A Silent Dream of Sexual Cacophony: Psychoanalyzing E. A. Dupont’s VARIETÉ – Part Four: The Phallus
Movie of the Week #28, Part 4 of 4
For this week’s Movie of the Week, we’re doing something a little different, covering one movie, but over four days. The film is E.A. Dupont’s Varieté, from 1925, and instead of a ‘review,’ we shall be reading a very peculiar essay I wrote in graduate school, for a class on Psychoanalysis and cinema. It is presented in the form of 4 letters from my alter-ego, Dr. Johnathon R. Black, to a fictive colleague, Dr. Reginald G. Winterbottom.
If you need to catch up, , you may read The First Letter here, and The Second Letter here, and The Third Letter here. Today, we conclude our long, strange journey with The Fourth (and final) Letter. Enjoy…
The Fourth Letter: The Phallus
From the desk of Dr. Johnathon R. Black
The Eighth of Prairial, Year CCXXVI
(Editor’s Note: May 27th, 2019)
To Dr. Reginald G. Winterbottom,
42 Cockburn St.
Motherwell, North Lanarkshire
ML18 0ZU, Scotland
I saw before me in the dim light a rectangular chamber about thirty feet long. The ceiling was arched and of hewn stone. The floor was laid with flagstones, and in the center a red carpet ran from the entrance to a low platform. On this platform stood a wonderfully rich gold throne … a real king’s throne in a fairy tale. Something was standing on it which I thought at first was a tree trunk twelve to fifteen feet high and about one and a half to two feet thick. It was a huge thing, reaching almost to the ceiling. But it was of curious composition: it was made of skin and naked flesh, and on top there was something like a rounded head with no face and no hair. On the very top of the head was a single eye, gazing motionlessly upward … Only much later did I realize that what I had seen was a phallus, and it was decades before I understood that it was a ritual phallus. I could never make out whether my mother meant, ‘That is the man-eater,’ or, ‘That is the man-eater.’
— Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections
Love that's pure hopes all things
Believes all things, won't pull no strings
Won't sneak into your room, tall, dark and handsome
Capture your soul and hold it for ransom.
You don't want a love that's pure
You want to drown love
You want a watered-down love…
— Bob Dylan, Shot of Love
My Dear Dr. Winterbottom,
‘Tis with a heavy heart I place the finishing touches on this latest missive. Confusion grips my heart, as I still have not received word from you these many months, confirming receipt of these dispatches from the recesses of my curious mind. Mayhaps you have been busy, my good friend? I hope this is case, as the alternatives – injury, loss, imprisonment – are too ghastly to contemplate (though in the absence of clear explanations, the mind races at an intractable gait). Perhaps my letters, dense with thought as they are, have proved overwhelming. I do respect your conviction to never own or use a telephone, but at times like these, the ocean between us seems so considerably vast.
Yet equally vast are the plains of untrod knowledge that lie before us as scholars, so the work must continue with unceasing dedication. When last I wrote, I had arrived at the point in my analysis of Mr. E.A. Dupont’s Varieté where the subject of the phallus – the most towering, if you will pardon the pun, of all psychoanalytic subjects – had become unavoidable. And this is where I resume my multifaceted musings.
His manhood challenged, it is clear that The Boss must now take action, must sail straight for the heart of this Bermuda Triangle of sexual conquest in which he has found himself lost. There he will tear asunder its foundations, resulting in the triumvirate’s collapse. Two sequences here shall form the climax of my months-long analysis, both concerning the annihilation of The Boss’ amorous adversary: one in which the action goes unresolved, one in which it is consummated. Both are driven by a phallic signifier, one invisible to our naked eye, the other all too corporeal. In each case, an understanding of the phallus as that which imbues power – or, in the event of its absence, denies said power – shall be critical.
But first, we must recapitulate what we have gleaned of the phallus thus far. It has manifested itself across the film and throughout my analysis, in a variety of visual symbols – The Boss’ salt shaker, Artinelli’s tobacco pipe, The Strange Girl’s dinner spoon – and in its position as the central signifier of the men’s fetish-construction of The Girl’s body, harkening to the absent maternal phallus upon which such fetishes are erected. Now we must contend more directly with the phallus as an embodied idea, one with the potential to both drive action andimbue power. Our chaperone here shall be Dr. Jacques Lacan, who, in the midst of his labyrinthine lexicon, guides us always towards an understanding of how deeply the personalities and actions of our players are motivated by the phallus’ semiotic energy. While Dr. Lacan arrives at no singular definition of ‘the phallus,’ the following passage – which I reprint here out of academic habit, though I know you must have it memorized by now – is an agreeable point of departure:
“…Man cannot aim at being whole … once the displacement and condensation to which he is destined in the exercise of his functions marks his relation, as subject, to the signifier. The phallus is the privileged signifier of this mark in which the role of Logos is wedded to the advent of desire. One could say that this signifier is chosen as the most salient of what can be grasped in sexual intercourse [copulation] as real, as well as the most symbolic, in the literal (typographical) sense of the term, since it is equivalent in intercourse to the (logical) copula. One could also say that, by virtue of its turgidity, it is the image of the vital flow as it is transmitted in generation.”
