Sigmund Freud's theory is that there are three constant character traits in film and they are the id, ego and superego. They all have specific characters that learn off each other in the narrative. These three characters consist in any form of media with a narrative structure according to this theory.
Sigismund Schlomo Freud was born on 6th May 1856 to Jewish parents, Amalia and Jakob Freud, in a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire now in the Czech Republic. When Sigmund was three, the Freuds moved to Vienna. He excelled academically, developing a passion for literature, languages and the arts that would profoundly influence his thinking about the human mind. Freud became very interested in medical and scientific research and went on to study medicine at the University of Vienna. While studying, Freud developed a particular fascination with neurology, and later trained in neuropathology at the Vienna General Hospital. In 1885, Freud travelled to Paris to study at the Salpêtrière Hospital with Jean-Martin Charcot, a famous neurologist studying hypnosis and hysteria. Freud was deeply affected by Charcot’s work, and upon returning to Vienna he started using hypnosis in his own clinical work with patients.
The id is the impulsive part of our psyche which responds directly and immediately to basic urges, needs, and desires. The personality of the newborn child is all id and only later does it develop an ego and super-ego. The id remains infantile in its function throughout a person's life and does not change with time or experience, as it is not in touch with the external world. The id is not affected by reality, logic or the everyday world, as it operates within the unconscious part of the mind.
The ego develops to mediate between the unrealistic id and the external real world. It is the decision-making component of personality. Ideally, the ego works by reason, whereas the id is chaotic and unreasonable. The ego operates according to the reality principle, working out realistic ways of satisfying the id’s demands, often compromising or postponing satisfaction to avoid negative consequences of society. The ego considers social realities and norms, etiquette and rules in deciding how to behave.
The superego consists of two systems: The conscience and the ideal self. The conscience can punish the ego by causing feelings of guilt. For example, if the ego gives in to the id's demands, the superego may make the person feel bad through guilt. The ideal self (or ego-ideal) is an imaginary picture of how you ought to be and represents career aspirations, how to treat other people, and how to behave as a member of society.
In 1923 Freud published his important paper, 'The Ego and the Id'. Here he further developed and elucidated his model of the human mind, introducing his ‘Superego-Ego-Id’ formulation to supersede the 'conscious-preconscious-unconscious' structure described in The Interpretation of Dreams. In this year Freud also discovered a pre-cancerous growth in his jaw, certainly caused by his regular and liberal consumption of cigars. He nonetheless found himself unable to give them up, and likened his addiction to them to his obsessional collecting of antiquities. The growth later turned into cancer and would ultimately cause his death sixteen years later.
Fight Club:
The Id in this scene immediate gratification strives for pleasure. This is something that you can visually see in both these characters as once Pitt shows the pleasure to Norton's character. Both seek for personal desire in this scene and give it to one and other as what they want is the same. They influence off each other, later on in the film we discover that these two are the same person and if you go back and look at them you can notice there similarities and piece together the puzzle.
The ego being Nortons character at the beginning of the scene refers to Pitts character going against his desire of being hit by Norton. Eventually, the Ego gives in and the Id takes over both of them, they both have a want and they both give into these wants. Later in this scene, Norton says to Pitt "We should do this again" This reinforces that the Ego is now gone and the Id has essentially taken over them both. The superego is at the beginning of the scene where Norton's character is in denial after being hit by Pitt.
As the scene progresses it is clear that this emotion leaves and the Id takes over as they both want to fight and that's what they pursue, not caring about anything that gets in their way. This shows the character to be mentally unstable as he can't control these three important feelings. They should be a balance with each other instead of predominantly being the Id.
Laura Mulvey:
Laura Mulvey had the main theory called the male gaze, the male gaze is when the camera is seen through the male eyes. Typically directors during the time of the theory's creation were male and this would make women in some instances seem over-sexualised by the camera. Her theory had been influenced by Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan which helped boost her essays into the public eye and elevate her theory. Mulvey states that she intends to use Freud and Lacan's concepts of 'the 'political weapon'. She argues that the classical Hollywood cinema has the majority male audience and this, in turn, inspired the male gaze. She states that the motivated camera movements and angles in movies suggest that the shot could over sexualise in certain situations.
