Psychoanalytic Film Theory and The Rules of the Game, by Todd McGowan

Abstract

Todd McGowan’s Psychoanalytic Film Theory and The Rules of the Game offers a non-technical introduction to Lacanian thought and its role in current psychoanalytic film theory. His theoretical reference is the Žižekian interpretation of Jacques Lacan, which emphasises the real as a productively impossible impasse of subjectivity and the objet a as the paradoxically insubstantial cause of desire. This tendency translates into McGowan’s work as a turn away from Screen theory’s preoccupation with imaginary spectator identity towards the ways narrative films represent the necessary failures of such imaginary cohesion.

Keywords

• lacanian thought
• psychoanalytic film theory
• narrative film
• subject
• desire