As these words, from Dr. Lacan’s “The Signification of the Phallus,” only exist here in a state of partial translation, some clarification is in order (if for no other reason than to lay out my own understanding of the terms – you shall let me know, I hope, if I miss the mark). For Dr. Lacan, the phallus is at root a signifier, which is to say a form taken by the sign to convey its ultimate meaning, which we further call the signified, and which is all a rather roundabout way of conveying the main point, that the phallus is an idea cloaked in a form that is not its own. That this form is frequently reminiscent of the primary male sex organ is not, as Dr. Lacan points out, coincidental, though neither does it mean the phallus’ connotation can be wholly reduced to that particular genital structure. (This is why the penis itself, as a tangible object, has not at any point been the direct focus of these letters’ attention, for it is at its closest that which is signified, and in many cases resides in a space more distant even than that.) As a force of signification, the presence of the phallus is gleaned only while in the company of an other in which it may be recognized. (For the semiotic equation to formulate, the signifier must also have a subject). In so doing, the phallus-as-signifier is a complex and dynamic force, moving not merely in one direction from signifier to subject, but as part of an exchange, of power and desire, between the two component beings.
Take, for example, a scenario from the film with which we are, at this point, intimately familiar: The Strange Girl extending one of her limbs, in phallic posture, for a worshipful reverie from one of her masculine paramours. “The demand for love can only suffer from a desire whose signifier is foreign to it,” Dr. Lacan writes. “If the mother’s desire is for the phallus, the child wants to be the phallus in order to satisfy her desire.” Simply reverse this formulation, so that the child (the man) is desiring of the phallus, and the mother (the woman) shall willingly personify the phallus in order to please, and these sequences of invitational fetishization are thus explained under this phallic formulation.
So too does this add another layer of elucidation to our comprehension of why The Boss would be receptive to the temptations of ‘another woman’ in the first place. After hypothesizing about the semiotic relationship underlying woman’s attraction to man – who bears the most literal version of the phallus and, by extension, those more ethereal facets of psychical satisfaction which the woman desires out of its signifier – Dr. Lacan posits the following:
“If, indeed, man is able to satisfy his demand for love in his relationship with a woman, inasmuch as the phallic signifier clearly constitutes her giving in love what she does not have, conversely, his own desire for the phallus will make its signifier emerge in its residual divergence toward “another woman” who may signify this phallus in various ways, either as a virgin or as a prostitute. There results from this centrifugal tendency of the genital drive in the sphere of love, which makes impotence much harder for him to bear, while the Verdrängung inherent in his desire is greater.”
Again, we see this conform closely with the nature of the relationship depicted in the film. That The Strange Girl is less a fully-formulated character than a sort of reflective wishing well in whose waters the bearer of the gaze may see his own repressed longings makes greater sense under this construction. So too does it track with the beastly, id-consumed nature of Emil Jannings’ performance, and indeed the central tenants of German Expressionism, as those nameless forces from deep within, those harbingers of Dr. Lacan’s Verdrängung,(*) seem to overwhelm the whole of his body, especially when he is moved towards violent and/or sexual acts.
(*) Verdrängung! Ah, what a mouthful of a word – appropriate, perhaps, given the subject matter. I believe it means ‘displacement,’ or ‘repression,’ though my German is, as I have heretofore admitted, wir verrosten.
Murder first pirouettes across the mind of The Boss as he prepares for the trinity’s next acrobatic showcase. In the dressing room, his mind still overcast with the truth revealed in the bar, The Boss applies his makeup awkwardly, his rough hands embellishing his face with distracted rigidity, while Artinelli beautifies himself gracefully, with precision. The performance awaits – another sexually-charged aerial troika, but with the dynamics of power irrevocably shifted. How shall The Boss, who as he now knows is not the decisive bearer of authority his nomenclature implies, perform under such conditions? Mr. Dupont aspires for us to brace for the worst; The Boss has a brief, shocking premonition of committing a midair murder most foul, of Artinelli’s turncoat body in deathly descent toward the ground, while the real Artinelli, just before stepping on stage, sees the morose skull patch he wears disengage from his leotard and fall ominously to the floor. As the act itself begins, the tension is nigh overwhelming, Mr. Freund’s camerawork just as boldly sensuous as before, though now laced tightly with the specter of death – which is, of course, when sexual arousal is wont to reach its greatest heights.
La petite mort never felt so grande.
