Queer Theory:
Queer theory was originally associated with the radical gay politics of ActUp, Outrage, and other groups which embraced “queer” as an identity label that pointed to a separatist, non-assimilationist politics. Thus, a central political weakness of queer theory: if non-straightness includes so many, what happens to the sexual minorities and marginalized “deviants” who seek explicit protections within well-defined political communities that can organize internally and create coalitions with other well-defined groups?
Post Modernism
Postmodernism: pseudo-intellectual Trojan Horse of tyrants everywhere in the western world. Began in Arts faculties in various universities under "thinkers" like Derrida, Baudrillard, Foucault and Irigaray, and spread like a cancer into at least the "soft" sciences, if not further afield.
There are no ultimate truths in either a moral or a scientific sense, and dressing up bullshit in flowery language.
Postmodernism pretends to be a guarantor of pluralism (a concept far better served, btw, by rational debate), and is in love with concepts such as the "transgressive" and the "paradigm shift".
Unfortunately, these matters are brought up in the midst of reams and reams of tendentious twaddle which constitute a dreadful waste of perfectly good trees, and the most notable effect of postmodernist (un)thinking is not the freeing of anyone's mind from conservative tyranny, but the scrapping of the very idea of objective truth. Once this happens, of course, what follows (outside the ivory towers of academia) is that the game goes, set and match, to the fellah with the biggest guns. Many conservative factions claimed that September 11 spelled the end of postmodernism. Ohhhh nooo, postmodernist twaddle was only just getting its boots on.
To take an (admittedly anachronistic) example of what is essentially the same thing:
"A new and magical understanding of the world is on the rise, one based on will rather than truth. There is no truth, in either the scientific or the moral sense."
- Adolf Hitler
Now let's see how this mechanism of fetishism can inform the different aspects of the unconscious vis-a-vis La Jetée.
1. The Character's Unconscious. La Jetée, at first glance, seems fairly remote from the psychoanalytic theory of fetishism. And yet, if we look closely at the protagonist's character, we might begin to see a certain fetishistic dimension to his fascination with the image of a woman that he retains. With the exception of an explicit emphasis on sexual difference, all the aforementioned coordinates are firmly in place: metaphorical castration (i.e., separation), fixation upon an object (i.e., the image of the woman), the preference shown to his relationship to the object over his relationship to living persons (i.e., his rejections of a present and future society to return to an image from his past).
Here we should also recall that the protagonist initially fixates upon the image of this woman at the moment when he sees a man (himself) die. Metaphorically speaking, it is he himself who is perceived to be castrated (cut off from their union), while she is merely vulnerable (to the coming holocaust). This reverses one aspect of the Freudian dynamic of fetishistic fear, but otherwise the model holds. By retaining the last joyful image of their potential union, the man will be able to mentally disavow all evidence of their inevitable separation. He will, in other words, suppress his ability to recognize himself as the man who is killed while running to grasp the woman.
The fetishistic cast of the protagonist's character is furthermore stressed by the form of narrative discourse Marker adopts in this film. It is presented as a sequence of still-images--which is to say, a photo-roman. Thus, the image of the woman that the protagonist imprints into his memory is literally objectified for the audience, rendered as a photo-chemical imprint, namely a photograph. This serves to heighten our sense of the image's status as a fetish-object--comparable to a fading photograph that a pining lover might carry in his wallet.
2. The Unconscious of Cinematic Discourse. Let us skip for the moment our examination of the way this film can expose a form of unconscious fetishism on the part of the audience. Turning then to the unconscious of the film's discourse, we find the coordinates of fetishism similarly inscribed in the form of the photo-roman, or more precisely, in the film's single instance of deviation from this form. I refer to the moment when the sequence of still-images is sped up to the point of momentary superimposition, or lap-dissolve. These yields, for a brief moment, the effect of cinematic "live-action." We are, (literally) for the blink of an eye, transported into the medium of motion pictures, or as it is commonly called, the "movies." This brief moment in the film serves to underscore the photographic (as opposed to cinematic) form which dominates the rest of the film's discourse.
Photographs imply, among other things, a sense of chronological separation from the persons or things photographed--a sense that we are "cut off" from them. "Live-action," by contrast, creates a sense of their immediate presence. But this instance of live-action radically undoes any sense of immediate presence. Here, in the gradual transformation from photographic sequence to live-action film, we see how the sense of immediacy is artificially produced in the movies. The slow formal transformation recalls us to the fact that live-action cinema is actually never anything more than a sped-up sequence of projected stills with fractional, flickering moments of darkness separating them. This produces the stroboscopic illusion of a continuous image in various stages of movement--the so-called phi-effect upon which all cinema relies. Thus, cinema inscribes a series of gaps (dark spots between frames) which "cut up" the projected image, and then cinema subsequently disavows these cuts by way of certain fetishistic sleight of hand (persistence of vision, flicker-fusion, and beta-movement). In the slow emergence of cinema at this single point of La Jetée, we catch a brief glimpse of the fetishistic unconscious of the film's discourse, a discourse that photographically alludes to loss and alienation, only to disavow this by deploying the standard cinematic technique (live-action cinematography) for recovering the immediate presence of what has been lost.
3. The Audience's Unconscious. The disavowal of the gaps between the photographic frames furthermore bears upon a form of fetishism unconsciously at work in the film's audience. For in addition to a sense of loss and remoteness, photographs also implicitly underscore the fact that they were themselves "taken" elsewhere, and, in this case, by someone else (the filmmaker). Psychoanalytic film theorists refer to this elsewhere as the "fourth field" (the unseen area behind the camera in any given shot), and to this someone as the "Absent One." As soon as film-audiences become conscious of the fourth field and the Absent One who resides there with his camera, they lose the feeling that they are in control of their own gaze. They come to discover that they are being coerced, through a careful manipulation of compositional framing, lighting, editing, and so forth. They perceive that they are being made to see only what the Absent One (the director, the photographer) wants them to see. Thus, audiences come to realize that they are alienated, "cut off" from their own powers of vision. The foregrounded artifice of photography in the photo-roman functions to drive this awareness home. The brief eruption into live-action cinema then provides a welcome moment of respite, a moment when the viewer can once again regain the illusion that he or she is seeing all there is to be seen, without the coercive mediation of an Absent One. Here, suddenly, the darkness framing each photographic instant disappears (or appears to disappear) as the photographs merge into a living, moving form--someone we can look at, so it seems, from our own perspective. This is what psychoanalytic film theorists refer to as "suture": the condition that arises when the perceived control held by the Absent One dissolves, and the audience accordingly relates to the film's field of view as if they themselves were in control of the film's visual field and capable of moving freely about in it. Suture thus names a fetishistic mechanism by way of which the audience disavows the loss of its visual powers and unconsciously subscribes to the fantasy of its own all-seeing gaze.
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