Desire and Subjectivity in Lacan and Vertigo

            Lacan definitely complicates and develops some of the approaches to gender and the gaze that we (and I in my previous post) have already discussed. I’m still not a hundred percent clear on Lacan, but one of the basic things I gather from his Four Fundamental Concepts is that the gaze splits the subject. It’s not just a simple matter of the subject who sees and the object who is seen, as I briefly discussed in my last post; rather, subjectivity is defined by the lack which fuels desire, desire for the “other”. Desire, however, must remain unfulfilled in order to be maintained, thus keeping the other at a distance, which in turn preserves the integrity of the subject.

This is where we turn to Vertigo, whose protagonist finds himself, during the second half of the film, in the predicament of being in love with a dead woman (whom we soon discover was an illusion all along). However, the fact that Scotty is obsessed with an elusive woman, a woman he can never have (either because she is possessed or dead or imaginary) is not so much a problem as a necessity. Scotty is obsessed with images—flowers, a suit, a painting, a profile—which symbolize and imaginary and elusive “real” he cannot have and perhaps, on a subconscious level, does not want to have. Like Baudrillard’s simulacra, these parts suggest a reality (the “self” Lacan discusses in the mirror stage) that does not and cannot exist. Scotty does not want what he can have: Midge, with her motherliness and her perception and her availability, is all too real for him, as is Judy, whom he remakes (like a reverse Pygmalion) from a real woman into a fiction. So what does Scotty’s self-defeating pattern reveal about the nature of the subject?

In her article, Modleski explains that Scotty’s subjectivity (and, hence, his masculinity) is complicated by his identification with Madeline. For instance, she points out that Scotty actually experiences Madeline’s dream after she “dies”. His identification, she claims, “feminizes” him, illustrating Lacan’s idea that, in desire, the subject must keep the other at a distance or risk losing his/her subjectivity. Here we can turn again to the Medusa myth. Fear of identification is present in quite a few of our readings of Medusa. Lacan’s concepts can even be read in Freud’s notion of the frightening female genitals; castration anxiety might be seen as a form of fear of identification. Vernant and Foster also both discuss how the Medusa serves as a reflection of the subject which threatens the notion of the “other”. In most versions of the myth it seems as though it is not Medusa’s gaze that possesses the power to petrify; it is not by looking but by being looked upon that she turns people to stone. Therefore, the subject who looks is undone by his/her own gaze and the implications of what he/she sees—a reflection of the self as other which destroys subjectivity by turning the subject into an object—rather than the actual gaze of the Medusa, which seems irrelevant.