Laura Mulvey interview:
Another Gaze – Could you start by telling me a little about what was latterly termed your ‘cinephile period’, before your involvement in the theorising of and making of films?
Laura Mulvey – I was born in 1941 and lived in the countryside for the whole of the war so I didn’t see any films until I came back to London at the age of six. Because of this, I remember the first films I ever saw quite clearly. I think the first was Nanook of the North [Robert J. Flaherty, 1922], because my father was from the far North of Canada and was interested in Inuit culture. The other films that stand out very vividly for me, from the early fifties, are Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes [1948] and Jean Renoir’s The River [1951]. I sometimes think that it’s because I didn’t see many films in my childhood that these two films are indelibly marked on my cinematic unconscious. My genuinely cinephile days started when I left university and started going to the cinema with a group of friends, including Peter Wollen. These friends were all influenced by the Cahiers du Cinéma, so that marked a shift into an adoration of Hollywood, and of those directors that the Cahiers had sanctified as part of the ‘politique des auteurs’. That took up a great deal of my time in the sixties… Going to see films that weren’t so current but hadn’t fallen out of currency, and the National Film Theatre was beginning to show retrospectives, and we were going to Paris, the Cinémathèque and any of the cinemas on the Left Bank, and building up as much of a knowledge of Hollywood cinema as we could.
Along with her consistent push of the male gaze and how prominent it is she also pushes feminism, here is an interview on both of these theories:
'Woman as image, man as bearer of the look' - Laura Mulvey
You deconstruct the male gaze out of the text instead of the intent being there when filming it.
Example of the Laura Mulvey theory:
Transformers (2007):
In the film, transformers, there are plenty of shots that could be considered over sexualising Megan Foxes character. The male gaze is something that can be seen as a very prominent feature in the film. As well as having over-sexualised characters in one of the films there are two characters that are overly racist towards each other. The male gaze is probably the most prominent problem especially the first film. The average shot length for a film like transformers would be not very long as its an action film with lots happening, with these scenes the shot length is very long and lingers on the character.
The beginning of the scene you get a mid-shot of Mikaela as she walks away from view, she is wearing a very short skirt and a tight top. The choice in clothing can indicate a sense of lust and desire by Sam. We then get a close-up reaction shot of Sam as he gets in his car and gets his friend out to pick up Mikaela. The desire that Sam has for her shows as he tells his friend to leave so that she can get in the car. Once Sams friend is out of the car he drives towards her and talks to her. During this, the song that is playing is a very slow and romantic song that pushes the ideology of Sam liking her.
We then get a shot of Sam looking at Mikaela through his window and she is angled in a very over the sexual way. The male gaze is in full effect that this point as both the camera and the character are objectifying Mikaela through the window, along with the romantic music it helps reinforce this ideology. When she gets into the car she describes her ex and he is a big football player and Sam wants the become this so that he can win over Mikaela. he then flexes on her with his bicep to win her over. As a big muscular person would be the stereotype that a girl like Mikaela would go for this reinforces this ideology. We get more of these shots where they linger on Mikaela later on in this scene. These shots reinforce the idea that we see films through the male eye and the camera is just a males viewpoint. Especially, in this case, Transformers has plenty of these shots that are objectifying Mikaela
Jacques Lacan:
The mirror stage: when a baby sees themselves in a mirror for the first time they see that as the ideal person and try and live up to. essentially you try and live up to someone that your not. It's an imaginary order that you try and live up to even if you will never achieve it.
