The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Theories of Representation and Difference)

272 Pages·1988·2.28 MB·English

by  Kaja Silverman

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The Acoustic Mirror
The Female Voice in
Psychoanalysis and Cinema
Theories of Representation and Difference
KAJA SILVERMAN
General Editor: Teresa de Lauretis
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Bloomington and Indianapolis
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Portions of chapters 1, 2, and 5 have appeared in somewhat different form in Wide Angle 8,
nos. 1 and 2 (1985), Iris 3, no. 1 (1985), and Mary Ann Doane, Patricia Mellencamp, and
Linda Williams, eds., Re-vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism (Los Angeles: AFI,
1984).
© 1988 by Kaja Silverman
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic
or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of
American University Presses' Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to
this prohibition.
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Silverman, Kaja.
The acoustic mirror.
(Theories of representation and difference)
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Women in motion pictures. 2. Moving-pictures—Psychological aspects. 3.
Psychoanalysis. 4. Voice.
I. Title. II. Series.
PN1995.9.W6S57 1988
791.43'09'09352042
87-45834
ISBN 0-253-30284-6
ISBN 0-253-20474-7 (pbk.)
4 5 6 7 8 00 99 98 97 96 95 94
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Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Preface viii
[1] Lost Objects and Mistaken Subjects: A Prologue 1
[2] Body Talk 42
[3] The Fantasy of the Maternal Voice: Paranoia and Compensation 72
[4] The Fantasy of the Maternal Voice: Female Subjectivity and the Negative Oedipus Complex 101
[5] Disembodying the Female Voice: Irigaray, Experimental Feminist Cinema, and Femininity 141
[6] The Female Authorial Voice 187

