Kaja Silverman: Changing the fantasmatic scene, Page 4

Changing the Fantasmatic Scene - Kaja Silverman

Splits foregrounds this reversal in a variety of ways. For instance, in this same section of the film Emma expresses dissatisfaction with her life, attributing her unhappiness to her place within the larger symbolic order:

It was clear in her mind that there was no distinction bet-ween her personal loneliness and her political loneliness, between her day after day life and her ideas about being used by everyone, as a token, with no sense at all, other than negating every attempt at her assertion.

"Token" designates something passed from hand to hand, which somehow qualifies or distinguishes the possessor - something whose function is to signify not itself, but another. It thus refers not just to Emma, but to the general condition of the female subject within classic cinema and the cultural regime with which it interlocks. As Claire Johnston observes, "Positioned and sexed by the mode of discourse ... of the Hollywood text, woman can only be exchanged as currency in the economy of desire in a perpetual play of metonymy." 23

   In the dream sequence which follows, and to which I will turn in a moment, Emma plays a very active –indeed ultimately a very aggressive– role. But perhaps most tellingly, before committing the murder she goes to her desk, pulls a gun out of the drawer, puts it into a transparent purse, and places the purse over the postcard of Saturn. She thereby indicates a radical shift in her relationship to the father.
   2. The Dream. This section of the film is differentiated from the others through a number of visual and sound markings. Com-posed entirely of newsreel footage, and shot in black and white, it dispenses with the split screen, the intertitles, and the female voices. The sound track contains instead crowds of male voices at a baseball game, football cheers, military drills, marching bands and the whispered question "Is she going to be acquited?" White brackets on either side of the image further distinguish this se-quence, suggesting that it derives from a different level of Emma's subjectivity than the others.
   Riot footage figures conspicuously and importantly here. That footage shows policemen riding their horses into crowds, hitting workers, smashing windows and generally functioning as beating fathers. There are also shots of soldiers with guns entering a river. Emma's dream expresses the desire to destroy these destroyers, and, in the process, to alter her own relationship to power.
   Signifiers of liquidity provide one of the central means by which that desire is inscribed into the dream. Not only does the latter begin with a shot of a turbulent ocean (another "bubbling substance"), but the riot footage is intercut with shots in which water always plays an important part – the already-mentioned soldiers entering a river, a flooded town, a sinking ship and woman swimming the English Channel. All of these images refer us back to the prologue.
   There are three shots of the sinking ship. As I noted earlier, the ship is a metonymy for the sailor, who is himself a metaphoric replacement for the father. Its destruction is one of the ways in which desire for the father's death is inscribed into the film. The swimmer is another; she swims against the tide of injustice, against the flooded socius and the sinking ship of patriarchy – i.e. she "liquidates the masters". (However, the most direct expression of Emma's murderous wishes occurs towards the end of the dream, when we are given a close up of a hand reaching into handbag and pulling out a gun. A shot is heard in the background.)
   Emma's dream once again inverts the political and familial. Not only is the riot footage stripped of any specificity, but the shots of the soldiers and of a crowd of Asians reaching out in vague appeal remain unlocalizable. All of this material has value only as a means of signifying the key positions within the Oedipal fantasmatic.

   It must also be remarked that both the swimmer and the hand which reaches for the gun are aligned with the male gaze. Im-mediately before the swimmer appears for the third time, there is a shot of a crowd of men on bleachers standing and looking out of frame; the two images seem to compose a shot/reverse shot formation. Similarly, just before the hand enters the purse there is a shot of an Oriental cameraman directing his lens towards us. Again the two shots seem to intersect.
   The notion that Emma is performing for a male spectator occurs again and again throughout the remainder of the film, and serves to qualify her shift from a position of passivity to one of aggressivity. These references to a transcendental gaze, which increasingly find their locus in the cinematic apparatus, function as a larger critique of the Oedipal fantasmatic, both in its "male" and "female" variants.
   The dream concludes with an elegant evocation of the reversal which occurs in the preceding section: An inverted street scene is held briefly as the sounds of strife and turmoil fade into silence. The world is (as it were) turned upside down. Once again the effect is one of vertigo – of a dizzying imbalance, a "time outside of time."
   3. The Preparation. In Borges' story Emma is given some money by the sailor with whom she sleeps, who mistakes her for a prostitute. She tears the bills into small pieces, repudiating not only the category into which they place her, but the idea that she might personally benefit in any way from her actions. The money reappears in Splits, but it is now stripped of any specifically sexual reference – it comes into Emma's possession not through the sailor, but through the foreign letter. One of the major elements in her preparation for the murder is its ritual burning.
Since that event occurs within the mise-en-scene of Emma's desk (here called a "night-table", underscoring its nocturnal use, its function as a kind of unconscious writing-pad), it must be understood as part of the fantasmatic. Emma puts the bills in a glass dish next to the postcard of Saturn and touches a match to it. As the camera hovers over the resulting fire, one of the female voices says:

On the night table was the money the man had sent. I sat down and crumpled it ... a vacuum ... zero ... notes on the debt of existence. I though of the moment when history liquidates the masters.

As has already been mentioned, Emma earlier describes herself as a "token", passed from hand to hand like a coin. The burning of money is in part a repudiation of her own subordinate and beaten position. It also speaks, in a confused sort of way, to Emma's identification with the proletariat –– an identification which she has previously refused, not participating, for instance, in a strike. The money is within this context a signifier for the wages paid to workers under capitalism, wages which are nothing more than notes on the enormous debt owed to them by the ruling class. When Emma burns those notes she in effect calls in the debt, liquidates the masters. In doing so she defines herself as an agent of history.
However, history quickly fades before the urgency of the performance. Emma's obsession with the death of the father distorts her sense of time and space: As she leaves her apartment for the fatal rendez-vous we are twice told that "time was being stretched and condensed in a manner foreign to her usual routine existence," and that assertion finds its correlative in a roof shot which both extends the visual field and reduces the human form to a mere speck moving along the ground. Time lapse photography and an accelerated zoom further alienate familiar objects. Contradictory titles in the upper half of the frame ––"The Enthusiastic Crowd", "Placid Citizens" –– speak to the impossibility when time and space are being stretched and condensed in this manner of knowing where to situate the eye.

There is a thickening in this section of the film of the cinematic metaphor first introduced in the dream. Two citations in particular warrant attention. The first of these is a further reference to the perpetual crisis experienced by Emma, but it also draws attention to the masochistic drama which has already been staged so many times within her psychic theater, and to the radical transformation which that drama is about to undergo:

The window didn't have a shell-like view as it did most mornings, rather is was a lifeless reflection of a room as if the set were waiting for a movement, some careless gesture that would subvert its order. (emphasis mine)

The second cinematic citation, however, suggests that even though Emma's position within the fantasmatic has shifted, she is still subject to an authorative and sexually differentiated gaze; mentally rehearsing the murder she feels her hand "(slip) erotically, synched with a male eye."