The Fright of Real Tears - Suture and Interface

Suture and Interface

In Chapter Two, "Back To The Suture", Žižek laments the demise of the concept of "suture" in Lacanian film theory, writing that "the time of suture seems to have irrevocably passed: in the present-day cultural studies version of Theory, the term barely occurs; however, rather than accepting this disappearance as a fact, one is tempted to read it as an indication of the decline of cinema studies" (TFRT, p. 31).

Žižek describes the "elementary logic of suture" as consisting of three steps:

• "Firstly, the spectator is confronted with a shot, finds pleasure in it in an immediate, imaginary way, and is absorbed by it" (TFRT, p. 32).

• "Then, this full immersion is undermined by the awareness of the frame as such: what I see is only a part, and I do not master what I see. I am in a passive position, the show is run by the Absent One (or, rather, Other) who manipulates images behind my back" (ibid).

• "What then follows is a complementary shot which renders the place from which the Absent One is looking, allocating this place to its fictional owner, one of the protagonists" (ibid).

The function of suture is to engage the viewer with the narrative events onscreen; the viewer is subjectively sutured into the narrative by the filmmaker(s), in order to keep him or her invested. Žižek then notes that there are some films which intentionally fail to produce the effect of suture; for instance, the films of Jean-Luc Godard pose a challenge to viewers used to more conventional narrative editing. It should be noted, however, that even the most successful use of suture does not result in the complete immersion of the viewer within the narrative, as Žižek says: "suture is the exact opposite of the illusory, self-enclosed totality that successfully erases the decentred traces of its production process: suture means that, precisely, such self-enclosure is a priori impossible" (p. 58).

Žižek argues that it is not only avant-garde cinema in which suture sometimes fails. He claims that suture hides the fact that what Lacan calls "the big Other" does not exist. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the big Other is the regulation of the domain of symbolic mandates. For instance, an individual may tell other people that they are a poet, but they are not truly a poet (and certainly not in the eyes of the big Other) until they have their poetry published by a legitimate company (and not, say, a vanity publisher). In his other work, Žižek frequently characterizes the big Other as a symbolic, inter-subjective fiction which we buy into in order for society to function. However, this fictional status of the big Other means that it does not actually exist and is therefore capable of being radically re-articulated (say, for instance, in an act of revolution).

Žižek believes that although all of our thoughts and actions stand in relation to the big Other, we can occasionally glimpse the big Other's fictional status. Whereas suture serves to hide the fictional status of the big Other, avant-garde films in which suture does not function reveal the big Other to be a delicate fiction, vulnerable to violent disintegration. In between these two extremes are art film directors such as Kieślowski, who do not violently get rid of suture (and therefore conventional narrative meaning) in their films but, rather, allow the fictional status of the big Other to shine through in sublime moments. Žižek cites several examples of this technique (which he calls "interface"), two of which can be described here:

• In Orson Welles' 1941 classic Citizen Kane, in the scene in which Kane makes his big political speech, Kane speaks before a giant poster of himself. Žižek compares this to large concert events in which, because the audience is so large, most people watch the performance on giant television screens. Žižek notes that it is wrong to claim that this makes the idea of a live performance a ridiculous one simply because the audience could view the same images in the privacy of their own home. Instead, he claims that what is important is the fact that the performer takes into account the existence of the giant screen and integrates it into their performance. In Citizen Kane, the moment when Kane swallows in close-up during his speech, with the gigantic static image of himself looking serious erected behind him, is a sublime moment. The gap between the small Kane at the lectern and the large, manufactured image of Kane behind him allows the purely fictional nature of the big Other to shine through.

• In Kieślowski's A Short Film About Love, when Magda and Tomek speak to each other through a glass intercom in the local post office, the reflection of the characters' faces in the glass effectively creates the same effect as just described in Citizen Kane.