The Pervert's Guide To Cinema Page #5

The music that accompanies

this great humanist finale,

the overture to Wagner's opera, Lohengrin,

is the same music as the one we hear

when Hitler is daydreaming

about conquering the entire world

and where he has a balloon

in the shape of the globe.

The music is the same.

This can be read

as the ultimate redemption of music,

that the same music which served evil purposes

can be redeemed to serve the good.

Or it can be read,

and I think it should be read,

in a much more ambiguous way,

that with music, we cannot ever be sure.

Insofar as it externalises our inner passion,

music is potentially always a threat.

There is a short scene

in David Lynch's Mulholland Dr.,

which takes place in the theatre

where we are now,

where behind the microphone

a woman is singing,

then out of exhaustion or whatever,

she drops down.

Surprisingly, the singing goes on.

Immediately afterwards, it is explained.

It was a playback.

But for that couple of seconds

when we are confused,

we confront this nightmarish dimension

of an autonomous partial object.

Like in the well-known adventure

of Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland,

where the cat disappears, the smile remains.

You may have noticed

that I'm not all there myself.

And the mome raths outgrabe.

The fascinating thing about partial objects,

in the sense of organs without bodies,

is that they embody

what Freud called "death drive."

Here, we have to be very careful.

Death drive is not kind of a Buddhist

striving for annihilation.

"I want to find eternal peace. I want..."

No. Death drive is almost the opposite.

Death drive is the dimension of what

in the Stephen King-like horror fiction

is called the dimension of the undead,

of living dead,

of something which remains alive

even after it is dead.

And it's, in a way, immortal in its deadness itself.

It goes on, insists. You cannot destroy it.

The more you cut it,

the more it insists, it goes on.

This dimension,

of a kind of diabolical undeadness,

is what partial objects are about.

The nicest example here for me,

I think, is Michael Powell's Red Shoes,

about a ballerina.

Her passion for dancing

is materialised in her shoes taking over.

The shoes are literally the undead object.

Perhaps the ultimate bodily part

which fits this role

of the autonomous partial object

is the fist, or rather, the hand.

This hand, raising up,

that's the whole point of the film.

It's not simply something foreign to him.

It's the very core of his personality out there.

Security?

I am Jack's smirking revenge.

What the hell are you doing?

That hurt.

Far from standing

for some kind of perverted masochism

or reactionary fantasy of violence,

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