Just as Artinelli prepares to leap across to a receiving Boss, the moment where this ghastly eroticism may reach its mortal apex, the command of the phallus fails him. He swings there, limp, sweaty, petrified, wiping his brow, unable to perform. A kaleidoscope vision of all the eyes gazing upon him strikes his psyche and overwhelms the frame of the film, as he crumbles under this brief chance awareness of his own to-be-looked-at-ness. All that which he has borne thus far, all those intangible entities which gave him psychical power – control of the gaze, possession of the fetish object, exclusive access to its phallic signifiers – have failed him, and he finds himself unable to ‘get it up,’ forsaken once more in the wasteland of emasculation.
That The Boss does, eventually, resolidify his manhood just long enough to complete the act is perhaps the real surprise of the sequence, so primed are we to see this particular encounter climax in an orgasm of morbidity. But of course, the murder we see awaiting on the horizon cannot happen here, in the air, in the throws of this communal sexuality, for it would not be nearly pointed enough, nearly symbolic enough – nearly, dare I say, phallic enough – to act as a proper climax for this particular film.
Laying his trap, The Boss lies to Artinelli and claims to be on his way out of town. Instead, he journeys to the bar, and like a man who requires alcohol to perform in bed, lubricates his senses with a quick drink. Time passes, and we find a drunken Artinelli stumbling back to his room. The Boss is waiting inside, to catch him alone. The sexuality of the triad having been consummated in its heteronormative permutations – The Strange Girl and The Boss, The Strange Girl and Artinelli – it must now be effectuated homosocially, between its two phallic poles; and it must, here, be consummated in blood.
The Boss merely stares, his forceful gaze making his colossal form appear all the more engorged, as the sozzled Artinelli offers him booze and cigarettes. He tries being playful, to seem powerful, but, in a direct mirror of the earlier rape sequence, The Boss moves to the door and locks it. He must claim ownership over Artinelli now, even if it comes in the form of eradication, for it is the only way to regain mastery of the phallus, of the fetish-object that is for him The Strange Girl.
Just as eyes have met throughout the film in electrically charged moments of eroticism, The Boss and Artinelli lock gazes here, their opposing irises shown to us in extreme close-ups of dark sensuality. Artinelli appears, finally, to grasp the true nature of their encounter. Without a single word exchanged, a macabre foreplay has been established. Artinelli staggers anxiously about the room, but The Boss’ intense, violent gaze never breaks. Finally, the larger man moves towards his diminutive foe, and unto the table whips out his tool: Two knives, long and sharp, a deadly phallus for each man to wield.
“Choose a knife and defend yourself!” he ejaculates. It must be a knife, of course, for no other murder weapon would bear such symbolic import. In Lacanian terms, the gun or the hammer may possess some salience “of what can be grasped in sexual intercourse,” but only the knife – the weapon which penetrates – “is equivalent in intercourse to the … copula.” For a battle over which man shall bear ultimate possession of the phallus, there can be no other instrument of combat.
Artinelli rejects his knife, tossing both to the floor. Undeterred, The Boss retrieves his with cold determination. “I count to three!” Just as Artinelli earlier claimed The Strange Girl’s body without her consent, now The Boss will claim his. Artinelli moves hesitantly to grab the remaining knife, not, perhaps, so that he may defend himself, but so he may possess this figurative phallus as he begs. And beg he does, on his knees, face level with The Boss’s manhood, until their violent copulation begins. Artinelli pounces, both men struggle, and each falls out of frame. Artinelli’s hand, white knuckles gripping the knife, rises once more into view, fighting, restless, straining – until the acrobat’s hand goes limp, the phallic knife slips loose from his grip, and his body falls into that eternal refractory period we call death.
Wandering back to his room, The Boss, seemingly disengaged entirely from his own body, cleanses his slaughter-stained hands in the washbasin; the water turns dark with the color of blood. Noticing the release of his own bodily fluid, The Boss is briefly recalled to reality, just long enough to move his gaze up a few inches, to the mirror situated straight in front of him. For the first time in the entirety of the film, The Boss is made to look upon his own image – to gaze at himself. And like Dr. Lacan’s mirror-stage infant, he has a moment of profound recognition, of identification with his own body. In this instant, an identity must be affixed – and as the good doctor informs us, its fastening is no small thing:
“This form would, moreover, have to be called the “ideal-I” … in the sense that it will also be the root-stock of secondary identifications … this form situates the agency known as the ego, prior to its social determination, in a fictional direction that will forever remain irreducible for any single individual or, rather, that will only asymptotically approach the subject’s becoming, no matter how successful the dialectical syntheses by which he must resolve, as I, his discordance with his own reality.” (“The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function, as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience”)
Dr. Lacan, of course, assumes this attachment of body to identity shall come early in youth, such a connection forged at a time of minimal experience, to be informed moving forward by the “becoming” of the subject out in the world. The Boss, while reduced to a state of symbolic infancy in his murderous id-fueled rage, is not, however, a baby. He is a man grown, and he has done terrible deeds, abandoning his wife and child and murdering his fellow acrobat, all for the possession of a woman whose name he does not even know. His reality is monstrous, his guilt limitless, the darkness of his reality unresolvable with any sustainable identity – and so he leaves, stoically, walking down the stairs, hailing a cab, and directing it to the nearest police station, to turn himself in and leave the consequences of his actions, and the path of his remaining life, in the hands of a higher power.
