Page 97 - Decoding Culture

90 D E C O D I N G C U L TURE

everything may come to be projected, there is one thing and one
thing only that is never reflected in it: the spectator's own body'
(ibid: 45). In the Lacanian mirror stage the child's (mis)recognition
of its own body in the mirror gives rise to a unified sense of self, a
differentiation of the ego, and ultimately facilitates entry into the
Symbolic which is the world of the Law and language. The child
identifies with its like in the mirror. But, Metz asks of the film
'mirror', where is the spectator's ego in relation to the cinematic
signifier? With what does the spectator identify? He offers two
interlinked solutions to this puzzle. At one level, he suggests some­
what obscurely, the spectator identifies 'with himself as a pure act
of perception (as wakefulness, alertness) : as the condition of pos­
sibility of the perceived and hence as a kind of transcendental
subject, which comes before every there is' (ibid: 49). This is pri­
mary cinematic identification, identification with one's own 'look'.
In fiction films, in addition, he suggests that there is a secondary
cinematic identification: that with characters and through the looks
of characters within and outside the frame.
This stress on perception (the cinema, he says, is 'more per­
ceptual' than many forms of expression) is then extended into a
concern with voyeurism (scopophilia) in an account of what he
calls 'the scopic regime of the cinema' (ibid: 61) . This is again
established via a series of resemblance claims, the distinctive char­
acter of which is caught in the following passage:
For its spectator the film unfolds in that simultaneously very close
and definitively inaccessible 'elsewhere' in which the child sees the
amorous play of the parental couple, who are similarly ignorant of
it and leave it alone, a pure onlooker whose participation is incon­
ceivable. In this respect the cinematic signifier is not only
'psychoanalytic'; it is more precisely Oedipal in type. (ibid: 64)

There is a typical slide here (film - inaccessible 'elsewhere' -
seeing amorous play of parental couple - Oedipal - film) in which

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