보는 것과 아는 것: <현기증>에 나타난 응시, 환상, 그리고 죽음 (Seeing and Knowing: Gaze, Fantasy, and Death in Vertigo)

서지정보

· 발행기관 : 문학과영상학회
· 수록지 정보 : 문학과 영상 / 9권 / 3호 / 694 ~ 726페이지
· 저자명 : 양석원

초록

To see or not to see - that is the question of Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece Vertigo. The question of gaze and knowledge is the central issue in Gilles Deleuze’s and feminist film theories. Deleuze regards Hitchcock as a precursor of modern cinema who, introducing the mental image into the films, privileged the protagonist’s (and the spectators’) perception and knowledge of the relations between characters over his actions. Feminism is critically concerned with the male gaze that objectifies, persecutes, fetishizes and punishes female characters without seeing and knowing female subjectivity.
From the Deleuzian point of view, the meaning of Vertigo hinges on when and how Scottie, the protagonist, and the spectators see the relations in which Judy, playing the role of Madeleine, the wife of Gavin Elster, inveigles him into the latter’s murder plot. Feminist criticism focuses on whether Scottie sees through the image of Madeleine as a construction of male fantasy into the real subjectivity of Judy. However, there is more to what Scottie sees or does not see than the relations of characters and female subjectivity in the psychoanalytic understanding of the film.
Vertigo illustrates Scottie’s painful passage from the initial blindness to the final insight into the inevitable lack of symbolic castration that opens onto the uncanny void of human existence. Vertigo is a symptom that signals Scottie’s inability to confront this void, which is visualized by the image of the spiral that prevails throughout the movie. Scottie starts to look awry and steps into the strange world of fantasy when he first lays his eyes on Madeleine in Ernie’s. What catches sight of Madeleine in this scene is not Scottie’s conscious eye, but his unconscious “gaze” as an “organ-without-body,” and Madeleine captivates him as objet a, the object cause of desire in his fantasy.
Implementing the symbolic mandate of investigating Madeleine cunningly imposed on him by Gavin the father figure, Scottie indeed pursues his own fantasy which is a scenario staging his impossible wish to regain the originally lost object of mother for which the image of Madeleine serves as a substitute. As fantasy is a screen that veils the fatal lack of symbolic castration, traversing fantasy triggers the traumatic confrontation with the abyss of the real. When Scottie finds out that Judy is Madeleine and thus Madeleine does not exist from the outset, he experiences the “loss of loss” and his fantasy structure collapses. But he desperately strives to hold onto his fantasy object until the very end of the film when Judy falls from the bell tower. Only at that moment can Scottie look down squarely at death without feeling dizzy, which implies that he traverses fantasy and goes through “subjective destitution.” Paradoxically enough, Scottie’s final gaze may parallel Oedipus’ final blindness since both indicate the recognition of human imperfection and nothingness.

영어초록

To see or not to see - that is the question of Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece Vertigo. The question of gaze and knowledge is the central issue in Gilles Deleuze’s and feminist film theories. Deleuze regards Hitchcock as a precursor of modern cinema who, introducing the mental image into the films, privileged the protagonist’s (and the spectators’) perception and knowledge of the relations between characters over his actions. Feminism is critically concerned with the male gaze that objectifies, persecutes, fetishizes and punishes female characters without seeing and knowing female subjectivity.
From the Deleuzian point of view, the meaning of Vertigo hinges on when and how Scottie, the protagonist, and the spectators see the relations in which Judy, playing the role of Madeleine, the wife of Gavin Elster, inveigles him into the latter’s murder plot. Feminist criticism focuses on whether Scottie sees through the image of Madeleine as a construction of male fantasy into the real subjectivity of Judy. However, there is more to what Scottie sees or does not see than the relations of characters and female subjectivity in the psychoanalytic understanding of the film.
Vertigo illustrates Scottie’s painful passage from the initial blindness to the final insight into the inevitable lack of symbolic castration that opens onto the uncanny void of human existence. Vertigo is a symptom that signals Scottie’s inability to confront this void, which is visualized by the image of the spiral that prevails throughout the movie. Scottie starts to look awry and steps into the strange world of fantasy when he first lays his eyes on Madeleine in Ernie’s. What catches sight of Madeleine in this scene is not Scottie’s conscious eye, but his unconscious “gaze” as an “organ-without-body,” and Madeleine captivates him as objet a, the object cause of desire in his fantasy.
Implementing the symbolic mandate of investigating Madeleine cunningly imposed on him by Gavin the father figure, Scottie indeed pursues his own fantasy which is a scenario staging his impossible wish to regain the originally lost object of mother for which the image of Madeleine serves as a substitute. As fantasy is a screen that veils the fatal lack of symbolic castration, traversing fantasy triggers the traumatic confrontation with the abyss of the real. When Scottie finds out that Judy is Madeleine and thus Madeleine does not exist from the outset, he experiences the “loss of loss” and his fantasy structure collapses. But he desperately strives to hold onto his fantasy object until the very end of the film when Judy falls from the bell tower. Only at that moment can Scottie look down squarely at death without feeling dizzy, which implies that he traverses fantasy and goes through “subjective destitution.” Paradoxically enough, Scottie’s final gaze may parallel Oedipus’ final blindness since both indicate the recognition of human imperfection and nothingness.

참고자료

· 없음