How Do We Watch?

It seems like a lot of us are addressing this question of identification that occurs, at various levels, in the film viewer, and also what it is we learn from this analogy between film-viewing and Freudian and Lacanian psychological phenomenon. For now, I’d have to answer one of Katie’s questions affirmatively: the analogy seems somewhat contrived; Baudry and Metz convincingly outline and describe parallels between, for example, the viewer’s identification with the camera and the Lacanian mirror stage, but I have not yet put together what is useful about the analogy, what it tells us about viewing film. At best I see it as moving towards an explication of what is pleasurable about watching film, but, in the psychoanalytic context, this has more to do with sublimated satisfaction of (Lacanian) desire than with pure escapism, which Mara and Jason note in their blogs.

According to Metz, the viewer goes to see a film “partly in order to be carried away by the film (or the fiction, if there is one), but also in order to appreciate as such the machinery that is carrying them away: they will say, precisely when they have been carried away, that the film was a ‘good’ one, that it was ‘well made’” (835). So it seems to me that this notion of being “carried away”—which maybe fits somewhere within the levels of cinematic identification Metz enumerated earlier: primary=camera level; secondary=character level—is the escapism we’re talking about, but because the viewer’s agency (as many of us have noted) is either implicitly assumed or completely unacknowledged, I find reconciling the psychoanalytic components of Metz’s (and Baudry’s) arguments with the awareness of the active (with agency) viewer problematic. The active film viewer, it seems, consciously moves between being carried away by the fiction of the film (and that itself also being the viewer’s choice) and either appreciating the filmmakers’ adroit technique or criticizing the lack thereof. Does film function then as a fetish on a purely unconscious level?