Notes 235

Index 254
Page vi
For Michael and Philosophy on the Telephone.
Page vii
Acknowledgments
Anne Friedberg, Barbara Miller, Tania Modleski, Elizabeth Weed, Anne Norton, Joan
Scott, Stephen Heath, Mahara Ranger, Karen Newman, Roswitha Mueller, Margaret
Mchugh, Laura Mulvey, Lorette Clement, Jackie Rose, Rey Chow, Mary Ann Doane, Elena
Feder, and my colleagues in the Women's Studies Program at Simon Fraser University all
contributed in some vital way to the intellectual and social milieu in which I wrote this
book, and have taught me to think in new ways about feminist theory and practice. The
generous support of the Brown University Pembroke Center made it possible for me to
write chapters 1 and 2. Judith Mayne read The Acoustic Mirror in manuscript, and offered
wonderfully helpful suggestions for improving upon it. I also owe particular thanks to Peter
Wollen and Naomi Schor, with whom I talked over crucial parts of this book, and to whose
friendship it is a small tribute. Teresa de Lauretis helped to pull me through many a
conceptual impasse, and has been a constant source of intellectual, political, and emotional
support. Mary Russo is, quite simply, the best of everything that a friend can be, and most
of the thoughts in this book have been in some way filtered through her. But above all I
want to thank Michael Silverman, who has always "been there," even when he couldn't
actually be in the same country, and who always knows how to make even a good thing
better.
Providence
April 1987
Page viii
Preface
"No matter how many times I do this, I still get the same thrill," confides one of the doctors
in Curtis Bernhardt's Possessed (1947), as he injects a woman played by Joan Crawford
with a drug which will induce her to "confess" her past upon demand, and without her
conscious participation. He waits with ardent anticipation for each new installment of his
patient's story, repeating the injections whenever her voice falters. The scene is strikingly—
indeed uncannily—reminiscent of a scene from George Cukor's A Woman's Face, a film
made six years earlier by another director and for a different studio, but which also takes
place in a hospital room, also theatricalizes the exchange between a male doctor and his
female patient, and also casts Joan Crawford in the role of a patient: the scene, that is, where
the doctor removes the bandages from the female face which he has surgically reconstituted.
However, the uncanny similarity is undermined from within by a critical difference—
whereas A Woman's Face stages its drama at the surface of the female body, Possessed
derives its narrative coherence from the female voice. In the later of those two films, the
doctor's desire is engaged not by the possibility of constituting woman as spectacle, but by
the possibility of extracting speech from her. Possessed is by no means an isolated moment
in the history of Hollywood. Films as historically diverse as Johnny Belinda (1948), Singin'
in the Rain (1952), Marnie (1964), and Blow-Out (1981) testify to its continual fascination
with the sounds and meanings generated by the female voice. Like the doctor in Possessed,
classic cinema could be said to "get the same thrill" each time that voice is produced.
It is curious in light of this institutional obsession that the feminist critique of classic cinema
has focused primarily upon the image track and the construction of woman as the object of
the male gaze—upon the spectacle which is revealed, as it were, when the bandages are
removed from Joan Crawford's face, rather than upon the "confession" which is medically
extracted from her. It has somehow escaped theoretical attention that sexual difference is
the effect of dominant cinema's sound regime as well as its visual regime, and that the
female voice is as relentlessly held to normative representations and functions as is the
female body.
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This book derived its initial impetus from my desire to extend the feminist critique of
Hollywood into the area of the voice. However, as I wrote, that latter concept became
increasingly flexible and commodious, capable of subsuming not only a wide variety of
recorded vocalizations, but the whole problematic of authorship. My theoretical
investigation of the female voice also opened decisively onto a range of "subjective" issues,
from castration, projection, disavowal, and fantasy to narcissim, melancholia, and the
negative Oedipus complex.
My target of study underwent a similar expansion. It proved impossible to limit the category
of classic (sound) cinema to a fixed period of Hollywood history, since the auditory regime
I uncovered in films from the 1940s and 1950s is still operative in films as late as Klute
(1971) and Blow-Out, and can be detected in non-American films such as Darling (1965)
and Diva (1981). (Within the context of this book, classic cinema designates less a formal
system of the sort exhaustively codified by David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin
1
Thompson than a textual model which holds the female voice and body insistently to the
interior of the diegesis, while relegating the male subject to a position of apparent
discursive exteriority by identifying him with mastering speech, vision, or hearing. The
psychic and ideological underpinnings of this model are discussed at some length in chapter
1. Its sonorous dimensions are outlined in chapter 2. I should add that while the system of
classic [sound] cinema is an abstraction gleaned from repeated viewings of numerous films,
all individual films exceed that system in at least some respects, and often in many. No film,
in other words, is reducible to the category of classic cinema, no matter how that category is
conceived.)
But even stretching the category of classic cinema in this way left it too restrictive for my
purposes. I wanted to include a discussion of two films which exceed its paradigm in a
number of very striking ways, but which are in some sense "about" it—Peeping Tom (1960)
and The Conversation (1974). I also wanted to look closely at a Hollywood film—Three
Women (1977)—and an avant-garde British film—Riddles of the Sphinx (1976)—which are
libidinally unassimilable to classic cinema. Finally, I wanted to examine authorship in the
work of the Italian director Liliana Cavani, and to include in my larger analysis of the voice
a group of experimental films by women which have effectively dismantled Hollywood's
sound/image regime. As a result, only the first three chapters deal with classic cinema. The
remaining three address films which challenge that model, particularly at the level of voice.
The investigative field of The Acoustic Mirror also expanded to include a range of texts
drawn from psychoanalysis, film theory, and
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feminism. At times these texts are given a metacritical function, but more often they too are
read "symptomatically," shown to be motivated at least in part by the same psychic and
ideological forces as the films with which they are grouped. Chapter 1, for instance, is
predicated on the assumption that Freud's essays on anatomical difference and fetishism
enact a similar projection to that effected by classic cinema, and are part of the same
undertaking—the construction of an "adequate" male subject. Chapter 3 attempts to show
that Michel Chion's theoretical account of the maternal voice is structured by an identical
fantasy to that which informs Sorry, Wrong Number (1948), a fantasy which is very
different from the one which informs Guy Rosolato's account of the maternal voice, or Diva
(1983). And chapter 4 pursues the libidinal traces of the negative Oedipus complex not only
in Riddles of the Sphinx, but in Kristeva's writings on motherhood. A number of chapters—
1, 4, and 6—are indeed primarily organized around theoretical texts, the first of these
seeking through a "diagnostic" reading of Freud and film theory to redefine what is
generally understood to be the castration crisis, the second mounting an exhaustive search
within key essays from Polylogue and Histories d'amour for the libidinal economy of
feminism, and the third tracking authorial subjectivity in a wide range of essays dating from
the 1960s through the 1980s. Another, chapter 5, gives equal attention to Irigaray and the
feminist avant-garde, in addition to elaborating its own theory of femininity, and expanding
further upon the negative Oedipus complex. The result of all these textual intersections is as
much an anatomy of female subjectivity as a study of the female voice.
Page 1
[1]
Lost Objects And Mistaken Subjects:
A Prologue
Lost objects are the only ones one is afraid to lose.…
Christian Metz
Acknowledgement of castration prevents murder; it is its opposite and opposes it.
Julia Kristeva
THIS CHAPTER WILL attempt to demonstrate, with Lacan, that there is a castration which
precedes the recognition of anatomical difference—a castration to which all cultural
subjects must submit, since it coincides with separation from the world of objects, and the
entry into language. However, it will also venture something which psychoanalysis has not
as yet undertaken, which is to articulate the relationship between that castration—symbolic
castration—and the traumatic discovery anatomized by Freud. It is my assumption that the
former as well as the latter can be uncovered in certain of his texts, and I will to that
purpose perform symptomatic readings of "Some Psychical Consequences of the
Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes" and "Fetishism."
But the scope of my investigation will extend beyond psychoanalysis. I will endeavor to
show that classic cinema has the potential to reactivate the trauma of symbolic castration
within the viewer, and that it puts sexual difference in place as a partial defense against that
trauma. I say "partial" both because no system of defense is impregnable, and because this
one serves to protect only the male viewer. It has very different consequences for the female
viewer, at least assuming that identification in any way follows gender, since it projects
male lack onto female characters in the guise of anatomical deficiency and discursive
inadequacy.
Although it might seem odd to mount such an argument without a series of detailed
analyses of prototypical Hollywood films, I will be looking instead at a range of
"secondary" texts which might be said to register the symbolic castration anxiety that
classic cinema is capable of generating at the site of male subjectivity. The texts to which I
refer constitute the dominant tradition within film theory, from Munsterberg