Here is a good video that explains the theory well:
Medically trained as a psychiatrist, Lacan’s first texts started appearing in the late 1920s (during the course of his psychiatric studies), with his publishing activity really taking off in the subsequent decade. The 1930s see several early Lacanian milestones: the publication, in 1932, of his doctoral thesis in psychiatry, De la psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité (On Paranoid Psychosis in its Relations with the Personality); collaborations with the Surrealist and Dadaist artistic movements in whose midsts he circulated as a familiar fellow traveler; entry into analytic training, including a didactic analysis with Rudolph Lowenstein; attendance at Alexandre Kojève’s renowned seminars on G.W.F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit; the first presentation of the now-famous theory of the “mirror stage” at the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) conference at Marienbad in 1936 (a presentation truncated by Freud’s friend and biographer, then-IPA President Ernest Jones); and, the appearance, in the Encyclopédie française in 1938, of a substantial essay on a sizable swathe of analytic topics entitled Les complexes familiaux dans la formation de l’individu: Essai d’analyse d’une fonction en psychologie (“The Family Complexes in the Formation of the Individual: Attempt at an Analysis of a Function in Psychology”). This crucial period of Lacan’s development, as the immediately preceding already indicates, was marked by the collision of interests and influences related to psychoanalysis, psychiatry, philosophy, art, and literature, among other areas. More specifically, the robustly interdisciplinary combination that came together for Lacan at this time of Freudian analysis, Hegelian dialectics, Kojèvian pedagogy, and different experiences of “madness” from numerous perspectives indelibly colours and permanently inflects the entire rest of Lacan’s intellectual itinerary.
The account of the mirror stage is perhaps Lacan’s most famous theoretical contribution (maybe even more famous than the well-known thesis apropos the unconscious as “structured like a language”). Initially developed in the 1930s, this account involves a number of interrelated ingredients. Lacan offers the narrative of this stage as an explanation specifically for the genesis and functions of the Freudian psychical agency of the ego (Ich, moi). One of the psychoanalytic and philosophical upshots of the mirror stage, a crucial one in Lacan’s eyes, is that the ego is an object rather than a subject. In other words, the ego, despite conscious senses to the contrary, is not a locus of autonomous agency, the seat of a free, true “I” determining its own fate. This portrait of the ego-as-object is at the heart of Lacan’s lifelong critical polemics against Anglo-American ego psychology, with the ego psychologists seeking to strengthen their patients’ egos by appealing to supposed autonomous and “conflict-free” sides of these psychical agencies. Against this, Lacan views the ego as thoroughly compromised and inherently neurotic to its very core, as a passionate defence of a constitutive ignorance of the unconscious.
Example of Jaques Lacan theory:
The Wolf Of Wall Street (2013):
1:15 - 2:33
Jacques Lacan's theory also states that you are born with a lack of something and it gives you a want to fulfil it. You will never be satisfied and there will forever be a lack in your life and never be fulfilled. You are driven by desire and will never achieve that desire. Everyone is born with a lack and a desire to fill that empty space. Jordan Belford is never satisfied with himself. He forever wants more and more, this inevitably ends with him in prison by him stopping at nothing to get what he wants.
At the beginning of this scene, Jordan is listing all drugs he does and that the amount he does a day would seduce the whole of Manhatten and Queens for a month. This shows the character of Jordan Belford is very sedated all the time and is the kingpin of his business. Jordan wants more drugs, money and or sex throughout the film. Jordan describes money as his favourite drug and this apparent. Later on, in the scene, he is describing that money is the only thing he wants more of. You can tell from his reckless behaviour that he has money to spare and he doesn't care about anything except making more money.
Jordan's ideology of life is that money can buy everything you want. He is more about the
materialistic things money can buy he's all about showing off his money in every way possible. Towards the end of the film, his addiction gets to the point where he risks his wife's, friend and his life for the security of his money. He keeps on taking risks throughout the film and this mistake changes him as he nearly dies. He decided to take a yacht through the very rough sea and his yacht gets wrecked and people got killed. Inevitably he was putting other people at risk for his benefit yet he has enough money to sustain himself for his life and more. The want for more money is constant throughout the film but during this part, in particular, he doesn't see it as the worth is. At this point, it's too late and he is arrested not long after.
| |
