity of jouiisance” with Thomson achieving accidental
success and a smiling Sam watching Thomson take wing out of the window. The audience does
not know if Thomson actually jumps to his death. But if he did, the first scenario can be
described as an almost failed integrative filmic move that takes his eventual flight as the
obviously imaginary redemption. Here, Groves’s affirmation of cinematic affect is exemplified
by the viewer’s perceptual alignment with the protagonist’s. However, if cognition is the
theoretical stake, the filmic end affirms the poiesis of the aviating flow that starts from the silent
placeholder of Baudry’s “dream screen” and concludes with the analytical passage of motion,
direction and purpose quite the contrary to the din from a real within the imaginary.

Conclusion

Given that the writing of this essay was encouraged by Elsaesser’s advice to examine the
metaphorical abundance of psychoanalytic film theory, I shall conclude with a word on
Elsaesser’s “media archaeology”, a term that recalls the filmic transition made from analogue
to digitisation in “What is Left of the Cinematic Apparatus, or Why We Should Retain (and
Return to) It”. His genealogical mapping of apparatus theory, which, in the Anglo Saxon world,
was called “screen theory”, “after the journal that promoted it most actively”, and later known
as “suture theory”, calls attention to the fact that filmic identifications abound owing to the
desirous nature of the human individual, an affirmative nod to Miller whose medical metaphor
is indicative of the stitching together of open flesh. Elsaesser’s archeological endeavour also
efficaciously figure (re)mediation as filmic suture that psychoanalysis theorizes. He looks to
the “rewriting of the past in light of the future” (2011:33). Reconsidering the post-cinematic
here means placing the theoretical emphasis on the real within the symbolic, a noteworthy
reprising of the real attentive to the material medium that visually or/and aurally projects and
organizes besides the physical artifact itself, the things-in-themselves that we may never
absolutely know. Notwithstanding, it is also how the real must be acknowledged so that an
understanding of the virtual, whether imaginarily or digitized, can be achieved. Both, by the
way, can be thought of as extensions of each other. In other words, the real is necessary to how
we comprehend the ontological underpinnings of the virtual just as we must approach the
expressive with an intuition of the silenced, the Lacanian real external to symbolization. Thus
the imaginary that constitutes the ideal-ego, a false completeness based on reifying an image,
despite being the source from which all the other ego ideal type of identifications will occur,
requires a symbolic intervention of the mother-child dyad, reinforcing the individual’s “ideal”
facet that sparks off her desire, a maturing process that Lacan insists is ontologically necessary.
However, the taint in the mirror, which Inarritu’s Birdman makes explicit, a result from the
suppressed ungovernable instincts of the human race, will return as the repressed, indicating
Goh, C. 99

the unwholesomeness within the imaginary besides the lack of authoritative guarantee. Armed
with this knowledge, I shall align myself with McGowan who, in his filmic psychoanalysis,
celebrates this symbolic unsettling because it emancipates us from our social dependencies such
that our faith in an inherited world of imperfections can be renewed time and again in and
through the promise of perfection.

References

Althusser, L. (1970) Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. in Lenin and Philosophy and
other Essays pp. 1-52. Internet:
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1970/ideology.htm
(Accessed: 20/03/2018)
Baudry, J. L. and Williams, A. (Winter, 1974-1975) “Ideological Effects of the Basic
Cinematographic Apparatus.” Film Quarterly 28(2), 39-47. CrossRef
Baudry, J.L. (1986). ‘The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of
Reality in the Cinema’, translated by Jean Andrews and Bertrand Augst. In Narrative,
Apparatus, Ideology, edited by Philip Rosen. New York: Columbia University Press,
pp. 299-318. http://academic.uprm.edu/mleonard/theorydocs/readings/JBaudry.pdf
(Accessed: 14/01/2018)
Cubitt, Sean. (2014) “Suture.” The Routledge Encylopedia of Film Theory. Ed. Warren
Buckland and Edward Branigan. London: Routledge. pp. 453-457.
Derrida, J. (1993) Specters of Marx: the State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New
International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. London and New York: Routledge.
Driscoll, J. (2016). Psychoanalytic Theory and the Rules of the Game. [Review of the
book Psychoanalytic Theory and the Rules of the Game, by Todd McGowan]
Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media 12, 103-109. Internet source:
http://www.alphavillejournal.com/Issue12/ReviewDriscoll.pdf (Accessed: 16/02/2018)
---. (2016) “Reification and Alienated Form in A Clockwork Orange. Mise-en-scène: The
Journal of Film & Visual Narration 1(1), 1-14.
Elsaesser, T. (2011) What is Left of the Cinematic Apparatus, or Why We Should Retain (and
Return to) It”. Semiotic Inquiry 31(1-2-3), 33-44.
Goh, C. (2014) Aesthetic(s) Moves. The International Journal of Humanities and Cultural
Studies 1 (2) [Online] Available at:
https://www.ijhcs.com/index.php/ijhcs/article/download/22/34 (Accessed:
07/05/2021)
Groves, T. (2006). Entranced: Affective Mimesis and Cinematic Identification. Screening the
Past, 20. [Online]. Available at: http://www.screeningthepast.com/issue-20-first-
release/entranced-affective-mimesisand-cinematic-identification/ (Accessed:
12/022018)
Lacan, J. (2006) Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York:
W.W. Norton & Company. pp. 1-444.
---. (1998) The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan,
Book XI. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W.W. Norton &
Company. pp. 1-215.
---. (1998) On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge, Encore 1972-1973.
Trans. with notes. Bruce Fink. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. New York: W. W. Norton &
Company.
Goh, C. 100

---. (1991) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book 1, Freud’s Papers on Technique 1953-54. Ed.
Jacuqes Alain Miller. Trans. John Forrester. New York and London: W.W. Norton and
Company.
McGowan, T. (2007) The Real Gaze: Film Theory after Lacan. New York: State University of
New York Press.
Metz, Christian. (1991) “The Cinema: Language or Language System.” Film Language: A
Semiotics of the Cinema. Trans. Michael Taylor. Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press. pp. 31-91.
Miller, J.-A. (1997) “The Drive as Speech.” On The Drive. Umbr(a): Journal of the
Unconscious 1. 15-34.
---. (2007) Suture: Elements of the Logic of the Signifier. The Symptom – Online journal for
Lacan.com 8 [Online] http://www.lacan.com/symptom8_articles/miller8.html
(Accessed: 12/01/2018)
---. (2016) “Truth is Coupled with Meaning.” Hurly Burly. halshs-01720558
Olivier, B. (2004). Lacan's subject: The imaginary, language, the real and philosophy. South
African Journal of Philosophy, 23(1), 1–19. CrossRef
Penley, C. (1989) Feminism, Film Theory and the Bachelor Machine. In: The Future of an
Illusion: Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis. Minneasota: University of Minneasota
Press. pp. 57-80.
Rizor, V. (2014) Birdman: Five Points of Contention Filmmaker Magazine.
Internet Source: https://filmmakermagazine.com/88413-birdman-five-points-of
contention/#.XEq_Zy2p2u4 (Accessed: 20/02/2019)
Zizek, S. (2006) “Jacques Lacan’s Four Discourses.” How to Read Lacan. Lacan.com
Internet source: https://www.lacan.com/essays/?page_id=303
(Accessed: 12/01/2016)