Thusly Varieté comes full circle, and we return to the ‘prison of the self’ seen upon embarking, the nature of its construction now fully apparent. The Boss, known here as Number 28, kneels before the warden, hanging his head in shame, having unburdened his conscience before this higher power to whom he so long ago surrendered. “God’s hand has rested heavily on you, but his mercy is greater than his judgment,” this benevolent minister of justice responds. Mr. Freund’s camera cuts to a high angle, looking down upon a kneeling Number 28 as he gazes back up towards the lens. For the first time, he is in a submissive position, waiting on his knees in perpetuity for the money shot of mercy either we, the Priest, or God may deliver unto him.
Yet as I draw my lengthy analysis to a close, I find myself unsatisfied. Here, I must ask of you, my dear Dr. Winterbottom, a question only my reader may answer. Who, precisely, are we, in the dualistic composition of this final scene? Are we The Warden, delivering a clergy-esque judgment on the man whose story we have heard, or are we the man himself? Are we The Boss, a victim of our own unrestrained gazing, of endless consumption and unchecked fetishization, laid low by the darkest vices we harbor? To be ‘The Boss’ would mean, linguistically, to be ‘in charge,’ and yet, as the filmic Boss’ story has repeatedly demonstrated, there is no freedom or power in being indentured to one’s own repressed urges; that way lies only jealousy, paranoia, and death.
Perhaps we, as the viewer, are both, and perhaps we are neither. Perhaps, in our unique standing as subjects situated outside the story yet experiencing it from within, we are both signifier and signified, the arbiters of meaning and its creators, the judge and the condemned. We watch, yet we participate, we evaluate, yet we do not disavow. Perhaps the film plays so intensely like a dream not only for the qualities of its creation, but because it is an object of the outside world that feels like it came from our own internal reality, allowing us the singular position of bearing witness and experiencing within the same instant. Perhaps all films, at their core, allow for such a sensation. Perhaps none do. Perhaps there is only the gaze, surveying outward in all directions, infinitely and unstoppably, in which we all participate, a communal force of objectification and fetishization, its tendrils in a state of limitless expansion, extending until no discernable reality is left.
Who, in this formulation, is truly left to say?
I anticipate your answer, delivered unto my hands by those of my loyal postman, with feverish intensity.
Sincerely,
Dr. Johnathon R. Black
Bibliography
I have appended here, to my latest letter, a partial list of the sources to which I referred in writing to you. I assembled it from memory, while standing before the postal clerk, hastily scribbling before the other customers grew too impatient. But the demands of rigorous scholarship respect no timetable! It is my hope, Dr. Winterbottom, that you, at least, will appreciate a good reading list.
Aly, Götz and Michael Sontheimer. Fromms: How Julius Fromm’s Condom Empire Fell to the Nazis. Translated by Shelley Frisch. New York: Other Press, 2009.
Cabaret. Directed by Bob Fosse. Allied Artists, 1972. Warner Bros, 2013. Blu-ray.
Collier, Aine. The Humble Little Condom: A History. New York: Prometheus Books, 2007.
Dylan, Bob. “Watered-Down Love.” In Shot of Love. New York: Columbia Records: 1981.
Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Translated by James Strachey. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1961.
Freud, Sigmund. “Fetishism.” In Miscellaneous Papers, 1888-1938, Vol.5 of Collected Papers. London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1924-1950. 198-204.
Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Translated by Joyce Crick. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Jung, C.G. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Recorded and Edited by Amelia Jaffé. Translated by Richard and Clara Winston. New York: Pantheon Books, 1961.
Lacan, Jacques. “The Signification of the Phallus.” In Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Translated by Bruce Fink. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007. 575-84.
Lacan, Jacques. “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function, as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience.” In Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Translated by Bruce Fink. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007. 75-81.
Lynch, David. Quoted in “David Lynch and Christian Louboutin launch foot fetish exhibition.” Associated Press Entertainment, October 2nd, 2007. Hosted by AP Archive, July 21st, 2015.
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. Edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. 833-44.
Springsteen, Bruce. “Hungry Heart.” In The River. New York: Columbia Records, 1980.
Springsteen, Bruce. “The River.” In The River. New York: Columbia Records, 1980.
Varieté. Directed by E.A. Dupont. UFA, 1925. Kino Video, 2017. Blu-ray.
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